Midnight Express to A Turkish Prison: The Billy Hayes Story

Today 

Today, on Crime & Entertainment, we have Billy Hayes. Billy was arrested and jailed for trying to smuggle 4½ pounds of hashish out of Turkey in 1970. Caught at the airport as he was about to board his US bound plane, he spent five years in jail in Turkey. He hatched a plan and escaped from prison and upon his return to the US wrote a book titled Midnight Express, which Oliver Stone turned into a movie.

Billy's Site https://ridingthemidnightexpresswithb...

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Felt this huge swell start rolling up under me. It's like, holy fuck, I feel like I'm on the back of this rising whale and I'm scared out of my mind. But far off in the distance I can see tiny red blinking lights and I head towards them. And I'm rolling and I'm stroking and I'm exhausted, but I am so driven. I'd I'd row a thousand fucking miles. I'm I'm free. I'm out here for the first time in five years. I'm free. I'm beyond the balance. I'm still fucked. I'm still in Turkey and I'm out in the fucking dinghy in the sea, but I'm free. I'm not worried about drowning. I'm not worried about drowning. I just don't want somebody to find me on the beach when I hit the beach. If I hit the beach, and I'm so I'm rowing and I'm stroking and I'm so exhausted. And the dinghy scrapes down on the sand. And the leg waves lifts and scrapes down again. And I look up through the dim morning light of this wild rugged coastline. And I realize I made it. It's the coastline at Asia Minor. I pulled a little dinghy up on the beach. I hug the bow. I love this little dinghy.

SPEAKER_02 3:09

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Crime and Entertainment. I got a different setup here because we're shooting here live in Vegas, and I'm with a good pal of mine, Billy Hayes. Billy, how are you doing, my friend? I'm live in Vegas, so I'm doing well. We're here at CrimeCon. Uh, you're actually local to the area, so you were kind enough to come out and join me for this interview. I'm glad to have you. My pleasure. Uh so Kenny Bayer, shout out Kenny Bayer had introduced us, and then I was here with Matt Cox, and I think you've been on his show as well. And he was like, Yeah, you got uh did you check out Midnight Express? And I said, Well, no, I've heard of it, but I never watched it. He said, Well, you might better watch it. I said, Why? He said, That's about Billy. And I was like, Are you serious? So I got up early this morning in Vegas, grabbed me a coffee, watch Midnight Express. That's a tough way to start your day. It is. That was a pretty, pretty violent movie. Um, but obviously that's only a small portion of your story, man. So we we got a lot of digging to do. So let's start from the beginning, man. Tell me a little bit about where you grew up, early life, and then we'll get into everything that led to that.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

And when I start rambling somewhere, stop me, focus me, because I get into this shit. I I'm I'm out here somewhere, so keep me down. Uh I was born in the Bronx in New York, April 3rd, 1947. So I'm 79 now, which is just staggering to me because I wake up, I think I'm 18, till I look in the mirror or start to move. Then I remember, oh yeah. 18 was a long time ago. But um I grew up on uh in the Bronx at about seven. Um, excuse me, my dad moved us out to Long Island to the suburbs because the city was getting to be a tough place and he didn't want me to go bad. Surprise, surprise, dad. Excuse me. Um I'd always wanted to be a writer. Jack London was my hero. I went to Marquette University journalism school. Uh the idea for me was to go out, have adventures, write about them, just like Jack. Um so uh in my senior year of college, a friend of mine came back from uh Istanbul and he had a little uh his dad was a distributor, alcohol and wine, and he came back and he had a little piece of hash, the best hash we ever smoked, hidden in his money belt. This was 1968, 60, 69, actually, when he came back. So we smoked this little bit of hash, and he said they it's cheap, it's easy, they sell it right on the street. And I was like, Really? And back then nobody got searched boarding an airplane. Uh I worked part-time at a hospital working with actually disturbed children on a locked ward, kind of a precursor to prison. But uh it was so tough emotionally. I wanted to help these kids, I wanted to make them better. Right. It you're not gonna make them better. I mean, I had no experience in this. I met a woman in a bar one night, she was older, like 30 or so, and she turns out she was the head nurse in the hospital. I'm hitting on her, and she's like, you know, stop Bob. I said, I'm looking for a summer job. It's college in mid-between. She said, Well, you what are you gonna do at a hospital? You have no experience with this. I said, I don't know, but uh I I get along good with kids. She said, Really? She had me come out to the hospital the next I started the next day as a child psychiatric aide. My job was to make friends with these disturbed, severely disturbed kids, which I I could do. But it was so emotionally difficult for me. Every time I'd get a break, I'd walk off the locked ward and take a walk around the hospital just to breathe and relax a little bit, and I walk past what turned out to be the cast room, and I saw a doctor dipping a roll of plaster tape into water, wrapping it around a patient's broken leg. And an idea came to me that literally changed my life. So two weeks later, I'm in a little Istanbul hotel room, and I've got two kilos of hash plaques, the best hash, Curtis hash, wrapped around my leg, and uh I'm dipping a roll of plastic tape into water, wrapping it around the hash as this rough, bulky, but beautiful white cast takes shape. I spend an interesting night uh smoking hash and watching the cast dry. And next day I'm clumping across the Istanbul airport, up to the customs guy who glances at my passport, looks down at my cast, asks me how I broke my leg. I tell him uh climbing on those beautiful ruins down south near Ismir. He says, uh, where's the doctor's note? The doctor's note.

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Oh shit.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

I tell him, you know, I must have lost it down at Ismir. Do I have to go all the way back down there with this broken leg to get another note? He looks at me at the long line, back at me, stamps my passport, waves me through onto the plane, where sympathetic stewardess reseats me in first class so I can stretch out my injured leg. Soon after I'm clamping across Kennedy Airport, approaching U.S. Customs. When I see a trail of little white flakes and realize my cast is crumbling beneath me as I approach customs, but they just stamp my passport, wave me through, yay, I made it. Not quite the flawless planning I was hoping for, but now I'm back and I'm selling hash to all my friends, making a chunk of money, getting laid a lot, talking about the summer of love, and generally confirming to myself my swashbuckling pirate attitude. I really believe this shit. That's how stupid I was. Me and my friend rode motorcycles across Europe uh after that, and uh we were on Ibiza in Spain and living there. I ran with the bulls in Pamplona that year. I got my picture in a Spanish newspaper where they describe a Rubio Melonudo, Spanish slang for a blonde hippie diving out of the way of a charging bull. It's like with my long hair and my lucky hat in my hand, same hat I had when I got busted. So I don't know how lucky it was, but I had it all through prison. Anyway, uh it was fun, and six months later I was broke again because I only made about $5,000 per trip, which, you know, back then maybe it was like 30 equivalent. But I was just spending it. I was stupid. I was young, I was 23 foot loose, fancy free. I got no obligations. I, you know, I got girlfriends, but I don't have a wife, I don't have kids. I could do what I like. And I like to just do what I was doing, which is gathering my notes for my book and traveling around. And the second time I went back and I went to the same guy I got the hash from. Um, he was a Kurd. Kurds, it's like an ethnic group within uh the Ottoman Empire at one point. And now it's just Turkey, and the Turks or uh Kurds are within Turkey. They're called Turks, but they don't accept that. You can't call a Kurd a Turk, though. No, no, we're not Turks, we're Kurds. What they did have was they lived in the eastern part of Turkey, up in the mountainous part, where the climate and everything was perfect for growing marijuana cannabis, and they had the best hash. I mean, literally the best hash. I talked to this guy, and you know, everybody sells your hash in Istanbul. You can buy it on the streets, sometimes it's just garbage stuff, sometimes it's pretty good, usually better than most of the stuff you can get back in the United States in 1969. But this hash was Kurdish hash. It was so good. So I I put the hash on, taped it to my body, and pulled on my t-shirt, my sweater, and I jumped on the Orient Express train, chugging west out of Istanbul, heading towards Paris. And six months later, I'm back in Istanbul third trip. I'm falling in love with this city, this magical city. I've I've been traveling the streets and I had a Turkish girlfriend. It was wonderful. The third trip, I felt so good. And this is, I mean, I'm invincible now. I'm 23 years old. I got cash in one pocket, hash in the other pocket. I just put on my clothes, taped the hash to my body, pulled on my jacket and stuff, put on my smile and walked straight onto the damn plane and rode another load of hash, my third now, to New York. And I should have quit while I was ahead because six months later, in October of 1970, uh I was back in Istanbul. The PLO had just hijacked and blown up some planes out in the Jordanian desert, beginning of all the airport security. Before this, nobody got searched getting on a plane before 1970 when all the stuff started. Right. And, you know, I went went out to the airport the day before. Since they'd just blown up some jets, I'm I'm gonna check. I figure airport security's got to be on alert. So I go out the day before and I look at people going through customs. You used to be able to like stand on the observation deck and watch people getting on the plane and wave to the none of which you can do now. But that's my plan. I'm gonna go watch people go through customs. I'm up on the top. I got a hat on, my dark shades, cool, casual, watching passengers go through. There's no metal detectors, nobody's getting body searched at customs. I figured a piece of cake. So I go back to this English girl studying belly dancing here in exotic, erotic Istanbul, instead of going up on the observation deck as I planned and watching people till they actually get on the plane. Not for the first time, a lovely lady leading me astray. Next day I breeze through customs with the normal two key loop tapes under my arms, and they keep us in the downstairs room for a while, which is a little odd, but you know, no problem. Bond, James Bond, just through customs. I'm feeling fine. And they put us on some old buses to take us out to the plane, which I get a little odd, but no problem. And that kindly old lady from Chicago sitting next to me, telling me about her grandson who's stationed here in the Air Force and how much she likes it. Istanbul, and the bus stops, and the Turkish cop gets on and stares down the aisle. I've stopped breathing, and he says, Out, out, women stay, men, out, out. And I look out the fucking windows at Turkish soldiers surrounding the plane with a long brown table set up in front of the boarding round. Cops on both sides were apparently they're gonna search people, getting on a plane. This is a problem. My first reaction, deny reality. This can't be happening to me. This can't be happening to me. While it's happening, I'm thinking, is it what it what it was? So I I drop to the floor, pretend I lost my passport, because I need time to think. And the kindly old lady from Chicago points out that my passport's right there in my top pocket. It's like, uh oh, yeah. Thanks. And I'm out the door. And all these men from the other buses are funneling down around the table, and there's nowhere to go. I I can't get back to the airport. I can't unstrap the shit from my body. I just have to balls it out and bluff my way onto that plane. I can't believe this situation. I'm getting myself into. So I move through the jumble of men and I and I circle around the first cop and I'm taking my yoga book, which I had in my backpack, I'm putting it putting it back in my shoulder pack as if as I'm sliding around the second guard, as if I've already been searched. I point and indicate first cop got me. And I got one foot up in the air towards the boarding rail. When this hand grabs my elbow, and the first cop just happens to finish with the passengerial. My cop catches his eye and nods immediately, do you search this guy? The cop shakes his head, no, and the grip on my elbow tightens as this nervous young cop out here looking for terrorists and and mad bombers realizes I you know, I just lied to him. So he pulls me aside and he gestures, lift your arms, which I do, and he starts to search me. And he hits the hard plaques under my arms. And he keeps going, and he hits the hard plaques taped to my stomach, and he keeps going down my legs. I find myself praying, please, Jesus, get me out of here. I will never do this shit again. But you know, this is a Muslim country. I'm praying to the wrong God. And this time the cop comes back up and he hits the hard plaques under my arms and he freezes, and his eyes widen, and my heart stops. You know those moments in your life when your whole fate is hanging in the balance. I knew it right then. I just I knew there's nothing to do. And then he freaked out, jumped back, pulls his pistol, drops to one knee screaming, Bamba, Bamba, and all the soldiers swinging their rifles down, and people are collapsing on the ground, and I'm frozen there, not breathing, waiting to be shot. All of this story, by the way, is part of this one-man show I've been doing for like six years around the world because people ask me questions like, What happened here? It's like I and I've been explaining it, and it turned out to be a show, which I did for six years until COVID shut us down. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 15:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:37

But uh did they think it was a bomb or did they recognize it? He thought it was he thought it was a bomb until he he the gun was shaken in my stomach and he lifted my sweater, and it took him a moment to realize it's not a mad bomber wired with explosives, it's some idiot out here smuggling hash. I could see the tension go out of his face. Hashish, hashes he calls out, pulls the gun from my stomach, so relieved. And all the soldiers put their rifles down, so relieved, and everybody's so relieved but me. This is the start of a very long five years. It's you know, it's bizarre that being busted and sentenced to life in prison was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to me. It it was terrible because I was prison and I caused so much grief to my family, which is by far the hardest part of jail. You know, I was young, I was 23 to 28, I was healthy, I'd been an athlete, I'd done some martial arts and I wasn't worried about the part of prison, everybody thinks, oh, that's gotta be bad. I can deal with all that. What I discovered, the hardest part is that every day my family, my mother's going to sleep every night with pain in her heart. Like that's hard. I mean, you know, I've I have such a wonderful family. And it was it was so good to me that the fact that I could be so selfish and so stupid and just not consider anybody else except myself. That was hard, realizing what I've just done to them. You know, bad enough, I just fucked my own life. But again, I'm a writer, I'm taking all this down, I'm making notes, I'm gonna be Jack London. But you know, every night I go to sleep thinking. My mom wrote me a letter one point saying, every night I go to sleep with a little pain in my heart from my son so far away. Whoo! 60 years ago I can barely get that out. I was telling this to Kenny the other day. I could I couldn't tell this fucking story. It's it's it's all so close. It's so far away, but it's so close. I'm the opposite of most guys who have been in jail. Most guys come out of prison, they do their time, they learn what they're gonna do, they get out, and they're gonna move on with their life. Uh they don't tell the whole world I was in jail for five or ten or twenty years, whatever. I didn't have that option. When I get off the plane to Kennedy, a hundred reporters were waiting for me. They they'd heard from the Turkish. Anyway, so I'm I showed up in the, I'm I'm in all the newspapers. I get off the plane, I'm to a news conference. Um, my dad is there with my brother. We didn't want my mom in the middle of that. And I do a news conference and I'd take the car out to Babylon where I grew up on Long Island, and uh, there's 20 more reporters in front of the house with lights in camera. I see my mom peeking out the door, wanting to come out, but she doesn't want to deal with this. Like, guys, guys, please let me see my mother. So I spent the first night at home, and my grandma made a roast beef, and my mom and my family, and it was just so incredibly wonderful to be back and to be among the people who love me most and to feel like I don't have to like have eyes in the back of my head all the time. Because you know, you do time in jail. I I even now it's real hard for me to sit in a room without my back to the wall. I don't like people walking behind me.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

It just Yeah, I've I've never been to prison, but I've a lot of people that I've interviewed that have been there, they have that same sentiment. They don't like any opportunities where anybody could be behind them. I like to sit the back to the wall. There's even a quote in a movie called Mystic River where Lawrence Fishburne's character says you can tell when somebody's done time because they've got this tension in the shoulders that never leave.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

That's so true. And you don't want your back exposed, and but after a while, what I learned was by by coming out and literally being forced as I stepped off the plane to talk about this. I'd I'd have been putting it off. I'd have been put off writing my book. I'd still be procrastinating about writing. I didn't want to talk about prison. I just I wanted to get home and see my family. But I also realized, you know, I owe a lot of money. My dad spent money five years in jail, and what am I gonna do? I'm a writer. I I I don't I can't get any other jobs. So the idea of doing the smuggling for the beginning, one of the ideas was uh adventure and I'll have a story to write. So this is what I did. I stepped off the plane at Kennedy. By the time I was home in Babylon, and we had the reporters at the house, and uh I was talking to literary agents. I met several of them, and I met an old uh avuncular kind of Mr. Chips kind of character, uh Julian Bach, who I just loved instantly. On the on his wall in New York City, when he is a picture of him running. I'm a marathon runner myself, is a picture of him running around uh the uh the lake in Central Park. So I knew I liked this guy right away. And I sat with him and he put me down. He he said, give me a sample. So I wrote like 15 pages or so. And he took it and I sat in the office and the lights coming through the window on Fifth Avenue. I hear the cars, and I'm being patient because I want him to love my writing. And again, this is what I did. I was at journalism school. I wrote so many things. I sent him in a uh Facebook uh not the boys' life and and something. I was sending in they'd send back these yellow receipts. I kept sending them in. I wanted him to love my writing. He said, Well, Billy, now we know we need a professional writer. I said, What are you talking about? I went to journalism school. He said, Yeah, yeah, yes, I understand, but he termed my style the hysterical subjective. He said, You write like from Rolling Stone and your immediate stone compadres. If you want to get a book out to reach a full market and make some money off it, you have to just tell the story. Calm the fuck down in your in your being and in the way it comes on the paper. So I had to really change what I was doing as terms of a writer and figure out what I'm doing. And it was wonderful. He said, uh, I got a guy I want you to work with. I said, I don't want to work with somebody, but I really did because I don't know where I'm gonna start. I I got busted here, I I escaped here five years later. I just have to fill in the fucking middle of five years, and there were so many characters and stuff, it was difficult for me to like focus. And I sat down with this guy who I love because he was very calm and centered, but he was just he was like my wife, which I found like he just never. Let up. Like my wife is just brutally honest. And she just never lets me get off the hook, which drives me crazy, but I so love and I so need. And he sat me down and we spoke into tape recorder for like two or three days. And then he got all that stuff transcribed. It's humbling to uh realize what you sound like. You, you, when it gets personal, I go to third person what I sound like when I'm rambling and I go off in the that direction, and I'm doing all that. So, but we took all that, we did it, made some notes, and he organized me, which is what I so needed. And we started here and we finished there, and in between we put goalposts of where we wanted to get to, and he assigned me, you need to write this chapter, you need to do this, we need to get here. And we come back. And after like about a month or so, this book had come together. It was, it was cre really, you know, I wanted to do it, I needed to do it. And once I started, I realized I have to do this. Just as therapy, I'd need to get this shit out. Because it's a lot of stuff when I started to remember and put down, I realized I I this stuff that happened in jail, I just put down here because I couldn't deal with daily life, which is what you got to deal with, and still deal with all of this emotional shit. So I just buried this stuff and kept it buried. But it was rumbling and the lid was cracking like this. And by the time I got out, there was so much just that emotionally I'd find myself, you know, I'd be writing and working, and then I'd have to go out and walk down the streets of New York, tears poor. I'm an emotional guy anyway, but tears pouring down my face because I'm getting into all of this stuff that I wanted to forget, which is what most guys coming out of prison, there's a lot of stuff they want to forget, and they try and forget it and they put it away. It doesn't go away. I got lucky being forced to deal with it because I brought it out. It forced me emotionally to deal with what I felt inside and what I'm thinking now. And that was wonderful therapy. And I'm still doing it. I'm doing it here now today. I did this one-man show around the world. I have so many friends say, Don't you just wish you could just forget all that midnight express shit? Why do you keep talking about it? I said, it's not even a question of forgetting it. I mean, I learned some really valuable stuff about myself and Gio. Very costly lessons. You don't forget those. You don't let them eat you up. But to not let it eat me up, I had to put it somewhere and I put it in types and I put it up, and then I was become an actor. And I discovered through an acting teacher who early on, it's Eric Morris, this acting teacher, who he sees like crazy and he forces the actors in his class, like he makes you do things. Be silly, be stupid, be angry. Let me see, and he has you do all these emotions to see how free you are with your emotions. And he'd find the ones that you were not free with, and he'd make you do things with those. And one of the things he said to me, I was doing all the stuff in the class, he said, you know, there was an exercise where you want the class to give you sympathy for something and you go around, give me the dime. It's like not a real dime, but and nobody was giving me the dime. He said, you know, nobody's giving you the dime. Why do you think that is? I said, I don't know. I don't give a fuck. He said, No, actually, you do. They don't give it because you're not letting it out. You're not letting us see the real stuff. You're just saying stuff, you're just covering it over. It's like, oh, fuck you. He said, No, fuck you. This is, and we started arguments, screaming like, I don't need this. He said, You need this class, like you need air. I'm running out of the acting class. Fuck you, fuck you. I get in my car, I drive two blocks and have to pull over because tears are running down my face, and all this shit is coming up from jail that I didn't want to deal with. But he made me deal with it. And he also made me realize this is your gold, G-O-L-D, as an actor, because that's what I was becoming. He said, a writer is one thing, yes, but as an actor, you need to be able to touch this stuff. You need to be able to work with this. You can't avoid it because you're going to be on the stage and that's going to come up and you're going to avoid it, which stops all of the free flow of acting. So becoming an actor was really therapeutic. And I did lots of theater as an actor and then as a director. I like to direct theater too. And that carried me through the 70s, the 80s, into the 90s. You know.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

I can speak to like I had a pretty traumatic situation happen in my personal life. And when it drug on for about five years before we finally, you know, come to a conclusion and I was able to kind of move past it. And I had a lot of people say, Well, I'm sure you probably just never want to think about that and get on with your life. And I think that is something that people probably think is the way to go when it's a traumatic experience. But when I started talking about it on podcasts as a guest, it became kind of what you're talking about. It became therapeutic. It is. You know, to express it. And at the same time, you could possibly give somebody hope that's battling a similar situation or heading to a similar situation. So there's ways to do that.

SPEAKER_00 26:48

Very much so. In fact, that's one of the pluses for me is I've had people read my books, I've had people see my my theater pieces. I I do a show, it's like 73 minutes. I stop and I just I sit there. I have to take some breaths, I got to drink some water, but I don't leave the stage. I just stay there and say, you know, who's the brave soul who wants to ask the first question? And then somebody asks, and then we saw, and I do a QA as an actor and a writer since I wrote the show, especially the first couple of weeks of the hearing their input was so valuable because someone would ask me a question. In my head, I'm thinking, yeah, I answered that, but obviously not enough in a way that made it clear to them. So I'd answer it, but I work on it later. So we can't, it's a little dangerous tinkering with the show by giving, getting in input from the audience, but it helped me a lot. And it was good for me after the show to hear what people had to say because I heard a lot about. Again, my initial hesitancy to do this was Billy Hayes Midnight Fucking Express. Everybody's heard this shit. They've heard it forever. I got friends who've like, but I and I I keep thinking they don't want to hear anymore. And I realize actually they do. And I I also know people related to my story, bizarre as it is, locked up in a Turkish rocking prison. But everybody's been there. Everybody's been in a real deep hole somewhere in their life, struggling to get out. You know, my story, I got busted, I got in, I got a couple of years prison. I was in there for a couple of years. I was supposedly scheduled to go home in 54 days. Right. Calendar, 56, 50, 54 days prior to going free. I've been in there almost three and a half, four years now to finish my sentence. The high court in Ankara, who decided they Richard Nixon, war on drugs, raising their penalties. Uh, they rescinded my original four-year, two months. I was originally sentenced to uh four years, two months, and these guys now uh had me come back and go to court again, and I would be resentenced to life in prison. It's like what?

SPEAKER_02 28:49

Those are some things I kind of wanted to talk to you about because in the movie, like I said, I just watched it this morning, so it's very fresh in my mind. In the movie, when you get in there, you your relationship with your dad is very good. He is supportive and he's trying to do everything he can to get you out. Now, I think probably one of the hardest things about your case is you're dealing with some people that are speaking a different language. In the movie, you even said, What did he just say when y'all are in the court in the beginning? Because they're they made a big deal about whether this was uh possession or uh what was it? Trafficking or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It carries a big difference in the big difference. So he tells you that you know you think you're gonna get in possession, which is a much lighter sentence, and it's gonna be good. Was that the consensus? You thought you were gonna get possession with this?

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Yes and no. It was one of the more difficult, frustrating parts of my experience is I never knew what was fucking happening. Because it was in a different language and I didn't speak Turkish at that time very well. Now I can speak it and I learned in jail. But you never knew what was going on, and laws are different in different countries. I didn't appreciate anything good about the states. I complained about the Vietnam War and then Vietnam and then the civil rights and women's rights, and I took all the good stuff for granted. Like uh innocent till proven guilty. A little different than Turkey. They assign you a percentage of guilt, in my case, 100%, and then you have to argue your way back to innocence. So I went into the court, and what I heard was because of Nixon and the war on drugs and Turkey wanting to show the U.S. and other people that they're they're pressuring Turkey, uh pressuring the whole world with this drug stuff. They, me and actually two American women who were busted a year or so after me, um, we all had our sentences raised. My sentence went from four year, four years, two months, to going back to the same court, the same judge who originally sentenced me to four years and two months, now had to, because of the High Court in Ankara, forcing him, he said, My hands are tied. Kalepshe, Lee, my hands are tied. He didn't want to issue this verdict. He said, I wish I'd retired before I had to issue this verdict. Like, wow. But he had no choice. His only prerogative is the High Court in Ankara demanded I get Muhabet, which is my original scent. That's what I have, Muhabet, which is life. But he could reduce it to 30 years, which he did. Thanks, I guess. 30 years, life for me, yeah. But he felt bad. You know, that the judge felt bad sentences in me. Like they mentioned that in the movie a few times that the judge really liked me. He did. The judge liked me the truth. The prosecutor, you know, screaming and yelling. But he also has, you know, the high court in Ankara demanded this is what he does. He's gonna do it. You know, he's not gonna argue or lose it, anything because of some idiot tourist, which is what I was. So they resent me, they brought me into court and they uh uh the judge sentenced me to life, which he reduced to 30 years, and then they uh the soldiers wrapped the chains around. I hate chains. Uh again, uh those zip ties and and handcuffs, they're bad. You hate them. But chains are weird. Chains are like atavistic. Chains are I I really don't like. They put these big chains on you and hook them up with a thing like that. So the the the soldiers putting the chains on me, and uh the American consul, my lawyer, my dad, everyone's offering me getch mislsen, which is the Turkish phrase for may it pass quickly. Getch mishelsen, getch mishelms. They're all telling me, getch mishelves, may it pass quickly, may it pass quickly. It's like, may it pass quickly? I just went from going home in 54 fucking days to spending the rest of my life in jail. May it pass quickly. But what happened was the escape switch slammed back on. I was trying to escape from the day I was busted at the airport. I had all sorts of plans. I ended up going to uh I discovered there's a clause in the Turkish law that says if you're judged to be crazy, I mean little literally mentally insane, they can't keep you in jail. But if you're that crazy, they don't let you on the street. They put you in this Bakakoi mental hospital, section 13 for the criminally insane. That was one of my first escape plans. I figure I could convince them to let me go to Bakakoy and spend time there. And uh Bakakoi says it's this old building. It used to be a barracks for the Sultan's Janasari troops back during the Ottoman Empire. Big, big, big park. And in this big park, there's a lot of buildings, each of different kinds of hospitals, big, big grounds. One of these little buildings in this big park, surrounded by these crumbling walls, was where they had put me, along with uh criminally insane. You gotta do some pretty bad stuff to be a criminal for the most part. You gotta do some really bad shit to be criminally insane. And everybody there was criminally insane. And I was going there to convince the doctors I'm one of them, because I want them to keep me there, because I know if I can be in that place, that's much, much easier to escape from than the locked up fucking prison I've been in for the last three and a half or four years, whatever it was, three years at that point. So I I bribed the prison doctor, everything, bakshish, everything works on a bribe. So the prison doctor became my friend and I bribed him, and he sent me to Bakakoy, and I went to Bakakoy for a couple of weeks for observation to get a crazy report because I wanted to stay there. And I uh most of my friends at the time wouldn't think that it would be too hard for me to get a crazy report until I got there and saw the competition. Oh my God. It was, I've been a lot, a lot of weird places in my life, nothing even came close to Bakukoi Mental Hospital. So I'm there and I'm trying to convince them I'm crazy and I'm walking the wheel in the base. Oh, you saw the movie, so you must have seen the war. That's all that was all pretty accurate. Alan Parker, he took a lot of grief for some of the stuff in the movie. And, you know, I'm the least objective of viewers, so I had some problems. But the man's brilliant. He made an incredible film. Oliver Stone, who wrote some of the shit in it that gave me problems, he changed my story, but he's still a brilliant fucking filmmaker. I got lucky because when I got home, again, I got off the plane. I next day I'm talking to an agent, and then we're writing a book, and of sudden the book's not even finished. And the first galley of the book has been bought by Peter Goober at Columbia in California, and they're flying me to California to make a movie. It's like, what? I was in jail eating beans like a couple of months ago. I'm going to California to make a movie. And they made the movie, and it was an incredible movie, and it hit. And the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1978. Which, you know, I'm I'm in the big theater, this huge theater, and people are in the tuxes and the costumes. And I'm kind of like shrinking down in the seat because I'm watching the image on the screen, and like I got the images in my head, and my memories in my head, and I got these pictures on the screen. It was really bizarre. And the film ended, and Brad jumped up in the air and clicked his heels, and then they stopped it. And the theater was like dead quiet. Peter Goober, the producer later on, I heard him do an interview. He said, Oh my god, it ended, it was dead quiet. We thought they hated it. He says, I'm getting the other producer, I'm hitting people. Let's get out the back door. And he said, and suddenly the place erupted. People were standing and cheering and screaming and crying. I'm like, going down under the seats because I can barely breathe. And Brad's lifting me up, and cameras, it's like it was so bizarre. They took me afterwards. We we went out to uh the big ballroom across the street in the at the at the palais, the festival, and I'm doing interviews and I mean people all around me in jail. You don't want to be the center of attention. It's usually not a good place to be. I got people all around me, yelling and screaming, and I know by this point because my book came out, and then the movie came out. And when the book came out, the Turks were really upset about my book. But you know what? You can't bitch much. The shit in my book is real. It happened. Everybody knows this, so you can't. The movie, that was another story. Oliver Stone wrote the screenplay, and there's a couple of things in the film. Like when I'm at the film festival across the street, I'm talking to Rona Barrett, who is one of the people who did the uh what do they call the interviewers back in the day. She was like the famous lady, and she'd talk to all the stars, and I don't know who does it now, but I'm talking to her, and the crowd is around me, and I'm I'm just I'm feeling so fucking uh nervous at this place, and I'm thrilled and so happy at the same time as I'm scared because I've seen guys get stabbed in the back a few times. It doesn't take much, and the knife is in. Like you don't see somebody the knife is in you three times before you realize you've even been stabbed. And like I got people all around me. It was such a bizarre feeling, and I'm wanting to get away, and then I I the people are dancing, and I look out across the floor, and I see this uh blue-eyed, blonde-haired angel moving through the crowd in my direction, and she puts her hand out. Wendy says, Oh, you being so romantic. No, this is exactly what happened. She put her hand out asking me to dance, and I was like, whoa. And then she took a step closer, and I took her hand, and we started to dance, and the whole night faded away from me. I was just locked into her, and we danced for a little while, and then the music changed, and she left, and I left, and I've been married to her for 47 years. I just knew at the moment this was it. She said, Oh, you didn't know that. I did. I knew at the moment she put me in her arms. Who I feel good. This is what I need. And then when she left, oh, I'm back and dealing with the crowd again. So soon after we did, like we were there for a day or two, and Brad Davis, the actor, and we all after the stuff were ending, we were all up in my hotel room at the Hotel at Cannes, and John Hurt was pouring vodka, and people were rolling stuff and smoking out of little bar duck glasses. You know, you take the piece of hash, you put it on a pin, you light the hash so the smoke goes up, and you got this chai glass with a little like this, and you put that over it, and so now the the smoke is filling in the little glass, and you tip it, take it from the glass like this. And we were all doing that, and then it was time for everyone to leave, and Wendy was leaving, and I I did one of these French kisses on each side, like this, and she stopped me. Oh my, she said, How about a real one? And she gave me a real one that was like, Whoa, Jesus. I knew this lady was so right for me. And I was right. I make mistakes, but sometimes I get a good pick. She was a good pick for me.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

Well, that's awesome. Uh Randy Quaid in there was was really good in that one. Oh, yeah. Poor Randy. Because I was a big fan of uh Randy Quaid. And I mean, I know he's people think he's gone off the reservation a little bit. I'm not so sure if he's quite off the reservation or if he might be a little bit on to something, but that's a that's another podcast and another story. Yeah. But in the movie, he comes with to you with the idea with the escape plan first, which two different methods, like a rooftop escape, and then one tunneling through and going under. And you're kind of against it because you're thinking you're close to your release.

SPEAKER_00 39:52

That was one of the problems I had. I never knew what my sentence wasn't official. When you get an official sentence in Turkey, it goes through courts and it goes to someone, and then it has to go through Ankara. The high court in Ankara has to give you a tostik, it's called like your official paper. Until you have that official paper, you're not really, you don't have a system. You don't have it in the system. You're locked in. So I was waiting for years for this fucking Tostik thing to arrive. Then I was waiting literally from the first day I got there, they were they were uh talking about amnesty. It's like they do amnesties in Turkey. And that was a big thing, especially in prison. Every day there's an amnesty, every month is an amnesty. Yeah, the new election, and the the somebody came on the radio and said to all of those people incarcerated, you will be home in a warm nest tonight. You know, all just bullshit. But the prisoners here, you gotta believe it, you love it. So I I never knew when I was getting out, and my sentence kept being changed, and it never, even when it got down to four years, two months, which is 50 months in jail, even when it got down to that as my official in big quotes, because I don't have the official fucking paper, it it there was an amnesty. Something happened. I think there was an election or something, somebody won. And so they were giving an amnesty to all the prisoners. But if it came, I wouldn't go out because I've still got my, I haven't gotten my Tostics. So I wasn't sure where the fuck I was at any point. My mom was thinking he's coming home now, he's not coming home now. Then when we got down to the 54 days, she, like me, was marking it off her calendar. We we knew I was going home. Right. And then suddenly I'm looking at the rest of my life in prison. And so that definitely kind of prompted you to you need it, you needed to. Prompted me to go. I've got a couple of trains running. I've got the uh the train on the far out track. There was the United States government train, which they were trying to set up a prisoner exchange treaty and bring me and other foreign prisoners home. They were doing that. They started doing it. I had another lawyers who started to do that treaty. They couldn't get it done for me, but a couple of years later, it did come. In fact, it's still in progress where Americans in foreign prisons can be exchanged for foreign prisoners in the estates or just to let people out. I was waiting for one of those trains. I was waiting for the amnesty train to let me out. I was waiting for the escape train, why I went to the madhouse and try to go. But after a while, it just it just like I can't wait anymore for people. I'm, you know, my dad's trying so hard, and I got the American Council waiting, and my fucking life is passing, and my teeth are falling out of my head. And after like almost five years inside, I one way or the, I was ready to go. One way or the other, I'm out of here. If they shoot me and kill me, I'm dead, but I'm not getting caught again. So I knew the best way for me. I did the madhouse that didn't work. I did some of the paperwork, we tried this. I I ended up going, getting myself transferred to Imrali Island Prison, which I'd learned about. Again, I had maps. I knew everything. I knew where the rivers were. That's all you do inside. All I did was think about escaping. There was a couple of guys who you could talk to about it, but you know, everybody talks. Nobody really does anything. I ended up getting a map of Greece, and I learned the best escape routes near the Greek border. Um, I had a knife that I stolen from the canning factory. I had a rope at one point. We used to play volleyball out in the yard, banging volleyballs around. One day the volleyball net disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to it. I I'd gotten it at night, broken it apart, wrapped it up, so I got this really good, tight piece of volleyball net, and there's an old broken locker. Everything's broken at all, but I got this stuffed under the one of these broken lockers down at the end. I got a file for the bars. But the big difference between planning an escape and actually trying it is a huge abyss of pain and fear because first off, if you get caught, they beat the shit out of you if they don't kill you. And they your sentence, whenever you're sentenced, whatever sentence you have in Turkey, if you have a three year sentence, one year goes off as good behavior time. As they do this in most prisons, it's an incentive for the prisoners not to fuck up in jail because you lose your good time. So it would for me, it would have been, you know, 30 years, 10 years off. I'd have gotten 10 years, you're still trying to escape. But I just knew I You know, I had a friend who got caught escaping. They they beat him just so fucking bad. He ended up in a hospital with a hernia and just smashed up face. All kinds of bad shit happened. I'm not gonna have that happen. I'm gonna get shoot me okay, but I'm not going back to jail. So I got I knew if I could get transferred to this island prison. It was 26 kilometers off the coast uh in in the Sea of Marmorra. And again, I'm a swimmer, I'm an ocean lifeguard, I'm a swimmer, that's all I do. If I could get to that fucking island, it would just somehow beating the sea and getting to the mainland, and I'd get out of there. I just needed to get out of this prison. That's what I thought, at least. So I got myself transferred. I bribed a prison doctor, my good friend, bribed a big time, and he arranged for a transfer. Then I got my my oh, my Tostick finally came. So I have a good time. When you get your official paper in jail, all prisoners are allowed to uh they have certain privileges. Once you're official, like you can get transferred to other prisons and such. So I got my Tostick. So I have the I I I asked for it to be transferred to this Emralie Island prison out in the Sea of Marmor. Everybody said, You don't, you'll never get that. That's like half-open jail, that's for big gangster prisoners who have served their time, and now they get in, and it's nice. It's an I we work, there's guards with guns, but you work on the island. You carry fruit comes from the mainland to this island, and we carry it up to the uh canning factory, and then we make it and they get the can, cheap labor, and we make the can. So every day there's boats coming and going from this island, not a lot of boats, but fishing boats and the canning stuff. Incredible fruits in Turkey. So I knew if I can get to the island one way or the other, I'm gonna get off the island and I'm gone. And I was right. I I started working there. I worked in a canning factory for a while in the beginning. They were picking stems off strawberries and putting them new things. I ate so many strawberries, I shit like a goose. I worked on a on a line, putting lids on cans, but I know what I wanted. I I got myself transferred to a job nobody wanted, which was carrying these heavy 50 kilo sacks off the boats that come from the mainland. Take the fruit off, load the cans on, and then they leave because they're not allowed to spend the night in the harbor because it's a prison island. But one day at lunch, I'm I climb a hill above the village. It's sort of a horseshoe-shaped island and an old what must have been a little village in the day. Now they turned into a uh a prison. I I climb a hill above the village and I'm looking down it, and there's a big dark clouds and the storm brewing, blowing, blowing, coming in, and I see that the all these little boats that come into the harbor, they each have a little wooden dinghy tied behind it. You know, at first I thought about swimming. Again, I'm a swimmer, but 26 kilometers, I've been in jail five years, that's a long way. But this little dinghy, I knew if I can get one of these fucking dinghies, I'm out of here. And I arranged for long stories. Uh at night you get locked down at nine o'clock, uh, all of the Kappadai, meaning the big the gangster prisoners, you know, the guys who live like kings in jail. They have people who shine their shoes. And if you got money, you'd live like a king anywhere, but especially in jail, because most people in jail don't have money. So these guys would come down to the accounting shed, this little shed down here with a couple of nerdy guys at adding machines. You know, they didn't have this these days. This is 1969, I did these adding machines, and these Kappadaies would party after night count when everybody else is locked down. They'd drinking Rocky and slapping down dominoes and smoking joints. I arrange with the head Kappadai. Again, you go into jail, you find who's the baddest guy in there? Who's the toughest guy here? Who's the guy that I want to be my friend? And so, you know, you try and make friends with. I've made friends with the toughest guy in there, and I'm an American, and he's talking to me about my dad. And my dad, does your dad have a factory? Do you hire people? And and uh, you know, uh, you're a hash smuggler. We could get a boat and bring a whole lot of hash. This he's talking to me about, we could bring a whole lot of hash to New York. He was right. I should have done that. I was smuggling two fucking kilos at a time. I needed to be more ambitious. I needed to have Bruce with his big boat loading on hundreds of kilos of this shit. I needed my wife who would have pushed me to be more ambitious, even though it was drug smuggling. But uh I get I get lost now. The boat. Yeah, we're getting the dinghy land. I yeah, yeah. I know that if if I can get one of these dinghies, I I can get to the far shore. So I waited until a storm came. A couple of days later, the everything blew up and it was dark, and I I could see it. I during work, I'm I'm still working now, I'm carrying stuff back and forth, but the storm kind of knocked everything down, and I could see the boats in the harbor. Instead of the boats that came in early, they're locking down and anchoring up. They're not going out because the storm is getting too bad out of sea. So they're gonna spend the night in the harbor. And I went down to the canning, got finished and stuff, and at nine, just before nine, when people all got locked into their cells at nine o'clock for bed check. I I'm past the night betcha because I've arranged to be with the Kappadai down in the uh accounting shed. The head Kappadai is like a big time guy. He literally tells the guards what to do. He's one of those guys. He takes a hundred lira note and says, you know, get us some cigarettes or whatever. Uh he arranges I could that I can be in the accounting shed after night count. So that gets me out past the bed check, which means it'll be morning before anybody really knows I'm gone, because the next bed check is going to be in the morning. The guards usually, when I stay in the accounting shed, when I come back in an hour, whatever it was, the guards have to open up and let me in. But sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not, sometimes I have to go find them. It's raining, I know they're under an umbrella. They don't give a fuck. I know I've got till morning. So I hid in this big, I I said, I told the guys in the place, I don't feel so good. They said, Have some hash, you know, no, thanks. Have some rocky, no, no, thanks. I'm just feeling sick. I'm gonna go back to the barracks and rest. Instead, I go down to the harbor and underneath this little overhang, I climb up into the lip of this big empty concrete vat used to hold tomato paste. And I drop to the bottom and I'm huddled up and I'm listening, wanting to make sure there's nobody else out there, listening for footsteps. You know, there's guards that patrol here, even the night. It's it's a prison island, but they still have guards patrolling. There's a dock out into the water with uh a flash big uh light that spins around, the guards out there with their machine guns, but nobody's looking. It's fucking raining. This is an island. The people who are on this island, the prisoners, are like they're here because they've got short time left and they want to have a nice place. I mean, the island was so much nicer than the fucking lockdown barracks that's Samajala's that but in for years. There's this light and sea, and so these guys, they nobody wants to fuck up when they're on this island and get kicked off and get sent back to the prison. So everybody's pretty chill. There's not a lot of fighting, there's not a lot of stabbing and shit going on because nobody wants to fuck up the situation. So this guard, you know, he he let me come down and I was able to go from there and I got out, got down to the water, and I I saw I tried to actually I I climbed, I guard came by, I I heard footsteps. I was starting to climb over the lip and I heard footsteps. It's a rocky beach. I and I dropped down to the bottom and I heard, I heard, I heard this rocky, and and then suddenly I I I hear I see a flare and I smell smoke. The guard is standing inside, just on the other side of my wall. He's got the lid over him, lighting a cigarette. He's right next to me. I can I can smell the smoke from his fucking cigarette. I'm thinking stone, inanimate object, no human vibrations. And uh the guard walks off and I climb the wall and I get down into the water and I flatten into the mud when the searchlight comes along the beach, and then I slide into the cold waves breaking. Again, I'm a swimmer. I'm not worried about the swim bar. I go out past the first couple of boats, there's boats, and they got the little, and I climb into the one little dinghy and collapse in the bottom. And I'm shivering there, and I'm trying to catch my breath, and uh the the diggy is pulling against its tether rope, and I get my knife that I stole from the candy factory and start cutting the knife on this on this fucking rope, and it doesn't, it doesn't want to cut, and I'm ready to gnaw this fucker apart in my teeth when the rope snaps and the dinghy swirls away back towards the rocks and the guards with the guns. And I grab the oars and discover they don't have oar locks on the Turkish prison, on on uh on uh on the Turkish rowboats here. They've got a big pretzel of rope around the oar, and somehow, and a peg of in the rail, somehow you put it in front or behind. I I figure it out, but I'm out here tilted back and forth, and panic is fucking right there, and I have to slow it down. And I dig the oars in and the dinghy stops drifting, and then slowly, slowly, I turn it around and it starts moving out of the harbor, away from the prison, and I'm concentrating, keeping the rhythm and keeping the stroke, and keeping the rhythm, and keeping, and when I look up, I realize I'm past the last of the boats into the open sea. I'm free! I almost lost an oar. I put it down. I get it together, I put my back into it, and I head off into the swirling rain-filled darkness. I'm using the again, horseshoe shape. I'm using the lights of the prison as my guide because I know if I lose the lights, I know, or again, I know everything that can be known. I I know the water is coming down from the north from this direction. It's swirling around the island, it's gonna go this way, down towards the Dardanelles. And I that's why I have to pull harder on my right oar eventually to keep it going, because I know I need to get a pretty straight line from Imraeli Island out to the tip of Asia Minor. Because if I miss it, I'm gonna be swept south down the sea, down to the Dardanelles. I don't want to be there. So I'm stricking and rowing out here, and at one point, uh I I felt this huge swell start rolling up under me. It's like, holy fuck, I feel like I'm on the back of this rising whale and I'm scared out of my mind. But far off in the distance, I can see tiny red blinking lights, and I head towards them. And I'm rowing and I'm stroking and I'm exhausted, but I am so driven. I'd I'd row a thousand fucking miles. I'm I'm free. I'm out here for the first time in five years. I'm free. I'm beyond the balance. I'm still fucked, I'm still in the turkey, and I'm out in the fucking dinghy in the sea, but I'm free. I'm not worried about drowning. I'm not worried about drowning. I just don't want somebody to find me on the beach when I hit the beach. If I hit the beach and I'm so I'm rowing and I'm stroking and I'm so exhausted, and the dinghy scrapes down on the sand and the leg waves lifts and scrapes down again, and I look up through the dim morning light at this wild, rugged coastline and realize I made it. It's the coastline of Asia Minor. I pull a little diggy up on the beach, I hug the bow. I love this little dinghy. I probably should have got something and bashed a hole in it and sunk the fucker because they actually found it the next day. They found a diggy abandoned on the beach because they this let me see. The American council was informed by the Turks that uh William Hayes is missing from Imralee Island Prison. A rowboat has been found on the opposite shoreline, and we don't know where he is. I later I talked to the council, who actually was a friend of mine. He said, they told us this. We didn't know what to make of it. You know, I was worried for you. Did you did they drown you? You're on the island, did they shoot what? I didn't know what happened, and uh I said, yeah, I'm sorry I couldn't inform you before before I left, but I didn't have much time to send you a telegram. Um, but he said, we were worried about you, and we contacted your family and kind of told them that you were missing and they didn't know what was happening. But later on, my dad said, you know, I just knew you had a plan. Thanks for the confidence, Dad, but the plan was like, just get the fuck out of here and don't get caught. He said, I knew you had a plan and I I knew you were gonna make it. Makes me cry even thinking about that after I would put them through. But he was right, I had a plan and I made it. And I got to the beach, and I again I knew I need to make my way up the coast near Mudania, this little town, and I knew I need to make my way up the winding coast coastline. Again, this is Asia Minor. I need to get back to Istanbul and then back to Greece. Because I knew if I could if I could swim across the Maritza River, which I can do, swimming, but if I can get across the Maritza River, it separates, it comes down from Bulgaria, it separates Turkey from Greece. And I know the Greeks would never send me back to Turkey. They've been enemies for 5,000 years, 2,000 years, whatever it is. So I'm making my way from Istanbul. I got a bus. And uh actually, I don't know how how long you need to do this. I'm good. You stop. Okay. Yeah, no, we're gonna go. So I make a way, bro. I make my way. Uh let's see, the uh we go we go up the coast, I'm in a bus. The guy puts me in a bus, I'm in the bus with these sweaty peasant farmers, and I'm I'm against the dark, dirty window of this bus, and we're winding up this m mountain road going up to Bursa, the big town up the coast, and uh these all these sweaty peasant farmers, they got onions and fruit and shit powed on the roof, they're all uh sprinkling themselves with a little bottle of scented water, like that helps. And the bus driver, he's telling stories, he's winding around these roads. I'm looking down over the fucking edge. But we make it to Bursa, and then I'm on another bus, and I'm heading north and west along the coastline, and late in the afternoon I see far off in the shimmering distance the rising minarets of Istanbul. And then I'm on the higher high arcing bridge of the uh the Yenikopru Bridge, and the the dark, rushing water of the Bosphorus is far beneath us, crossing from Asia back to Europe. I go to a little hotel where a prison friend of mine, Wolfie, is working as an assistant manager of this hotel. He'd been in jail for a bunch of years. He spoke great Turkish, he was he'd become a Muslim, and he owed me just a big favor from, you know, in jail. Sometimes people pay what they know for favors, sometimes they don't. I just thought he would do this, and we'd we'd had some letters back and forth. And he owed my, he I saved him from a real bad beating once in jail. And he was the kind of guy I know he'd he'd cover up for me. So I knew if I can get to this hotel, I'd have him hide me after a week. We get some false papers. I slip out of the country. And I get to the hotel, and the little hotel manager says, Oh, Wolfgang, no, you just missed him. He lived yesterday, Afghanistan. Like, oh no, fuck. That's the end of plan A. I have a backup plan B, but now I'm out wandering the streets, kind of numbed and dazed, and still blown away by sights and smells of women and hair and dogs and perfume. Hair. I got blonde hair and a blonde mustache back then. I go to uh Sierrank Boya, that's black hair dye. I go to a drugstore, buy some Sierra Rink Boya, and I check into a really funky little hotel down by the waterfront. And the the the guy down there he said, uh, you have bags? I said, uh, no, I lost them. He said, You have a passport? I said, No, my passport was in my bag. How much is the room for the night? 200 lira. Maybe it was a hundred at the most. 200 lira. It's like, good. I give him the 200. He lets me take the room. No passport, no luggage. It everything works like that. It's turkey. Well, the whole world works like that. You give somebody money. But I knew especially here, this kind of stuff. So I spend the night in this, I get in this little room, and I spent the night in the room, and uh, I took the black hair dye that I bought out in the street, and I got this uh gooey paste that smells like uh cat piss, and I got this rug and rag, and I'm I'm putting it in, I'm rubbing it in my hair, and my hair looks lanky and black, and I put it in my mustache. The hair looked bad, but at least it was passable. The mustache, it looks so phony. It looked like this big chunk of licorice on my upper lip, and I got this. No, I it was so bad I went out and bought a razor and shaved it off. Now I got this lanky black hair, this kind of raw space under my lip, all raw, outlined in black. I'm a mess. I collapse into bed. I'm just desperate for sleep. Actually, when I got to the room, the first thing I did was check the little window out back for the jump to the alley, and I propped a chair against the door. Then I dyed my hair. I collapse into bed. Um, I'm waking with any creak. If I hear footsteps on the stairs, I'm out the back window. It was, I didn't get much rest. And by the time the sun's coming up, I'm on a bus and I'm heading towards Edirne. Again, I know where I want to go and how to go there. You go down to Istanbul, you get a bus. It takes you to Edirna, it's a couple of hundred kilometers west on the uh Moritza River. But again, it flows from Bulgaria, separates Turkey from Greece. And I know if I can get there, if I can get to that river, and then go a little, actually a little south from when I get to Adirna, when the bus lets me off. I go south past a couple little towns into this kind of marshy open borderlands, which I know that's where I need to get to to be able to swim the river. And again, I don't care how fast the river is, again, I'll swim anywhere. I'm ready, I'm so close to getting out. Desperate men do desperate things. I was so desperate, but I was also, for the first time in a long time, confident. I mean, I know at any moment things could go wrong, but I'm here. I'm fucking free. I'm out on my own. Nobody's telling me what to do. Like, that's a that's an interesting feeling to have people telling you what to do 24-7 all the time. Nobody's bugging me about anything. I'm on my own, and I know I just get to this river. So the bus eventually makes the makes it to Adirne, and I get out and I go to a like a really busy cab stand, and I find this long-haired Turkish kid, and he's got an old uh blue Buick. They used to have all these old American cars in Turkey, all 40s and 50s, very cool American cars back in Istanbul, back in the day. So I got he's got this old blue Buick, and I I tell the kid, I'm I've been camping with some friends south of here, near the river, because I know the river's where I need to get to, uh, and I've been separated. And could you take me there? He says, Where you learn Turkish? I tell him uh in prison in Istanbul. For hashish? Yeah, you want to buy some hashish? No, no, no, I don't want any hashish. I just need to get to the campground. He drives south and we pass some little villages and he stops at one like a bus stop, and people are there, and he yells out to some people for directions to the campground. And I see a guy with a full-page newspaper. He's got a full-page color drawing of this muscle-bound guy. I should look like this guy with a knife cutting a rope on a dinghy in a stormy sea. On the fucking front page of the newspaper. Like, go, go! I tell the guy. He drives south, and we stop at another little place and he yells us to some people on the wooden porch of a taverna for directions, directions to the campground. And this big guy in a uh suit with a tie hanging open and a beer bottle in his hand saunters down the steps. He's an off-duty cop. He leads in the window. I can smell the beer on his breath. You know, no fucking campground here. I'm telling the kid, go, go. And we go, and then the road kind of peters out, becomes dirt, and then the dirt just it stops. The kid stops. He won't go any further. It'll hurt his car. I offer him the last of my Turkish money. I still got some American money, but I don't need this Turkish money anymore. I don't want to have to spend it anywhere. I offer the kid more money. I tell him, I know the campground is just ahead here somewhere. And he takes the money and he drives a little ways, and the road becomes dirt, and then it stops at the edge of a dry cornfield. I get out and I stand on the front bumper of his car and I'm looking west at this crimson sun setting in the distance in the dark rolling hills, and I know the river is down there somewhere. I can't see it, but I know it's down there. So I I thank the kid and I offer him uh like a alaqurasun, like, and he returns a la Quran God be with you, God be with you. He returns Allah Qurasan. And then he actually tries to talk me out of it. He says, No good, tourist alone at night, here, danger. Like, yeah, thank you. He drive, he drives away, trailed in a plume of dust, and I drop down into the corn, waiting for the sun to set. And I know if I can make it over these next couple of ridges of the hills somewhere, I know I'm gonna find the river, and I wait and wait and wait, and then the sky gets all dark, and then I see the little blue stars twinkling, and I start moving out of the corn, up over these hills, trying to trying to make my way quiet, but the stones are skittering out from under my feet, trying to get to the river. I can see far off in the distant hilltops flashlights blinking on and off on these distant hilltops. These are soldiers patrolled. This is a very tough border, the Turkish and the Greek border. There's soldiers patrolling on the in the weeds and the trees. I gotta be really quiet out here. I make my way over these hills and up and down. I'm looking for the river, and at one point I drop down into a drainage ditch beneath the beneath the ridgeline. And I'm all huddled down there and I'm catching my breath and oh, just relaxing a little bit. And I start to crawl out of the drainage ditch, and I hear singing. I drop down into the ditch, and these two Turkish border guards stroll along the top of the ditch above me, singing these little folk songs. It's Bairam, it's Hira holiday time, and they're all celebrating. They're so close I could reach up and grab a fucking ankle. But again, I'm a stone in the mud, no human vibrations. And by the time the singing fades and the frogs start croaking in the ditch again, I come up out of the ditch, over the ridgeline, and down the other side, and more trees and bushes, and and the ground starts to get muddy. Muddy, muddy is good. I like muddy. And I think I see something glint, a metal onto the right, and I go in that direction. I see tanks crouched down in the woods. These fucking Turkish tanks crouching down. There's like, no way to move around the other direction, more trees, more bushes. The ground's getting muddier, the branches are whacking me. And at one point, the branches open, and there's I can see it, hear it more than even see it. This black, rushing water in front of me. And I start to move in up to my knees and up to my waist. I'm ready to swim when suddenly the water goes down and it comes up to my waist, and I'm across, and I made it across. But it just can't be that easy. And it's not. I'm on a little narrow island just off the coast. I push the bushes aside. There's the real river rushing down from the Bulgarian mountains to the distant A G and C and on the other side, freedom. At least I think it's freedom. The river's shifted, the borders changed over the years, but I'm so close. I I collapsed in the riverbank, catching my breath a little bit, catching my courage a little bit. I'm picking stickers out of my feet because I took off my shoes on the other side of the border at one point, thinking I there was I thought I heard dogs. That freaked me. Not fucking dogs. I took off my shoes and socks, I buried them right at the base of this tree. They can smell these, you fucking dogs. Get your noses blown out. I jump in a tree and I climb out a couple of branches and I drop down and I scurry away. But now I'm barefoot. My feet are getting all chewed up. I don't care. I don't care. So close. So I'm on the riverbank and I know it's time to go. And I kind of just give one one last little look to the sky. Just in case. I was raised a Catholic, but me and the church were so far away of puberty, but you never know. I'll take everything I get just in case. Just get me across this fucking river. And I drop into the into the water, and the current sweeps me away, and I'm I'm breaststroking. I'm trying not to make noise because you know, whether it's a Turkish bullet from this side or a Greek bullet from that side, you're dead. So I don't want to make noise. And then I just said, fuck this. I'm not gonna drown. I'm kicking and stroking, and my my knee hits a rock and I brace against the current and I drag myself up on this this muddy riverbank and collapse on my back, staring up at the stars. And this wild giddy burst of joy bursts out of me. Now I'm uh I'm sleepwalking. I'm cold and I'm tired, and I'm I'm I'm still not sure where the fuck I am. I don't want to go up to the first guy and have him be a Turkish border guard. So I'm wandering through the woods in the night and I'm staying off the road, I'm in the trees and stuff. And at one point I come out of the out of the woods to a little dirt road. I know I shouldn't be on it, but it feels so good on my feet. And I think I see a farmhouse and the dogs come barking out of me. I rush away from the dogs, and I'll get back in the woods just past that little wooden. I don't even notice it. I'm almost on like a wooden kiosk, and a bayonet slashes down in front of me. And this would happen. People stick a bayonet in your face, you do this and stand there. And this this guy yells something, and I don't understand him. And he yells again, and I realize I don't understand him. And I speak good Turkish, which means he's speaking Greek, which means I made it. I collapse on the ground, this big shit eating grin on my dirty face, and the cops blowing the whistle, and the other soldiers come with their guns, and this captain guy sticks his pistol in the light. He says, Who are you? Who are you? I'm an American, I just escaped from Turkey. They kept me in a little room in the woods for 12 days while the Greek government figured out what to do with me. I know they're never going to send me back to Turkey. Not after almost five years in jail for two kilos a pot. But first morning, this Greek military intelligence officer comes in and he's he's he speaks great English, bushy eyebrows, these piercing brown eyes. He starts asking me all this stuff. It's like, wait, wait, wait, stop, stop. People have been pushing me around telling me what to do for five years now. I'm an American citizen. I know my rights. I know my rights as an American citizen. He blow some smoke. He said, Let me tell you what your rights are, kid, blowing the cigarette bags. We find you come out of a military zone, complete military. Forbid, forbid. You got no papers, you don't have a shoes and socks. We could arrest you for coming into the country illegal. We could take you and throw you back to the Turks across the river. We could take you out in the woods and shoot you. Nobody knows. Or you can shut up, cooperate, and we send you home. Like, well, in that case, what do you want to know? He asks about the insignia on the uniforms of the soldiers on the island and about the radar base on top of Imray, about the tanks I saw in the woods. He takes out this topographical map. You can see anthills on it. I show him, here's where I think I saw the tanks, here's where I think I crossed the river. And he says, You're a lucky man, William. So yeah, yeah, I know. He says, No, you don't know. We think all this land mined. Oh, mined? Holy shit. I got home. My old grandma heard this. That I was walking on this minefield, and she said, I used to go to church every Sunday and I would light a candle for you, and each one of those candles I lit was one of those bombs in the ground. And that's why you didn't step on them. It's like great. From that day on, every time I see my granny under Lee, it says, Keep lighting those candles, Granny. I need them. But uh oh god, I miss my grandma so much. I miss my family. Yeah, well, I was without them for five years. My dad came one or two times to visit in the beginning and then once in the middle, and then he was there when my sentence got changed. He was standing behind me. I know that that broke his heart. See, uh I talk about this stuff and it's almost like it's it's now. It just hits me. One of the things I wanted to talk about here, I've got this new book I just did.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:09

It's called one second before we get a new boat. What did they finally do?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:13

Who? The the Greeks, because the options they kept me in a little room in the in the in the woods there for 12 days while they figured out what to do. The American council came out, brought me some food and clothes and books and a pair of his own sneakers, because I got no sneakers that are in the other side of the border. Um, and they ended up they did the best thing they could do. They deported me as being a bad influence upon the youth of Greece. Uh-same charge against Socrates. I thought, wow, that puts me in some nice company. Yeah. I just don't drink any hemlock. But uh they did that, and then the uh my dad uh sent some money and uh we got a new passport. I they took me out into the street. I've got, in fact, it's on the passport I have, I believe.

unknown 1:11:56

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:57

I got lost. I got stolen in England. Black hair, the black hair that I dyed myself in the hotel room on the on Turkey. By the time I got back, they took a photo of me. I've got the fast passport with the black hair. They bring me out to uh the airport at uh Thessalonica. I catch the first flight, which is going to Amsterdam. I thought, if I'm gonna be free anywhere in the world, it'll be Amsterdam. And I did. I flew to Amsterdam and got off the plane like any normal passenger, and people were waving, and I took the bus into the city, and it was just I'm I'm amazed. It's like tripping 24 hours a day when I got home without any acid, which I used to take a lot because I liked acid. But I'm taking, I got on the bus and the bus stops and leaves us off in the middle of Amsterdam Street and the cobblestone streets, and people are riding and clicking the little bells on their bikes, and women and dogs and hair, and it it was surreal. I wandered down the street for a while until I heard some uh funky Wilson Pickett music. Mustang Sally, do, do, do, do, and I wandered into this little hotel bar, and it's bar made with these big boobs pouring, pouring beers for everybody, you know, no you're about a slow. I ordered a beer. I don't even drink beer, but I wanted to watch her bend and pour. I drank uh some of the beer while Wilson Pickett sang Mustang Sally. Uh, then I had an order of peach pancakes and a strawberry ice cream soda. It was the most amazing thing I've ever eaten in my life. It was so good. The waitress came over. I do it again. So I had two orders of pancakes, two peach pancakes, and then I went out wandering the streets of Amsterdam, which these these back roads by the canals, they've got these little picturesque picture windows with neon lights in them, and all these beautiful half-naked women lounging in the in the on the sheets and beckoning you in with their bodies. I I walked down the street. I hadn't been with a woman in five years. I I didn't even want to go in. I was at orgasmic levels of amazement, just looking at them. They're so unbelievable. Men, all you see is men day and night, and men are dirty and sweaty and they don't clean up. These women were in silks and satins. But you know, they realized quickly that I'm just gawking and not buying. They would come to the window, smile sweetly, close the drapes, and I'd move to the next window. It was amazing to wander the streets and just be free in at night, because you're never out at night in jail. So to be out at the nighttime and oh man, I love it. And uh next day I went to um downstairs. There was a clip shop, uh hair place down in the street level of the hotel I was in. And uh I got my hair, which used to be blonde and now it's black, uh dyed, cut short and dyed blonde again. And I wander out into the wondrous Amsterdam morning, and the first thing I come to is the Reeks Museum, and I walk in and there's a painting up on the walls, a Van Gogh painting, huge painting of it's called Prisoners Exercising, and it's a group of prisoners walking around a circle in a stone courtyard, and in the foreground of the painting, looking out at the viewer, is this blonde-haired prisoner. I just dyed my hair blonde, is this blonde-haired prisoner staring out at the viewer, staring out at me as I stare back at him. And it was the most amazing feeling for me. I I looked at that for a little while, and I knew what he felt like behind his eyes. I could like flip into the painting. I'm looking out at myself, standing there on this this morning. It was kind of surreal and acidy. But I knew I was out, I knew I was free, and I wandered out of the museum and spent another day in Amsterdam, and then flew back to New York and got off the plane at Kennedy Airport, and there was a guy in the front saying, uh, Mr. Hayes, Mr. Hayes, I'm thinking the police. I'm gonna get I hate fingerprinting, I hate that ink. And I said, Yeah, that's me. He I said, You're with the police. He said, No, no, I'm I'm with the Pan Am representatives. Follow me, please. So like I followed him, and we went out a different door, and we went down some, I didn't even go through customs, which clicked in my mind for a second. I didn't go through customs. Oh, no, stop thinking like that. Don't think like that anymore. He takes me out of the back door, and we go to a little room, and suddenly a door opens, and there's my dad and my brother, and it was just incredible to hug them. And dad says, Listen, Will, this this couple of reporters out here, and if you don't want to talk to them, we'll we'll go out some slip. He said, We'll slip out some some side door. He said, Slip out a fucking side door. I'm not slipping out any, I'm free. I'll I'll talk to anybody. I'm thinking it's a couple of guys talking with some camera. Here's a hundred fucking reporters out there with lights and cameras and people screaming questions. Billy, what's it like to be home? I don't know. I just got here, haven't even seen my mother yet. It never stopped. I mean, I'm doing it now, 60 years later, 55 years later, but it never stopped then. By the time I got home, there were reporters on the front porch of our house and they were talking to me. I got home on like a Thursday night or something. By Monday, I'm in New York, I'm interviewing potential uh agents, literary agents. And then I started to meet uh reporters who wanted to do tell stories, and then I got this literary agent who he said, Well, Billy, this is good. You know, we're gonna we're gonna bring somebody in to help focus you. And I didn't, again, I'm a writer. I went to Marquette University, I'm a journalist. I wanted someone desperately because of this. What do I where do I start? What do I put in? What five years? How what do I leave? He got a guy, again, who was like coming back. I lose it like Wendy, who just focused and he was very smart, and he sat me down and we did this, we did all the paper, and I spoke for three days, and then he cut it up and we put it into chapters. We made this organization. We both said, you know, you you busted here, you escaped there. That's and let's fill it. And so it was good. And uh he lived in Maryland and we took the train back and forth. I'd write some stuff, I'd send it to him, he'd work on it, he'd put his red pen, he sent it back. Then I'd go down there, we spend, but we were pressed because we this was a big story. I mean, it was all the newspapers, every TV, every radio, and I got back. And my agent, Julian, he said, Well, Billy, this is good because you're doing these interviews and you're spreading your story a little bit. But now that we're going to be putting a book together, uh, every word out of your mouth now is going to be a dollar out of your pocket when the book comes out. If you keep giving all of this information away freely, it was like so. I stopped doing interviews for a while. I'm, you know, people were writing, and this was big time in New York when I got back. It's like everybody on the streets knew me. Like people were in the subways knew me because they watched the fucking TV. It was like I was on all the channels. My friends were like, this is unbelievable, dude. I mean, look at this shit. But it it was good for me because, again, it forced me to deal with it. People would talk to me and I'd have to deal with stuff that I would rather have hidden, but it I couldn't hide anything. And then when I started, well, I did the book, and then the book had me doing a lot of public interviews. Um, and I I literally went around the world doing interviews for the book, and then Columbia and Peter Goober had me in LA, and I was talking to Oliver Stone, like he was a madman in a hotel room, and he's doing smoking joints and snorting up Coke and knocking down Rocky, and he's talking and making notes, and like I loved, I love that kind of energy. Coke, I don't like so much, but he was just manic and I'm I'm out. Fucking, I'm doing stuff. This is good for me. And now they're talking about a movie? No, really? A fucking movie? So the first couple of months back, I worked on the book and I worked in this, and suddenly um the book has come out and they're putting me out in the streets, and then I'm I'm gonna be working on a movie, and then I met Wendy, and we got married, and we were at the Cannes Film Festival. I met her, and that was a huge turning point in my life was before and after getting busted, right? And then before and after of escaping. So that's all one thing, and then before and after meeting her, because she's she's the best thing that ever happened to me. And again, uh being married was the best thing I've ever done, not the easiest thing I've ever done. Because you have to work at it, you have to accept the fact that whoever you married in today, in a week, in a month, in two years, they're gonna be somebody a little different, just as you're gonna be somebody a little different. You're gonna grow and you're gonna learn and you have to work with that. It's like constant battle, Ruby. Constant battle. It's so hard for me to go from thinking me, which that's all I thought of most of my life because I'm such a selfish fuck like most people, and especially in jail. That's all I thought of was me. At first, when I was in prison, I you know you have to learn your way around. And then new guys come in and all the vultures sweep down on them, and people want to, I got a lawyer who you should work with. I got this or I got that, or everybody's at you. So I when I was first there, I sort of got involved and I kind of like maybe try and help out a new guy. But then I make an enemy of some other guy. Because he he this guy wants this kid to get his lawyer, and I've heard this his lawyer is gonna rip you off. So if I tell a kid this, suddenly he's not going to that lawyer, and I've made an enemy. Not healthy to make enemies in jail. So after a while, I stopped. I just took care of myself. I didn't deal with anything. And I could after a while, I could watch really nasty, terrible shit happening.

unknown 1:21:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:41

And just look away. And that's gotta be the hard part. I mean, yo, when you ignore another human being's pain, that's at the cost to your own humanity. It's why so many guys come out of jail hardened in ways that they just can't change anymore, or broken in ways that they can't fix.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:57

I mean, in the movie, it portrays you getting a I I don't know what the focus was on the feet, but like they give very bad beatings to the feet. Was that an accurate depiction, or was that something that Oliver kind of drew up in his mind?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:09

No, he drew up my mouth is all sticky from this. Oliver drew up some other. No, that's a form of a punishment called Falaka that's prevalent throughout the Middle East. Okay. Where they uh they tie your feet beat and beat your feet with a whippy stick. That scene, unfortunately, very much happened. Oh that was because it didn't happen quite the way it was depicted in the film, but my first night in jail, I got I got I got put in a cell by a guy who's uh he's like a prisoner, a prisoner guard trustee kind of guy, and he runs things, he tries to run things. And he puts me in this bare empty cell with no blanket on a little skinny stained mattress on this wood plank bed, and it's fucking cold. I say, Is it the blanket? So yeah, yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow. And he's he's got big keyrings. This isn't like you know, eh, with the gates open. This is 1970s. There's no shit like there's no internet, nobody's got cell phones, letters. You write letters, it takes them two weeks to get there, it takes them two weeks to get back if they come back. It was so discombobulated, you didn't know where you stand. Now you could ask your lawyer, what's happening to my case? Like, we had nothing like that. So uh what led me to that? There was a reason. God, I get so lost talking about this shit. Well, in the movie, that was what led to the movie. Oliver Stone. Uh I'm still lost. I'm sorry. I get so caught up in this. No, that's fine.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:38

Like I said, in the you I remember it before that meeting you were asking about a blanket, and in the movie, they just come and kind of grabbed you. Yes, thank you. The blanket.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:45

So he's got the keyrings and he's I see he he gives up. I mean, I don't think my cell's really locked. I hear him jangle away with his keys, and he's gone, and I hear psst from the next cell. I open my door, and the guy in the next cell, Popeye, who I'd met earlier that that day, earlier in the evening, this big German guy. He gives me uh uh a stick with a nail on the end of it, and he tells me uh blankets last cell. So I go down to the last cell, I see, I hook a blanket, I hook another blanket, I come back, I give him a blanket, give him back his stick, close my door, collapse on the bed, exhausted, and just collapse into sleep. And the door slams open, and Amy's there, and he's yelling, he's screaming, he's yanking my blanket. Again, I'm not real big, but I used to be really fast and nasty, and I'm scared, shitless. And I nail him in the face. Wow! He's down, his nose is bleeding, he's spread across his face, he's screaming for the guards, they're rushing in, they're dragging me out. I'm trying to explain in English, which they don't speak, you know. He woke me up, he hit me first. All they know is new guy. First night in the fight, lesson needs to be taught. And again, what they do is they take you to the cellar and they they tie your feet and they beat your feet with the stick. And uh, you know, I thought they were fucking killing me. Bang, bang, bang, bang, and I'm screaming and yelling, hit my hands, hit my arm. Turns out it wasn't really a bad beating. Bad beating is when they break bones and they leave you there and they come back the next day and beat you again. I didn't have any broken bones. That's what they say that's not a bad beating. Like, whoa, what the fuck? Not a bad beating. It's one of them it was an effective lesson for me about fighting in jail. Because if you and I are fighting in jail and the guards come or something and I'm all bloody, they're gonna beat you equally bloody. If I'm all if you're all bloody, they're gonna beat me equally bloody. You can't win. You got to get in, get out, and get away from it. Because when the guards come, they don't give a fuck what happened. They just beat the people up. Shut up, don't fight anymore. Bang, bang, bang, bang, and they hit you with the sticks. So uh, you know, uh, they they beat my feet, and I I thought I was gonna die, but it turns out it's not really a bad meeting. Bad beatings go on a while, or like when the student, they had student protesters and rioters, they had revolutions and shit happening in Turkey in the 70s with uh communist students and people on the streets marching and all sorts of stuff. The when they they went to catch the rioter kids, which they were, they were young. You gotta be young and stupid to be rioting out on the street, or or you have to care for it, which is what they did, because their country is being taken away from them by these fascists, kind of like now. That's not who Wendy said, Don't talk politics, don't talk politics or religion. Whenever I go out, she says, Don't talk politics or religion. I go play poker, don't talk politics or religion, because you're gonna get which is true, especially playing poker. Uh anyway. Uh well, she doesn't give bad advice. Yeah, yeah. She gives me real good advice. I don't always listen to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:48

It takes me a while to get to it, but what about and I'm sure if I gotta pick a few things that was Oliver's Liberties. There's a scene in the movie, I think it's before you go to the sanitarium or whatever, where you flip out after a guy kind of dimes out a friend of yours, yeah, and you bite his tongue off.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:05

Uh, they that they got better ju juice out of that scene than I did. I actually got on the started beating on this guy. He he busted a friend of mine who got beat real bad. But uh I was not able to do what they did, which is have the tongue of the he was an informer, so have the informer's tongue bitten out. That scene, though, people say, well, they they show all the stuff that didn't happen, so that's not real. It's like that scene, no, I didn't bite a tongue out, but I could give you 10 examples of some really nasty shit that happened all the time, one way or another. So it's like it's no big deal, but that scene was so vivid. And they had Brad, they had a pig tongue. Again, I love Brad Davis, the actor who worked. Randy, you talk about. I was friends with Randy too. We were all friends for a while. Randy sort of went off the edge and he had uh a wife who what's it called? Ful fully fully. They both of them went crazy together. And I knew it was weird because Randy, at one point, he had was talking to people about somebody who's uh taking the monies from act from actors and they're they're counterfeiting something and they're stealing their money out of the banks. And that may be true. I mean, you know, somebody's gonna steal from you anyway. They can get you outside, inside prison, anywhere else. But uh I knew from Randy, if you're gonna steal somebody's money, especially at that point, find Brad Pitt's money. Randy at that point, he he didn't have the money that he used to have. You know, he doesn't do in movies anymore. I just think he got just too weirded out.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:40

I I I feel bad about it because I really liked him and he did a great job in the movie.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:44

Well, Randy was a great actor. I mean, a lot of great ones. I mean, Days of Thunder, quick change. I mean, obviously the National Lampoons Crucification will probably be remembered for the wheel.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:52

And uh less detailed, I think, too. He was the kid that he was a great actor. Um, I just think he lost his mind, but I don't know. I I should speak.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:02

What about the final scene with the with the guard where it looked like you were fixing to get another beating with the in there and it was like okay, looked like he was fixing to do some sort of essaying.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:11

Absolutely. The guard, again, for prison, if you're a victim on the outside, you will be a victim on the inside. Yeah, you're not, you're not, you got to deal with things. But um, again, I didn't have too many problems in jail. That one night I got in that first fight, that served me well. Because all around the this guy walked around the prison, this aiming guy, and everybody saw, I mean, his face was really off, and his nose was bleeding, he got all swollen and black eye, and they all said, What happened to him? Because he was known around the prison. He dealt drugs, everybody knew this guy. They said, Oh, the the new guy, Willie, which was my name in jail. And then they come and they see, Willie, I'm 145 pounds. It's like that guy? But it was enough that if they're looking to fuck with somebody, they're gonna pick somebody else, pick somebody else. And that served me really well. I didn't have to fight that much in jail. Every once in a while, something had happened and you got to deal with it. I it was never a problem. I mean, I deal with it. I don't go find somebody who's like this black belt six foot four guy. Him I deal with in a different way. I make friends with him, right? I make him laugh. I I talk about his family, whatever he needs, I want him on my side. But anybody else, it's it was usually one punch ends fights, usually, if depends upon who you're fighting. And if I know something's actually coming down, and if he's close enough to be in range to hurt me, I'm gonna hurt him first. And that's how I kept myself in jail. People knew when they they say uh Viper. These guys who go, because I I'd hit somebody so fast and so quick, they didn't even know what was happening. And it was like, what? And then I'm backing off because I don't want to be in a fight with the guys. He hit me, now he's gone. People, they learned that. And I was after I learned my way around, I wasn't worried too much about prisoners. There's some guards. There's guards who they're just guys doing jobs and this terrible job. They're not making money, they're open to bribes, they're in the same violence as we are. They do 12 hours on, 12 hours off shifts. I make friends with the smaller guard. Some of the big guards, they're the guys who you gotta be careful about because they're working bigger deals. They're working the big gangster guys, they got their friends in the office, and there's one guy who he uh he was a sadist. He just liked to hurt people. Yeah, he was really a big guy. How many do we need? He'd walk around and he would walk down the line, and you do if he's walking, if you're out in the hallways and he comes walking the hallway, everybody does that, that POW stance or your homes like this, your head down, and just praying, please don't stop in front of me. Because if he stops in front of you, now you gotta deal with him. And I don't, you know, it depends upon you did something, you didn't do something. It doesn't matter all the time. He just looks you in the face. And he does, he's a big guy, he's got this big fucking hand. While he's looking in your eyes to see how you're acting, he's pulling this big hand back, and you know this hand is gonna come and smack you the fuck in the face. Well, you can't go at him and attack him because there's three other guards with sticks waiting for you to do that, and he boom, hits you in the face with this hand and wrings the fuck out of your head. Your head literally goes rang, tears pour out of your eyes. You're just standing there waiting like this. And he's waiting to see what you're gonna do. Not too many people do anything except just fucking stand there and just like pray you don't get hit again. Some of the guys, some of the younger guys, some of the badasses who don't give a fuck, they'll go at him, and that's what he wants. Because he doesn't care how bad you are, him and his two friends will beat beat you to a pulp on the ground. So he was one of the bad guards. Uh Oliver Stone made a biggest the biggest change he made in the movie for me was in the courtroom. There's the courtroom scene where I'm being sentenced to life, and Brad has a chance to speak. And what he says is something along the lines of, you know, uh, you're a nation of pigs, you're I fuck you all, I fuck your sons, I fuck your daughters. First off, logic. I mean you're sentenced to life in prison in this country, and you're going to tell the whole world, starting with the head judge, you're a nation of fucking pigs, I fuck your sons and daughters. That scene was so stupid for me. Also, the whole world, including all the Turks, saw that scene and they heard me, they heard Billy Hayes saying, You're a nation of pigs, I fuck your sons, I fuck your daughters. The Turks really heard that. Yeah, they didn't issue an interpol warrant for my arrest when I was uh when I was busted or when my first book came out. But when they saw this scene in a movie, they issued an interpol warrant that stood for the next 20 years. Wow. So that's uh thank you, Oliver. He didn't give a fuck. Uh what else did he do? That was the biggest one. Uh there was another scene where they've got uh me and Brad uh uh what's his name? The other guy and and me in this in this steam room coming together like this, and they've got Brad shaking his head, no. And then they uh kind of put the scene away, which pissed me off. I actually had a relationship with this French guy in some of the early months. Then he left and uh I turned to masturbation, of course, like everybody, and then uh actually to um uh abstinence. I got into abstinence for quite a while. I was working on my yoga and my meditation, and I was just trying to get really strong and centered and all abstinence in your 20s, it's that's pretty amazing because the most amazing dreams, but like it was part of my getting tight and getting really strong and centered to get ready to go free. Right. But then I didn't go free. Then I was looking at life in jail, and then everything shifted again too.

unknown 1:34:41

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:42

You mentioned earlier about a book, a second book or something. Ah, yes. So every day I was again, I was Marquette University. I went to uh journalism school. I wanted to be a writer. Um, always wanted to be a writer, like Jack London. Every day in prison, I wrote letters. You don't have phone. The only thing you have is letters. I wrote a letter every day. I was in prison, I don't know, what's it, 1,324 or something like that. Days I wrote at least one letter a day to my family, my friend, my girlfriend. That was my biggest. When I couldn't talk to my folks, and I just I tell them what needed to be heard, but I couldn't tell them the tough stuff. I couldn't, I didn't have anybody to talk to except her, and she'd been my longtime girlfriend, and I could tell her the real hard stuff. And she wrote back. And so we had this back and forth letters with her, my dad, and a couple of my my major friends, my friend Bone, who was going to come to help me escape. He was the guy I was writing letters back and forth, and he's the guy that whoa, uh when I went to Bakukoi the first time, and I knew if I can if I can get back there, I can climb this the wall. If I had somebody on the outside with a car and clothes and money and a false false passport, I can bribe the doctor, he'll send me back to the crazy house, and I'll climb that fucking wall. And my friend from the outside, I contacted my friend Bone, and we we wrote letters back and forth. He actually came to the prison and we coordinated a bit. Then he went back to Mannheim, Germany, where he was working in the John Deere Tractor Factory, make a good job making the money we'll need for the big break from the madhouse. He was organizing what we needed: false paper, money, car, a gun, but that's a tricky thing because I got a gun and the guards got a gun, somebody's gonna shoot somebody, and he's dead, and then I'm I can't be I'm not free anywhere in the world. You know, I'd have to hide out in Uruguay. So I I opted not to have a gun during the course of this escape thing. But he was in Germany and he was getting the car and the false papers, and we were writing letters back and forth. And then one day I got a telegram from dad. Remember telegrams? I got a telegram from dad saying that Norman was found dead in his hotel room in Mannheim with an army bayonet through his chest. The German police said it was it was uh uh suicide. It's like you got a fucking bayonet through his chest. He he was the kind of guy that uh women never left him alone. He just they just loved him, and he would just he'd go out in the street and find three or four girls and bring them back to our party. He was one of those guys. And um he was a poet and a writer, and uh I just knew that he would give it as much as I needed to get out. I mean, I put stuff on everybody while I was in jail. I've I'm ashamed of the the grief that I caused my family and what I put my dad through and my mom and even my friend. He was my best friend. He came to uh I wrote him a letter and he left. He was working in Alaska on the uh the fishing boats. And he uh this is like an adventure to him, like the Count of Monte Cristo. He was a man on a mission. He showed up at the prison, we talked, we coordinated, he went back to Mannheim, Germany, where he's organizing the stuff. I'm still dealing with my prison doctor friend, bribing him with cartons of Marlborough that the American Council would bring out, promising him more stuff, a lot more stuff. If he can get me back to the back to the Bakekoy hospital where I need it for my mental health. And so I've got everything set up to go back to there. And then a telegram arrives from dad saying that Norman was found dead in his hotel room in Mannheim. When it was an army bayonet, the first thing I thought of prison. He's boffing the wife of this uh American uh military sergeant from the nearby base. That's I mean, how stupid is that? But that was Norman. The women just but he was dead. And uh my not only have I fucked up my own life, and I'm causing daily pain to the people who love me most, but now my best friend is dead because of me, because he was coming to help me escape. And that that was uh that was probably the lowest point of prison for me because I've again I've fucked up my own life. My mom suffers every day, and now my best friend is dead. I just kind of collapsed. I I didn't ride home for months, I I didn't do anything. I wandered the yard by myself, people didn't talk to me. It was I actually looked at suicide, which I my whole life that's the last thing I could even think about. But I you know, guys would commit suicide in jail. People would get a piece of glass or a razor and cut themselves up. But you know, if you want to cut yourself, there's the vein. People do this, this, this, make it all bloody, and they go to the hospital, they get attention. But you're not gonna kill yourself up here. You want to do it here. And I'm thinking about it's it's an easy way to go. And I was so low and uh out, and uh, but then I thought, you know, I I can't put this weight on my folks. I've already put them through what they've gone through. I just couldn't do that. So I had to rule out suicide, and Norman was gone, so I'm ruling out escape, and I just uh decided to turn the escape switch off, which had been on for the first fucking moment. I got caught up constantly thinking about escape. I turned it off, and prison became a different place. I mean, literally, it was I was looking at it through new eyes. I got intensely into my yoga. I I uh I was doing meditation, I was I was content to finish my time, whatever it was, another 18 months or whatever the fuck it was until my sentence was done, I'll do my time. And that made prison completely different. Um I actually was enjoying prison for a bit. How strange is that? But it was I was enjoying the sheer joy of of existence, of just waking up to be alive. Yeah, hey, I'm alive, the sun is shining, I'm still healthy. It's it was it was um um it was a time for me that I learned a lot of good stuff about myself, what I needed to learn about who I was and what I really cared about and what was really important to me. And I was preparing myself to go back out into the world. And I was in that space, and nothing was bothering me. Guys would be have fights in jail, guys would be bagging each other, guys would be coming, people would kick him with knives, and new guys would come in and scream. It's like, yeah, yeah, okay, just don't don't bleed on my bed. Please leave me alone. I'm fine over here. Let me be. And people let me be, and I didn't do much, and I was uh I was out in my mind again, 56, 55, 54 days when the American consul showed up unexpectedly. I really thought the Turks are letting me out early. This is great. And then I saw his face, and I know it was bad news. I'm more I'm worried about somebody at home, somebody hurt, somebody sick at home. Yeah, not about me. I'm out of here in 54 fucking days. I'm gone. I'm already out in my mind already. I'm gone. And uh suddenly to now be looking at uh the rest of my life in jail, that was that was quite a switch. The escape switch slipped back on, and that's all I thought about 24-7 was escape, get out. One way or the other, I'm getting out. And that's that was where the really the focus on getting myself to this island. I've had bad luck in in the Samajula prison for a couple of years now. I thought I was gonna get lucky by going to the madhouse, but now I'm not going back there. I don't have a friend who's gonna help me out there. I I knew I'm just gonna spend my time and I was ready to spend my time and then go free when the time came about. But uh now I've got fucking rest of my life in jail. I I have to change plans and get to the island. So, what is the basis of the second book? Ah, thank you for bringing me back to that. Um, the second book is bec is called Midnight Express Letters from Turkey to Hollywood. I don't know if I'm fucking this up. No, you go from Turkey to Hollywood, um, 1970 to 75. All these letters that I wrote, people sent them back to me. Thank you, getting me back on topic. All these people sent them back to me. I used them to write the first book, Midnight Express. Me and Bill Hofford, the guy who I worked with. Right. We ordered these, organized these letters, and I had them out. We laid them out, and I'd be writing some stuff, and I'm Bill would look at it, and then he came back. He said, Wait a second now. I see you're writing over here. You're saying blue, blue, blue, blue, blue. But I'm looking at this letter from this date, and it says green, green, green, green, green. So how do you balance? I guess it's he said, it's it's more green. You're trying to make it blue because that's where you want it to be, but I'm reading your letter from the moment it was green. So that scene, I want to, he said, you're writing some of these scenes as this kid who's 28 years old, you're out, you're free, you're in New York, you're getting laid, your life is good. I need the guy who is in jail at 23 and 24, who didn't know what was what tomorrow was gonna break. I need that guy. But I didn't want to be that guy. I didn't want to go back to that guy. He said, I understand. That's why you need to do that, because that's where the truth is going to come. So that forced me to uh rewrite the book and rewrite some scenes that uh I had to go back. The last thing I wrote, I wrote every scene, I wrote every chapter, we had everything done except I think it's chapter nine, which was the Madhouse. And Bill said, We're done. Where's fucking chapter nine? You need to say, Oh, I mean, I didn't want to go there again. But one day it was just fuck that. I got it, didn't I? And in about three hours, nonstop, almost didn't have a word. I knocked out chapter nine. I sent it off to Bill down in Maryland, and like two days later, I get a phone call from him. He said, I hardly had to put a red pencil to chapter nine. That's how good I thought that was. It's like great, because I wanted to get it done and be f he said, no, no, you have a little couple, a couple of little red marks. I said, Yeah, I know you're like my wife. I know there's a couple of little red marks. He said, but it's not a lot, it's easy. And so we got the book done, and uh and the book went out. Uh, Oliver Stone is still, it's the scene in the courtroom where he where he writes, that's the biggest change he made that personally affected me. And the people who saw it, everybody who saw this movie knows that Billy Hayes said, Fuck you to all the cur the Turks and cursed out their sons and daughters. Yeah. I didn't say that. But that's what the world knows. It's what the Turks certainly know, and they were furious with me. They were so angry at me. They asked the interval warrant to take me back. I I became a hated man in Turkey. I bet so. Something I didn't say. You can hate me for whatever was said in Midnight's rest of the book and for the fact that I made Turkey look bad because I talked about your legal system and your prison system, but you know what? That's the way it is. You got to deal with it. No, I didn't say fuck your sons and daughters, or I didn't do, I didn't kill that fucking guard. They've got me kill the guard. The guard's coming in and he's taking his pants down as if he's gonna rape me, and I butt him with the head, and he goes back, and there's that spike. Yep, goes in a big one. I've watched that scene with the sound off. Nothing. There's a spike. When you put the sound on, you know the some sound effect guys took like a big watermelon and found a big metal spike and about 20 times recorded the sound of that sound with the that sound is whoa. I hear it now. That's the sound that's that's in the thing, and that's what Oliver Stone has got me killing this Turkish guard, and all the Turks know you killed the Turkish guard. You said, fuck your sons and daughters. No, I didn't. Oliver Stone did.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:28

Call Oliver Stone, blame him. The two key things he took liberties with, and there's what they remember out of the whole thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:34

Well, you know, most movies, they're a combination of what here's the story and here's how you write it. Nothing's really, really, really because whatever the story is, you're breaking it down to two hours. Right. You gotta leave something, you gotta change something. You can't people say, Well, you wrote all this stuff. It's like, guys, I got five years. I don't know what to pick, I don't know what to leave. I wrote so much shit that got left out. I have many other stories from jail that got written down. Tell them that. Turn them out. Again, my my agent, Julian, he said, you know, get the story done. You don't want all this shit over here. Just focus this, get it done clean.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:09

Well, it's an amazing story, Billy. Uh, the movie is great. I I don't know how I missed it, to tell you the truth, until now. Um, I recommend anybody go out there and check the movie. But I I do have one question. I have I have something too.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:21

Absolutely. Because you you you started me uh on a question, I didn't finish it. The book, all these letters, I kept these letters. Um when I when I finished working with Bill on the first book, I put all the letters in a cardboard box up in the attic. 25 years they stayed there. One day Wendy had me cleaning out the shit in the house. I took all these letters, I had them out on the curb for the garbage. She made me come out and bring them back in. I told this to my friend and lawyer, Michael Donaldson. And he said, What letters? I said, moldy old Turkish letters. See, he read a few. He called me that night. He said, You need to take all these letters. You need to organize them, annotate them, don't change a word, which is the hard part. Reading what you think you know about life, so young and foolish and desperate at 23. Like I read this stuff. Who was this idiot writing this shit? But he said, You need to take all of these letters and put them down in a book form, which I did. That was so I wrote the letters in jail from 70 to 75. And then I used them to write the first book and I put them away, and then I took them out of the attic and I wrote a book, a little literal book, The Midnight Express Letters. And then 10, 15 years went by, and Wendy said, You need to do an audio book of your Midnight Express letters, which I was mixed feelings right away because I'd like to get a book out, I'd like to make some more money, I'd like to get my profile a little higher. I've got other projects I'm trying to do. So I did the audio book, but the moment I started, we set it up. I was in my house. I had a young kid set his stuff up, we got it all set. And the moment I started to read this, I realized the words on the paper instantly sucked me back into the moment of their creation, back into the kid I used to be sitting on the bunk. I could, I could feel the metal, I mean the the wood planks under my ass. I could smell this place, I could hear the prison again. It was so bizarre. I had to like just whoa, back out of this shit. It was so hard to record the Midnight Express letters because I could barely get through some of them. I mean, you here now I'm getting a little for clemp, but a little thing I think about some of these letters, uh, I just couldn't get through. Luckily, this kid was very patient. He was young and he was sort of enamored of this bizarre story because he's a pot smoker. And he said, I remember your story from fucking back my father told me. So many people I've had said, you know, my mother made me read your book before I went off to Europe for the first time. I said, Yeah, I I've heard all about it. I've got so many parents that say, We made our kids read your book before we let them go out into the world. It's like, good, you don't be as stupid as me. At the very least, my life is a cautionary tale. So I I when I put them together. And once we started doing it, it overwhelmed me. It took me months to do this book. It shouldn't be taking that long at all. But I got caught up and my editor had some problems and I didn't want to go back to it. I just like I'd leave it. Wendy kept making me go back. And I went back to it and I finished it drained. It was, I was so totally drained by doing this book because everything in that book was so personal. I mean, these letters, when I write other books, you know, I start to finish, but I'm writing them with the idea of a book. This was never meant to be a book. These were just letters that could get past the bars, or I couldn't go. And now I'm trying to make fit them into a book. And each time I change it, it emotionally, holy shit. So I was constantly thrown back emotionally by this. But when the book was finished, and I had a couple of friends read it, and I had a uh a writer whose opinion I really cared about, and he read it and he gave me this incredible review. He said that the writing and the power is one of the more powerful. Um everybody likes to hear nice stuff about your work, especially when you're putting it out there, because it's like, you know, you put it out, and somebody's gonna say it sucks. Somebody's gonna say it. You got to deal with all of that. But the most part, he gave me this wonderful review, and I began to trust that this book is going to uh do what I want, which is spread the word of what I've been doing, especially now in the latter years, and be able to use it for other stuff. So if you can, the Midnight Express Letters from Turkey to no, no, that's the Midnight Express Letters uh from a Turkish prison, 1970 to 1975. It's uh available on Amazon, audio, and uh what's the other one? Barnes and Noble. No, there's three A's Audible.

SPEAKER_02 1:51:47

Audible. Oh, okay, great. Yeah, that's I love listening to stuff on Audible. You know, I discovered we'll put a link to that for everybody that's listening to that in the show notes for you uh guys to go check it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:57

You know, there were no audible books uh 15, 20 years ago. They just they just started, and I hadn't read any, and then I did. I I listened to one and it was wonderful. And people have been telling me that's the thing now.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:08

Yeah, because you don't really have time to sit down and read a book, really, but you can listen to an audible book while you're working out, while you're driving.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:15

That's what everyone said. Everybody's doing them. So Wendy said we need to get this as an audible. So we've got it. It's there, it's up. Um, it's out in all the stores. If you're interested in more of my bizarre, strange tale, that audiobook will give you another insight as to what was like to be in a Turkish prison for five years.

SPEAKER_02 1:52:33

We'll definitely put links to both uh in the show notes so people can go check it out. And you kind of answered the question. I was gonna wrap this up with you know, how old are you now, Billy? If you don't mind me asking, I'm 79. 79 years old. So, with everything that you've been through, everything, you know, going to prison, managing to escape, getting extradited back home, you you don't know really what's going on, you're trying to figure out how to rebuild from this time period. You get a movie, uh a book deal, a movie deal, your life's been a whirlwind after that. What do you think your legacy is?

SPEAKER_00 1:53:05

Legacy, that's an interesting question.

SPEAKER_02 1:53:07

Because I mean, you mentioned earlier cautionary tale, which I do think that does is is very accurate to some people, but I mean, or what do you what do you think your legacy is, or what do you desire it to be?

SPEAKER_00 1:53:16

What I hope is that people can um hear my story, see my story, read my story, and come away with the realization that no matter how bad things are, how dark the world is, you can get through it. Just never give up. I've got a big plaque on my wall from uh Winston Churchill, that quote of never, never, never surrender. I actually did some research on that. I think that quote it's been changed different ways, but I think the original quote was from like one of his grade school places that when he got into politics, he went back to speak. And this I I followed some internet stuff, and this kid says the actual quote was never surrender, never, never, never, never. Winston Churchill. That's don't give up. That's the image I have. No matter how bad things are, you can make it through. Believe in yourself. That's hard sometimes.

SPEAKER_02 1:54:16

Well, I love that message, man. And you're the epitome of that. I want to thank you for coming over, sitting down, taking the time to share your story. I recommend everybody go out, check these books out, check the movie out if you hadn't seen it. And Billy, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show, my friend. Thank you, my friend. I do appreciate it. Thank you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that'll do it for this episode of Crime and Entertainment. We'll see you next week. Billy, we appreciate you, my friend. All right. I committed the crime. This is the entertainment. Thank you, buddy. Yeah, you too.