HACKSAW JONES

Miami Herald, The (FL)
August 29, 1982
Author: MICHAEL BROWNING Herald Staff Writer

AFTER 14 BREAKOUTS, AMERICA'S WILIEST PRISON ESCAPE ARTIST SWEARS HE WON'T TRY AGAIN. HONEST. HE PROMISED HIS MOM.

Prisoner 97961 got a hernia a few weeks ago. He had to go to the hospital.

The jailers shackled him with handcuffs and leg irons. Eleven armed men escorted him in a three-car motorcade. He was admitted under a false name and brought to the operating room.

Doctors and nurses gaped as he was chained to the operating table. Two cops, scrubbed with antiseptic and wearing surgical masks and gowns, hovered over him during the operation. He was unconscious, but they were taking no chances. That night, around his bed, four guards kept vigil, dozing fitfully in their chairs.

Who is this guy, anyway?

He is Edward R. Jones Jr., better known as "Hacksaw Jones," The New Houdini, The Man Bars Can't Hold. A petty thief with an eye for women and jewelry, Jones has escaped from custody 14 times in the past 21 years. He has waved goodby to jails from Seattle to Tallahassee, leaving his turnkeys empty-handed and open-mouthed. He cut his widest swath through South Florida, where he pulled his biggest robbery and engineered his most spectacular escape. All across the country, even years later, they remember him: the policemen, the jailers, the FBI agents, the U.S. Marshals. They'll never forget Jones, the incomparable Hacksaw Jones. He is the stuff of legend. He is the one that got away.

"Somehow you could never get mad at him," said Don Forsht, a former U.S. Marshal, now a private investigator in Miami. "You'd put him in solitary confinement, he'd laugh and say fine, he needed to catch up on his sleep.

"But he was one cool cat. He could damn near get out of anything."

Jones' prison career has been a long game of hide-and-seek, spanning two decades, reeling on and on like some cliffhanger serial at the Bijou. At the end of every episode he's nabbed and stuck in the calaboose. The steel door clangs shut, the bars rattle, the lock clicks and you think it's all over. Then, suddenly, there is Hacksaw out again, free again, on the lam again. It plays like a movie and it may soon be a movie: This month an independent producer bought an option on a screenplay about Hacksaw's life. There is talk that actor Robert Conrad is interested in the role. Three publishers are eyeing a 572-page autobiography Jones just finished.

So what's The Saw doing in jail, of all places?

Time. He has been in prison for over two years now, longer than he's ever stayed locked up in his life. He says he has changed, reformed. He says he is sorry for his misspent life and for all the heartache he has caused his mother. He has placed his bag of tricks at the disposal of the law, helping prison officials in Chicago and San Diego tighten security at their jails. He has submitted designs for a burglar-trapping revolving door for banks. He has offered suggestions on how to make handcuff and shackle locks pick-proof.

Above all, he swears he will never escape from prison again. Never.

"Ha ha ha." guffaws ex-marshal Forsht. "That's what he says. He's going to bide his time, and when the time comes, he's going to go. He can't help it. It's in his blood."

Hacksaw: "My mother visits me every weekend and I've promised her I will never escape again. My promise to my mother is stronger security than any steel bars."

Forsht: "Ha ha ha."

Prison officials are playing it safe. Jones is kept in virtual isolation at his federal facility and the authorities have made it clear they wish he were someplace else, preferably the maximum security federal penitentiary at Marion, Ill.

Jones consented to be interviewed on condition that his whereabouts be kept secret. U.S. Bureau of Prison officials don't want the location of his jail divulged and Jones is trying to play ball with the feds nowadays. He is up for parole in 1984.

Why did he do it? What makes an escape artist escape?

Jones laughs. "I don't know. I don't have claustrophobia or anything, although I do hate zoos. I hate to see anything caged up. But I really don't know why I pulled all those escapes. Each time it just seemed like the natural thing to do.

"I never was nervous during the actual escape. Everything went right along and each detail is still incredibly clear and bright in my mind. But afterwards, every time, I'd get these horrible shakes and nightmares and practically throw up, remembering it all, and thinking what could have gone wrong.

"I can tell you this: Escaping from jail is better than sex, better than any high, better than anything you could possibly imagine. Personally, I never considered escape a crime. Jesus Christ, it's only natural. If you catch a wolf in a trap, he'll gnaw his own leg off to get away. You put a man in a cage, it's human instinct to want to get out."

Jones is serving two sentences concurrently, 29 years and 55 years. The 55 are for armed robbery, the 29 are for escape and interstate transportation of stolen property. In fact, Jones has been tried for escape far more often than for any other crime. On his rap sheet, 10 of his 12 convictions are for escape.

"I never hurt anybody," he says. "All I hurt was their pride."

He was born Jan. 21, 1943 in Richmond, Va., an only child. At the age of 8 he was packed off to the Beaumont School for Boys, a tough Richmond reform school, where he spent two years.

"I was running around wild, playing hooky. My mother was working. They said I needed more male supervision," he remembered.

He got it. The boys at Beaumont were worked like chain gang prisoners. Discipline was called "nose and toes" -- the kids had to stand flush against the dormitory walls for hours on end, their faces pressed to the masonry. Beaumont was one of the few places from which Jones never tried to escape.

In 1960, at 17, he married Gloria Cash and bought her a hot diamond ring. He was caught, tried as an adult and sentenced to 10 years for possession of stolen goods. He was sent to work on a chain gang at prison camp No. 21 in Falmouth County, Va. In 1961 he was denied parole.

"So I decided to make my own parole," he said. His first escape sounds like an episode from Cool Hand Luke, except that Cool Hand Luke hadn't been written yet. Jones was working out of sight, in a trench. He wired down the trigger of a pneumatic dirt tamper so that it would keep pounding away, convincing the guard he was still at work. He wasn't. He was gone.

They found him four months later working as a security guard for the Samuel Triviani Detective Agency in Philadelphia. He wound up at Camp No. 15 in Chatum, Va. Two weeks later, Jones was fitted with leg irons and handcuffs, loaded aboard a prison truck and sent to Richmond to be tried.

He never arrived. It was the first of his ball point pen escapes.

Jones had discovered how to bend the metal cartridge of a ball point pen in such a way that he could use it to pick a lock. He got out of his cuffs and shackles, sprung the van doors open and hit the road running. The van was doing about 40 miles per hour. Jones lost a shoe, fell, scraped his hands and feet, and kept going. He was arrested the next day at a bus terminal. He had a ticket for Philadelphia.

This time the authorities took no chances. In 1962 Jones was put in the Virginia State Penitentiary. He stayed there for seven months and 23 days before escaping.

He did it by building a cardboard dummy with coat hanger arms and hair from the prison barbershop, and sneaked it into a latrine at the prison, propped it on a toilet and stuck a newspaper in its hands. It stayed there for hours after lights out, until the midnight-shift guards began wondering how anyone could read a newspaper in the dark. By that time Jones was gone. He used a 4 by 4 beam to scale the prison wall, which was unmanned at night.

He drifted to Florida in 1963 and worked about a year as a cabana attendant at the Americana Hotel in Miami Beach, cleaning the pool, sweeping the sun decks and rubbing suntan oil on women. Jones has a way with women. Several of his arrests occurred in or near bedrooms, and some of the women have been amazed to learn whom they'd been sleeping with.

"I'm not a ladies' man, really," says Jones modestly. "But for some reason women seem to find me attractive."

He got homesick. Jones returned to Richmond to visit his mother, got picked up for burglary and tossed into the Chesterfield County Jail. Almost immediately he managed to saw his way through a grill over an air vent at the back of his cell. This time he stayed free for three years.

He drifted, tending bar here and there, in Colorado, Arizona and California. In Los Angeles, in 1967, he joined a musical group called The Modernesians. Jones played drums and sang. He has a serviceable baritone. The Modernesians went to Hawaii and Jones went with them.

It was at a penthouse party at the Ili-Kai Hotel that he saw the traveler's checks, about $3,000 worth, lying in the open. "I let temptation get in my way," Jones admits. "We had a gig coming up in Seattle and I thought I could get away with it. When I tried to cash one, they pinched me."

Jones landed in a holding tank in Seattle's King County Jail, sharing his cell with a young man named Robert White who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. The two started talking. Soon Jones knew all about White, his address, his Social Security number, his birth date. He tied White up with bedsheets--today prison officials suspect White went along with the idea; Jones denies this--and when White's name was called for release, Jones strolled out wearing White's plastic wrist ID band. He gave all the right answers at the booking desk, and sauntered off.

He would have gotten clean away, but for a young rookie cop named T. Michael Nault. Nault had been on duty at the jail when Jones escaped. He is now a precinct captain in Seattle.

"I took the escape as a terrible personal insult," Nault recalled, laughing. "My buddy and I decided to find this guy. We found a girl's name on the back of a card Jones left behind, and the card was from the Lake City Sheraton Motel."

The girl was Linda Arciaga, lead singer for the Modernesians. Nault and his buddy cornered Jones outside her room at the motel.

"He began running. We fired two warning shots over his head and he hit the dirt real hard. He said he was pretty mad at himself, getting caught by a couple of rookies."

And the state of Washington was pretty mad at Jones. He got 10 years for his escape and was sent to the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. He stayed there 14 months, then was shipped back to Virginia to stand trial for his Chesterfield County Jail escape.

"They put me in the same, identical cell I'd busted out of four years ago," Jones chuckled. "They said: 'You'll find there've been some changes.' "

The changes were that the grill was now welded to the vent. Jones was ready. A friend in Washington had given him a hacksaw blade, which he had glued in the sole of his shoe. "I went through those welds like nothing," he said. It was his fifth escape from a Virginia jail.

Jones went to Las Vegas and had beginner's luck at baccarat, parlaying $200 into $13,000 in an evening's frenzied play at Caesar's Palace. He bought a new Dodge Trans-Am for $3,700 and drove across the U.S. to break it in. In a pouring rain near Shreveport, La., he saw a pretty girl with a flat tire by the roadside. He stopped to help her.

Her name was Susan Black and she was a legal secretary. Jones ended up marrying her (his marriage to Gloria had been annulled by this time). He gave her a false name, a false life history. He wanted to go straight. He got a job at a local Dodge dealership.

He hated it. Jones was no choirboy, but the daylight trickery of selling used cars disgusted him. "I just couldn't handle it," he says. "A nice middle-aged couple would come in and I was supposed to stick 'em with a turkey. It was awful."

He remembered the baccarat tables in Las Vegas. In August 1971 he took $1,000 out of his savings account, told Susan he was going on a business trip, and headed for the Strip. In 10 minutes at the Frontier Hotel and Casino he was wiped out.

Then he saw the two Japanese tourists.

"They were at the casino bar, stuffing $100 bills into a plastic shoulder bag. So I followed them up on the elevator and found out what room they were in. Then I went down by the pool and nursed a drink and waited."

Two hours later the light in the fourth-floor bedroom went out. Jones clambered up the balconies, tiptoed into the room, grabbed the bag and went down the way he came. When he hit the ground, something exploded in the back of his head.

He awoke on the operating table at Sunrise Hospital. A hotel security guard had conked him on the head with a 5-pound, leather-sheathed time clock. He had a fractured skull.

After his operation he was chained to a hospital bed with four locks. Two guards were stationed outside his door. He was barefoot, wearing only an open-backed hospital gown and a turban of bandages. There was a tube in his nose, an IV needle in his arm and a catheter in his penis. Things looked bleak.

Jones was about to make one of his most spectacular escapes.

When a nurse came to give him a sponge bath, he feigned shyness, asking to do it himself. She obliged, drawing the curtains around his bed. Jones got busy.

He yanked out his IV needle, bent it with his teeth and opened three of the four locks in five minutes. Then, realizing time was running out, he pulled the bed frame apart, wound the chain around his leg, took a deep breath, ripped out his nose tube and catheter, and opened the door.

"I was lucky. The cops were down the hall, flirting with the nurses and I was on the ground floor. I ran down the hall and out of the hospital. They were all yelling, 'Halt. Halt.' My gown was flapping. My bare ass was shining like a new moon," he said.

He jumped several fences and hid beneath a sofa on a back porch for several hours, eluding a house-to-house search by police. Finally he crawled out. It was getting dark. He peered around.

And there was the homeowner, holding a gun on him.

"I decided to gamble," Jones said. "It takes a lot to shoot a man in the back. I just said: 'Look mister, I'm not going to hurt you, but I'm not going to stay here either.' So I walked away and didn't look back. I was lucky. He didn't shoot."

Jones took some laundry from a clothesline and hitched a ride to L.A. He called Susan and told her everything.

"She cried a lot, but she said she wouldn't leave me. She said, on one condition: No more crime. I said: 'You got it.' " He stayed straight for four years, working as a property manager for apartment complexes in California and Texas.

Well, not quite straight. He got picked up for drunk driving by a state trooper near Irving, Tex. The trooper had him locked in the back of his patrol car and was taking him into town when Jones had an idea.

"I gotta puke," he groaned. Not wanting vomit in his back seat, the officer stopped the car and let Jones out. In a trice he grabbed the trooper's gun, locked him in his own squad car, and escaped.

Another peccadillo: Jones embezzled $37,000 from one of the apartment complexes in California. He and Susan and their newborn son, Derek, fled to Houston, where he got a job managing the Cambridge Arms apartment complex. It was pleasant work. Here Jones, the ex-burglar, helped install dead bolt security locks in the tenants' apartments. Here Jones, who was wanted by police in at least three states, hired a sheriff's deputy to work for him as a part-time security guard. Then one day, everything fell apart. It was a one-in-a- million fluke: An ex-guard from Jones' old Virginia chain gang applied for an apartment at the Cambridge Arms.

"I said, 'Oh Christ. Honey, we've got to leave,"' Jones said. "And Susan said, 'No, I'm not running anymore.' So I left, alone. That was a hell of a day for me."

Jones went to Atlanta and Susan went to Shreveport with Derek. When he tried to visit her in early 1975 he got picked up for speeding in Lincoln Parish, La. Another piece of bad luck: They had a brand new crime computer in the county jail at Ruston. They fed Jones' name into it and the machine went crazy. Jones was jailed.

Eighteen hours later he was free. He managed to shove a guard into a room by the telephone, lock the door, pop his handcuffs with a ball point pen cartridge, and hotfoot it out of the jail. He made his way across country to Monroe, La., and returned to Atlanta.

But it was catching up with him, the pressure of living on the run, the way his marriage had ended. Jones began drinking, brooding. He thought that if he could make one last big score, he could take Susan and Derek and leave the country. He heard about a jewelry store in Fort Lauderdale, Galt Ocean Galleries it was called. He came South in July 1975, accompanied by a girl friend, Mary Anne Lawson. She was an X-ray technician at Emory University who had fallen in love with Jones. She had no idea who he really was.

On July 9 he walked into the store, hung around for several hours, accosted the owner, Joseph Sirgany, and pointed a .357 magnum revolver at his head. Just how much jewelry he took is in doubt. Jones said three trays. Sirgany said six.

Jones was arrested by FBI agents a couple of weeks later at Susan's home in Shreveport. Some $250,000 worth of jewels -- half the amount Sirgany said had been stolen -- were in a tin box by his bed.

He told the police an extraordinary story: The entire robbery had been Sirgany's idea. The jeweler had plotted the heist in order to collect insurance money from Lloyds of London. Then he double-crossed Jones by calling in the police. The detectives scoffed at this tale. Jones was brought back to Florida by U.S. Marshals.

So began a bizarre, three-state odyssey enlivened by at least half a dozen escape attempts, three of which succeeded. To this day the U.S. Marshal's Service in Miami refuses to talk about those wild days in late 1975 when Hacksaw Jones made them look silly.

The first breakout happened in Tallahassee, where Jones and the marshals stopped, enroute to Fort Lauderdale. The Leon County jailers didn't want to handle somebody as slippery as Jones, so he was put in the Federal Corrections Institute. Nobody realized he had two hacksaw blades taped to the back of his forearm.

"It's all in how they strip-search you. It's a regular routine: lift your testicles, turn around, bend your knees, spread your cheeks. If you do it right, the back of your forearm remains out of view the whole time," Jones explained.

If this sounds incredible, the fact remains that Jones sawed his way out of the federal jail the same night he was brought there. He was running through the woods when he felt something sting his leg. A few minutes later he started to feel nauseated. Fiery streaks of pain ran up his knee. He sat down, dizzy.

"And it was then I realized: I've been snakebit." Jones said. The sheriff's bloodhounds found him beneath a tree, too sick to move.

But not too sick to escape again: Jones cut his way out of another cell the next night and was across the prison yard when a guard in the yard sounded the alert. He was recaptured.

Now he was becoming famous. The cops were calling him "Hacksaw Jones."

"CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION CAUTION. NOTE: SUBJECT IS HIGH ESCAPE RISK HANDLE WITH CAUTION AT ALL TIMES," says a set of instructions given the U.S. Marshals. A U.S. Bureau of Prisons memo went further: "This man is extremely dangerous. He will fake illness, blackout spells, etc. He will go to any lengths to escape. He should not be handled by air. Handcuffs and leg irons must be used.... It cannot be stated too strongly as to his escape potential."

The prisoner and his captors moved South. Jones was booked into the Broward County Jail and assigned a public defender, Jon Ferdinand. Today Ferdinand is in private practice. He says Jones was undoubtedly the most remarkable client he ever had.

"He never struck me as violent," Ferdinand said. "He was a happy-go-lucky guy, the kind of guy you almost had to like. I think it was a game with him. He just basically loved to escape from jail."

Locked up in the Broward County Jail, Jones divided his time between planning his defense strategy and plotting how to escape.

Guards found three hacksaw blades in Jones' yellow legal pad. They found ball point pen cartridges taped to the wall behind his cell door and inside a tube of shaving cream. One day Jones almost walked out of the jail by impersonating his defense lawyer. Finally he hit on a master plan. He promised the FBI he would lead them to the rest of the stolen jewels if they would take him to Atlanta.

"I didn't know where they were, of course," he says now. "Sirgany had them, not me. But it seemed like a good idea."

U.S. Marshal Forsht smelled a rat.

"The FBI came to me and said, 'We want to take Hacksaw to Atlanta.'

"I said, 'Shee-it. He's just trying to escape.'

"And they said, 'There'll be three of us and three of your men with him.'

"And I said, 'Hell, no. No way."' Forsht even got the court order canceled, but the FBI went over his head and got a directive from the Justice Department.

And so it was that on a bright September morning in 1975 Jones found himself walking through a junk-littered vacant lot off Roswell Road on the northwest side of Atlanta, handcuffed to U.S. Marshal George Spell, with three FBI men and two more U.S. Marshals guarding him. He lit a cigaret, pointed out a spot for the men to dig, reached down to stub the cigaret out -- and came up with a chrome-plated revolver in his hand. It had been hidden in a pile of rubbish, wrapped in an orange rag. Jones says he planted the gun there weeks earlier, after the jewel robbery.

George Spell isn't likely to forget what happened next. "He held the gun to my head and said, 'George, you better tell 'em something,' " said Spell, now a bailiff at the Dade County Courthouse.

"So I told 'em: 'Boys, he's got me.' "

While Jones held Spell at gunpoint, the other lawmen threw down their arms. Jones kept one pistol, flung away the others, handcuffed everyone together except Spell, yanked the ignition wires on one car and got ready to drive away in the other. Just before leaving he turned to Spell.

"He said, 'I need some money. George, throw me your wallet,' " Spell said. "He took $50 out of it and gave it back to me. I've always thought that was kind of nice of him, giving me back my driver's license and all my ID's."

Jones sped away, leaving the disgusted officers to walk half a mile to a pancake house and phone for help. Hundreds of Atlanta cops threw out a dragnet. In 10 hours they found Jones, drunk, lying beside a swimming pool at a Holiday Inn.

Again: While awaiting trial for the jewel theft, Jones was taken back to Shreveport to face federal firearms charges for stealing the marshal's gun. They put him in a cell that was monitored by closed-circuit TV cameras 24 hours a day.

"He never gave us a bit of trouble, never complained about anything," recalled jail superintendent P.D. Leon. "He just sat there watching us all the time, waiting for the right minute. And when it came, he went."

Out of sight of the camera, in a corner of his cell, he fashioned a fake knife out of a plastic cup and some tinfoil. He brandished the plastic blade at three trusties, a prison guard and two armed detectives on his way out of the jail. It fooled them all.

More than 500 cursing policemen had to cut short their Thanksgiving holiday to comb a 10-block area around the jail. It was the largest coordinated manhunt in Louisiana history. Eight hours later, almost by accident, a lone rookie cop stumbled on Jones hiding beneath a trailer only 100 yards from the jail.

Jones finally came to trial for the Fort Lauderdale jewel heist in September 1976. It was a circus. Jones clanked into court each day, shackled and manacled, rattling his cuffs for effect. Stony-faced bailiffs surrounded him. The doors were locked and spectators were frisked. The trial lasted a little over a week and nobody believed Jones' story implicating Sirgany. The jury deliberated less than half an hour before reaching a guilty verdict. Fifty-five years. A federal judge piled on another eight for transporting the gems across state lines.

"I wasn't surprised," Jones said. "Hell, they said Sirgany was a pillar of the community and I was just old Hacksaw Jones. I expected it."

But the story has an interesting postscript. In June 1981 Joseph Sirgany was arrested and pleaded guilty to masterminding a different $5 million dollar robbery of his own store. The old jeweler broke down, confessed, and got five years' probation from Circuit Judge Joseph Price. The sentence surprised the prosecutor. It flabbergasted Jones.

"He got what?" Hacksaw yelled over the telephone. It was the first he had heard of Sirgany's sentence. "Damn. That makes my blood boil."

Jones spent 15 months in the federal prison in Atlanta. Only one man had ever broken out of the Atlanta penitentiary. Warden M.R. Hogan told the National Enquirer that Jones was behind bars to stay.

He wasn't. His Atlanta break occurred on Dec. 20, 1977 and was the capstone of his long career. Even today, prison officials refuse to discuss it. At the time, they told reporters that Jones had somehow managed to sing his way out of the lockup by mingling with a group of visiting Christmas carolers. The truth was, they didn't know how he'd gotten out.

This is how he did it: Jones spent five months making a dummy with wax stolen from the prison dentist's office. He tape-recorded 30 minutes of snoring and had some buddies put the tape cassette player next to the dummy. Then he strewed his path with false clues. He sawed through the bars of his cell, taped them back into place and painted over the tape. He managed to have a line thrown over the north wall of the prison, to make it seem he had climbed out.

The truth was, while the dummy snored away in his bunk, Jones was in a boxcar in the prison freight yard. He stayed there all afternoon, all night and into the morning, through four headcounts. Finally the boxcar rolled. When it reached a warehouse outside the prison, Jones fled during a lunch break. It is the escape he is proudest of today.

He stayed free for more than a year, making a living as a bookmaker. He was arrested for the last time on May 2, 1979 in San Diego, Calif. by the U.S. Secret Service. Agents had traced some counterfeit currency to him.

It was the end of the road. Since then, Jones has been in custody at a succession of jails in California and Illinois. A letter from his mother, whom he hadn't seen in 12 years, led to a reconciliation with her and with his daughter by his first marriage, Dee Dee. Today he stays in close touch with both of them. His second wife, Susan, and his son, Derek, are living in Louisiana. Derek is 9 and has never been told he is the son of the famous Hacksaw Jones.

Jones, the rakehell, daredevil escape artist, says he is a changed man.

"Sometimes when I look back over my life, when I think about all the time I've spent in jails and in front of judges, I think I'm the dumbest guy that ever lived. I'd rather be a free ditchdigger than be Hacksaw Jones where I am today. You know I hate that damned name, 'Hacksaw.' I wish to hell I could get rid of it, but I guess I never will. They'll probably carve it on my tombstone."

The days in jail roll by heavily. Jones exercises a lot in the prison gym -- that's how he got his hernia, lifting weights -- writes stories, works on appeals. The Sirgany episode in Florida has freshened his hopes of getting a new trial here.

Mostly, he reads. "Just for escape," he says.

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC MAG
Page: 10
Copyright (c) 1982 The Miami Herald