Steve Kilgallon.

NEW ZEALAND’S most ingenious modern-day escape artist is the Paremoremo inmate Arthur William Taylor, whose other hobby is reflected in his nickname, the ‘‘Jailhouse Lawyer’’.

Taylor, who has over 130 convictions ranging from fraud, burglary and armed robbery to P-related offences, believes both his offending and his escaping can be traced to his upbringing in the tough Epuni Boys’ Home in Tawa, Wellington, once telling author David Cohen: ‘‘I have many good memories: of leaving the place.’’

Taylor mounted a string of escapes from the home, escapes which he says began to include theft along the way – and so beginning his long association with the penal system.

‘‘I believe he has broken out of more New Zealand prisons than anyone,’’ a close friend of Taylor’s tells the Star-Times. ‘‘I’d only be guessing at his true motivations, but he had unusual motivation and intelligence to do it – the same qualities that assist him as a jailhouse lawyer.’’

The two skillsets collided in 1984 when Taylor escaped conviction for escaping from a mental hospital (where he had been sent from prison) after proving the law at that time around escapes from custody applied only to prisons.

A policeman who once chased Taylor for over 30 kilometres as he evaded arrest had his own theory. ‘‘He’s not the sort of fellow who likes being cooped up,’’ explained Terry Johnson. ‘‘His personality doesn’t go with being shut up for that amount of time. He wouldn’t like having his wings clipped.’’

Johnson had pursued Taylor for almost four hours in 1988 after he was challenged while lurking at night in a Stratford car yard. Eventually, Johnson banged on a wall as they passed a house and asked the resident to call police, who arrived and surrounded Taylor. The pair were shouting at each other the whole way. ‘‘He was quite a determined sort of guy, very cunning and calculating,’’ Johnson later told the Taranaki Daily News.

‘‘He seemed to know things you only expected police to know, things like police procedures. He was also resourceful and fit, not that tall, but quite strong.’’

Taylor led a 1998 escape with

ARTHUR TAYLOR three other prisoners, including the murderer Graeme Burton, which was organised partly after he discovered a loophole in the jail phone system.

Inmates are supposed to call only 10 approved telephone numbers. Taylor got around the system by asking one of his numbers to be signed up to a Telecom call diversion scheme, then arranging for it not to be answered so it could be diverted elsewhere.

After escaping from Auckland Prison, Taylor, Burton, Matthew Solomon and Darryn Crowley holed up in a Tairua mansion owned by American millionaire Roger Flowers and left a cleanup cost of $30,000 (among the damage was leaving the toilets unflushed and red wine in the fridge).

‘‘I came into the planning late. The other three had been working on it for months,’’ Taylor once told a journalist. ‘‘They were even running around the yard getting fit and all, but I don’t think they would have gotten out anytime soon.’’

Taylor was caught after six days, the rest after 16.

Then in March 2005, former fellow inmate Manu Royal ambushed guards escorting Taylor from Rimutaka Prison to a CYF family conference in a Wellington carpark.

Royal held the guards up with an air pistol while Taylor escaped through the ceiling panels of a BNZ bank, but fell through it into a toilet cubicle occupied by a woman.

He was recaptured the same day and had four years added to his sentence, while his wife, Carolyn, was also jailed for her part in the affair.

Sentencing was shifted to Auckland at the Crown’s request because of Taylor’s history of violence and escapes and the ‘‘extreme’’ risk he would try again. The Crown said 81 phonecalls were made from numbers associated with Taylor on the morning of his escape.

Taylor said he had no role in the plan, but was found guilty of escaping, being party to Royal kidnapping the officers, but not guilty of being party to Royal having an air pistol with intent to help Taylor escape.

Taylor’s escapes have lengthened his long spell in prison; his current sentence expires in 2022 but he’s trying to persuade Corrections to reduce his classification so he can be eligible for parole.