From Gentleman's Quarterly, April 27, 2021:
The Secrets of the World's Greatest Jailbreak Artist
Through the bars of his prison window Rédoine Faïd can see far off into the cloudless sky. It's early on a sunny Sunday in July 2018, and for now, the morning is quiet and ordinary at the Réau penitentiary, 25 miles southeast of Paris. But Faïd can envision what's coming—he can see it all unfold like the movie he's been scripting for months in his mind.
Outside his cell, two guards approach. These are the solitary confinement quarters: a controlled unit within the maximum-security prison where notable or potentially dangerous criminals are held. Few prisoners in France are as notable as the 46-year-old Faïd, who officially ranks among the country's highest-risk inmates. A notorious thief—the architect of a flurry of dazzling heists and blockbuster robberies in the 1990s that targeted banks, jewelry stores, and armored cars—Faïd became more infamous still in 2013, when he blasted out of the Sequedin prison, near Lille, where he'd been serving time after a botched robbery, using smuggled explosives. That dramatic escape embarrassed the top echelons of the French justice system, and since Faïd's recapture six weeks later, he's been under stringent restrictions.
The officers have come to escort Faïd to a visit with his brother. After unlocking his door, they pat down the prisoner. He's a slim, bald man with a charming smile; he's wearing an orange Hugo Boss T-shirt and has a dark suit jacket draped over his arm. As they search his pockets, they find something hard. A makeshift weapon? No, just a pack of candy. He's a known sugar freak, with a love of mint Hollywood chewing gum.
Unperturbed by the candy, the guards ultimately detect nothing else of note. They're used to keeping careful watch over him. “When he goes to use the telephone, the whole ward gets blocked off,” one of the guards tells France TV. “He's the only detainee in France I've seen for whom even the staff get blocked off. He passes by with two supervisors and a guard from the solitary confinement wing. Like a star. He's made into a star. Everybody watches him.”
Faïd had always wanted to become a real-life fictional character. The son of Algerian immigrants, he came of age with a crew of petty thieves and graduated from the projects of Creil—a hardscrabble Paris suburb—into a gangster who bedeviled police and enchanted his fellow criminals. It wasn't just his flair that set him apart. An obsessive cinephile, Faïd envisioned himself from a young age as the protagonist of his own movie—and in his holdups he emulated exploits he had seen in the films of Quentin Tarantino and Kathryn Bigelow and his idol Michael Mann. To him, life itself became celluloid.
Even now, from Réau's isolation ward, Faïd sees no reason why he can't escape the truth of his past by authoring a different kind of movie for his future. Yes, he might be in solitary confinement, but he's also certain that his greatest scene still lies ahead of him.
For this story, Faïd has agreed to a rare interview in which my questions, and his answers, are relayed via email by one of his relatives. In addition, he has shared with me an unpublished autobiographical account of his daring escapes, titled Spiral, in which he describes the steps it takes to mentally prepare himself for a jailbreak. “There's a deathly silence in the cell,” he writes. “I can't hear a thing anymore. If I'm breaking out this morning, it's to leave that silence behind. I worked hard these past months to get my spirit as clear and concentrated as it needs to be to make it to the top on this day.”
Despite the scrutiny he receives, Faïd seems to have been scanning for weaknesses and opportunities since the moment he arrived at Réau, as Régis Grava, a representative for the prison-workers' union, will later recount. According to a fact sheet kept in his dossier by prison officials, Faïd is, on the surface, both polite and funny, someone who likes chatting with his jailers about everything and nothing. At the same time, the report notes, “He is exceptionally observant and gives the impression of constantly being in search of the slightest deficiencies within the detaining organization.”
Months earlier, authorities noticed something unusual: drones flying in strange patterns above the prison. They immediately wondered whether this could be related to their celebrity inmate Faïd, whom they seemed to suspect of having associates on the outside working to help spring him out. In June 2018, officials urgently requested that he be transferred to another facility. The country's central administration replied that the transfer would take place in September. Such a delay was infuriating to those running the prison at Réau, officially known as Centre Pénitentiaire Sud Francilien (CPSF), one of whom called the decision “extremely dangerous for the CPSF, our personnel, and the public order.” For his part, Faïd had no intention of being available for a transfer: He'd been working on his own exit strategy, set for today, July 1.
As Faïd tells me, he regards moments like this the way a filmmaker might. “It's a kind of mise-en-scène—soigné, efficient, precise,” he says. “You have to be able to stop time.”
And how does one go about pausing time?
“The situation itself freezes,” he replies. “Time freezes, everything stops while you do what you need to do. The idea is to sense in advance where trouble might come from. You don't want any problems. When you've eliminated all the paths, in the end there's only one path left for you to take.”
As the guards lead him out of his cell, Faïd's heart starts beating faster. Fear is just a sensation, he reminds himself. “It's all good to train yourself to forge a mentality of tempered steel,” he writes, “but when faced with a situation this serious, your subconscious asserts itself and brings your focus back to the reality at hand. Because the threat of dying is real.”
Shortly after 11 a.m., a dark speck materializes on the horizon. A helicopter. Flying low toward the Réau prison. It sinks into the courtyard with delicate precision, like a slow-motion metalloid dragonfly. According to a report in Le Parisien, two inmates tasked with emptying trash cans into a dumpster in the adjacent yard stare up in openmouthed disbelief. Nobody else even seems to notice what's happening.....
....MUCH MORE
