Mayhem

by Matthew Thompson

  There are some close shaves when the staff enter the unit asking, ‘Where is inmate X?’ and he’s down the hole and unable to surface without being seen: true Hogan’s Heroes stuff. Another inmate has to pull the staff’s attention another way with some bullshit and for long enough to give the tunneller time to safely surface.

  The entrances we conceal by slotting in plastic meal trays that are covered with dirt and even have grass sprouting from them. It is perfect.

  We all laugh when it rains and the yard turns a pale grey due to the landfill from the tunnel. Mulch, food scraps and newspapers do nothing to restore it back to brown. It’s beyond us how the staff never notice.

  CLOWN TOWN

  The Acacia staff introduce a new uniform policy: clown red.

  Make that cheap, ill-fitting clown red.

  And in their endless quest to not only dress us up as fools but also remove our identities, they strip us of our private white t-shirts, shorts and thermals. The only non-red items we are now allowed to own are socks and jocks.

  I refuse to be dressed as a clown in red synthetics and instead wear a couple of prison towels on my exercise periods, even in the rain and the bitter cold of winter.

  One towel draped over my shoulders covering my upper torso, and the other wrapped around my waist is my uniform, not theirs.

  For weeks another inmate and I brace the cold and wet in towels, refusing to wear their cheap, crappy clown outfits.

  We ask if we can source reds that fit the new colour code but are higher quality and fit better – as we had been allowed to do with the white t-shirts they’ve seized. Denied.

  I complain of having an allergic reaction to synthetic material, which is what the cheap new reds are made from. I’ll break out in a rash if I don’t wear natural fibres, I tell them – adding that only natural fabrics agree with me: leather, cotton and silk.

  To break our resistance, the Acacia Unit staff tell us that if we do not comply and wear their nasty clown gear, then we will be charged for disobeying a direct order and face a governor’s disciplinary hearing.

  The only way out is through a medical certificate.

  The Senior Prison Officer, a certain Mr Norman, says he doesn’t believe me about the allergy and that he wants to see the rash for himself.

  ‘If I wear your reds tomorrow and go for a jog,’ I tell him, ‘my pores will open up and I’ll be covered in a rash.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘All right, I’ll show ya, then.’

  I have just the thing: a tube of clear, odour-free, extra strength deep-heat balm.

  The following day I apply a good coating to the inside of the clown shirt, and then when the exercise period starts, I walk out in my white towels, carrying the red t-shirt.

  I call out to Mr Norman, who is watching me from behind the mirrored perspex, and ask him to look for any visible rash on my body before I put on the red top and go for a ten-minute run. He confirms no skin irritation is evident.

  Donning the shirt, I start running and within minutes I can feel the heat being generated by the balm. The longer I run the hotter it gets. When ten minutes is up, I pull up, walk to the mirror, call to Mr Norman to witness this and then pull off the t-shirt. I’m as red as a lobster.

  ‘Look,’ I say. ‘Are you fucking blind or what? Do you see it now?’ It’s obvious to all of them and they can’t argue. So I tell Mr Norman that I want my skin sensitivity confirmed and reported.

  Leaving the red t-shirt on the ground, I finish my yard time and return to my cell, still covered in a red rash. ‘It worked,’ I tell the other inmate who’s holding out, and I give him a good dollop of balm to spread inside all his reds.

  The next day he refuses to wear their synthetics, is told he’ll be charged if he refuses the order, and now tells Mr Norman he has the same sensitive skin condition as me.

  ‘Bullshit,’ says Mr Norman. ‘The chances of both of you having the same things are one in a million.’

  So the inmate goes back to his cell, dons the red top, and then runs the yard, all the time being watched like a hawk by Mr Norman.

  ‘Get over here,’ says Mr Norman after the run. ‘Remove the shirt.’

  The inmate is covered in a huge red rash.

  Mr Norman is fuming: he’s carrying on about not believing for a minute that we both have the same allergy to the inmate uniform. But he can’t work it out and reluctantly reports this inmate as also excused from general issue reds.

  Due to this they have to get in new stock for us and we’re both issued with decent cotton tops, t-shirts and shorts – not the Warwick Capper up-the-arse type that the others are made to wear.

  Strutting about in the yard, I show off to the others watching from neighbouring yards. ‘Gee, these feel heaps better,’ I say. ‘They’re not up my crack.’ I want to rub it in their faces for not holding out with us. If they had, they could be dressed better, too.

  Some of them start complaining to the staff that we have better shorts; that it’s not fair that ours don’t give us wedgies. So to shut them up, new shorts are handed out but they still have to wear the rest of the clown set.

  *

  A bigger problem develops in Unit 1, however, due to tension between me and inmate Peter Gibb who, with fellow prisoner Archie Butterly and a female screw Gibb was screwing, used a small explosive charge to blow a hole in the same Melbourne Remand Centre window that I previously burnt, and abscond.

  The issue I have with Gibb is that when the police eventually closed in on them, Archie was shot dead with a police revolver that the two had earlier stolen and I don’t think Archie shot himself.

  Gibb knows I don’t like him, and although we’ve set our differences aside for the escape the animosity is close to the surface.

  One day in the yard Gibb makes some smart remark and in a flash I’m landing a flurry of punches. He grabs a pitchfork and confronts me with it but I don’t run and there we stand when staff separate us. Gibb leaves the yard with two black eyes, the ‘hardcore’ crook then refusing to return into my company. The progress of the tunnel now slows, as we’re on half-day run-outs [permitted time out of cells]: Gibb out in the yard while I’m locked in and vice versa.

  Mere days out from the escape, the staff make a snap demand for us to change cells. Work on my window had been the most advanced of the group’s, some of whom had only begun cutting out the screws holding in their window frames, and the cell I land in has had the least work done so now I’m behind everyone and cutting feverishly to make up ground.

  As the day nears and I’m finishing my window, the others ransack the TAFE workshop for the tools we need. I manage to take the window out but I’m having trouble getting it back in as the sealant is tough and not budging at all. When one of the marauding inmates is out in the sterile zone behind the cells, I ask him to help push my window back in.

  The sterile zone here is fenced off and out of sight except through a triangle opening about ten centimetres wide that’s been cut out at the gate for accessing the padlock.

  Unbeknown to us, a guard is having a smoke at the other side of the gate and spotted the roving inmate. He realises this isn’t right and hits the alarm. Sirens blare: the inmate shits himself and scurries back down the tunnel but in his haste he fails to put the lid back in place. The prisoner makes it back to his cell before they enter the unit and conduct a lockdown head count.

  The officers can’t work it out – nobody’s missing in the entire jail and doubt builds over the smoker’s claims. Guards go up on the roof: still nothing, so they start dispersing, one officer walking the line of the fence until he falls down a hole, and, startled, is suddenly looking up instead of down.

  We’re all at the windows watching with bated breath. He screams that he’s found something and officers pile back in. The tunnel is found and they storm the unit. A search of the laundry and day room uncovers a stack of equipment taken in the raid on the TAFE workshop. Due to being locked in over the Peter Gibb incident
, I’m the only one to have an alibi.

  Head Office goes berserk, turning Acacia upside down and spending a stack updating the unit which was already high security.

  *

  Time for Plan B.

  Now, I like to plan for emergencies like this, so a little while back I staged a skirmish with staff and, given my confrontational past, they tipped me straight to Punishment Block Unit 4 where I secreted a third of a hacksaw blade.

  And when the shakedown hits, the officers neglect the punishment block.

  Plan B is for a smaller escape team of two at the most. And my Plan B running mate, Johnny Lindrea, also manages to secure a third of the blade through the upheaval. So now, for the two of us, it’s all systems go.

  The plan was that I would arrive in the punishment block and he’ll follow weeks later so as not to draw suspicion. It works perfectly – he lands in the adjacent cell, allowing us to talk after emptying out the water in the toilet bowl, as they were on the same pipeline.

  First we had to run tests by placing empty butter satchel wrappers over the area we wanted to cut. If the guards paid no heed and the satchels stayed there we assumed we could start cutting the door locks, just covering them with wrappers at the end of a session so the staff wouldn’t notice when they opened and locked the doors each day. They left the wrappers alone. Yes!

  Within days we start cutting the steel covers of the door locks, and then into the locking device that is housed inside the gap in the frame, covering our work with empty butter wrappers.

  It’s time.

  We hip, shoulder and kick out the rear cell doors, the metal cut out around the locking device bends out easily, offering no resistance at all. So now we’re out in the yard with four hours to cut a padlock and the rear mesh and be on the jail rooftop.

  There we’ll have the high ground to observe the hourly security patrols that start at 8 pm when the rest of the jail is locked down after the last muster of the day.

  All we have to do is cut the padlock off the inner rear gate of the yard, then reach the next outside gate, and this time cut the security mesh so as not to alert guards to a damaged lock, because they rattle them there by hand on roving hourly patrols.

  Both of us are out of our cells, but when I try to cut my gate’s padlock, it won’t cut. It is security-hardened steel. ‘I’m stuck,’ I tell him. ‘I can’t cut it.’

  Johnny says that his is cutting easy, and that he is going to push on without taking the risk of waiting for me.

  I begin to cut the steel tubing frame of the gate above the hinge, as once this is removed I’ll be able to drop the gate off the top hinge and detach it.

  When Johnny cuts through the padlock easy, I tell him to target the security mesh at ground level so that they’ll be less likely to see it. I say to peel it back, crawl through out of the yard, and then bend it back into place.

  I get through the tubing, unhinge the gate, put it back in place and work on mesh, I cut through in no time, and my mate is now behind me.

  But I wait for him, unlike he was going to do for me.

  He fucking cuts out the mesh section at the padlock level; I can’t believe it. The damage is fully exposed: right in their line of sight. To make things worse, when he tries to squeeze through the gap he gets stuck and I have to then use the steel tubing frame to bash out the hole. It’s still a tight fit and he’s cut to pieces, now leaving a blood trail that even the blind couldn’t miss.

  His desperation to get out is going bring us down. I think of something that might survive a few patrols – but definitely not a change of shift – and run back into my cell for some A4 paper and a black Texta.

  ‘YARD DAMAGED – NOT IN USE’, I write, signing it off as the area chief of Acacia Unit and positioning it over the damage. This actually fooled them for the first three patrols.

  We now head off to the prison industry area, climb the roof and crawl along until reaching the fenced-off industry yard where we drop down. Aware that the industry roller door can be lifted with force, we gain entry to the loading dock where a six-metre stepladder and a nine-metre extension ladder are padlocked and chained to the wall.

  As I lift the roller door to allow him to crawl under, he spots a box in the corner over the door with a red light visible beneath it. Thinking it’s a motion detector, he halts to avoid setting it off. We decide to damage it and set it off, then hide and wait for the staff to attend, think it’s a false alarm, turn it off and leave.

  The problem now is to create a hiding position out of material lying around the yard, but this is taking up precious time that we can’t afford.

  We cut a fire hose to tie at one end of the nine-metre extension ladder, which we’re going to use to slide down the far side of the wall instead of jumping, and then prop a ladder up by the alarmed inner fence. We’ll throw the other ladder over that fence into the sterile zone, jump after it – also without touching it and triggering the alarm – and then stand it against the last wall and breach for freedom.

  When everything is in place, we return to the roller door. Johnny slides underneath whilst I hold it up, wedges it open with a container, and now I slide under, too.

  Only to find out that our motion detector was nothing but a ‘fire exit sign box’ positioned over the exit door.

  We cut the ladders free and secure the fire hose to the end of the extension ladder. It’s no more than 100 metres across the oval to the first inner alarmed fence, which we’ll clear in a jump from the extension ladder.

  I’m up the ladder, my head over the industry fence when I spot the change of shift. They’re starting their patrol for the night from the front gatehouse. I expect the yard damage to be discovered and say, ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Let’s wait til they do the patrol. Then we’ll have an hour head start before the next patrol finds the ladders and hits the alarms.’

  Johnny’s reasoning is that because the jail is in a semi-rural location, we need the head start to get out of the area.

  But we have car theft implements and Corio is less than six kilometres away so I say we should go for it. Waiting is a bad idea. I’m adamant than even if they set off the alarms we can cross over the outside wall and clear the area.

  ‘But it’s your call,’ I tell him. ‘You have longer time than me.’

  His call doesn’t change, and I reluctantly climb down from the extension ladder and start concealing that and the stepladder in the industry yard.

  In my gut, I know I have made the wrong choice. I think of that solo flight at Parramatta: that solo run in a hospital gown in Melbourne. My solo leaps over the walls at Poplar House. But today I’m in a team and Johnny’s the one with the deadening term ahead.

  They find the damage to his yard and call it in, launching a search of Acacia that reveals we’re missing. Saturating the exterior of the jail with security, search teams work from the outside in, as they guess we haven’t yet breached the perimeter.

  We’re pinned down inside the industries fence by a roving vehicle and foot patrols. A helicopter hovers above, its spotlights trying to work over the jail but more so they set the fog ablaze with white light. Huge contingents of security crews with dogs pour in through the gatehouse.

  Johnny doesn’t want to get bitten by the approaching, barking German shepherds, but I refuse to declare our position and I hold out until the very last moment – three hours after the search began. I’m not comfortable at all in surrendering.

  They’re also fuming. After all, it’s only some weeks since the previous escape attempt was exposed and they’re still reeling from the media attention.

  The head office of Corrections Victoria hits the roof yet again, and as a consequence Johnny and I are placed in leg-irons and handcuffed to body belts during our one-hour exercise periods.

  Johnny’s restraints are removed after fourteen days. He has vowed to abide by the rules and regulations.

  Johnny Lindrea would get out eighteen years later, walking free
this time out the front gates not over the wall. I’d see him that day and give him a bundle of cash to help him out and get on his feet – our paths going separate ways once more.

  I launch legal action and the governor, Clive Williams, an old foe from Pentridge, tells me to drop it. I tell them to fuck off. ‘Leg-irons? Shackles? I’ll see you in court.’

  Williams claims I’ve said I’ll escape again and so I remain chained for three months, even on box visits. It’s totally absurd but my challenge fails in the Supreme Court of Victoria.

  In the exercise yard I hobble about in prison-made shackles with about half a metre length from one end to the other. Their hinged clasps are secured with big padlocks and I look like some medieval dungeon rat. They wear away the skin inside my ankles.

  With my hands cuffed to a body belt, I grip hold of the exercise bike and, inch by inch, force it across the yard until it squarely faces the staff sitting hidden behind the mirrored perspex.

  Now I climb aboard and pedal like mad, staring dead at where they sit, feeling nothing at all as the chains strip my skin to blood.

  My ankles still carry the scars of this today.

  54. A LETTER TO BARWON PRISON

  1995: ACACIA UNIT

  Shackled, Chris writes a letter to the prison.

  CHRIS:

  You tell me who I have injured, maimed, raped, molested or killed to justify being treated in this manner.

  Yes, it is true I have used a gun in obtaining a financial advantage in the commission of a crime in the past. This may be due to lacking ability in seeking a financial benefit with the ease of a stroke of a pen, like so many others, or the gift or the qualities that amount to becoming a politician.

  Yes, some may have suffered during bouts of terror associated during the act of armed robbery by verbal threats, for which I apologise, yet does anyone shed a tear for the suffering, trauma and torment inflicted upon me by a number of aggressive, abusive staff assigned to cater and handle my care. No.