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

by Paul Buck

  Eventually they reached Paramaribo, the capital of Dutch Guiana. Fortunately, Guerin found a Scotsman who helped him to purchase a white cotton suit, so that he could move around the streets less conspicuously. Though he still looked in a sorry state, covered in bites, he approached the United States Consul. This man helped him to reach his contacts in Chicago and prepare the next step. He even paid for Guerin to stay at the same hotel as himself.

  Once it was time to leave, Guerin set off for Georgetown in British Guiana, his passage paid. From there he took a boat, The City of Quebec, but, not having enough money left, he had to travel with black people who treated him with contempt, whilst above, “in the saloon were my own race going about in lordly ease.” Finally he arrived in New York, the city he had not seen since his departure for Europe, twenty years earlier.

  It had been no mean feat to escape Devil’s Island, though he remained a fugitive and the French would recapture him if they could. But he was not in hiding. He moved around his hometown of Chicago fairly freely, making the French more determined to arrest and extradite him. The Chicago police were far from keen, forcing the French Consul to contract the Pinkerton Detective Agency to pick him up, by trailing his sister. The French messed up the operation, however, as Billy Pinkerton was sympathetic towards the local boy. On top of that, they had no budget to pay his detectives.

  Nevertheless, Guerin took heed of the warning and left the country, crossing back across the Atlantic to England – where by chance he met Chicago May, his former partner, the woman with whom he had been arrested in Paris. May had always done well for herself, earlier earning her living as a ‘badger’, a prostitute who robbed, blackmailed and fleeced her rich clients.

  But some say that Devil’s Island had changed Guerin and their relationship no longer showed any spark. He went off with a younger woman and, in her jealousy, May hired a hitman who hunted him down. Guerin survived the bullet, though Chicago May and her accomplice were sent to prison.

  The Frenchman René Belbenoit was transported to Devil’s Island in 1920 for stealing pearls from his employer. He was sentenced to eight years of hard labour. At that time, the conditions of the sentence remained the same: if you were lucky enough to survive the conditions of the penal colony, you would only be released from prison, not brought back home. You were supposed to stay for the same period as your sentence – or, if it ran to more than eight years, you were exiled for life. Thus you would probably have to live in squalid, inhospitable conditions until your death, your punishment becoming effectively a life sentence.

  Belbenoit had served with distinction in World War One, and thus was allowed to avoid the hardest labour. But the whole place was disease- and mosquito-infested, and the heat unbearable. If not working in water up to your waist, then you were working naked except for shoes and a straw hat, which helped to minimise escapes. Nevertheless, people did at least try.

  Within two weeks, Belbenoit and another man made an escape attempt on a raft, heading for Dutch Guiana. They were caught and returned. A further attempt alongside some others ended in their canoe capsizing on the Maroni River, whereupon they fled into the jungle. They were lucky to climb out of the river, for stories abounded of onlookers watching bodies ripped apart by piranhas, only the skeletons remaining. The jungles were little better, for armies of large soldier ants might also pick you clean. After three escapees died, Belbenoit and the others sought the help of the Indians, who took them to the Dutch – who in turn handed them back to the French.

  In 1934, Belbenoit was officially released but wasn’t allowed to go back to France. He thought he might try to ‘escape’ his freedom in the colony and reach the United States. With money given by an American filmmaker who was researching prisons, he bought a boat and set off by sea with five others. They argued during the rough journey and, at one point, Belbenoit had to draw a gun to force everyone to continue.

  When they came to Trinidad, the British authorities refused to hand them over to the French, though they were told to set sail again. Their next landing, after sixteen days at sea, was on a beach in Colombia. His companions were apprehended and handed to the French, but Belbenoit was able to exploit some sympathy, escaping again and travelling north. He worked his way slowly through Panama, and up through Central America, until he arrived in California in 1937, carrying the manuscript of a memoir of his trials and tribulations, Dry Guillotine. It was a success on publication, but it also attracted the attention of the immigration authorities. He was allowed to stay temporarily, but then told to leave in 1941. After a spell in Mexico, he sought readmission but was caught and imprisoned. Eventually, he gained a passport and went to work in Hollywood, as an advisor at Warner Bros studios.

  The third escapee, Henri Charrière – better known as ‘Papillon’, derived from the butterfly tattoo on his chest – also recounted his exploits in a book, which was produced as a film in 1973 with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffmann. It would grant him a heroic stature, and make Devil’s Island infamous.

  Papillon was a crook, but was wrongfully condemned to the island for the 1931 murder of a pimp in Paris. No sooner had he arrived than he knew he had to leave. He also knew he would stand a better chance of escaping from the mainland than from one of the three islands that comprised the penal colony. He claimed to be ill and was sent to the mainland hospital, where he escaped by knocking out the guards with the feet of his bed and climbing a wall. With two others, he set off by sailboat – but it turned out to be a rotten vessel, so they ventured into the jungle and found a leper colony, where they bought a better boat with the money Charrière stored in a charger.

  They went with the current of the Cayenne river into the Atlantic Ocean, and then sailed north-westerly hoping to find Venezuela. Their first stop was in Trinidad, where the British welcomed them but gave them only two weeks before they had to set off again. Their next stop was Curaçao, where they were shipwrecked and imprisoned. Charrière recounts how he escaped once again by sawing through the bars with hacksaw blades he had bought. From there he fled to the safety of an Indian tribe, where he was allowed to settle for six months. However, he was distracted by his obsession with vengeance against those in Paris who had wronged him in the first place, leading to his recapture and imprisonment. Further escape attempts were made, including smuggling in dynamite in a loaf of bread. All failed, and they were returned to French Guiana at the end of October 1934.

  This time, Charrière was placed in solitary confinement for two years on the islands. When World War Two broke out the conditions tightened further, and all escape attempts were punishable by death – unless you were regarded as mad, for then you were no longer responsible for your actions.

  Determined to escape, Papillon feigned madness and was sent to the asylum for a while. Later claiming to be cured, he asked to be sent to Devil’s Island itself. Wanting to make one last attempt at escape with a raft, he had decided he would rather perish than live any longer in the penal colony. Pondering the impossibility of his predicament and the roughness of the sea, he would sit on the beaches, watching the waves come in and out. Then, one day, he found a place where the waves broke against the rocks differently. The area was not watched by the guards. “This side of the island was completely safe – no one would ever imagine a man would choose the most exposed and therefore the most dangerous place for getting away.”

  Collecting jute bags to fill with coconuts, he and a companion made two rafts and leapt into the sea at night, on a full moon when the tide was highest, to catch the seventh wave – the large roller that started three hundred yards back and which, after its crash between the rocks, sucked everything back out of the grasp of the next six waves coming in. Their intention was to be swept to sea and carried along for a few days, in the hope of washing up on the mainland. It took forty hours before they came ashore, sunburnt, lips cracked, eyes glued together, altogether in a poor state. Charrière watched his friend, some distance away on his raft, becoming impatient. Despite be
ing warned, he was tempted to step into the shallow water, only to be sucked into quicksand. Charrière kept his patience until he was washed right ashore.

  Charrière then went in search of a Chinese man, the brother of a friend on Devil’s Island, and together they bought a boat and set sail for Georgetown, navigating by the sun, moon and stars. Though they would be allowed to stay in the British territory, they decided to venture onwards to Venezuela, where, in 1945, Charrière was given citizenship. When he came across L’Astragale by Albertine Sarrazin, in a French bookshop, in which the author recounts her prison exploits, he too decided to write his autobiography in the style of a novel.

  Though there is nothing to compare to the horrors of Devil’s Island, it would seem that Alcatraz also struck fear into the minds of prisoners with the idea of its inescapability. The records show – if they are correct, having been written inside the institution subject to any changes or cover-ups required – that fourteen attempts were made to escape from this island prison in the middle of San Francisco Bay in its twenty-nine years as a federal penitentiary, and that none were successful. Of course, that assumes that the thirteenth attempt, the one that we shall outline, did not succeed. Yet, given that no bodies were ever recovered, and none of the escapees were officially noted as ever having been seen again, it is an assumption that many are not willing to accept.

  The first desperate attempt occurred in April 1936 and was made by Joseph Bowers. Bowers had no greater plan than just to plunge into the water and do his best to swim or drift to the mainland, unmindful that the currents, let alone the ice-cold water, were said to be enough to kill all but the superhuman. But Bowers never had the chance to put it to the test, for he was shot by a guard in a watchtower as he climbed a chain-link fence.

  The second attempt, in December 1937 by Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe, had more potential, as they fled undercover of fog, making it difficult for the guards to detect their flight. Indeed, there is the possibility that they made it, though the consensus is that they could not have survived the adverse weather conditions. But officialdom must have seriously considered the possibility, for they were placed on the FBI’s ‘Most Wanted’ list.

  But if we go through the list of other attempts, the escapes from cells or other buildings around the prison, whether by sawing through bars or walking out, all of them led to detection by guards either on the roofs or across the fences, or by the shore just as the escapees were ready to plunge in, or to push makeshift rafts into the water. They were then mostly fired upon, some being killed, others injured.

  John Bayless, the sixth attempted escapee, did manage to start swimming, but gave up. James Boarman, one of the four who made their escape in April 1943, was shot whilst swimming, though his body was never recovered. He and his comrades had jumped thirty feet off a cliff into the water in their underwear, their bodies covered in grease. Floyd Hamilton, another who took the plunge, managed to return to the shore, eluding capture and remaining, frozen, in a small cave for three days, before climbing back up the cliff and in through the same window he used to escape from the prison. He was discovered beneath a pile of material in a storeroom of the industries area.

  John Giles tried to escape in July 1946 by donning the uniform of a US Army staff sergeant and boarding the prison launch. He had gathered together the uniform piece by piece over a number of years, until he had the full costume. He was discovered missing not long after the launch departed, and was met by prison officers at Angel Island.

  It appears that only John Paul Scott, who escaped in December 1962 with Darl Parker, officially managed to make it to the mainland. Theirs was the fourteenth and last attempt. Scott was found on Fort Point suffering from hypothermia. They had used inflated surgical gloves as water wings, their escape starting in the kitchen where they both worked. Noticing that a storeroom could not be seen from a watchtower, they sawed through a bar using moistened string dipped in abrasive kitchen cleaner. It took weeks to accomplish, and was made all the harder because the window was ten feet from the floor. The advantage was that the guards did not check the window for that very reason.

  On 2 May 1946, there was an attempt which became known as ‘the Battle of Alcatraz’, when prisoners took the main cell-house and grabbed two firearms there. They had also intended to take keys to a door, but they were not in their place as a prison officer had breached regulations and not returned them. Thus their attempt was inadvertently blocked. The prisoners refused to surrender and, in the battle that ensued, three of their number and two of the guards were killed.

  This sets the scene for the only known escape that may possibly have succeeded – the Escape from Alcatraz, as the film based upon it is entitled. On 11 June 1962, Clarence Anglin, John Anglin and Frank Morris made the most elaborately well-planned attempt that we know about. The escape plan was hatched in December 1961 when Allen West, a member of the team who failed to go on the night itself, discovered some old hacksaw blades in a utility corridor whilst cleaning. Initially, each started work digging around the vent-holes in their cells, using spoon handles to scrape and scratch (and, later, an electric drill they made from a discarded vacuum cleaner motor and electric hair clippers), digging into the moisture-damaged concrete which broke away quite easily in places. These holes made their way into the utility corridor, an otherwise empty space filled with pipes.

  The use of the motor was masked by music played during recreation hour. They also blocked the hole each day with false walls made from papier mâché and the canvas boards used for painting, which most of them did as a hobby. One would work while the other kept lookout, using mirrors. They worked from the 5:30pm count until the lights-out count at 9pm. What seems remarkable in this case – as indeed it is in other cases where tunnelling and filing took place – is that no one heard the sounds. Despite the covering music, it has been noted that every single sound was very clearly amplified in Alcatraz, and guards or inmates would prick up their ears instantly if they heard something out of the ordinary. “Almost any sound inside the cell house echoed and reverberated as though the entire building were a drum. Even well-muffled sounds of digging or scratching or filing could not be entirely eliminated,” wrote Don DeNevi in Riddle of the Rock.

  Then they worked on the vent at the top of the cell block, climbing up the three tiers using the pipes as their ladder. Their breakout was prepared over the space of several months, thus the chance of discovery was greater. Bars were regularly given the shakedown, hit with a rubber mallet to see if they rang the same for each. (If they are cut, the sound changes.) But it seems no one checked the air vents at the back of the cells, or indeed the roof vents, very often.

  To work on the escape at the top of the third tier of the cell house, which could be viewed by the guard post, West obtained permission to clean it. Because he made dust fall down to the main floor of the cells, he was allowed to hang blankets whilst he worked up there, almost sealing the whole area from prying eyes. The officials were not to know that Morris and the others were also working by night on the air vent, prior to constructing their rafts.

  At the same time, they prepared the dummies they would need to leave in their bunks on the night of the escape, or indeed on those evenings they were busy working on the top of the third tier. The papier mâché heads were made from toilet paper, soap and cement powder, coloured with paint from the art block and hair from the barber shop. All were hidden by day on the top of the cellblock.

  They knew that to get away across the water they needed a raft, as previous attempts had indicated it was too cold to swim. They collected together standard, olive, rubberised-fabric, US Army raincoats that were issued to all the prisoners. They used somewhere in the region of thirty coats, collected from other prisoners or obtained over a period by asking the guards for new ones. These were glued together in such a way that they could be inflated with air. They also made lifejackets for each escapee to wear. To inflate them they would need a bellows – or in this case a concertina, whi
ch they obtained via a mail-order catalogue, discarding its sound keys.

  Thus, at 9:30pm on that June 1962 night, after lights-out, three men went through their cell holes. Allen West was left behind because his false wall would not stay in place, and he had cemented it in too well. It had hardened and, though one of the others tried to kick it free from the other side, it would not move. West had never actually gone through his hole before, because he was making paddles and lifejackets from the raincoats in his cell. He stated that he did eventually break through after he worked on an unforeseen metal obstacle in the fabric of the wall, but by the time he reached the roof the others were gone. He could not continue alone to the shore as a guard was now watching over one of the vital areas.

  The others had gone onto the roof via the prepared vent bars and the ventilator shaft. They had cut the rivets with carborundum cord earlier, replacing them temporarily with little balls of soap. After they ran along the roof for one hundred feet, they went down the old bakery flue to the ground, lowering all their equipment with wire. Then they went over a chain-link fence, dropping down the steep, brush-covered embankment to the shore. They were carrying all their equipment in parts that were then assembled, before blowing up the pontoon-style raft with the makeshift bellows. The raft measured six by fourteen feet, but they dismantled part of it and left it behind for West in case he should follow. It was also noted that they had a reflector and homemade torch with them.

  The three prisoners are still officially listed as missing, presumed drowned. The assumption is based on bits of raft, paddles and papers that were found in the water and the vicinity over a period of time. But the authorities found no bodies.