The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (11 page)

In June, Garelick returned to the prison, and when Mitchell asked about the timetable for his escape, he was told to be alert, as it would have to be arranged at short notice. Garelick, Connelly, Miss A and another girl also spent some time reconnoitring the area around the prison during this trip. The plan was then presented to Ronnie and Reggie Kray in London for their approval.

The third visit at the start of December saw an increasingly anxious Mitchell insistent that he wanted to go home. Garelick reassured him that he would be, and told him that he would need to “run further” now than they had originally told him. The day before the escape, Garelick and Connelly made a final trip to Dartmoor, a couple of days after hiring a car.

The weather wasn’t good on 12 December; it wasn’t sufficiently bad to prevent the working party from going out to work on a fence on the firing range at Bagga Tor, but it did mean that for the majority of the day, the prisoners stayed in the base hut. In the afternoon, Mitchell asked if he could take some bread to feed the horses, something that he had done regularly near the point where the prisoners were dropped off and picked up. Usually he would be waiting there for them when the rest of the prisoners arrived. This time, there was no sign of him and it was at least forty minutes before the alarm was raised.

By this time, Frankie Mitchell was sitting in the back of a Humber car on the way back to London in the company of three of the Kray gang: Albert Donoghue, ‘Mad’ Tommy Smith and Billy Exley. He was taken to a flat belonging to another member of the gang, Lennie Dunn, in Canning Town, and stayed there for the next twelve days – the rest of his life.

When they realized that he had gone, the prison authorities began a massive search. More than a hundred police using tracker dogs joined thirty prison officers combing the area during one of the worst hailstorms in recent memory. The next day, a hundred Royal Marines had been divided into three search parties, backed up by two Royal Navy helicopters, but all without success. It seemed as if he had vanished off the face of the earth.

The following weekend, warders at the prison even made a plea via the pages of the
Daily Mirror,
believing that he might want to give himself up. “If you let us know where to meet you, we will be quite willing to pick you up,” they said, believing that Mitchell might be frightened of going to the police, but would be willing to surrender to people he trusted. “If he does this,” a statement from the warders noted, “he will not only gain reasonable consideration for himself but will also vindicate those who trusted him and were proved wrong – and prove wrong, indeed, those who have condemned him.” By this stage, though, police investigations had started to centre on the East End of London.

The Krays claimed that they assisted Mitchell to escape from Dartmoor to help publicise his case. If he could be kept on the outside without causing trouble, then hopefully the authorities would reconsider his lack of release date. He therefore – with a great deal of assistance – wrote letters to four separate newspapers, which were authenticated by his thumbprint on the bottom. They weren’t quite identical, but it was clear that they had been written from a template, with all of them highlighting the indeterminate nature of his sentence, and asking for a release date. The letters were printed in
The Times
and the
Daily Mirror.
However, the government response was clear: he had to return to prison before any consideration would be given to his case.

All the time, Mitchell was kept under lock and key, with at least one member of the Kray Firm guarding him. When he became insistent on some female company, Lisa Prescott, a hostess from the Winston club, was provided on 19 December. Mitchell very quickly became attached to her, telling his guards that they were going to get married, and refusing to contemplate moving out of the flat without her. Prescott herself was kept cowed by the Kray henchmen and only allowed to leave the flat in the company of one of them.

Mitchell was getting annoyed with his situation. He didn’t feel that he was being treated seriously by the Krays and was threatening to leave the flat to visit them. He probably didn’t understand that this was designed as a temporary escape, and that the intention was that he return to Dartmoor but with a clear end to his sentence in sight. When the henchmen suggested that he should go back on 23 December, he refused, saying he wanted to stay out at least over Christmas.

That refusal probably sealed his fate. According to the court case, and the evidence of Freddie Foreman, Mitchell was persuaded to leave the flat, perhaps on the pretext that he was being taken to spend Christmas in Kent with Ronnie Kray. He was assured that Lisa Prescott would be following within the hour. When he got into the back of a waiting van, two of the Krays’ gunmen were waiting for him. At close range, a fusillade of bullets was pumped into the Mad Axeman. Certainly sounds of muffled bangs were heard from within the vehicle, and then the two men who had walked out with Mitchell returned to the flat, and made a phone call. “The dog is dead,” one of them said, before ordering the others to completely clean the flat. Prescott was then taken to another flat and threatened by Reggie Kray to keep her mouth shut. She was told that “they gave [Mitchell] four injections in the nut”. Mitchell’s body was disposed of at sea.

Ronnie Kray didn’t deny that Mitchell was dead, but blamed it on one of his men, Billy Exley, and three Greeks, who had offered to get Mitchell out of the country. However, when they couldn’t cope with him, they shot him. (Equally, another member of the Kray firm said that Ronnie told him: “He’s f***ing dead. We had to get rid of him; he would have got us all nicked. We made a mistake getting the bastard out in the first place.”)

Either way, Frankie Mitchell achieved his aim of not being in Dartmoor at Christmas. Wally Garelick received an eighteen-month sentence for his part in the escape.

Sources:

Daily Mirror,
19 December 1966: “Dartmoor warders in plea to Mitchell”

Evening Argus,
29 October 2003: “Ex-Kray henchman spared jail”

Hansard, 13 December 1966: “House of Commons: Dartmoor (Prisoner’s Escape)”

Hansard, 14 December 1966: “House of Lords: Dartmoor Escape of Frank Mitchell”

TheKrays.co.uk

Foreman, Frankie with John Lisners:
Respect
(Arrow, 1997)

Glasgow Herald,
26 June 1968: “Crown story of Frank Mitchell’s murder after escape from Dartmoor”

Cinema audiences in 2002 were treated to a fun romp starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a young criminal being pursued by a dogged FBI agent played by Tom Hanks. Directed by Steven Spielberg,
Catch Me If You Can
was a highly fictionalized version of the life of Frank Abagnale junior, a conman who had achieved great success before his twenty-first birthday. But while the film didn’t hesitate to conflate events and characters, Abagnale’s story was astounding enough without any additions. According to one report, there was even a plaque on the wall of Atlanta Federal Penitentiary commemorating Abagnale’s escape from the prison since apparently he was the first person to do so. (He wasn’t, but he was one of the very few who did.)

It is very difficult to verify many of the claims that are made in Abagnale’s book, also called
Catch Me If You Can.
According to the former conman himself – who has subsequently gone straight, and acts as a security consultant – not everything should be taken at face value. “I was interviewed by the co-writer [Stan Redding] only about four times,” Abagnale writes on his company’s website. “I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography. This is one of the reasons that from the very beginning I insisted the publisher put a disclaimer in the book and tapes.” As with some of the other stories in this volume where the primary evidence comes from the escapee’s own account – such as Henri Charriere or Casanova (a comparison that the younger Abagnale would probably have enjoyed) – this should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt.

Abagnale’s account of his life as a conman from the ages of sixteen to twenty-one – posing as a Pan Am co-pilot, a paediatrician who worked for nine months as an administrator in a large hospital, a lawyer, a college professor and a Los Angeles stockbroker – makes for highly enjoyable reading, but by the end of his short-lived career, he was on the run in twenty-six different countries around the globe. He spent six months in the infamous Perpignan prison in France, where he was thrown naked into a cell, about five feet cubed, and told he would be there for his entire year-long sentence, with no bedding or anything beyond a bucket. From there he was transferred to Swedish custody for trial on fraud charges, and found their prisons were comparatively luxurious. After being found guilty of a lesser crime, he served six months in Sweden (much of it in hospital recovering from his treatment by the French), and then, thanks to the intervention of a Swedish judge who didn’t want to send Abagnale on to Italy for prosecution there (thence to Spain), he was deported to the United States. Knowing that he was facing a prison sentence there, Abagnale resolved to escape from the custody of the guards deporting him.

Using the knowledge he had gained while working as a pilot, Abagnale removed the toilet unit, and lowered himself to the ground through the hatch cover used for the vacuum hose once the plane had landed in New York (at that time, there weren’t the restrictions on moving around the cabin or using the restrooms during take-off or landing that there are today). He made his way to Montreal, and was on the verge of catching a flight to Brazil – which didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States – when he was arrested by a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Mounties transferred him to the Border Patrol, and from there Abagnale was in FBI custody.

He eventually ended up in Atlanta where he was taken to the Federal Penitentiary to await trial. Built in 1902, the medium-security facility had a capacity of around 3,000 inmates, and a reputation for being nigh-on impossible to escape from. In April 1971, when Abagnale arrived there, the prison, like much of the rest of the American penal system, was under higher scrutiny than usual. Geed up by civil rights groups, congressional committees and the Justice Department were investigating the treatment of convicts, and undercover agents were regularly being placed into the system to report on conditions. For a man used to living on his wits like Abagnale, this was a heaven-sent opportunity.

It helped that he wasn’t properly checked into the prison by the US Marshal who delivered him there. The Marshal didn’t have the correct paperwork, and more or less insisted that the prison admissions officer take Abagnale without it. To the jaded eyes of the guards, this more or less confirmed that there was something suspicious about Abagnale, and right from the outset they were convinced that he was an undercover prison inspector, out to get more of their colleagues fired.

Although he initially protested that he really was a prisoner, Abagnale quickly saw the benefits to the deception. There clearly was an increased interest in prison conditions – and they would be forcibly brought to the public’s attention by the riots at Attica prison in New York in September 1971, caused by the atrocious state of the penal system – and the Atlanta authorities didn’t want to be found wanting. Abagnale received special treatment, and decided to use it to make his escape.

According to his own account, Abagnale contacted Jean Sebring, an old girlfriend of his in Atlanta, and when she visited him, posing as his fiancée, he outlined his plan. Sebring had been contacted by Sean O’Riley, the FBI agent who had doggedly tracked Abagnale for some time (and the basis of the character Hanratty, played by Tom Hanks in the movie), and possessed one of his business cards. At Abagnale’s instigation, she then claimed to be a freelance writer and gained an interview with US Bureau of Prisons Inspector C.W. Dunlap – and got hold of one of his cards too. This she was able to pass to Abagnale during her next visit.

While Abagnale continued to allow the guards to believe that he was spying on them, Sebring took O’Riley’s card to a local printer, and spun a story that she wanted to surprise her father with a set of business cards with his new telephone number on them after he moved apartments. Everything else needed to be identical to the original. Far from any connection to O’Riley, the new numbers in fact belonged to a couple of payphones in a shopping mall.

Once Sebring had given Abagnale one of the new cards, he moved into action. Shortly before 9 p.m. he told one of the guards that he really was a prison inspector, and passed over Dunlap’s card, saying that an emergency had arisen and he needed to see the lieutenant on duty. The guard dutifully took him along to the lieutenant, who was as pleased as his subordinate to learn that Abagnale had come clean about his true identity. Abagnale explained that he would have been released the following Tuesday, but he had been forced to reveal himself, since he needed to speak to an FBI agent regarding a case. With that, he handed over the card, complete with the FBI seal, address – and fake phone numbers. The lieutenant didn’t consider for a moment that there was anything amiss (and one has to assume that no one had told him, or others in the prison, exactly what Abagnale was on remand for!) and called O’Riley’s “office” number.

Sebring answered, and the lieutenant passed the phone to Abagnale, who carried out a fake conversation during which it transpired that “O’Riley” was undercover, and couldn’t come into the prison to speak with Abagnale. The only way that the two men could meet was if Abagnale could pop outside the prison and have a chat for a few minutes. The lieutenant couldn’t see any problem with that; after all, as far as he could see, Abagnale was going to be out of their hair in a few days’ time anyway. He assented to Abagnale meeting O’Riley. After fifteen minutes or so, a car pulled up outside the prison and the lieutenant himself escorted Abagnale to the door. The conman jumped into the car, driven by Sebring, and disappeared into the night.