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.