“I had made three successful trips, I don’t get any credit for my successful runs,” Billy Hayes complains in mock outrage. You would think a convicted drug smuggler would shut the hell up about the drugs he didn’t get caught for, but it becomes clear that Billy is not the shutting the hell up type. He was arrested in 1970 at Istanbul airport trying to smuggle two kilograms of hashish back to America. It did not get any better from there. Sentenced to five years in jail, he was weeks from release when he learnt that due to the American government’s war on drugs, pressure had successfully been place on the Turkish government to extend his sentence to life imprisonment. From there it still gets worse before it gets better. But man, it gets better. “One of the things I miss that wasn’t in the movie is the escape,” says Hayes. “I actually escaped off an island in a rowboat, in a storm, rowed through the night, I ran through Turkey for three days, I dyed my hair, it was made for a Hollywood movie. They didn’t use it.”
The movie was Midnight Express written by Oliver Stone, he of Platoon, Natural Born Killers and J.F.K fame, and directed by Alan Parker (Mississippi Burning, The Commitments). Stone won an Oscar and the film was nominated for a bunch more including best director. It was all based on the book Hayes wrote. “When I returned home, in New York there were 100 reporters waiting at the airport as I stepped off the plane,” he explains. “So I have been writing about this taking about this for the last forty years or so. I’m 68 now, this happened in my 20s, so I can put some perspective on it. It was the worst and best thing that ever happened to me. The worst because it got me locked up in jail. At the time I was not thinking about the consequences of my actions, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” Hayes makes a sermon of his mistakes, he talks like priest that is trying to be ‘cool with the kids,’ if that priest was trying to convert people to drugs. “I don’t have problems with smuggling marijuana, personally I think pot should be legal but that’s a whole other issue,” he preaches. “The reality is that it was illegal and I knew it and I still did it because I knew I was ‘invincible’. That’s how stupid I was back when I was young. But everybody has been down in the bottom of a hole somewhere, trying to find their way out and get to the light. Hopefully I can offer some inspiration. I give it my all. I tell it as truthfully as I can with as much emotion as I can and I’m open to anything you have to ask.”
Hayes’ show, Midnight Express, is a his funny, sad and moving tale that focuses on the people, not the jail as the movie did. “Oliver wrote a wonderful screenplay,” he says. “My problem is you don’t see a single good Turk in the whole film and it creates this overall impression that Turkey is a horrible place and these are horrible people. None of which is true. I’d been there three times before I got arrested, I love Istanbul, I get along well with the Turks, I didn’t like the prison, I didn’t like the guards, but that is true of any jail. It caused Turkey a lot of grief, there tourism dropped 95% when the movie Midnight Express came out. It’s great there, you should go. Don’t get arrested though.”
BY JACK FRANKLIN
