Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes

by Paul Buck

  Madson and friends went down the ladder, across to the gate and, finding that it did indeed open, returned for the ladder and went over the wall. In those days, if you were free and were not caught for another offence for the remaining period of your sentence, then the slate was wiped clean, a kind of gentlemen’s agreement. Two years later, so the story goes, Madson turned up at the prison with his solicitor, asking for his clothes to be returned.

  Another of his escapes is notorious. On the morning of Saturday 24 June 1961, when there was a reduced staff on duty, Madson led the capture of two warders in the mailroom at Wandsworth. Whilst they were being tied up, Madson pulled on an officer’s hat and brown coat and sat in his box, watching over the mailroom. Then he marched those seeking to escape (variously reported as ten men or six men) across the yard. “They had no clue how they were going to get away,” one former associate recalls. All was resolved when they saw a ladder that the works people had been using. Although they grabbed it and went over the wall, “They had no help outside, nothing.” (Another account says that cars were waiting outside, provided by Ronald Jeal who had been released three weeks earlier. One guy had reputedly broken his leg and had to be lain on the backseat.) As a result, half-day Saturday work was ended inside the prison.

  Richard Dennick used the cover of a birthday party to aid his escape, after getting over the wall of Lewes Prison in 1983. One evening, while watching television in the TV room, Dennick, who was serving life for murder, noticed some decorators’ scaffolding and thought he could gain access to the roof that way. He returned to his cell to collect a few things and, remembering The Great Escape, stuffed some sheets into a pair of jeans and left it looking like a dummy on his bunk. Back in the TV room, he waited until everyone had gone off to bed. Three cleaners were still lurking around, but, as soon as he jumped up the scaffolding, they turned a blind eye and quickly left the room. When the guard came in to check, he only saw an empty room and locked it up for the night. Dennick was still on top of the scaffolding and had until morning to leave.

  Finding the plasterboard between the rafters, he scraped it away with a scaffold clip, making a hole big enough to get into the cavity, and then prised away the tiles until he could get onto the roof. He tied the TV cable he had ripped out to a drainpipe and abseiled down the forty-five-foot wall. The last fifteen feet were quicker, as the cable snapped and he plummeted, landing on his arse and breaking his front teeth.

  After crossing the yard, he threw his blanket over the razor-wire fence and went over. The wire cut his chin to the bone, but he ignored it. Though he was spotted by a guard and his dog, and the alarm was raised, he kept running. He changed his clothes in a back garden and tried to walk down the road normally. That is when he heard loud music coming from a club and went inside. It was almost closing time, but he was bought a drink by one of the partying crowd. Dennick decided to confide in the birthday boy, who didn’t shirk but suggested he join them on a coach taking them into the coastal Sussex town of Brighton.

  Dennick went his own way once they were in the seaside town, calling some friends who brought him clothes and money. (They tossed the bundle of clothes out of the car at an arranged spot, as they refused to be involved any further.) He checked into the Metropole hotel, drank from the mini-bar and paid his bill the next day, before leaving for London. After meeting up with some new accomplices, they robbed a corner shop of £250. They were arrested almost immediately. Dennick was later located in Wormwood Scrubs, charged with possession of a firearm under another name.

  In the USA, Richard Lee McNair has escaped from prison three times in the last twenty years, the most recent instance being in April 2006, from the US Penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana. This was the one to draw him to public attention, for he was captured on camera by a patrolman who stopped him down the road by a railroad track, along which he was jogging. The episode, which lasts ten minutes, was filmed by a camera in the patrolman’s car and can be viewed online. It shows McNair calmly handling the officer, joking about the escapee, even giving him two different names within that short space of time. Despite fitting the escapee’s profile, we see McNair finally shaking hands with the officer and trotting off on his way.

  McNair was finally caught in October 2007, by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in New Brunswick. He escaped from the maximum-security prison by burying himself under the mailbags, as he was employed in the workshop mending damaged sacks. He had built a case on a mail pallet to hide in, which was then taken out to a nearby unguarded warehouse. You could say that he mailed himself out of prison. In fact, he was the first person in thirteen years to escape successfully from such a high-security institution. Previously he had been in the super-maximum security prison at Florence, Colorado, from which no one had ever escaped. Realising he would not be the first, he had actively sought a transfer to Pollock.

  Lucien Rivard, the Canadian mobster and drug trafficker, was imprisoned in Montréal’s Bordeaux Prison, awaiting extradition to the United States. In March 1965, along with his companion André Durocher, he asked the guard if they could go to the furnace room to collect the hoses to water the outdoor rink – on an above-zero evening when the water would not freeze! Subsequently, Durocher pulled a gun – which was, in fact, carved wood blackened with shoe polish – and tied up the guard before restraining another guard on the west wall. They used a ladder to climb the small interior wall and the hoses to climb over the large exterior wall. Once away they hijacked a car, paying its owner a fare and later phoning to tell him where they had parked it. Durocher was picked up in a Montréal flat after a tip-off a couple of months later, and Rivard was found sunbathing at a cottage near Chateauguay with some of his associates. No escape charges were brought in order to speed up the extradition process.

  Frankie Fraser gives cat burglar Ray Jones his vote for the best single-handed escape, when he went over the wall at Pentonville Prison, breaking both his legs in the process and yet still getting away. Fraser gives scant details, but somehow, in 1958, Jones managed to climb onto the prison roof and, in scaling down the sheer face of the outside wall, smashed one kneecap, then fell and broke his ankle. Nevertheless, he continued, scaled another wall, and broke the other leg when he jumped.

  Still he persisted, crawling into a block of flats and making his way onto a roof, where he fell headlong through a skylight as he tried to prise it open. When he regained consciousness he made his way out of the building, pulled himself along using the railings on the Caledonian Road, crawled across the road to King’s Cross station, over the railway lines and into someone’s garden. Eventually he decided to seek help and attracted the attention of some young men, asking them to give him a lift “because I had had a bad fall.” They guessed who he was, but didn’t betray him. After they left him at his relative’s flat, his wife arrived and arranged for him to stay elsewhere, where he remained for five months while recovering from his injuries. He was not recaptured for two years.

  When Glen Hewson attempted to escape in 1982 from Peterhead and fell from the perimeter fence, breaking both legs, he was able to sue for damages, claiming the guards were throwing stones and bits of concrete at him. In 1987 he received £35,608, the judge being unimpressed by evidence offered by the prison officers.

  I make no apologies for periodically including failed attempts, along with those that succeeded. There is sometimes a fine line between the two and, in any case, the failures still show the modus operandi.

  Noel ‘Razor’ Smith mentions a couple of his failures to get over the wall of the Verne, at Portland Bill in Dorset. The way out was best pursued at night, after last roll-call at 9pm. One disadvantage of the location was that, as soon as someone went missing, the causeway was blocked and the naval police from the Royal Navy base at the bottom of Portland Bill joined in the search.

  Smith mentions teaming up with Andy Philipson to scale the walls. Their first bid entailed taking a fifteen-foot piece of timber from the woodwork shop and nailing it with six-
inch nails as handholds. Unfortunately, that attempt was spotted by the night patrol and they hightailed it before being caught. The next time out they went for bed-sheets tied into a rope, with a grapple attached, made from a sawn-up tubular chair. Their mistake was to not braid the rope, for it was a stormy night and the rain soaked both them and their sheets. The sentries failed to spot them in the open, as they were probably dozing, and, after two attempts to get the grapple to hold, Philipson shot up the rope and straddled the wall. But the sheet tore for the heavier Smith, who couldn’t reach the dangling end to haul himself up the rest of the way. Though he threw up the broken end, Philipson hadn’t the strength to hold it whilst Smith climbed. Smith told Philipson to go it alone, but he refused and dropped back down with the intention to try another night.

  Reggie Kray tells the story of Dave McAllister, who at one time robbed the prison safe before making his escape, and another time charmed a teacher into hiding him in the boot of her car and driving him out. He had told her that, if they were caught, she was to claim that he told her a bomb was rigged in the car which he threatened to detonate. In the event, the escape was successful and he remained free for a month. But the love-struck teacher was unable to hold her tongue under questioning. She received six years for aiding and abetting him.

  Francis Quinn left Frankland Prison in 1992 in the back of a laundry van. He was the first person to escape from Frankland since it opened in 1980, but there was barely any press coverage. When Barry Redfern and Edward Pollock, two loyalist prisoners, tried to repeat the method of an earlier escape from Long Kesh in 1973, by Brendan Hughes in a refuse collection lorry, they hadn’t taken into account the modernisation of the dustcarts. The compressors set to work before they were through the gates. Both were badly injured and one died in hospital.

  Joseph Steele kept escaping from prison for one reason only: to call attention to what he claimed was a miscarriage of justice, his own conviction for murder. His initial escape, in August 1989, was from custody when visiting his sick mother. He climbed through a skylight onto the roof and sat astride the ridge tiles to draw the media, photographers and local people to witness his protest. After three hours, he returned to his escort.

  Four years later, in April 1993, on a similar trip home accompanied by one officer, he went out the bedroom window and, instead of hanging around Glasgow, was found five days later outside Buckingham Palace, glued to the railings. He had handcuffed his left wrist to a gate railing and superglued his right to another. A police van and ambulance were strategically parked to block him from public view. It took over an hour of solvent application before his hand was unglued.

  A few weeks later Steele was on the sports field at Saughton Prison in Edinburgh, watching a game of football, when he slipped away with four others. There was only a perimeter fence topped with razor-wire at the extreme end of the outfield. Though there was a security camera, it did not cover the corner to which they fled, or the spot where a hole was already cut. Two of them were soon recaptured, but Steele telephoned the Daily Record and stated that he would continue his protest from abroad. More publicity was forthcoming this time. Six weeks later he turned up outside Barlinnie Jail, where he made speeches with film crews in attendance before giving himself up to the authorities.

  Pearse McAuley and Nessan Quinlivan were two IRA members on remand in Brixton Prison, awaiting trial for conspiring to kill Sir Charles Tidbury, a Tory Party backer and brewery tycoon. Their escape occurred on Sunday 8 July 1991. On the way back to their cells after hearing mass in the prison chapel, McAuley bent down to his shoe and produced a small gun that he fired in the air before sticking it to the head of one of the guards. As Category A prisoners, they were supposed to be accompanied at all times when out of their cells.

  Taking the keys, the pair opened the gates into the yard. Other warders followed, but held back as McAuley shot one in the leg. There was a wheelbarrow in the yard left by workmen. They piled it on top of a dog kennel placed against a perimeter wall and clambered up, cutting themselves on the razor-wire at the top. After dropping to the ground outside, they commandeered a prison officer’s car that he was cleaning and drove off. They were immediately blocked by another guard in his car. This time they set off on foot towards Brixton Hill and hijacked another vehicle, the driver objecting and receiving a shot in the leg for his remonstration. His passenger was ejected too, and McAuley and Quinlivan sped off down the hill, abandoning the car soon after and taking a taxi to Baker Street, carrying with them a case of clothes and some money they found in the car. By the time the alarm was put into effect, they were underground, blending in with the public. As remand prisoners, they were entitled to wear their own civilian clothes.

  Initially, the gun was thought to have been smuggled in via the confessional box, though it was later discovered to have entered in the sole of a training shoe when the prison metal detector was unavailable. There were also some suggestions that MI5 had allowed their escape to happen in the hope of being led to IRA safe-houses.

  McAuley and Quinlivan were both recaptured in Ireland in April 1993, within days of each other. Both men carried loaded revolvers, though neither made any attempt to use them. They knew what they were doing. The Dublin courts refused to extradite them, stating that the offence of having a weapon in the Republic took precedence over any UK issues.

  There have been many attempts to escape from prison by the IRA. As a self-proclaimed army, the repeated refusal to be acknowledged as such by the British authorities – who treated each offence as criminal rather than political – meant they had a virtual duty to escape. In November 1971, at Belfast’s Crumlin Road Prison, nine IRA prisoners playing football abandoned their game and ran towards the prison wall as soon as two rope ladders were sent flying over. The operation to get them over the wall and into waiting cars happened so quickly that the prison officers failed to respond.

  On 10 June 1981, having had guns smuggled into the Crumlin Road Prison by visitors over a period of time, eight IRA prisoners – Joe Doherty, Robert Campbell, Angelo Fusco, Paul Magee, Michael McKee, Anthony Sloan, Gerard Sloan and Michael Ryan – arranged to meet lawyers in the visiting area. After an hour, Magee, one of the leaders, produced a gun and held it to the head of a guard, prompting Doherty to follow suit. Ten officers and three solicitors were tied up; some of the prisoners changed into the guards’ uniforms, whilst others disguised themselves with the solicitors’ clothes and briefcases.

  They made for the gates, and although they were recognised it was always at the last minute and each guard was overcome before he could take action. However, another officer some distance away thought that something was wrong and, as the prisoners were escaping through the second set of gates into the outside parking area, a gun battle ensued between the IRA backup team with cars and the police in the court opposite the jail. Only three escaped in a car, which was riddled with submachine gunfire in the process. The others made it on foot, remarkably, because for a republican to walk through the loyalist Shankhill estate was like sticking his head into a lion’s mouth – though a hijacked car completed their bid to reach the safety of the Falls Road area.

  ‘The Great Escape’, as it became known, from the Maze (formerly Long Kesh), near Lisburn, outside Belfast, came as a big surprise. This prison was regarded as extremely secure, with more officers than prisoners and more sophisticated systems than most. As was later revealed, the officers’ slackness resulted from the way the prisoners worked to lull them into a false sense of security. Larry Marley was to organise the escape, though he was ordered not to depart as his release was imminent.

  It began at 2:30pm on 25 September 1983, a quiet Sunday afternoon worked only by a skeleton staff to reduce the overtime bill. On this day thirty-eight IRA prisoners would escape, all of whom were either housed in Block 7 or had contrived to be working there. With inmates free to move around the wings for recreation, some prisoners strategically placed themselves near officers so that they would not be able
to reach the alarm buttons.

  On a signal these prisoners produced guns that had been smuggled in and took control, though not without some injuries to the officers. Twenty minutes later the staff were all secured in two games rooms and their uniforms removed. The plan was to hijack the kitchen truck that visited each day at 3pm, and to conceal the mass escapees in the back. At that time they would avoid the staff shift change. But on that day the truck was late and, when it arrived, at 3:30pm, they had to turn it straight around.

  The driver was an officer, but he was driving with his foot tied to the clutch and an inmate lying on the floor, with a gun trained on his crotch. All went without incident through the first two gates, but when they finally reached the main gate the next shift of officers was arriving in greater numbers. Nine of the prisoners who had changed into uniforms jumped from the back and took control of five officers in their lodge, then rounded up more guards as they entered. At one point an alarm was triggered, but when the control room checked they were informed it was a mistake.

  The escape started to falter when a guard tried to break free. He was stabbed and died later. That incident was enough to send out serious alarm signals. One officer contacted the emergency control, another watchtower guard phoned to say he could see officers fighting. In the resulting fracas, everyone had to make a break for it, fleeing on foot as the gate opened.

  Outside, rolls of perimeter wire trapped some of the escapees, while others managed to negotiate it. Troops and police by the hundred flooded the area. Of the thirty-eight who escaped, nineteen were caught immediately or soon after, and nineteen got away – though in the long term, only three were never recaptured: Séamus Campbell, Tony McAllister and Gerard Fryers. This was the biggest escape in British history, and the biggest in Europe since World War Two.