Convicts: Self-Made Lazarus

At the moment, Teddy Green is a car salesman in Boston. He is a pretty good one, too, with an unusual spiel. He tells customers that Fords are reliable and have great pickup—which is why he always chose them when he was stealing getaway cars. For Teddy Green used to be a bank robber; he got out of jail just four months ago. “I feel like Lazarus,” he says, risen as he is from the living death of what was once a 56-year sentence. Unlike many ex-cons, however, Teddy has refused to mope, instead is coping by making a virtue out of his background. There is hardly a Bostonian who has not heard his story. He has been invited to lunch at the Harvard Club, addressed Wyndham girls’ school, and appeared on radio and television. A twelve-part series under his byline has just finished running in the Boston Globe.

He has plenty to tell. The son of a Greek immigrant, he decided early to gofor easy money rather than the legitimate proceeds of the small restaurant chain his father had built up from a pushcart. He began by swiping a briar pipe and a pair of sunglasses from a parked car, eventually worked his way up to an armed stickup. Caught and locked up, he proceeded to pry a board out of a fence around Mattapan State Hospital, where he was under observation, and began an ancillary career: jail breaking. When the police got him back, they kept him for five years; when he got out, he says, “you might say I took up bank robbing as my vocation. In about two years, with various accomplices, I made eleven withdrawals. There wasn’t much planning—none of that movie stuff with diagrams and stop watches. We’d just pick a likely spot, go in and do the job.”

Cheering Section. Eventually fingered by an informer, he got his 56-year sentence in 1952. After eight months in Charlestown State Prison near Boston, he doped a guard’s coffee, stowed away in a box of rags and was shipped out. He made it to New Jersey, where he fell afoul of another stool pigeon. Back he went to Charlestown. Next, he and five others managed to sneak in some guns and build a ladder. The idea was to pin down the lone tower guard with gunfire and climb the ladder over the wall. Everything went as planned, except that at the key moment two of the cons jumped on the ladder and it came crashing down. “This was broad daylight,” remembers Green, “and all 300 inmates were watching. It must have been the first break in history with a cheering section. They were hollering: ‘Get that ladder up!’ When it crashed, everybody yelled, ‘Get it up again!’ ”

They did not; several months in isolation followed. But Green was not cured. In 1955, he sawed his way out of his cell, but the alarm went off before he and his confederates could get any farther. Desperately, they took over a cell block, and an 84-hour prison revolt began that 38 state policemen and an Army tank could not quell. It only ended when Ringleader Green’s daughter pleaded with him to surrender; after extracting some promises of reforms, he did. Some promises were kept, but Green was on his way to Alcatraz, the federal pen for troublemakers.

Non-Frivolous. There he turned more and more to yet another specialty—jail-house lawyering. This did not mean giving up efforts to break out; he and three friends built and hid the necessary parts for a kayak to paddle off “the Rock.” But the law seemed a more promising way to freedom. He read lawbooks voraciously (he also read the Encyclopaedia Britannic a all the way through from A to Zygote—four times). In all, he eventually filed 56 appeals on his own behalf, and not one, he says proudly, was “a frivolous motion.” Judges came to know him. “Undaunted, Green has tried again,” wrote one with affection. And undaunted, Green got to the U.S. Supreme Court a few times. He was unsuccessful there, but other suits eventually managed to get 30 years lopped off his total sentence.

Out on parole, Teddy found a journalist friend who helped get him the auto-selling job. But he is well aware that precious few other ex-cons have the brains and brass to forge the sort of legitimate life he seems to be making. An outspoken backer of prison reform, he recommends that long sentences be dropped in favor of indefinite ones so that a man does not lose hope. He also feels that an inmate should be paid for prison work so that he can help support his family and build up a cushion to help make the transition to life on the outside.

It would help, of course, if all ex-cons were as unquenchable as Teddy Green. The other day, when a bank cashier refused to cash a check for him, he went straight to the credit manager. “I’m Teddy Green, the bank robber,” he said. He had, in fact, once robbed a branch of the very same bank. The manager did not blanch. Quite the opposite. He checked Teddy’s credentials, found them solid, cashed the check.