by Paul Simpson
In Mountjoy exercise yard, the potential escapees were beginning to worry that once again everything had fallen through. Joe Cahill, alongside some of the other prisoners, gave up watching the game and returned to his cell, thereby ensuring that he couldn’t take part. Twenty-three prisoners were left there, watched over by eight unarmed guards. At 3.40 p.m., the sound of a helicopter filled the air.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Captain Boyes had landed, as instructed, in a field near Stradbally. However, instead of collecting a cameraman and his equipment, he was faced with two masked gunmen. They told him very politely and firmly that if he followed the instructions he was given, he would not be harmed. Boyes was canny enough to recognize that he was caught up in an IRA operation, and, reassured to a small extent by the gunman’s mask, he did as he was told, and with one of the gunmen seated beside him, started to follow the path of the Royal canal into Dublin.
When he was told about the plan, Boyes raised his concerns: three extra passengers would make taking off very tricky, as would the enclosed walls of the exercise yard, if he couldn’t get sufficient upswing on the helicopter. He was told to get on with the job.
Hearing the arriving chopper, Kevin O’Mallon began signalling with white strips of cloth. The other prisoners started to surround the guards to prevent them from taking action as the helicopter came in to land. Mallon, O’Hagan and Twomey ran for the machine and started to board. For a moment, the guards thought that it might be a visit from Minister Paddy Donegan using his usual mode of transport, but the sight of the three IRA men getting into the helicopter soon disabused them of that notion.
Captain Boyes struggled with the overladen machine, as O’Hagan pulled Twomey up into the helicopter. A fourth IRA man tried to get on too, but was dissuaded rapidly by the chopper passengers from taking his escape attempt any further. Even so, the turbulence caused by trying to take off within such an enclosed area, combined with the weight of the helicopter, meant that it took much longer than anyone had anticipated before it rose over the walls of Mountjoy. To the evident amusement of the IRA prisoners left behind, one of the guards shouted out possibly the most useless instruction ever: “Close the gates! Close the f***ing gates!”
The volunteers who had managed to evade the authorities after throwing the rope ladder over the walls of the prison a few weeks earlier had been tasked with getting hold of a getaway vehicle and meeting the helicopter at Dublin racecourse at Baldoyle. They eventually commandeered a taxi, putting the driver out of harm’s way, but had to move away from the rendezvous when a Garda officer started to become suspicious. By the time they got back, the helicopter had landed, and the escapees were in the middle of hijacking a vehicle. They abandoned that in favour of the already-stolen taxi, and headed off.
To his intense relief, Captain Boyes was released unharmed; he had realized during the flight that he knew one of the men – O’Hagan – and he had been reassured by the IRA men that he wasn’t going to be harmed, and he would be paid. That turned out to be the case.
Although the Irish government were convinced that the men were smuggled out of the country, they had in fact simply been moved to various safe houses. The IRA released a statement: “Three republican prisoners were rescued by a special unit from Mountjoy Prison on Wednesday. The operation was a complete success and the men are now safe, despite a massive hunt by Free State forces.” Over 300 Garda detectives began a manhunt in vain, as bonfires of celebration were lit in Belfast. Within Mountjoy, one prisoner recalled, “One shamefaced screw apologised to the governor and said he thought it was the new Minister for Defence arriving. I told him it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” Eventually one of the largest security operations ever carried out on Irish soil got under way, with over 20,000 security personnel involved in the search for the three terrorists.
The consequences were immediate for the IRA men left behind in Mountjoy. Ten days after Twomey, O’Hagan and Mallon escaped, they were transferred to the maximum-security facility at Portlaoise. The perimeter was guarded by members of the Irish Army, and wires erected to ensure that no other helicopters would make unauthorized landings within the prison walls.
All three men were eventually recaptured. Seamus Twomey remained on the outside for the longest, evading capture until 2 December 1977, when he was spotted by Special Branch in Dublin during a raid on an arms shipment. After a short but high-speed car chase through Dublin, he was arrested, carrying with him highly sensitive IRA documents about the reorganization of the movement. He was sent to Portlaoise, and served the remainder of his term. He was released in 1982 and died in 1989.
J.B. O’Hagan was rearrested in early 1975 in Dublin, and sent to Portlaoise to finish his sentence, and then a further two years for his part in the escape. He continued to be involved with IRA activity until the peace process in the 1990s; he died in 2001.
Kevin Mallon, however, masterminded a second escape attempt, this time from Portlaoise. He was only free for six weeks after the helicopter escapade: he was arrested in the town of Portlaoise on 10 December 1973 and sent to the prison there. On Sunday 18 August 1974, he and eighteen other prisoners were able to blow their way out.
Three months before the successful breakout, the IRA prisoners’ hopes had taken a battering after an eighty-foot-long tunnel was uncovered. However, the Portlaoise Escape Committee were undeterred and decided to exploit a weakness near the laundry area of the prison. The laundry led to an outside stairway, which went down into a courtyard where the Governor’s House and the Warders’ Mess were located – as was a doorway which led out onto the streets of the town! If they could only break through that door, then they would be free.
The GHQ gave its approval to the plan, and arranged for explosives to be smuggled into the prison. The inmates began to make ersatz prison officer uniforms so that when the escapees were running through the courtyard, the troops stationed on the roof of the jail wouldn’t be sure whether they were prison officers or inmates, and therefore would hold their fire.
At 12.30 p.m. on 18 August, prisoner Liam Brown asked if he could collect an item from the laundry that he claimed he had inadvertently left there. When the guard gave permission, he was rushed by a group of prisoners, and the key to the laundry taken from him. The escapees then ran through the laundry and down the stairs into the courtyard. The fake uniforms served their purpose – the troops didn’t open fire, worried that they would be hitting prison officers, giving the IRA men sufficient time to reach the door to the outside, set the bomb and detonate it. As soon as that went off, of course, the soldiers knew what was happening and began firing over the heads of the escapees trying to persuade them to stop. However, they had to cease fire when genuine prison officers rushed into the courtyard!
There was confusion for some hours over how many men had managed to flee: in order to give those who had made it the maximum amount of time, the other prisoners refused to cooperate with the prison authorities, and wouldn’t allow them to carry out a headcount. Only when they were threatened with riot police did they relent. At that point, it was discovered that nineteen men – including Kevin Mallon – had made it, five more than the prisoners themselves had anticipated.
A massive manhunt began, with every outhouse in County Wexford searched, and the navy put on alert. But not one of the men was recaptured during the week-long searches. A further tunnel was masterminded by IRA man Eddie Gallagher after the success of the August escape but it wasn’t completed. “We tried to free others by tunnelling from Portlaoise hospital under the Dublin–Limerick road and into the jail. Sean Treacy, myself and two others were removing foundation stones from beneath the outer jail wall on the night Special Branch and [the] army raided our billet nearby and arrested the day shift who were asleep in the house,” he recalled in 2005. Kevin Mallon was recaptured in Foxrock in January 1975 and returned to Portlaoise; after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which was designed to mark the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland, he became a breeder of greyhounds.
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br /> Fact vs fiction
The Real Prison Breaks version of the helicopter escape states bluntly that this was the first time that such a breakout was attempted; this was not the case. It also implies that a helicopter pilot would knock back a pint of Guinness before a flight!
Sources:
Time magazine, 12 November 1973: “Ireland: The Canny Copter Caper”
Sunday Journal, 23 October 2005: “Herrema’s kidnapper explains motive”
An Phoblacht, 26 August 2004: “30 years on: The Great Portlaoise Escape”
An Phoblacht, 10 September 2009: “Remembering the Past: IRA Chief of Staff Séamus Twomey”
An Phoblacht, 27 August 2009: “Remembering the Past: 19 prisoners escape from Portlaoise”
An Phoblacht, 1 November 2001: “Remembering the Past: Chopper Escape from Mountjoy”
Hayes, Paddy: Break Out! Famous Prison Escapes (O’Brien Press, 2001)
Real Prison Breaks, Discovery Channel, 2008: Archive news interview with Captain Thomas Boyes
Hearing the Foxes Bark
Since the vast majority of prison breaks end with the inmates’ recapture, a wide variety of different items have been cited as the benefits of being on the outside. Sometimes it’s something as simple as being able to have a drink in a bar; other times, it’s a little more poetic. Dale Otto Remling, a conman who was the first American to be freed from a prison on domestic soil by helicopter, was good-humoured when he was captured in a bar not that long after his flight: he told reporters that he was glad he’d had a chance to be on the outside, since he could hear “some birds sing, water trickle, and a fox bark”. It was the sort of charming statement that had bamboozled some of his victims and led him to Jackson Prison in the first place.
In 1951, aged twenty-five, Remling had a stroke of luck, on which he based much of his career: he found a wallet belonging to James J. Mangan, then a bellhop at a hotel in Wichita, Kansas. Rather than return it, Remling decided to adopt Mangan’s identity, and over the next twenty-two years built up a whole new life for Mangan in parallel with the real man’s career working for the US Forestry Service. The ersatz Mangan was considerably less scrupulous: he would issue bad cheques to buy merchandise, and then sell it on to raise cash. He was arrested in California in 1955 and sent to Soledad Prison; he escaped from there but was recaptured after three days. After serving his time, he continued his larcenous career, adding arrests for cattle theft, and then grand larceny in connection with the theft of an airplane in 1971. This landed him back in Soledad.
Remling made a fresh bid for freedom, this time from a prison farm at Sonora, California – and on this occasion he was successful. He headed east and found himself in Crystal, Michigan in 1972. Over the following year, he established his identity as a major cattle baron, with a range in Colorado, and wooed and wed Kay Petersen, the daughter of Crystal’s wealthiest man, after presenting a sob story suggesting that his first wife had passed away after suffering for months in an iron lung. Remling’s new bride and her father-in-law covered some of his bad debts, but time was running out for the conman. An attempt to steal 383 hogs at gunpoint from a family in Nebraska foundered when Remling and his accomplice forgot to obtain the health records for the livestock; without them, the pigs were unsellable, and worthless.
Remling eventually wrote over $50,000 worth of bad cheques, and was arrested and charged with fraud. He was sentenced in August 1973 to a maximum term of six years and eight months to ten years for attempting to purchase a $2,440 car with a bad cheque. His marriage was annulled, and the real James J. Mangan was horrified to learn what had been done in his name (including a dishonourable discharge from the US Navy!).
From the moment he arrived in Jackson Prison, Remling intended to escape. “I think cages are for something other than people,” he pointed out. “You talk about problems with people: the prison system breeds it into you.” However, this time he wasn’t going to go over the wall. “I didn’t have enough nerve to try the wall,” he admitted after being returned to jail following his escape. “I’m getting a little old for that.”
At that stage officially known as the State Prison of Southern Michigan, Jackson prison sat three miles north of the town of Jackson. Thirty-four-feet high walls surrounded the nearly sixty acres of prison grounds with twelve watchtowers looking after around 6,000 cells, making it the largest walled prison in the world. In 1975, there were 3,245 prisoners housed at Jackson. “The place is so damned big something could happen at one end, and you wouldn’t know about it until you read about it in the newspaper,” admitted one prison officer in the aftermath of Remling’s escape.
Jackson’s imposing edifice didn’t immediately offer any obvious signs of an escape route, but Remling wasn’t discouraged. Although there was a lot of publicity at the time of his eventual escape bid connecting it to the release of Breakout, the Charles Bronson film which was itself inspired by the escape of Joel David Kaplan from a Mexican prison (see chapter 35), Remling was adamant that he had come up with the idea of using a helicopter long before publicity for the film began. Certainly the most that he might have been able to see in the run-up to the movie’s release was the brief television trailers (which did include the scene where the chopper lands in the yard), but Breakout wasn’t screened for prisoners, nor did Remling have any access to seeing it outside. It’s more likely that Remling may have read some of the publicity that surrounded Kaplan’s escape at the time, and the idea stuck at the back of his mind.
On the morning of 6 June 1975, he put his plan into motion. At 11.05 a.m., a helicopter landed on a spot in the yard of Jackson prison which had previously been marked with a red handkerchief. The pilot, Richard Jackson, a Vietnam combat veteran, had been hired at the Mettetal Airport in Plymouth to take a businessman by the name of Donald Hill to a meeting at Capitol Airport in Lansing, Michigan. However, ten minutes into the flight, Hill had pulled a knife on him and ordered him to fly to the prison. Jackson tried to make a Mayday call, but Hill pulled the microphone jacks from their sockets. Seeing that the other man was nervous, the pilot therefore decided to comply with his kidnapper’s demands, and brought the chopper in to land at the prison on the second attempt (he overshot the landing point the first time). Dale Remling, who had been waiting beside the licence-plate manufacturing building, promptly ran across and jumped inside. Since the area was supposed to be under electronic surveillance, the guard towers were unmanned. That meant there weren’t any guards within easy reach of the helicopter, and Jackson was able to take off unimpeded. He had been on the ground for no more than twenty seconds.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Hill told Jackson and instructed him to fly in a north-easterly direction, following state highway 106. As they approached a junction, Jackson was ordered to land the helicopter, but as soon as they were on terra firma, Hill sprayed mace in his eyes. He couldn’t tell which of the various cars that had been at the drop point the escapees had disappeared in.
As soon as his eyes cleared from the stinging liquid, Jackson radioed the airport, and went in pursuit of the fugitives. Noticing another car nearby, he passed on its information to the police, who stopped and then questioned its occupant. Jolyne Lou Conn was one of four women who had been hired as a decoy to attract attention away from Remling and Hill. They were all meant to be meeting up at a motel in East Lansing, but when the others heard that Conn had been arrested, they went their separate ways.
Donald Hill was arrested later that day – and police realized that he had nothing to do with the case. The hijacker, Morris Eugene Colosky, had taken a leaf out of Remling’s book, and implicated a completely innocent man. Colosky was eventually arrested in Garden City, Kansas, along with another conspirator, mother of eight Gertrude Woodbury, and charged with kidnapping and aircraft piracy. In all, seven accomplices were arrested over the escape.
However, in the confusion at the rendezvous, Remling had missed his ride! The man whom all the fuss was about was left to run for cover.
He spent the night hiding in a barn, before heading for the town of Leslie as police officers carried out a house-to-house hunt for him around northern Jackson County. Local residents spotted the stranger in their midst, and called the police (although one report suggests that Remling was turned in by a former cellmate who refused to help him).
Remling entered Huffie’s Bar but before he could even order a drink he was faced with a state trooper bearing a gun. The conman grinned, then surrendered without a fight. “There was no use for me to shed tears,” Remling said later. “He had the cannon on me, I didn’t have it on him.” He had been out of the prison for a mere thirty hours. At a press conference held by the state police, he said that he probably wouldn’t try to escape again. The FBI agent in charge of the investigation, Neil Welch, was scathing about Remling’s planning: “Remling spent a couple of years getting this ready,” he said the day after the conman was recaptured. “And his total plan apparently ended with his getting over the wall. The whole thing just fritzed.” State Corrections Chief Perry Johnson gave Remling a little more credit: “In terms of adventurousness and bizarreness, I’d say it was one of the strangest,” he told reporters.
Hardly surprisingly, the prison authorities looked at ways of preventing other people from using a helicopter. Chief Johnson said that he didn’t “want to have an unsightly scarecrow arrangement on one hand or act precipitously and cost taxpayers several million dollars in the next decade”. A system of poles and cables that could shear off helicopter propellers was seriously considered.
Remling kept to his word; he was released from prison in 1993 after serving twenty years, and died six years later.
Sources:
Waterloo Courier, 8 June 1975: “Helicopter escapee is captured”
NBC Evening News, 8 June 1975
Palm Beach Post, 16 June 1975: “Take a Bow, Dale Remling”