The Real Midnight Express Billy Hayes Part 1

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm here with writer, actor, and director Billy Hayes, whose story was chronicled in the nineteen eighty four movie Midnight Express. Billy got caught smuggling hash and got sentenced to thirty years in prison. Billy served over four years in a Turkish prison before he escaped. His new book, The Midnight Express, Letters from a Turkish Prison, is available on Amazon, Kindle, and it's also available on audiobook on Amazon. Billy Hayes, welcome to the show. Thank you, sir. Nice to be here. Billy, tell us your story, because I know you you can tell a story, so I'm just gonna let you unroll with it.

SPEAKER_01 0:30

How how much time do you have? You want a thirty minutes, forty minutes, three hours? I mean one of those. Let's shoot for the 45 minute mark. Because once I start talking, I get lost and I go off in the direction. So if you can focus me and bring me back, that would be lovely. Otherwise, you'll just hear me babble for As long as you don't get insulted. Okay. No, no, no, not at all. So I was uh I was arrested in uh 1970, excuse me, at the Istanbul airport with two kilos of crime, Turkish hashish, cannabis, legal now, taped all over my 23-year-old body, which led to uh almost five years in prison, and I was able to escape off an island prison in uh October of 1975. I was busted October 7, 1970. I escaped October 2nd, 1975. I just missed my fifth anniversary. My sentence was strange because I I never really knew what my sentence was. Originally I received a four-year, two-month sentence. But in Turkey, you don't really have your official sentence until it comes down from the High Court in Ankara. Until then, you're really in no man's land. For years, I had a four-year, two-month sentence, but I never had my tastik from Ankara, so I was never really sure when I was going free. And it kept changing, depending upon some legal stuff would happen in Turkey, or there'd be a an amnesty rumor. So I never knew when I was actually going out, which was difficult for me was way more difficult for my parents. You know, prison was it was hard in a lot of ways, but I was 23 to 28 at the height of my physicality. I was young, I was healthy. You know, back in college, I was an athlete. I used to do some martial arts, just enough to make me dangerous to myself. Because you know, if you turn around, there's always somebody back there who can kick your ass. But in prison, you have to establish yourself. I was kind of lucky because the first night I got arrested, I ended up in a fight with one of the prison trustee guard kind of guys. Just a slimy guy who dealt hash and he he had no uh he had no morality at all. He was one of those people, amoral is what he was. And one thing led to another, and suddenly he and I are fighting in in my prison cell my very first night. And uh I didn't know what was actually going on, and I wasn't sure how to how how to react to this, but next thing I know, this guy is in my face, and I just naturally reacted, hit him, and boom, he went down. It was like, no, because his nose is bleeding, he's screaming for the guards, they're rushing in, they're dragging me out. I'm trying to explain in English, which the guards don't speak. He woke me up, he hit me first. All they know is new guy. First night in a fight, lesson needs to be taught. And the way they teach it in at least Turkey and a lot of the Middle Eastern countries is a punishment called falaka, where they they tie your feet up with a rope and pull them up, and this guy beats your bottom of your feet with a stick. Which sounds kind of toast milk toast, but boy, it hurts. The bottom of your feet, I've got so many nerve endings in them. And he beat my feet and beat my feet and smashing me in like this, and my hands are up and I was screaming and he was hitting my arms. I thought he was killing me. Turns out it wasn't a bad beating at all. Nothing broken. If there's nothing broken, it's not a bad beating. Whoa. Just a lot of cuts and bruises and a very effective lesson about fighting in jail. If you and I are in a fight in a Turkish prison and you're all bloody when the guards come, they beat me equally bloody. If I'm all bloody, they beat you equally bloody. You can't win in a fight because they beat up the other guy. Whoever wins, the other guy gets beat up. So you have to get in, get out, and get away from it before the guards get involved. One of the first lessons I learned in Turkish prison that night. The good thing for me, this guy was sort of a big cheese in the jail. He worked with the guards and he was an informant and he ran drugs, all that kind of stuff. The normal life goes on in the inside the prison just like it does on the outside. A little more confined and compact, but the same stuff going down. This guy was known around the jail. The next day, he's walking around, the people are seeing Ziat, this big black eye and swollen face, and they're saying, What happened to I forget, I keep changing the name to be going to the books. What happened to Zia? And they say, Well, the new prisoner, Willie, which is my name in Turkey, Willy, and then they see Willie, I'm 140 pounds. It's like, that guy? But it gave me a little edge because they saw, well, he may be small and skinny, but Zia's got a big fucking black eye and a swollen face. And Zia had a little bit of a rep in the jail. Well, that helped me because now if somebody's looking for somebody to mess with, well, that guy, yeah, he beat up Zia. Let's find somebody else. Because there's always somebody else that you can find if you're looking for trouble. Which people did. But I'm suddenly, just because of my first night fight, I'm suddenly in a little different category. It made prison a little easier for me. People wouldn't mess with me as as much if they hadn't seen that I got in a fight the first night, and this guy's all bloody. So that helped me out on my first day. Five years. How can I even start this? What that was like.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

Turkish prisoner was like Well, let me ask, sure, what what was the food? What was the food and the medical care in there like? Food three times a day.

SPEAKER_01 5:53

About noon, they come around, oh in the morning, they come around, big blankets, big big loaves of bread, one for each prisoner, if you get to the door in time, because otherwise somebody will snatch it up. About noon, these big steel pots full of lentils and beans are delivered. Beans. Eighty guys locked up together, and every day they serve beans. And then in the evening they bring around the big pots with some soup or a kufta or a then there's stuff that's stole. Prison is this vast captive market. There were almost almost 3,000 guys in this prison when I was first arrested. And outside food vendors would come around selling fruits and vegetables, all kinds of stuff, pushed around in these big steel carts, which you could buy if you had money through the door. It it if people had no money in prison, it was really bad if all you got was what they served you. But otherwise you could buy stuff. Turkey has an incredible amount of fruits, stuff I don't even know the name of in English, but wonderful fruits. You could buy those things one or two times a week, the cart would come. So if you had enough money, you could buy something. If you had enough money, uh you could live like a king. The guys who did have money, the big gangsters. They called them uh Kapadites. These are the gangster prisoners who, for one reason or another, the people they used to bribe on the outside to keep them free got overbribed by somebody else, and now they gotta do, you know, a couple of months and then they work this and their lawyer works that, and they go free. Not like me and the rest of the idiots who got busted with hash and stuff. We we're not Turks. We don't know how the game works. We're in there. So my first call, I went to court, I believe, 14 months before I received my first sentence, which again, it wasn't a permanent sentence. So I had it, but I didn't really have it. And my lawyers talked to my council, the American council, told my parents that I've gotten a f a sentence of four years, two months, which means I should be going for free on a certain date. But not really because I didn't have my official paper. This this harassed me and my family so badly, we never knew when I was going out. My my mom would like have a calendar and she'd stirle something on it. It all changed and it kept changing. I was trying to get an official sentence right up to the very last moment when I was trying to get transferred to another prison. If you receive your official sentence in Turkey, you then have an option of being uh allowed to transfer to other prisons if you wanted to. I ended up, when my first sentence came down, I ended up getting transferred uh to an island prison. This was like almost four years after I'd gotten arrested. And I had a three-year, I had the the uh four-year, two-month sentence. It went on, it went on, and then I was crossing out days, 56, 55, 54 days prior to going free. The American council showed up for an unexpected visit. And I'm thinking, yay, the Turks are letting me out early. And as soon as I see his face, I know it's bad news. I'm worried. Somebody at home, somebody sick. Bad news for sure. Not about me. I'm going free in 54 fucking days. Except the council said, hmm, Billy, we have some problems. The the High Court in Ankara responding to uh Nixon's war on drugs. That whole uh beginning of the war on drugs was happening back then, 1973, 1974, while I was in. And Turkey was getting a lot of bad criticism in the American papers and in other places saying that Turkey did not enforce their drug laws. And Turkey took offense to this. And what they did was they said, fine, you don't think we enforce our drug laws? Let's show you what we do. And they chose me and unfortunately two American women who were in there for drugs too, who had the same sentence as I did. And they uh they sentenced me to they actually they they gave me a new court, and in the new court, the same judge who originally sentenced me to four years back almost four years ago when I first got arrested. That judge, he he said, I wish I'd retired. This is the judge in the court telling me, in the standing in the prisoner's docket, with my dad standing right behind me, which by far the worst part of prison. The pain I caused my family. My dad standing behind me, and this same judge, he puts his hands up, he says, My hands are tied. The high court and umperh is forcing me to do this. Like, forcing you to do what? And what he did was the high court, the high court sentence speaks about Muhabet, which is life in prison. The same judge who originally sentenced me to four years, he owned the only prerogative he had was to lower the life sentence to 30 years, which he did. Bank, I guess, 30 years, and then they were wrapping the chains around my wrists, and the soldiers were talking to me, and the American council and the lawyers were they all had their eyes lowered and they're offering me getsch mishls, getsch mischilson, which is Turkish were may it pass quickly? I just got sentenced to fucking 30 years in jail. May it pass quickly? The escape switch, which had been on from the first moment I was arrested back at at the airport, I've been thinking about escape. I tried so many escape attempts. We'll talk about them. But I had so many, I tried, I tried, I tried, and at one point I stopped trying to escape. I realized I was causing so much grief and pain. If if I did get caught while escaping, maybe they shoot me, maybe they kill me. They certainly give me way more prison sentence. But I was so desperate, and desperate men do desperate things. What it came down to was actually I looked at suicide too. That was an option. You know, I'm the last thing I would ever think about in my life is suicide. But guys try and kill themselves all the time in jail. But if you really want to kill yourself, here's the vein on your aura. Don't slash your up here. That gets you bloody and it gets you to the hospital and it gets you sympathy. If you really want to kill yourself, turn it over, slice it here, and go under your blankets and die. That's if they wanted to do. So, you know, I was I was so desperate, I didn't know what I was going to do. But when I realized the pain I'm causing my parents, the pain I'm causing me, I need to change my my ways. I need to change everything. And what I discovered was I discovered I could do, I could do my time in jail. I could, I could take what I needed to do, take the pain off my parents, accept the fact that I was going to be going free four years and two months. This is why this is happening. So I still have like another, I don't know, 20 months or something, which seems like forever when you're 22, 23 years old and you've been locked in jail for a few years. 20 more months is like, no, I have to fucking get out. But I couldn't get out, and I couldn't, I couldn't cause any more pain to my family. And I just decided to turn the escape switch off. And that one act changed everything. I remember William James from college philosophy, William James, who said, people can change their lives by changing their attitude. Whoa. I decided to do that. I decided to change my attitude. So instead of being crazed and trying to get out every day and hating everything that was going on, I just took a breath and kind of accepted the fact that I'm going to be in here for another at least 20 months, and then I'll be free, and then my parents will be happy again. And I just changed my my attitude towards the whole world. Prison suddenly became a different place. I was seeing it with new eyes. I totally got into my yoga, which I sort of abandoned after a while. I just let every day pass the way it needed to pass, and I was just part of it, and I wasn't crazed every morning thinking, how am I going to get out? And I didn't go to sleep every night with all this madness in my head. I just calmed down. Which seems easy, but wasn't so easy. Not so easy for me, because I'm not a very calm person usually, and I wasn't calm about having to spend all this time in prison while my life was changing and my teeth were falling out, and every night my mom went to sleep every night with pain in her heart. That killed me. That was the worst part of jail. You know, I'm young, I can deal with it, I'm healthy enough, and I I made my way in jail. People left me alone. It was like nobody bothers me. Friends in prison is you don't fuck with me, I don't fuck with you. We're friends. So I was friends with everybody. Nobody bothered me. I didn't worry too much about the violence around me because people weren't bothering me. And I've known, I know now how to handle prison. I know how to deal with shit. I've got friends with the guards who I made. So I knew it was gonna be okay. And I started to have I started to enjoy prison. How bizarre is that? Just enjoying the fact that the sun is rising to this morning. I'm healthy. I'm not free yet, but I'm healthy. I'm gonna be out soon. My parents won't be having to deal with all of this madness every day. And life changed for me. The last almost the last year that I was in jail, I was a very different guy than when I first got in. You know, I'm a writer. I was writing every day. I've got my notes. I I didn't interact very much with anybody unless I had to. And my friends in jail, again, friends are you don't fuck with me, I don't fuck with you. They come, they go. So it's hard to make a friend because you know tomorrow they could be gone. I just took care of myself. And the hard part there is not getting involved. When I was first in in prison, I mean, I'd see something happen and a new guy would come in and all the vultures swooped down on me. At first I'd get involved, I'd help out a new guy. But then I'd make an enemy of some other guy. Because I mean, he's trying to get the new guy to work with his lawyer who's gonna rip him off. I know that. Somebody else is trying to get the new guy. No, no, work with my lawyer. Everybody's after you when you first get in there. I just helped the new guy, kind of gave him some good advice, but then the other guy is not gonna get to work with him as a through his lawyer. So now the other guy is pissed at me and like I don't need to create any more fucking enemies here. So I stopped. After a while, I could see terrible things happening. And just look away. And when you ignore another human being's pain, it's at a cost to your own humanity. That's why so many guys coming out of prison are hardened in ways that they can't change or broken in ways they can't fix. I get lost when I start talking about this stuff again.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

Where am I? Where am I? Yeah. You I I I you I saw you on another interview explain that at one point when you decided you were gonna escape, you had a friend Norman from the outside, who was gonna try to help you get out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

One of my many escape plans, I used to have an acid, LSD sent to me in prison, sent to me under the little par Avion stickers on the letters. Some amateur philatelist up in the censor's office would steal the cool foreign stamps. They had all the foreigners in one cell bar. Turks mixed in, but you know, 18, 19 different languages. And so the the people up in the censors office, they don't speak, they don't know what's in these letters, but they like the foreign stamps. So they would steal the foreign stamp. The little par Avion sticker, little tiny rectalian sticker, you could put about 10 tiny hits of window pane acid LSD. They used to like LSD. You had about 10 panes in under this little sticker. So you put two or three stickers on, and one of them's got ten hits of window panes under. So the guy up in the office would steal the cool foreign stamps, and then they send the letter in. And I get the letter, and I open it up, and I take the ten hits of window pane out. I had some in there and I was gathered. It's just part of life. I used to like where I went with LSD othering window pane because one, I wanted to trip every now and then in jail. Also, more importantly, I was gathering a stash, a stash. One of my many escape plans was to get transferred to a prison in far eastern Turkey. It takes about two days to get there by bus and train. And if if a prisoner gets transferred to another prison, they assign two soldiers to him to be his guards to take him there. What the soldiers are told immediately is if this guy escapes, you serve the rest of his sentence. I got a 30-year sentence to serve my 30-year sentence. Whether they would do it or not, I don't know. But I had these things set up. These two soldiers are watching me. They are not gonna let me escape. Because then they have this was my one of my plans is to go there in the midst. I would take some of these acid things, I put them in little, slice open a little chocolate bar, and I'd put it in there and then close it up again. I'd find some way to get this acid into one of these or two of these soldiers while we're heading east to to put me in this other prison in far off in far off eastern Turkey. That was one of the plans. Another plan was Bakakoi Mental Hospital, Section 13 for the criminally insane. I learned there's a clause in the Turkish law that says if you're judged to be crazy, they can't keep you in prison. But if you're that crazy, they don't put you out on the street, they put you in Bakakoi. But that's a better place to escape from. So I bribed a prison doctor, a big bakshish, and arranged to get sent to Bakakoi for two weeks, or three weeks actually, of observation amidst the madness. I've been a lot of places in my life, nothing, nothing even compares to Bakakoi Mental Hospital, Section 13 for the criminally insane. When they took me out there, we were I was in a prison van chained to this drooling, babbling young kid with vomit all down his front, and it was like dark when the van pulled up in front of this massive iron gate set in a crumbling grey wall topped off with rusting barbed wire, surrounding what supposedly had been a barracks for the Sultan's Janasari troops back during the Ottoman Empire. That's how old this place was. But it was a better place to escape from. So me and the crazy guide, they took me in and an old guy came out from the grizzled old attendant came out from a little metal door and the big metal gate and led us across a dusty courtyard to this low slung whitewashed building. And inside, it feels like I just stepped into that Boris Carloff film, bedlam, where the inmates bricked the doctor up alive in the wall. There was no semblance of a hospital here. Just this crumbling bin full of filthy broken men, some stark naked, others wandering around in these wrapped in filthy sheets and this mad mix of shouts and moans and weird singing. I spent about two weeks there. Again, at the end of two weeks, I was I was questioning my own sanity. In the movie Midnight Express, they've got a wonderful scene where they've got me walk in the in the basement of the madhouse, they have a stone pillar, and around it about twenty or so of these crazy inmates would would march in a big circle. Around and around and around. This is the bottom of the birdcage. I slip right in, circling with them around and around. I all I wanted to do was spend my time here, get a crazy report so that I would have more time here. And then I was contacting my friend, Norman, my best friend, who he was going to come and help me get out. So I wrote some letters to him. Um I was in Bakakoy. I did the circling. I spent two weeks in Bakuk, two and a half weeks actually in Bakakoy. And then finally, and if I had somebody on the outside who I can trust, that's that that was my out. That was my escape. But he was ready to drop everything to come and help me escape. So we wrote letters back and forth. And then Norman showed up at the prison and we talked and coordinated. He went back to Mannheim, Germany. We've gotten a good job in the John Deere Tractor Factory, making the money we'll need and organizing it for the big break from the madhouse. For Norman, this was an adventure like the Count of Monte Cristo. He's a man on a mission and a truer friend I could not find.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

Hey, sorry. We've hit a um a technical issue with what Billy was recording on. I'm gonna reconnect it with him in the coming weeks, and we will have another episode out here. I'm really sorry, but I figured I'd put this out. Something is better than nothing. And as always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in Hampton, New Hampshire, Beaverton, Oregon, Alexandria, Virginia, Kitchener, Ontario, McDonough, Georgia, and Adeline, South Australia. If you worked in law enforcement and had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at VicFerrori50. If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. And if you enjoy the content, please check out my Amazon author page where you'll find my series of behind the scenes NYPD booked, the $10 payback, or $2.99 ebook download, and you can preview them all for free. Thanks again, everybody, and I'll see you next week.