by Paul Buck
For a few moments, there was no sign. Then she heard a metal ladder crashing against the outer wall and saw her boyfriend’s head appear with a rope ladder. She had to hurry once she reached the top of the twenty-five-foot wall, for one of her girlfriends, who had come along with another woman, was having a fracas with two officers a hundred yards down the street. They thought it would be fun to watch her escape and had turned up in dark glasses, sitting in a pink Ford Zephyr with leopard-skin seat covers, parked right in front of the main gate, where officers coming on and off duty regarded them with suspicion. And this early on a Sunday morning! Progl and her boyfriend went off across the bombsite to the waiting car, joined seconds later by their friends.
Progl lay low for a week, changing her hair from blonde to red. Then, reunited with her baby daughter of two and a half, she went on the run to a caravan site near Paignton, the same place where Jumbo Parsons had fled to. For a fortnight she devoted herself to being a mother. It didn’t last. She returned to London to resume her usual lifestyle and, after forty days of freedom, she was picked up when a policeman whose hobby was collecting car numbers noticed 1958 number plates on her new, stolen 1959 Consul.
The occurrences of women escaping from prison are minimal, precisely for the point Progl reveals: children and family. It is not easy to be on the run with children and their needs, nor is it easy to have to abandon them to the care of others. At that time though, Progl had taken the latter choice, a son from a previous relationship having been given up for her mother to raise.
VII
Into the Blue Beyond
An escape by air has to be organised by those on the outside. Of course, the history of such escapes does not go back too far. The use of a hot air balloon may well feature in cinematic adventures, but the reality would hardly offer a speedy departure. It is surprising, though, that helicopter escapes do not feature more heavily, for there is far less traffic in the sky than on the ground. The only disadvantage is that those below can clearly see and hear the whirling machine, and thus follow the trajectory of the escape, running the risk that faster helicopters, or even planes, can take off from nearby airports or other bases to intercept them. But the helicopter is a good means for hoisting inmates from prisons, provided it comes back to ground within a reasonable time, transferring the escapees to more conventional transport before they vanish.
There has only been one escape by helicopter on mainland Britain, and it was a long time in coming. Not only had it been predicted as far back as 1966, when prisoners protesting on the roof at Leicester Prison were buzzed by a press helicopter, but, just a couple of years later, the governor of Parkhurst had made a low-level run over his own prison and noted how easy it would be to escape that way. Even after worldwide press attention had been given to Michel Vaujour’s 1986 Paris escape (noted below), there were still no precautionary measures using netting or wire in the UK.
Thus it should have been no surprise when, on 10 December 1987, Andrew Russell (using the name Andrew Downes) hired a Bell 206 Longranger helicopter from Stansted Airport. On the pretext of flying towards Market Harborough, he stuck a gun to the head of the pilot at the last moment and told him to go to Gartree Prison, in nearby Leicestershire, to touch down on the football field and collect two prisoners.
Russell and his accomplice had made a dummy run eight days earlier. That time they had landed on a golf course in the area, his pretence being that he worked for a security company and was checking out possible hijack points. From there the pair had accepted a lift from a golf club member, who saved them the trouble of calling for a taxi and took them into the town, where they visited the library to consult local Ordnance Survey maps. They asked to photocopy them, but declined to do so when asked to become members of the library. (Why hadn’t they visited Stanford’s, or a similar travel bookshop in London, and bought the appropriate map?) It had also been noted that they were carrying a radio frequency scanner used to monitor police signals.
On the day of the escape itself, as they came into land on the prison football pitch, two robbers on afternoon break from the workshops, John Kendall and Sydney Draper, started running towards the centre circle, waving towels as identification. Guards who tried to follow were hindered by other inmates. At 3:17pm, only twenty-one seconds after it had landed, the helicopter commandeered by Russell was lifting away from the prison with its two escapees.
The plan had been to come down on the golf course, where a getaway car was waiting with a driver. But there was a swirling mist across the course, and it couldn’t be seen from the air. That plan was aborted and the helicopter touched down on an industrial estate, where the pilot was left handcuffed to his plane and the three occupants set about hijacking a delivery van. The receipt for the hire of the helicopter, still in its envelope and bearing Russell’s prints, was left behind in the cockpit.
The prison had feared this might happen one day. For such an eventuality, they had instigated a plan called Operation Rogue Elephant with RAF Wittering, whereby Harrier jump-jets would scramble and intercept any helicopter. But on this December day, when an emergency call was made to the air-control centre at RAF West Drayton, the only response was an operator with no idea of the plan, or even of the existence of a place called HMP Gartree. He suggested they call the local police who, even if they had responded quickly, would still have been hard-pressed to locate the helicopter, as it was soon back on the ground.
Kendall went with Russell when they hijacked a Fiat, leaving its female driver with the delivery van. From there they went to Corby and kidnapped an old man driving a Mini Metro in a multi-storey car park, taking him along, tied up in the back, as they sped northbound up the M1. They abandoned him in Sheffield, where he was found that evening, bound and gagged, with £40 stuffed in his pocket for the trouble they had caused him.
On the last day of January, Kendall was located in a one-room flat along Chelsea’s King’s Road. A forty-strong team of police with searchlights and weapons led a full assault on the building at 3am, smashing their way into the place and terrifying the neighbourhood. Kendall was asleep in bed. Unluckily for Russell, he was also there.
Sydney Draper went another way after the helicopter had come to ground. It was fourteen months before he was recaptured, in February 1989, at a house in his old stomping ground of Enfield.
Reggie Kray, who was at Gartree at the time, noted the commotion and its aftermath, particularly the witty notices on the board: “Helicopter trips/To and fro/Leicester to London. All enquiries to: Chief Security Officer.” “Please check your luggage before helicopter flight.” “Helicopter trips all full for the season. Check for vacancies at a later date.”
One of the government’s proposed methods for prevention was rocket defence, but that had to be scrapped as it was almost certain that, in any helicopter escape, the pilot would be an unwitting outsider. Barrage balloons, nets and wire barriers across exercise yards and open areas within the walls were other cited possibilities. Kray wrote that at Gartree, “they brought in anti-escape devices, including orange-coloured balls stretched across the field. From a distance they looked quite pretty, especially when the arc-lights were flickering on them.”
Kendall and Draper made their way into the annals of crime history. It could just as easily have happened earlier, as Ronnie Biggs and others had been entertaining the idea of a helicopter escape from Wandsworth in the spring of 1965. However, “the police might take pot-shots at us, which didn’t thrill me,” confided Biggs.
Others have undoubtedly explored that same avenue. In Northern Ireland, when the possibility had come up at Long Kesh, it was discarded because the prison was too close to a British army base, and they would have alerted helicopters which were much swifter than the civilian variety.
But it was in Ireland that the first non-mainland helicopter escape happened. At Halloween 1973, an Alouette 2 hired ostensibly for aerial photography purposes by someone impersonating an American was hijacked in a field near Stra
dbelly by a hooded man. The next time it landed was in the exercise yard of Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison at 3:40pm.
It was behind schedule. The game of football in progress as a distraction had lost its edge, and the spectators had dwindled. Kevin Mallon semaphored the helicopter down using pieces of white cloth, and other inmates were ready to restrain any officers. Mallon and two other important IRA prisoners, J. B. O’Hagan and Seamus Twomey (who the year before, as Chief of Staff of the Provisionals, had been in London negotiating with the British government), were lifted away. Though the officers were restrained with difficulty, they could hardly do anything as the blades were creating a dust storm. The narrowness of the yard left little room between the rotating blades and the perimeter wall, making it difficult to counteract the turbulence as the pilot struggled to take off.
The flight was short, barely six minutes to Baldoyle racecourse, where a car was to collect them. The people designated to steal the getaway car couldn’t find one, and had hired a taxi instead, which they proceeded to hijack brandishing a hefty Colt .45. When the escapees climbed out of the helicopter, the getaway car was not waiting. Believing they were under surveillance, the hijackers had taken the taxi for a quick tour around the area to kill time, delaying their arrival. Once collected, the three IRA men were driven to three different safe houses and the taxi abandoned. (The taxi driver, like the helicopter pilot, was paid a full fare.)
After the escape a prison officer apparently apologised to the governor, saying he “thought it was the new Minister for Defence [Paddy Donegan] arriving” – only for a republican prisoner to retort, “it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” The escape entered republican folklore, immortalised further by the Wolfe Tones in ‘The Helicopter Song’.
Over the English Channel there have been a number of notable cases (each with their own twist) that have made headlines. None more so than that of Michel Vaujour, rescued by his wife at the time, Nadine, who took lessons to learn to fly a helicopter. Little did her instructors know that this single mother, raising her two children, was seeking to free her husband from La Santé Prison in Paris.
Vaujour had escaped three times before, but this fourth escape was to seal his notoriety. On 26 May 1986, Vaujour, serving twenty-eight years for robbery and attempted murder, made his way onto the roof of the prison, armed with a fake gun and nectarines painted to look like grenades, where he was snatched away by his wife in a hired helicopter. They landed nearby on a football pitch, where a car was waiting for them.
Vaujour was captured later in the year, when he was shot in a failed bank robbery. (Nadine had earlier been arrested at a villa in Southwest France.) The bullet hit him in the head and put him into a long coma, with profound effects upon his behaviour. In prison he had to be helped to learn to speak again.
The case had its place in history cemented by the film La Fille de l’Air, starring Beatrice Dalle as Nadine. As the film shows, flying over Paris – or indeed, over any major city where the airspace needs to be vigorously controlled – soon draws the authorities onto your tail.
Pascal Payet seems to have determined that his notoriety was best served by a series of helicopter escapes. Payet was serving thirty years for a murder committed during a 1997 robbery, in which he shot a security guard fourteen times with a Russian AK47 automatic assault rifle – acquiring the nickname ‘Kalashnikov Pat’. In 2001, Payet escaped from Luynes prison in the South of France with a hijacked helicopter; then two years later, while still on the run, he organised an escape for some of his comrades (Franck Perletto, Eric Alboreo and Michel Valero) from the same Luynes prison, using a hijacked helicopter. Though he was later captured, as were the other three men, he escaped once more in July 2007 – this time from Grasse prison, once again by a helicopter, which had been hijacked at Cannes-Mandelieu airport.
The last escape had a special touch because it took place on Bastille Day, the French national holiday that commemorates the storming of the Bastille Prison in 1789. The four men who had hijacked the Squirrel helicopter in Cannes ordered the pilot north to Grasse, where they landed on the roof of the prison at the start of the night shift. Three of them broke open the doors, threatening the guards with machine pistols and sawn-off shotguns. They knew exactly where they were going, forcing their way through a number of doors into the isolation section until they reached Payet in his cell. Within five minutes they were back on the roof and away. As with Charlie Wilson, Payet’s rescuers came in to collect him – remarkably enough, for in this case everyone must have heard and watched the escape.
They touched down at a heliport next to a hospital in Brignoles, twenty-five miles inland from Toulon, not far from Marseilles, Payet’s hometown. It was unusual for a helicopter to be so long in the air. But the escapee’s freedom was short-lived. In September he was recaptured in Spain, not far from Barcelona. Even though he had undergone plastic surgery, he was still recognised by the Spanish police.
In July 2005, Payet was in prison at Villefrance-sur-Saone in Southern France when another attempt at rescue by helicopter failed, though this time he was not the intended escapee. Earlier, in May 2001 at Fresnes Prison, south of Paris, a helicopter had dropped a pistol and a Kalashnikov into the exercise yard. Though two prisoners took three guards hostage, they failed to escape and were forced to surrender after twenty-four hours. Another failed attempt occurred near Lyons in 2000, when a hijacked helicopter lowered a net over the prison for three inmates on the roof to grab. Guards opened fire from a watchtower and killed one, while the other two escaped and hijacked cars once they were set down. They were later captured after a gun battle with police.
Though cables or nets were strung across some prison yards after Michel Vaujour’s escape, not all took such basic preventive action. Draugignan Prison had done little to hinder escape when, in March 2001, a helicopter hijacked at an airfield near St Tropez was forced to land in the courtyard. Three robbers, Emile Forma-Sari, Jean-Philippe Lecase and Abdelhamid Carnous, leapt aboard (“the whole thing was over in a flash,” a guard commented). The machine was in the air for some while, travelling the extraordinary distance of sixty kilometres to the village of Auribeau-sur-Siagne, before coming down to rendezvous with the waiting getaway car.
Another success story occurred in December 2005, when two men hijacked a helicopter in Albertville as it was in the process of taking off to collect skiers in the Alps. The pilot was forced to fly to Aiton Prison and bring it down in the exercise yard. With no security mesh, three men – one serving time for drugs, one for armed robbery and the third for leading a robbery – were lifted and taken to open country near Grenoble. All in all, almost a dozen helicopter escapes have been noted in France since 1981.
Belgium saw two such escapes in 2007, including the high-profile fifth breakout of Nordin Benallal, the self-styled ‘escape king’, though it did not go according to plan. Unforeseen by him, when the prototype helicopter – hijacked from an engineering company and piloted by one of its employees – arrived in the prison yard just before sunset on 28 October, Benallal was not the only one to leap aboard. So many inmates tried to clamber in or hang onto the skids that the plane could not lift off. When the engine failed, it came back to earth and crashed.
Benallal and his heavily armed accomplice leapt from the machine, grabbed two guards as hostages and forced doors to be opened so that they could grab a Volkswagen Golf prison car equipped with a flashing police light and escape Ittre Prison, thirty kilometres south of Brussels, one of the most secure modern facilities in the country. Initially jailed in 1998 for five years on armed robbery charges, Benallal first escaped in June 2000 and was quickly recaptured. In October he was off again for another three months, using a fake leg injury to obtain a crutch with which he beat guards during a transfer between jails. His third escape was affected in January 2001, with the help of his brother, when he swapped clothes and places with him during a prison visit. He was caught three weeks later in a billiard hall.
His fourth
escape, in 2004, saw him cut through two wire fences before scaling a twenty-five-foot wall with a rope ladder thrown over by an accomplice waiting with a car. It was after this escape that he shot two policemen who tried to apprehend him, critically injuring them and adding substantially to the accumulating years of his jail sentence. Benallal, who is not yet thirty, now faces over fifty years for ninety-five convictions. One has to expect that escape will remain his central preoccupation for the foreseeable future.
Of course, his fifth escape was short-lived. The car was abandoned three miles away in a forest, probably the original rendezvous point for the helicopter bid. Within a day he was recaptured in neighbouring Holland, cornered in a motorcycle showroom. One Belgian commentator likened his escape, the first ever from ‘Belgium’s Alcatraz’, to an episode of Prison Break. But people in Belgium want his prison to be made secure, as it also holds Marc Dutroux, the paedophile jailed for murdering four girls.
Benallal’s was the second successful helicopter escape of 2007. The first took place on 15 April on the other side of the country, at Lantin Prison in Sint-Truiden, near Liège, where two men posing as tourists from Marseilles hijacked a helicopter and flew into the yard to pick up Frenchman Erik Ferdinand, on pre-trial detention awaiting extradition to Spain where he was wanted for fraud and theft. The pilot initially refused to land in the yard as it was too small, but at gunpoint he couldn’t argue. One rescuer threw teargas canisters into the crowd of exercising prisoners, while Ferdinand clambered aboard. The helicopter flew only a few hundred metres before setting down, and the three men escaped in a waiting car.
In Holland, during September 1997, a helicopter escape attempt from De Geerhorst Prison failed when the plane crashed into the ground and killed the pilot.