The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  There was no possibility of Belbenoit accepting that he had to stay in Guyana for the rest of his life, and on 2 May 1935, he and five others set out in a canoe to paddle to Trinidad. They reached there in a pitiful state, after nearly losing their lives on many occasions. The British authorities didn’t arrest them, or try to send them back to Guyana – instead, because their canoe was so badly damaged, they provided them with a new lifeboat, with sail, oars, a chart, food, water and a lamp! They planned to head for Florida, but got caught in currents, and ended up in Colombia, where they were arrested and taken to Barranquilla prison. The French ambassador wanted him to be returned to Guyana; the Colombians refused, and, Belbenoit believed, passively assisted him to escape. The others with him, who were still prisoners, rather than freed like Belbenoit, were returned. Belbenoit made his way through Colombia to Panama City, where he met Pyle and told his story.

  At this point Belbenoit’s story becomes rather puzzling. According to most accounts, Belbenoit travelled from El Salavador to Los Angeles, and with help from Blair Niles, had his account of life on Devil’s Island published. He lived on and off for the next twenty years in America – he attracted attention from the immigration authorities, and served a term for false entry, but eventually gained American citizenship. He died in 1959, and received an obituary in the Los Angeles Times.

  However, an article published in Brazil in 2005 claimed that Belbenoit never went to the US. Instead, another prisoner went in his place, and pretended to be Belbenoit. The real Belbenoit remained in Brazil and invested heavily in gold and diamond mines. He also wrote accounts of his life in prison and afterwards, which found their way into Henri Charriere’s hands and became his bestsellers Papillon and Banco. Charriere was one of the five others who fled from Devil’s Island with Belbenoit; according to them, Belbenoit died in 1978. (The inconsistencies in this account with Belbenoit’s original version, let alone the story as related in Dry Guillotine, make it dubious, although it does provide one explanation for where Charriere derived his material.)

  Dry Guillotine, subtitled “Fifteen Years among the Living Dead”, caused a storm and went through fourteen printings in its first year in a translated edition. The French government issued a decree in June 1938 preventing any further prisoners from being dispatched. But before too much could be done by the authorities to deal with conditions on Devil’s Island, France was overrun by the Nazis. It was during this time that the later events of Henri Charriere’s Papillon are set.

  If Charriere’s story is taken at face value, then he was wrongly convicted of the murder of a pimp, and sent to Devil’s Island. He quickly escaped, sailing to Trinidad but was then arrested when he reached Colombia. He managed to get away from that prison, and spent time living with an indigenous tribe. Unfortunately, he was recaptured, and despite many attempts to escape from Barranquilla prison, he was returned to French Guyana. He spent years in solitary confinement after various tries to flee from the island, but when the authorities decided to support the quisling Vichy regime after the conquest of France by the Germans, the penalty for escaping became death.

  Charriere therefore tried to feign madness, and was sent to the prison asylum, which wasn’t as well guarded. A flight by sailboat ended with the death of his fellow fugitive, and the boat smashed against the rocks. Apparently cured of his illness, Charriere asked to be sent to Devil’s Island, where he studied the wave pattern, and deduced that every seventh wave could carry a large object out to sea so it could drift to the mainland. He and another prisoner tried this, using coconuts as a makeshift flotation device, and succeeded in reaching land, only for his fellow to succumb to quicksand. Charriere eventually made his way to Venezuela where he found freedom.

  The title Papillon (butterfly in French) derives from a tattoo that Charriere had; he also had a deformity on his hand. Oddly enough, so did another convict from Devil’s Island, who definitely was imprisoned there: Charles Brunier, who had the tattoo of a butterfly on his arm, and an atrophied left finger.

  Brunier came to media attention in 2005, aged 104, when there were a number of articles in the French press about him after the then-minister of tourism wanted to see if Brunier recalled the minister’s grandfather, who had also been incarcerated in Guyana. (He didn’t.) He had been sent to Devil’s Island in 1923 for an attack on a pimp and the murder of an old woman. Once there, he adopted the name of Johnny King, and tried hard to escape. On one occasion, he reached Venezuela and spent several months there before being recaptured in a manner very similar to Charriere’s supposed adventures; after the outbreak of war, he finally made it to the coast of Mexico, and enlisted as a fighter pilot. He fought with the Free French Army in North Africa, but at the end of the war, he was returned to Guyana. On 12 June 1948, he was given a complete pardon “because of his skilled conduct during the course of the hostilities”.

  After entering the nursing home in 1993, Brunier would often tell staff that Charriere stole his story. “From time to time Monsieur Brunier tells us stories from his life. He certainly served in the ‘bagne’ with Henri Charriere, and knew him quite well. And he is utterly convinced that Charriere stole the idea for Papillon from him,” Isabelle Mesureur-Cadenel, the director of his retirement home, said. Brunier died in 2007, the last survivor of Devil’s Island.

  Charriere was certainly held prisoner in French Guyana, and he escaped from the prison in 1944. But it seems certain that it wasn’t by jumping from Devil’s Island holding onto a string of coconuts. “Far from being one of the outstanding tough guys in the penal colony, he was a comparatively well-behaved convict, who was contentedly employed for a long time on latrine duty. He never escaped from Devil’s Island, and the heroic confrontation with the commander of the camp never occurred,” Gerard de Villiers commented in the New York Review of Books after carrying out a detailed investigation into Charriere’s story, published as A Butterfly Pinned.

  Whether he conflated many people’s stories into one or not, Charriere’s Papillon and the movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman taken from it, both ensured that the name of Devil’s Island will remain remembered for many years to come. The prison itself was finally shut down in 1953 (although some of those who had gone insane lived out the remainder of their lives there), and although most of the Îles de Salut are now a tourist resort, boats don’t go to Devil’s Island. Those brave few who venture across unanimously report that it feels haunted . . .

  Sources:

  Duval, Clement with Michael Shreve, Marianne Enckell: Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony (1929; PMP 2012)

  Canberra Times, 7 September 1928: “Prisoner’s Escape”

  Sabotage Times, 7 September 2012: “Return To Devil’s Island: The Toughest Penal Colony Of All Time”

  Mail & Guardian, 26 June 2005: “Papillon alive and well in a Paris retirement home”

  Le Parisien, 17 December 2005: “The real Papillon”

  ISTOE Independent, 17 August 2005: “A verdadeira história de Papillon”

  Belbenoit, Rene: Dry Guillotine (Blue Ribbon Books, 1938)

  Los Angeles Times, 3 March 1959: “Death of a Fighter”

  Los Angeles Times, 23 August 1936: “Fugitive from Devil’s Island”

  Murderpedia: Dr Pierre Marie Bougrat: http://murderpedia.org/male.B/b/bougrat-pierre.htm

  Black Flag Quarterly, Vol 7, Number 5 (Winter 1984): “An Anarchist on Devil’s Island”

  Pittsburgh Press, 17 October 1937: “3 Fugitives Spend 77 Days in Canoe” (note: error in number of escapees)

  Virgin Islands Daily News, 18 October 1937: “Four Fugitives from Devil’s Island Here”

  The Victoria Advocate, 19 October 1937: “Four Devil Island Men Float 77 Days”

  Milwaukee Journal, 28 November 1931: “France to Abandon ‘Devils (sic) Island’ as Prison; Too Many Men Escape”

  The Lamp (probably 1934): “Escaped from Devil’s Island” (posted at http://www.lago-colony.com/DEVILS_ISLAND_ESCAPE/escape_from_devil
.htm with lots of photographs from the time)

  Charriere, Henri: Papillon (HarperCollins, 1970)

  Farewell to the Rock

  One of the best-known prisons in the world is Alcatraz, the maximum-security penitentiary that was built on the island of that name in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Its location meant that there were considerable natural forces opposing anyone who wished to flee from its not particularly welcoming shores, and although most people only think of the federal penitentiary featured in the 1996 Sean Connery movie The Rock, or the recent short-lived J.J. Abrams TV series Alcatraz, there were prisons on, and escape attempts from, the Rock long before Joseph Bowers tried to leave in 1936.

  The Rock first became a long-term prison in 1861. There had been a guardhouse on the island as part of the Army outpost that was stationed there but on 27 August 1861, four months after the outbreak of the American Civil War, the Rock became the point for collecting military prisoners on the west coast. Civilians were also incarcerated, although there aren’t adequate records of the period to indicate how many. The Rock’s usefulness was noted in a report by Colonel De Russy in 1865: “the only locality in this Harbor suitable for such a purpose is Alcatraces (sic) Island, where the guard house and prison are of a good size and well guarded by sentinels, added to that, the difficulty of escape from the Island is rendered extremely difficult on account of its size as well as the formation of the high banks or bluffs which surround it.”

  That hadn’t prevented John D. Wood, of the 2nd Cavalry Volunteers, who was under sentence of death for trying to kill his captain, from getting hold of a small boat and disappearing on 21 June 1862, making him possibly the first person ever to escape from Alcatraz. The first massed escapes from the Rock occurred soon after De Russy’s death in 1867 when prisoners from Alcatraz were moved over to work at Fort Point, situated beneath where the Golden Gate Bridge now runs. They took advantage of being on the mainland and scarpered. The remaining prisoners were returned to Alcatraz in early 1868.

  Prisoner numbers increased in the early 1870s, necessitating further building work which went on throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Alcatraz prison had deplorable sanitation, even by contemporary standards, and the hole in the floor in the privy which allowed the sanitary waste to flow into the bay was so large that on one occasion in around 1890, an intoxicated civilian fell through it.

  Attempted escapes were frequent, mostly from work details on the mainland, rather than from the Rock itself. In the mid-1870s, deserter James Wright of the Fourth Artillery caused some scandal by taking a fifteen-year-old girl to a hotel bed while on the run after escaping from a work party at Point San Jose. In 1877 nine prisoners escaped from such work parties, and one fled from the post hospital on Angel Island. May 1878 saw two prisoners commandeer a boat, and row to freedom from the Rock itself; similar such escapes are noted in the records in both 1884 and 1890. On these occasions, the guards didn’t try to shoot the prisoners, but in 1892, an Alcatraz inmate was shot when trying to escape from a work detail at the Presidio, on the mainland. A further prisoner was killed while trying to flee in 1900.

  The coming of the twentieth century saw some ingenuity enter the prisoners’ planning. In 1898, some blatant nerve meant that three men were able to escape. Edgar M. Sweeney, H.R. Beale and John Meredith were working as stage managers for a prisoners’ concert, and escaped through a door at the back of the stage in the prison chapel (or possibly the library – the newspaper reports vary). They headed for the wharf, and stole a boat under the nose of the sentry on duty. Although they muffled the oars, the sentry heard them, and opened fire. The fifth shot hit one of the prisoners, who dropped to the bottom of the boat and started groaning.

  At that point Sweeney called out, “Don’t shoot any more. Don’t you see we’ve got no oars?” (and possibly claimed that they were fishermen). The guard stopped firing, and began to explain the situation to his superiors, and while his attention was elsewhere, Sweeney and his comrades started rowing again. By the time that the prison boat set off after them, Sweeney had too much of a head start, and they reached the mainland.

  In early April 1906, four prisoners thought that a butter vat might provide suitable transport across the bay, and liberated one from the bakery. Unfortunately, Arthur Armstrong, George W. Davis, Thomas Stinnatt and George W. Brossman had no way of controlling the vat to counter the effects of the wind and the tide, and they soon found themselves back on Alcatraz, and very soon after that, in irons. In February 1907 three men tried the same trick using a dough-kneading trough, but encountered similar problems. They had managed to keep the trough hidden for a month after stealing it from the bakery, while making some oars, but it wasn’t seaworthy, and pitched them into the sea when they were only a few feet from the shore.

  A deserter from the 5th Cavalry used a log as a flotation device later in 1907 and very nearly made it to shore; unfortunately for August Stilke, just as he approached the Union Street dock on the night of 22 October, he was hit by a ferry steamer. The crew brought him aboard, bringing his escape to a premature end.

  One daring prisoner simply forged his own release papers while on the island in 1910. He presented them at the office, and departed the Rock on the San Francisco ferry, never to be heard from again. He was following in the footsteps of Joseph White, John L. Moore, Cornelius Stokes and James Darling, who used forged pardons to escape from the prison in 1903 – in Stokes’ case only five days before a genuine pardon was heading his way. The forgeries were probably compiled on Alcatraz, and then mailed to the prison by an accomplice on the outside, a messenger who deserted as soon as he came under suspicion.

  Two prisoners, both of whom had been transferred from Fort Leavenworth with a wealth of convictions behind them, tried to escape from the island on 16 November 1912. According to the report in the San Francisco Call, Thomas V. Frayne (or Frayney) had been court martialled thirteen times, Michael Mullins five, while between them they had been tried 234 times by executive officers. Although some accounts suggest that they disappeared successfully on a raft, a report in the Call on 20 November says that “[w]eakened in flesh and spirit by two deadly foes, hunger and thirst” both men had been recaptured three days later. After somehow getting out of the dungeon beneath the main corridor of the prison, they had hidden under a pile of driftwood, and had been able to file off their heavy ball-and-chains. What they hadn’t bargained on was being unable to find food or fresh water, and Mullins was found, covered with slime and nearly famished on 19 November.

  Another pair disappeared from a work party on the island into the heavy fog in 1916, and stole a log each from the flotsam washed up on the Rock. One was initially believed to have drowned, but hid in a boathouse hoping to escape later; the other made it to safety on Little Alcatraz Rock, to the northwest of the mainland, but had to call for help from the prison. Two years later, a brace of cheeky inmates who had worked their way up to become trusties, and thus not watched so closely, managed to purloin guard officers’ uniforms, probably from the prison laundry, and simply boarded the ferry to the mainland. Their audacity wasn’t rewarded with liberty: they were arrested two days later at Modesto.

  The same government tug, the General McDowell, was used by four conscientious objectors who tried to leave Alcatraz without permission in August 1919: they had managed to get hold of civilian clothing, but two of them were queried by the captain of the ferry, who wondered why they had wet trousers. He also asked for their passes, which they claimed they had been told they wouldn’t need. Although Captain Hornsman seemed to accept their explanations, he told the officer of the day on Angel Island that he had suspicious persons on board. All four were found and returned to Alcatraz.

  “I believe the men attempted to escape in the belief they could secret (sic) themselves on board with the members of a visiting baseball team which came to the island on Sunday,” Colonel Joseph Garrard, the Commandant of the island told the San Francisco Examiner. “There is little possi
bility of men getting away from the island without proper credentials. Everyone coming and going is required to display a pass. Lack of this was responsible for the apprehension of these men.”

  However, five years later a similar ruse worked for Edward Lay, Basil Mann and Roy Kennison. The trio apparently took overcoats and hats belonging to guests attending a reception on Alcatraz on 8 October 1924, and then simply mingled with them as they returned to San Francisco. There is no record of the men being returned to the island.

  Planes assisted with the search for two escapees in 1927, but their plank-paddling exploits were brought to an end by the astute Captain K.V. Anderson of the Redwood Empire ferry, who additionally captured himself a $100 reward. Two men clinging to a ladder in 1929 only managed to get a few hundred yards from the Rock before the tides prevented them progressing. A trio of escapees a year later tried to sail across to Berkeley on large planks of wood, after prising the bars off the barber shop window, but they soon realized that their chances were slim, so yelled for help. They were located by the large searchlight on the island and brought back, one of them in a seriously exhausted condition.

  The final recorded escape from the military prison took place on 23 June 1930. Jack (or Jasper) Allen simply stripped off, greased his body and dived into the bay, or at least, that was Colonel G. Maury Cralle, the Alcatraz commandant’s opinion. Since Allen’s corpse was never discovered, he may have been one of the few to make it off alive, but like the 1912 escapees, there was never any trace of him alive either.

  According to an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1933, seventeen military prisoners escaped from the island either using boats or by swimming across the bay, and six fled by other means during the Rock’s seventy years as a military prison. As a percentage of the total number of prisoners incarcerated there during that time, it wasn’t that many, but it alarmed the good people of San Francisco who objected strongly to the Justice Department’s plans to house “desperate or irredeemable” types on the Rock.