Past escapee’s new plan a bargaining chip
The plan sounds ingenious. Remove two small security screws and combine them to create a tool to remove heavy bolts. Loosen wires to disable an electronic sensor. Fashion water-soaked bedsheets and the bunk-bed ladder into a tourniquet-like device; use it to pull open a hole in a woven steel grate. Train to get guards used to seeing you pace your cell at night wearing a hat, with a towel around your neck; then build a standing dummy facing the toilet so they don’t realize you’re gone until it’s too late.
Those were a few of the basics of an inmate’s scheme to escape from the Special Housing Unit at New York state’s Five Points Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border. But instead of using it to break out, the inmate had a different idea — inform his jailers.
He had his girlfriend tell authorities that he would reveal his plan in exchange for a few privileges: an extra visit each week, and the ability to receive food packages and to take photos with his girlfriend and her 6-year-old daughter.
Prison officials had reason to listen: He is David Sweat. In the summer of 2015, he and another inmate, Richard W. Matt, engineered an escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in rural Dannemora, New York, and then led authorities on a three-week deep-woods chase that riveted the nation, attracted intense scrutiny to security lapses and abuses in state prisons, and embarrassed Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Matt was eventually shot and killed; Sweat, now 37, was shot and wounded. He later pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the episode and had a three- to seven-year sentence added to his original life term for murder. Eventually, he found himself in the Special Housing Unit at Five Points, where he was confined in his cell for 23 hours a day.
But clearly the experience has done little to lessen Sweat’s taste for escape plans.
So his girlfriend, Fran Malanik, relayed his message early last month, and authorities did, indeed, meet with him at Five Points, on Nov. 17. There, Sweat described his plan to senior investigators from the state prison agency and the state Inspector General’s Office. The investigators made an audio recording, Sweat and current and former officials said, and he also demonstrated some of the possible escape techniques as he was recorded on video.
On Dec. 20, Sweat detailed the escape plan in a twohour interview with The New York Times.
In the end, Sweat’s skills as an escapee might be stronger than his ability as a negotiator.
He said that within hours of his session with the investigators, he was transferred under high security to the Attica Correctional Facility, a prison 90 miles to the west of Five Points that was built in the 1930s and houses some of New York’s most dangerous criminals. He was put in Attica’s Special Housing Unit and has not been granted any of the privileges he sought.
An official of the prison agency, the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, confirmed that Sweat had provided information about “his perception of security vulnerabilities.” But the official said that the agency’s Office of Special Investigations had “investigated his claims and found them without merit.” The official added: “Out of an abundance of caution ... Sweat was moved to Attica.”
The prison agency has declined to say precisely what information Sweat provided or why the agency concluded that his escape plan would not work. It has also declined to provide copies — or excerpts — of the audio or video recordings of the meeting with Sweat. The Times is disclosing only the broad outlines of Sweat’s scheme, leaving out many of the specific details he provided.