The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  Linwood Briley took the driver’s seat, with the others putting the “bomb” in and then jumping in behind, and drove off. At 10.48 p.m. they were out of Mecklenburg, and started heading south-east from the jail, wanting to get over the state line from Virginia into North Carolina as quickly as possible. They abandoned the van in Warrenton, around thirty miles from Mecklenburg, where the Brileys, Tuggle and Jones parted company with Peterson and Clanton.

  By this time, the hostage situation on death row had ended. Thirty minutes after the Mecklenburg Six had departed, the hostages were freed, and control of the pod returned to the authorities. Around midnight, other officers began arriving to take charge; two hours later, the Department of Corrections director Robert Landon was informed of the escape, as was the state governor, Chuck Robb. Around two hundred North Carolina law officers, along with tracking dogs, began combing the countryside around the area where the van was abandoned – it had been found very soon after the inmates fled from it. Aircraft and Virginia state troopers were also checking the land around Mecklenburg, in case only some of the fugitives had been in the van. “This is our top priority right now,” Allen H. McCreight, special agent in charge of the Richmond office of the FBI, told the press. “It’s a big one.”

  The manhunt would go on for nineteen days, during which many in Richmond lived in fear, particularly those who had been involved in the prosecution of the Brileys. “I think what concerned me the most was that I had seen first-hand what they were capable of doing. I knew their determination to seek revenge. You never forget the smell of death and the smell of blood from what they did,” one former Richmond detective, Woody, now city sheriff, later recalled. They were not aware that the Brileys had no intention of coming back to Richmond; they wanted to get far away.

  Clanton and Peterson only lasted nineteen hours. They tried to hitch a ride around midnight with hospital orderly Andrew Davis, asking him where they might be able to get some drugs or find some nightlife. When he said he didn’t know, and tried to throw them out of his truck, he was attacked but managed to get away. Rather than use the truck, the fugitives ran off in the opposite direction (leaving their knife in the car) and hid in the local woods overnight, before getting rid of their guards’ uniforms in the morning. Getting hungry, they headed into Warrenton and bought some cigarettes, wine, bread and cheese with money that they had stolen from the prison guards the previous night. They then stupidly made phone calls – Peterson tried to call his mother. At 6 p.m., while they were still eating their wine and cheese in a local Laundromat, the two fugitives were arrested without putting up a struggle. Earl Clanton was executed on 14 April 1988; Derick Peterson on 23 August 1991.

  The other four also stole a vehicle, a blue pickup truck, which was spotted that night at a twenty-four-hour gas station in Thornburg, around fifty miles north of Richmond. Lem Tuggle was being kept in the back of the truck, facing backwards, and was becoming disorientated: “All I could see was the back of the highway signs,” he complained later. The men had decided not to stay in Richmond: the Brileys knew that that would be the first place the cops would look for them. Instead, they parted company with the other two in Philadelphia, where they bought some second-hand clothes from a thrift shop and dumped their prison uniforms. Linwood Briley gave Tuggle and Jones $25 each, keeping the remainder of the $800 they had taken from the guards, and sent them on their way. Jones desperately wanted to stay with the Brileys but Linwood firmly refused.

  Jones and Tuggle took the van and continued to head north, reaching Vermont, and camping just across the Massachusetts border in the Green Mountain National Forest for three days. Ten days after they had escaped from Mecklenburg, they stopped about ten miles short of the Canadian border, and to raise some funds, Tuggle went back to a gift shop he had noticed in the small town of Woodford. He stole $100 from the elderly owner, who had the presence of mind, despite a knife to her throat, to take the licence plate number of the van. The state police put out an APB for it and within a few minutes Tuggle had been apprehended. He surrendered without an argument, and was returned to Mecklenburg. Lem Tuggle was the last of the Mecklenburg Six to be executed. He recorded a cassette tape giving his account of the escape which was smuggled out of death row, and subsequently uploaded onto YouTube. He received a lethal injection on 12 December 1996.

  Jones thought he had been abandoned by Tuggle. He broke into a house and called his mother, who told him to turn himself in. He thought about it for a few minutes, then went to another house and asked to use the phone. He then called the state police, explained who he was, and agreed a meeting point. At 5.30 p.m. he was picked up and taken back to Mecklenburg. Derick Jones needed two separate supposedly lethal jolts of electricity to kill him on 22 August 1991.

  The Brileys took longer to catch. They had gone to ground in Philadelphia, working at Dan’s Custom Car Factory. Known as Slim and Lucky, James and Linwood had been introduced to the eponymous Dan by their uncle, Johnnie Lee Council, and fitted straight into the small business, to all intents and purposes out-of-towners just working to keep a roof over their heads. However, after Lem Tuggle admitted he had dropped the brothers in Philadelphia, the FBI began surveillance on Council, who quickly led them to the Brileys.

  The Bureau staked out the garage, sending in an undercover informant to befriend the Brileys, then on the evening of Tuesday 19 June, as the feared mass murderers were barbequing chicken and drinking beer, the FBI swooped. Although the brothers tried to deny who they were, scars on James’ chest were a giveaway. They were arrested and held on $10 million bail before returning to Mecklenburg.

  Linwood Briley went to the electric chair on 12 October 1984. Not long before he did so, he told an interviewer, “I had my nineteen days. They couldn’t take that away.” James followed him six months later, on 18 April 1985.

  Major changes followed at Mecklenburg. Many inmates had felt that the prison had been like a powder key, ready to explode, and in July it did, with full-scale riots breaking out on two separate occasions. (Although some sources suggest that the fear of these led to the Mecklenburg Six breaking out earlier than they had originally planned, this does not appear to be supported by the evidence.) The warden and the chief of security were both suspended without pay for ten days, and then moved to other jobs. Five of the guards taken hostage were fired, including the two control-booth guards. When Dennis Stockton’s diary was smuggled out and published in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper in September, many of the deficiencies of the system were brought to light. Two months later, the Department of Corrections boss Robert Landon resigned.

  “We have done all we could to ensure nothing like that ever happened again,” the assistant warden maintained in 1994. New guards were hired and the system changed so that individual guards didn’t control all the locks. All the cell windows – which had been taken apart and used to form some of the knives the prisoners created – were now checked daily, and the evening recreation period was abolished. That didn’t stop men trying: Willie Turner, who had prevented James Briley from killing the guards during the break out, was able to create huge numbers of weapons which were found in his cell, including a three-foot-long Samurai sword made from pieces of his bedframe, as well as keys for nearly every door in the building that took them. However, as his execution date grew near, Turner’s mental stability crumbled, and eventually his stash was found. He was transferred to Greensville prison and sent for a lethal injection on 25 May 1995. A gun was found inside a typewriter in his cell after his death.

  Mecklenburg Correctional Centre ceased to be the home of the death-row prisoners in 1997; it was closed down in 2012.

  Sources:

  Jackson, Joe and William Burke Jnr: Dead Run (Times Books, 1999)

  Los Angeles Times, 3 July 1994: “Wounds Deep 10 Years After Nation’s Largest Death Row Escape”

  Lem Tuggle Death Row recording (YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/v=UA-DdHiTnsA)

  Times-Despatch, 13 December 2011: “McDonnell o
rders Mecklenburg Correctional Center Closed”

  Times-Despatch, 31 May 2009: “Death-row escape [graphic]”

  Free Lance-Star, 31 May 1994: “Virginia’s greatest jailbreak”

  Times-Despatch, 2 June 1984: “2 Mecklenburg escapees captured; prison officials were warned twice”

  Times-Despatch, 1 June 1984: “Death row inmates are hunted in N.C.”

  Times-Despatch, 1984: article by Bill McKelway reprinted at http://www.leelofland.com/wordpress/escape-from-death-row-the-briley-brothers/

  Checking Out of Hotel K

  No matter what you may read in some of the more conservative papers in the United Kingdom, prison is not a safe or pleasant place to be. True, there are some old lags who have become institutionalized, and find the environment inside prison much better than anything they can find in the outside world. But they are the exceptions, not the rule – and many of the prisons around the world are anything but safe or pleasant.

  Take, for example, Bali’s infamous Kerobokan prison, known to its inmates as Hotel K. In its time, it has housed the Muslim bombers responsible for the Bali nightclub massacre, a Balinese King convicted of killing his brother, Australian yachtsman Chris Packer after he was found with illegal weapons on his boat, and international chef Gordon Ramsay’s brother, Ronnie. First impressions might suggest that it’s moderately pleasant but the moment a new inmate steps through the doors, he or she is entering a world of violence, filth and deprivation. Unsurprisingly, many of those who have been arrested on drugs charges want to escape from its confines, despite the sometimes lax approach demonstrated by the guards. Sex, drugs and alcohol are easily available, if you’ve got the cash, and some prisoners have even been able to get “days at the beach” with guards. But if you try to escape and fail, then chances are you’ll be beaten up as much by your fellow inmates as by the guards.

  There have been some successful escapes from Hotel K, which was built hastily in 1976 to replace the original jail in Denpasar that had been demolished to allow a shopping mall to be built. It holds both men and women, and usually has about three times the 320 prisoners that it was designed to contain. At various times, parts of the perimeter walks have crumbled, affording prisoners a chance to escape.

  The greatest escape – which led to major improvements in security at the jail in the short term – saw 289 prisoners abscond on the afternoon of Sunday 5 December 1999. It was masterminded by “Tony”, who was incarcerated for his part in the murder of a Javanese debt collector. Tony had watched as his brother, Saidin, a former soldier, had cut off the man’s head after he had threatened to kill the family of one of his friends. Although Tony hadn’t actively participated in the killing, which his brother had been hired to carry out by the threatened friend, he had helped his brother to roll the man’s headless corpse into a ditch not that far, ironically, from Hotel K, and was sentenced to imprisonment in the notorious jail.

  Saidin was released from Hotel K within a few months: the Balinese court had failed to hear his appeal case within the mandated length of time, so there was little option but to release him. His brother wasn’t so lucky, but he had no intention of remaining within Kerobokan any longer than he needed to.

  Once in Hotel K, Tony became involved with Filipino prisoner Nita Ramos, one of the many drug dealers incarcerated, as he prepared for his escape. Tony (and Saidin while he was still there) had a powerful reputation within the jail as a result of the brutality of their crime, and few prisoners would take the chance of crossing them. All the male inmates were ordered to save their daily ration of kerosene, used for cooking, and everyone was instructed, under pain of death, to run when the escape started. Those who had the most to lose, whose sentences were coming to a close, were included, even though everyone was aware that if they were recaptured, their sentences would be increased.

  In Hotel K, the fifty-three prisoners held in the women’s portion, Block W, were locked up for the night at 4.30 p.m. Within a few minutes, smoke could be seen rising from the men’s part of the prison, and by 4.45, it had become thick enough that the women began to fear for their lives. Its cause: kerosene-soaked mattresses, which had been placed in every cell block of the men’s section. Tony had set the first pile alight within his own block, and as soon as the guards raced towards that, others were ignited in a coordinated pattern, so that the fourteen guards were quickly stretched beyond their capacity to cope, particularly when the prisoners began to take them captive too and keep them together in an office.

  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.