by Paul Simpson
It took three weeks to cut through the steel mesh, but, to Maher’s delight, he discovered that the bars behind them were an easier target. Once he had cut through the top, he was able to bend the bars back, creating a gap that would be tight around his six-foot-three frame, but achievable. Knowing that there was no chance that they would simply be able to remove all the bars and create a gap the size of the window, Maher practised manoeuvring his body through the rungs of the ladder on the bunk bed in his room, and kept himself fit by running in small circles in a basement area. Two weeks after starting work on the bars, he had reached the outer mesh, and could see the grass beneath the prison walls.
The next obstacle was the drop to ground level, which was over twenty-five feet. Maher therefore created a rope out of forty-six rubbish bags, which he secured with Scotch tape and braided together. The area was also overlooked by a highly effective panoramic security camera. He and Ciardelli monitored its movement, and realized that they would have half of its forty-five second arc in which to make their move.
On the night of 22 January 2003, Maher and Ciardelli made their escape. After making dummies in their beds that would fool the hourly inspection by the guards, they removed the wire mesh and the bars, and tied the rope to one of the bent bars. Ciardelli went out of the window first, quickly followed by Maher, who was horrified when the Italian decided to strike out on his own. As soon as he let go of the rope, Ciardelli raced away, heading eventually for San Remo in Italy.
Maher had banked on Ciardelli’s assistance to get out of Monaco, and was now in trouble. His face had been all over the Monaco papers only two months earlier during his trial and sentencing, so he knew he had to try to avoid attention. He used a sleeve from the sweater he was wearing to create a hat, and put on a pair of Ciardelli’s reading glasses to add to the disguise. Managing to use the little French he had to say good evening to a passing policeman, but realizing that he needed to get out of the principality as quickly as possible, he started to walk to Nice, twelve or so miles away over the border in France.
Four hours later, around 3 a.m., Maher arrived in Nice. Desperate for somewhere to stay to get out of the freezing conditions, he knocked on the door of a cheap hotel and spun a yarn about his car breaking down. The manager agreed to allow him to make a collect call so he could arrange for some money, but Maher then received his second major setback of the night.
When his wife Heidi answered the phone from her home in New York state, she told him point-blank that she wasn’t going to aid and abet him with his escape, and was not going to give him her credit card number. Even though he and his wife had been starting to discuss divorce, Maher couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t help him after standing by him right the way through the trial, and angrily slammed the phone down. He then tried to ring Father Ball, who had unwittingly brought the hacksaw blades into the prison for him, telling him that he was free, and wanted access to the money that his family had been sending the priest to buy items for Maher while in jail. Ball agreed, and told Maher to ring back at 10.30 that morning. Relieved that things were starting to go his way, and reassuring the manager that money would be forthcoming later that day, Maher took a long bath and went to bed.
As agreed, Maher called the priest at 10.30 on the morning of 23 January, and couldn’t believe it when Father Ball announced, “The man you want is on the phone”. He hung up, realizing that the Monaco police would have liaised with their French counterparts. He got dressed quickly, but by the time he reached the lobby of the hotel, the police were waiting for him. Without making a fuss, Maher surrendered into their custody.
His calls had been his undoing. His estranged wife, who had apparently decided after hearing the evidence at his trial that he was guilty, had got in touch with the producer of a CBS documentary on the case, who had then spoken to the segment producer in Monaco. When they got in touch with the prison authorities, they were told that there had been no escape. However, when Father Ball then confirmed that he had spoken with Maher in Nice, the escape was taken seriously.
Maher was eventually extradited from France to Monaco, and a further nine months was added to his sentence for the escape. He tried to claim that Ciardelli – who had been apprehended in Pisa, Italy, after two months on the run – was the instigator of the escape, and that he hadn’t taken an active role. The court didn’t accept another version of Maher’s earlier trial defence (which can be summed up as “It’s not my fault!”), even on appeal.
The director of the Monaco House of Arrest was suspended, and the authorities announced that improvements would be made. Maher was unable to get out of the House of Arrest a second time. He was released in 2007 and returned to America, where he still maintains his story about the intruders.
Probably the best epitaph on Maher’s escapade came from Billy Hayes. When they learned the connection between Maher and Hayes, the American press got in touch with the former drug smuggler. “I feel bad for the guy,” he said on the day Maher was recaptured. “Everyone talks about escaping, but there is a vast space and fear between thinking and talking about it and actually doing it. It sounded like he got real stupid.”
Fact vs. Fiction
The Real Prison Breaks account of Maher’s escape makes the Monaco House of Arrest look like a medieval prison, its only nods to modernity an old refrigerator and standard-issue jail beds. In fact, as contemporary news reports show, the cell looked more like a basic American motel room!
Sources:
Court TV, 23 January 2003: “Daring Monaco escape ends in France”
Vanity Fair, 1 September 2005: “Did Someone Say Safra? Some cases just don’t get cold, and the mysterious death of billionaire Edmond Safra is one. (Obituary)”
Tru TV, 20 March 2010: Dominick Dunne: Power, Privilege & Justice – Mystery in Monaco
La Liberation, 23 January 2003: “L’infirmier pyromane brûle la politesse à ses gardiens”
Riviera Gazette, 30 January 2003: “The Not So Great Escape”
Monaco Times, 12 July 2006: “Ted Maher gets nine months”
Monaco Times, 28 November 2006: “Ted Maher in court to reduce sentence”
Vanity Fair, December 2000: “Death in Monaco”
New York Post, 31 July 2007: “New Claim in Safra Death”
Dateline NBC, 23 March 2008: The Mystery of the Billionaire Banker
Real Prison Breaks, Discovery Channel, 2008
Shawshank Redux
The warders in charge of the new buildings at Union County Jail, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, were able to maintain a proud boast for eighteen years: no felon managed to escape from their grasp. In that sense, it was rather like Stephen King’s fictional prison in his novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which became the basis for one of the best prison escape movies of all time, The Shawshank Redemption. And prisoners Otis Blunt and Jose Espinosa looked to that film for inspiration for their escape in December 2007.
There has been a prison on the site of Union County Jail since 1811 – forty-seven years before there even was a Union County. New buildings completed in 1989 serve the community that lies adjacent to Newark International Airport. The jail is an ugly, large concrete building surrounded by barbed wire, filled with over a thousand prisoners in for everything from parking tickets to murder charges, watched over by armed guards.
In the autumn of 2007, those inmates included thirty-two-year-old Otis Blunt, accused of armed robbery and shooting a convenience store manager, although he was strenuously protesting his innocence. Like so many others, he was worried that he was about to be railroaded into a long prison sentence – anything up to twenty years, given his prior history – and he was determined to escape before that could happen. In September, he tried to whittle away at the mortar surrounding a cinder block in his cell in the hope of dislodging it, so he could wriggle through the opening. One of the other inmates betrayed him to the guards, and Blunt was moved into cell B310 in a higher security section of the jail, sealed within
a concrete bunker.
His next door neighbour on the third floor, in cell B311, was Jose Espinosa, a nineteen-year-old illegal alien member of the Bloods gang, with a long criminal record, who was awaiting sentencing for aggravated manslaughter. Facing a seventeen-year prison term for his part in the drive-by shooting of Hassan Jackson, a member of rival gang, the Crips, unsurprisingly Espinosa willingly agreed to become part of an escape attempt.
The plan was for Blunt to break through the wall between the two cells, allowing him to enter Espinosa’s, while the younger man created a hole in the wall next to his window. From there they could get access to a small roof that Blunt had noticed, and a thirty-feet drop over the razor-wire fence to cross the railroad tracks to freedom. Since he had some experience in the construction industry, Blunt was aware that the weak point of the walls was the mortar around the blocks, so he stole a towel hook, and flattened it. Once all the prisoners had been locked in their cells for the night, and the guards were slightly less attentive, he and Espinosa then started to use it to scrape away the filling on the blocks that they had respectively chosen.
It wasn’t going to be a quick job, although Blunt was under time pressure since his court hearing was rapidly approaching. However, they couldn’t proceed too quickly, or the work would be discovered. Each cell was checked twice hourly, and from their block of eight, three would be randomly searched each day. To keep the damage to the wall hidden from prying eyes, Blunt emulated Andy Dufresne’s method from Shawshank Redemption: in the book, he covers the hole with a poster of film star Rita Hayworth; in the movie, Dufresne uses pictures of Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and finally Raquel Welch. Blunt didn’t have access to that sort of shot: he simply used pin-up pictures of women in bikinis (prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow pointed out that in the movie, “they had better pictures on the wall”). The dust and rubble were concealed in their lockers or disposed of in the toilets within their cells.
The towel hook proved to be insufficiently strong: they needed something that would do the job much faster. Looking around the recreational area, Blunt noticed that the valve for the water supply had a small wheel on it, about the size of a saucer, which could easily be removed. This was a much more effective implement, and using that, as well as a piece of wire that prison officers believed the men found inside the wall, the pair were ready to make their move after three weeks’ work.
On the night of 14 December 2007, each rolled up blankets and placed them underneath the covers on their beds, so that a quick glimpse by the guard would not reveal their departure. Blunt then squeezed through the eight-by-sixteen-inch hole that he had created between the cells. The pair made the final hole in the outside wall and stepped out through the similarly sized gap onto the roof.
The razor wire was the last obstacle. Although prison officials originally believed the two men had jumped together, then gone their separate ways once they were free of the prison, it eventually transpired that Espinosa was first to jump the ten or so feet over the wire, although he damaged his ankle on landing. His cry frightened Blunt, who waited for some time on the roof before eventually deciding to clamber down into the gap beside the perimeter fence and then climb over that. Although he injured himself during this part of the escape, Blunt was finally free.
One of the more unusual elements of the escape is the length of time it took for it to be discovered. Blunt and Espinosa were long gone from the prison by dawn on 15 December, but the alarm was not raised until 5.15 that afternoon – a good twenty or so hours since they left their cells – when guard Rudolph Zurick pulled the cover off Blunt’s bunk to reveal the rolled-up blankets.
A manhunt immediately began, and at a press conference on 17 December, prosecutor Romankow showed the note that Blunt had left addressed to Zurick: “Thank you Officer Zurick, for the tools needed. You’re a real PAL (sic)! Happy holidays.” It was completed with a smiley face. At first glance, it appeared as if this was suggesting that Zurick was complicit in the plans, but it was very clear to all the prison authorities that “at most we’re looking at negligence by corrections officers”. Zurick didn’t see it that way. On 2 January 2008, the day that he was due to talk to investigators regarding the escape, Rudi Zurick, who had a fourteen-year unblemished record in the prison service, committed suicide.
This added a further edge to the investigation. Espinosa was the first to be captured, after a tip-off to the US Marshals. He was arrested in a basement apartment in Elizabeth on 8 January along with nineteen-year-old Odalys Cortez; he had hobbled on his injured ankle to the train station, where he caught a cab and lain low in a motel for a few days before holing up in the apartment. Cortez was charged with resisting arrest. When Espinosa was asked by reporters about Zurick’s suicide, he simply said, “It wasn’t my fault.”
Blunt was located in Mexico City, and civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton became involved with trying to persuade him to surrender. On 6 January, two days before Espinosa was tracked down, Sharpton claimed that he had been contacted by “people in touch with Blunt”, possibly as a result of prominence given to the case on the TV programme America’s Most Wanted. “I have been asked by them to help facilitate his safe surrender,” Sharpton said. “I have contacted law enforcement to see if I can be helpful towards that end.” The next day he issued a statement from Miami noting that he and members of his National Action Network were travelling “in regard to the request made by fugitive Otis Blunt that he would like to surrender himself . . . I am prepared to move within the next 24–48 hours to personally see if I can physically facilitate Mr Blunt’s request.”
This grandstanding didn’t go down well with the lawenforcement officials trying to find Blunt. “I am upset that Reverend Sharpton is waiting between ‘24–48 hours to personally see if (he) can physically facilitate Mr Blunt’s request’,” prosecutor Romankow said in a statement. “Meanwhile, the escapee is still on the loose.”
Sharpton went to Mexico City on 8 January and spoke to Blunt that night; the next day, at 4.30 p.m. Blunt was arrested by Mexican Federal Police. According to one report, he defecated himself when he was captured. The authorities wouldn’t confirm whether Sharpton’s involvement had assisted with locating Blunt; Sharpton himself said, “I wish I could have been on hand to assure Mr Blunt’s safety but clearly his calling me to where he was helped lead to the conclusion that it did, and I hope that justice for all parties will be served.”
It was. Blunt received a five-year term for the escape; ironically, he was cleared of the charges that he was on remand for, and would have been freed. He served his sentence at the East Jersey State Prison in Woodbridge and received an extra year after it seemed that he hadn’t learned his lesson: on 22 July 2010 he was spotted by one of the correction officers sketching a diagram in the sand with a stick while talking to another inmate. The guard moved closer to the two men, and said that he overheard Blunt tell the other man how to break off a piece of metal from a cell and bend it into a tool to cut mortar from the cell wall. Blunt denied the charge, insisting that the guard misheard the conversation, and he wouldn’t have taken such a risk so near to his release date. The other inmate, who wasn’t identified, claimed they were discussing a sketch for a tattoo. Although he appealed against the decision, Blunt’s term was increased. He became due for release on 11 May 2012.
Espinosa also was given a five-year term, which was added to the seventeen years for manslaughter. As a result of their break, security at Union County Jail was considerably increased.
Fact vs. Fiction
The Real Prison Breaks episode about this escape, first broadcast in summer 2011, gives a false impression of the physical nature of the cells in which Blunt and Espinosa were housed. It also fails to mention the note left by the men, or its consequences for Rudolph Zurick. For footage shot in the actual cells, go to the America’s Most Wanted link given below:Thomas Romankow shows reporters where the holes were.
Sources:
New York Times, 18 Decembe
r 2007: “Bold Escape Not First Try for Inmate”
Union County Jail website: http://ucnj.org/government/dept-of-corrections/
USA Today, 7 January 2008: “Rev. Sharpton may help inmate surrender”
America’s Most Wanted: http://www.amw.com/fugitives/capture.cfm?id=51698
New York Post, 26 June 2009: “Two in ‘Shawshank’ Jailbreak Sentenced”
Elizabeth Inside Out, 30 December 2011: “Otis Blunt Serves more time for helping to plan an Escape”
Real Prison Breaks, Cineflix Productions, 2011
PART III: THE BERLIN WALL
My City, My Prison
What do you do when your entire city becomes a prison? For those who were caught in the partition of Berlin after the Second World War, with relatives spread between the Western Allies’ sectors and the Russian part of the city, this question became highly relevant when the political situation became more volatile, and a strictly enforced barrier was erected between the two portions.
The division of Berlin as part of the settlement following the war against Hitler was always going to cause problems. The city was its own separate enclave deep in the heart of East Germany, with Western capitalist ideology governing the American, British and French sectors, while the Russians imposed Communism on the rest of East Germany, including their sector of Berlin. Stalin tried to starve the Western powers out of Berlin shortly after the end of the Second World War, but an airlift of food into the besieged city forced the Soviet leader to back down. West Berlin became a symbol of freedom, to the Communists’ increasing anger.
Eventually, on the night of 13 August 1961, they took action to prevent the flood of refugees who were crossing between East and West Berlin. As thousands of soldiers lined the border, concrete posts were erected, and barbed wire strung between them. The Berlin Wall – which would divide the city for the next twenty-eight years – had been started.
