by Paul Buck
The potentially lethal chaos of other prisoners clambering onboard was avoided when Vassilis Paleokostas, serving twenty-five years for kidnapping and robbery, was sprung from Greece’s maximum-security Korydallos Prison, near Athens, on the late afternoon of 6 June 2006. Flares and teargas were thrown around the helicopter to deter stowaways. Joining Paleokostas on the escape was Alket Rizai, an Albanian serving life for homicide. The escape was engineered by Vassilis’ brother, Nikos, who had been on the run himself for some years. They flew to a nearby graveyard in Schisto, where motorcycles were waiting to take them to the port of Piraeus.
The first such Australian escape occurred in March 1999, when librarian Lucy Dudko rescheduled her tourist flight to view Sydney’s Olympic site from the sky by hijacking the copter. Coaxing the pilot with a gun to make for maximum-security Silverwater Prison, she found her lover, John Killick, serving twenty-eight years for armed robbery, waiting outside in the sports area for his lift. He was whisked away to the sound of cheering inmates and a hail of bullets from the prison guards.
The helicopter landed in a park several kilometres away at North Ryde, where the pilot was tied up and the couple hijacked a car and its driver. They eluded the police for six weeks, eventually being captured at a caravan in the Bass Hill Tourist Park.
Dudko received ten years for organising the escape, and was released on parole after seven. She is allowed to write to Killick, but not to phone or visit him. His release will be in 2013 at the earliest, when he will be seventy-one and she will be fifty-five. The escape captured the public imagination, much to the annoyance of police and politicians, for being the most dramatic on record. The media gave them the ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ tag, or made references to the Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’. The public seemed to appreciate the romance of their exploit, and even to hope they would retain their freedom and live on the stash of accumulated earnings from earlier robberies.
Dudko had planned the escape, enquiring about hiring a helicopter earlier at Bankstown Airport, making a dummy flight a fortnight before, and buying the guns – as well as renting out three very apt films from the video shop: The Getaway, Captive and Breakout, in the latter of which Hollywood’s Charles Bronson is hired to free an innocent man from a Mexican prison. These were all found in her flat.
In Puerto Rico, the situation of five prisoners who escaped by helicopter seemed, by our standards, worse than hopeless. Orlando Valdes Cartagena and Jose A. Perez Rodriguez were serving two hundred and fifty-four years and three hundred and nineteen years respectively for murder; Victor Gonzalez Diaz was serving one hundred and thirteen years, Hector Marrero Diaz one hundred and nine years and Jose M. Rojas Tapia one hundred years. It’s hardly surprising that, at the very end of December 2002, two men who rented a helicopter in the capital, San Juan, ostensibly to inspect construction sites in the southern city of Ponce, forced the pilot at gunpoint to bring the helicopter down on the roof of Las Cucharas Prison where the five were waiting, having cut a hole in the chain-link fence.
One man was forced to hang onto the skids of the helicopter, as there was no room left inside, whilst they were flown into the central mountain region. All were later recaptured, except Gonzalez Diaz – whom the others claimed they killed soon after the escape, though no body was ever found. The authorities wondered if the prison’s guards had played any part in the escape, for, in 1991, when the only other helicopter escape occurred, a law was brought in giving guards the authority to shoot down any helicopter during an escape attempt.
Things are pretty rough in Brazil too, where escapes happen more or less on a daily basis, and where prisons are controlled more by the inmates than the authorities. Nevertheless, a helicopter escape is a rarity. In January 2002, when a hijacked copter snatched two inmates from the central yard at the Jose Parada Neto Penitentiary in Guarulhos, a suburb of the capital Sao Paulo, guards opened fire. The machine was later found fifty kilometres away, riddled with bullet-holes. “It was fast, Miami Vice-style,” said a military police spokesman, referring to the 1980s TV cop series.
In California, when Ronald J. McIntosh walked from a minimum-security prison on 28 October 1986, his purpose was to free his lover from her jail. McIntosh, who was already an experienced helicopter pilot, took a practice flight under the name Lyle Thompson with an instructor from Navajo Aviation on the 31st. On 4 November, using another alias, Fred Holbrick, he arranged to hire a machine for the next day from Aris Helicopter in San Jose.
McIntosh set off with the hire company’s pilot, and forced him at gunpoint to set down at Bollinger Canyon, near Danville. He then instructed the pilot to climb out and took over the controls himself. Thirty minutes later, at 11:15am, McIntosh landed the helicopter on the prison athletic field at the Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton, east of San Francisco, where he collected Samantha Lopez who was serving a sentence for a 1981 robbery. She was waiting for him.
They were apprehended on 15 November in a Sacramento shopping mall, when they went to collect wedding rings they had ordered. The police were waiting, having monitored the bank account on which the cheque was drawn. McIntosh was subsequently given twenty-five-years for “air piracy, and using a gun in the commission of air piracy”, and Lopez received a further five to add to her fifty for the bank robbery in Georgia. They appealed the conviction, claiming a ‘necessity defence’, which can excuse an otherwise criminal act – in this case, they claimed, Lopez had to escape because her life was in danger, as she was being threatened by prison officials, a fact they claimed the jury was not made aware of.
Lopez explained that she held a position on the Inmate Council, a group that liaised between prisoners and administration, and worked in the business office handling the prison’s financial records. In her position she had pointed out various prisoners’ problems to the warden, whom she claimed expressed no interest. She then made the implicit threat that people outside might be interested in “misappropriation and mismanagement of funds that she had uncovered while working in the business office”, according to her attorneys. Lopez claimed that not only did the warden threaten her life, remarking that “accidents happen in prisons every day”, but that from then on an increasing catalogue of other threats and actions against her were made, until she felt her only alternative to suicide was to escape. McIntosh added that he felt compelled to help her. The defence failed.
There is always the difficulty in staging a helicopter rescue of whether the machine fits into the landing space, or can lift off vertically without clipping the enclosure. It seems that the pilot who tried to aid the escape of Benjamin Kramer from prison in Miami misjudged his manoeuvrability and caught the blades on the wire fence, bringing the helicopter back to earth. On 18 April 1989, it swooped into the exercise yard of the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in South Dade at 10am and snatched up the waiting Kramer, a boat builder and speedboat racer serving life without much chance of parole for heading a drugs ring.
When Kramer climbed aboard he unbalanced the craft, and the pilot, probably too eager to pull away, apparently did not lift off as cleanly as he should have done. He set the helicopter in a spin, its tail hitting the concertina wire, catapulting it over the fence and causing it to crash nose-first into the prison grounds outside the exercise yard. Kramer broke his ankle, while his pilot accomplice – Charles C. Stevens, who had learnt to fly over a period of six months specifically for the escape – broke his neck. Their intention had been to transfer to a twin-engine plane that would take Kramer to Colombia.
The Metropolitan Correctional Centre is unlucky for helicopter escapees. Three years earlier, another inmate found that the contact who had arranged for him to be lifted out was in fact a federal agent. No sooner had he climbed into the cockpit than he was arrested by other agents aboard the machine.
The Chilean government were none too pleased when, at the end of December 1996, four leftwing guerrillas belonging to the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, who had fought General Pi
nochet’s military junta, escaped from prison in a spectacular helicopter swoop. Knowing that speed was of the essence and that they would probably be engaged in a gun battle, the prisoners were to climb aboard a fisherman’s basket suspended beneath the helicopter, its sides reinforced with bullet-proof vests as armour.
In the event, after the helicopter descended on the maximumsecurity Frente Prison in the capital, Santiago, lift-off did not go smoothly. Patricio Ortiz and Mauricio Hernandez were left clinging onto the basket. When it brought them down in a park where cars were waiting for them, Hernandez had to drop the last three metres whilst Ortiz was crushed beneath the basket and seriously injured. The third member, Ricardo Palma Salamanca, jumped awkwardly and found himself rolling on his head. Only the fourth, Pablo Munoz Hoffman, was unscathed, climbing out through the cables that had supported the basket. Ortiz later surfaced in Switzerland, seeking political asylum, and Salamanca published a book chronicling the group and its escape.
Most helicopter escapes are over in the blink of an eye, the machine coming to ground before anyone can set up chase. However, in July 1988 an aerial chase did occur after three inmates were lifted from the Penitentiary of New Mexico, near Santa Fe. The Aerospatiale Gazelle helicopter then flew eighty miles south to Mid-Valley Airport in Los Lunas, south of Albuquerque, where the police were waiting. A gun battle ensued, wounding one of the convicts, whilst another escaped on foot. The copter took off again, but this time was pursued by others, which started a battle in the skies. As one might expect to see in the movies, one of the state police helicopters was almost forced to collide with a crane, while there was an attempt to ram another pursuing craft. Eventually, low on fuel, the machine was forced down and its occupants arrested, including a woman in the cockpit.
Escape teams have also used what appear to be official helicopters. In July 1986, when a machine with state police markings attempted to lift Stephen Vento Sr, a known Mob figure, from the yard of the Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, those making the bid were armed with a grenade launcher and machineguns, an indication of the lengths to which they were prepared to go. Still they failed.
The proportion of women involved in helicopter escape bids is surprisingly high, as we have already seen. Joyce L. Bailey chartered a helicopter in December 1985, and subsequently drew a gun from her cowboy boots, forcing the pilot to land in the yard of the highsecurity Perry Correctional Institution, near Pelzer, South Carolina, to pick up Jesse Glenn Smith, William Ballew and James Rodney Leonard. The silver sedan they subsequently escaped in was left four miles from the prison. Another switch was made seven miles further, this car being abandoned in Mobile, Alabama, after it broke down. According to an investigator, Bailey had developed “a romantic attachment” to Smith, who was serving forty years for armed robbery, and had visited him in prison a number of times.
In August 1989, two women hired a helicopter in Denver on the pretence that they wanted to photograph some real estate. But, once they were nearing the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Colorado, Rebecca Brown pulled a gun and directed the pilot to land in the prison yard to collect their partners, Ralph Brown, doing time for sexual assault, theft and criminal impersonation, and Freddie Gonzales, serving four years for robbery. The guards held fire because they feared the pilot was a hostage. They were flown to a waiting Ryder truck that Rebecca had kitted out with clothes, Albertson’s fried chicken, Double Stuf Oreo cookies, and condoms.
They were later recaptured after a chase and shoot-out in Holdrege, Nebraska. Both Brown and Patricia Gonzales received twenty years for their venture. Today they are free, unlike their men. Rebecca has divorced and started afresh under another name. She puts her mistake down to emulating her mother’s dutiful devotion to a military husband. Rebecca too thought she was obliged to stick by her man, no matter what, and so set about organising the escape that her husband had suggested.
When Rebecca herself was an inmate she was known as ‘Chopper’, which afforded her protection. “I would hide behind that,” she admitted. “It kept me from getting beat up. I was a very weak person, but because of what I did, I had total, automatic respect.” Her crime has gone down in Colorado folklore, still spoken of with awe by inmates. But she feels she has been lucky to survive both her marriage and her time in prison. “I was a doormat. I’m not that person anymore.”
VIII
Forcing the Issue
It is not difficult to escape from an open prison, or any other low-security custodial institution. If you are intent on leaving then you will, whether by the front gate or over a fence. Or perhaps by going for a day out, or a weekend’s home leave, and never returning.
Many more do this than might be imagined. At various times the media run scare stories on those who abscond so easily, particularly if they are regarded as ‘celebrity’ criminals. Others, having been imprisoned for a major crime such as murder, are often placed in low-security prisons after a relatively short time, the institution effectively dangling a carrot that may lead them to escape. There are certainly cases where escape from open prison is made for a seemingly valid reason – at least as far as the escapee is concerned.
Mary Bell joined the ranks of the infamous after killing two little boys in 1968, when she was only eleven years old. As her incarceration entered its less severe period, in 1977, she was moved to Moor Court, an open prison set among the hills of Staffordshire. She was being prepared for the parole process, and for becoming a member of society.
Bell was not pleased. She told the governor it wasn’t a “step forward”, and that a less secure facility “was like being sent to prison, because you see you are more in prison when it’s open.” She was convinced she was destined to remain in prison, and that making another life outside was beyond her. Bell was twenty at the time.
The pressure to run away was great. Moor Court was like a four-star hotel set in a beautiful landscape, a millionaire’s country home. It was too much for her, and for other inmates, she believed, who would have to be released eventually to high-rise flats and a more squalid way of life. “It leaves people with a feeling of discontentment, feeling they are better off in prison than outside.”
‘Open prison’ meant what it said. She could go outside, lie on the grass, be alone. She could do anything she wanted, except go beyond the prison perimeters. As the governor explained, “What we are doing is requiring you to make your own decisions.” Bell didn’t know whether she could withstand the pressure of so much trust being invested in her. She warned them she would run away, that she perceived herself to be a ‘lifer’, and that it was all too much for her. She also demanded knockout pills. “I wanted to be blitzed.”
Within three months, in September 1977, she fulfilled her own prophecy and jumped over the fence, heading off across the fields accompanied by one of her new friends, a short-timer. They went on a Sunday, once the visitors started arriving at 1:30pm. They knew that, with so many people walking around the grounds, no one would note they were missing until the next headcount at 6pm.
Once they reached the road, they hitched a lift. The first lift didn’t last long, as Bell suspected the driver had twigged where they came from, as he quickly dropped them off. The next lift was from three young men, though one got out soon after. (Bell suspected he too had guessed.) The remaining two young men were heading for Blackpool, an idea that appealed to Bell and her friend. She says it wasn’t long before both boys were informed where the women had absconded from, and that she was Mary Bell. One of the boys had actually read a book about her, though both swore that they would not alert anyone.
Bell later described her euphoria at riding on the big dipper, of getting roaring drunk easily, as she had no experience of drinking, and of dancing late into the night at a club. She also lost her virginity there, though she remembers little of the experience. By the second night she was back in Derby, at one of the lads’ family home.
The following day, she awoke to find herself plastered over the
front pages of the newspapers. The boy went to see a social worker he knew, for advice on what he should do. He returned to Bell and offered her a river barge to stay on, but she said she would head for London. Before that could happen, a motorbike policeman recognised her when she was out in the car. When he asked her to wind down the passenger window and said her name to her, despite some evasive blustering she knew the game was up. He took her to the police station.
She hoped that the ‘dangerous’ tag assigned to her would not stick, and that no crimes committed locally in the last few days would be attributed to her. She told the police she had intended to go to London, to work for a few months and then to give herself up, just to prove that she could do it. Her story was untrue, as she really only wanted to have a good time. But the press reported that she had left to get pregnant; the boy had succumbed to the lure of chequebook journalism, and stated that Mary wanted his baby.
She knew what awaited her though. She would soon be in another prison, “and there wouldn’t be any smiling, understanding policemen, only the furious system I had kicked in the face.” Two officers came from Moor Court; they told her she had been stupid, and that she had blown her chance of freedom for some years. She was taken to the less than salubrious Risley Remand Centre.
A couple of years later Mary was allocated to another open prison, at Askham Grange. By then she no longer felt the need to escape. “I no longer imagined, as I had done before, that I was a kind of prisoner, like POWs you know, who have an obligation to escape. Nor did I feel the need to run that I’d had at Moor Court.” As she concluded, “I was ready … ready to be me again.”
Mary Bell was released in 1980, to be given a new name and a new life. Her daughter, who was born in 1984, knew nothing of her mother’s past until she was discovered by the media, some years later. They had to leave their home with bed-sheets over their heads. Though the daughter’s anonymity was legally protected until she became eighteen, Bell took the issue to the High Court and was granted lifelong anonymity for both herself and her child.