He went back every six months or so and grew more confident - and more careless - with each successful crossing. Hayes had his fill of the drug and pocketed about $5,000 - more than $35,000 in today’s money. Two weeks later, in April 1969, he was in the Turkish city, having been staked by several of his friends, taping two kilos to his leg and wrapping that appendage in plaster before clomping back to the U.S.
Soon after, wandering the hospital’s halls during a break, Hayes saw a doctor applying a cast and something clicked. Hayes was studying journalism at Marquette University in Wisconsin while working at a hospital when a friend came back from Turkey with a small piece of hash. “I wanted to do all this so I could write about it. It’s what I loved most,” he says of those trips. It was so therapeutic to start talking when I got off the plane, and I never stopped.”įar from the sweaty, conspicuous mess portrayed in the movie by Brad Davis, by the time the real Hayes approached that Istanbul customs agent, he’d already made three successful smuggling runs. “I never had that opportunity and probably am glad I didn’t. “Most guys want to forget prison,” Hayes, 72, says over coffee and a muffin.
He spent the next five years in a variety of prisons around Turkey before escaping, flying home to see his family and chronicling his ordeal in the book that inspired the landmark film. 6, 1970, the current Summerlin resident tried to board a flight from Istanbul to his native New York with two kilos of hashish taped to his torso. No one knows those horrors, though, better than Billy Hayes.
Then, in 1978, came “Midnight Express,” a movie so harrowing that the words “Turkish prison” still have the power to terrify. Billy Hayes, the young American who escaped from a Turkish jail where he had spent five years for hashish smuggling, is pictured in 1978. They’d already weathered nightmares involving sharks, Linda Blair’s spinning head and Ned Beatty’s misadventures in the Georgia woods. Moviegoers in the 1970s were a hardy bunch. Brad Davis, right, portrays Billy Hayes in “Midnight Express,” opposite John Hurt, who earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a fellow prisoner named Max.
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