Planning an exit strategy: From El Chapo to Redoine Faid, the most audacious prison breakouts

By Divya Verma

It looks like a scene out of a movie: smoke bombs, assault rifles and a helicopter that whisks an inmate to sweet freedom. Only this time, it was real.

A look at some of the most audacious prison breakouts.

A flying start

Redoine Faid, 46, who was serving a 25-year sentence for murder, made an audacious escape from a prison in Reau recently, after heavily armed men landed a helicopter in a courtyard, freed him from a visiting room and carried him away. The men set off smoke bombs to blur the scene from video surveillance. But this wasn’t the notorious criminal’s first attempt to flee justice. Five years ago, Faid had blasted his way out of a different prison with explosives hidden in tissue packs.


Tunneled vision

His ability to elude capture is the stuff of Mexican legend. In 2015, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, a drug kingpin known as El Chapo, gave the slip to the long arm of the law — for the second time. El Chapo, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, escaped from the most secure prison in Mexico using a mile-long tunnel that ran from his cell to a building under construction outside the prison’s perimeter. He was recaptured in January 2016.

Earlier in 2001, the gangster was smuggled out of Puente Grande maximum security prison inside a laundry basket.

Slip and slide away
It won’t be a stretch to say that yoga has many benefits – even when it comes to prison escapes. In September 2012, Choi Gap-bok, who had been practising yoga for more than 20 years, was arrested on the suspicion of robbery and put in a detention cell at the police station in the city of Daegu. Rather than bend the prison bars, the yoga master bent himself out of shape, slipping through the tiny slot at the bottom of the cell that is used to give prisoners food. The entire escape took only 34 seconds. Gap-bok was rearrested six days later and placed in a cell with a smaller food slot.

Return mail
In April 2006, Richard Lee McNair, a prisoner with multiple sentences for murder, managed to outwit the prison staff and the police at a federal penitentiary in Pollock, Louisiana, by escaping from prison after burying himself in the prison mail crate. The escape was the third one for McNair ever since he was prisoned for life in 1987. While serving his sentence he worked in the prison’s manufacturing area for a couple of months repairing torn and old mailing bags. He was arrested 18 months later in Canada.

Holiday jeer
In December 2007, two prisoners used sharpened wire and the handle from a steam pipe to chip their way out of cinder block cells at Union County Jail, New Jersey, jumping from the roof and scrambling over a razor-wire fence. Inmates Jose Espinosa and Otis Blunt covered the hole in the wall using magazine photos of bikini-clad women and stuffed their beds with decoys. And on their way out, they decided to spread some holiday cheer, leaving behind a note, “Happy Holidays!” with a drawing of a character making an obscene hand gesture. The two were arrested the following month.