JAILBREAK

‘For all intents and purposes, today I’m Hannibal Lecter.’

—Prisoner Allon Lacco

IT ALL started as a fairly typical day in the Supreme Court of Western Australia. In the criminal division the usual parade of human brutality, regret and dysfunction was on display. Only serious crooks get a hearing in the Supreme Court—killers, rapists, drug dealers, shotgun-wielding thieves. Gentlemen of that ilk were on this day in the court’s holding cells. The various assembled defendants were dressed in civilian clothing for their court appearances. They awaited their hour of judgement in the dock with varying degrees of concern and indifference.

On that Thursday morning in June 2004 the court’s security officers were confronted with a messy puzzle. In the bowels of the court the uniformed men from a private security company were trying to divide the thirteen ragtag convicts before them into an odd number of available cells. They were finding a clean result elusive. At least one of the thirteen inmates did not want to be in the notoriously dank and crowded cells and he had tried unsuccessfully through his lawyers to arrange a video link-up rather than being squeezed in like a sociopathic sardine for the day.

There is an ancient puzzle about a man who must ferry a wolf, a goat and a cabbage individually across a river in the least number of trips. The danger lies in not leaving something on either bank with another thing that might eat it. Like the man in the riddle, security officers were on occasions like this required to determine the least dangerous combinations of cellmates. On this day they had given a female offender the first available cell and a juvenile killer the second. It made sense for both to be given the protection of their own cells. There was just one hitch. The cell block had been filling up all morning as the justice system’s clients were driven in from their various jails and dropped off at court. Six prisoners poured in from Hakea Prison 19 kilometres south of Perth, adding to the wardens’ growing dilemma. They were Pezzino, Simion, Nicolaides, Sweeney, Lacco and Hill—armed robbers in the main, with a sprinkling of assault, theft and sex crimes.

Lacco had done time for several sex attacks and was once described as a ‘monster’ by a prosecutor. Released on parole from jail, he raped a 28-year-old woman. Then, bailed on that crime, he struck again, perpetrating a brutal indecent assault on an 11-year-old girl as she slept in her Leederville home in 1989. When he was arrested he told police his attack was ‘the act of an animal’ and asked them to shoot him. In prison he bulked up by pumping iron and became, according to onlookers with limited relocation opportunities, the number one standover man in his jail.

After Lacco and his five fellow Hakea travellers, another two inmates arrived at the Perth court, followed by another three: Fullgrabe, Hapke and Dodd. That trio arrived at court from their lodgings in Casuarina Prison, a serious institution 35 kilometres south of Perth which serves as Western Australia’s main maximum security prison for long-term male jailbirds. Twenty-eight-year-old Dodd wore a soul patch and had a history of moving on from secure lodgings he didn’t like, even if his stay within them had been mandated by the queen. Dodd had escaped while under guard at a Bunbury dentist in December 1993 while doing a stretch for armed robbery and assault. Six years later he escaped again from the maximum security unit of the Broome Regional Prison. He became Western Australia’s most wanted man, at large for three months until caught in an ambush in Nollamara near Perth.

With the first two cells occupied, that left eleven of that day’s gnarled customers of the court sharing the third cell. Whatever the collective noun for armed robbers is, well that was what the court authorities had crammed into that cell: a caged collection of brutal, flint-hard, cold and calculating crims. At least nine of the eleven men were armed robbers. All were in their twenties or thirties and fighting fit. All knew each other from their common criminal skill set and had done stints in jail with some of the others. All were now sharing not just a jail, but a small courthouse cell. As far as the guards having to solve the placement puzzle were successful, the wolf was about to snack on the goat that was eyeing off the cabbage.

THE movies have spoiled us when it comes to jailbreaks. We now expect our escapes from custody to be complicated. We tend to want our fleeing convicts to really work for our guilty barracking. If the anti-hero of the escape can harness the triumph of human ingenuity, athleticism and cunning against overwhelming odds, if he can masticate his toilet paper into a lifelike papier-mâché mannequin of himself, pick a lock with a paperclip, then shiv his way to freedom, we might happily overlook the fact that he is now slinking back into the community. Hollywood tends to do away with such troublesome snags of the conscience by making their fleeing prisoners innocent men wrongly convicted, or at the very least much more handsome and less nasty versions of their meaner jailbird compatriots. But truth be told we’ll probably barrack for even the vilest celluloid scoundrel if he has the tenacity to hide a paperclip in his mouth for later use in jigging a lock or garrotting a snarling, perimeter-guarding Alsatian. But life’s not like that and modern jailbreaks are less about the ornate than the opportunistic. The escape of the Perth nine was real and as such it was not very elaborate.

There was no secret tunnel dug with spoons by moonlight. There were no memorised mental blueprints of sewerage systems. They skipped the gratuitous swim through shark-infested waters. They bypassed the fake guns whittled out of wood and painted black with nugget. For the jailbird gang there was just a series of happy coincidences and a security guard’s unguarded moment. It was a simple opportunity spotted by nine convicts whose thrust for illegal liberty, while lacking in strategic artistry, was still devastatingly effective.

AS THERE were no toilets in the cells, courthouse protocol dictated that a prisoner needing relief was to get the attention of a guard. Prisoners needing to use the facilities would then be escorted into the court complex toilets and then back to the cells. The cell itself and the cell block were locked down and the men behind bars were watched in the block by three unarmed guards. There were another four guards in the court complex. Shortly after 11 a.m. one of the three guards in the cell block was called away. That left two guards in that area watching the assembled crooks. As far as the crims could tell only two locks lay between their captivity and their freedom: the lock on the cell and the lock on the cell-block door. Had the inmates so desired they could have whispered to each other, as the close quarters of the crammed cell made it like a Petri dish for malevolent scheming. But when the opportunity arose the men did not even need to talk to each other—they all sensed it. The chink in the security registered naturally on all their criminal radars.

One of the inmates called out that he needed to go to the toilet. The prison guard supervisor Graham Kelly unlocked the door and was overpowered by the rush of men, led by two in particular, that spilled out of the third cell. Kelly and another guard, John Brown, were ordered by members of the group to sit down. The guards were told if they remained calm then nobody would get hurt. A set of keys that could open the cells and the perimeter locks was snatched from Kelly’s hand. The prisoners’ escape path had unwittingly been made simpler by the guards that morning as they had left two steel-plated doors unlocked and chocked open for their own ease to move through the area.

Seven of the crims followed the trailblazing duo. Lacco joined the escaping throng because he just wanted to go home. The convicted sex offender had been in jail for seven months awaiting trial. He was sick of it and wanted to see his 20-year-old pregnant girlfriend Christine. Armed robber Fullgrabe wanted to see his 3-year-old daughter Charisma, for whom he had been sole guardian for most of 2003. You have probably heard the expression ‘run like you stole something’—well this crew had lived it and knew exactly what to do. There was the sound of feet shuffling along a floor and within seconds the jailbirds’ exit route was negotiated and the big, free outside world beckoned in the form of the Supreme Court Gardens. And with that, nine desperate criminals were no longer under lock and key. Instead, they were loose in the city of Perth. By the time the guards hit the duress button some of the state’s most dangerous criminals had escaped from custody and were gone. Two of the eleven for their own reasons decided to forgo the freedom charge and remain behind in captivity. One of them had been convicted of stealing the day before and did not want to ruin his chance at a suspended sentence by legging it with the herd.

ANOTHER graduate of the Western Australian prison system, Bon Scott of AC/DC fame, had done time in Fremantle Prison for stealing petrol and had sung about that old jailbreak feeling: ‘It was all in the name of liberty’. But when the nefarious nine spilled out of the court complex and onto Perth’s rain-flecked winter streets they seemed less like sweet birds of liberty and more like uncaged tigers. Dressed in civvies but still rendered conspicuous by their jailbird builds and life-worn noggins, the group ran to a nearby street and carjacked the vehicles of two unlucky drivers stopped at red lights near the court. Pezzino, Lacco, Fullgrabe and Hapke commandeered a silver Land Rover and drove it north up a southbound lane of the city’s Kwinana Freeway, weaving around oncoming traffic and ensuring at least one cinematic escape staple was observed. Four of the others carjacked a blue Holden Commodore, and the ninth continued his escape solo on foot.

Seeing the sights Perth has to offer that morning, mother and daughter Dutch tourists Rolina and Irene van Vliet got a bit more local colour from their trip to the convict nation than they had bargained for, as they witnessed the escapees burst out of the court precinct. ‘My mum thought they were running because of the rain but I thought they didn’t look like people working at the Supreme Court so something else must be going on,’ Irene told The Australian. She raised the alarm, yelling to security staff who bolted out of the court building a few seconds later. As the anarchy continued it emerged Western Australia’s inspector of custodial services had warned in a report two years earlier that security at the 101-year-old heritage-listed court building was terrible and it was ripe for a breakout. The report had urged a revamp of the ageing building but that had fallen on deaf ears.

Public humiliation is a powerful motivator and the authorities reacted with helicopters, sniffer dogs, infra-red cameras and public appeals. It is not unusual for penniless fugitives to do an armed hold-up to further fund their escape. If the botched public security was to lead to a stick-up-gone-wrong and a member of the public was hurt—or if one of the cons with violent or sexual crimes on their record reverted to that form of behaviour—things would go from bad to worse for the powers-that-be. It was made known from on high that netting the nasty nine was priority number one.

Police released a composite containing severe headshots of the nine fugitives. Arranged in three rows of three, the community prompt was reminiscent of The Brady Bunch opening titles—only with a slightly more death-metal feel. The tardy activation of the panic button gave the crims the jump on authorities. But as the silver Land Rover tore up the city’s main freeway, police were generally aware of the direction it was headed and were in hot pursuit at high speeds. Officers blocked off parts of the freeway and cops flooded Perth’s southern suburbs. Eventually they gained ground and honed in on the Land Rover. But the high-velocity villains were stopping for no one. Three hours after they broke free, the police were finally able to stop the crims’ yuppie getaway car in its tracks by throwing a ‘stinger’, a tyre-puncturing strip of spikes, under the driver’s tyres. The speeding Land Rover veered off course and crashed into a fence. The four men decamped from their broken chariot and legged it on foot. They did not get far before being stopped and arrested by police. A police car hit Lacco as he tried to escape through the streets of suburban Brentwood and he would later accuse the cops of trying to kill him. Following his arrest, Lacco was sent to Royal Perth Hospital under watch to have his leg injury examined. Pezzino, Fullgrabe and Hapke were sent to the Perth lock-up—back behind bars before the sun had even set on the day of their escape.

When they were brought before court, the authorities—who had just a few days earlier put them in a Federation-era building guarded by a couple of unarmed private security folk—were no longer taking any chances. Lacco was heavily shackled and flanked by eleven police and security guards. Asked to confirm his name the heavily bound Lacco decided to play the sympathy-for-a-serial-sex-offender card before the assembled onlookers. ‘For all intents and purposes, today I’m Hannibal Lecter, look at me,’ he said. It was a touching performance. There wasn’t a wet eye in the courtroom.

Still at large, in a city teeming with police desperately hunting them down, were the other five escapees: Nicolaides and Simion, Dodd and Sweeney, and Hill. Beggars can’t be choosers but if authorities had been able to select which of the crims they would claim back first, it would have been Nicolaides. They regarded him as the most alpha of the alpha males in the escaped crew and potentially the most troublesome. He had ten convictions for armed robbery under his belt and in October 2003 he had shot a man outside a Northbridge nightclub. He emanated such an air of malevolence that chaos and entropy seemed to spontaneously erupt around him. His latest armed robbery trial was aborted when a juror had a heart attack. Nicolaides and Simion, who had together once relieved a hotel of $10 000 and abducted the manager, were the next to be ticked off the list.

Having broken free before noon on Thursday, Nicolaides and Simion remained at large until Friday night. As Perthlings scrunched up the paper from their fish ‘n’ chips and watched the night’s football game on television a helicopter floated in and hung over Lockridge. It flicked on its high beams, directed them at the ground and turned night into day. Specialist officers dressed for war surrounded, then stormed, a house and extracted Simion and Nicolaides with little fuss and no shots fired. The latter fact was made more remarkable with the discovery the runaways were packing heat. Arresting officers seized a .45 calibre pistol with the two crooks, and the two men were taken before an East Perth court shackled to police officers. The more police quacked the more little ducks came back. But three still remained over the hills and far away: Sweeney, Dodd and Hill.

POLICE had reacted quickly and netted six of the nine escapees in two swoops on the two days after the jailbreak. But with three still on the run the momentum then slowed and the weekend passed with no more arrests. As one hundred cops searched bushland and suburbia, former jailbreakers popped up to freely share their views in a kind of expert running commentary. One such reprobate who warmed to the respectability of the role demanded of him was Bernie Matthews. Bernie was one of just a few men to have escaped Sydney’s ultra-secure Long Bay prison. Again in the non- Hollywood vein of jailbreaks it was opportunism over the ornate: Bernie got out by jumping the jail wall. Bernie had lasted nine weeks on the lam before being caught and dragged back to jail. He made another fifteen escape attempts over three years but all were foiled. Bernie’s many thoughts on the topic had since hardened into a few certainties. ‘I can’t think of anyone who has escaped and never been recaptured,’ Bernie said. ‘Sometime, somewhere, you will make some sort of mistake and then you’re gone. Whether it’s two years or twenty years, they will eventually get you back and that’s the bottom line.’ Bernie had also concluded that quality of life was not particularly crash-hot while endeavouring to stay on the run. ‘It is impossible to be free, it doesn’t matter how long you’re on the run for, you are never free. The opportunity for someone to tap you on the shoulder is always there [and] you never know how or when it’s going to come ... Immediately the warning light goes on when a person looks at you.’

Wayne Patrick Hayter, another old jailbreaker, said the longer the trio were on the run, the more paranoid and desperate they would get. ‘It is the worst scenario one can be in. The longer it goes on the more dangerous and volatile they will be because you lose all the premise of morals and codes towards the rest of the world. You know you’re beyond the pale, therefore other people are beyond the pale.’ Being pursued doesn’t help with the paranoia, as Hayter lamented: ‘I felt like an animal that was being hunted … You fear your friends and you dread your enemies. It creates very dangerous people … they are a hunted person and a hunted person is more like a hunted dragon’.

THE retired-jailbreakers-turned-special-commentators reinforced police fears that the criminal runaways would inevitably resort to crime to fund their further fleeing. On Tuesday, five days after the escape from the court cells, a South Perth TAB was robbed. A balaclava-wearing bandit entered the betting agency wielding a handgun. He pointed it at a customer and then held it to the head of the shop manager and threatened to kill him. The armed robber jumped the counter and fired a bullet into the carpet before being driven away in a silver Holden Gemini with the TAB’s cash. Police believed the gunman was Sweeney and the getaway driver was Sweeney’s old robbing crony, the serial Houdini Dodd.

The pair remained cashed-up and at large for another three days before their number was up. At 8 p.m. on Friday, Sweeney and Dodd were in a car with two women in their twenties and a 15-year-old boy when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by heavily armed, masked police pointing weapons and torches at them. The officers shouted ‘Get out of the car! Get out of the car!’ and as Sweeney was arrested he shouted back ‘You can’t fucking lock me up forever. I wish you had put a fucking bullet in my head’. A pregnant neighbour who was watching the heavy scene unfold from her nearby home was so overwhelmed by what she saw she thought she might go into premature labour. The women in the car—one of whom was already on bail over a heroin offence—were charged with aiding an escaped prisoner. Sweeney and Dodd were brought into court handcuffed to heavily armed police. The court heard one of the women had left a rear door open at her house and two meals warming in the oven at 6 a.m. that Friday but her lawyer said there was no proof she had harboured the fugitives.

Eight of the nine jailbreakers had been dragged back to the big house, leaving police hunting that one last little piggy. Hill was regarded as one of the smartest, most cool-headed, and least volatile of the escapees. Hill had been on the lam on his own since the courthouse breakout but not necessarily by his own choice. It was thought he had initially been in with Dodd and Sweeney but they had forced him to go off on his own so they could travel more easily and less conspicuously in a pair. Whatever the case was, by going solo Hill had outlasted all the other wayward wastrels. On his eleventh day on the run Hill rang the media from a public phone. ‘I just can’t go back to jail for something I didn’t do and just sit there and wait and wait and wait,’ he told the Perth office of Channel Ten. ‘I lost everything—my house, my girl, my family—it’s been a battle.’ Hill said he had not broken the law while on the run and that he would give himself up soon. While speaking to the media Hill, the youngest of the nine at twenty-five years of age, had intended to be as good as his word and hand himself in within twenty-four hours. Then he changed his mind. Not only did he change his mind, he very courteously called the television station back to let them know he had changed his mind. So in the end the police had to go and get him. Shortly after 6 p.m. on Tuesday 22 June, his twelfth day at large, officers found him being assisted to remain in hiding by a woman in a house in East Victoria Park. Hill was caught by surprise and did not put up a fight. For authorities, that was nine-out-of-nine opportunistic convicts returned to prison, with each receiving a new offence or two to add to their rap sheets from their latest adventure.

THE embarrassment caused to powerful people by what came to be dubbed the ‘WA Supreme Court great escape’ proved survivable and not sufficiently acute as to lead to real change. And reforms in the wake of the mass escape from the Perth court were not so instant or far reaching as to prevent further incidents from occurring. The very night that Hill was being tucked back into a prison bed by proud-as-punch authorities, another WA fugitive was on the loose in highly embarrassing circumstances.

A paroled prisoner purportedly under ‘a high level of supervision’ got hold of a gun, shot his flatmate in a share house and had then fled. The share house was controlled by a contractor to the state’s justice department. The following year, double killer Brian William Edwards—who had got life for killing a young Mandurah couple ‘because they were white’ while on the run in 1979—executed a crafty jailbreak simply by walking out of the low-security Karnet Prison Farm in his prison greens. He lasted ten days before being nabbed.

In time, some of the notorious nine from the Perth courthouse escape left jail in a more conventional way: through the front door. One of those was Lacco who was out of jail by March 2006, having beaten the rap for the carjacking outside the courthouse. He had gotten ten months for escaping custody but a jury found him not guilty of stealing the car after he successfully argued he was just a passenger in the carjacked vehicle and not actually involved in the theft. Free once more, Lacco struck again and in 2007 he was given a nine-month suspended sentence for bashing a 42-year-old woman and leaving her with a broken cheekbone.

Having done his time for the courthouse escape, Lacco moved his criminal operations to the other side of the continent where he was involved in a series of scandals. Few real outlaw escapes are as ornate as Hollywood jailbreaks. And as was proved by Lacco—as he continued on his merry, destructive, recidivist way—escaping from justice does not even have to involve breaking out of buildings. In his new home in Victoria, Lacco adopted the fake name Williams and hung out at a skate park giving kids drinks and lollies. He even lured some boys back to his house, although they fled after he tried to make them watch porn. But just as Lacco could not keep out of trouble, so the system, it seemed, could not keep him locked up. Lacco had already spent some time in custody on other matters when he was charged over a drunken tantrum during which he attacked a car, smashed its windscreen and then violently resisted arrest. He was given six weeks’ jail taken as already served and he was once again free.