- A brilliant safecracker...
- He spoke five languages.
- Locked up in a dangerous prison
nicknamed "The Wall."
- It was only a matter of time until I either got killed,
or killed somebody.
- Hand picks a team of five hardened convicts.
- There was certainly a risk to add additional members.
- To tunnel out of the prison.
- If the tunnel was collapsing, that would shut off
the air supply.
- And make their way to freedom.
[dramatic music]
- If they was found out digging that tunnel,
they would have went to the Hole for a lot of years.
♪ ♪
[exciting music]
- Some of the greatest stories ever told
start behind bars.
Locked up in the most notorious prisons
in the world, spied on by guards
and fellow prisoners,
it takes a devious mind to find a way out.
It could lead you to freedom,
or it could cost you your life.
♪ ♪
But wouldn't you try
when you have nothing left to lose?
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- Western Penitentiary,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Freezing cold in winter, boiling hot in summer.
Sometimes it floods here too.
It's one of the oldest prisons in America.
Back in 1882, its amenities were cutting edge;
running water, electricity, and common spaces
for prisoners to congregate.
But what began as an enlightened experiment
in criminal reform became a living hell.
By 1996, it was overcrowded and in disrepair.
♪ ♪
The one thing that never changed is its nickname,
"the Wall."
♪ ♪
- The walls of Western State Penitentiary
are very large, very forbidding,
very fortress-like, massive stone and concrete walls.
They're 25 feet tall.
They also run underground.
- Your security perimeter, that's level one
to deter escapes.
Then, inside the perimeter, your gates,
doors on the cellblocks,
all those things that deter inmate movement
are part of the system that keeps people in.
- Where most people see a series of impossible obstacles,
one man sees a puzzle to be solved.
♪ ♪
He's never told his story on camera
until now.
♪ ♪
- The reason why I don't want my face seen is because
I'd like to have the option of choosing who I let know.
The fact is, that once you get that label
of criminal, that can lead to discrimination.
- By 1996, Nuno Pontes is serving
a 10-to 24-year sentence for safecracking.
♪ ♪
He's a Robin Hood,
stealing from the rich and giving to the poor,
as well as to himself.
Over the last decade, he has been in and out of prison.
He's been at Western Pen for the past four years,
and, for the first time,
he just happens to have a cellmate he can trust.
♪ ♪
- I became cellmates with Nuno in '96,
or end of '95.
I call Nuno, "Nick."
He's articulate, passionate, he's brave.
He believes what he says, and he backs it up.
Those dudes are a rare breed.
♪ ♪
- Because of my nature, I had been thinking
about escaping all along.
There was nothing positive to do,
and the penitentiary was just too dangerous.
- It was definitely a dangerous place.
One time, I saw three guys were stabbing this other guy.
I don't know what it was about, I don't want to know
what it was about. He ended up dying.
Raises the stakes is what it does.
♪ ♪
- It was only a matter of time until I either got killed,
or killed somebody out of necessity.
And either one of those was an unacceptable option,
so I decided to leave.
♪ ♪
- Nuno begins brainstorming
with his cellmate about how someone could escape
the prison.
- The first option that I considered was
actually bringing the wall down.
That was abandoned because they would have known right away
that there was a mistake.
- Their next idea
is to hide in a construction truck,
but they soon realize that's a dead end.
There's always a prisoner headcount
before any truck leaves the compound.
♪ ♪
- Then we came to the third option,
which was a tunnel.
♪ ♪
- Over the last hundred years,
many prisoners have attempted to escape this hellhole
by tunneling out.
But none have been successful.
Not yet.
Nuno thinks he can succeed, but he can't do it alone.
He has no experience tunneling,
and neither does his cellmate.
- That's when Arizona became interesting, I think.
Billingsley's nickname was Arizona
because he was from Arizona.
♪ ♪
- Kevin Billingsley is serving
a 23 1/2-to 77-year sentence for several charges,
including robbery and assault.
[siren wails]
And he has skills Nuno needs to dig a tunnel.
- I meet Kevin Billingsley through an old convict.
I made introductions because Kevin also was
pursuing the idea of an escape.
[rattling]
Kevin had, actually, some mining experience,
but he was very skeptical.
And my idea was, we'll just break the process down
into stages.
We'll tackle one stage at a time.
- With Kevin Billingsley on board,
the next step is to determine where the three of them
should dig.
The only way to do that is to get jobs
that will give them more access
and knowledge of the prison's layout.
♪ ♪
Nuno Pontes sets his sights on working
with the prison engineer
in the prison's maintenance office.
- The prison engineer is a critical person.
He or she was responsible for the plumbing, the sewage,
the electrical, the ventilation.
And his office was the repository
for all of the blueprints.
♪ ♪
- With a job in maintenance,
Nuno now has an inside view of how this place works.
- I had access to all the maintenance issues.
Through that, I collected quite a bit of knowledge
about how the institution was set up.
[clock ticking]
♪ ♪
- And by a remarkable stroke of luck,
Nuno receives a request to fix a problem
in a warehouse just outside the prison perimeter.
This might be the place
where the tunnel could end.
♪ ♪
- The institutional warehouse, it's function is
to control the movement of goods and products
into the prison from the street.
- Nuno knows that if they can find a way
into that warehouse, they can then walk
right onto the street.
♪ ♪
It's the perfect exit point for their tunnel.
♪ ♪
But he still needs to find where it should start,
a spot he and his co-escapees can access
away from the watchful eyes of the guards.
Nuno starts eyeing a secluded part of the maintenance shops
close to the warehouse on the other side of the wall.
- The maintenance office and the maintenance shops
are built just inside the perimeter wall.
They are close to opposite the institutional warehouse,
which is on the exterior of the wall.
- Nuno is eventually able to get his hands
on blueprints of the building.
Using these diagrams, he determines the perfect spot
to start digging the tunnel is this crawl space.
But the place is surrounded by impenetrable brick walls
and a steel door.
Somehow, they have to get past all this.
♪ ♪
Thinking it over, something suddenly occurs to him.
He can access the crawl space if he can drill through
its exterior brick wall.
And he knows exactly the spot.
- So, to get through this wall that led to the crawl space,
I broke this overflow pipe for this steam tank.
And I told the maintenance guy,
I said, "Hey, there's this steam tank that's leaking,
but if you guys get me a hammer drill, I'll fix it."
So security came over and approved the job
and brought this hammer drill in.
They stood there with me.
I crawled under this platform, started drilling on the wall.
Of course, the guard now is talking,
so I would drill a little bit on this wall
and then go to the wall I actually wanted to go through,
and drill on that one.
- Nuno was attempting to access the crawl space
with a guard standing right next to him.
It's a bold plan.
[drill whines]
If the officer figures out what he's up to,
the plot to escape this dank and dangerous prison
will be over before it even begins.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- At Pittsburg's notorious
Western Penitentiary, Nuno Pontes is trying to drill
his way into an underground crawl space.
From there, he'll be able to tunnel
under the prison's impenetrable wall.
[drill whines]
Right now, however, he's being watched closely.
But every time the guard looks away,
Nuno shifts his focus to the crawl space wall,
trying to break down the first barrier between him
and freedom.
[drill whines]
- It was just taking too long.
This drill didn't have enough oomph to get into that area
to dig. And then we abandoned that.
- Since he can't get into the crawl space
with a drill, Nuno Pontes, Kevin Billingsley,
and Greg Quiring are going to have to find another way.
- The second option was to make a key
and go through the actual doors that led to the crawl space.
♪ ♪
- The three escapees need a key,
a key only the guards have,
and, somehow, they have to find a way to make a copy.
- Just weren't sure what we could use
that would hold the form of the key.
This has got to be a good print.
It's got to be both sides for this key to work.
- We experimented with various materials.
'Cause, obviously, we needed to get an imprint of the key.
- I know we tried a bar of soap,
and then we did oatmeal, and then it was Styrofoam.
The Styrofoam really, you know, held a nice imprint.
- Once they get an impression of the key,
they can then transfer that to a piece of paper.
- Then, from the piece of paper, we made a key blank,
you know, out of brass.
In the machine shop, we cut a piece of brass
the right size, and then just transferred
the shape of the key onto it.
- Now they need to get their hands on the key
to the door.
But how?
- So we waited for the guards to do their rounds.
Once they opened the lock,
they put the keys back on their belt.
But the key they just used tends to be on top.
Obviously, the guard is not gonna be too keen
to let you approach him close enough
for you to get an imprint of the key.
- They have an idea.
[people shouting]
Nuno pays two inmates to create a diversion for him.
♪ ♪
- The guard has to intervene, but as the guard tries
to diffuse the situation, I step in.
And he's welcoming the fact that I'm there
and I'm helping to quell the thing.
But I'm sitting right next to him.
I mean, we are shoulder to shoulder.
And that gives me the opportunity to reach down.
- Nuno has mere seconds
to make the impression,
and the clock is ticking.
- It's a tense situation.
My concern was that the guard would hear the keys
as I touched them.
[keys jingle]
It actually worked and went fairly smoothly.
♪ ♪
- With the key print in hand,
he can have a key made.
And Kevin Billingsley does that at night
in his cell in between the guards' rounds.
♪ ♪
The next step is to try the key they've just made
to see if it works.
And they must do it without being detected.
- There's a risk that one of the guard towers
would be able to see them.
♪ ♪
- Nuno knows from observing the guards
that he and Greg have exactly 17 seconds to get to the door
and try the key
before the guard on the wall above them
comes out of his booth and sees them at the door
where they shouldn't be.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- We went down, we were going to go check the key,
make sure it works.
♪ ♪
Made it too thin. It broke.
- Amazingly, the guard in the tower
doesn't see them, and he won't be able to see the broken key.
But they aren't in the clear.
- There would be checks that would come around
to check to make sure that that lock is locked.
♪ ♪
- If the key is found,
not only will their plan be discovered,
they'll also be sent to the place every prisoner dreads.
♪ ♪
Solitary confinement.
- It was a question of coming up with ways of dealing
with unpredictable events.
I had to deal with those situations on the fly.
- Their only option is to steal needle-nose pliers
from Nuno's job at the maintenance office
on the back side of the building.
- Pontes knew where tools were.
He was able to get to this cabinet
where the tools were kept,
file the hinge pins off on the bottom,
pop the hinge pins out, take the tools,
put the hinge pins back in,
and then get them back at the end of the day.
- His heart races as he rushes back to the lock
with the stolen pliers,
hoping the guard in the tower doesn't see him.
And if he can't get the broken key out of the lock,
it will be just a matter of time before they are caught.
At last, it's out.
But they still don't have a working key.
- It wasn't just a one-try thing.
I actually had to go several times
until I got the key adjusted.
- And then we got another key made.
- This is the moment they have been waiting for.
♪ ♪
[lock clicks]
- And it worked.
♪ ♪
- The first time that it works, relief is the main emotion.
It's like, whew, finally.
- They can now access the crawl space
to begin digging.
But before they start operating full speed ahead,
they need to divert the attention of the guards
away from the digging operation.
♪ ♪
- So my idea was the standard strategy magicians use.
You show one thing with one hand,
as you're doing one thing with the other hand.
So what I decide to do is to mount a huge
wine-producing operation.
We were making 30 gallons at a time.
We are actually taking, you know, gallons of wine
out to the yard and have lines set up.
♪ ♪
- The guard become focused on trying to nab
their wine-making operation,
not realizing that the trio is getting ready to start
digging the tunnel.
They're waiting for them to slip up.
Nuno's magic trick is a dangerous proposition
because if they're caught,
their whole escape plan could be in jeopardy.
♪ ♪
- There was this one guard in particular
that used to be in the gate when I came
from work to go back to the block.
He really didn't like me.
One time, I got to the gate, and he says,
"Pontes, put your hands up. Pat-down."
So I pull my keys out of my pocket
and hand them to one guard, and I say,
here, hold these.
- Inmates do have certain keys they're allowed to have.
A padlock on a footlocker, for instance.
- But in my keys, I also had the keys that were their keys.
I had these keys that, obviously, they weren't
the type of keys inmates would have.
- Nuno has just handed the guard the keys
to his escape.
Will the guard uncover his plans
and keep him trapped in this hellhole forever?
♪ ♪
- As he plots his escape
from a Pittsburg prison, Nuno Pontes is about to get
a pat-down search from a prison guard.
The one thing Nuno does not want him to find
is the illegal copy of the key to the crawl space.
That is the key to his freedom,
so he makes a bold choice.
He hands the key right to the guard.
♪ ♪
- They never actually looked at the keys.
♪ ♪
- While Nuno may not have gotten caught
with the keys to the crawl space,
their wine-making operation backfires.
They lose one of their team members,
Greg Quiring.
- I was on cell restriction for the wine. [chuckles]
So I was locked in my cell.
I can't be at yard, I can't be at work
at the library or anything else.
- After his time on cell restriction,
Greg is sent to solitary for an unrelated incident.
He won't be taking part in the escape.
Luckily for the team,
Greg is the only one nabbed for wine-making.
♪ ♪
With the precarious cover in place
and the key to the crawl space,
Nuno and Kevin are ready to start digging.
♪ ♪
- At first, it was just Kevin and I.
And we would take turns going down there
because when we go down to dig,
somebody has to lock
whoever's down there in
'cause you can't leave the lock unlocked.
The guards would notice.
- Once they're locked into the crawl space,
they have little more than some pieces of wood,
some buckets, and some hardhats
they've stolen from the prison's power plant
and rigged with lights.
- The digging is hard. The soil is clay.
It's a riverbank.
We would break clay loose with the sticks
and then pull it up into the crawl space.
- Just to go 60 feet, they have to remove 15 tons of soil
from that little opening.
That's a lot of material to be hauling around.
It's very strenuous.
- Nuno and Kevin are hoping to tunnel
from the crawl space to the warehouse
on the other side of the wall,
but there are big obstacles in their way.
- The wall went down underground,
so we would have to dig 14 feet down,
and then across because there was a road
- There's quite a bit of inherent danger
where they dug this tunnel.
Coal trucks run over the road that they went underneath.
They certainly had a real possibility
of having a cave-in.
♪ ♪
- And not only do they have to worry about collapse,
they also have to worry about running out of oxygen
as they dig deeper into the earth.
[heavy breathing]
♪ ♪
- We were constantly running out of air in there,
so we have to come back, turn around, and go back.
- The threat of collapse
and the potential for suffocating
is heavy on their minds
as they slowly expand their tunnel.
But the risk is worth the reward
if they can dig their way to freedom.
♪ ♪
The work is slow going.
Nuno and Kevin debate about adding another team member
to help dig.
Then something out of their control happens.
- Carmen Keller saw something.
He's asking questions.
He's obviously suspicious that something more
than just the wine-making is going on.
♪ ♪
- Carmen Keller, an inmate serving
a life sentence for second-degree murder,
is added to the team as a third member.
- I'm nervous about hiring him, but by bringing him in,
he's got an incentive not to tell anything to anybody.
- Carmen Keller brings more to the table
than just an extra pair of hands.
♪ ♪
- He had a job as a pass runner for the educational department.
- As a pass runner,
Carmen is given access to places
and allowed to wander the prison without much oversight.
This means he has time to dig and can provide passes
for the other inmates to get them out of their jobs
and cells when need be.
While the three men dig the tunnel,
Nuno is planning ahead.
♪ ♪
And for the getaway,
he will need to add a fourth team member,
George Conard.
♪ ♪
George Conard is a convicted killer
serving a life sentence.
- George Conard is from Pittsburg,
and he's got contacts on the outside
that can provide us with a getaway car
once we get to the other side of the wall.
- Conard is essential to arranging local connections
once they escape the prison so that Nuno
and his team can travel to Texas.
From there, they plan to leave the country
and go their separate ways.
♪ ♪
With Conard, the four-member team is able to dig faster
than they ever have before.
- We are trying to get as many shifts in as possible.
Keller can get away in the morning,
and I can also sneak away in the morning sometimes.
But most of the time, it's Carmen and Kevin
in the afternoon.
- After four weeks, they have dug 14 feet down
and 30 feet across under the access road,
putting them somewhere right below the wall's foundation.
Although they are moving quicker now,
there's always the danger of being caught red-handed.
♪ ♪
- One day, I put him in the tunnel, lock him in,
and I go to the Chow Hole to eat.
While I'm in the Chow Hole eating,
the alarms go off.
They blow the horn three times.
[horn blares]
- In December of '96, shortly after noon,
an inmate stabbed two officers.
From that, we did a general alarm to get
all the inmates back into their cellblocks
in a general lockdown.
- They locked the Chow Hole. I'm locked in there.
And, obviously, the first thing
what I'm thinking now is,
"I gotta go get these guys out."
This prison's gonna be locked down,
and they have no way out of there.
[horn blares]
- Mr. Pontes knew if he didn't get them out of there
right away, the jig was up.
- If they were found out digging that tunnel,
they would have went to the Hole for a lot of years.
A lot of years.
- Let's go, let's go!
- Nuno Pontes is going to have to think fast
if he's going to get the guys safely out of the tunnel
without anyone knowing what they were up to.
If he can't figure it out, the escape is over,
and they will all rot in the Hole
for many, many years.
[dramatic music]
- For the last year, four men have been furiously
planning and working towards a daring escape
from Pennsylvania's infamous Western Penitentiary.
Their plans are on the brink of collapse
as two prison guards have been stabbed,
sending the prison into lockdown mode.
Carmen Keller and Kevin Billingsley
are underground, digging the escape tunnel.
They can't hear the lockdown alarm
blaring at the surface.
Mastermind Nuno Pontes has to think fast
because if they don't get back to their cells
for head count, the entire escape plot is done for,
and they'll all spend years in the Hole.
♪ ♪
- I could have walked away.
They would have been locked in there.
That wouldn't have been neither the smart nor the right thing
to do.
- Nuno Pontes asks two fellow inmates
to create a disturbance as they're walking back
to their cells so he can slip off.
- [whispers] Now.
[people shouting]
♪ ♪
- His plan works, and the guard doesn't realize
he's missing.
But Nuno isn't in the clear yet.
He still has to get into the crawl space
and be locked in so the guards don't notice anything
out of place.
And to do that, he's going to need the help
of another inmate,
one who isn't aware of the escape plan.
- I grabbed this guy, Tree, and I said, come with me.
I didn't necessarily want to let anybody else know,
but I have no choice.
I tell Tree, here's this key. Lock this door behind me.
Come back in ten minutes and let me out.
And that was--that was a very tense moment
'cause I have no idea if this guy's gonna do it.
♪ ♪
I started to go through the crawl space.
Kevin and Carmen are coming.
For some reason, they had a sense
that something wasn't right, so they were coming out
of the tunnel.
And I tell them, "Look, we gotta go.
There's a lockdown in progress."
We go back to the exit.
- Nuno and the escape team fear
Tree won't come back to let them out.
If he doesn't come back, the next person to open that door
will be one of the guards,
guaranteeing them all years in solitary.
In their minds, there's only one question,
"Who's going to open the door next?"
Tree or the guards?
♪ ♪
Thankfully, Tree pulls through and opens the door.
- And so we went to our blocks, and that was it.
It was by the skin of the teeth, as they say.
♪ ♪
- The team's close call creates a strong bond,
and they resolve to finish the tunnel even faster.
- From then on,
they were much more willing to do whatever I said
'cause they just couldn't believe
that I actually went there and told Tree to lock me in.
'Cause, in essence, whatever fate they were gonna suffer,
I was gonna suffer.
- Meanwhile, Nuno's working on the plan
for what happens once they leave the prison walls behind.
- So Conard is supposed to have gotten somebody to be there
with a car for us.
But he's not coming through, so we need somebody
that knows how to steal a car.
And none of us has any experience with stealing cars.
Kevin, he says, "Look, there's this kid that's a car thief.
He can hotwire a car very quickly.
♪ ♪
- Andrew Heim is serving a 4-to 15-year sentence
for theft and assault offenses.
- I don't really know Andrew, but we do have this problem.
- There was certainly a risk
with Nuno adding additional members
because the more people that know stuff,
the more people that can tell.
- Andrew Heim is the fifth member
added to the team
just as the tunnel is nearing completion.
But he's not the only new addition.
Nuno brings on an unlikely sixth member,
Thomas Berkelbaugh.
♪ ♪
Berkelbaugh has a long history of robberies
and is serving a 10-to 20-year sentence.
- Berkelbaugh is a little bit of a different duck,
as far as the escape goes.
He had very little role to play in it.
He and Pontes were friends.
They decided to take him along
because they felt sorry for him
that he was gonna go blind.
♪ ♪
- There are now six inmates
in on the escape.
The team is complete.
- When you look at these six, they live in different areas,
they work in different areas,
their age groups are from 30 to 65.
There's not a lot of other things that tie them together,
other than the goal of doing this escape.
- The prisoners have been tunneling
for four months.
But the most difficult part of breaking out
still hangs over their heads,
digging straight up 14 feet to reach the floor
of the industrial warehouse.
- Now you're actually excavating the dirt
above your head.
If you hit any kind of unstable condition,
then you're gonna get a major collapse.
- I was the only one crazy enough
to do that sort of thing.
And the last bit of dirt came down,
and this rush of air came in.
This vacuum of "Whoo!"
The tunnel filled with air.
[breathing heavily]
- Freedom is so close they can feel it,
but their tunnel isn't complete.
The last and most difficult step is next,
breaking through the warehouse's
reinforced concrete floor.
To do that, they're going to need tools.
♪ ♪
- I have keys that I made for the engineer's office
and for the cabinets, that's where there's tools.
We wait until night.
I get a hammer drill, and an hydraulic jack.
We took those tools down into the tunnel,
we drilled a bunch of holes in the concrete
to weaken the concrete.
And then we made a little indent
on the cement wall,
put the hydraulic jack against that,
and then we just pump.
[drill hammers]
- So they crank this jack till it literally broke through
the concrete floor.
And then they use this reciprocating saw
to cut through the rebar
and create an opening that allowed them to have access.
♪ ♪
- They came up near a mechanical room
for two reasons.
There's a lot of noise there that would cover
their noise that they would make
when they're breaking through the floor.
And it's in the very back of the warehouse,
quite a ways from where any staff would be at, normally.
- It's a bold risk to leave the tunnel exit exposed,
but they have no choice.
They all can't get there until the morning.
They just have to pray that no one will find it
before they can leave.
♪ ♪
- At Pittsburg's notorious Western Pen,
it's almost go time.
Nuno Pontes and his coconspirators
have completed their tunnel to freedom.
Now they wait for dawn to break
so that all six of them can escape.
- I was awake all night.
That is the first and only time during this project
when I confronted the enormity of what's going on.
I'm responsible for these guys with me,
and all sorts of things can go wrong.
So I remember being in the cell
and just shaking uncontrollably.
♪ ♪
- Dawn eventually comes.
It's time.
- All six of the inmates were up early that morning.
Most of them left their cells sometime between 6:00 and 6:30.
- Keller was a pass runner.
He got us a bunch of blank early call passes.
These are passes that get you out of your cell early
before they open for the day.
- They converged, and they started to work their way
through the tunnel.
♪ ♪
- Conard had never been there,
Andrew Heim had never been there,
Berkelbaugh had never been there, so Kevin went first,
and I went last to make sure nobody would turn around
and potentially give the thing away.
- Making it through the tunnel
would be challenging, even for the most athletic.
Nuno worries that they may not all be able to claw
their way to freedom.
- Berkelbaugh is right in front of me.
His prosthetic eye came out.
- Augh!
- He just felt his way around and found it.
You know, it was one of those surreal moments.
"I lost my eye." [chuckles] Well, it happens.
♪ ♪
- Amazingly, all six make it out of the tunnel.
♪ ♪
- Finally, we are all in this room in the warehouse.
We change clothes.
- At the time, the prison allowed civilian clothes.
This was part of a prisoner's bill of rights.
♪ ♪
- Even with their civilian clothes on,
they need to figure out a way to get out of the warehouse,
and there is a catch.
A guard is stationed on the wall
directly above the exit to the street.
- Turns out, the door can just be opened,
so I go out there first to see what needed to be done.
The guard is there, and he's looking at me.
I come back in, and I say, "Look, the guard is sitting
"out there on the wall, so you guys just remain calm.
I'm gonna say something to him."
We have street clothes, we have hardhats.
- Because it is outside the secure perimeter,
anyone that you would see there, you would think was
either working as a maintenance crew.
No one would think
that inmates are coming from that area
and escaping the institution.
♪ ♪
- So we all walk out.
The guard looks down at us, and I look up at him
and waved at him, and he waved at us.
And we went out the door onto the street.
The exhilaration was overwhelming.
The air felt different, the light felt different.
Everything.
There's something supernatural about it,
it's just unbelievable 'cause, I guess,
until the very last minute, you don't think
it's gonna go through.
♪ ♪
We are free, but not scot-free.
I mean, obviously, now is the hard part.
♪ ♪
- As soon as they got outside the prison,
they stole a car, piled into that car.
[engine revs]
♪ ♪
- What the guards did not realize is
all of them had escaped through the tunnel,
probably around 8:00 in the morning.
And it wasn't until the 10:00 head count
that the institution realized there was a breakout.
♪ ♪
- The Pittsburg Six may have just executed
the perfect prison escape.
They have a two-hour head start
on the authorities.
But now they are faced
with their biggest challenge so far.
Will they survive on the outside
without being apprehended?
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Six inmates at Western Penitentiary,
led by Nuno Pontes, have tunneled their way
out of the run down and dangerous prison.
♪ ♪
The six are now on the run, hoping they won't get caught.
- I understood.
I knew it was much more likely for me to get caught
if I were with them than without them,
but the consequence of leaving them to their own devices,
somebody might have gotten seriously hurt,
and I'm the one that made the escape happen,
so it would have been my responsibility.
- The fact that there were six of them together
compounded the likelihood that we were going
to catch up with them.
- They became known as the Pittsburg Six.
- We were gonna go to Texas, get our IDs,
go from Texas to Mexico,
and then from Mexico onto South America,
and then from there, everybody could go their own way.
- The six travel undetected to Pasadena, Texas.
There, they hide in a hotel
while waiting for falsified documents
so they can leave the country.
♪ ♪
- It wasn't until the first substantial lead came
on day six.
We received a late-night phone call
from Thomas Berkelbaugh's brother-in-law
that he has been hospitalized in a Houston, Texas, hospital.
- Berkelbaugh had serious drug-use problems.
He did a bunch of meth. He was getting really paranoid.
I had to put my foot down, as far as trying to get things
under control, but Berk decided he wanted to leave.
- Fortunately, for the remaining five,
Berkelbaugh doesn't give the details
of their whereabouts away.
But now the authorities know they are in Texas.
♪ ♪
- Nuno Pontes and Carmen Keller end up in a chase
with Texas authorities.
And Keller is arrested, Pontes gets away on foot.
- After being on the run
for two days, Nuno eventually makes it back to the hotel
while Keller sits in jail.
♪ ♪
- Keller, that had gotten arrested,
tells them who are contacts are.
So they put them under surveillance,
and they follow that contact to the hotel in Pasadena.
- Because of Carmen Keller,
the authorities now have the hotel surrounded.
They have found the remaining escapees.
♪ ♪
- All of sudden, all these guns and machine--
Everybody's pointing guns at me.
I really wasn't expecting--
We were almost scot-free, you know.
They say, "Don't move, don't move."
'Cause I'm analyzing the situation,
thinking, "What are my options?"
There's no way out of this one.
So I lay down on the ground, and they cuff me.
♪ ♪
[siren wails]
And that was it.
That was the end of that adventure.
♪ ♪
- After years behind bars,
months of planning, avoiding detection
and tunneling under the earth,
the Pittsburg Six executed one of the most brazen,
brilliant, and cunning escapes in history.
The Mastermind, Nuno Pontes,
got just 12 days of freedom,
and then 14 years in solitary,
spending 23 hours in a cell, utterly alone.
♪ ♪
[door slams]
You have to ask yourself,
was it all worth it?