The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (35 page)

On 18 November 1961, blood-stained men’s clothing was found by the side of the Mexico-Acapulco highway, along with personal effects belonging to Luis Vidal and a room key for the Continental Hilton Hotel. Four days later, a corpse was found two miles from the clothing, buried by the side of the road, riddled with four bullet wounds. This was identified by Mrs Teresa Vidal as her husband’s – although apparently the body was that of a balding elderly man, whereas Vidal had a full head of hair and was in his thirties. The eye colour was wrong was well; Mrs Vidal allegedly suggested that someone had switched his eyeballs! Oddly, too, on 21 November a man answering Vidal’s description used his passport to cross the border into Guatemala. And to add a further layer to the mystery, a US State Department official also positively identified the corpse as Vidal.

Evidence was given that implicated Kaplan in the murder. He had met Vidal on his arrival in Mexico on 11 November and helped him check in at the Continental. That night, he had told Jaimes that the rental car he had hired had broken down and needed collecting. When Jaimes did so, he saw holes in the window and blood stains on the front seat and door, which Kaplan couldn’t adequately explain. The hotel staff stated that Kaplan had checked Vidal out of his room on 12 November.

In his own deposition, Kaplan stated that he met with Vidal late in the evening of 11 November along with Petrushansky and another man, Earl Scott, alias Harry Kopelson. Kaplan had been dropped at another bar, and then when Scott and Petrushansky came to collect him later, was told that Scott had killed Vidal because he “had not fulfilled his part of the deal”. Kaplan denied knowing where Vidal’s body was buried, but admitted checking Vidal out of his room.

Kaplan was arrested in Spain and extradited to Mexico to stand trial. After a year’s imprisonment, he was tried and convicted of concealing evidence, and since he had served the sentence for that already he was freed – only to be rearrested. He claimed he was told that if he paid $200,000 he would be freed; if not, he would be charged with murder. Kaplan didn’t have access to that sort of money; his uncle Jacob refused to help. After a further year of delays, Kaplan was tried for murder and found guilty.

Throughout the rest of the 1960s, Kaplan’s sister Judy Dowis tried to buy or bribe his freedom, but without success. She believes that her uncle was successfully offering even more money to keep Kaplan locked up – after all, while Joel was languishing in a Mexican jail, Jacob held the purse strings for the foundation. Joel himself kept coming up with new schemes for escape: as his biography notes, “for five years, escape plans would roll off his fecund brain like symphonies by Mozart”. He realized that there was no point overplanning: “A plan can be brilliant in thought and just as brilliant in execution,” he told his biographers, “but pure old-fashioned luck will be the determining factor.” He watched every aspect of his life within the jail: from the personal tics and foibles of the different guards, to the little changes in routine that might afford an avenue.

One such came during a period he spent in Santa Marta prison hospital. A prisoner suffering from a bleeding ulcer couldn’t be treated within the prison walls, so would have to be transferred to the Mexico City General Hospital. Kaplan watched as the ambulance taking him away drove through the front gate, exactly as he himself wanted to be doing. He decided to fake an attack of appendicitis, and read up on all the symptoms; he approached the ambulance driver, who was quite happy to assist, as long as he was paid. Through Judy, he made contact with a Canadian named Dempsey who would help once he was on the outside, meeting the ambulance about three miles outside the prison. Dempsey would pretend to mount an assault on the ambulance and “force” Kaplan to depart at gunpoint, which would save the ambulance driver from being charged with conspiracy. They would then change cars and meet up with two women who would pose as the two men’s wives, as they headed out of Mexico at the end of their vacation.

All seemed to be going okay; Kaplan was even willing to pay out a fee to a hospital attendant who insisted that his help would be needed, and therefore compensated. But Kaplan’s machinations fell apart: the ambulance driver had gone on a drinking spree, and been fired for turning up for work drunk!

Another plan involved faking his own death: for $100,000 Kaplan was convinced that he could “persuade” a load of doctors and health officials to certify him dead. When his body was taken out to a funeral home, Kaplan would miraculously resurrect, and another dead body put in the coffin in his place. There was a certain grim appropriateness to this idea: as far as Kaplan was concerned, the identity of the corpse in his own case had been switched. However, Jacob refused to release the necessary money.

Some of the plans suggested by others seemed idiotic, even to Kaplan, who was willing to do pretty much anything to get out. Judy was living in Miami, at a time when that city’s underworld included many refugee Cubans and out of work mercenaries, as well as others who were involved (whether legitimately or only in their minds) with covert plots to destabilize Communist countries. She got to know a group known as the “Soldiers of Misfortune”, who appeared willing to help her with her quest to free her brother from prison.

One scheme saw a flamboyant former CIA operative, Jack Carter, drive down to Mexico City (borrowing Judy’s Jaguar for the ride), with a plan that would see Kaplan rescued by a pair of Cuban exiles. They would drive a phony linen-supply truck into the prison, ostensibly to refill a storage room that Carter would have arranged to be set fire to; Joel would depart with them, and be placed in the hands of a professional Austrian mountaineer who would take him across the hills to a plane hidden in the distant mountains. Unsurprisingly, this one didn’t get past the drawing board, although Carter sold Judy’s car claiming that he needed it to finance the plot.

After Judy moved to Sausalito, she encountered “Lewis”, the leader of a group known as the Big Sur Ranchers. Over time she came to trust him, enough that when Kaplan whispered to her during one of her visits that he had found a sure-fire way to escape, and just needed someone he could trust in Mexico City to handle things there, she asked Lewis to deal with the arrangements. Kaplan had learned that the governor of the prison was willing to drive him out of the prison and hand him over to friends, as long as he was paid around $30,000. If the warden did that, then Lewis would get him out of the country. Lewis therefore created a homemade armoured car, customizing a 1969 Pontiac with bulletproof glass, and flack-jacket insulation. If the warder decided that his best bet was to try to prevent his escape and make himself out to be a hero, at least they would be prepared. A retired Air Force colonel in San Diego agreed to fly into Mexico to collect him.

Ten thousand dollars was paid to the warden, and everyone involved was kept on standby, waiting for the warden to give a three-day warning. That went on for four months, before Lewis went to visit Kaplan, who finally agreed that it was clear the warden didn’t have the guts to go ahead with the plan. The whole scheme had cost a further $12,000 in expenses and equipment; all of it went to waste.

The next idea was to tunnel into the prison; there was no way that a tunnel out would be feasible, given the concrete floors. But if someone were to dig their way beneath the fence, disguising their entry point as a chicken shed, then they could come out in the middle of the courtyard without too much of a problem. Kaplan had married Irma, a Mexican girl, without bothering to divorce his New York model wife Bonnie Sharie; he claimed that being married was the only way he could receive visitors, and Bonnie wasn’t going to travel to Mexico. Irma got hold of an engineer, who advised that it would take about four weeks to dig the six-feet tunnel. Six days in, though, they hit a thick vein of lava rock. That plan also came to nothing – although it did provide Kaplan with a cooked chicken supper!

All the avenues seemed to finish like that tunnel, in a dead end, until Dowis was put in touch with Victor Ellsworth Stadter, a self-confessed “legitimate smuggler”, suspected by the US Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration of being a very devious and clever narcotics trafficker, no matter how much he might protest that he “never fooled with narcotics”.

Stadter was intrigued by the case, claiming when he talked about the escape in 1991 that “the United States government is the only government in the world that doesn’t do a damned thing to help get its own citizens out of prison. Guys like me have to do it.” The potential State Department and CIA involvement meant that Stadter might be giving the US government a metaphorical two-fingered salute if he could help bring Kaplan out.

It clearly wasn’t going to be easy, and Stadter used various different ruses to try to get Kaplan out of the prison, but none of them was successful. It didn’t help that another factor now entered the equation: Kaplan was seriously ill, and potentially dying. Inside prison he had become an alcoholic, and was knocking back a bottle a day of spirits – which, because of his situation, had to be home-made. The rum was reacting badly with his liver, giving him recurrent bouts of hepatitis, and a bad infection. If Stadter didn’t get Kaplan out of there quickly, he would be coming out in a box.

At one stage, they considered using a make-up artist to disguise Kaplan so he could exit looking like one of his own visitors; that was foiled because his health recovered sufficiently for him to be moved out of the hospital to his prison cell – although that didn’t last for long, and when they tried to reactivate the plan a few days later, they discovered that someone had betrayed them. Every person leaving the jail who wasn’t bald was going to be checked – and the disguise relied on Kaplan adopting the distinctive hairstyle (i.e. the wig) of his visitor.

It was at this point that someone came up with the idea of using a helicopter. According to the book he co-wrote about the escape,
The 10-Second Jailbreak,
Kaplan suggested it. Stadter has stated that it was his idea but since Kaplan “[is] dead now he can have that one”. As far as Stadter was concerned, it was the answer to the problems. He purchased a high-powered Bell helicopter in Wyoming, and flew it down to Houston, Texas, where he stripped everything non-essential from the frame. Because Mexico City sits 7,200 feet above sea level, the air is thin, which makes piloting a helicopter considerably harder than it would be for many of the pilots who were to emulate the feat. The helicopter was painted blue, to match the one used by the Mexican Attorney-General, Julio Sanchez Vargas, and the doors were taken off.

At this point another obstacle presented itself. Kaplan refused to leave the prison without his cellmate joining the party. Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a Venezuelan counterfeiter, was a non-negotiable addition, and reluctantly, Stadter agreed.

Although he considered learning to fly the chopper himself, and initially arranged for a friend, known only as Cotton, to start lessons, in the end Stadter hired a Vietnam veteran, Roger Hershner, to fly the mission. On 17 August, Cotton visited the jail, along with Kaplan’s wife. Cotton told Kaplan to wander around the prison basketball court at 6.30 p.m. on each of the next three evenings, and to carry a newspaper under one arm.

Luck, for once, was on Kaplan’s side. On the evening of 18 August, for the first time in two years, a movie was being shown for the benefit of the prisoners.
The Altar of Blood
attracted most of the inmates, as well as the guards; only Kaplan and Castro were out in the yard in the rain.

Stadter had estimated that the critical phase of the escape would last merely thirty seconds. During the first ten seconds, the guards would hear the helicopter approaching, and hopefully be confused sufficiently not to react. The next ten would see Kaplan and Castro climb on board. The final ten would see the chopper have time to fly out of rifle range. The middle ten, unsurprisingly, were the most dangerous, and Stadter ordered Hershner to wait for no longer than ten seconds on the ground. If Kaplan and/or Castro didn’t board during that time, it would be their bad luck.

At 6.35 p.m., the Bell helicopter came in to land on the basketball court – to be greeted not by rifle fire, but by salutes. The guards believed for the critical few moments that they were receiving a surprise visit from the Attorney General. By the time they realized their error, Kaplan and Castro were on board, and flying into the history books.

It still nearly all went wrong. As the helicopter came in to land nearly an hour later, a pickup truck with Mexican federal agency insignia was waiting – totally unconnected to the prison escape, but a worry for Stadter, who was waiting with further getaway vehicles. For a horrible moment, Stadter thought that Hershner believed that he should land by the truck, and even the dimmest-witted Mexican official might be surprised to see two men in prison outfits descending from the helicopter. He flashed the landing lights of his Cessna light aircraft, and got Cotton, who was driving the Cadillac beside it, to do likewise with his headlights. Hershner brought the helicopter down in the right place. Kaplan raced from the chopper to the Cessna; Castro tried to follow but was directed, forcibly, by Stadtner to the Cadillac. Stadtner then took his seat behind the Cessna’s controls, and piloted himself and Kaplan to La Pesca airport, near the Texas border, where they changed planes again. When Kaplan passed through US Customs at Brownsville, Texas, he used his own name.

According to the contemporary
Time
report, Castro accompanied Kaplan to La Pesca, and was then put on a plane to Guatemala, but in
The 10-Second Jailbreak,
it says that Cotton dropped Castro at the Hotel Panorama in the medium-sized town of San Luis Potosi, around 200 miles from the jail. He eventually made his way back to Venezuela, where he claimed that he was the mastermind behind the helicopter escape, and that Kaplan had paid him $100,000. Nobody took him seriously.

Unusually, the Mexican government didn’t start extradition proceedings. Although Sam Lopez, the Chief of Police in Mexico City, wasn’t best pleased by the news Kaplan had escaped (“That dirty f***ing gringo has crossed the border,” he apparently shouted when he found out), little was done. The Mexican Foreign Ministry knew that there would be considerable resistance to an extradition request for Kaplan, and didn’t pursue it with any vigour.