The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (34 page)

After discounting Egypt, Yugoslavia and Switzerland as potential destinations, Blake chose to head for East Germany. This would mean that his friends wouldn’t need to have any dealings with communists: they could drop him on the autobahn that linked West Germany with Berlin, and be within the Western sector before Blake made contact with the East German authorities. Randle was the only person with a valid driving licence, and he and his wife decided to bring their two young sons along too, providing a perfect cover.

They set off on 17 December 1966, heading from Dover to Ostend and then across Europe, arriving at Berlin early in the morning of Monday 19 December. The Randles let Blake out of the van not far from the checkpoint; although he wasn’t greeted with quite the exuberance he had hoped for by the guards when he presented himself, Blake was made welcome the next morning. Two weeks later Sean Bourke joined him in East Berlin: he had used Pat Pottle’s passport, suitably amended to feature his photograph, to travel to Paris, fly to Berlin, and then go through Checkpoint Charlie into the Russian Sector, where he reported to the Soviet headquarters.

Blake has remained in Russia for the rest of his life; he was awarded an Order of Friendship by former KGB head Vladimir Putin in 2007, and at that stage was still contributing help to the KGB’s successor, the SVR. Sean Bourke didn’t enjoy his time in Moscow: he was keen to return to Ireland. He wrote a book about the escape, which made clear the identities of Michael and Anne Randle as well as Pat Pottle, but died in his early forties. In 1989, Michael Randle and Pat Pottle wrote their own book; two years later they were tried for their part in the escape and despite the judge giving clear directions regarding their guilt, their plea that they helped Blake because his sentence was hypocritical swayed the jury and they were acquitted.

Michael Randle still has no regrets: speaking to a BBC World Service documentary in 2011, he made it clear that he had no sympathy with what Blake did. But was it right to sentence him to death in prison for doing what both sides in the Cold War were doing?

The Blake escape is fictionalized in Desmond Bagley’s novel
The Freedom Trap,
which was turned into the 1973 movie
The Mackintosh Man,
starring Paul Newman. It suggested that a highly organized gang called The Scarperers were responsible for the prison breaks – a world away from the reality of Bourke’s mismanagement! Simon Gray’s play
Cell Mates,
about the relationship between Blake and Bourke, is perhaps more famous for Stephen Fry’s departure from the original production than its content.

Sources:

Camden New Journal,
11 September 2008: “George Blake – The ‘Red spy’ who slipped over the prison wall”

Randle, Michael and Pat Pottle:
The Blake Escape: How We Freed George Blake – and Why
(Harrap 1989)

Blake, George:
No Other Choice
(Jonathan Cape, 1990)

Ealing Gazette,
5 September 2008: “Blunders by MI5 opened escape route for Russian spy”

Simpson, Paul:
A Brief History of The Spy
(Constable & Robinson, 2013)

Life Magazine,
24 January 1969: “The Irish ‘Who’ in a British Whodunit”

Hansard, 24 October 1966: “George Blake (Escape from Prison)”

ITN:
Reporting 67,
1 January 1967

BBC World Service:
Witness: Michael Randle

Sean Bourke:
The Springing of George Blake
(Mayflower, 2nd edition 1971)

He’s now a respected journalist, who lectures to prison inmates about the futility of the path they’re following. But for two years at the end of the 1960s, John McVicar was deemed “Public Enemy No. 1” with newspaper headlines screaming “Wanted Dead or Alive”. His biggest crime: not the armed robberies for which he had been sent down, but his escape from the supposedly impregnable E Wing at Durham Prison.

McVicar had a history of escaping before he arrived in Durham. He had been able to get away from a coach taking him to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight in 1966, while serving an eight-year sentence for armed robbery. After he was recaptured and sentenced to a further twenty-three years, he led a breakout from Chelmsford Prison, which only failed – at least according to his own autobiography – because he refused to listen to advice he was given about how to prepare the rope and hook that was going to be thrown over the wall. If he had done as suggested, he and eight other prisoners would have made it, after getting through a trapdoor in the roof of one of the bathrooms and down into the yard. Instead they carried out a protest on the roof. As a result, McVicar was sent to Durham.

Durham Prison had a pretty good record for keeping its inmates where they should be. In March 1961, when Ronnie “Houdini” Heslop dug his way out of his cell into the unlocked one beneath, using a teaspoon and a kitchen knife, and then fled into the night over the prison wall, there hadn’t been any escapes for six years. Shortly after that, Durham was designated the home for the country’s most difficult prisoners, and those deemed most likely to make a break for it.

During his comparatively short time in Durham, McVicar was involved in both a riot and a hunger strike, before fellow prisoner Wally Probyn alerted him to an oddity in the shower room. Probyn had escaped sixteen times from prisons during his career, and, according to McVicar, was always alert to the possibilities inherent in any situation. One of the corners of the room had been cut off – a diagonal piece of wall ran in front of where it should have been. As Probyn pointed out, nothing was ever done in a prison without a good reason: maybe it was hiding a shaft of some sort.

Because the corner was hidden from view when the door of the showers was open, the chances of discovery were comparatively low, and Probyn dug through the bricks to discover a shaft about a foot across behind the wall. With the help of another prisoner, Tony Dunford, they then began to extract the bricks properly, using papier-mâché as makeshift mortar when they were replaced at the end of each day’s excavations. It took three weeks before they removed a complete path through to the shaft, at which point they realized they would have to descend into whatever lay beneath, since the shaft got narrower the higher it went.

As their digging progressed, the men were approached by crime boss Charlie Richardson, who was serving a twenty-five-year stretch on E Wing. He blackmailed them into letting him be part of the escape attempt. (Richardson made a half-hearted start on a tunnel in the same showers, which was bound to get caught; if it was, the authorities would tear the showers apart, and find McVicar and Probyn’s work.) Ironically, they had been considering bringing Richardson into the scheme, since Dunford didn’t want to escape.

They disposed of the rubble down the toilets – although Richardson came close to blowing that by trying to flush too much at one time – with the larger pieces thrown out of their windows. One close shave nearly saw the whole plot discovered: a random headcount was called when Probyn was deep within the hole, and it was only because the prison officer who eventually located him, (after he had got out, and hidden within a shower stall), didn’t notice that he was still wearing his overalls while supposedly taking a shower, that the escape wasn’t brought to a premature end.

By the early part of October 1968, the hole was big enough to see that the shaft led into a cellar under the showers, and on 20 October, Probyn was able to drop down to have a reconnoitre around the room. After twenty minutes, he returned to explain that the cellar led to an external ventilation shaft, which ran to the indoor exercise yard. All that stood in their way was a grilled window, and a padlock on the grid at the top of the shaft in the yard. There was even a broken stepladder in the cellar that they could use to get up the shaft.

To throw Richardson off the scent, since Probyn and McVicar no longer had any intention of allowing him or his cellmate Tony Lawrence to join the escape, he was told to get hold of a hacksaw blade to use on the bars, although Probyn in fact already had one. Probyn also prepared a rope and a hook to use for going over the wall. McVicar made a hole in the perspex in the library cell’s outer wall, which they would need later.

On Sunday 23 October, Probyn cut through the bars and broke the padlock, leaving it looking intact. During that week, they were joined on E Wing by Joey Martin, a robber serving life. McVicar decided to invite Martin along, and the con agreed with alacrity. On the Tuesday evening, 25 October, McVicar and Martin dropped a rope from out of the hole in the library, tied to a table. After dinner that night, Martin, Probyn and McVicar went to the shower room; Richardson and his cellmate were oblivious to the imminence of the escape.

The three men dropped down into the cellar, and made their way along the tunnel, up the shaft and into the yard. They had previously hidden dark clothes in the cellar to eliminate the chances of being spotted. They went up the rope, but running across the plastic roof gave away their presence – notably to Richardson, who realized he had been betrayed, and started to cause a commotion within the prison, alerting the guards to the escape.

After dropping down from the roof, they ran along by the wall, although most of it was topped with barbed wire. When they reached the end of the remand wing and started to climb up onto the roof of the courthouse, next to the main gate, Martin was caught by one of the guards. McVicar and Probyn kept going, but realized that they still couldn’t get over the wall, as it was covered with barbed wire at this point. The part of the courthouse they were on was only a single storey high, but the portion next to it was ten feet higher. Knowing that they were very close to being caught, the two men desperately used spikes halfway up the wall to pull themselves up.

Probyn and McVicar were now on a flat concrete roof, and made their way towards a section that overlooked the outside. When they were spotted by the warders, they separated. McVicar jumped from roof to roof, ending up outside the prison grounds. When he could, he descended to ground level and began running.

McVicar stayed on the run for 744 days in total. He made his way across Durham, despite not really knowing the geography of the city, and swam across the river on two separate occasions to evade his pursuers. He headed north and eventually found himself in Chester-Le-Street, around ten miles away. After calling a former girlfriend for help, he was picked up by friends from London, although not before he was chased around the streets by a couple of detectives who thought he was behaving shiftily.

Once back in London, he reverted to his criminal ways, with Detective Chief Inspector Tom Morrison doggedly on his heels. Adopting the alias Allan Squires (the name of the first detective who arrested him), he rented a flat in Blackheath, which is where he was arrested on 11 November 1970, along with two women. He had become a well-known figure in the area, buying champagne and brandy at the local off licence and not worrying about the police Panda cars which parked nearby regularly to keep an eye on troublesome teenagers.

McVicar was sent back to Durham, where he received a further three years added to his sentence. He was paroled in 1978 after studying sociology, and co-wrote and consulted on the film
McVicar,
starring Roger Daltrey, based on his time in Durham. Probyn was caught on 29 October, ninety miles from Durham prison. He was released in 1975, but later served a three-year term for having sex with underage girls.

Sources:

Glasgow Herald,
12 November 1970: “’Phone Call Led Police to McVicar”

Evening Times,
30 October 1968: “‘Danger Man’ McVicar Still Free”

Edmonton Journal,
4 March 1968: “Prison Mutiny Continues”

McVicar, John:
McVicar By Himself
(Revised edition Artnik, 2002)

The world’s first helicopter escape wasn’t, as you might think from numerous books and TV programmes, the descent in October 1973 into Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison to liberate three members of the Irish Republican Army who were being interned there. It in fact took place on the other side of the world, in Mexico, two years earlier. This daring raid inspired the movie
Breakout,
featuring Charles Bronson and Robert Duvall, and because of various elements involved with the case, has featured in a number of examinations of conspiracy theories over the years.

On 18 August 1971, Joel David Kaplan was in the middle of his tenth year in prison after he had been accused of and then convicted of the murder of his business partner Luis M. Vidal Jr. He was serving out his sentence at the Santa Martha Acatitla prison, in Mexico City, a harsh facility out of which, to the surprise of many who knew the corrupt ways of the Mexican judicial system, he seemed simply unable to bribe his way.

Kaplan was the heir to a fortune in the molasses industry – his uncle, Jacob M. Kaplan, controlled the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York (and the $100 million that went with it), and the younger Kaplan was convinced that he had been framed by his uncle, or alternatively by the CIA, for the murder. This wasn’t as far-fetched as it might sound: Joel was definitely involved in some questionable dealings in Mexico and Central America, during a period when the CIA were at the height of their quests to destabilize what they perceived as hostile governments. Two years after Joel was found guilty of Vidal’s murder, a Texas congressman stated that he believed that the J.M. Kaplan Fund was acting as a conduit for CIA funds, in contravention of proper practice.

The relationship between Kaplan and Vidal was stormy. According to evidence presented at the trial of Evsey S. Petrushansky, who was also accused of the murder, Kaplan told Luis deGaray Jaimes that Vidal was “a very dangerous individual, with whom he had had serious differences in the past, and he had been informed through other channels that he planned to eliminate him; for this reason, he thought that the day was not far off where either of them would do it, that is to say, commit a murder between themselves.”