The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (2 page)

If we’re honest with ourselves, no one wants to be caged up. The thought that our entire lives are at the dictate of others, and that we’ve lost control of our day-to-day existence, is horrifying. But most members of society agree that there are elements who need to be kept away from the general populace. This isn’t the place for a discussion about whether a propensity for criminal actions is a form of mental illness, or what defines a crime: people are put behind bars, and others are charged with keeping them there. And the ones who are inside often want to get out – preferably much earlier than the due process of law will allow.

The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks
was inspired, in part, by the TV series
Prison Break,
which starred Wentworth Miller as Michael Scofield, a young man whose brother, Lincoln Burrows, was incarcerated because he had been framed for murder. In order to help free Linc, Michael committed a crime so he could be sent to the same prison, Fox River Penitentiary, but before he did so, he had a complete blueprint of the facility tattooed onto his body. Although
Prison Break
got progressively sillier as the seasons passed, the first year, which followed the attempts to break out of Fox River, showed the many possibilities and problems with such an escape.

Prison escapes have formed the core of a number of classic movies – from
Papillon
to
The Shawshank Redemption
– and there’s a whole subgenre of prisoner-of-war films such as
The Great Escape
and
The Colditz Story.
Some of these are based on real incidents, magnified for the purposes of a good story; others are completely fictitious (not that that has prevented them from inspiring real-life escapes, as we will see later on.) Television has presented ‘real-life’ dramatizations of such exploits: two series of
I Escaped: Real Prison Breaks
have aired around the world, and many broadcasters have looked to their own country’s history for source material. Some of these stories are retold in this book, although all of the assertions made in these documentaries have been re-examined and quite often found to be overly generalised.

Some of these escapes are well known, others much less so, and have often been found when a news report on one story makes a casual comment about a previous escapade. The first helicopter escape from an American jail, masterminded by conman Dale Remling, is an example of this: overlooked by compilers of such escapes, probably because it’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia listing, it’s a lovely story of a man revelling in temporary freedom.

As well as looking at escapes from the last hundred years, we’ve delved back into history: the first escapes from the Tower of London; the flight of Mary Queen of Scots from Lochleven Castle; the miraculous acrobatics of a young monk later beatified as St John of the Cross; the tunnel dug by Yankee prisoners during the American Civil War.

Each entry has been cross-checked with as many primary sources as possible: the Newspaper Archive website and Google News both have scans of newspapers from around the globe, and it’s been interesting reading how five different papers have treated the same core information. Many escapees have written their own accounts of their exploits, and these have been matched with the contemporary reports where possible (and the occasional piece of ‘unreliable narration’ commented on). Some of the breakouts have given rise to urban myths that have eventually been presented as gospel; where possible, we have identified these. What follows aren’t definitive accounts, of course, but hopefully present a wide perspective.

Inevitably there are a few stories that didn’t make the cut for this volume, sometimes eliminated because it was simply impossible to find any form of corroborating evidence. An escape from a Mexican jail in which the participants managed to tunnel their way up into the courtroom in which they had been sentenced is a great tale, and worthy of inclusion in Steven Pile’s
Book of Heroic Failures,
but as it isn’t referenced elsewhere, it isn’t expanded upon here. (Equally, trying to find those references led to a detailed account of another escape from a Mexican jail that we’d not heard of previously, which does feature.)

The book is divided into three main sections. Prisoners can go over the fences that pen them in – whether it’s a fifteen-feet-high metal obstacle with barbed wire on the top, or the full might of the Berlin Wall – or they can tunnel beneath them (although there aren’t that many of those outside of prisoner-of-war tales). The third alternative, which often leads to the most daring exploits, sees prisoners trying to go out through the gates that have been slammed shut behind them – hiding inside a dog basket, perhaps, or within a food lorry, or, as in the case of Frank Abagnale, persuading the jailors to open the doors themselves.

Each escape is different, and in this book we don’t judge those who are doing the escaping. Details of the crimes (if crimes they were) are given, as well as a brief note of what happened to the escapees after the end of the hunt for them. But the focus is on getting from point A (inside the prison) to point B (outside).

We start with one of the most daring escapes of modern times, when, in 1983, nearly forty members of the Irish Republican Army broke out of the highest security prison in Western Europe . . .

Paul Simpson
January 2013

Prisoners – particularly those who feel that they have nothing left to lose, such as those serving life sentences – will take advantage of any chink that they find in the security of the establishment in which they are being held. It usually doesn’t matter to them whether the escape happens tomorrow, next week or next year, just so long as they can finally get away over, through, or under the walls that are keeping them away from the life they want to lead.

Political prisoners often regard themselves as prisoners-of-war with the same concomitant duty to escape, and during the years of the struggle in Northern Ireland, those who were held by the British considered it an absolute imperative to get free in order to continue the fight. Equally, those holding them were resolutely trying to ensure that they didn’t have that opportunity.

When the Maze prison was designed, with its many high-security features, no one would have guessed that the weak point would be a lorry that carried food and other items around the camp. But on 25 September 1983, thirty-eight highly dangerous members of the Irish Republican Army used that lorry to break out – and had it not been for a slight delay in its schedule for the day, they would probably have been able to drive out through the gates. As it was, it got them as far as the “airlock” before the final gate, from where they were able to escape mostly over the fence.

The Maze prison had grown into a huge maximum-security prison on the site of the Long Kesh internment camp, a set of Nissen huts on a disused RAF airfield about nine miles southwest of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The British government’s reaction to the problems with holding IRA prisoners following the introduction of interment in 1971 had been the creation of eight H-Blocks, which were designed as the ultimate in prisoner control. Named after their shape of a capital H, each “leg” of the H was a “wing”, a self-contained prison unit, with the “bar” of the H forming the “circle”, the nerve centre of the unit. Prisoners were not meant to be able to move between wings except under guard, and there were barriers between the wings and the circle to prevent movement. Within the circle were the areas for the prison guards, as well as the Emergency Control Room (ECR) which housed the alarms, a telephone and a radio.

Even if prisoners could get out from the H-Block, they were still encased within a large fence which had a couple of “airlock” security gates comprised of a gate on either side of a neutral area, and those leaving were checked on both sides before the outer gate was released. That was still within the main prison compound, and to get out from that you had to get past the Tally Lodge, where there was another airlock gate, and everyone – even prison warders – were searched as they went to and fro. And then there were British Army patrols everywhere once you got outside the Maze itself.

In March 1981, two and a half years before the mass breakout, which would be described by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as “a very grave incident, the most serious in our prison history”, members of the IRA had started to go on hunger strike demanding political status. An earlier hunger strike had not led to the concessions they believed they had won, so a new, staggered strike began, with Bobby Sands the first to refuse food. During the strike, Sands was elected as an anti-H-Block candidate to the British House of Commons, raising the profile of the strike considerably. Sands died after sixty-six days; nine other hunger strikers also died before the protest came to an end on 3 October. Mrs Thatcher’s government’s refusal to give in to the demands, and their hard line approach to the strikers (“If Mr Sands persisted in his wish to commit suicide, that was his choice. The Government would not force medical treatment upon him,” Northern Ireland Secretary of State Humphrey Atkins said shortly before Sands’ death) caused more unrest.

This made the actions of the men in block H7 over the next few months all the more surprising. Rather than taking on an equally hard line demeanour and trying to make life even more difficult for the hated British, they started to be almost pleasant. It wasn’t until that Sunday morning in September 1983 that the cause of their change became clear: the IRA were intending to take over H7. To do that they needed access to the circle at the heart of the prison, and to achieve that, they had to be trusted.

Although many odd ideas were suggested for breakouts from the Maze – from tunnels (which weren’t feasible, given that the blocks were built on concrete specifically to deal with such a threat), to hot-air balloons – the IRA realized that a proper coordinated response was the only way to combat all the various obstacles that sat in their way. Rather than have multiple people working on different strategies, one escape officer was appointed: Larry Marley, who had achieved fame for breaking out of a courtroom where he was on trial for an attempted escape. Marley and some colleagues had tried to get out from Long Kesh internment dressed as a British Army foot patrol, but had been arrested. When they were placed in a holding cell at Newry courthouse, they realized they could get through the bars of the cell toilet, and managed to not only negotiate that, but also the thirty-feet-high fence that surrounded the courthouse.

Marley was being held in H5, and became the clearing-house for all escape ideas. He realized that he needed as much information as he could get about the prison – which wasn’t easy, since whenever prisoners were moved in or out of the facility, they were kept from seeing the layout. Every little snippet was passed on to an intelligence officer in each block, who arranged for it to reach Marley. Maps and photos of the buildings were smuggled in so that they could work out the relative positions of each block to the gates.

If an escape attempt was to have any chance of success, then the warders needed to be taken unawares. If the prison authorities got wind of any sort of activity, then they would have no hesitation in cracking down. The IRA men knew they needed to get inside the warders’ heads, and create a softer environment where there wasn’t the daily tension. This didn’t go down well with some of the men inside the prison, who only a few short months before had been engaged in dirty protests against the Brits, but it achieved its aim. Larry Marley found out exactly how they could get out from the Maze. While most activities within the prison were regulated, the prison food lorry seemed to be a bit of a law unto itself. It was even allowed out of the main gate without anyone checking its contents. If the IRA men could somehow get hold of the lorry, and “persuade” its driver to take them to the main gate, then as many men as could fit in the back of it could escape. The only way that they could get hold of the lorry was to have control of one of the blocks which it visited. And the only way that could be achieved was if they had real weapons and ammunition with which to intimidate the guards into submission, so that they were aware that this was a proper IRA operation.

Firearms would need to be smuggled in from outside the prison, and it was also clear that if a large enough number of prisoners escaped (and the mantra of the escape was “think big”), then assistance would be required to spirit them across the border into Southern Ireland speedily, before the inevitable manhunt caught up with them. The plan was therefore worked out meticulously, written down, and smuggled out for approval by the IRA’s GHQ. Only those who absolutely needed to know what was going on were told of the plans within the prison, and those few were kept on a very tight leash. If any hint was dropped, even inadvertently, then the person responsible would not be included on the list of potential escapees.

H7 was designated as the block to take over. The block opposite it, H8, was empty, which meant there was less chance of the escapees’ activities being noticed quite as quickly. Within the group were three of the IRA’s top men: Bobby Storey, Gerry Kelly and Brendan “Bik” McFarlane. All three had played their part in getting to know the prison officer by becoming orderlies with access to the nerve centre in the circle. Grilles that should have always remained shut were left open because the prison warders knew the men would be passing through some tea and toast; the inmates were occasionally left on their own while a warder popped out to make himself a drink. Although none of the prison staff would probably have admitted it, a certain level of trust had been quite deliberately gained, and a complacency that was vital to the IRA plans was beginning to be felt.

The GHQ gave the go-ahead, and arranged the various logistical elements that were needed. Even now, nearly thirty years later, the IRA will not admit how they got the guns into the Maze – apparently just in case they need to do something similar again – but five handguns were somehow brought into the prison. (Prison officers speculated that they might have been smuggled in by female visitors concealing them very uncomfortably; certainly, visitors didn’t go through a metal detector – one of the elements of which the Hennessey Report on the escape was critical).