The Strange Case of the 1971 Non-Criminal Prison Break in Mexico City Lily Rothman - TIME
go to original June 8, 2015

Joel David Kaplan: Not every escape leads to a manhunt (El Universal)

It would seem to go without saying that breaking out of jail is a criminal act. As the manhunt in New York state continues, the two convicted killers whose escape from Clinton Correctional Facility was discovered on Saturday have joined a long list of truly dastardly break-outs - some of which retain a certain magician-like mystique.

...But the history of jail breaks also reveals an odd counterexample. Not every single instance has actually been criminal.

Case in point: the 1971 escape of Joel Kaplan from a Mexican prison. Here’s how TIME described the bravado breakout that August:

"Most of the 136 guards at Mexico City’s Santa Maria Acatitla prison were watching a movie with the prisoners last week when a Bell helicopter, similar in color to the Mexican attorney general’s, suddenly clattered into the prison yard. Some of the guards on duty presented arms, supposing that the helicopter had brought an unexpected official visitor. What they got was a different sort of surprise. As the chopper set down on the paving stones, two prisoners dashed out of Cell No. 10. The men were airborne in less than two minutes. One of the most enterprising jailbreaks in modern times had been accomplished without a shot being fired."

Kaplan, one of the two escapees, was a prominent New York businessman from a wealthy family. In 1962, Kaplan’s business partner Louis Vidal Jr. had been proclaimed dead in Mexico City; Kaplan had been charged with killing Vidal, even though there seemed to be doubts over whether the body in question was actually Vidal’s. (The other escapee was a Venezuelan named Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, in jail for counterfeiting; his story was much less widely covered in the American press at the time.) After the escape, the prison noted that the Kaplan’s and Castro’s wives had visited the day before, accompanied by an American man who seemed to be surveying the prison yard.

Following the flight to freedom, the helicopter delivered the two men to a private plane at a nearby airport, which in turn delivered them to an airport near the Texas border, where they split up. Castro went to Guatemala; Kaplan made his way to California.

Read the rest at TIME

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