The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (15 page)

Tony’s reputation ensured that nobody betrayed the plan, and it all seemed to proceed smoothly, although the prisoner who was deputed to collect Nita Ramos on Tony’s behalf failed to persuade her to come along with him. None of the women, including Ramos, had any idea that the prison break was planned, and in the confusion, Ramos believed that she was being targeted under cover of the fire, rather than effectively being rescued. Her cell door was the only one that was opened, which led the Indonesian police to suspect that she was complicit in the escape.

Mobile phones were rife within Hotel K, and many of the prisoners had actually booked taxis to come to collect them from the jail. Once Tony had used a stolen bunch of keys to open the front door, and the other prisoners had used iron bars to smash open the other locks, the inmates piled out of the prison. Others set fire to the registration office, and burned as much paperwork as they could find, in the hope of eliminating their records and wiping their histories (which was more likely to be successful in the period before computerization became commonplace).

Two hundred and eighty-nine prisoners escaped under cover of the fire; by sunset 104 of them had been recovered. Some hadn’t made it out of the prison at all, caught in the refuse area. Five prisoners stopped automatically when a police officer shouted at them to freeze or he would shoot – even though he was unarmed. Others were found in local cafés, taking the opportunity to eat some fresh plates of the rice dish nasi goreng, or simply wandering around the streets aimlessly. Four were found in toilets, another on the Kuta beach. One simply took advantage of the prison break to visit his family, but asked his brother to tell the police he would return the next morning of his own volition – which he did.

Tony was one of the 130 prisoners who were never recaptured, disappearing to Malaysia. Those who were returned to Kerobokan faced harsh treatment at the hands of the embarrassed guards: they would be beaten, and then chilli-laced water would be used to “cleanse” the wounds. Fresh fences were placed around the cell blocks to prevent a similarly coordinated attack from taking place again. Even when fires were started during riots in 2012, the new security measures ensured that no prisoners were able to escape, even though they had control of the prison for over seven hours during one incident in February that year.

Other escape attempts from Hotel K weren’t as successful as Tony’s. Sentenced to eleven years for drug possession, Brazilian civil engineer Rogerio Pecanz Paez was desperate to get out and although he would eventually become resigned to his fate, adopting the Buddhist faith, he did try an ingenuous scheme to abscond, with the help of his Italian cellmate, a mechanic named Ferrari.

After ensuring that no locals would want to be in the cell with them – the Brazilian could put on a convincing impression of a lunatic when he wanted to – Paez made a load of noise to cover the sound of Ferrari cutting through the bars of their cell window using a blade that had been smuggled into the jail inside a papaya. Ferrari was only in Hotel K for four months, but used the time to assist Paez in return for a daily supply of drugs. Each night the two men would work on the bars before gluing them back into place so they appeared normal to the guards during the day.

Unlike many of those who tried to escape from Hotel K, Paez made his plans sensibly, arranging for a motorbike to be waiting outside the prison, on which he could travel to a waiting boat. That would take him to Java, where he had already arranged with a corrupt immigration official to stamp his fake French passport with a tourist visa and entry stamp, so he could depart from Jakarta airport. He even had snakebite anti-venom ready in case he encountered a cobra during his escape, and a hammer to smash the jagged glass stuck in the top of the prison’s outer wall.

It seemed foolproof but then, as Paez describes in his blog, a “small detail went wrong”. The only thing missing was a clip to use as a form of grappling iron that he could throw over the wall, attached to the rope which he had previously prepared. However, while sawing a metal bar off the roof of the medical clinic, he snapped the piece off – and the loud noise it made alerted the other prisoners. Although he tried to get rid of the bar, Paez was put in solitary for possessing it. On his release he was put in a different cell. Amazingly, the bars in his old cell continued to fool the guards for some weeks, but when they discovered the deception the Hotel K authorities gave Paez a severe beating, and sent him to the maximum-security tower where his fellow inmates included the Balinese terrorists.

American Gabriele Natale was foolhardy when he tried to escape from Hotel K. The forty-two-year-old building contractor only had five months of his sentence left to serve when, drunk and high on drugs, he decided to abseil from an empty watchtower, over the walls and into the street. There was a hole in the inner wall of the prison where the old concrete wall had collapsed into a tunnel that had been used for smuggling alcohol into the jail. Ignoring the snakes that infested the grass between the inner and outer wall, Natale went through the hole, climbed into the tower, and used two bedsheets that he had brought with him to get over the wall. Looking like the surfer dude that he had been before his imprisonment, he hoped to catch a taxi and escape before a pursuit began.

Unfortunately, Natale’s escape was spotted, and a gang of guards and local prisoners chased after him, with one of them using a motorbike to knock Natale into a nearby rice field. The American was given a severe beating outside the prison, which continued when he was brought inside, and only the intervention of the US consul, hastily summoned by one of the other prisoners, prevented him from being kicked to death. Although Natale survived, his escape attempts were over (he was released from Hotel K later in 2005). Others took advantage of the hole that was there, which the authorities covered with metal sheets – Rudi Setyawan, a convicted murderer, escaped on 18 March 2005.

The riots in spring 2012 focused attention on the conditions at Kerobokan, and it seems new prisons will be built in Indonesia to alleviate the stress, with the authorities hoping that these will prove to be successful in keeping the inmates on the correct side of the fence.

Sources:

Bonella, Kathryn:
Hotel K: The Shocking Inside Story of Bali’s Most Notorious Jail
(Quercus, London 2012)

Rogerio Pecanz Paez’s blogspot (not updated since 2005):
http://rogeriopaez.blogspot.co.uk/2005/07/hell-on-bali-island-of-gods-real-drama.html

Prisoner details from:
http://www.phaseloop.com/foreignprisoners/prison-indonesia02.html

and
http://beatmag.com/daily/tag/prison/page/3/

The creators of the police detective series
CSI: Miami
emulated the popular use of a theme song by The Who in the original
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
show, and chose the British rock band’s 1971 track “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. It’s a song that might well have been adopted by the Quincy County sheriff’s department in 2008, when they realized that one of the convicts in their charge was about to try to escape using a trick that had worked very successfully for Christopher Glover, aka the Phantom, and his girlfriend, Shannon Rideout, in 1995. Passing over a handcuff key during a loving kiss was not going to happen twice!

Twenty-year-old Christopher Glover was being held at the Norfolk County Correctional Center in Dedham, Massachusetts in November 1995. The centre was comparatively new: it had only been opened three years previously, with its 501-bed capacity costing $33 million, replacing the large stone Dedham Jail in which murderers George Hershey, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had been incarcerated. While not as imposing as its predecessor, the Correctional Center still posed a considerable deterrent to those wishing to escape from its confines – not least the fact that it was built between the north and south carriageways of Interstate 95, the only prison in North America constructed between the lanes.

The old jail had seen its own escape attempts, the most notable taking place on 26 January 1975. Four inmates – alleged armed robbers James Mamey, Robert Perotta, and Thomas Carden and alleged murderer Louis Goforth Jnr – managed to get hold of a gun, which had been thrown over the jail wall by an accomplice outside, and tried to order Norfolk County Correction Officer Joseph Stroy to open the jail’s main door. Carden had used the gun to hold up Joseph Colligan, one of Stroy’s colleagues, telling him not to move or he would blow the guard’s head off, then used his keys to open up the cells containing Mamey, Perotta and Goforth before locking Colligan up. However, the main door was controlled from the “cage”, which Stroy was manning. Despite looking down the barrel of a gun a mere six feet away, Stroy refused to open the door; when he reached for the alarm, he was shot for his pains with a bullet that damaged his spinal cord but lodged too close to his aorta to be removable safely. The prisoners used a broom handle to trigger the mechanism and escaped, carjacking a vehicle to flee the jurisdiction. Based on tip-offs, three of the quartet were recaptured within a day in Boston; the fourth surrendered to authorities two days later in New York’s Bronx. Stroy eventually lost his leg as a result of the bullet wound and died prematurely aged sixty-four.

Christopher Glover had finally been captured after some months of criminal activity in the Quincy area, carjacking vehicles and taking them for dangerous drives around the local roads. On many occasions, the police were simply unable to keep up with him, and he earned the nickname “the Phantom” as a result. He was arrested in April 1995 after a week-long crime spree, and one stunt which pushed the police too far: he allegedly stole a police car, and tried to run the officer down. Arrested in Florida, he was sent back to Massachusetts for trial.

Since he didn’ t particularly fancy serving the sentence for car theft and assault that was coming his way, Glover decided that he would make a break for it. Rather than try to find a way around the various security measures that surrounded the Correctional Center, he decided that the ideal time to flee was during one of his court appearances. If he could evade his guards and get to a vehicle then he could make good his escape: he was expert enough to be able to hotwire any vehicle and once behind the wheel, he knew there was a fair chance that he could outrun any pursuit.

However, of course, there was one major problem: for all transport between the jail and the court, he would be handcuffed. Somehow he would have to remove the handcuffs before he got out of the prison van so that his hands were free to manipulate the wires. To do that, he would need a key.

You might think that getting hold of a key to police handcuffs would be difficult, that perhaps those wishing to purchase them need some form of official identification. Nowadays you can simply Google names of suppliers. In 1995, there were plenty of places where they could be obtained – perhaps not totally legitimately, but certainly very easily. Glover’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Shannon Rideout, didn’t have a problem in finding one that would fit the cuffs, but she still needed to get it to him without setting off the metal detectors which swept visitors to the jail.

On 9 November 1995, Rideout came to visit Glover at Dedham. Before she entered the jail, she wrapped the key in a piece of duct tape which masked the metal from the detectors; once inside the prison, she slipped the key into her mouth. Nobody was at all surprised when the attractive young couple exchanged a long, lingering kiss when she was due to leave.

A week later, Glover made his move, surreptitiously removing the handcuffs while in the back of the van. The moment that the prison officers opened the rear doors to escort him into the courthouse in Quincy, Glover legged it and as quickly as was practicable, he stole a car. By chance he was spotted, and the police were on his tail far more rapidly than he would have liked.

Glover abandoned the car, and tried to flee on foot, but again, luck wasn’t with him. He was identified by one of the Quincy police officers, who followed him to a gas station. Glover attempted to carjack another vehicle but this belonged to a handicapped senior citizen who found it difficult to follow Glover’s orders. Glover claimed that he had a gun, which turned out to be a can of Mace, and after a stand-off, Glover was arrested. He was sentenced to six and a half years for the escape and carjacking charges. Shannon Rideout was given two suspended two-year terms, and two years’ probation.

A decade later, Sean Ciulla, who was being charged with third-offence shoplifting and giving police a false name, also managed to escape from guards at the Quincy Courthouse on 5 November 2007, although he made his move after his hearing rather than before. Ciulla was shackled with wrist irons and leg irons when he slipped away from the prisoners who were being loaded into a transport van back to the correctional centre. According to one account, Ciulla’s absence wasn’t noticed until the van arrived back in Dedham. All that the manhunt could find was his discarded shoes.

He was recaptured two weeks later, after investigators used cell-phone records to track him down to a North Quincy apartment where his girlfriend and another woman tried to prevent police from entering the property while Ciulla made an escape through a back window. They spotted him, barged in and arrested him. Ciulla faced charges of escaping from custody, and his case turned on whether he had jumped out of the van – as described by one of the other prisoners, and which was regarded as more serious by the law – or simply not boarded in the first place.

On 10 December 2007, around the same time as Ciulla was being arraigned, James N. Miller was arrested by Quincy police officers on drugs charges after being involved in a car chase which finished with him slamming his SUV into a house on an intersection. He was sent to the Norfolk Correction Center, and started plotting his escape, assisted by his girlfriend on the outside, Theresa Fougere. The mistake the pair made was discussing their plans on the phone from the prison: although, as Sheriff Michael Belotti pointed out, it wasn’t possible for the authorities to monitor every call that went in and out of the prison, their policy was to “aggressively monitor all inmate communications that we are entitled to monitor under the law to ensure that the public remains safe”.