![]() Out on parole, Teddy found a journalist friend who helped get him the auto-selling job. He was unsuccessful there, but other suits eventually managed to get 30 years lopped off his total sentence. “Undaunted, Green has tried again,” wrote one with affection. In all, he eventually filed 56 appeals on his own behalf, and not one, he says proudly, was “a frivolous motion.” Judges came to know him. He read lawbooks voraciously (he also read the Encyclopaedia Britannic a all the way through from A to Zygote-four times). This did not mean giving up efforts to break out he and three friends built and hid the necessary parts for a kayak to paddle off “the Rock.” But the law seemed a more promising way to freedom. ![]() There he turned more and more to yet another specialty-jail-house lawyering. Some promises were kept, but Green was on his way to Alcatraz, the federal pen for troublemakers. It only ended when Ringleader Green’s daughter pleaded with him to surrender after extracting some promises of reforms, he did. Desperately, they took over a cell block, and an 84-hour prison revolt began that 38 state policemen and an Army tank could not quell. In 1955, he sawed his way out of his cell, but the alarm went off before he and his confederates could get any farther. They did not several months in isolation followed. They were hollering: ‘Get that ladder up!’ When it crashed, everybody yelled, ‘Get it up again!’ ” It must have been the first break in history with a cheering section. “This was broad daylight,” remembers Green, “and all 300 inmates were watching. Everything went as planned, except that at the key moment two of the cons jumped on the ladder and it came crashing down. The idea was to pin down the lone tower guard with gunfire and climb the ladder over the wall. Next, he and five others managed to sneak in some guns and build a ladder. He made it to New Jersey, where he fell afoul of another stool pigeon. After eight months in Charlestown State Prison near Boston, he doped a guard’s coffee, stowed away in a box of rags and was shipped out. Eventually fingered by an informer, he got his 56-year sentence in 1952. We’d just pick a likely spot, go in and do the job.”Ĭheering Section. There wasn’t much planning-none of that movie stuff with diagrams and stop watches. In about two years, with various accomplices, I made eleven withdrawals. When the police got him back, they kept him for five years when he got out, he says, “you might say I took up bank robbing as my vocation. Caught and locked up, he proceeded to pry a board out of a fence around Mattapan State Hospital, where he was under observation, and began an ancillary career: jail breaking. He began by swiping a briar pipe and a pair of sunglasses from a parked car, eventually worked his way up to an armed stickup. The son of a Greek immigrant, he decided early to gofor easy money rather than the legitimate proceeds of the small restaurant chain his father had built up from a pushcart. A twelve-part series under his byline has just finished running in the Boston Globe. He has been invited to lunch at the Harvard Club, addressed Wyndham girls’ school, and appeared on radio and television. There is hardly a Bostonian who has not heard his story. Unlike many ex-cons, however, Teddy has refused to mope, instead is coping by making a virtue out of his background. “I feel like Lazarus,” he says, risen as he is from the living death of what was once a 56-year sentence. For Teddy Green used to be a bank robber he got out of jail just four months ago. ![]() He tells customers that Fords are reliable and have great pickup-which is why he always chose them when he was stealing getaway cars. He is a pretty good one, too, with an unusual spiel. At the moment, Teddy Green is a car salesman in Boston.
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