Whitemoor; Paul Cryne and Keith Rose

I caution all readers of this blog to acquaint themselves with the alert in the opening paragraphs of the diary entry entitled 28/11/11 - 7/7/12.

Thomas Jefferson.

First a bit of a "rant" telling it how it  is. Perhaps others with blogs have expressed similar views, but the Internet being the vast repository that it is in the 8 weeks that I've been at liberty, ever since HMPPS dumped me on the streets of Southwark with just £46 to my name, destitute, I've not stumbled across those sites yet. Perhaps those of you that are aware of them, can pass me the URL(s)?

Forty years ago, I left these lean and mordant shores as I thought I could see the direction that the country was being railroaded towards. Basically, I "sensed" that the country was heading towards a grey, featureless society where all decisions were decided by (un)civil servants, unelected and of themselves so lacking in charisma that they would be unelectable. Automatons ruling upon the lives of the common people but unrepresentative of them. Petty little noneties that spend 99% of their time ensuring that their own sinecures were secure at the expense of we, the proletariat.

Boy, did I misread that Tarot Hand. I must have been eating Lotus Buds! Having arrived back in late 2011, even from HMP Wanno I could see it was 10 times worse. Finally, by the time I arrived in HMP Onley in 2015, I could see that it was 100 fold worse!

Continuing til 4/5/13

 

La Jabba, or to give IT it's real name: SONJA SMITH appears below:

Sadly the "Release Dates Notification" sheet will not change until I get to Rye Hill, some 7 months away. In reality of course, this change well before then.

That slug, La Jabba - Sonja Smith - clearly was refusing that my sentence would reduce. For the sake of "Completeness" I wall include it anyway.

6/7/12 HMP Whitemoor, Sentence remaining to serve: 29+ years. Years incarcerated to date - 9.

Name:          GARY JONES

NOMS No.  A2573CJ            Prison No.     D38223.           Cell:  WRI-C-2-012

Sentence calculated on 22/5/2012 

Sentence(s)  1/   1         29 years 7 months 17 days 

Number of days in sentence.                           : 10822

Sentence Expiry Date       (SED Date).           : 16/6/2032

Conditional Release Date (CRD Date).          :  8/3/2022

HDC Eligibility Date        (HDC DATE).       : 12/4/2017

Licence Expiry Date.                                      :  16/6/2032

Mike Connell is proving a surprising good companion. Much of the time we spend together, is taken up with the prime topic amongst repatriatees from Dieland of Amnesties. Amnesties are usually  promulgated on auspicious anniversaries; Birthdays of the Monarch or his wife, significant anniversaries of coronation, significant King/Queen's wedding anniversaries. Not all birthdays qualify. As a Buddhist country, they follow a 12 year cycle:12/24/36/48/60/72/84 etc. The significant decades also qualify: 25/40/50/60/70/75 etc. Of course, once in a while, a minor Royal can be the ocassion to declare an Amnesty. We in the "know" don't tend to count them in our forecasts. Even were an Amnesty to be announced, it is not axiomatic that Drug Cases will benefit.

By sticking to reasonable expectations, Mike and I manage to forecast a very reasonable prediction that by Aug. 12 2016, both he and I MUST BE RELEASED ON LICENCE - the CRD date specified above will adjust down to that date over the next 5 years. Both of us can do this time on our head!

Sadly however, from the start of the year, Mike has been complaining of the difficulty his Father has been having with visiting him. He is giving serious thought to transferring to Strangeways in Manchester. Being from Bolton, admittedly, this does make sense for.

Up until now, all of the other repatriated from "Dieland" have received plum postings within just weeks of landing back in Blighty. This holds particularly true for the suspected Grass, Steven Bristow. Bristow was very close with Embassy staff when he was in both Bombat and Bang Kwang. That alone would have been highly suspicious, however he made a point of being the "spokesman" for all of the Brits in BK. Well I for one never voted for the Grass. The real proof of his allegiences came when he was rapidly repatriated. Whereas Mike and I had to spend months rotting in that Shithole Wanno, Bristow spent less than a month before he was shipped out to a plum position in HMP Lowdham Grange, which at the time was paying top wages for work in the prison industries (I heard later that Bristow was getting over £70 per week, at a time when the rest of the prison estate was paying us "honest" (sic) cons £12 - £14 tops!

I had always been suspicious of anyone who spoke Thai fluently. During the seven years I had been in "Dieland" before my arrest I had met with a few of these dodgy characters. Each one of then keen to deprive me of something, money usually. Bristow was typical of the ilk; crass, coarse, cunning, and ultimately a cheat. After he repatriated was when the more pertinent revelations were being openly voiced. Firstly, we were to learn that he had spent time in a US Jail on a Drugs charge; which was where he allegedly learnt Thai. By turning State's Evidence, he got an early release. Putting his linguistic skills to use he transferred to "Dieland" and settled in South of the country. Here he acted as a recruiter for the Thai Filth, by selling small quantities of drugs to tourists then grassing them up to the constabulary for pocket money. What Bristow never realised was that the Filth are treacherous swine, and whenever they thought that the "Goof-er" had served its purpose they too would be stitched up. for the big money payouts. His few short years in BK consisted of using the same ploy on his fellow incarcerees.

Michael's sojourn in Whitemoor came the predictable conclusion - he is suddenly shipped out to another CAT A. For his sake, Manchester. Whether he knew of the impending move or not I don't know. This does though leave a bit of a gap in my prison life. One that is going to be hard to fill.

Coming out of all of this is the excellent work he and I did to establish what our eventual dates of release will likely be. Forget La Jabba's supposed control over the length of our sentence, both of us are due for release on or around August 2016!



My mate and former detainee in
 Dieland, Paul Cryne



The Prison system, as is the same with nature, abhors a vacuum, and very soon there are new characters that take additional prominence in my life. Two such characters, hitherto unmentioned, come to mind; Paul Cryne and Keith Rose. Both are on the same spur as I, and both, in their own ways ease the burden of these early days of being a long term prisoner in a British nick.

Paul is possibly the lesser known of the 2. A reference to the Daily Mail website (URL below) will document his alleged case a lot more. However, in the interim this snippet might suffice:

"An assassin who flew from Thailand to kill a disabled divorcee in her home was sentenced to at least 28 years in prison today.

The judge told him that he 'may well spend the rest of your life behind bars' and that, if he did, it was his own fault.

Paul Cryne was paid £30,000 to travel 3,000 miles to the UK and strangle Sharon Birchwood on the orders of her debt-ridden ex-husband. 

Mrs Birchwood, 52, a reclusive ME sufferer, was ambushed by Cryne in her home, bound and gagged with parcel tape and throttled with an electrical cable.
Cryne, 62, who became a professional hitman after blowing a fortune on a flamboyant lifestyle in Thailand, thought he had committed the perfect murder.

He had already left the country by the time Birchwood, 56, alerted police three days later, claiming he had found Mrs Birchwood's body after travelling to her bungalow in Ashtead, Surrey, to check on her."

(Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1302130/Hitman-Paul-Cryne-faces-life-sentence-perfect-murder-disabled-divorcee.html#ixzz4sMHjH3VQ)

Paul and I share a number of things in common; Flying, Skydiving and SCUBA; so we have a number of things in common. He is also still in contact with a former SAS lad being held in Rayong (Dieland) prison, Marcus. This might prove particularly useful as despite repeated attempts to write to my own contacts in Bang Kwang, I've yet to hear anything back. Paul also had some experience with Kate "Kuntz" Dufall, regarding it as a person that would vastly improve the world's genetic stock by its absence.

A common human trait is to - in prison parlance - "give it large" when recounting one's exploits to strangers or those we are trying to influence. From experience, I've noted that this holds true both banged-up as well as on the out. Honesty is always the best policy, if for no other reason than the truth is easier to remember than porkie pies. As Paul and I are discussing some fairly "macho" pursuits, it is only natural that both of us will tend to "give it large", if only to establish some form of pecking order. Paul, who has clearly done all 3 but has far less experience - excepting possibly SCUBA - acquiesces fairly quickly and acknowledges my limited superiority with Skydiving and my given expertise with Flying. Once that we've established each other's credentials, then some very pleasant reminisces are enjoyed by both of us. I will always defer to Paul when it comes to military matters, he will defer to me for issues regarding aircraft and RW (Relative Work, a Skydiving term relating to free fall formations).

The same doesn't hold true with Keith Rose.

Here follows a brief summary of  his notorious escape from "Parkhurst":

When I met him in Whitemoor he

had aged considerable, he was beardless

and his hair was greyer and whiter

Although staging a daring escape, it began to emerge yesterday that beyond scaling the 25ft-high perimeter wall of the maximum security jail, the men had only one plan which, when it failed, left them unable to devise a way off the Isle of Wight.

Last Tuesday it had just got dark. Having hidden in the prison gymnasium, they used the master key they had roughly copied to pass through normally blocked exits. Then it was on to the prison workshop to pick up the three-section ladder they had made and hidden. Next the perimeter wall. Not hampered by advanced touch-sensitive technology as in other maximum security jails, they made it over, undetected and uninjured. Two hundred yards beyond the wall, they left the key at the base of a postbox. Why? One police theory is that it was to be picked up later and somehow destined to make its way back into the prison to be used again.

Keith Rose, serving life for murder, had qualified as a pilot. They intended to avoid ferries, and spurned any attempt at a crude DIY boat. They would fly to freedom.

 It was a 10-mile hike to the small, private airport between Sandown and Shankhill in the east of the island. Heaving with tourists in the summer the small resort towns are quiet in winter, and the airport would have been deserted on Sunday.

If they had relied on luck, their gamble failed. All but a small Cessna 105 (ed. this is a typo. It should read 150. Additionally, had Keith ever been inside a light aircraft, he'd have surely seen that there's only 2 seats in a 150/152!) were locked away in the main hangar. Rose should have known the aircraft is a trainer aircraft, meant for two. With three heavy men inside they would have had no chance of leaving the runway.

The Cessna had no door key. Easy. It needed less than a crow-bar to open it. Inside, there was no cockpit key. Instead, Rose must have tried a crude piece of metal to get the engine going. But it broke off, leaving a piece of metal still in the lock. The Cessna was a right-off, and the men had to hide from the search they would have known would be escalating.

The east of the Isle of Wight, in the triangle between Shanklin, Cowes and Bembridge, is littered with small forests and derelict farms building would have offered shelter.

By Sunday, they were cold, probably hungry, tired. Why they were openly walking on the Newport to Ryde road, the men have yet to explain. But around 7.00pm their luck ran out.

An off-duty prison warden, Colin Jones, recognised the familiar gait of Matthew Williams, convicted for a bombing and arson campaign. He telephoned the police immediately, and scores of officers and dogs headed for the men.

Near Wootton Bridge. Keith Rose and Andrew Rodger, a convicted murderer, were confronted by Special Constable Mike Carr, a school teacher, and gave themselves up. Williams still thought he could make it. Hunted by police and dogs across open fields, he may not have realised it but he was heading west, directly back towards Parkhurst. When finally caught, trying to swim across the River Medina at the Island Harbour marina, he was just two and a half miles from the wall he had scaled five days earlier.

PC Tony Woolcock and his dog, Bongo, cornered the last of the escapers. In the deep water of the marina, Williams, frozen and exhausted, was overcome by PC Woolcock. Back in custody he was discovered to be suffering badly from hypothermia.

Cessna 172

This is nowhere near the story that Keith related to me. In his version the Cessna was a 4 seater, the type he declined to tell me; (maybe a 172 see inset). But tellingly Keith's version has it that the battery had been removed. Given the amount of effort that he had expended on the escape by this stage, were that to have been true, then he still had several choices; hand crank it via the prop, use a regular car battery to start it instead, or if he really felt it was de-rigeur to fly with a battery why (?) - after all, light aircraft use magnetos and only need a battery for non-flight essential equipment such as starter motors!

Oh, I don't doubt that he had been a member of a very botched escape attempt, just that I have to seriously doubt his intelligence in thinking he could con his 2 fellow absconders into believing him to be a reincarnation of Biggles.

Having been initially banged up from the end of 2002, and been reading his, what I considered to be well researched articles in Inside Time since around 2006, I felt in "awe" of Keith when I first encountered him on the spur in Whitemoor. Here was someone's brain that I certainly needed to pick.

Our initial conversations only related to matters of UK prison law so I had no idea as to the shallowness of his area(s) of experise. Instead, I reasoned that until proven otherwise his wealth of erudition was all encompassing. Fairly soon this presumption of mine was put to the test when I heard the story of his escape from Parkhurst. That it involved light aircraft serendipitously provided a window on the his psyche. In any field of human endeavour Keith Rose will bullshit your ears off arrogantly attempting to prove himself the alpha male. Later he was to make some very stupid and opinionated remarks about a former client of mine, IBM. Given that I HAD designed software for them in the past but never heard of him in any of their research laboratories, steeled my resolve to consider that whatever he preached about should be taken with a very large mountain of salt!

Those readers new to prison dynamics take note. Very nearly 99.999% of all inmates are full of crap. Don't believe a word of anything they say. Get your own documentation, do your own research, use your own lawyers. It's 100% certain that NO ONE IN prison is altruistic and will do something for nothing.

My usual bromide concerning Messrs. Sue, Grabbit and Runne should be considered if those detailed above believe they've been libelled. Sadly your masters and mistresses won't allow you to get me in court for the fear of the damage I can do to their masters and mistresses with my pen. More's the pity. Enjoy reading and small (50p to £5) donations to my PayPal account - ggjonesbk@googlemail.com - would not go amiss as I've been forced to survive the past 8(now) weeks on the £46 discharge grant thanks to the malfeasance of those mentioned beforehand.

Dr. Gary Graeme Jones