Before there were helicopters there were airplanes, and before the attempts to escape by helicopter there were efforts, albeit not always terribly successful ones, to escape by plane. And before planes there were trains to help escapers flee—and on which they could commit crimes. On a train the escapee stood a chance by jumping off. Nineteenth century trains did not go fast uphill and they then had to be stopped along the way for telegraphs of an escape to be sent to stations down the line. Provided the escapee landed reasonably well, it was worth taking the chance, particularly if they faced the prospect of a death sentence or a long prison term.
One of the earliest train escapes was on 10 October 1863, when William Carr and William Mackie, who was serving seven years for armed robbery, were being transferred along with five others, including the bushranger Lawrence Cummings, by train from Berrima on the Southern Highlands of New South Wales to Darlinghurst in Sydney. Carr was serving five years for burglary at Potts Point when he was stopped by the police and had shot at them. He and Mackie now managed to slip their leg irons and jumped from the train as it left Fairfield Station in Sydney. A police officer jumped out after them but by then the train had started to gather speed and he was badly injured. Carr, who had also been injured in the fall, was soon found lying under a log nearby. Mackie, said to be an expert bushman, vanished.
In January 1903 housebreaker Stephen Stone, alias Wilson, tried to escape by jumping out of a carriage window of a moving train when being taken to Beechworth Gaol in country Victoria. Four miles out of Beechworth the unfettered Stone took his chance. Police Constable Cahill, driving to Everton, saw a man in prison clothes hiding behind a tree and that was that. Others were more successful.
Two months after Stone made his attempt, on 23 March, Wingella, also known as ‘Butcher’s Paddy’, was sentenced to death with a strong recommendation of mercy. The previous November he had speared Gee Ling, another Aboriginal, to death near Mulline in the goldfields of Western Australia in a quarrel over a woman. He was being taken from Kalgoorlie to Perth by train with a single guard when, 22 miles (35.4 kilometres) from Southern Cross, he leapt from the window and disappeared into the bush. The train was stopped but there was no immediate trace of him. The fear was also that since he was an expert bushman he might never be retrieved and there are no reports that he ever was.1
Criminals great and small tried their arm at escaping from trains and on 11 March 1909 Ernest ‘Shiner’ Ryan was one who managed to get off the train taking him from the Adelaide Gaol to Gladstone in Queensland. At 11 am between Hoyleton and Kybunga he asked to be taken to a lavatory and in the seconds when he closed the door and Warder Rowett opened it, although Ryan was wearing handcuffs and the train was travelling at full speed, he leapt through a window, turned a number of somersaults, and was off, staying out until April 1910. His prosecution for escaping was sloppily prepared. There was no evidence produced that he was in ‘lawful custody’ at the time and the charge was dismissed. Although he was then serving a mere two months for being an idle and disorderly person, there were a number of old charges waiting for him in Adelaide for which he eventually received three years.2
While his warders were not concentrating, Walter Sutherland, just sentenced to ten years for armed robbery in March 1918, escaped near Strathfield Station from a Parramatta to Sydney train before hiding in Rookwood Cemetery. Apparently two men later reported they had seen and chased him in the graveyard but he had been too quick for them. ‘Not so,’ said Sutherland when he was eventually caught. ‘I knew they were looking for me so I hid behind a gravestone and jumped out yelling “Boo”’. The men had run off in panic.3
Another murderer, Frank Matamin, also known as Rosland, was not so fortunate in his jump. On 30 January 1923 he had been condemned to death for killing an Afghan camel owner, Zareen at Nullagine, the previous August in a dispute over payment for a saddle. On his way to Perth by train his guards said Matamin had escaped by smashing a carriage door. He was found in a poor condition two days later near the point where he had jumped from the train. He said, and he might have been right, that he had fallen. He had asked the guards for some water and been told to get it himself from a canvas bag outside the compartment. As he reached for it the train lurched and off he came. It did not really matter one way or another. His appeal against the murder conviction was dismissed and he was hanged in Perth on 12 March.
Much more serious was the case of Royston Rennie who, on 3 June 1926, killed 23-year-old bank guard John Roger Greville on a Guildford to Perth train and then tried to escape by another. The plausible Rennie, whose real name may have been Hope, had arrived in Western Australia on 5 May. He had been brought up in Victoria and was sent to an industrial school on a charge of petty theft. He visited the National Bank at Maylands in Perth on a number of occasions under the pretence of transferring funds from Melbourne, telling the bank staff he was an airline pilot and using the name TA Hope. He knew that a guard took money from the bank on the train, as he had often travelled on it with Greville. Coincidentally, he said. Reconnoitering the land, said the prosecution. On 3 June he joined Greville and seventeen-year-old Douglas Favas in a compartment on the train and began talking about aviation.
While Favas was looking out of the window Rennie shot Greville and, when Favas tried to stop him making off, he beat the boy unconscious before leaving the train at Perth Station with the money and a watch and chain. He was arrested three days later in a first-class sleeping compartment on an eastbound train, and detectives found the bank’s money in his suitcase. Rennie gave a series of explanations about the shooting being an accident; how he intended only to frighten Greville; how he had not known there was a bullet in the barrel; and how he had intended to give himself up but at the last minute decided to take the train. He had, he said, only used the false name to save his family back east from embarrassment. On the day he was sentenced to death he wrote to the Railway Department asking for a refund of part of his £17 fare to Sydney saying he should only pay for the section of the journey before his arrest.4
In 1935 the hotel ‘barber’ Herbert Kopit, also known as Colbert after his Egyptian father had deserted him and his mother, served a six-month sentence. On 2 April the next year, in what became known as ‘The Horror on the Rocky Mail’, he climbed several steps in the criminal pantheon. In March he had stolen an all-lines first-class railway pass and was placed in a sleeping compartment on the Bundaberg to Brisbane mail train. His fellow passengers on the train, Harold Edward Speering and Frank Costello, were already asleep. The next morning, when the conductor, Thomas Boys, looked in as the train approached Brisbane he found Kopit trying to steal from Speering and Costello. Both men woke up and Kopit killed them with a tyre lever and bashed Boys, who suffered irreversible brain damage. Kopit left the train at the inner-north Brisbane station of Wooloowin with all the money he could find and, wearing Speering’s coat and trousers, made his way to Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales, and then to Casino where he caught the Sydney train. There he stayed at the Doncaster Hotel in Kensington and bought himself some women’s clothes. Then it was on the express train to Melbourne.
Down south, Kopit booked into the Victoria Coffee Palace, a residential in Little Collins Street, as Miss Williams and was dressed as a woman in a brown two-piece costume and red straw hat. He was a trifle unlucky. The young female desk clerk, suspicious of the woman’s deep voice, whiskers and a hairy hand, thought Kopit might be a sex pervert and contacted the police. He was arrested at the residential half an hour later. He received life imprisonment. In April 1942 Truth, which thought he should have been a candidate for the rope, gleefully reported of the man with once almost film-star looks:
His hair is cropped and stubbly; the skin of his face is yellow and lined; his teeth, decayed, have to be often treated by the gaol dentist; his eyes are weak and bleary; he is not over-particular about hygiene; never smiles now, seldom talks … he is sullen, morose, evil tempered, and thoroughly unpopular with his fellow prisoners.
In March 1951 Kopit died aged thirty-nine in Brisbane General Hospital to where he had been transferred suffering from acute asthma. The Brisbane correspondent of the Maryborough Chronicle thought it had been, ‘A brief but terrible story of a life which started in squalor, and ended in the dread misery of a death without a friendly smile to lighten the dark road of oblivion.’ The conductor Boys had died the previous year.5
After the Second World War Ralph Gustav Wahle, a German migrant was almost constantly in trouble in the 1950s in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. By August 1959 he finally clocked up some serious time in Pentridge in Melbourne for larceny and unlawful weapons. At 6.30 am on 23 September 1960, a year into his three and a half-year sentence, while on kitchen duty in B Division, Wahle was up and over a five-metre sandstone wall along with three others. Two months later, after a spate of housebreakings in Sydney, Wahle was recaptured and sent up to Grafton Gaol.
On 11 July 1961, knowing the Victorian Police would want to extradite him for the Pentridge escape and while he was being taken by the north coast mail train from Grafton to Long Bay prior to his release, Wahle asked to use the lavatory as the train neared Cowan, and had the guards loosen his handcuffs. The lavatory door was left open so a guard could watch him but as the train lurched around a corner the door slammed closed and Wahle threw himself out of the toilet window.
With the renowned if dodgy thief catcher Ray Kelly in charge, Wahle had a number of close calls, including one when he was found stealing food by the proprietor of a hotel in Manly in Sydney, and one when he fought off police officers on Manly Beach and swam away. Three days later the police staked out a garage and around 5 am Wahle emerged from under a car. Rather relieved he told the arresting officers that he was glad it was all over: ‘I could not have lasted much longer.’ When he faced charges at Manly Court for assaulting police, stealing clothes and escaping, ‘excited’ women ‘young and old’ burst into the court grounds to see him. In August that year he received six months and was deported to Victoria.6
By the time Wahl engineered his escape he was thirty-five years old. The first escape using an aeroplane was on 5 August 1925. It was carried out by the much younger 21-year-old Arthur Charles Watson—not to be confused with another repeat escapee, the burglar also called Arthur Watson, who had escaped from Boggo Road Gaol where he was serving a sentence for the theft of a motorcar. Employed as a kitchen boy and gardener at the home of Prison Superintendent JF Whitfield, Watson stole the clothes and driver’s licence of Whitfield’s son and took a taxi to Archerfield Aerodrome south of Brisbane, paying for the flight with the £2 he had also stolen. There he checked in on a New England Airways plane as the super’s son, claiming he had to visit his mother who was dangerously ill and his father would pay later. With the plane due to take off, no confirmation was possible and so he flew to Toowoomba, landing while the search was still continuing in Brisbane, and managed to disappear. Because he was so well known in Toowoomba, Watson was not expected to last long on the outside. In fact he survived for over a month until he was tracked down trying to reach the New South Wales border at Goondiwindi on 13 September. Trying to swim the Macintyre River, rather ingloriously he got stuck in the mud and was recaptured. For his pains he received an additional two months.7
Efforts by escapees to use planes have necessarily been sporadic. Robert George Dibbs actually tried to fly one himself when he and a fellow prisoner escaped from Beechworth in Victoria in 1968. Sentencing him to two years’ imprisonment concurrent with two for office breaking, Justice Gillard told him he was a very foolish young man and that he was lucky he had not managed to get the aircraft off the ground. Had he done so he might not have been alive to answer the charge. Perhaps it would have been better had he managed to do so. In 1972 he was sentenced to a minimum of ten years for a series of rapes.
In the afternoon of 28 August 1971, 22-year-old David Lawrence Shaw escaped from the Bunbury Rehabilitation Centre south of Perth by climbing a fence. He managed to evade roadblocks and police and the next day flew from Bunbury to Jandakot Airport outside Perth in a chartered Cessna 172. He paid off the pilot in cash and took a taxi to the city, where he was caught in Claremont when the police swooped on him while he was in a public phone booth. The pilot later said the charter had been arranged by a third party and that Shaw had told him he was in a hurry to get to Perth because his brother had been smashed up in an accident.8
At one time prisoners being transferred in New South Wales were often put on a commercial flight with their warders and in 1972 Earl Heatley and Dave Barben tried to hijack a plane transferring them from Long Bay to Grafton. It was not a success and passengers leapt in to help the warders. Heatley was very badly beaten as a result. After that the airlines banned prisoners from their flights. Robbery charges against Heatley that were outstanding for nine years were dropped, partly because over the years one crucial witness had come to believe he was the racehorse Phar Lap.9
One man who attempted to outfly a chasing plane in the Northern Territory was drug dealer and repeat escaper New South Wales-born Donald Roy Tait. Born in 1933 in Casino, seven hundred kilometres north of Sydney, after a series of charges and shortish sentences Tait went to America and on his return in the 1960s he had charges of forgery and bigamy to deal with. For those he received a four-year sentence in the early 1970s.
It was time to go abroad again and in 1977 he received seventeen years in Indonesia following charges of smuggling 664 kilograms of marijuana through Bali. However, five months into his sentence he managed to bribe the guards into allowing him to live in a bungalow in the prison grounds and simply walked away. Disguised as an English tourist he took a flight to Singapore and on to Thailand. But he did not last long on the outside.
His nearly fatal flight came the next year when he was part of a syndicate that planned to fly $3.4 million worth of Buddha sticks from Brunei into Darwin with the cargo then to be driven to New South Wales. On 21 January he took off at 6.45 am in a light aircraft and began a zigzag flight, not keeping to his filed flight plan. The next day, only 160 kilometres out of Darwin, he was intercepted by an RAAF Hercules. He crash-landed in a paddock near Katherine, set fire to the contents and the plane, gave his co-pilot $100 to help him get away and hid out in the bush for forty-one hours before mistakenly flagging down a police car. This time he received six years and eight months from a Northern Territory court.
Tait continued to have an interesting if not very successful career. He was released in 1982 and it was on to Sydney where he pleaded guilty to fraud charges. In 1985 he was sentenced to death in Thailand over yet another drug deal but the conviction was quashed. In 1990 he received ten years when he was convicted in Sydney along with his girlfriend and a former member of Thailand’s parliament on charges of attempting to import ten kilograms of heroin.10
As for helicopter escapes, Australia has rather lagged behind other countries racking up a total of four efforts compared with eleven in France. The first successful escape worldwide was that of New York businessman Joel David Kaplan, who escaped from the Santa Martha Acatitla prison in Mexico on 19 August 1971, and then fled the country. Kaplan had been convicted of killing his business partner in 1962, something he always denied, and later was the subject of The 10-Second Jailbreak. Along with him on that flight in 1971 flew Carlos Castro, a Venezuelan counterfeiter.11
Of the successful and unsuccessful escapes since that of Kaplan, until 1999 seven had been organised by women, one of whom was Nadine Vaujour, who took flying lessons before rescuing her husband Michel from La Santé prison in Paris in May 1986. Then on 25 March 1999 Russian-born Lucy Dudko hired a helicopter to free her boyfriend John Killick, then serving a sentence for a string of robberies that had netted him around $56,000. It was not Killick’s first escape either. The previous one had been good if not as spectacular.
Killick was a career criminal, regarded by his fellow professionals such as Bernie Matthews as a gentleman. Killick had a way with women, many of whom either helped him escape or harboured him. He had first been convicted in 1960 and in 1968 was serving over seven years in Pentridge in Melbourne, during which time he and two other prisoners planned an escape attempt from E Division. Secreting a hacksaw blade behind a dormitory mirror the plan was to have a prisoner just inside the locked door visibly sandpapering a block of wood while Killick and others hacksawed through the bars on the door’s grille. They were then to call a screw and overpower him using an iron bar from the gym, get his keys and let themselves out using a rope made of sheets—an old crim’s trick for a grappling hook was to tie a broom to the end of the sheet rope. The screw was called and, according to Killick’s book Gambling for Love, to his dismay it was benevolent, ‘good natured’ guard John de Boer. Reluctantly Killick hit him on the head with the bar and hunted for his keys. However, since the escape by Ronald Ryan and Peter John Walker in 1965, which involved fatalities, guards locked in a Division no longer carried keys.
Alarms and sirens sounded and dozens of police were summoned and Killick’s plan was done for. Negotiating through bars with the quite reasonable prison governor Ian Grindlay. Killick first wanted to know that de Boer was not dead. He then demanded assurances that the three would-be escapees would be dealt with by a magistrate, who could only give a two-year sentence, and that when they were put inevitably in H Division there would be none of the usual ex-cathedra floggings.
Grindlay came to visit Killick every day in H Division for the first week or so to confirm the warders had not laid a hand on Killick. When a jail magistrate gave the men eighteen months in H Division for the escape the warders were furious at Grindlay’s leniency and held a stop-work meeting, debating whether to demand Grindlay’s resignation, which they did not get. Killick served several months in Long Bay before his release in 1973 courtesy of a benign judge. Then it was back to a new series of crimes and a new series of young female admirers.12
While serving time for a series of TAB robberies committed in 1977 and 1978 and then on 9 August 1984, Killick escaped in Brisbane while being taken to the Princess Alexandra Hospital for treatment on an injured eye. On that occasion his then girlfriend, twenty-year-old Jacqueline Hawes from Adelaide, wearing an auburn wig, brought him a pistol and he held up his guards at gunpoint. While on the run he wrote to the Courier-Mail saying that everything he had done was for the benefit of his nine-year-old child. A year later Hawes received two months for aiding and abetting the escape.
In 1999 Killick was sentenced for three armed robberies committed while on the run, including one in New South Wales. Charmed by him, Lucy Dudko, who had left her scientist husband Alex to be with Killick, hired the helicopter for what Tim Joyce, the pilot, at first thought was to be a joyride over the Olympic site. Instead he found himself ordered at gunpoint to land in the Silverwater prison exercise yard. The other inmates behaved well, standing by and cheering as Killick hopped on. It was not always the case. When murderer and drug dealer Ben Kramer had tried to escape by helicopter from a correctional centre in Miami in 1990 too many inmates tried to climb aboard with him and the chopper crashed. After take-off Killick forced Joyce to land in a nearby park, where he was later found bound with radio wires. Killick and Dudko then hijacked a taxi at gunpoint.
The pair was thought to have left the state and to have headed for Honolulu in Hawaii but, although they had made a round trip to Melbourne, they were recaptured six weeks later on 9 May at Bass Hill Tourist Park in Sydney’s western suburbs. The manager of the park had recognised the couple when they booked in because he had seen their pictures on television the night before. Surrounded, they immediately surrendered. Literature and the cinema are not always good for the mind. Killick had apparently thought up the escape after reading Robert Lindsey’s The Flight of the Falcon and watching Breakout, a version of the Kaplan escape.
On 21 December 2000 Killick appeared before Judge Barry Mahoney in the New South Wales District Court, where a solicitor and a Child Support Enforcement case manager claimed that he could reform. It was argued that he had been well on the way to rehabilitation in the early 1990s when, after a series of personal reversals, he slipped back into a life of crime. Mahoney would have none of it, handing Killick a maximum sentence of twenty-eight years for the helicopter escape and some related matters. It was later reduced to fourteen years.
Lucy Dudko, known in prison as ‘Red Lucy’, fared a little better. She always claimed that another woman had chartered the helicopter. Throughout her ten-year head sentence she maintained that because of the publicity surrounding the case she had not received a fair trial and her Moscow-based lawyer Akhmad Glashev took her case to the UN Commission for Human Rights. A model prisoner, curiously enough visited regularly by Killick’s estranged wife Gloria, she was eventually freed on parole on 8 May 2006. One condition was that she did not visit Killick. He was released in January 2015 with a condition that he did not communicate with Dudko until 2022. This ban was deleted from his parole conditions in April 2015.13
The other three escapes never got off the ground so to speak. In January 1983 a plan to free three drug dealers from Pentridge was thwarted when the renegade, drug dealing, bar-girl loving Lord Tony Moynihan, then in exile in the Philippines, dobbed in details to the federal authorities. The idea had been to free the 23-year-old former Caulfield Grammar schoolboy David McMillan, then serving seventeen years for leading a multimillion-dollar heroin ring, along with his colleagues Supahaus Chowdury and Michael Sullivan, by landing on the prison tennis court one Sunday lunchtime. The plan had been dreamed up by Sydney accountant Charles Maxwell McCready, who recruited a British army corporal, Percival Roger Hole, to provide the expertise. He had been promised US$397,000 to get the men out but, thanks to the good Lord Tony, police had bugged Hole’s hotel room. On 19 January 1983 the police swooped. McCready claimed that Hole was a conman who had been stringing him along trying to defraud him, but it did neither of them any good. McCready received seven years for his part in the plot while in June 1984 Hole went down for four and a half years.
Overall, McMillan had led an interesting life, appearing at the age of twelve on Channel 9’s Peter’s Junior News and working as a cinema projectionist before taking a short-lived job in an advertising agency in Melbourne. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the 1980s he fell into bad company. It was through his work in cinemas that he had met some of the city’s leading safebreakers, traditionally the cream of organised criminals—skilled, talented and very often untrustworthy. Trying to avoid the glare of police spotlights, the safebreakers were turning to drug smuggling, hoping for an easier life and bigger returns. It was the talented and inventive McMillan who devised a bag switch routine, bringing in hashish from India to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport.
Sadly, however, most drug dealers are not known for their loyalty. Particularly if they are renegade English peers such as Lord Anthony Patrick James Cairns Berkley Moynihan, who spent much of his adult life avoiding prison, often at the expense of his former friends, before dying in 1991 aged fifty-six. Moynihan had an early spell in Australia, where he earned his crust playing the banjo. He had arrived in 1956 to avoid assault charges brought by his wife and her father over Lord Tony getting too close to a nightclub hostess, but time is a great healer and that was smoothed over. He returned to London, took a job as manager of the louche Condor Club in Soho, was divorced and married again, this time to Shirin Quereshi, a one-time snake charmer and magician’s assistant. There was now another charge of theft, then it was on to Ibiza and, on his father’s death, back to Britain to take his seat in the House of Lords. But within five years he faced a total of fifty-seven charges of fraud, including the purchase of a Rolls-Royce with a bad cheque. Back to Spain and then, when extradition proceedings began, off to the Philippines, where he struck up a friendship with President Marcos, something that wiped away if not his sins then at least alleged crimes, including the murder of a nightclub owner.
Lord Tony was clearly not a suitable companion for a well-brought-up Australian boy, and so it turned out. Tears before bedtime were inevitable and they came over a sting that Moynihan hoped to work, having McMillan detonate a capsule in the neck of a fighting cock on which there was heavy betting. McMillan, warned by friends that he was to be the victim of the sting, explained the facts of life to Moynihan, thereby earning his undying enmity.
Back in Australia things went well for McMillan until he imported a Clenet car brought in from California, greatly undervaluing it on customs declaration papers. From small acorns do big oak trees grow and this particular acorn led to Operation Aries, a Victoria Police–Federal Police operation looking into houses and businesses bought on the east coast for cash by McMillan and his partner Michael Sullivan, who were both arrested in 1982. To add to their troubles their girlfriends, Clelia Vigano and Escolar Castilo, who were both on charges along with McMillan, died in a fire at Fairlea women’s prison in Victoria. Trying to escape they had piled up bedding and books and set fire to them with a cigarette lighter. A third woman, Danielle Wright, also died in the fire.
With two witnesses under 24/7 protection, McMillan’s trial lasted six months, costing the state $4.2 million. The jury retired for seven days and only convicted him on one of twelve charges. He was jailed for seventeen years and paroled in 1993, after which he returned to drug-smuggling duty in Thailand. This led to another prison sentence and, in 1996, to a later and this time successful escape from Klong Prem prison, the dreaded ‘Bangkok Hilton’. Now in Denmark, in 2001 he was sentenced again for drug offences.14
The second attempt at escape by helicopter was to rescue drug dealer Pietro Antonio Cerullo from Mobilong prison in South Australia. Cerullo had stolen the identity of an acquaintance and used it to start a business in Adelaide that was a front for the distribution of cocaine. Cerullo, aged sixty, had been given a twenty-year sentence in 2004 for hiding 317 kilograms of cocaine in his shed. The cocaine had been divided into 476 discs that resembled rounds of cheese and was hidden inside six barrels. Police also found $300,000 in cash stuffed inside an onion bag in Cerullo’s pantry. The old ‘hide it in commercial items’ trick was often used by the Calabrian mafia in its global drug trade, and detectives discovered Cerullo was importing sandstone from Colombia, under the guise of making gravestones. He imported twelve huge sandstone blocks in three separate shipments in 2000. Evidence suggested three of the twelve sandstone blocks were hollowed out and used to hide the cocaine the police later seized at Cerullo’s home. At the time he was arrested, Cerullo also had a warrant for his arrest in Victoria over a 1994 marijuana crop.
Customs investigator David Chantrell told an Adelaide court he suspected Cerullo had also imported cocaine in 1999 and had attempted to import the drug in 1998. Cerullo was serving a minimum fourteen-year sentence in Mobilong prison when the word came through that there was to be a James Bond-like helicopter rescue attempt. He was promptly moved to Yatala.15
The last and hopelessly inept attempt at a helicopter escape should remind criminals that a dog is for life. It involved ‘Leo’ (his real name was suppressed) and was a cautionary tale altogether. Leo, from a dys-functional family, was well into drugs at the age of thirteen and had stolen to pay for them, working his way up from simple theft in March 2002 to breaking and entering in the June, and in July 2004 to a lenient twelve months for armed robbery with violence. And the reason for the lenient sentence was that he dobbed in his mate.
In prison dobbers are not regarded highly and he needed protection, which came in the form of ‘Gordie’ Fine, serving life for the murder of his wife whom he thought was about to dob him in. But protection comes at a price and the price for this was that on Leo’s release he would not only send drugs into the prison but also help Gordie to escape by helicopter. By the time Leo was released on 20 May 2005 he had already obtained a mobile phone for Gordie, who had put up the money for him to buy some camouflage clothing. In turn Leo sent ‘Charlie’, a friend of Gordie, $300. Four days later Leo also cut up a few Aeroplane brand tennis balls, put some methylamphetamine and sativa heads in them and tossed them over the security fence.
Meanwhile Leo was detailed to find a GPS navigation system, maps and firearms. He managed to get a rifle that he passed on to Charlie who promptly lost it in a dispute with some bikers. Then there was the tricky question of renting the helicopter. It was all getting on top of Leo. He contacted some charter services but then he began to realise just how deep a pit he was digging for himself. He sent a text to Gordie to say he hadn’t done any good renting a helicopter but by then Gordie had troubles of his own. A cell search turned up a mobile and a trace through the records showed just who had been in contact with him. Leo was arrested and this time dobbed in five mates. Bailed, he found work in a bottle shop and to pay for a lawyer he stole rather over $1100. Now it was not just a question of prison, but for how long.
Those who plead guilty get time off their sentence and dobbers get even more. In March 2007, with the court told of Leo’s help and the insight he now had into his drug abuse, prospects for rehabilitation and with support forthcoming in the community, he ended up with an eighteen-month sentence and a parole date three months earlier than he could have expected.16
Although since then there have been a number of successful and unsuccessful helicopter escapes worldwide, the latest attempt being in Greece in 2016, that has been the last recorded attempt in Australia. The initial breakout and the attempts to recapture them may be the most dangerous moments in an escapee’s life, but one would have thought that the one safe place where a prisoner could relax was surrounded by police and security in the courts. This is not necessarily the case.