Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes. Paul Buck
wrists and was able to slip out of his handcuffs, and from there to abscond out of the window. No other details are given, other than it was in “the middle of London”. All we know is that Stanton immediately stole a car, for he is reputed to have driven past the prison bus, catching the eye of Bindon, still seated at his window. When the officers asked where “the little one” had gone, Bindon informed them he had just waved at him from a passing car.
Stanton wasn’t the first to thumb his nose in such a humorous way. It is recorded that, two and a half centuries earlier, after escaping from Newgate Prison, Jack Sheppard rode past the gates of that same prison in a carriage with a woman on either side, all of them the worse for drink, only to end the night recaptured. He was subsequently hanged at Tyburn shortly after. (Things were not quite so drastic for Stanton, though he was caught within two weeks.)
In the century after Sheppard, that habitual prisoner, Charles Peace, the original ‘old lag’, having committed countless thefts, burglaries and two murders, thought to hurl himself out of the window of a moving train. He was being taken from London’s King’s Cross (starting the day at Pentonville Prison, where he was serving life for the attempted murder of a policeman) north to Sheffield, to stand trial for murder. He had originally been taken up on 17 January 1879, to be charged before the stipendiary magistrate, and was returned to London until the second hearing on the 22nd. Again they took the early morning train to Sheffield at 5:15am. We are not talking Eurostar or high-speed trains, but they still sped along at a fair rate, and the reality of clambering out must have been more hazardous than some James Bond fantasy. In fact, Peace hurt himself on landing and was recaptured.
Peace had not initially intended to leap when it was moving. At any station where the train stopped, he tried to find excuses to go down to the toilet. He had probably tried this on the earlier trip, for the two warders had provided bags for him to use – and then throw out of the window! Peace used the act of disposal as his excuse for opening the window, and made his bid for freedom by taking a flying leap through it. One warder caught his left foot just in time. Peace held onto the footboard and kicked furiously with his right to free himself. The other warder, unable to get to the window, pulled on the communication cord to urge the driver to stop. The train steamed on for a mile, with Peace desperate to liberate his foot. When he finally freed it from his shoe and tumbled down onto the line, it still took another mile before the driver halted the train, and only then due to encouragement from passengers in other carriages.
Though the warders ran back along the line ahead of the reversing train, they needn’t have worried. Peace was still lying beside the track, near Kiveton Park, unconscious and bleeding from a bad wound on his head. He was lifted back into the guard’s van of the train and taken to the police station at Sheffield, where he was attended by a surgeon. The case was adjourned for eight days.
The method works much better if one can get the means of transport to slow down considerably – particularly if it’s an airplane. This is supposedly the case with Frank Abagnale. For a few years, starting in his late teens, he led a busy and successful life as a confidence trickster, forger and impostor, details of which were recorded in a book that reads like a Steven Spielberg movie. (Which in fact is what it became. Called Catch Me If You Can, it starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale.)
Abagnale’s personal adventures offer an impressive escape from a plane, a British Viscount VC-10, flying him back to face trial and undoubted imprisonment in the United States in 1971. Excusing himself to go to the toilet, just before the pilot signalled to fasten seatbelts, Abagnale released the toilet fasteners from its apparatus, a self-contained unit, and climbed down into the space beneath, knowing there was a hatch used to remove the in-flight toilet waste at the end of each journey. After the plane landed on Runway 13 at JFK International Airport, he waited for the moment it slowed, and then virtually stopped, as it turned to the taxi strip. Then he dropped ten feet from the hatch to the ground and made his getaway, leaving the FBI agents on the plane staring at an empty toilet. It begs the question of how he managed to stay in the toilet once the crew knew he was not fastened in his seat, but no one seems to have checked out his disappearance at that point.
Abagnale scaled a cyclone fence under cover of darkness, took a cab to Grand Central Station, then a train to the Bronx to visit a girl who had stashed some clothes, money and a set of keys for a Montréal safe deposit box for him. Leaving her most of the money, he took a train for Montréal. There he collected $20,000 and proceeded to Dorval Airport to take a flight to São Paulo, knowing that the United States had no extradition treaty with Brazil. But he never made the flight, for a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman saw him in line at the ticket counter. He was later escorted to the Canadian border and handed over to the US Border Patrol. Today, Frank Abagnale runs a financial fraud consultancy company, and can be viewed on YouTube talking about his exploits.
It’s not impossible to escape from a moving plane (on the ground, anyway). It happened in California in December 1985, when Reginald Still was being taken to Sacramento to stand trial. No sooner had the plane landed, and slowed to around fifty miles per hour, than Still broke open the emergency door and leapt onto the wing, then the runway, leaving eight guards behind on the plane. And he was wearing leg irons and handcuffs at the time!
In much the same way, Mickey Green, a.k.a. ‘the Pimpernel’ (a name acquired by evading arrest for more than twenty years), a successful armed robber in the 1970s before moving on to the lucrative ventures of gold bullion and drug smuggling, took the opportunity to escape from the airport itself, en route from California to Paris. FBI agents had arrested him in 1993, at the former mansion home of Rod Stewart that he was renting in Beverly Hills. As he was wanted in Paris to serve seventeen years for a drug trafficking conviction, he was being flown back across the Atlantic. Though Green had British nationality, he also carried an Irish passport. When the plane made a stopover at Shannon Airport, he simply alighted from the plane and slipped through customs. As extradition terms between Ireland and France were weak at the time, he decided to stay in Dublin for a while, acquiring a luxurious property outside the capital. Later he moved on to Spain, when his presence came to the attention of the IRA and he was advised that he might do well to depart.
What is quite remarkable is how so-called dangerous men who are facing heavy sentences are sometimes moved around in such cavalier ways. School kids are used to the hired coach for their days out breaking down en route, as schools cut corners on the financial outlay. But it seems the prison authorities have no more foresight.
In November 1996, Blundeston Prison in Suffolk needed to transfer ten prisoners to Wandsworth Prison in London. But they had no vehicle available, so they hired a private coach with its driver. It barely moved two miles down the road before it broke down, and a replacement had to be sent along so that six of the ten could continue on their journey. The six, five of whom were robbers – Lee Mitty, Warren Edwards, Gary Staggs, Christopher Ward and David Currey – and the other, Stewart Warwick, jailed for possession of firearms, were only accompanied by five officers, whereas it would be usual to have a dozen for six prisoners in transit, particularly as they were regarded as dangerous, and three of them (Mitty, Edwards and Staggs) had impressive records for escape. Not that the prison officers knew of their records; perhaps they did not even know they were being moved because they had formed a gang inside the prison, and had been involved in a fight resulting in some unpleasant injuries. As was noted by a perplexed Prison Officers Association representative, “It is very strange that they [the prison service] were trying to split up the gang by taking them from a secure environment on to a standard coach.” And all together, at the same time too.
When they were going down the M25 it appeared that the prisoners slipped their handcuffs, one of them showing the others how to dislocate the thumb to achieve this. Around the Waltham Abbey area of Essex, they took over the coach and viciously set about the officers, inflicting quite extensive bodily damage with the captured truncheons. They also destroyed all their personal files, which were travelling with them, hurling the ripped documents out of the window, and changed into their civilian clothes which were also on board. In the meantime, the coach driver was forced to press on with his journey towards the capital. When they reached Duncombe Road in Archway, their ride