Pascal Payet: The French Outlaw Who Escaped Prison by Helicopter

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Prison walls, razor wire, and steel doors all assume the threat comes from the ground. Pascal Payet looked up. The French criminal organized more helicopter prison escapes than anyone in history, hijacking civilian aircraft at gunpoint and lifting inmates out of maximum security yards in seconds. This episode studies the logistics and the escalating contest between one resourceful man and a national penal system, while keeping the real story in view: Payet was serving time for a 1997 armored car robbery in which a guard was killed.

Born in Montpellier in July 1963 and settled in Marseille, Payet moved from aggravated assault to conspiracy to the Banque de France heist that made him a top priority for French police. Arrested in Paris in January 1999, he treated prison as a temporary problem. He flew out of Luynes in 2001, came back for his friends in 2003, and broke out of solitary confinement on Bastille Day 2007. The state answered with constant transfers, classified locations, and cables strung over prison yards.

• In October 2001 Payet escaped the prison at Luynes by helicopter with fellow inmate Frederic Impocco, who was caught days later in Paris.
• In April 2003 he returned to the same prison by helicopter to free three men, including Eric Alboreo, his accomplice from the 1999 arrest.
• Authorities moved him through nine maximum security prisons in 30 months, prompting a hunger strike and an open letter on a blog titled The Saga of My Transfers.
• On July 14, 2007, four masked accomplices hijacked a helicopter at the Cannes-Mandelieu airport and pulled him from solitary confinement in Grasse.
• He was captured that September in Mataro, near Barcelona, and French prisons later installed anti-helicopter cables above their yards.