Midnight Express by Billy Hayes & William Hoffer

Author:Billy Hayes & William Hoffer [Hayes, Billy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Drugs, Prison, Adventure, History
ISBN: 9780988981447
Publisher: Curly Brains Press
Published: 1977-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Day after day passed. A whole summer of my life down the drain. Charles wrote from Imrali and seemed really happy working out his sentence on the island. He could swim on his lunch hour. He could take long walks around the island on Fridays. The food was good. Since he worked with fresh fruits and vegetables all day long, canning them, he could eat as many as he liked.

His letter started me thinking. “Max, what about Imrali?” I asked. “It’s fine, I guess. If you like to work.”

“No. I mean to run from.”

“You mean scam?”

“Yeah. Bust out.”

“Naaah. You’re twenty miles from the land. And even if you get to the shore you’re still in Turkey. What’re you gonna do then? You’re better off at Imros.”

Imros was another island prison. But it was located off the west coast of Turkey in the Aegean Sea. Some of the Greek islands were less than ten miles away. There was a catch. Imros was classified as an “open” prison. I probably couldn’t get a transfer there until my sentence was too short to make an escape worth trying. By that time it wouldn’t matter.

Max and I settled down to some ambitious scamming, planning all sorts of wild escape attempts. Some of the time he was too incoherent to talk. But at other times he really seemed ready to try something. He peered through his thick glasses. He complained that the Gastro was making him go blind. He said he needed some real morphine for a change. When he furtively pulled out a Turkish map I was astounded; then I realized it meant that Max finally trusted me.

He surprised me again one day by pulling a set of drawings from among a pack of letters. “The plans to the prison,” he announced matter-of-factly.

“How’d you get them?”

“There was an Austrian guy here a while back. An architect. He was helping the Turks build some things here. He let me copy the plans.”

We studied them carefully. The dumbwaiter shaft led downstairs. Then nowhere. There would still be plenty of guards and bullets in the way of freedom. If we could somehow get to the roof of the kogus, however, we might have a chance. We could walk along to the edge of the main wall and drop over. We’d need a rope. And how could we get to the roof?

We agreed reluctantly that escape directly from Sagmalcilar would be almost impossible. The bullet percentage seemed high. Any plan would be too intricate. And the guards in the watchtowers had machine guns. Nevertheless, I copied the plans and kept them with the jumble of papers in my diary.

We developed the “acid” plan. We could request a transfer to Kars, a prison all the way across the country, near the eastern border of Turkey. That would require a two-day train ride. There would probably be two soldiers guarding each of us. Max still had his supply of LSD from the drugs that were mailed to him in Beyond Good and Evil.

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