by Paul Simpson
The 1995 film Murder in the First also maintains that it’s based on truth, but turns bank robber Henri Young into a thief forced by circumstance to steal $5 to feed himself and his sister. It plays fast and loose with the events of Young’s 1939 escape, and then claims he died on the Rock in the mid-1940s. He actually jumped parole in 1972.
Fictional escapes from Alcatraz form the basis of the shortlived US TV series Alcatraz, which claimed that the last inmates from the Federal Penitentiary were not sent to other prisons, but instead somehow disappeared before returning in 2011 to cause trouble. It lasted thirteen episodes before being cancelled.
Possibly the best fictional escape is seen in the Michael Bay 1996 movie The Rock, with Sean Connery as a forcibly retired British spy (sound familiar?) who was imprisoned there because he knew secrets that the American government didn’t want revealed. He was the only man who had ever escaped from the Rock, and the government (and more particularly Nicholas Cage’s chemical weapons specialist Dr Stanley Goodspeed) need to know how, so they can infiltrate the prison, where an armed force is holding hostages and threatening San Francisco with chemical weapons.
Sources:
Thompson, Erwin N., The Rock: A history of Alcatraz Island, 1847–1972, historic resource study, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, California, Denver: National Park Service, 1972 (available at www.alcatrazhistory.com)
Johnston, James A., Alcatraz Island Prison and the Men Who Live There (Scribner’s, 1949)
Karpis (Karpowicz), Alvin and Robert Livesey, On the Rock: Twenty-five years in Alcatraz (Beaufort Books, 1980)
San Francisco Chronicle, assorted dates
Catching the Midnight Express
Prison breaks are one of the staples of Hollywood movies. Think of films like The Great Escape or The Shawshank Redemption: although sometimes, as in the former case, they’re based on real events, the necessities of condensing a story into two hours or so running time means that many factors can be changed – sometimes removing what some would consider more “filmic” moments.
That happened in the case of one of the most famous prison films of all time: Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, which tells a version of the story of Billy Hayes, a young American drug smuggler, who was caught and thrown into prison in Turkey. A harsh, gritty film, it ends with Hayes escaping from jail by killing a cruel jailer who was about to rape him. Ironically – given that “Midnight Express” is the term given to an escape from prison within the film – Hayes’ escape was nothing like that at all. (When Hayes asked Alan Parker why it was changed, the director replied, “What forty-five minutes of this film do you want to cut out to put in your escape? They’d had enough, get the audience out of the bloody theatre.”) The film was based on Hayes’ own autobiography, written with William Hoffer in 1976; however, he had to bear in mind various considerations while writing that, so the full story of his escape had to wait until 2010.
Hayes was arrested at Yesikoy International Airport in Istanbul on 7 October 1970, literally as he was about to step on a plane, carrying four pounds of hashish. On his first night in prison, he learned the way of life in Turkish jails: he took a blanket from another cell, and was beaten up by the guards, including Hamid, a sadist who took great pleasure from making Hayes’ life a misery. (In the movie, Hamid is the guard that Hayes kills; in reality, Hamid was already dead by this point: a former prisoner recognized him outside the jail, and shot him eight times.) Hayes was sentenced to four years and two months in prison.
In Sağmalcilar prison, escaping was known as “taking the Midnight Express”, referring to the train that ran from Istanbul into Greece, from which escapees could jump off to freedom. Even though he had a comparatively light sentence, Hayes knew that he needed to escape, and learned that prisoners who were deemed to be criminally insane were moved to Bakirkoy Mental Hospital. Compared with Sağmalcilar, Bakirkoy was an easy place from which to escape. Being given an official “crazy report” might also assist with getting him freed legitimately. Hayes discussed his plan with a visiting friend, Patrick, who agreed to pick him up and drive to the border, providing false papers and a change of clothing. All Hayes had to do was convince the Turkish authorities that he was crazy.
Hayes succeeded in being sent to Bakirkoy for observation in 1972 – and discovered that he had swapped the frying pan for the fire. Bakirkoy only housed the criminally insane but Hayes was sure that he could survive while Patrick raised the necessary cash to arrange the papers. The plan fell apart when Patrick got on the wrong side of the wrong people; Hayes was informed in a telegram from his father that Patrick had been found dead in his hotel room with a bayonet in his chest. Hayes lost all hope at that stage, blaming himself for his friend’s death. Giving up on ideas of escape, he was returned to Sağmalcilar and resigned himself to serving out the remaining years of his sentence. (Hayes only revealed this part of his escape plans in recent times – his original account in Midnight Express only mentions his time in Bakirkoy, not the escape plan, or its unfortunate consequences. Patrick’s death is mentioned, but isn’t linked to the escape plan.)
With just fifty-four days left to go, Hayes received a visit from the American Consul and was horrified to learn that the High Court in Ankara had decided that they wanted to change the charge in his case. Instead of convicting him of possession of drugs, they were now convicting him of smuggling, an offence that carried a life sentence – or possibly just thirty years. Unsurprisingly, Hayes’ resolution to escape came back to life. A brief attempt to file his way out through the prison bars came to nothing when children spotted Hayes and a colleague at the window and reported them.
The US authorities tried, in vain, to persuade their Turkish counterparts to allow Hayes to be returned to America to serve out his sentence there. The Turks pointed out that the Americans couldn’t give the absolute guarantees that they required, so refused permission. The Foreign Minister suggested that the Americans try to make an appeal on the grounds that “Hayes’ health, physical and/or mental, was deteriorating as a result of his incarceration in a Turkish prison”. There was no guarantee that it would be successful, but privately, he indicated to the American Ambassador that he would do all he could to assist.
Billy Hayes refused to allow his countrymen to go down this route. According to the telegram from the American Ambassador to the State Department, “his experience in submitting to mental and physical examination at Bakirkoy mental hospital in 1972 was apparently highly traumatic for him. He does not like the hospital and based on this earlier experience there he does not believe that hospital staff will certify that state of his health warrants early release. (It will be recalled in this connection that in 1972 Turkish psychiatric authorities decided he was not psychotic and dismissed earlier efforts of his attorneys to play up Hayes’s psychological problems.)” He hoped to be transferred to a “half-open” prison, and that various amnesties that were being discussed might benefit his situation.
Hayes was moved to imrali Prison on 11 July 1975; three months later he was in Greece. imrali island lies seventeen miles off the coast of Turkey, and had been used as a prison since 1935. (A newly constructed building now houses terrorist Abdullah Ocalan, serving a life sentence for treason.) After the deprivations of Sağmalcilar and Bakirkoy hospital, this was like paradise for Hayes – but he was still locked in, working in a canning factory during the day.
The factory was served by boats which normally returned to the mainland overnight; however on 2 October, a storm whipped up so rapidly that the boats had to remain tied at anchor for the evening. And, as Hayes had noticed, all of them had little dinghies, complete with oars, tied to their side. If he could get out from the prison after bed check and swim out to the boats, he could relieve one of the owners of their dinghy, and row to the mainland. The prospect of the swim didn’t faze him: he had been a lifeguard and a surfer in his time.
Screwing up his courage, Hayes slipped out after the bed check, and crawled across the rocks, kn
owing that at best if he was caught, he would be returned to Sağmalcilar; at worst, he could be shot by the guards. As unobtrusively as possible, he entered the water, and began swimming quietly towards the moored boats, hoping that the searchlights manned by the guards wouldn’t be turned in his direction. He reached a dinghy, and was in the process of cutting it loose, using a knife that he had liberated from the canning factory, when he was nearly discovered by the owner of the boat. Narrowly avoiding being seen, Hayes cut through the rope, and rowed himself past the rest of the boats, and the end of the island.
His muscles strengthened from yoga and carrying large sacks of beans around, Hayes was able to row through the night, and hit the beach around the time the next morning that the guards realized that he had escaped. His initial plan had been to ask a favour from a former prisoner friend and hide in his hotel in Istanbul; however when he got there, he learned that his friend had just gone to Afghanistan. Hayes’ hopes of remaining in a basement till the hue and cry died down faded.
If he couldn’t stay out of the way then Hayes knew he had to cross into Greece as quickly as possible; he reasoned that the hatred between Greece and Turkey meant that it was unlikely he would be returned to Turkey unless he committed murder. For three days, he ran through Turkey, dying his hair, and even inadvertently travelling through a minefield on the Greek/Turkish border. He had close encounters with border guards, and tried his best to evade the dogs on his scent by removing his shoes and socks. Eventually reaching the Maritsa river that divided the two countries, he swam across and once on the far side, he was intercepted by a Greek soldier and arrested – he had arrived in a heavily restricted military zone. For nearly two weeks, he was interrogated about everything he had seen, both at the prisons, and on his journey across Turkey to the Greek border.
On State Department advice, Hayes didn’t remain in Europe, in case the West Germans or others decided that they would return him to Turkey. He caught a flight via Frankfurt, remaining in the transit lounge just in case, and Amsterdam to New York. It was more than thirty years before he would visit Turkey again: the film of Midnight Express had a noticeable anti-Turkish bias, which Hayes himself did not share, and he eventually went back, as he described it, to heal the breach. In the meantime, he became a film-maker, actor and director. He hasn’t been tempted to smuggle since that day in 1970.
Sources:
Hayes, Billy with William Hoffer: Midnight Express (revised edition, CurlyBrains Publishing, 2012)
Crave Online, 28 June 2010: “Billy Hayes Reveals ‘The Real Midnight Express’”
Time magazine, 13 April 1970: “Americans Abroad: The Jail Scene”
Tete de Turce: “Midnight-Express Phenomenon” www.tetedeturce.com
National Geographic TV, 2010: Locked Up Abroad: The Real Midnight Express
US Department of State, 25 May 1974: Telex from American Consul, Istanbul to American Embassy, Ankara
US Department of State, 19 March 1975: Telex from American Embassy, Ankara to Secretary of State, Washington DC
US Department of State, 9 May 1975: Telex from American Embassy, Ankara to Secretary of State, Washington DC
US Department of State, 21 October 1975: Telex from American Consul, Thessaloniki, to Secretary of State, Washington DC
PART V: PRISONERS OF WAR
Where the Wind Blows
He survived torture at the hands of the infamous Klaus Barbie, and was one of the few people ever to escape from the dreaded Fort Montluc prison in Lyon, but one thing was too much even for French resistance hero André Devigny. After he retired from the Army, he considered a career in politics, but decided that it wasn’t for him when he realized that “the backstabbing was far worse than anything I’d ever encountered in secret warfare”.
Devigny was working as a spy within occupied France during the Second World War when he was captured and sent to Montluc. In May 1940, the former school teacher had been commanding French troops in Belgium, battling against the advancing Germans, working behind enemy lines; unfortunately, he was the victim of “friendly fire” from his own side, and he was hospitalized back to Bordeaux, and then sent to recuperate at his family’s farm in the Savoie region, in the French Alps.
In 1942, Devigny became one of the undercover operatives run by Colonel Georges-André Groussard out of Geneva. Groussard was working with British Intelligence – both MI6 and the Special Operations Executive – as well as Allen Dulles, representing the American Office of Special Services, and was fomenting anti-Nazi resistance within France as part of the “Gilbert” network. Lieutenant Devigny, codename Valentin, was exactly the sort of young officer he needed.
In April 1943, Devigny’s Resistance cell based out of Annemasse, near the Swiss border, was infiltrated by a spy for the Gestapo. Robert Moog had worked at a gunpowder factory near Toulouse that had been sabotaged by Devigny’s cell, and he was determined to take revenge. He betrayed one of Devigny’s key colleagues, Edmee Deletraz, to the Gestapo, and she was forced to identify her leader. On April 14, Devigny and another member of the Resistance killed an Italian counter-espionage agent who was in the pay of the Germans. Three days after this execution in Nice, Devigny was arrested after Deletraz met him at the railway station at Annemasse.
Devigny was taken to Fort Montluc, a nineteenth-century prison which had been taken over by the Gestapo in November 1942 to act as a prison, interrogation centre, and internment camp for those awaiting transport to concentration camps. During the twenty-one months it was in operation, it is estimated that over 15,000 people were imprisoned within its walls; over 900 of them were executed there. In charge was Klaus Barbie, known as the Butcher of Lyon for his extreme methods of interrogation and torture, many of which he carried out himself rather than leave it to his assistants.
From 17 April to 25 May, Barbie and his men interrogated Devigny but he didn’t break, and gave them no useful information. He did his level best to escape from the prison, but each attempt was unsuccessful, and only resulted in ever more severe punishment. During one try, while he was being transferred, he was shot. In the end, on 20 August 1943, he was sentenced to death by a German military court; he would face the firing squad on 28 August.
Three days before he was due to be executed, Devigny escaped. Although the Germans thought that they had kept him firmly under lock and key during his incarceration, Devigny had been able to move around the prison. He knew how to remove his handcuffs using a safety pin, and had then ground down a soup spoon on the concrete floor of his cell to create a tool. He used this to push out the wooden slats at the bottom of his cell door, and found that he could squeeze through the opening. At night, when the guards were confident that their prisoners were secure for the night, Devigny moved around the cell block, talking to the other inmates. He would then return to his cell, and wedge the slats back into place.
The frame of an old lantern that he discovered in the hallway gave him the idea for his means of escape – he knew he would need some sort of grappling hook in order to get over the walls. He took the lantern apart and created hooks from it, which he fixed to a home-made rope, formed from a mattress cover and a blanket, with pieces of wire.
After his appearance before the German military, Devigny knew he had to put his plan into effect quickly, but the day before he was going to flee, the Germans put another prisoner in with him. Devigny realized he had two options: take the rather dim-witted Gimenez with him, or kill him. He decided on the former course.
As soon as the clock chimed ten on the night of 24 August 1943, Devigny sprang into action. He knocked out the wedges which held the slats up, and removed the wooden boards from the door, passing them to Gimenez, who stacked them in the corner of the cell out of the way. He then checked the corridor was empty, and helped Gimenez to squeeze through the gap.
A skylight gave some meagre light into the corridor, and it was through this Devigny and Gimenez planned to exit. Devigny tried to climb up to it but his strength had been sapped by
his days of solitary confinement following his previous escapes. Knowing that if he stopped now, he would be a dead man, Devigny summoned up all his energy and managed to boost himself up to the ceiling, and push the skylight open. After a few minutes’ rest, he let a small rope down to Gimenez, who passed up a bundle containing the large rope that they needed to get over the walls, as well as their clothing. Devigny then helped Gimenez to ascend.
The pair had to wait for trains to pass nearby the prison to mask the noise of their movement across the roof of the fort, but since the stretch of line near the fort carried trains between the two main stations of Lyon, there wasn’t too long a gap between them. Covered by the sound of a slow goods train making its way through the night, they managed to reach their goal, the side of the roof opposite the infirmary, slightly quicker than Devigny had anticipated.
Leaving Gimenez while he checked out the lie of the land, Devigny spotted a pair of guards smoking near the wash house, but from his initial position he couldn’t see the stretch of wall they would need to climb down. With infinite patience, he slowly made his way around the roof and checked whether it was safe to proceed.
Although it seemed that the coast was clear, Devigny doublechecked, and was very pleased that he had: his second inspection revealed a sentry sleeping on the steps, who would be in exactly the right position to see the two escapees as they came down into the courtyard. At midnight, the guard was changed, and Devigny watched his movements carefully. He then went back to Gimenez, and told him that they would be descending when the next train approached.
Just before 1 a.m., the two men heard a whistle in the distance which increased in volume. Telling Gimenez not to worry about the man patrolling below, Devigny slid down the rope into the courtyard, raced across to a low wall, threw the rope with the makeshift grappling hook over, hauled himself up and then dropped down the other side. Leaving the ropes for Gimenez, Devigny killed the sentry, then signalled for Gimenez to follow.