The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (43 page)

At this point, the US Marshals put Artrip on their “15 Most Wanted” list. “Anthony Ray Artrip is exceptionally dangerous. He is a federal fugitive who is not laying low, but continuing to commit violent crimes while on the run,” said United States Marshals Service Director John Clark in the press release announcing this. “By placing him on our 15 Most Wanted list, I have directed our investigators to use all resources to find and apprehend this dangerous criminal. From what we’ve seen since his escape, there is no indication that Artrip’s criminal activities are going to end. We need to put a stop to his crime spree.” The publicity from this – which included a feature on the TV programme
America’s Most Wanted
– brought Artrip’s latest escape attempt to a moderately swift close.

A robbery in Calhoun, Georgia, netting $20,000 was the last one that police believed he carried out before he was recaptured. That wasn’t easy: it came after a major stand-off at the Knights Inn motel in South Fayette, Pennsylvania, on the south side of Pittsbugh on 8 October, during which, as US Marshal John Schickel pointed out when announcing his arrest, Artrip tried to “pull off one more vanishing act”. Acting on a tip-off, the marshals had tracked him down to room 106 at the motel. Alongside the Allegheny County SWAT team, as well as police from sixteen local departments, they surrounded the building and broke down the door at 9.30 a.m. – only to find no apparent sign of Artrip. No sign, that is, until someone remembered his usual method of escape and looked up – and there, in the ceiling of the bathroom, a tile had been removed. Artrip continually moved around in the crawlspace for the next four hours, as attempts were made to negotiate with him, which he ignored.

Around 1.45 p.m., the marshals began to lose patience, and fired a concussion grenade into the area, but this still failed to dislodge Artrip. Eventually, about an hour later, they started to pump pepper spray into the confined space. That was enough, even for Artrip. Screaming, “Shoot me! Shoot me!” he tried to escape from the pepper spray, but it filled the area, and after fifteen minutes, he broke through the ceiling of room 123, and was promptly arrested.

“It is great news that we have finally managed to bring Tony Artrip in,” Marshal Shickel said. “This was likely one of the most brazen and elusive criminals we have ever pursued and all of us are relived [sic] that his crime spree has come to an end without further violence or injury.”

He would only remain behind bars for eighteen months. In April 2009, he was up to his old tricks once more, this time making his escape from the Edgecombe County Detention Center in Tarboro, North Carolina. It would be the shortest of his times on the run – within twelve hours he was back in custody. He still found time to rob another bank!

After his robbery spree in 2007, Artrip was sentenced to seven years at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, with the judge in charge warning that Artrip was likely to take advantage of laxer security if he was taken around the country to stand trial for the various offences he committed in different jurisdictions. During his trial in Kentucky, he was held in shackles, with marshals all around to ensure that he didn’t escape. The problem was that the North Carolina detention centre (described as a “podunk jail” by Artrip’s lawyer) wasn’t anywhere near as secure as it needed to be to hold someone as determined as Artrip.

While awaiting trial, Artrip sought help from David Lee Cox, accused of felony conspiracy, and James Butler, held on firearms charges. This time, there were no devious plans involving air ducts or ceiling panels. On 16 April 2009, the three men simply broke open a fire door at the prison leading to the outside, ran across the open space to the fence, and then used a mattress to help get over the razor-wire-topped obstruction. Stealing a van from a nearby house, they sped off, heading 400 miles towards West Virginia.

The next morning at 9.15, Tony Artrip walked into the City National Bank in Marmet, West Virginia, just off the West Virginia Turnpike. Demanding money, he then vaulted over the counter, and grabbed $53,000. Cox and Butler were waiting in the stolen truck and the trio headed for Charleston. However, when the truck was spotted at a Shop N Go gas station, a chase ensued, at speeds of up to ninety miles per hour through the streets of Charleston. The men dumped the truck, and tried to escape on foot, jumping over a fence. It was too late – police officers apprehended them. When he was asked why he had robbed the bank by a local journalist, Artrip claimed it was for “gas money”; Cox claimed that he didn’t know a bank robbery was planned. They hadn’t even had time to change out of their jail outfits.

Another Edgecombe County inmate tried his luck the same weekend as Artrip made his abortive getaway. Seventeen-year-old Chamone Diggins, being held for breaking and entering, larceny, felony, conspiracy, robbery, assault on a female and assault with a deadly weapon, overpowered guards around 9.30 p.m. on 18 April and was able to escape from the jail annex. He was rearrested at lunchtime the following day in Farmville, twenty-five miles from Tarboro. With four escapes in the space of seventy-two hours, Sheriff James Knight noted that “procedures were not followed”.

On 4 August 2010, Tony Artrip was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences, and three twenty-year sentences to run concurrently with the forty-year sentence imposed in 2008. He will not be eligible for parole. “Today’s sentencing puts an end to the criminal career of a man who brazenly made his way across half of the United States robbing banks and terrorizing citizens, and brings justice and closure to the many victims of his crimes,” US Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said.

But when he was asked by a reporter in 2009 whether the break from Edgecombe would be his last, Tony Artrip said, “Probably not.” And even though he’s now an inmate of the Supermax at Terre Haute, Indiana, no one would be in the least surprised if Tony Artrip somehow finds a way out.

Although the
Real Prison Breaks
series filmed a lot of its material at the sites of the various activities, note that the Grant County Jail footage was shot in 2011, and the reconstruction of the recapture of Artrip at the Knights Inn Motel suggests that the gas was thrown into the room, which brought him out – telescoping the events considerably.

Sources:

Boyd County jail design/history:
http://www.cmwjustice.com/projects/BoydCountyDetentionCenter.html

The Independent
(Ashland, KY), 26 June 2007: “Tony Artrip still at large”

The Independent,
27 September 2011: “Williams gets life for bank robbery”

US Marshals Service, 18 September 2007: “U.S. Marshals Add Convicted Bank Robber To ‘15 Most Wanted’ List”

The Kentucky Enquirer,
26 June 2007: “Man awaiting trial for bank robbery escapes from Ky. jail”

America’s Most Wanted Online Hotline’s Blog, 23 September 2007: “Dramatic Escape From County Jail”

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9 October 2007: “‘Escape artist’ corralled”

US Marshals Service, 8 October 2007: “U.S. Marshals End Bank Robbing Spree Of ‘15 Most Wanted’ Fugitive”

The Independent,
28 July 2007: “Chris Artrip arrested; Tony still at large”

The Independent,
14 May 2010: “Boyd machete-wielding homeowner fights back”

The Independent,
22 January 2011: “Would-be home invader sentenced”

The Herald-Dispatch,
17 April 2009: “3 NC Fugitives caught near W. VA. capitol.”

WSAZ.com
, 18 April 2009: “3 NC Escapees, Including Tony Artrip, Caught After Robbery”

WSAZ.com
, 5 August 2010: “Tony Artrip Gets Two Life Sentences for Bank Robberies”

Real Prison Breaks,
Cineflix Productions, 2011

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” So goes the Chinese proverb. It doesn’t say how you should feel if you’re fooled a third time – but that’s what the so-called King of Escapers, Pascal Payet did to French authorities when he used a helicopter to escape from jail in both 2001 and 2007, and to add insult to injury, organized for others to get out using the same method in 2003.

Luynes prison in the south of France was the target on two occasions; the jail was only opened in 1990, and its 600 inmates included many who were classified as DPS
(détenus particuliérement surveillés
– prisoners under particular watch). Payet, a habitual criminal who had convictions for aggravated assault and conspiracy, had been sent there following his arrest for murder during an armed robbery on a security van in November 1997, during which he had used his favourite weapon, a Kalashnikov AK47 automatic rifle, to shoot a guard who subsequently died. He had been on the run for fourteen months before being arrested in Paris in January 1999.

Helicopters had been used in a number of escapes in France during the 1990s – at least ten had been successful – so it’s a little surprising that somewhere as new as Luynes wasn’t better equipped to deal with the possibility. (After the escape, the governor pointed out that the unions had been calling for better security ever since the prison had been opened but had been ignored because of the cost implications.) Payet, who at the time was being held under the name Paillet, could see the obvious possibilities, since there wasn’t anything to prevent a chopper from landing in an open part of the prison yard which couldn’t be monitored properly from the guard towers. He therefore arranged with an accomplice on the outside to hire a helicopter from a local airfield.

As soon as the chopper was in the air, shortly after 4 p.m. on 12 October 2001, Payet’s friend drew a weapon and threatened the pilot and co-pilot. He ordered them to head towards the prison, and as they flew over the prison yard, he threw a bag of tools out of the door to Payet, who was wearing a distinctive fluorescent-yellow T-shirt for easy identification. He and another prisoner, Frédéric Impocco, who was serving a life sentence for murder, then used wire-cutters and pliers to get through the mesh fence that separated the yard from the open area. The helicopter landed, and the two jumped on board.

Their destination was the small town of Bouc-bel-Air, about ten miles north of Marseilles, where they returned control of the helicopter to the pilots. A Peugeot car was waiting for them; they abandoned that a few miles away and stole a Volkswagen Golf before vanishing apparently without trace – they evaded the special police cordon, codenamed Sparrowhawk, that was thrown up around the prison without difficulty.

Payet successfully avoided arrest for two years, although not without some run-ins with the police along the way during various armed robberies that he carried out to keep himself financed. Impocco wasn’t so fortunate. He was picked up by police in Paris less than a week after the escape. The authorities at Luynes learned their lesson, and made sure that there were security lines across the whole yard.

That didn’t stop Payet, when he decided to get two of his friends, accused of running an international drug ring, out from the prison. As far as he was concerned, that’s what friends did for one another. On 14 April 2003, he put his plan into action.

Once again, a helicopter was hijacked, but instead of bringing the chopper in to land, the pilot was ordered to hover over the prison yard, taking advantage of exactly the same blind spot as before. While one of the hijackers kept the pilot at gunpoint, the other dropped down on a rope ladder, and used a power saw to cut through the steel security netting. All that Michel Valero and Eric Alboreo had to do was grab hold of the rope ladder, and they were flown to safety. This time someone else came along for the ride: another drug trafficker, Franck Perletto, known as Lucky Luke, who later told a court that he was playing Scrabble when he saw the rope descending from the helicopter, and took advantage of the situation. Once again, the pilot was released unharmed.

The escape prompted outrage from the newspapers, with
Le Parisien
running the banner headline, “Yet Another Escape”. Future French president Nicholas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister, promised that “Teams are mobilized to find them and put them back where they belong – in prison.” He was able to live up to his promise: three weeks later, all three were back under lock and key – as well as Payet, who was acknowledged to have masterminded their escape.

The group hid in plain sight in the country area of La Baumede-Transit, in the Drôme department in south-eastern France, eighty or so miles from the prison. They rented a charming house in a small village, apparently based on its recommendation in the Routard travel guide, and as far as the locals were concerned, they were simply there for a holiday and to take part in various sports, as they trained for an upcoming biathlon. They went for drinks with the neighbours, but otherwise kept themselves to themselves, doing their own cleaning, and cooking steaks in the vineyard gardens of their home.

They did travel from time to time back to some of their old haunts, and this was to be their undoing. Michel Valero was spotted by the Swiss police near a bar in Geneva, driving a car that had been used in an attempted robbery on 5 May by Payet, whose hood had slipped during the abortive theft. The surveillance was taken over by the Lyons police, and a group of forty officers was assembled. At 6 o’clock on the morning of Friday 9 May, they swooped on the house in Richerenches and arrested the four men smoothly, without any shots being fired. There they found a stash of weapons and money in different currencies.

The French authorities learned their lesson, and didn’t allow Payet, or the others caught with him, to remain in any one prison for any length of time. Payet made a big fuss about this, publicly complaining about the many different prisons he had been incarcerated within – at one stage, he was transferred nine times within thirty months. In January 2005, he received a thirty-year sentence for his original murder; two years later, he confessed to his part in the 2003 operation and received a seven-year additional term, as well as six extra years for his escape in 2001. (This add-on has led some sources to believe that he was out of prison for six years; instead, the courts simply trebled the amount of time he was free to create the sentence.)