Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - The Real Story Behind "The Midnight Express" | Billy Hayes

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Billy Hayes 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 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://ridingthemidnightexpresswithbillyhayes.comGo to https://ground.news/Inside for abetter way to stay informed. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access to world-wide coverage through my link.F*%k your khakis and get The Perfect Jean 15% off with the code COX15 at theperfectjean.nyc/COX15 #theperfectjeanpod https://theperfectjean.nycDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [e-mail] you extra clips and behind the scenes content?Subscribe to my Patreon: https://patreon.com/InsideTrueCrime 📧Sign up to my newsletter to learn about Real Estate, Credit, and Growing a Youtube Channel: https://mattcoxcourses.com/news 🏦Raising & Building Credit Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/credit 📸Growing a YouTube Channel Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/yt🏠Make money with Real Estate Course: https://mattcoxcourses.com/reFollow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@matthewcoxtruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69

I'm now looking at the rest of my life in prison. I'm going to escape. One way or the other, I'm getting out. I had heard of the movie, Midnight Express. So I just watched it for the first time. I do have a lot of questions. But is it possible that, you know, you could maybe just explain and I could ask as we go along if that's not too...

I can, yeah, anything you like. And again, once I get babbling about this, you have to cut me off. Usually I have my wife around at a party or something and she'll, like, step on my foot or give me an elbow. know you're revving into the red zone slow down because i tell people all the time you just have to walk away yeah i tell people when they're talking i'm like listen bro you're just going to have to walk away because i'm just going to keep talking right you're not going to have to me so interject stop me tell focus me anywhere you want and literally any question you want to ask i jokingly used to say to

people ask me something i've never been asked before because i've done this you know since the moment I was busted in 1970. I escaped in 1975. I stepped off the plane at Kennedy Airport into 100 reporters. I've been in jail for five years. My big media event was like the mail coming through the door once a week, if you got mail. And suddenly, I got 100 people asking me questions and yell it. And it never stopped.

I'm still doing it. My idea of getting out of jail eventually was I wanted just a nice, quiet place. In fact, I wanted to go to, my dream was to go to a little beach. in south of Rabat in Morocco, where I always visioned, I have a nice quiet place and a woman who just wanted to make love and swim and eat fruit. And when I escaped, that little beach in Morocco was in the middle of a war zone. And they literally were fighting back and forth. So, you know, expectations always lead me to a fall anyway. But getting home was weird, stepping off the plane suddenly everybody's talking to me. Well, can we start it to be?

beginning, like just to start like where you were born, you know, how you ended up in Turkey, right? I was born in the Bronx, 97. Jesus, I can't believe in that old. I wake up, I keep thinking I'm 18 until I look in the mirror or start to move. And it's like, oh, no, no, no, that was a long time ago. A friend of mine came back from Istanbul. This was in 1969. His dad did travel to world. It was a wine distributor. My friend came back from Istanbul and he had a little chunk of hash best we had ever smoked hidden in his money belt he's and we smoked it and he said it's cheap it's easy they sell it right on the street it's like really and i started thinking and i was working as a child psychiatric aid how i got that job is just too long a story at the local hospital in

milwaukee at marquette university where i went to school journalism school always wanted to be a writer jack london is my hero and wandering around the uh the hospital I passed what was like the cast room, and I see a doctor dipping a roll of plaster of Paris tape into water and wrapping it around this patient's broken leg. And an idea came to me. And two weeks later, I was in an Istanbul hotel room. I had two kilos of hash plaques, best incredible hash, taped to my leg. And I was dipping the roll of plaster of Paris tape into water, wrapping it around the hash and watching as this rough, bulky, but beautiful white cast took shape. I spent the rest of the night smoke and hash watching the cast dry, and next day, I'm clomping across the Istanbul airport up to the customs guy with this cast on my life.

I was 21, the first time I smuggled. I actually smuggled four times, three successful. And I couldn't say that when I got home and got busted on the fourth. I should have stopped when I was ahead. But who does that? Especially when you're young. And I got, I smuggled, I smuggled, I smuggled, and the fourth trip in October of 1970, the PLO had just hijacked and blown up some jets out in the Jordanian desert, the beginning of all this airport security and control. Before this, nobody got searched boarding an airplane. You could walk on a plane with a chicken under your arms. Nobody bothered you. Now they were bothering people.

They were searching an ice saunter out there. I've got two kilos of hash plaques strapped all over my bio. skinny so it fit and I put a sweater on. And I got to the airport and I actually went out the day before to watch people. You could used to be able to do that. Go up on the observation deck and watch people going through customs and getting on the plane. Not now, of course. But I went out the day before because I'm thinking airport security has got to be increased since they just blew up these jets up in the desert. And I watched people going through customs. Nobody was getting searched. They didn't have any metal detectors. I figure piece it cake. And I actually

headed back to this English girl who was studying belly dancing here in exotic, erotic Istanbul, instead of going up on the observation deck as I planned and watching people till I actually got on the plane. So next day, I show up. I've got my two killers of hash plaques strapped under my sweater. And I go through customs. Nobody searches me. I'm sitting downstairs in the waiting room, which is kind of odd. But it was okay because, you know, James Bond. I'm through customs. I'm feeling fine. Again, this is my fourth trip. I figure I'm invincible. After the first trip with the hash and the cast on my leg, I could do anything. I was invincible. I could. So I kept doing it. And suddenly, I'm in the downstairs room on my fourth trip.

And then they put us on a bunch of old buses to take us out to the plane, which is a little bit out on the airport, which, again, is a little bit odd, but no problem. And this little old lady from Chicago is talking to me telling me about her grandson who's stationed here in the Air Force and how much he likes Istanbul and then the bus stops and I look out the window and there's Turkish soldiers with rifles surrounding the plane and they've got a long brown table set up in front of the boarding ramp with two cops on each side where apparently they're going to search people getting on the plane like what it was I was so surprised they could have knocked me over I dropped to the floor, pretending I've lost my passport because I need time to think. And then this little old lady

says, your passport, it's right there in your top pocket. It's like, thanks. And I'm out the door and all of these men are funneling down around the table on both sides. And there's nowhere to go. I can't unstrap this shit. I got it all over my chest. And all I could do, and I couldn't get back to the airport, all I could do is bluff my way onto the plane. That's where I've gotten myself at this point. Real quick, was in the movie you were with your girlfriend? Yeah, they did that so they'd establish her beforehand. No, I was not. I was by myself each of these times.

Okay. I tried to bluff my way. They were moving down and I kind of moved through the bunch of men and I circle around the first cop and then sideline past the second cop, putting my yoga book back into my shoulder pack as if I've already been searched. And I point indicating the first cop got me. And just at that point, the other cop here finished with another passenger and caught my cop's eye who points to me like, did you search him? And the first cop shakes his head, no, and the grip on my elbow tightens as this nervous young cop out here looking for terrorists.

They're not looking for hash smugglers. He realizes, 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 take to my waist 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 this is a muslim country i'm praying to the wrong god anyway and this time the cop comes up and he hits the heart plaques under my arms and he freezes and his

eyes widen and he drops to the ground picks his pistol out and starts screaming me bumma bomba and all the soldiers bring their rifles down and the people are screaming and collapsing and i'm frozen there waiting to be shot the the cop he was now the cop is really freaked and i the shaking gun is pressing into my stomach as this young cop lifts up my sweater and it takes him a moment to realize it's not a mad bomber wide with explosives just some idiot out here smuggling hash i can see the tension go out of his face it's like hashish and he screamed he says how Hashish, hashish. And he pulls the gun from my stomach and all the soldiers put their rifles down so relieved and everybody so relieved, except me because that was the beginning of a very long five

years. They put me, they drug me into the police station at the airport and there was proud of soldiers and cops and they ripped the hash from my chest. They ripped the hash from around my waist and I pile it up out front and all these soldiers are there. And then the couple of cops start talking to me and, you know, name William Hayes, William, and they're write that then the door opens another cop with two stars on his shoulder comes in and he what's your name william hayes they started writing this down it was the beginning of what was the most bizarre and difficult five years of my life but also it was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to me prison life was so easy for me market university journalism school the 60s i love the 60s

Sex, drugs, rock and roll, free love, no AIDS. I love the sixth. It was the start of a very long five years. So did you realize at that moment, like, I'm in a lot of trouble. Like, this is a big, big deal here. You know, I knew those moments where you literally know your life is hanging in the balance. When I tried to get onto the plane and I made that first step, when this cop grabbed my elbow, I knew this is the moment where my life is hanging in the balance.

And, you know, once he hit the plaque, once he searched me and hit the plaques and everybody was screaming. And it was a very rude awakening to reality. That's how stupid I was. That's because, you know, again, I got away with it the first time. I told you, I put a cast on my leg and I clomp through customs in Istanbul with this cast on my leg with all the hash. it. When I got to New York, I was clomping across New York airport heading towards the U.S. Customs, and I see a little trail of white flakes, and I realize my cast is crumbling beneath me. But they just stamp my passport, wave me through. Yay, I made it. Not quite the flawless planning

I'd hope for, but now I'm back, and I'm selling hash to all my friends and making a chunk of money. You get laid a lot. You're talking about the summer of love. I was six months later, I went back to did the double because I'd run out of money. I was making, I don't know, back. It was about $5,000 is the profit I made off this, which doesn't seem like a lot of money for the risk I was taking. But again, I was 21, and that was a lot of money back then. And I was footloose, fancy free. I didn't have any obligations.

I didn't, I wasn't married, a lot of girlfriends, but I wasn't married. I didn't have anybody back waiting for me. I get lost when I start telling you were you were you had been caught and I asked if if you realized how it you know how serious the charges were so they caught you they asked you a bunch of asked you your name and everything so now you've got to be you're actually incarcerated at this point yeah how long before you go in front of a judge um I was at the airport for a couple of hours, then they took me to a temporary prison, which I spent the day and that night and my first night in jail in this old beat-up Sultanamed jail prison. And the next day, they

took me out to the big prison where I spent almost the next, almost four years before I transferred off that prison to an island prison. I bribed the, everything in in Turkey is Bakshish. Probably old, you know, Bakshu. You have money you can buy anything. You can do. You can do virtually anything in prison. And I had money and I arranged with my friend, the prison doctor, who I've been bribing for the last four years, making friends with. The American Council would come out to visits and bring me cartons of Marlborough, which were forbidden in Turkey back then for some reason. And I would take the carton to Marlborough and give them to one of the big head guards, which means we're kind of friends. And then, you know, if you and I are in

jail and they find something like a piece of hash on the floor and I've been bribing the guard every couple of weeks with the carton marble and you haven't guess whose hash that is it's yours everything well you know everything where in jail works like that so it seemed to me that was going to be work okay until I got busted and I got thrown in the jail and then everybody worked for me I had lawyers from the United States eventually would come and work, and people kept thinking, you know, well, you'll get out because there was a big article in American papers about an American can buy his way out of any prison sentence in Turkey, which wasn't true to start with and certainly wasn't true for me.

And again, this was the beginning of the war on drugs. I got busted because Richard Nixon started the war on drugs and went pressuring Turkey and all of the other countries. if the U.S. gave money to, which is everybody, to increase their drug penalties. So I stepped right into the worst place I could possibly be. And there I was with four kilos of hash, two kilos of hash, 4.4 pounds of hash, the best hash. The guy I got it from in Istanbul was a Kurd. You know, they had, he's part of the ethnic groups that are in Turkey. In fact, Kurds say they're not Turks. They are. They live in Turkey, but they're ethnic. And they live in the eastern part

of Turkey sort of in the highland, the mountains, and they grow the best hash, the climate, the soil, everything is like that. So I had the best hash you could get out of Turkey. When I brought my hash back, I went to Marquette University of Milwaukee. I took, I went to Milwaukee. Everybody was like, what? They couldn't believe how good this hash was. People say, well, how do you go about selling it? You don't have to go about. You just sit there. People come to you. People, the word got out. Crazy. That was my nickname for some reason at college.

People say, crazy. Hey, so what did you want to talk about? Well, I want to tell you about Wagovi. Wagovi? Yeah, Wagoe. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not?

No, just ask your doctor. About Wagovi. Yeah, ask for it by name. Okay. So, why did you bring me to the circus? Oh, I'm really into Lion Tamers. You know, with the chair and everything. thing? Ask your doctor for Wagovi by name. Visit Wagovi.combe.com. Exclusions may apply.

Back. And I'm a chess player. So I have a chess set. I open up. There's a board you lift out where the pieces are. I was cutting these chunks of hash. I could cut it. I could balance it right down to a gram. I knew perfectly. So I cut all these chunks of hash, put them in the bottom of my chest set. Went to the park. I would sit in the park playing chess with people and lifting these little grams of hash out. selling them. And taking the money and my hash, I kept my hash and my money in a safety deposit box in the bank. I didn't know how to write a check. I literally had never written a check at this point. So I had my cash and my hash in a safety deposit box, and it worked very well the first time. After six months, I was running out of money. So I went back and did it again.

Second trip, I didn't use the cast since it was crumbling underneath me by the time I got back on my first trip. I just taped it to my body and jumped on the fabled Orient Express train and chugged out of Istanbul heading west towards Paris. And six months later, I was out of muddy again and I went back to my third trip. By now, I've fallen in love with Istanbul. I love Istanbul. People say, well, you must hate Turkey because I actually don't. I loved Istanbul. I had a Turkish girlfriend. I love the city. I love the hash. I'm not real happy with their government. now for the last 20 years with this authoritarian dictator that they have, Erdogan, but that's a whole other issue. You ever read a headline and think, wait, that's not what I read earlier,

or hear a story that was covered two totally different ways and think, I wonder which one's telling the truth. We all know the news can be biased. Algorithms push stories that they think you want to see. And some outlets spin stories to fit a certain agenda. It's exhausting trying to figure out what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just straight up misinformation. That's why I use ground news. It's a news platform that doesn't just show you the headlines. It shows you the whole story. It gathers articles from across the political spectrum, tells you the bias of each source, and even lets you compare how different outlets are framing the same event. For example, the recent federal health agency layoffs. Left-leaning news described the layoffs as a major

crisis, calling them a bloodbath that could harm important public health work like tracking diseases. On the other hand, right-leaning news saw the layoffs as positive change. They called it a win-win for taxpayers, which could save $1.8 billion a year. Both sides agree the layoffs and changes were happening, but they strongly disagree on what it meant. Ground News lets you compare these side by side so you can actually see the bias and decide for yourself what to believe. You can also see things like how news sources are covering a particular story, political leaning of news outlets, and the blind spot feed where you can see stories that are disproportionately covered by one side of the political spectrum. In a world of clickbait and echo chambers, having access to all

perspectives is more important than ever. That's why I love ground news. It helps me cut through the noise and stay truly informed. And right now you can get 40% off the vantage plan for unlimited access. Just hit the link in my description, ground. News backslash inside and start seeing the news differently today. Back then, it was in a magic place, a magic time. I smuggled the third time. Six months later, I should have stopped. I went back. And that was what I told you from the beginning the PLO had just hijacked the jets and started all this airport control that now it's normal but back then nobody did that nobody searched you getting on a plane right so when how long were you locked up before like the embassy showed up or your parents found out and did they get you an

attorney you know um i was locked they busted me at the airport for a couple hours i was out there dealing with stuff and getting searched and strip searched and all the weird shit that happens at the And then the next day, they chained me up and took me to the big, big prison, some module of a big place. And I spent my first three and a half, four years in that prison. At first, I was in an individual cell, you know, 12 feet long, stone, a little hole in the floor in the back for your toilet. I always have to keep a can or a rock over it, keep the rats from scurrying up at night. they do anyway. And I hated that little cell. I hated being locked in at night. I hated being in that little cage. And then about the beginning of my second year, they suddenly moved us into a

big barracks like set up. And I realized once again, like everything else in life, I took everything good for granted. I didn't appreciate that little cell because being locked up by yourself at night is bad, but it's really good compared to a big room with 72 beds and, you know, three. holes in the floor at the far end and there's always more prisoners than that so people are always sleeping on the floor or under the bunks or on the downstairs table was that jean paul sart talks about hell being other people always people always watching always waiting always aware that drove me crazy i mean a lot of those yeah how long until your lawyer and the embassy showed up oh i'm sorry i'm getting so ahead of myself we the second day a third day

there was somebody from the American consul who came out there. Actually, he was a Turkish guy who spoke terrific English. He worked for the council and he asked me how I'm doing, you know, am I okay? Meaning what happened to you the first night in jail there? He, he was okay. He worked for the council. He gave me some advice. He gave me some, a list of lawyers to look at, you know, a bunch of Turkish names. I can't even pronounce. He pretty much said, you're going to be here for a while. Everything he told me about my situation was quite discouraging. But, you know, I'm wanting good news. He doesn't have any. And I'm glad he didn't give me bullshit because I needed to start facing reality. I didn't do that. I was, again, I was at college. I was young. I was dumb. I was full of come.

I'd do anything I knew I could get away with until suddenly the world crashed on my head and forced me, again, prison was the worst. Prison forced me to grow up and to take responsibility for my actions and realize I just can't run wild and not worry about the consequences. And the first morning that that guy was out at the lockup before they took me to the big prison, he at one point he gave me a pencil and a piece of yellow paper and left. me alone in this little locked room to write a letter home to my folks. And that's when I was forced to face the reality of what I've done. I wasn't thinking about anybody. I could get away

with anything. And suddenly I realized I've just put my family in prison. I just 50 years. Every time I talk about it, 50 years later, it gets me. My mom went to sleep with pain in her heart every night because of me. And like, I, that shit, that was the hardest part of jail for me. I was 23 when I went in and 28 when I escaped. And I was in good health and I was really strong and healthy. I used to do martial arts and shit. I didn't worry about that part of jail. You deal with it. One man, the dirt and such. I don't care about that. What really got me was my parents. All the people who love me was suffering like I was. And I was just, that was one of the many lessons that was forced upon me that I needed to learn about taking responsibility for your actions because you have to

live with the consequences. And I never considered the consequences until it was too late. Did you have any, I mean, did you realize like when the guy from the consulate comes and he's talking to you, are you still saying like what kind of time am I looking at? Like, I mean, at what point do you realize? In the movie, they discussed like, look, well, there's possession and there's trafficking. Like, you want to be charged with possession. Right. You get. three or four years, you'll be fine. That's pretty much what happened. Originally, I was sentenced to, I went to court 14 times. They have a prison system. Again, I took everything for granted. I didn't appreciate the guilty till proven innocent part of American jail. Turkey is a little different. They assign you

a percentage of guilt. In my case, it was 100%. And then you have to argue your way back towards innocence. So I didn't appreciate it. And I thought one way or the other, I'm going to get out. I'm going to go free. It's not, that was not happening. I got sentenced originally to four years and two months, which still left me more than two years of prison, which felt like forever. Again, this is the beginning. Now two years is different than what it was back then. And I just, one way or the other, I'm going to get out. So I talked to everybody I could. You know, that's a preoccupation in jail. Most jails is everybody's got escape plans.

So they know this if you do this or if you go there. But I literally learned the best escape routes near the Greek border. There's a river that comes down from Bulgaria, separate Turkey from Greece. I knew if I could swim across that river, again, I'm a swimmer. I used to be an ocean lifeguard. If I could get off this island, which I know I can do, I can swim one way or the other, I'll get off this island. If I can make it to Greece, I'll be free because the Greeks and Turks have been, you know,

enemies for a thousand years. They will never send me back to Turkey. Not for two kilos of hashish. You know, if I killed someone, that's different, which is one of the things I had to consider in the escape plans, which, you know, do I want a gun? You got money. You can buy a gun. You can buy anything in jail. If you got money, you can buy a gun. But if I've got a gun and the guards got a gun, somebody's going to get shot, either me or if I shoot him, aside from the, you know, the carmic implications of killing another human being. legally i wouldn't be free anywhere in the world i'd have to like hang out in your way or somewhere so i didn't buy a gun well when you so i don't know how how accurate the film the film is but there were a

couple of characters that uh that are kind of like your buddies hanging out with you and initially you get like four years and you're just kind of sticking it out you're like eh i'm gonna stick it out that's how it seemed not in first when i got the four years I'm going to escape. No, I'm going to escape. One way or the other, I'm getting out. And I tried various things. I got myself transferred to a, whew, I've been in a lot of places in my life, but nothing comes close to Bakukoi Mental Hospital. It's a big hospital on the grounds of Istanbul. And with many, my big, big hospital, a lot of different sections. And one of the sections was Section 13 for the criminally insane. You've got to do some bad stuff, probably mostly to, to, to, to, to be a prisoner, to be criminally insane, you've got to do some really bad stuff. But for me, that was the perfect place to go because 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 even that crazy, they don't put you on the street.

They put you in Bacacoy. But I know that's got to be a better place to escape from than the big Samadjala prison with the walls and the wire and everything that I've been in all these years. So I got myself transferred to bribe the prison doctor, of course, and got myself transferred to Bacaquay Mental Hospital, the idea of convincing them that I'm crazy, I get a crazy report, they'll keep me there, and the place we were in was this, it was walled, it was originally of barracks for the Sultan's Janosari troops. That's how old this building was, and the walls were crumbling, and the barbed wire on top of it is all rusted and such, but it was a good place

me to escape from. So, at least I thought. So I wanted to get to this crazy hospital and convince them and get a crazy report. And then I got there and I looked at the competition. I mean, crazy is just a word until you live in and among crazy, really crazy people. Again, I wasn't too much worried about the physical stuff. I can deal with that. I'm too smart for the tough guys and I'm too tough for the smart guys. So people pretty much left me alone. My first night that I was locked up in this big prison, this prison trustee guy, this weasily fuck who works for the guards and tries to run things. He puts me in a, my very first night puts me in this bare empty cell with no blanket, a little metal frame bed with wood planks. And, you know, it was cold. I told

this guy, you know, I get a blanket. He says, yeah, yeah, tomorrow, tomorrow. And he's fumbling around a big jangling key ring, trying to find the right one to lock the prison. Again, this is 1969, 1970. There's no electronics. There's no internet. They don't have buzzers to open the doors. They got big keys. So this guy's fumbling around this key ring trying to find the right one. And I see he gives up. I don't think my cell is really locked. And I hear him jangle off. And when they jangled away, I hear from the next cell. I open my door. The guy, in the next cell, who I actually had met a couple hours earlier when I first got here, he gives me a stick with a big nail in the end, and he tells me blankets, last cell,

a big German guy. So I sneak down to the last cell, and I hope a blanket, and I hope another blanket, and I come back, and I give him a blanket, give him back his stick, close my door, curl up and collapse on my bed, exhausted from no, no sleep for two days. And I just collapse, and then the door slams open and this amine guy come charging into my cell yelling and screaming he's grabbing my blanket and again i'm not real big but i used to be very fast and nasty and i'm scared shipless and i nail this guy in the face bam he goes down oh fuck his nose is bleeding he's screaming for the guard the guards are rushing and 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 a fight, lesson needs to be taught. And they have a form of punishment in Turkey, all the Middle East called Falaka, where they tie up your feet and drag you up and they beat your feet with a stick. They did that scene pretty good in the movie, scared the shit out of me watching it. Brad, of course, he said, they were hitting me. Brad Davis, the actor who played me, who I love and I miss immensely. He's long gone now. But Brad said, I found that afterwards. Brad told me, he said that the director, Alan Parker, the guard who was beating my feet with the

stick said, you know, I don't want to hurt him. And Alan said, you can hurt him a little bit. We need, we need these things. And Brad said, he beat the shit out of my feet, got all bruises, but the scene works because of that. That's a great scene, by the way. And what you just portrayed is very well portrayed in the movie. It happens right away. But it's funny, a lot of the scenes that your things you're describing they they um it's not quite in the movie they do it the chronological order is different because i'm sure they have to consolidate and it has to be more streamlined sure and they have to you know i was in there for five years they got a pick and choose just as i did writing the book what scenes do i take when i first came back you know i'm a writer it's

it's what i wanted to do it's what i always that's why i went out into the world to experience life so i could write about it Surprise, surprise. I got my books published, but not the way I expected them to be. But because he beat my feet and they dragged me back, because this guy, Ziot, I keep changing the names from the book to the movie. But this guy walked around the prison with a big black eye in a swollen face, which again, I didn't, I wasn't happy getting my feet beaten, but that really served me well around jail because, you know, people said, what, what happened to Ziat? Because as I always got really black, really hit him strong in the nose. His face went out. And people said, well, the new guy,

Willie, which is my name in jail, the Willie. And then they come and they see me. I weigh 150 pounds. They say, this guy beat up Ziat. It was really helpful because if they're looking for somebody to fuck with, they'll pick somebody else. They gave me a little edge. Again, everything in jail is attitude. And that gave me an attitude that helped me. in prison for a while my feet were fucked up for a couple of days or bruised and swollen but a small price to pay for the balance of people left me alone for the most part again i'm too smart for the tough guys i can talk to them i could work my way and too tough with anybody else i can deal with that and it gave me a little edge that helped me a bit in jail um i mean at what point so in the movie

you get whatever you get four years and change right and and then at some point, like, I don't know if this is, this was, to me, killed me. Because as you know, your time's etching away and it's, you know what I'm saying? And then you get closer. And then suddenly you're like, I'm out of here in like 45 days. I had a calendar. I had a calendar. I was crossing out the day is 56, 55, 54 days prior to going free, the American council showed up for an unexpected visit. And I think, yay, the Turks will let me out early. And as soon as I see his face, I know it's bad news. I'm worried.

Somebody at home. Somebody's sick. Somebody hurt my family. Not me. I'm free in 54. I'm out of here in my mind already. I mean, gone. And then he said,

Billy, you know, the American Council and the pressure, the Turkish government, and the high court in Ankara has rescinded your original sentence. And now you're going to go back to court and you will be given a life sentence. So that's what I said.

So instead of going free and 50 four days, I'm now looking at the rest of my life in prison, which the same judge, when they brought me back, I had a chance to speak before being sentenced to life in prison. The same judge who originally sentenced me to four years and two months was now forced by the high court to sentence me to life. This judge said, I wish I had retired before I had to do this. He held his hands up. He said, Kalepsi, I mean, like, I'm tied by the high court to issue this verdict. He had to give me a life sentence, the Muhabat. life. The only prerogative he had was he could lower that to 30 years, which he did. Thanks,

I guess, 30 years life. It wasn't much of a difference for me. But at that point, I'd been to, I've been in there four years or so. I tried the madhouse to escape. I tried other stuff, none of which worked. And at one point, I had my best friend Norman came to help me get out. seeing how the madhouse was set up with the old broken down walls, I climbed like a squirrel. I could have got up to a, I needed somebody on the outside with clothes and a car and a false passport and the balls to come and do this. And that was my friend Norman. So he was working the fishing boats off Alaska. He gave up everything. He came to Istanbul. We talked a little bit. He got a good job in the John Deere Tractor factory in Mannheim, Germany, making the money and organizing.

we'd need for the big break. He had to get a car. He had to get a false passport and so on. Norman was a poet and a writer, and he was the kind of guy that women just wouldn't leave him alone. He's the guy that you'd go out somewhere. You send Norman out and he'd find three or four girls, and he'd bring them back. They just loved Norman. So he was willing to do that. He went to Mannheim. I was constantly with my prison friend, the doctor. Then 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. Which, who, he was, what, I got in a letter from Norman from from Mannheim telling me, you know, we're making plans, write a code and such. But he was telling me how he was boffin the wife, this American army sergeant for the nearby base, typical Norman.

And somehow or other, the sergeant, I guess, didn't appreciate it was going on and put a bayonet through his chest in this hotel room. The German government at first said that it was a big bayonet through his chest. And I know this guy. He's not going to commit suicide. He's coming to help me escape. That's how he was wanted. He was full of life. He was just full of life.

But when he died, that pretty much took the bottom out of my world. Things have been bad, but that was that was the low point. At that point, I realized not only have I fucked up my own life and causing my parents and everybody who loves me daily pain, but now my best friend has died because of me. And I just said, I need to, I need to grow up. I need to make some decisions and I need to take responsibility for me, for what I'm doing, and I turn the escape switch off. I said, I'll do my time. I'll finish my sentence. I'll learn my lesson.

30 years? No, no, no. This is before the situation. This is before I even got the 30 years. This is still four years. I had about two years plus. And normally was going to get me out. When he died, I said, you know what? How selfish can I be? I fucked up my life. And everybody who loves me are in jail with me. I'll just, I'll stop. I'll do my time. I'll take responsibility for myself and I'll spend the next two years here. And I turned the escape switch, which was on from the moment I got arrested. Escape, escape, escape. I've turned that off. And that changed everything. Prison literally became a different place. I mean, I'm seeing it with new eyes.

I'm a little Japanese guy, Koji, calmest guy in prison. He used to talk to me about trying to get me to live in the moment. He said, just take care each little minute, each little minute. And apparently the hours and the days and the years take care of themselves. And I remember William James from college philosophy who said, William James said, people can alter their lives by altering their attitudes. And I did. I altered my attitude, which changed everything. Suddenly, it's weird. I was enjoying prison. I was living in the moment. I was enjoying being alive. And I knew I'll do my time. And it made life so much different. I wasn't always there. I was so anxious. I could be calm a bit. I used to do, I did yoga every

day. And I did meditation. And now that I've only got only two years or so left, I can, I can handle that. I can just do that. And it made, it changed me. It changed the prison. It changed everything. And I was happy to spend my time and do the time. And, you know, after Norman was gone, I thought, I'm so selfish. I need to change my attitudes. And I did. And that made things very different. I was, I did a lot of writing in jail. I wrote poetry. I wrote story. You did it too. Everybody's in jail. I was a writer before I got there. That's what I did. That's what I always wanted to do. So I have thousands of letters every, every, every day. I wrote letters more than five years. And I've got notes and stuff. And I was putting together what I was going to become some kind of book or other.

And I was calm in a way that I had not been since I got busted. And that helped. And the days were ticking away. The calendar was ticking. And 54 days, as I told you, that's when the council came and said, bad news. And now you're going to look at going to prison. You're going to go to court. you're going to have to get sentenced to life. And the escape switch slipped back on because now, now, there's no question. Even my dad, who'd been telling me for all these years, stay calm. Don't do anything foolish. Don't make it worse than you already have.

And, you know, my dad's a smart guy. He was giving me good advice. But even he knew I'm not staying. So two months later, my dad showed up at the prison. Shue, my dad worked for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. he taught at NYU. He was teaching early X's and O's I used to call. He's taught early computer shit. If he had stayed in that, he had a guy who worked with him in the Met who was going off on his own to get into this IT stuff and nobody even knew what it was back then. My dad was, I guess he

was a programmer to some degree and he learned how to do that. And this guy wanted him to go with him and start the new company. But my dad had been working for 20, 30 years at the Met, which Metropolitan Life Insurance was, they called it Mother Met, because once you get there, they take care of you, they get your insurance. He's got three kids he's raising, so he couldn't take the chance. Oh, I wish he had. I'd be one of those young, rich guys who their dads are billionaires. Maybe it would have changed my attitude towards life. I'd like to have given it a try, but I didn't have the choice. And it, God, I get so caught up in this shit. It's been 50 years. So he showed up. He showed up.

He knew. He knew you were going. He knew there's no way this kits. I convinced him to, I coaxed him into staying for the past three or four years here, but I know damn well he's not dying. He's not going to be able to die. He brought me a photo album. He had cut the back of big photo album, pictures of my family, my friend, my beautiful sister in a cheerleader outfit. In the back of the photo album, he cut it open and he pasted $27, $100 bills in the back of this photo album. Fixed it up, perfect. And brought it in the to me when you when you have visits if you have normally you're between glass and stuff but you can get certain visits out in the side room if you got family or the council comes and you talk and whatever they give you you have to bring back into the jail and of course the guards search everything before they take it in and I had this photo album and when I went back back into the into the prison I went past the guard they said what did you got here I said oh I've got a gun and some hash you have to be around for a while you got to know the guard you got to be able to play the game and they kind of like laughed at that and they looked at the photo album and I showed him

here's my beautiful sister in a Chilean and he said your father does he works for he works in New York can I get a job if I get to New York could your father get me a job it's like guys whatever you like and I took the photo album and brought it back into the prison and I just laid it on my bunk left it there showed other people here's my sister here's my family one thing people to see this and feel okay about it because I didn't want to have to like everybody hiding it Prison is so, well, you know, prison is so boring, the same people, the same, same clothes. We didn't, we didn't have outfits in prison. Everybody wears their own clothes. So everybody's in there, in their own clothes, and they're talking about the same shit every

day. They got the same food, the same, it just becomes so fucking boring. I put the photo up in my bed. I let people go through it and look at it. I wanted them to feel all right with it because I knew that I'm going to eventually cut out that money and use that money to get And that's what I did. And I got myself transferred to an island prison, 26 kilometers off the coast in the Sea of Marmer. And I knew this prison was considered half open. People work there. It's a prison island. And they bring produce, boats from the mainland come over. Turkey has incredible fruits and vegetables. I don't even know what they are. I know the names in Turkish. And we brought them up. And we on the island, supposedly short-termers went to the island. So they're not going to escape. Because they've only got, what, half a year or a year, whatever. I got to the island and I told everybody and they believed that I, they said, you have a life sentence, 30 years? No, nobody gets that. Well, nobody ever got it until I did.

And unfortunately, a couple of American women, that's when the Turkish government increased their penalties because of Richard Nixon and the pressure from the U.S. government to increase their drug laws, have beginning of the insanity of 30 years of uh drug laws putting people away destroying their lives for cannabis for fucking pot i mean please so they i i kept that more like more like 50 yeah yeah or whatever you're going to get they're still they're still giving guys 15 and 20 20 25 years for a for a 10 dollar crack rock yeah it's what you doing this is some kid that grew up in the projects. He's selling crack to, you know, on the corner and you just 20 years? Yeah. Yeah. That's from the day I've got home, the very, whatever else I would talk about, I'd always take one message, which is stop putting our kids in prison for pot.

You're destroying their life. Everybody who loves them, you're destroying their life. You're crowding the prison. You're corrupting the legal system. The insanity of the war on drugs. I'm still talking about it. And it's almost over. But it's not over. there's still people inside right now as we speak as you know and people are getting busted for cannabis which i you know that's beyond me anyway i had the the money i got myself a bribe the prison doctor my my my buddy now and he got me on like a like a mental discharge because i was just i was so crazy having this life center 30 year sentence um and he got me transferred to this island prison again 26 kilometers off the coast in the sea of marmarra and

And I knew if I could get there, I'm a swimmer. I'm a lifeguard. One way or the other, I'm going to get out. And I was there for a couple of months working, carrying produce and stuff back from the, the boats would come over from the mainland, unload their produce. We'd bring them up to the canning factory, up on the hill, cheap labor, where we did the canning. And then we'd bring the cans back to them, and they would take it back. These prison boats, I mean, the boats with the produce, they were not allowed to spend the night on the island because it's a prison.

Island, except as I noticed one day, there was a storm building. At lunch one day, I climbed, I took a break from the cans, and I climbed the hill and I was sitting there looking down at the harbor and this storm is approaching. It's out at sea now, and the big storm is approaching. And I could see the boats were actually anchoring for the night. And each boat had a little wooden dingy tied behind. Again, I thought about swimming. And at first, you know, 26 kilometers after five years in jail. That's a long way to swim. I was desperate enough.

Desperate men do desperate things. I was ready to do anything. But I didn't want to be stupid about it. So I waited and I saw these boats. If I can get, so I had to wait till the next storm. I'd arranged to get past the night bed check. Again, I could run, go off in all directions. Stop me when you need me to move on.

They have a... No, no, you're good. I mean, I wonder, you know, people listening to this, like, to me, I'm, to me, in prison, they have count. Like, at four o'clock, everybody gets counted. And when you're saying the night bed check, I'm assuming, because I'm picturing the unit I was in, and I'm thinking of the CEO sitting, the correctional officer, sitting in his office at the end of the, this huge room where all our beds are, you have to basically get past him.

to get out of the unit. Not that you could in federal prison. The doors are locked. There's multiple layers of doors. But anyway, I mean, it's like as you're saying this, I do have a couple of questions I want to ask. Yeah. Can I ask real quick?

I was going to wait until the end. No, no, no. Stop me because I just ramble on and then I find something else and suddenly I'm gone. So, no, bring me back. And I like that it's different than the movie that your version. You're giving better details because some of the stuff didn't make sense. So for example,

In the movie, you've got, I want to say, is it Dennis Quay? Not Dennis Quay, it's his brother. Brother, Randy Quay. Randy, he's great. Crazy, but great, yeah. He plays crazy in the, oh, he's crazy in real life, too. Yeah, he is, unfortunately. So he and another guy, another great actor.

Brad Davis, John Hurt. Yeah, that was, this is the one in the, where you guys, I want to feel like it's like a restroom area where you guys cut out the blocks yes and go down i i was always wondering if that one if it was a if that is a real thing and two the catacombs in the in the movie it's this is a bad scene it's not a good it's not good the way they set it up because you guys go down there and you're wandering around which one i can't imagine it's as it was as large and clear and clean as it looked in the movie but two you guys are wandering round down there. And I guess you can't figure out a way out of this whole thing. Right. And then you get,

but in the movie doesn't show that. It just shows you it clips from or the cut is you guys wandering around like where, where, how can we get out of here? And the next thing you know, you're you're back in the prison. And apparently someone has figured out that these blocks have been removed. And then they grab, they start grabbing you guys to yeah. I'm wondering what, what happened there? Like, it's not a great transition. Actually, it's not a great transition because that didn't happen. That scene was, again, I wrote notes when I sat with Oliver Stone for about a week in a hotel room and we got back and he was crazy, you know, snorting smoking joints and knocking down Rocky. I loved his energy because he was nuts, but I love that energy. I told him about

something I'd written, which was a short story I'd written about going, it says cut the cut the block and going to prison up was on a couple of levels and one of the bottom levels was the kitchen and they had like a dumb waiter that would lift stuff up and then people would take stuff out and I wrote a scene where we did that went down into the catacombs which were down below Istanbul the truth is Istanbul has catacombs for a thousand years beneath it all the streets of this incredibly fascinating city so I wrote that as a short story as part of And Oliver Stone heard it and he said, really. And he included that part of the escape as one of the things that he put in.

It's why it doesn't really fit again. I didn't have much to say about it. Once I signed the rights to my book, I asked my agent, I said, so once I sign the rights to this book, what's going to happen? If I don't like the movie, he said, you're done. If you sign that, you know, you worked with guys in jail. You can get ripped off so easy if you don't know what's going on. I had a good agent. He said, when we sign the contract and they get the book, they'll do what they like.

I said, well, suppose they change. He said, you have a little clause in here that says, if you do not like the film, you can take your name off the title. He said, but they're selling the goddamn film on your name. You cannot, whatever they do, they're going to do. I got lucky that I had the people who were involved. The changes that they made that I don't like are, that's personal. that's, you know, I'm the least objective of viewers of the film. So I think I was lucky because they made a very powerful movie.

Brad Davis, the actor, gave his heart and soul to this thing. The music, I mean, Georgia Moroder did this music. People still, they hear that music. It's like, Middha Express, then, then, then, then. I hear little clips to that music. I'm out somewhere. It's like, holy fuck, that's the music that he put in there. And the acting, John Hurt, he played the junkie,

and he had the cracked glasses with the lids cracked. And he was so good. Oh, he was so good. And Brad, again, put his heart and sold it. Randy Quaid was terrific in this movie. That's before he got two off the end. So I got lucky that the people who did it did it. And it turned out to be a good film in many ways.

It was good for me because, you know, getting out of jail, what you know what kind of jobs you're going to get? You know, previous employment the last five years, convict. That doesn't get to a lot of work. And I didn't know how to do anything except right. So I wrote. You know, I've I've optioned the life rights to probably six different guys life, life rights, right? You always have this.

It's always that, you know, of course, I've written several books and I've written a lot of synopsies, right? So, you know, synopsies are like 10 or 12,000 words. You know, they're not, they're about double the size of a Rolling Stone magazine, true crime article. They tell the story. Yeah, they tell the story. They're good.

Basically, you could easily turn it into a script. So what's funny is I'll always get these guys because, of course, I would have them attach their life rights to the project because I'm not spending three months or two months writing your story. So I can then get out, promote it. Some producer talks to you and then he runs with it. No. So, you know, they always did the same thing.

Always the same thing. Well, what if they change it? Well, I want to be able to have controls. Like, stop it. Nobody is going to dump $40 million. or $80 million into a movie about your life and then have you doing things like, wait, that's not exactly how it happened. Or my car wasn't gray.

It was silver. Or I'm like those little details that mean so much to you don't mean anything. And they don't work. Your movie, your 300 page book, is about 20 hours of screen time. They have to consolidate that into two hours. and they're going to have to remove and conflate many, many stories that you're not going to be happy with. That's what my agent told me. When I said, can I change it?

He said, you're done. If you sign the contract, you're finished. And for good reason. I wanted to sign the contract. I had no money. I owed my dad for years. They'd been supporting me and such. So I was thrilled to sign a contract.

I was thrilled to have the movie move forward as quick as it did. I mean, I just got home. I was barely a couple of weeks home when suddenly my agent called. He said, uh, Billy, we have a phone call from Columbia Studios in Hollywood, and they want to fly you out and talk to you about making a movie. It's like, making a movie. I mean, I've been in jail for five years. Making a fucking movie.

It was wonderful. And they flew me out and I got wine and dine and met whoever. I was in the Columbia cafeteria and all these famous faces are sitting down and having their lunch and such. And it was wonderful for me. I was so happy about it. When it got to the film, they sat me down in a little screening room in, like, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Columbia had a room, and by myself in this little room, and they showed me their version of Midnight Express.

People said, well, could you get, how much input did you have? I said, none. I mean, when I gave the script to Oliver Stone, that was it. I was done. They showed me the film. I could barely breathe because they made such a powerful film. There were things in it that, you know, the escape was. One thing I knew when all of this started is they'll love the escape.

I escaped off the island and the storm and the robot running through Turkey, dye in my hair, black, getting to Greece. I mean, it's made for films and they didn't use it, which I couldn't understand why. I know now how much money it would cost to shoot at night and a robot and a storm. And I asked one of the producer guys, you know, why didn't you do? He said, Billy, what 45 minutes of this film? That's Alan Parker said, what 45 minutes of this film do you want to cut out to put in your escape? The audience is how enough.

Get them out of the fucking theater. And they were making a film about hope and fear and blah, blah, blah. They didn't necessarily want to tell my story. I mean, it was part of it. So I was good with all of that. It was fine. It was what it was. and you know I couldn't change it I didn't have any power over it so don't get excited about things

that you can't affect so I learned that in jail one of my lessons and so how how did the how did you escape you were I interrupted you with my question I escaped the island in the rowboat in a storm I knew when I saw that when I was I got transferred to the prison island with the money my dad smuggled my dad if they caught us he would have been in jail with me that's Yeah. Well, sorry. So where am I? So the story, you had to wait for a storm. You knew they had low boats. You knew they tied up during the storms. Yeah. And oh, we get back to how do I get past night bed check. There a couple of guys on the island, the guys called Capadai, meaning these are the big

gangster prisoners. These guys live like kings. They literally run the jail because outside they're rich. They got gone. But for some reason, this guy didn't bribe the right guy and this guy bribed the other guy and suddenly this guy has to deal with a couple of months in prison, but he'll get out again and then he'll probably get vengeance on the guys who put him the normal bullshit back and forth. But, you know, for me, I made friends with the number one Kappa Dai who these guys at night after bed check would go down to the accounting shed. A couple of nerdy guys with adding machines were toting up today's canning profits because, again, we do work on the island.

And I'm the only foreigner on the island at this point. I speak pretty good Turkish by now. I made good friends with the head copadai who I always found out the best way is you find the number one guy somewhere and make friends with him or if it happens a different way, you catch him in a throat or in the eyes and he goes down and then other people leave you alone, but now you've got to deal with him. I made friends with people. I had to. That was a good way to do it. Again, I'm not real big. I tried not to fight, but I didn't have to do too much. People pretty much left me alone. And if they didn't, I could deal with it.

I could find a way around it. The head copadai, he got me permission to be the accounting shed at night after the night bed check. These guys are drinking rocky and smoking joints and they're playing cards and knocking down dominoes. I arrange with them to be able to be past the night bed check, which means it'll really be mourning before anyone he really knows I'm gone. Again, this is 1969, 1970, 1975.

didn't have electronics. They didn't have everything was so crude back then. There was no internet. There were no cell phones. It's hard to remember now what life was like back then. But I knew if I can get past the bed check, I can get out to one of these boats. So I waited for the next storm and it blew and it blew and I saw the early boats were starting to lock down for the night. And then we finished work. I worked in the canny factories loading all of the shit back and wanting to get hard and healthy with the escape. And I got down to once the bed check was coming, I went down to the accounting shed. I'm cool. The guards know where's, where's Willie? He's down at the accounting shed. The head cop a die. If they have any questions, they'll go ask him

politely because he has way more power than any fucking guard. And he'd say, yeah, he's all right, leave me alone. So they wouldn't bother me. They wouldn't know until the next morning when everything got unlocked and they do a count. What happened to Willie? So I knew I've got the night. to get by. And I stayed there a little while and I told the guys, I don't feel so good. Have some hash. No, I don't want to. Have some Rocky. No, I don't want any Rocky. I'm just, I'm going to go back to the barracks and rest. But instead of going back up to the barracks, I make my way down through the cobblestone. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio, your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown

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and it's it's empty now and drop down into the bottom and you know and i'm listening and i'm waiting i want to be sure no other prisoners around and i'm thrilled to be this close to escaping and scared shitless of course there's no turlin back now and uh i waited a little while i i got my one leg up into the top of the shed and I hear a noise clattering on the stone beach and I drop down to the bottom into this little vat and one of the patrolling soldiers out here patrolling it's raining it's nasty but he's route patrolling he steps in under the overhang I can see the flare of a match as he lights a cigarette I can smell the smoke he's right on the other side of the wall I'm thinking stone inanimate object no human vibrations. And after I heard him clatter away, I got to the wall. I went up on the top

and it dropped down onto the mucky sand and crawl down towards the water and then slid right into the cold waves and breast stroking my way out again. I'm a swimmer. I'm not, that's not the hard part. But I was worried about being seen by, you know, somebody in one of the boats that are anchored here or shot the guard. There's a pier that goes out and there's a place out there where the guards are with guns but they're not out in the rain it's the fucking rain and wind and again people don't really escape these guys most of the people of this prison were short term they had less than a year or whatever left to go which their incentive for escaping was almost minimal which is why when i got there the first thing i said to everybody i still got a 30 year

sentence but i people were like 30 yeah how did you get that nobody gets that sentence i yeah except me and unfortunately these two women who got it around the same time. I said, you know, the American Council, I'm here for a little while. The American Council is going to help me and take me back to New York, which sounded very logical to people who don't really know. That's not the way things work, especially now with the incentive of the drug laws being pressured. But it made it easier for me to just, nobody was really thinking I'm going to escape from here. So I got out.

I swam out, I got the dingy, I got to one little dingy and Sid, got the oars and I start to pull and I'm starting to move out. And the dingy is, when I actually, when I cut the rope on the dingy, I had a knife that it's stolen from the candy factor. And I get the one little dingy and I know I start sawn on this big, thick hemp rope and it won't cut and it's like fuck. And then I hear whack and a wooden hatch opens in the boat, above me and this Turkish fisherman leans out

and spits out over me into the sea. I'm frozen there. If he looked down, I wouldn't be here now. I'd be dead by now. And then the hatch closes. And I start to saw at the rope again and it won't cut. And I'm ready to gnaw this fucker apart with my teeth when the rope lets loose and the diggies starts drifting back

towards the rocks and the guards with the guns. And I grabbed the oars. and discover they don't have oarlocks on turkish dinghies they have like a little peg in the in the rail of the boat and the big uh like pretzel of rope around each ore and somehow you put it over the top and i figure it out but i'm drifting back and forth and i'm scared out of my mind but fun again a little bit of movement and the dinghy stops drifting and starts moving out in the other direction out past the other boats out of the harbor away from the prison and i'm rowing and i'm strokling a little bit trying to keep the oars and keep and when I look up I realize I'm past

the last of the fishing boats I'm out into the open seat I'm free for the first time in five years I almost lost the day I was lost it or but I got it together and started rowing and I knew the island is like a horseshoe-shaped island and the prison is at the head of the horseshoe so as I was rowing I knew again I got maps I knew everything I knew that's all I had to do I had a lot of time. I studied. I knew I got to get just opposite Imrali Island and hit the mainland of Asia Minor. Otherwise, I'll be swept far south out to sea. In fact, I knew the current was coming from this direction, which is why I had to pull harder in my right oar than my left. And my hand got all bloody. I wrapped a handkerchief around, and I kept pulling because I know I want to hit right across and hit the mainland. And I use the lights of the

island. So if I was, if I was drifting too far, I'd have to pull and get the other way. But Pretty soon, I lost the lights of the island and I'm basically lost out here in the rainy night and I'm rowing and I'm stroking and I'm singing to myself to keep the rhythm and they catch me, they beat me, make it, I'm free, make it, and I'm rowing and I'm rowing and at one point these big waves started coming up on the big swells. I felt like I was on the back of a rising whale, but far off in the distance I saw what I think was tiny red blinking lights and I head towards them. And I'm exhausted but driven and I'm motivated. I grow a thousand fucking miles. I was so ready to go. And the night passed and I was rowing her and then getting a sudden the dinghy

scrapes up in the sand and a wave list of them. We scrape up again. And I look up into the really dawning, pale dawning light and I see this rocky coastline. It's the edge of Asia Minor. And I know I made it. I made it. I pulled the dingy up. What I should have done was put a hole in the bottom and sunk the boat, the little dinghy that I got. But I love this little diggy. I pulled it up on the sand. I hugged the bow, this little diggy. And the sun was rising and the storm was passing. But far off in the distance, I can see in Raleigh Island. And I know the clock is ticking. So I started running north along the beach, along the rocky edge of Asia Minor. And it was truly the finest morning of my life. Up against a cliff, I find a puddle of fresh water. Quenched my burning

thirst, washed up the salt, and I make my way around these boulders where the waves are crashing. And up on the cliff top, I see three tall blinking lights. There were my markers during the night. Turns out, it was an army base. I go back around the boulders. I climb up on the other side. This is, again, this is still Turkey. This is Asia Minor that I got to.

And I make my way around the army base through these wooded fields and stuff. And later I come out of the woods and I can see farmers off in the distance. distance. And the dirt road becomes cobblestones. And up against the plaster wall, there's an old Turk squatting down, smoking a pike. And I ask him for directions to Bursa, a big town up the coast. And he looks me over, wet, muddy, bloody bandaged hand. He wants to know where I learned Turkish. In prison in Istanbul. For hashish? I said, yeah, he said, and now you want more hashish? No, no, Baba. I don't want hashish. I just need to get to. Bursa, he says, well, you take this bus, so I paid, I think, like 12 lira, a couple of dollars

for a farmer who had this old Volkswagen bus with all this produce and stuff on the roof. And I got crammed into the back of this bus with all these sweaty peasant farmers. I'm up against the dirty crack window. They're passing around a bottle of scented water like that helps. And we made our way up the winding coast, up to the top, and then back to Istanbul. Istanbul, where I knew I had a friend in Istanbul who'd been in prison with me for a couple of years. He spoke terrific Turkish. He'd become a Muslim, and he owed me big time.

I saved them from a bad beating once in jail. I knew some people, they go, they don't care. They don't, you never hear from the most guys. I knew this guy. He'd stand up if I got there. So I'd get to the hotel and the little hotel manager. He says, oh, Wolfie, no, no, no. You just missed him.

He left yesterday, Afghanistan. It's like, oh, fuck, that's the end of my plan. I'm so freaked out. I mean, I have a plan B, but now I'm wandering the streets. And I'm just, I'm blown away by sights and sounds and smells and women and dogs and hair, perfume. Hair, hair. I've got really blonde hair and a blonde mustache back there. So I go to a C.A. Rancboa, which is black hair.

I go to a post office place that I got some black hair dye. See a rank boy, and I checked into a really funky. little hotel down by the waterfront and I locked the door and press a chair against the door. I checked the window for the jump down to the alley and I squeezed this gooey paste. It smells like cat piss onto the little rag and I'm rubbing it in my hair and my mask. The hair looks bad. It's all lank and black. The mustache, it looks, it was passable.

The mustache, it looks so funny like a big chunk of licorice on my upper lip. I go out, I buy a razor, I come back, I shave it off. Now I got this blank black hair and kind of. raw space covered with whatever and black all around it. I was a mess. I collapsed into bed and waiting every creek on the stairs. I'm ready to jump out the window. And when morning came, I went down to the bus terminal here and I knew I wanted to get to Edirne, which is a border town, a couple of hundred kilometers west on the Maritza River that runs down from Bulgaria, separates Turkey from Greece.

And I knew if I could get across that river, again, I'm a swimmer. I can get across any river. If I could get to Greece, they would never send me back to Turkey, not for my crime. Again, if I shot someone and killed someone, I wouldn't be free anywhere. So I have the moral, karmic implications of killing another human being. Literally, legally, I wouldn't be free. So I got to this little border town and, shoot. Oh, man.

It's so long ago, but it's right there. I got to the little border town. The bus stopped, and I was at a cab stand, and I picked out a young, long-haired Turkish cab driver with an old blue like 1952 Buick or something. They had all these old American cars in Turkey back in the day. And so I told them, I said, I'm camping with some friends of mine south of here near the river,

and I've gotten separated. Can you take me there? And he wants to know, where did you learn Turkish? I said, in prison in Istanbul. He said, for hashish? I said, yeah, you want to buy hashish? No, no, no, I don't want any hashish. I just need to get to the.

So he took me down and we go down and we wind around windy towns. And he stops at one place and yells up to some people for directions to the campground, which doesn't even exist. And I see a newspaper headline with, I've got all these pictures, by the way, with a full page drawing of this. muscle-bound, I should look like this, this muscle-bound blonde guy cutting a rope on a dingy in the stormy sea. It's like, holy fuck, go, go, go. And we drive down past and we stop again and the road winds. And he yells at some people sitting on a wooden porch of this little bar

place up there. And he yells for directions. And this big guy in a blue uniform with a tie hanging loose at a beer bottle on his hand saunters down the steps. He's an off-duty cop. He leans in the window. I can smell the beer on his breath. He said, no fucking campground here. And I'm telling the guy, go, go. We drive a little ways. We get down the dirt road kind of peters out. And the kid driving the cab, he stops. He won't go any further. It's going to hurt his car. I offer him more money. I tell him, I know my friends are just up ahead here somewhere. So he drives a little ways. And we stop at the edge of this dry cornfield. And I get out and step on the front bumper of his car. And I'm looking west towards these rolling hills. And there's a crimson sun setting

back behind the hills and I know somewhere out there is the river and that's what I need to get to. So I stayed in the corn until the sun went down. I hear farmers bringing in their sheep or goats or whatever they bring in for the night. I know I'll have to be really quiet. I can hear these tinkling bells in the quiet air. I didn't even swap at the mosquitoes. The leather on my face. It was like, drink my blood because you're not going to get another chance. And when the sun went down, I started moving west up over the hills and the rocky. I'm looking for silence, but the stones are sticking out from sliding out from under my feet. And I know somewhere up ahead here in the darkness is the river.

And I spent a couple of hours making my way up over the hills. And at one point I heard dogs barking. That freaked me out. Not fucking dogs. No dogs, no dogs. And I tore off my stinky old sneakers and socks. I've had these sneakers on for a while now. and buried them at the base of this tree thinking, smell these, you fucking dogs.

And then I climb up in the tree and I shimmy out on a branch and drop down and scurry away. It shows you how goofy I'm getting because now I'm barefoot. I'm walking along barefoot. My feet are getting all chewed up, but I didn't care. I was so close. And eventually I make my way up a drop. There's a ditch beneath a ridge line. And I, this is a tough board.

I saw little blinking lights on and off the hilltops. These are soldiers patrolling this border. The Turks and the Greeks are not friends. And I dropped down into this little ditch and collapse in the mud. Just exhausted, just kind of relaxing a little bit. I'm just starting to make my way out of the ditch when I hear singing and drop down into the bottom. And these two Turkish border guards stroll along the top of this ditch, singing little snatches of folk ditty back and forth to each other. It's Byram.

It's holiday time they're happy. I'm down in the ditch again. no human vibrations. And when I hear them fade away, I come up out of the ditch and over the ridge line and down and more trees and more bushes and the ground start. This is all marshy, marshland, which is I knew from before. This is where I need to go. There's cities and there's towns, and it's a bunch of marshland in between. I knew if I could get to that marshland. That's what I need. And I start moving forward and that I can, the ground is starting to get muddy. That's good. Muddy is good. That means the river is up here ahead.

I moved through some more bushes and trees, and I think I see some, like, metal glint somewhere. It's tanks crouched down in the woods. This is a tough border. I avoided the tanks. I went the other way. Now the bushes are getting real thick, but I can hear the water. It's getting louder, and I'm moving through bushes, and the branches are whacking me, and I parted some bushes, and there's, like, this black water flowing in front of me in the dark night. And I wade right in, up to my knees, up to my waist, ready to swim, when suddenly the water.

water goes down and I'm climbing a river bank and I made it across. But it just can't be that easy and it's not. It's just a little, little river. I part some more bushes. There's the real river. The Marathas River stretching down in front of me, running down from the Bulgarian mountains to the Adriatic Sea. And on the other side is freedom. The river has, that's the border, but over the years, you know, rivers change their banks. So the border has changed. And I wasn't really sure where the border was. I just knew if I could get across that river. So I weighed right in. And I again, I'm a swimmer. I'm not worried, but I'm swimming. And I'm trying not to make too much noise because I'm, you know, whether it's a Turkish bullet or a Greek bullet shooting me

in the water. It's the same. So I'm trying to be quiet. And then it's like, fuck quiet. I don't want to drown out here. So I'm kicking and stroking and stroking. And I make my way, my knee hits a rock and my feet find the bottom. And I brace against the current and drag myself up on this riverbank and collapse on my back, staring up at the stars and this wild giddy burst of joy bursts out of me. But I'm exhausted. I'm sleepwalking now. I'm tired and I'm cold and I'm hungry. And again, I don't want to go up to the first guy I see and have him be a Turkish border guard. So I avoided anybody. Later on, I come out of the woods to this dirt road. And again, I know I shouldn't be on it, but it feels so good on my bare, cut up feet. And then some dogs come barking up. I think

I see a farmhouse, and the dogs come barking up, and I rush away from the dogs. And I say, I got to get back in the woods, and I'll do it just up ahead. It's like a tunnel through some trees. And I say, I'm going to get back in the woods just past that. I didn't realize at the time. It looked like a wooden kiosk, an outhouse. And suddenly I walked past it at this bayon slashes down in front of me. And you put, that's what you do when somebody sticks a bayonet. You put your arms up. And this guy yelled something at me, and I didn't understand him. And he yelled again, and I realized, I don't know.

It's a good sign. And I speak pretty good Turkish, which means he's speaking Greek, which means I made it. I collapsed on the ground with this big, shitty grin of my dirty face, and this border guard. He's blowing his whistle, and other guards come out, and they got flashlights around me in a circle. And this one top guy, he puts his pistol in the light. He says, who are you? Who are you? I said, 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 decided what to do with me. Because again, they don't know what to do with me. But I knew once I got there, once I got to the Greeks, they're going to be fine. And they put me in a little room and it actually the next morning, this Greek military intelligence officer comes in to question me. He's got the bushy eyebrows and his piercing eyes and speaks great English. And he starts asking me all these questions. It's like, wait, wait, wait, stop, stop. People have been pushing me around asking me questions for five years. I'm an American citizen. I know my rights. I demand

to see the American Council. I know my rights. This guy just looks at me, blows some smoking, hits me with a cigarette. Let me tell you your rights, kid. We find you coming out of a totally restricted military zone. You got no papers. You got no shoes and socks. Everybody needs a good pair of jeans. What I like about the perfect gene is that the moment you put them on, they feel like sweatpants. They don't ever pinch or bind up. As a matter of fact, they're super stretchy. There's never any point where you feel like they're binding up on you or they're tight or they pinch you or anything like that. They're comfortable in pretty much any position that you sit in. They're really great. They're comfortable and they look great. And the best part is our

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Please support our channel and tell them we sent you. Fuck your khakis. Get the perfect genes. Cover with mud, we could take you and throw you back across the river to the Turks. We could take you out in the woods and shoot you. Nobody would ever know. Or you can shut up, cooperate, and we'll send you home. It's like, well, what do you want to know?

He's asking me about the insignia on the uniforms of the soldiers on the island and about the radar base on top of Emerald Island and these tanks I told him I saw him he's got a detailed map I show him here's where I think I saw the tanks and here's where I think I crossed the river he said you're a very lucky man william I said yeah yeah I know he says no no you don't know all this land we think is mine mine later when I got home my old grandma used to say oh actually my mom first would say you know God looks out for saints and fools. And then my granny, when we'd go to bingo with my mom, she would tell everybody, and this is my grandson, Willie. He was up the river, out the trash in her mind. He was up the

river for a while, but he's, he's home now. My mom is like, I don't know who this lady is. But it was, they treated me pretty well. They decided at some point that they could, they contacted the American government. They found that what I told them was the truth. And they did the best thing they can do. The Greek government deported me as being a bad influence upon the youth of Greece, which is the same charge against Socrates.

Bad influence upon the youth of Greece, I love being in that category. And eventually, I got a plane from there. I flew to Amsterdam. Actually, I did it a little in between, which I leave out of most of the story because it's too long. I flew up

in West Germany. Anyway, I got, eventually I got to Amsterdam and I knew if I'm going to be safe anywhere in the world, it'll be Amsterdam. They're not going to worry me. And I get to the abs of the customs and the plane stops and, you know, I just passed through customs. They signed. I got a passport. And the American Council came out, got a passport with that black hair that I dyed myself, the passport picture has that black hair on it. I spend a couple of days in Amsterdam.

Just incredible. And I knew this is, I'm free now. Once I got here, I'm free. And I hung a little while in Amsterdam a couple of days and got my hair dyed. I went out and dyed my hair blonde again. I got to cut short and dyed blonde, which is how it used to look. And my first morning of freedom in Amsterdam, I wandered out in, I found myself at the Riks Museum.

And I was in front of this Van Gogh painting called Prisoners Exercising. where a circle of conducts are marching around the stone prison courtyard and in the foreground of the painting this blonde-haired prisoner that vengo had his red blonde hair is staring out at the viewer staring out at me while i'm staring back at him and i know what it feels like behind his eyes and i flip into the painting and i'm staring out at myself on this amazing wondrous amsterdam morning and there's uh there's tears of my eyes as I back away from the painting and leave him hanging there and move out into my life. I know I didn't answer any of your questions, but I told me. No, you answer all. Yeah. No. I am wondering, so when you fly back, you said you flew back and there's just, there's tons of, like, did you realize when you were, did you realize you were flying back and that your story had hit like the media and

Well, what I knew was Long Island newspaper, Newsday, I was, you know, local boy goes bad. They picked up my story five years earlier when I first got arrested and got my four years and two months sentence. So I was in the papers and blah, blah, blah. When my sentence was changed to life in jail, that's when the press hit. And every newspaper had this story. The American, I was probably the first American who got a life sentence out of all of this increased drug penalties. And that made a big deal. So they were following the story.

My lawyer at the time, Mike Griffith, he was sort of my PR guy. And he arranged when I told, I got somehow found these guys and told them what flight I'm on. And he arranged to be at the airport. And so when my plane landed, I got off the plane. Actually, a guy came on and up in front and he said, Mr. Hayes, Mr. Hayes. And I'm thinking it's the police and they got a finger for me. I hate, I hate getting fingerprinted and I hate that fucking ink on my hands. And I said, you're with the police, I assume.

He said, no, no, no, I'm with Pan Am. Follow me, please. And he texts me down some side door. I didn't even go through customs, which had me thinking, hmm, no, no, don't think like that anymore. And he led me downstairs and there was my father and my brother to see them and have my dad hugging me and my brother hugging me. My mom, she stayed home.

We didn't, we didn't want her to be in the middle of this. She never came to visit in prison. I didn't want her to see me in jail. I, it was okay for my dad and my brother, but I couldn't have dealt with my mom seeing me in jail. But we got home and we got in the car. We did this press conference. People are asking me all these questions.

And I watched it a bunch of times. I realized I got my arm around my dad's shoulder. I needed something solid to just anchor me here. And people are asking me all these questions and yelling and screaming. It was crazy, but it was good crazy. Again, all of the difficulties that I experienced when I got home, relative to where I'd been, I'll deal with press comp, or whatever. I got to the house.

There were 20 reporters. We live in Babylon out of Long Island. There were 20 reporters waiting in front of the house. You know, I see my mom looking out at the front door. I hadn't seen her in five years. I wanted to go up, but I had to get to guys, leave me a look, get through this pile of reported just to see my mom. And that was the first, that's when I knew I was home.

When I sat down at the kitchen table and my mom made some roast beef and my old grandma cooked rice pudding for us. And that was my first weekend at home. The phone, we had to take the phone off the hook because it just kept ringing. If I could have gotten away from all that, I probably would have. But I not only couldn't I, I shouldn't. I needed to get, what am I going to do now? I owed a lot of money. I don't know how I'm going to pay people back.

I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. People are what are you going to do now? It's like, I told them, I guess I'm going to write a book because that's what I was doing. I was a writer. And I didn't know what else to say. I don't do anything else. That's the only thing I've ever known is to write and to act. So I talked to people on the phone.

And by Monday, I was meeting literary agents and a couple of pretty big name writers. I don't have to mention them, but two or three of them turned out of me. little douchebags. And then I found Julian Bach, this agent. He was like an avuncular, like Our Mr. Chips. And I met him in his office. And I look up on the wall and he's got a picture of him running around the loop in Central Park. And I'm a runner. I used to run marathons and shit. So I love this guy right away. And he's the guy that hooked me up and started talking to people. And he made a deal with E.P. Dutton, his big publisher back at the time. He's the one that we just started that.

He said, bring me something. So I knocked out about 12 pages. Next day, I gave him the 12 pages. And he read all of this. And he said, well, Billy, this is very good because now we know we need a professional writer. I said, no, no. I went to Mark. I went journalism school.

I could write this. He said, yes, yes, yes. But your style, he turned it the hysterical subjective. He said, your style might work for, you know, Rolling Stone and your immediate peers. But we need to get beyond that. You need to write a book that's going to be able to go out everywhere if you're going to make any money off this, which, again, I needed to make some money. So he focused me down. We met a couple of writers who I didn't like much and didn't.

And then I met a guy who I liked instantly. And he kind of reminded me of my wife. He was calm and steady, but he never let up. My wife's like that. She's calm and steady, but she's the stubbornest human being I've ever met. which is good for me, and we started to work. And the first thing we did was he sat down and turned in a tape recorder and had me babble like I'm doing here for about two days.

And then they went and transcribed it. I hate to be the girl who had to go transcribe this because I speak back and forth and I've got these. And we put it all together. It was a humbling experience to read how I speak in line. But that we chopped up into pieces. And he said, so look, what we need. have to, what he gave me, I'm a writer, I'm good at that, but I just, I didn't know where to go with

this. I've been in, she after five years, where do I start it? And there's so many characters, there's so much stuff. It was overwhelming. And Bill said, come, come, come, come. Here's what we do. We started here, which you get arrested, and we ended here when you escape. All we got to do now is fill in the middle. And that's what we did. I couldn't mention, actually, when I got home, my lawyer, Michael Griffith, he said, what are you going to do now? So I'm writing a book. I want to talk about, you know, all my stuff and my first three, my first three escape, my first three smuggling trips and all the good stuff in between, because I was running wild. In between the trips, I was in Europe. I was in Spain. I was writing motorcycle was running with the bulls. It was a wonderful

time for me. He said, wait, wait, wait, you want to write a book and mention your first three smuggling trips? I said, yeah, why not? I want to tell the truth. He said, one more question. Are you out of your fucking mind? You can't say that? I said, why not? He said, they have no proof. They can't do anything for me. He said, they don't need proof. The Turkish government, you're an escape convict drug smuggler. The Turkish government is going to ask for your extradition. And the U.S. government is either going to say yes or no. And you want to publicly say to the government, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, I made three escape. I made three smuggling trips before I got busted. He said, you cannot talk about any of those first three trips, which certainly made a little logical

sense once I thought about it and I spoke to other people. But what it made difficult was writing the first book because I had to start my book where the fourth smuggling trip happened and then escaped. I couldn't mention the first three, which made it a little difficult because I spent a lot of time in Istanbul. I made a Turkish girlfriend. I loved my first three trips. It's an amazing city. It still is. It's changed a lot in 50 years, but it was a wonderful, magical place for me. But it made it difficult to write the first book. But getting the first book done and out of me, I had a lot of people say, you know, you should seriously consider some therapy.

I said, I don't need therapy. I'm fine. I'm free. I so did therapy. And the writing became the therapy because of the words came out. They kind of stuck to the page. And Bill was, again, like my wife, just calm and steady, but never gave me an inch. He said, wait a second.

You're saying this and this, but I've, I had all my letters. I wrote thousand letters. People kept all of my letters. And when I got back, I got calls and emails. There was no email. I got calls and people saying, you know, I've got 20, 30 letters here from you. You want me? And they all sent me my letters, which was great, because I used that as the basis for the book. And we divided everything up and Bill got me that the order. You start here, you start there. And then we use these letters to fill in the middle. So, you know, he'd say, now, wait a second. You just wrote, because I'd write two or three or four. or 10 pages, and I'd send it to him.

And he'd look at it, bits of red lines, and we'd go back and forth like this. That's how we worked. And he said, you're saying this and this and this here. But I've got this letter from that very time where you say, I was saying blue, blue, blue, blue. He said, your letter is saying red, red, red. I need the guy. I don't need the guy who's out here now getting laid and he's famous and he's on TV and he's

happy. I need the guy who wrote the letters back in prison who was desperate. That's where you need to get back to. I didn't want to go there. I wanted to talk about it. I didn't want to really get into how desperate I was. But he never let up. He forced me to keep going.

And every day I'd have the last thing we did, he said, we're done except for, I believe it was chapter 9, which was the madhouse. I mentioned to you when I went to the crazy house and what was going on there. He said, you haven't done this yet. I said, you know, but he said, we're done. done you need to write that chapter so i was like all right fuck it so i went back basically in two hours i wrote all chapter nine with hardly any changes and gave it to bill and they said okay but you know this is terrific we're done and then julian took it and we uh the book got published and

suddenly i was really out there i'm doing the today show and you know you do book publicity and that back then now you got to publish your own self-publishing which is it's hard You know, you get the money, but it's hard. Back then, E.P. Dutton set me up. They'd tell me, you go here, you go there. They'd send me a car and bring me to the studio. I talked about it endlessly. And the book, the book was hardly even out when Julian called.

And he said, Billy, they want to fly you to California in Columbia Pictures. Peter Goober, head of Columbia Pictures, wants to talk to you about doing a movie. Nice. It was nice, but it was so strange. movie again i've been in jail for five years i've been out for a couple of months and now i'm flying to california to talk about a movie which uh again i'm when i'm hot i'm really hot and when i'm not i'm really i was not hot for five years and suddenly i got hot again and it kept going and it kept getting better and suddenly there was a movie and the movie premiered i got

I was arrested in October 1970. I escaped in October, just missed my fifth anniversary in October, in October 1975. And pretty soon, the book was finished, and I was sitting in a room with Oliver Stone telling him this story. And he was taking notes and snorting, drinking Rocky, and whatever he was doing. And then he went off into the mountains and wrote a script. And then there was a movie. And the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, which usually doesn't happen. some little small film but these producers they had some had some balls on them to do that and they

premiered the film at the can film festival and i was sitting in my seat and the movie came on and for two hours i was caught between the memories behind me and the movie in front of me and i kept sliding down further and further in my seat it was when the film ended there was like boom the film ended and there was silence. Peter Gourb, I heard him later talking about. He said, I'm sitting with David Putnam, the other producer, he said, the film ends dead silence. I look at, I look at David. He looks at me. We're thinking, they hated it. Let's get out of the theater quick. Suddenly, the lights come up and the audience stands up and starts cheering and screaming. And I'm like, whoa, because this was just such a weird thing. But it was, it was wonderful in so many ways.

and at the after party across the street where they had Rona Barrett, that's how long ago this was, she was the, the, what I meant, the host interviewer. Rona Barrett is asking me and stuff and I'm in the middle of this big thing and people are dancing and they're in the tuxedoes and it's the after show thing. It was okay, but, you know, in jail, you don't want to be the center. Again, I'm saying, you know this. You don't want to be the center of attention. I usually had, I always wanted to have my back.

against the wall in jail i want to know what's in front of me what's around me and now i'm surrounded by people then they're yelling and screaming and it was it was good but it was just freaky i wanted to get away from all this and i look out in this music playing and i see this kind of blonde-haired angel moving across the floor which puts out her hand and asks me to dance and i take her hand and i take her in my arms and i've been married to her for 44 years again prison was Very nice. Prison was the worst and the best thing that ever happened to me. And so from there we, well, I can stop. You asked. Well, I mean, what did you do? What industry did you go into? Do you continue to write? I started. I wrote and then I, in the course of the writing, I had some friends who said, you know, you really, in fact, it was Brad Davis, the actor. who told me about an acting teacher. And he said, you know, you need this guy.

And I went to this acting teacher, Eric Morris, who he was known as the mad Dane, is he had this crazy style, but he was a wonderful teacher. He looked at me, he looked right through me. He knew all my bullshit. I'm good at talking and being glibbing, covering stuff up. He saw right through all my bullshit.

He said, yeah, you talk about this stuff and stuff, but you gloss it over. You don't really get down, into what's going on. I said, well, of course I do. And I wrote a book. He said, no, no, no, you don't. You cover it up.

You don't want to touch. There's stuff, phew, there's stuff that you don't want to deal with. And he said, if you're going to become an actor, you need to touch that. That stuff is your gold, G-O-L-D. And if you can't deal with it, if you can't bring it up, don't waste your time or my time here in this acting class. I said, you waste you your time. Fuck you.

I'm telling you this stuff. This is all real. He said, no, it's not. You're covering it up and blah, blah. I was screaming and yelling. We would leave class. I'd be saying, fuck you. I don't need you.

He says, you need me like air. You need this class like your air. Like, fuck you. And I get in my car and I start to drive and two blocks away. These tears start pouring up. I got to pull the car over. Tears are running down my face. This is such a strange thing because all of this stuff that had been locked up in there

was really starting to break out now. And it was overwhelming. But I met Eric and I met Wendy Wright. around the same time and between the two of them i was lost or found actually because he forced me to deal with it and she saved my life she she makes my heart sing still does 44 years later so i i began acting and i started to do a lot of theater i've done i've done weird films i was a i was in assassination i got shot to death by charlie bronson which i loved machine gun to death by charley Bronson in this movie and a lot of strange, weird movies, but mostly theater. And I love,

and I still do. I did a lot of theater. And I just started to direct a lot of theater. And I did that for, I'm still doing that. I mean, recently, we, uh, I wrote a show called writing The Midnight Express with Billy Hayes. You want to use the plugs. You use all the plugs we got. And it was me telling the story. It was about 75 minutes. Um, a producer who I'm not I'm still working with. She said, she called me one day. She said, we've been working on the script of the play. And she said, Billy, somebody just dropped out for the last three. This is 2013. Somebody just dropped out. I had a spot for the last three nights of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is the big theater marketplace in Edinburgh, Scotland. And he said, we have the last

three nights. And would you want to do your show now? I said, well, sure. I said, when is this? He said, two weeks. It's like two weeks. No, no, no. I've got about 150 page script. She said, he said, you just got to cut this down and you got to make this 70 minutes or whatever. That's all they allowed in the initial stuff. So I had to cut it down. I was working back and forth every day. Suddenly I'm in Edinburgh and it's my turn and I walk out onto the stage in a sort of a big auditorium that bleachers going up like this and I walk out onto the stage and the stage and The whole place starts clapping and cheering and they're standing up and I've got the people are yelling and screaming. This guy in the front row does this me and shows me. He's got a joint

in his hand in the front row. That's what I knew that it's okay. And I got to do my show in front of this audience and their response was amazing for me. It made me realize I need to do this. You know, I'm not healed. I'm whatever I am, I need more. And I need and I've been talking about this story. A lot of folks that said, Jesus, don't you want to stop talking about this shit? Forget about it. No, actually, I learned some valuable lessons that you don't forget. You know, you don't get eaten up by them, but you just, you don't forget them. You have to use them. And this was the beginning of me talking about my story, which I was doing this on the road. We did it for, let's see, 2013. We did it for about six years. I was in New York a couple

times. I was upstate in Rochester, New York, or six times they brought me there. We did the show in London and in Scotland and in Beirut, Lebanon. I did the show in Melbourne, Australia, traveled the world, telling my story, which, again, I'm, I guess I need this because I'm still doing it. I'm doing it here. I'm telling you my story. It became the focus of my life. No matter what else I was doing everybody remembers midnight express people don't know i did x y and z they don't know i was in this movie it's like all they know is midnight express which is what it is i should have bigger problems than that this was so good for me yeah yeah not a bad life no no well you know you take what you take what you learn you took it while you were in jail you were learning it and using it and now

still using it in your life out here and i'm still doing the same thing yeah Yeah, I was going to say I've had a guy that, you know, I was talking to it at the gym one time that knew me beforehand and he, he had said, well, you've really turned this into something, haven't you? And I said, well, I said, I mean, I, you know, you got two choices. You can run from it or you can lean into it. And I said, you know, so I decided everybody else I know in prison is, is they're planning on, they're getting out and they're going to run from what got them into prison. And I said, I'm not just, I'm just not going to do that. It doesn't work. You cannot get that far away from it because it's still there. And it's going to stay there in ways that probably aren't healthy for you if you're not getting it out or using it.

Actually, it never goes away, but I find a way to use it now. So I'm very emotional when I talk about, you know, my mom and that kind of stuff. But it's good emotions. It's healing in so many ways. Yeah, I get the same way. Yeah, yeah, I know. That's why you're still doing what you're doing. Which is good for you and good for the guys in jail who you were trying to help. Because I know that no matter how good their story is, they're going to get ripped off if they're not careful.

Even if they are careful, they're going to get ripped off. So I think you were an intermediary for them in the biz and maybe try and help them make this work. Most guys in jail are not terribly literate, as it were, or aware of how to do business in the entertainment field like that. I got lucky. Again, I was really lucky. Not for a while, but then I got lucky again. And I'm still lucky. I'm the healthiest guy I know. I got lucky because in the summer of 1969, I discovered yoga. And I've done yoga every day for the last 60 years, more than that. And again, I'm the healthiest guy I know. Knock on everything. Do you have anything else you want to cover? Can you see that? Midnight Express. Midnight Express, find your freedom. It's cannabis. I'm working with a company called Pharmaceutical, and they've got a line of product that they did, a big company.

They do a lot of health care, farm suitable wellness. And I'm now working with them, and they're going to represent my Midnight Express, Find Your Freedom, which is the, my wife designed this whole box for me. So this has got our story in it, and I'm back in the cannabis, which. Well, what's what's in it? What does that care? Is it like a, this one is CBD and CBG hemp pre-rolls, but they're also doing, you know, it's one plant. Less than 3%, a 0.3% of THC, you can classify it as hemp, which basically is all going free now. But it used to be you could sell something because it was less than 3%. Three points of THC and it made it legal and they could call it hemp and sell it. We're now. they're going to be doing a line of hash which is perfect for me so you will have my midnight express find your freedom hash out on the market and i wish my dad was still alive because the look on his face would be you're doing what didn't you learn anything it's like yes dad do it legally and uh

make some money off it as opposed to wreck my and everybody who love me their lives i'm doing that and i've got some uh what else i've got a tv show out now called uh Greatest Prison Escapes with Billy Hayes, and it's 10, 10 episodes. We shot it before COVID. That's what we started, and they got 10 episodes, and it's on, where do they have it up? On Amazon, I believe they have it up now. Greatest Prison Escapees, which is stories of, and I'm the moderator, as it were. Right. Perfect job for me, yeah.

Yeah, I was going to say the host thing, you'd be a great host for. And it sounds like very, very similar. or my favorite kind of like true crime documentary series is locked up abroad. They did my version. Oh, did they? Have you ever seen those? That's probably the best. Those are probably the best.

You know, they've got some that are super cheesy. They do a really good job for, you know. No, no. I mean, it's probably the best one I've seen. I was very happy about what they did in terms of telling my story because other people have tried and back, they were really good. Well, they had some money and they were really professional. And everybody who's seen my locked up abroad story said,

they did a great job, which they did. I was very happy to see that come out. I love the reenactments. I love the way they cut it with the real. They do a great job cutting in with the real, the subjects, you know? Yeah. Yeah. They're good at that.

And they, it was around that time. Also, they, uh, these, a Danish ballet troupe did the Midnight Express ballet, which again all my New York friends were like fuck a New York ballet would they make you wear a tutu at the show it's like but they did a wonderful job and they flew me and Wendy to London in the huge I forget a spectacular old theater in London and we got to see the ballet of my story which again I'd like that my dad to hear like what ballet because you know from going from the worst thing that happened to me strangely enough to the best thing prison was the worst than the best thing that happened to me. And it's still going on. It's still working. Hey, you guys, I really appreciate

you watching. Do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified of videos just like this. Also, we're going to leave Billy's social media links in the description box. And I'm going to ask him if he has a link to the website that sells his hemp product. If he does, I'll leave that in the link also. Once again, really appreciate you watching. Thank you very much. please share the video hit like subscribe thank you see you