The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks (47 page)

In the autumn of 2007, those inmates included thirty-two-year-old Otis Blunt, accused of armed robbery and shooting a convenience store manager, although he was strenuously protesting his innocence. Like so many others, he was worried that he was about to be railroaded into a long prison sentence – anything up to twenty years, given his prior history – and he was determined to escape before that could happen. In September, he tried to whittle away at the mortar surrounding a cinder block in his cell in the hope of dislodging it, so he could wriggle through the opening. One of the other inmates betrayed him to the guards, and Blunt was moved into cell B310 in a higher security section of the jail, sealed within a concrete bunker.

His next door neighbour on the third floor, in cell B311, was Jose Espinosa, a nineteen-year-old illegal alien member of the Bloods gang, with a long criminal record, who was awaiting sentencing for aggravated manslaughter. Facing a seventeen-year prison term for his part in the drive-by shooting of Hassan Jackson, a member of rival gang, the Crips, unsurprisingly Espinosa willingly agreed to become part of an escape attempt.

The plan was for Blunt to break through the wall between the two cells, allowing him to enter Espinosa’s, while the younger man created a hole in the wall next to his window. From there they could get access to a small roof that Blunt had noticed, and a thirty-feet drop over the razor-wire fence to cross the railroad tracks to freedom. Since he had some experience in the construction industry, Blunt was aware that the weak point of the walls was the mortar around the blocks, so he stole a towel hook, and flattened it. Once all the prisoners had been locked in their cells for the night, and the guards were slightly less attentive, he and Espinosa then started to use it to scrape away the filling on the blocks that they had respectively chosen.

It wasn’t going to be a quick job, although Blunt was under time pressure since his court hearing was rapidly approaching. However, they couldn’t proceed too quickly, or the work would be discovered. Each cell was checked twice hourly, and from their block of eight, three would be randomly searched each day. To keep the damage to the wall hidden from prying eyes, Blunt emulated Andy Dufresne’s method from
Shawshank Redemption:
in the book, he covers the hole with a poster of film star Rita Hayworth; in the movie, Dufresne uses pictures of Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and finally Raquel Welch. Blunt didn’t have access to that sort of shot: he simply used pin-up pictures of women in bikinis (prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow pointed out that in the movie, “they had better pictures on the wall”). The dust and rubble were concealed in their lockers or disposed of in the toilets within their cells.

The towel hook proved to be insufficiently strong: they needed something that would do the job much faster. Looking around the recreational area, Blunt noticed that the valve for the water supply had a small wheel on it, about the size of a saucer, which could easily be removed. This was a much more effective implement, and using that, as well as a piece of wire that prison officers believed the men found inside the wall, the pair were ready to make their move after three weeks’ work.

On the night of 14 December 2007, each rolled up blankets and placed them underneath the covers on their beds, so that a quick glimpse by the guard would not reveal their departure. Blunt then squeezed through the eight-by-sixteen-inch hole that he had created between the cells. The pair made the final hole in the outside wall and stepped out through the similarly sized gap onto the roof.

The razor wire was the last obstacle. Although prison officials originally believed the two men had jumped together, then gone their separate ways once they were free of the prison, it eventually transpired that Espinosa was first to jump the ten or so feet over the wire, although he damaged his ankle on landing. His cry frightened Blunt, who waited for some time on the roof before eventually deciding to clamber down into the gap beside the perimeter fence and then climb over that. Although he injured himself during this part of the escape, Blunt was finally free.

One of the more unusual elements of the escape is the length of time it took for it to be discovered. Blunt and Espinosa were long gone from the prison by dawn on 15 December, but the alarm was not raised until 5.15 that afternoon – a good twenty or so hours since they left their cells – when guard Rudolph Zurick pulled the cover off Blunt’s bunk to reveal the rolled-up blankets.

A manhunt immediately began, and at a press conference on 17 December, prosecutor Romankow showed the note that Blunt had left addressed to Zurick: “Thank you Officer Zurick, for the tools needed. You’re a real PAL (sic)! Happy holidays.” It was completed with a smiley face. At first glance, it appeared as if this was suggesting that Zurick was complicit in the plans, but it was very clear to all the prison authorities that “at most we’re looking at negligence by corrections officers”. Zurick didn’t see it that way. On 2 January 2008, the day that he was due to talk to investigators regarding the escape, Rudi Zurick, who had a fourteen-year unblemished record in the prison service, committed suicide.

This added a further edge to the investigation. Espinosa was the first to be captured, after a tip-off to the US Marshals. He was arrested in a basement apartment in Elizabeth on 8 January along with nineteen-year-old Odalys Cortez; he had hobbled on his injured ankle to the train station, where he caught a cab and lain low in a motel for a few days before holing up in the apartment. Cortez was charged with resisting arrest. When Espinosa was asked by reporters about Zurick’s suicide, he simply said, “It wasn’t my fault.”

Blunt was located in Mexico City, and civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton became involved with trying to persuade him to surrender. On 6 January, two days before Espinosa was tracked down, Sharpton claimed that he had been contacted by “people in touch with Blunt”, possibly as a result of prominence given to the case on the TV programme
America’s Most Wanted.
“I have been asked by them to help facilitate his safe surrender,” Sharpton said. “I have contacted law enforcement to see if I can be helpful towards that end.” The next day he issued a statement from Miami noting that he and members of his National Action Network were travelling “in regard to the request made by fugitive Otis Blunt that he would like to surrender himself . . . I am prepared to move within the next 24–48 hours to personally see if I can physically facilitate Mr Blunt’s request.”

This grandstanding didn’t go down well with the lawenforcement officials trying to find Blunt. “I am upset that Reverend Sharpton is waiting between ‘24–48 hours to personally see if (he) can physically facilitate Mr Blunt’s request’,” prosecutor Romankow said in a statement. “Meanwhile, the escapee is still on the loose.”

Sharpton went to Mexico City on 8 January and spoke to Blunt that night; the next day, at 4.30 p.m. Blunt was arrested by Mexican Federal Police. According to one report, he defecated himself when he was captured. The authorities wouldn’t confirm whether Sharpton’s involvement had assisted with locating Blunt; Sharpton himself said, “I wish I could have been on hand to assure Mr Blunt’s safety but clearly his calling me to where he was helped lead to the conclusion that it did, and I hope that justice for all parties will be served.”

It was. Blunt received a five-year term for the escape; ironically, he was cleared of the charges that he was on remand for, and would have been freed. He served his sentence at the East Jersey State Prison in Woodbridge and received an extra year after it seemed that he hadn’t learned his lesson: on 22 July 2010 he was spotted by one of the correction officers sketching a diagram in the sand with a stick while talking to another inmate. The guard moved closer to the two men, and said that he overheard Blunt tell the other man how to break off a piece of metal from a cell and bend it into a tool to cut mortar from the cell wall. Blunt denied the charge, insisting that the guard misheard the conversation, and he wouldn’t have taken such a risk so near to his release date. The other inmate, who wasn’t identified, claimed they were discussing a sketch for a tattoo. Although he appealed against the decision, Blunt’s term was increased. He became due for release on 11 May 2012.

Espinosa also was given a five-year term, which was added to the seventeen years for manslaughter. As a result of their break, security at Union County Jail was considerably increased.

The
Real Prison Breaks
episode about this escape, first broadcast in summer 2011, gives a false impression of the physical nature of the cells in which Blunt and Espinosa were housed. It also fails to mention the note left by the men, or its consequences for Rudolph Zurick. For footage shot in the actual cells, go to the
America’s Most Wanted
link given below:Thomas Romankow shows reporters where the holes were.

Sources:

New York Times,
18 December 2007: “Bold Escape Not First Try for Inmate”

Union County Jail website:
http://ucnj.org/government/dept-of-corrections/

USA Today,
7 January 2008: “Rev. Sharpton may help inmate surrender”

America’s Most Wanted:
http://www.amw.com/fugitives/capture.cfm?id=51698

New York Post,
26 June 2009: “Two in ‘Shawshank’ Jailbreak Sentenced”

Elizabeth Inside Out,
30 December 2011: “Otis Blunt Serves more time for helping to plan an Escape”

Real Prison Breaks,
Cineflix Productions, 2011

What do you do when your entire city becomes a prison? For those who were caught in the partition of Berlin after the Second World War, with relatives spread between the Western Allies’ sectors and the Russian part of the city, this question became highly relevant when the political situation became more volatile, and a strictly enforced barrier was erected between the two portions.

The division of Berlin as part of the settlement following the war against Hitler was always going to cause problems. The city was its own separate enclave deep in the heart of East Germany, with Western capitalist ideology governing the American, British and French sectors, while the Russians imposed Communism on the rest of East Germany, including their sector of Berlin. Stalin tried to starve the Western powers out of Berlin shortly after the end of the Second World War, but an airlift of food into the besieged city forced the Soviet leader to back down. West Berlin became a symbol of freedom, to the Communists’ increasing anger.

Eventually, on the night of 13 August 1961, they took action to prevent the flood of refugees who were crossing between East and West Berlin. As thousands of soldiers lined the border, concrete posts were erected, and barbed wire strung between them. The Berlin Wall – which would divide the city for the next twenty-eight years – had been started.

To begin with, escapes weren’t as hard as they later became. The Wall itself didn’t boast the defences that later generations would feature, but people who crossed it were risking their lives. One of the very first to go was East German soldier Conrad Schumann. The nineteen-year-old former shepherd was part of a brigade that was transferred from Dresden to Berlin on 12 August 1961, the day before the Wall was erected. The soldiers must have known that something major was going on: their pay was increased by nearly ten per cent for “danger money”.

On 15 August, Schumann was on guard at the corner of Bernauerstrasse and Ruppinerstrassse, and watched as a small girl was refused entry back into West Berlin. Her parents were waiting for her on the western side: she had simply been visiting her grandmother in East Berlin before the Wall was erected. That didn’t matter: free travel between the two sides was simply not permitted any longer. Even though the child could see her parents, the rules were strict: she was sent back to her grandmother’s house.

According to accounts that Schumann later gave, that was the catalyst for his escape. He swapped his full sub-machine gun for an empty one, as people on the West German side called for him to come over to them. By chance West German cameraman Peter Liebing was standing near the junction, and photographed Schumann as he hesitated for a moment, then vaulted over the barbed wire, and ran to a police car that was on the other side of the barrier. “I had him in my sight for more than an hour. I had a feeling he was going to jump. It was kind of an instinct,” Liebing later explained. “I had learned how to do it at the Jump Derby in Hamburg. You have to photograph the horse when it leaves the ground and catch it as it clears the barrier. And then he came. I pressed the shutter and it was all over.” The still photograph – as well as cine footage of the escape – became an iconic image, representing the desire of East Germans to flee the country.

Schumann’s family were not impressed by his defection, and he received numerous pleas from them to return to the East, which he declined. The East German secret police, the Stasi, would have loved to use him as a poster boy to show the failings of the West, but Schumann refused to cooperate, remaining in the West, where he worked for car manufacturers Audi. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, he was able to return home, but was still regarded as a traitor by some. Suffering from depression, he hanged himself on 20 June 1998.

While East Germans were finding holes in the barbed wire and desperately making their way through to a new life in the West – around 12,000 people managed to escape during the latter part of 1961 before the Communists tightened security at the Wall – some gave their lives in the pursuit of freedom. Nine days after the Wall was erected, on 22 August, the East German police and army were told that anyone “violating the laws of our GDR is to be called to order, if necessary by use of weapons”. Two days later, Günter Litfin was the first escaper known to be shot.

The tailor, who had worked in West Berlin until the Wall, decided to try to cross the border near the Reichstag building just north of the Brandenburg Gate. When he was spotted, Litfin dived into the Spandauer boat canal that separated the two parts of the city, and swam desperately for the Western side. He was within a few inches of the bank when a border guard fired his sub-machine gun; Litfin was hit in the head, and sank underwater. His corpse was fished out from the canal later that day.