WANDERER RETURNS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22712, 26 October 1935, Page 23

WANDERER RETURNS

THRILLS SMUGGLER OF NARCOTICS Eighteen vcars ago a youth, the “baby” of his family, left his seaside home m England to seek fortune, and sailed before the mast to Australia (says a Daily Express representative). At the end or August he was welcomed back in the family circle, a wanderer returned. Only his old mother knows that he is a convicted drug pedlar and daring prisonbreaker, deported from America s strictest penitentiary under a new United States economy measure. The wanderer is blue-eyed and softvoiced. Since 1916 lie hoe wandered tno world, in Panama, Chile, Mexico, and vutually every one of the United States. He has done all kinds of jobs, from taxicab driving to spirit and drug smuggling. He has made small fortunes and lost them. Then, in 1926, the adventurer was sent to prison for 10 years as a persistent smuggler of narcotics. He served seven years and four months m the rock-bound “ escape-proof ” Spanish fortress of Alcatraz, sot high amid the swirling waters of San Francisco Bay. The writer met the man in the early hours of the morning, a bent figure, Pacing the deck of an Atlantic liner, which took him from Ellis Island to Plymouth. He is the first of 16 British prisoners to be deported from America to their homes. (i Now here I am, w the iuun said, with a free pardon as long as I never enter American territory again. Believe me, 1 shall not. The folia will be surprised to see me. But only my mother knows the truth. I don’t mind her knowing. You know, you can always tell your mother things, can’t you? How I’m looking forward to seeing her! ” The wanderer might have been a tree man two years ago if he had not twice escaped from custody. He had served five months of his sentence in Leavenworth Gaol, Kansas, and was being transferred by train to a penitentiary on M'Neil’a Island, on the coast of Wasliingl°As the train was passing through Nebraska, travelling at about *2o miles an hour, the man suddenly broke away from his guards, hurled himself through the closed carriage window, and escaped, cue and bruised. “I kept going, and did not stop running for a long time, he said. “ They caught me 10 months later in New York, and sent me back to Leavenworth. “In 1929 I took part in the not there. For an hour we convicts had complete charge of the prison; As < an alleged leader of the riot and an instigator 1 was kept in solitary isolation. “ Next year they transferred me to Fort Leavenworth, in the same State, but with two other fellows I escaped. We dug below the foundations of our cell, tunnelled across to and under the outer wall, and coming up just outside the wall. We put dummies in our beds, removed tbc locks from the doors, and got away. It had taken us five months to prepare it. _ » i ■< “They caught me in Los Angeles ii months later and sent me back. When the new prison at Alcatraz was opened 1 was sent there with the rest of the gaolbreakers, It’s a terrible place. ’