Foxwell smiled. ‘Well, you won’t get to see your family. It’s a long way from here.’
The inmate laughed. ‘My missus will move straight there. Do your best, chief. I’m not giving up shit.’
Foxwell had counted on this response. ‘Then we’ll wait until she settles right on down, finds a house, and maybe even a job, before we move you to Maitland. And when she does that all over again there, we’ll move you to Bathurst.’
The inmate no longer looked sure.
‘You have two choices,’ Foxwell continued. ‘Be here in an hour with the key or with a packed bag. Because if you don’t have the key to me by then, the bus heading to Grafton will be waiting for you.’
The inmate walked out. He returned 40 minutes later. ‘I have nothing further to say,’ he said, turning his back and leaving as fast as he’d arrived.
‘Well, where’s your bag?’ Foxwell screamed.
The prisoner turned again, winking as he nodded towards the floor.
‘Sure enough it was there,’ Foxwell said. ‘The key was on the floor.’
Foxwell grinned before waving the inmate out. He had every key now. He had just foiled six escapes.
Trapped Rats
‘There were plenty of diggers in Long Bay, and the way you would deal with them was to send them up a floor. If you found a tunneller, or you suspected one, you would just put them in the top landing. At least, if they had a desire to dig, you would find them in the cell below.’
Former PO Dave ‘Emu’ Farrell
‘I can’t sleep,’ whined the prisoner. ‘The chewing, the banging, the clawing … It’s right under my bloody cell! It’s driving me mad. These rats must be as big as dogs.’
The guard who was working the night shift in the remand centre nodded. He walked towards his colleague. ‘Fucking rats again,’ he said.
‘I’ve been hearing them too. We better get maintenance to go down with some traps.’
So down went the maintenance man …
‘Dog-sized rats, my arse,’ fumed the maintenance man, his torch cutting through dark and dirt. He’d brought the traps – his biggest traps – and poisoned pellets.
‘Here, Lassie,’ he joked, knowing he had more chance of finding Scooby Dooby Doo than a rat, whether it be the size of a pitbull or a pug.
Crack!
He jumped, his torchlight slicing through the dungeon-like dark.
The trap he’d laid last week sprung, the unhinged metal missing his foot by a millimetre, slapping cheese and wood instead of flesh and bone.
‘Rats!’ he fumed again, much louder this time. He kicked at the deactivated trap, then stumbled on something that brought him crashing to the ground.
Thud!
Pushing himself up, he took his flashlight, pointed it at his feet and saw the electrical cord.
‘He found an extension cord that led to a light,’ said a guard. ‘And then next to the light he found a shovel. And next to the shovel he found a crowbar. And then he found the big hole in the roof.’
The maintenance man rushed from the dark and towards the guard. ‘We don’t have a rat,’ he said. ‘We have a runner!’
The guard needed no further explanation. ‘Lock down!’ he screamed.
The prison officers, armed with torches, headed underneath the remand centre and uncovered the digging equipment. They didn’t have to do much to find out who had been digging. All they had to do was follow the tunnel.
Crack!
Metal slammed against concrete as the cell door was thrown open. Jerry O’Holia, an inmate of African descent known for always carrying a shiv, jumped from his bed.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ he asked.
Tap. Tap.
‘Yep,’ yelled the guard standing in the prisoner’s cell. ‘Clear.’
The guard smashed the tiles with his sledgehammer.
‘There was a huge hole right at the back of his toilet,’ said the guard. ‘He had dug all the way to the bottom landing and underneath the wing, and all he had left to go was the external wall.
‘You could see how this bloke got the gear to do it because he worked in maintenance. He had the necessary tools to pull apart his toilet and then the walls and the floor. He did it at night because no one else was around.
‘O’Holia was absolutely shattered when his tunnel got found. He thought he was going to get out. And maybe he was even more shattered because of the way he got caught. He was going down there every night, God knows how long he was at it. And the thing that brought him undone was rats.’
According to former guard Paul Rush, O’Holia was a mischievous prisoner who was always up to no good. He was also a loner, which was probably why no one knew about the tunnel before the maintenance man stumbled across all his hard work.
‘He was a funny bloke, that one,’ said Rush. ‘Not sure what he was in prison for, but while he was there he was into everything and anything. He was always hanging around the inmates that ran his jail and he was in the middle of everything. Whether he was running, setting up a deal, or dealing, he was involved in something. He ended up getting the shit kicked out of him on a couple of occasions by some Maori enforcers. But no one took him lightly because he was a big, fit bloke who always had a shank.’
The guards scratched their heads. What do we do with this one? they thought.
This digger was already on the first floor.
‘There were plenty of diggers in Long Bay,’ said former guard Dave Farrell. ‘And the way you would deal with them was to send them up a floor. If you found a tunneller, or you suspected they were one, you’d put them in the top landing. At least if I had a desire to dig, you would find them in the cell below.’
The Long Bay walls and floors were like sirens to the shipwrecked.
‘There were always plenty of tunnels about,’ said Farrell. ‘The floor out there was sandy soft and it was quite easy to get through. Inmates could use anything to have a go and they tunnelled everywhere.’
Sure, digging was easy, but they were all on a hole to nowhere.
‘They were wasting their time because like Parramatta Jail, there were no structures underneath that could minimise digging. They were all separate jails and the only place you would come out was in the yard of another jail. Not that it stopped them.
‘We busted a heap of them the late 70s. I reckon we had at least five attempts in 3 Wing. There was a boiler beside that jail and some crims thought they could get into it and out that way. Maybe they could have? But we found the tunnels before they had a chance.’
Infamous Sydney criminal Jockey Smith – a hard nut despite his name – was one of the many who tried. But like the rest, he failed. Smith’s reputation and status among the criminals gave him access to the unimaginable.
‘He built a tunnel all the way under the walls,’ said former inmate John Elias. ‘I could hear the jackhammer. He was making noise every day and no one would dare say a word. He turned up the volume on all the TVs and radios, and whacked away. He started from behind his sink and got a tunnel that went all the way to the wall. He probably would’ve been the bloke who got the closest to getting out because he’d bought – or someone had given him – the plans to the jail.’
A veteran Long Bay guard knows of at least two other genuine tunnel attempts. He still works at the prison, and has been with NSW Corrective Services for over 30 years.
‘In the Metropolitan Remand Prison (MRP) they found a massive tunnel that led from the activities room all the way to the boiler house,’ said the guard. ‘That escape was foiled last-minute, like all the rest. To be honest, we caught most of them out of sheer dumb luck. And if we didn’t stumble across the tunnels, it would be because someone who knew about it would get nervous and Dog. Many years ago in the Central Industrial Prison (CIP), they had another one that went all the way out to the external wall. Needless to say, that was also foiled.
‘The one next door in the MRP was better. It was during the early 80s, and they were caug
ht just before they got out. The tunnel would have been 40 or 50 feet and that’s a bloody long way.’
Rush revealed that the biggest of all the Long Bay escape tunnels was quickly covered up, the men at the top quickly sending in cement trucks to fill a very embarrassing and large hole.
‘In 1991 we found a huge tunnel in the Reception and Induction Prison (RIP), as it was called at the time,’ Rush said. ‘It was the most hardcore jail in Sydney during the early 90s. There were four or five inmates involved and it almost led to a mass escape. But the incident was hushed up quickly and quietly, the trucks coming in and filling it all with concrete.
‘The tunnel started under the activity centre in the RIP, which is where the sex offenders unit currently is. The inmates involved worked in the maintenance department, where they not only had access to relevant machinery, but also to the site they needed to get rid of the huge amounts of dirt they were pulling out, which was the industrial dump area. Without this area, they would’ve had nowhere to get rid of all the dirt and they wouldn’t have been able to dig the tunnel. Like most of these escape attempts, they were caught only weeks before they would’ve been able to get out.’
Select Bibliography
Bayley, R., ‘The Settlement of old Goulburn’, Goulburn Post, 27 February 2013
Bearup, G., ‘George Savvas’s $317 meal to remember’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March 1997
Bissett, K., ‘Savvas tip-offs failed to stop escape’, Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1997
Corrective Services NSW, Offender Classification and Case Management Policy and Procedures Manual, 12.3 Category AA and Category 5 Inmates, December 2013
Dalton, V., ‘Prison homicide in Australia: 1980 to 1998’, Australian Institute of Criminology, February 1999
Davies, L., ‘Life alone for killer in Supermax’, Daily Telegraph, 23 August, 2010
Davies, L., ‘Sydney sharia whipping case: man jailed for dishing out 40 lashes’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 June 2013
Doherty, L., ‘High security prison to house the very worst’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 2001
Fife-Yeomans, J., ‘Radicals run riot’, Daily Telegraph, 22 September 2014
Fife-Yeomans, J., ‘Charges laid over jail riot’, Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2014
Gibbs, S., ‘Hard men turn to Islam to cope with jail’, Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November 2005
Gilmore, H., ‘Inmates studying al-Qaeda manual’, Sun Herald, 2 December 2007
Hills, B., ‘How bikie ran gang from his jail cell’, Sunday Telegraph, 17 November 2013
Kennedy, L., ‘Warders hurt in prison riot’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 2002
Kennedy, L., ‘Blonde wig and glasses – how Savvas fooled prison warders’, Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1996
Kerr, J., ‘Goulburn Correctional Centre: a plan for the conservation of the precinct and its buildings’, commissioned by NSW Public Works for the Department of Corrective Services, September 1994
Lewis, D., ‘High tech jail escape barriers’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1996
Lipari, K., ‘X-rays could net Milat $40,000’, Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2002
McIlveen, L., ‘Worst killers get a jail of their own’, The Australian, 2 June 2001
Masters, C., ‘Supermax’, Four Corners, ABC, 7 November 2005
Mercer, N., ‘Torture, and having to eat brown bread – the extraordinary complaints about life in Supermax’, Sunday Telegraph, 7 October 2007
Mitchell, A., ‘Milat, Savvas jail break-out foiled’, Sun Herald, 17 May 1997
Mitchell, A., ‘Inside story of Savvas: the mystery of the final hours’, Sun Herald, 25 May 1997
Mitchell, A., ‘Cartel links to jail killing’, Sun Herald, 2 November 1997
Mitchell, A., ‘Mastermind recruiting gang inside super jail’, Sun Herald, 22 April 2007
Morton, J., Maximum Security: the Inside Story of Australia’s Toughest Gaols, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2011
Moss, I., ‘The Savvas report: a special report to Parliament under section 31 of the Ombudsman Act/NSW Ombudsman’, December 1997
Moss, I., ‘Report on investigation into the introduction of contraband into the High Risk Management Unit at Goulburn Correctional Centre’, ICAC, February 2004
Silmalis, L., ‘Milat sparks escape scare’, Sunday Telegraph, 11 May 2003
Spaccavento, B., Dowel, N., Quilkey, C., ‘Custody and Sentence Planning – a through care model for “AA” inmates’, Australian Journal of Correctional Staff Development
Sutton, C., ‘The new $22m home for our most evil men’, Sun Herald, 27 May 2001
Tonkin, S., ‘Girlfriend used condoms to smuggle phones, cables into Goulburn Jail’, Illawarra Mercury, 23 September 2014
Vass, N., ‘Jailers seize drugs’, Sunday Telegraph, 21 April 2002
Wallace, M., ‘A fake gun but no empty threat’, Daily Telegraph, 7 August 2004
Watson, R., ‘Guns, drugs, rope, lip gloss must-have items behind bars’, Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2009
Watson, R., ‘Killers, madmen, me and Ivan Milat – inside Supermax’, Daily Telegraph, 9 May 2009
Watts, B., Lawrence, K., ‘Smirking inmate drug ring charges’, Daily Telegraph, 6 December 2008
Exterior view of Goulburn Jail. (JOHN GRAINGER/NEWSPIX)
Correctional officers at the gates to Unit 7 of the High-Risk Management Unit, known as Supermax. (BRAD HUNTER/NEWSPIX)
All along the watchtower. The forbidding walls and guard towers overlooking Goulburn Jail – Australia’s most secure prison. (SANDRA PRIESTLEY/NEWSPIX)
(ADAM TAYLOR/NEWSPIX)
Cannabis weighing 11 grams wrapped in balloons and two mobile phone SIM cards found in an M&M wrapper brought in by a visitor during a security lockdown. (SARAH RHODES/NEWSPIX)
Crystal methamphetamine – ‘ice’ – has become an epidemic in Goulburn Jail. ‘Ice can give some men the strength of 20 bulls,’ one officer said. (CRAIG GREENHILL/NEWSPIX)
Contraband mobile phones and chargers seized from Supermax. (AAP IMAGE/DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIVE SERVICES)
Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, along with Governor David White, at the opening of Supermax, 1 June 2011. (JOHN FEDER/NEWSPIX)
Supermax prison officers stand at attention. (JOHN FEDER/NEWSPIX)
An aerial shot of the Supermax complex. The main prison and sandstone entrance are to the upper left.
A close-up of the Supermax complex, detailing the basketball courts and red outdoor athletics track. Opposition MP Andrew Humpherson felt the facility more closely resembled a luxury hotel than a maximum-security prison for Australia’s worst criminals. (BOTH PHOTOS BY BARRY CHAPMAN/FAIRFAX PHOTOS)
‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’ A correctional officer stands at the entrance to Supermax.
An officer jogs during his break on the athletics track in the Unit 7 yard of Supermax. Note the garden that serial killer Lindsay Rose was paid $12 a week to weed and water. (BOTH PHOTOS BY BRAD HUNTER/NEWSPIX)
The clinical, well-lit hallways inside Supermax. What goes on behind those thick cell doors is the stuff of horror, shame and secrecy. (ADAM TAYLOR/NEWSPIX)
The inside of an isolated Supermax cell. The bed is a concrete slab fixed to the wall; a 25-centimetre-thick piece of foam serves as a mattress. (BRAD HUNTER/NEWSPIX)
A phone inside a cage where Supermax inmates can book in to make calls, pending approval from the commissioner’s office.
A breakfast pack for one of the Supermax inmates. The contents include coffee, sweetener, strawberry jam and cereal. (BOTH PHOTOS BY ADAM TAYLOR/NEWSPIX)
Star of the hit TV show Hey Dad..!, Robert Hughes had an epic fall from grace when he was convicted of ten sexual and indecent assault charges involving five girls between the ages of seven and 15 years old. (NEWS LTD/NEWSPIX)
Robert Hughes arrives at the Downing Centre Local Court in Sydney with his wife, Robyn Gardiner. Hughes received a prison sentence of up to ten years and nine months. In the sentencing, Judge Peter Zahra
noted, ‘The offender does not express remorse, and there is no evidence that the offender remained troubled by his conduct.’ (ADAM TAYLOR/NEWSPIX)
Confessed murderer and kidnapper Robert Mark Steele, who was involved in a siege and subsequent shootout with police at Hanging Rock Station, Cangai, on 29 June 2001. According to former Goulburn Jail Governor Allan Chisholm, ‘He was simple but kind, and could have destroyed anyone in the jail but didn’t.’ (GREG NEWINGTON/NEWSPIX)
Lindsay Rose confessed to murdering five people and was sentenced to five consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. He now spends his time tending to his chronic haemorrhoids and writing complaint letters concerning inmate conversions to Islam. (NEWS LTD/NEWSPIX)
Notorious serial killer Ivan Milat being escorted out of Goulburn Hospital and back to prison after cutting off his own finger and attempting to post it to the High Court. (GARY RAMAGE/NEWSPIX)
Former Corrective Services Commissioner Dr Leo Keliher holds a hacksaw blade found in a packet of arrowroot biscuits in Ivan Milat’s Supermax cell. (SANDRA PRIESTLEY/NEWSPIX)
Police officers take drug dealer and gang member Michael Kanaan away from his house in Belfield following a 32-hour siege. Kanaan is serving three life sentences plus 50 years and four months, without the possibility of parole, for murdering three people in 1998. (ADAM HOLLINGWORTH/NEWSPIX)
Brothers 4 Life gang founder Bassam Hamzy has been described as the most dangerous inmate in the correctional system.
Australia's Most Murderous Prison: Behind the Walls of Goulburn Jail Page 20