Prison Break - True Stories of the World's Greatest Escapes. Paul Buck
when it presented itself. Conflictingly, the court was told how he indicated his whereabouts in the van by tapping on the window. Hobbs is known to have lain low for a few days in south London before obtaining a false passport and fleeing to Spain. He was tracked down and arrested at Puerto Banus, near Malaga, in August 2007. For some while it had been bandied about that he was a prime suspect in the £53 million Securitas heist in Tonbridge, in February 2006, but this seems to be unfounded. Noel Cunningham has not been recaptured, but is believed by some to be on the ‘Costa del Crime’.
In September 1984, Terry Smith and John Kendall were moved to Maidstone Prison in Kent, ostensibly to further their educational studies, though they planned to go over the wall. Things changed, and the pair of them, both armed robbers, were marked for transfer back to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight at the earliest opportunity. Smith was still determined to escape and informed his friend outside, Tommy Hole, that he was moving the following week, on 20 November. He told no one inside the prison, not even Kendall.
Kendall undoubtedly sensed something was going down, because he asked Smith on the morning of the transfer and was told that something might happen. If they were cuffed together, he should just hold his arms out “and they will be bolt-cropped.” Kendall was cuffed to Smith, and the other prisoner on the ride, a Turkish inmate, was joined to an officer. The officer in charge sat in the front of a yellow Bedford minibus with bars on the windows, alongside the driver, whilst three other officers sat in the back with the prisoners.
No sooner had they left the prison than the van stopped at a newsagent’s, for the senior officer to rush in to buy a paper. Smith noticed a BMW pull in front of them and one of its occupants go into the shop. As the man came out he looked directly at Smith in the van. Smith told me recently that he was thinking, “What’s he come in his own car for?”
“I was worried that they had just come down to see if it was genuine I was leaving,” rather than to implement the escape. But, whatever was going to happen now, he had to wait. He was entirely in their hands.
The prison van joined the M20 heading for the M25 link someway up the road. They were followed at a respectable distance by two BMW’s. As their occupants were all professional criminals, they knew how to tail a van without being spotted. (Don’t believe movies or TV crime programmes where everyone hangs so close together that only an idiot wouldn’t rumble it.) As Smith recalls, “It was a bright yellow van. When you’re doing the visuals you can hang back a good two miles and stay out of sight. On a motorway it’s perfect. And they want to get onto those motorways as soon as they can.”
An hour after leaving Maidstone, when the van was turning off the M25 to go south on the A217 to Reigate at Junction 8, one of the BMW’s appeared, shot past the van and smashed into the driver’s side, forcing the vehicle off the road and onto the grass verge. At the same time the second BMW blocked the van from behind. Two masked men leapt from the first BMW; one, wielding a pickaxe handle, smashed the windscreen whilst the other, carrying bolt croppers, grabbed the van’s keys and headed for the rear doors.
Smith leapt forward onto the officer in the passenger seat, thrashing to free himself as he was rugby-tackled from behind. Wary of the ‘outside help’, the senior officer instructed his staff to let them go. Smith dragged Kendall out with him through the passenger side and into the back of the waiting BMW, whilst the rescuer who had wrenched open the back door found Smith and Kendall were already going out the front way. Making a U-turn the BMW sped back past the van and the traffic building up at the scene, shot over the elevated roundabout and down a string of country lanes until it was time to split up and go their separate ways. Smith took one of his associates, his friend Tommy Hole, along with Kendall onto a commuter train at Coulsdon, bound for Victoria, whilst his other two friends found a different route home.
It was close to twenty months before Smith and Kendall were recaptured, after a robbery that went disastrously wrong for Smith, who seriously injured his leg and was lucky not to lose it altogether.
Sheer force was the method of armed robber Vic Dark in September 1988, when he was being taken across London from Hackney police station to Wormwood Scrubs Prison. They had handcuffed him, daisy-chain fashion, with two sets of cuffs to the bars of the window. They had secured him so well that he wasn’t expected to be any trouble. But Dark wanted out and knew he would have “to Rambo it”, as he said later. There was no other way than to rip the whole window grille away from the bodywork of the Ford Transit van.
The bars came away, leaving him handcuffed but able to manoeuvre. He kicked out the window itself and was halfway through before the officer in the front seat reacted and grabbed his legs. In the meantime, the other guard had pulled the van up in the Gray’s Inn Road and gone around the outside to prevent him coming out of the window. Extra help arrived, and the four-strong team moved into the back to watch over Dark, taking him back to Hackney to start the whole process of transfer over again. If he had levered himself out he would have landed on his head, like poor Charlie Peace. But at least his transport would have been brought to a halt.
One of the most notorious escapees in the United States through the 1920s was Roy Gardner. His exploits could have filled a book – which indeed he could have written, for he was an educated man, had taught in the English department at a Midwestern college and wasn’t slow to flaunt his knowledge, once making Shakespearian references to a judge in court. In his early days he had become a gunrunner during the Mexican Revolution, and, though he was arrested, he escaped the firing squad and returned to the States, where he became a prize-fighter and sparring partner to heavyweight champion J. J. Jeffries at his training camp in Reno, Nevada, during the summer of 1910.
Though he had an extensive criminal record which included escapes, Gardner was stunned by what he saw as the inappropriateness of a twenty-five-year sentence at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, Washington, for robbing the US Mail. His response to the judge was, “You’ll never get me there.” He wasn’t joking. On the train journey to prison in June 1920, he distracted the two marshals escorting him by drawing their attention to something out of the window, and then reached for one of their guns, overpowered them, and fled near Portland, Oregon.
It wasn’t long before he was caught again, being a basically unsuccessful criminal. After receiving another twenty-five years for armed train robbery, he was once more placed on a train bound for McNeil Island. And once again they failed to get him there, just as he had warned them. (The papers had printed his boast.) On board the train he asked to go to the toilet. The officers went with him, and took along another prisoner, Norris Pryor, handcuffing both men together. All four fitted into a toilet cubicle that was obviously built larger back in those days. After relieving himself, Gardner moved to the sink to complete his ablutions, but instead slipped his hand under and withdrew a gun – no one knows how it was placed there, as he was very much a lone criminal. Gardner and Pryor handcuffed the officers together, bound their mouths with the tape used to secure the gun beneath the sink, and alighted from the train in the Vancouver yards, disappearing into a misty rain. With the major press coverage his escape received, it was inevitable that Gardner was soon recaptured and transported in a more security-conscious manner to prison.
To conclude his story, it wasn’t long before Gardner determined that prison was still not for him. After little more than six weeks, whilst watching a baseball game on the prison field, he slipped beneath the bleacher seats to the ground below with two others, when the attention of inmates and guards was absorbed by a big hit in the opposite direction. With wire cutters he had brought along from the machine shop, Gardner breached the fence.
There was an expanse of open space ahead that had to be covered before undergrowth and trees would provide relative cover. Halfway across, the tower guards saw the escapees and opened fire. Both his friends were halted in their tracks, but Gardner, though hit in the leg, dragged himself onward to the bushes. Extensive searches were made and security craft circled the island, but he could not be found.
They didn’t know he had returned to the prison and was hiding in the barn, nourishing himself by milking a cow, and tending to his wound. After forty-eight hours the search was called off, the guards suspecting he had reached the mainland. Few