PRISONS: The Siege of Cherry Hill

The Massachusetts State Prison, a cramped compound of blackened granite and dilapidated brick buildings in the Charlestown section of Boston, is the oldest, most disreputable prison in the U.S. It was built in 1805, has been damned for 80 years as a verminous pesthole, unfit for human habitation.

In the past two years the prison has been the scene of 16 disorders, including riots and attempted escapes. Last week, in the 17th and most spectacular try, four armed convicts held five guards and six fellow prisoners hostage, and kept the combined forces of the National Guard and prison authorities at bay for 82 hours, the second-longest prison siege in history (the longest: 100 hours, in 1952, at the State Prison of Southern Michigan, at Jackson). Scene of the attempted break was the Detention Demerit Building, popularly known as Cherry Hill, where the prison’s most unruly criminals are kept.

Smothering Grease. Late one afternoon four convicts began sawing through the one-inch bars of their solitary cells. They used smuggled hacksaw blades, smothering the noise with grease stolen from the kitchen. When the bars were held in place only by narrow slivers of steel, the desperadoes hid their blades and waited.

At midnight they burst out, captured two guards. At 1 a.m. they forced the guards, at gunpoint, to give the “all’s well” signal. Meanwhile, they improvised a ladder from scraps of wood, belts, bits of rope and a necktie. But it was too short to breast the prison wall, too flimsy to support their weight. By 4 a.m. three other guards had been captured. At 5 a.m. a general alarm was sounded.

The rebels were a desperate crew: 1) Walter Harold Balben, 38, the leader, a husky, trigger-tense gunman and ex-paratrooper, serving sentences of 35 to 49 years, 2) Teddy Green (né Georgacopolis), 39, a notorious, publicity-conscious escape artist and bank robber (he is a major suspect in the $1,219,000 Brinks’ robbery), under sentence of 45-52 years, 3) Joseph (“Red”) Flaherty, 32, a handsome, fast-talking rapist and thief (35 to 47 years), and 4) Fritz Swenson, 31, a hulking, taciturn cop-killer and a lifer.

Hovering Helicopters. The morning after their break, the four trapped rebels allowed twelve of their fellow convicts to return to the main part of the prison, held the remaining six as additional hostages, and forced them to start digging a tunnel through the concrete floor of Cherry Hill. The escape tunnel was abandoned when water seeped into it. The desperate four demanded that Governor Christian Herter send them a getaway car. “One shot, one gas bomb,” Green shouted across the prison yard, “and all five of your screws die.” Massachusetts Attorney General George Fingold replied over a public-address system: “If one of those guards dies, you all die in the electric chair.” As news of the big break spread, the public and the press swarmed to Charlestown. Press helicopters whirled overhead, and photographers swung perilously above the prison wall on a crane. State troopers converged on Charlestown, and a Walker Bulldog tank lumbered up to the prison gates. The Rev. Edward Hartigan, the prison’s Roman Catholic chaplain, was permitted to enter Cherry Hill to hear confessions and give Communion to some of the hostages. The prison physician was allowed to minister to a sick guard. Pretty Toby Green, 16, made a telephone call to her besieged father. Excerpts: Toby: Hey, Dad? Green: Oh, Toby! . . . Toby: What are you doing?, Green: I just want to get out. Toby: Dad, that’s silly. How can you get out that way? Green: Toby, Toby, you know Dad. Toby: I know you. Green: I’ll get out! . . . Honey, Toby, honey, I am awfully sorry . . . Wait a minute, dear. Some of the boys are wondering who I am calling “dear” and “honey.” One says who am I talking to, the warden? . . . Toby: W7hat are you doing with the guards ? Green: Oh, playing a little bridge with them or something like that. Toby: What about the man who is sick? Green: Who? Oh, he’s lying down—throwing up … Toby: What are you going to do to them? Green: I would rather not talk about it, honey . . . Toby: If anything does happen to them, by God, you won’t be a father to me . . . Green: I am sorry, Toby, but if that warden don’t let me out in the car, I positively will. That is the way I feel about it and that is that … I am sorry, Toby, you got hurt this way, but it is one of them things. I got to have my freedom and get all that money that is put away and I have to get it for you and Ma and the kids. If they give me a car like I want to get out of here, I won’t bother them . . . My God, it is driving me out of my mind to get that money … It is too much money lying in the ground … I don’t know no politicians so I have to get out my own way. I want out, and that’s the whole darn thing . . .

Toby Green put down the phone and wept.

Gathering Tension. On the third day of the siege the convicts agreed to negotiate with a seven-man citizens’ committee. At the first, tense meeting, between midnight and 3 a.m., the convicts were polite but adamant. They faced the com mittee across a table, set up with a pad and pencil as if for a board-of-directors meeting. They served coffee to the committeemen, talked at length of their hopeless futures, the rigid Massachusetts penal code, the miserable living conditions in Cherry Hill (one of the committeemen, Editor Erwin D. Canham of the Christian Science Monitor, was shut for a few min utes in one of the granite solitary cells —to see how it felt). At the second meeting, the following afternoon, the tensions mounted. The committee agreed to try to help the convicts, but made no deals.

At last, after six hours of negotiating, the grim men decided to surrender and face the consequences (up to 20 added years). “Until almost the precise moment when [the four] pulled their guns from their dungarees pockets, slipped out the clips or bullets, and tossed them on the table before us,” wrote Canham, “we did not know whether the men would choose tragedy or hope.”