Really good story of hustler michael barret and how he organised the jail break from Queensboro Correctional Facility during the eighties.
Theres about 4 pages so click on the link at the bottom for the rest.
‘Inside’ tale of NY’s biggest jailbreak
By GARY BUISO
Last Updated: 6:51 AM, September 23, 2012
Posted: 2:01 AM, September 23, 2012
Escape isn’t easy when you’re from the South Bronx.
That’s how Michael Barrett sees it, at least.
In the 1960s, the Kelly Street delinquent got mixed up with the law early and often — fighting, stealing, selling drugs.
Pretty soon, he was deemed incorrigible — spending more time in state prisons than schoolrooms. “It was either carried by six or tried by 12 . It’s as simple as that,” he said.
He soon became a thug prince, rubbing shoulders with kingpins and celebrities in smoky gambling dens and half-lit lounges.
But after doing a seven-year prison stint on an assault charge, he slipped up again in September 1981 — busted for possession of 19 ounces of cocaine. “It was 14 ounces after the cops got done with it,” he said.
The bust eventually landed him in Queensboro Correctional Facility, a medium-security state prison in Long Island City.
Barrett took one look at the joint and knew his stay would be brief.
“It was basically a converted warehouse. I said, ‘Oh lord, I’m out of here!’ ”
In less than a month, he was. Thirty years ago, Barrett led the largest escape ever from a New York prison. It was brazen and prompted by a simple calculation.
“I’m looking at 15 years to life on a felony drug charge. I just did seven years — that’s 84 months, 61,000 hours, 2,555 days . . . I used to know how many seconds,” Barrett said. “I had to get out of here.”
As luck would have it, security at Queensboro was questionable.
“We’d be playing handball, and at exactly 7 p.m. another ball would come over the wall. Inside was everything you needed — cocaine, marijuana, whatever. Bam!”
The “handball express” turned out to be critical in supplying the currency to get his scheme rolling. It was a simple plan — unscrew a security window, slide down a rope and make a run for it.
Weeks before the escape, Barrett was already making preparations, particularly after learning that an inmate was sneaking into a sergeant’s office to use a private telephone hooked up to the prison network. Those calls were not, Barrett believed, recorded, unlike inmate conversations.
To check it out, he tied shirts to his elbows and knees, clambered up into the ceiling, and quietly wormed his way through the rafters down to the office.
“I had the guy show me how to connect the red, green and yellow wires,” he said, chuckling at his own audacity.
He managed to hook up a wire through the ceiling to the phone’s network of wires, and “acquired” his own phone by paying off a maintenance worker. “I kept it under my pillow.”
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/the_great_escape_uLxjs6yO270DlhPMkeShcO
