Cracked Article: 5 Real Prison Escapes That Shouldn't Have Been Possible

It's up here! I'mmmmm running late to work but when I get home tonight I'll have a post up with the rejected entries and two fully written ones that weren't in the final version of the article (including one that I was convinced would be the #1 spot). So check back later!

EDIT: As promised, a fully written entry and some rejected ideas. Before I get going though, I wanted to briefly mention that this article is a semi-sequel to my first Cracked article, which seems pretty cool to me. In any case, here we go!

1.     Andre Devigny Is The Most Badass Man Ever

Devigny was your average French schoolteacher in the 1930s. In 1939 he enlisted into the French Army right before World War II began. When France was occupied by Germany he joined the resistance and smuggled information to the British under the codename "Valentin."

So far we have a Frenchman operating under the title “Valentin” and fighting Nazis. That should be the synopsis of a movie.

We hope Mila Kunis finds a way to be in it.

In 1942 Devigny became one of the three commanders of the Gilbert Network, a resistance group dedicated to helping refugees escape France, sending information to the British and sabotaging any German equipment they could set their sights on.

A SS informant eventually infiltrated the Gilbert Network and Devigny was captured. Sent to Fort Montluc, a Gestapo prison considered escape-proof, he spent four months under the caring hand of the Nazi secret police, meaning they tortured the fuck out of him for information.

Devigny wouldn’t give up anything though, and he repeatedly tried to escape. His attempts weren’t successful, but they were so frequent that the guards began chaining him to the walls of his cell.

Irked by Devigny’s disinterest in their torture tactics, they called in the best torturer they had:

SS Captain and Gestapo member Klaus Barbie. 

This douche.

If Klaus Barbie doesn’t sound familiar, he should; he was so depraved and violent he was known as the Butcher of Lyon. Scholars estimate that Barbie was responsible for over 14,000 deaths, and personally responsible for torturing and abusing countless men, women and children. His war crimes were so heinous his trial was filmed, something the French court hardly ever did. Described as a monster, he would cuddle with cats while breaking prisoner’s vertebrae. His victims described him as sadistic and deranged. 

This guy tortured Devigny for two weeks. And Devigny gave him nothing. Barbie, furious, told Devigny he was going to be executed.

He was jealous of Devigny’s moustache. That and his steel balls.
 

Torture is one thing, but Devigny wasn’t having any of that execution shit. Remember how he was chained to his cell walls? He used a safety pin to unlock them and then pried open the slats beneath his cell with a ground down spoon. Armed with only a rope made from his blanket and mattress cover and a grappling hook made from an old lantern, he squeezed under his cell door and made one last escape attempt.

And right in the prison’s courtyard he ran into a German sentry.

Devigny had to think fast. The guard had a gun and even if the shot missed the sound would still alert everyone to the escape. So he gave up and went back to his cell. Hah, just kidding. He actually tackled the shit out of that soldier.

Both men went to the ground and Devigny wrestled the gun out of the sentry’s hands. You know, the malnourished, starved prisoner who’d been tortured for months overpowered a guard. Happens all the time. 

But he still couldn’t shoot the gun without drawing attention, so he stabbed the guard with the man’s own bayonet. Then Devigny threw the rope and grappling hook over the prison wall and escaped. It was the only breakout Fort Montluc ever had. The only way his escape could have been sweeter was if he’d run into Klaus Barbie instead of a random redshirt. 

What was the first thing he did when he got back to France? If you guessed “bathed in pussy” you may be right, but history tells us that he actually rejoined the war efforts immediately. Because fuck Nazis.

Annnnnnd some rejected entries are coming up. Originally the premise was "Insane Prison Escapes Straight Out of the Comics." I'd hoped to find a co-writer who would scan panels from comic books with corresponding escapes, i.e. one where a prison transport van is ambushed so Lex Luthor could be freed or something, then show the real life counterpart. But I scrapped the idea and went with just "ridiculously badass escapes" instead. So here is a mix of rejected ideas from both premises:

Julien Chautard

Chautard got away from his guards and hid under the prison van that had brought him to court. He clung to the underside of the van and let it drive off, carrying him to freedom.

Clifford Hobbs and Noel Cunningham have their men ambush a prison transport van 

Hobbs and Cunningham were being transported to court in June of 2003. When the van got there the driver stepped out to request access to get in. As he opened the door a man dressed as a postman attacked him; a second man held him at gunpoint. The driver was shot in the knee and the escort-guard was pistol-whipped after he opened the doors. Hobbs and Cunningham fled.

Sean Bourke Frees George Blake

Blake and Bourke met in prison, and Bourke really took a liking to Blake. When Bourke was released he engineered a breakout for Blake; Blake broke his cell window, slid down a porch and made it to the perimeter wall, where Bourke tossed him a rope ladder made of knitting needles.

Tim Jenkin

In 1979 Jenkin escaped from Pretoria Central Prison with two other inmates. They were imprisoned as political prisoners for fighting apartheid, but didn’t take their imprisonment lightly. They spent 18 months patiently plotting a detailed escape that involved breaking through 14 locked doors and walking out the front gates. The men had to learn how to pick locks and falsifying keys.

Libby Tunnel Escape

In 1864 more than 100 Union soldiers broke out of Libby Prison, a POW camp in Richmond, Virginia. But the Union officers weren’t having any of this “be in jail” shit and plotted a breakout. They organized three relief teams of diggers with five members each to dig a tunnel out of the camp. It took less than three weeks and the men escaped only to find themselves walking the streets of Richmond.

They might have been fucked but the Confederate guards thought Libby was inescapable and ignored anyone outside the prison walls. Because of the work of 15 officers 109 men were able to get away, though only 59 succeeded in getting back to Union lines.

Douglas Alward
Alward has escaped from prison seven times, with the seventh making him the only Colorado prisoner to ever escape past a lethal electric fence. He spent two years planning, using his job as an inmate maintenance worker to remove copper piping from ventilation systems to build a ladder which he hid in the wall behind his toilet along with shipping boxes and unused shower curtains he found.

For the actual escape he went right through his own window; the previous year he’d been asked to secure all the windows (including his own) on the east side of the prison. Alward used altered rivets on his window so it would appear secure but could still open. Despite his ladder breaking while he was still on the razor-wire fence, he surmounted it and made it to the next fence, which was electric. He wasn’t daunted though, as he later told a news station, “The only thing keeping potential escapees inside the fence is ignorant fear of electricity." He built an insulator out of the shower curtains and cardboard boxes, got over the fence, scaled the third fence (barbed wire) and peaced out.

Previous escapes: using the hospital bed he was chained to to snap his shackles in half, ramming open prison gates with a school bus he shouldn’t have had access to, hiding in the walls of a prison for two days until the search was called off and then running away and overpowering a guard escorting him to review legal materials during a hearing.



Houdini
The famous magician got early fame for slipping out of handcuffs, visiting towns and even countries and escaping from their jails, and busting out of any prison cell, even when he was stripped naked and searched before going in.
Once, a Chief Constable surprised him by requesting an early display of Houdini’s skills. Houdini was stripped, searched and put in a cell that was also searched and then triple locked. His clothes were in an adjoining cell that was also triple locked, and the iron gate to outside was secured with a seven-lever lock. Houdini emerged after roughly five minutes, during which he’d dressed, unlocked every single cell on the block and unlocked the iron gate.



Henri Charrière   
All of this is according to his memoirs:

Charrière was a small-time thief and petty criminal in France. In 1931 Charrière was convicted of murdering a pimp; despite denying the charges he was sentenced to life in prison in a penal settlement on French Guiana. He escaped after three years by claiming to be ill, then with two other inmates they offered a guy sex, clubbed him over the head and ran away in a boat. They traveled 1,800 miles in a boat; he and several other escaped prisoners were caught off of the Columbian coast and were captured and imprisoned again. Once again, Charrière escaped with another friend. He joined a Native American coastal village and married two teenage sisters, getting both pregnant. He left the village, was caught again and imprisoned again, this time in Santa Marta. Despite numerous attempts he couldn’t escape, then he was transferred back to French Guiana. Over several years he made many attempts, all of which failed.

He made one last attempt from an inescapable penal colony on Devil’s Island. He and a pirate floated on sacks full of coconuts and let the current take them to the mainland. The pirate died in quicksand, Charrière was captured a while later and then eventually officially released.

When accused of mixing up details, falsifying events, stealing stories from other inmates and getting many dates wrong, Charrière responded: “I didn’t have a typewriter with me.”



Wayne Carlson
Carlson has escaped a staggering 13 times in all. Escapes include: slipping out of a window, sawing through bars and then making rope sheets to get to the prison yard after which he scaled the wall, running away while on parole, taking seven sheriffs hostage with a revolver and locking them up and then leaving, using a wooden gun to overpower a deputy in a court bathroom then stealing the officer’s gun and commandeering the jail’s prisoner transport van, sawing through bars again and tying up guards, making a key to open the doors of a prison, leaving a dummy in his bed and hiding in a pile of dirt and then cutting through a prison fence, and twice more violating parole.

He was called a “professional jailbreaker” by the police.



The Fenians and Fremantle Prison
The Australian Fremantle Prison has been home to some pretty hardcore guys through the years. Among these were members of the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish republican political group/secret society that worked to undermine the British rule of Ireland. Some Fenians were eventually pardoned. Six, however, were not.

The Fenians decided that was horseshit and thought a rescue was in order. Two Fenians were sent to the prison undercover while a whaling ship was purchased. Most of the 22-man crew believed they were going from Massachusetts to Australia to, you know, hunt whales. And the eleven month journey certainly helped keep that charade alive. But in reality, they were meandering toward the prison to free the remaining six men. The ship got the Fenians aboard but was intercepted by an Australian steamship, The Georgette. The captain raised the American flag and told the Australians that if they attacked they’d be declaring war on America. The Georgette’s captain feared an international incident and agreed to fuck off, and the Fenians sailed back to America.