Convicts: Self-Made Lazarus

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At the moment, Teddy Green is a car salesman in Boston. He is a pretty good one, too, with an unusual spiel. He tells customers that Fords are reliable and have great pickup—which is why he always chose them when he was stealing getaway cars. For Teddy Green used to be a bank robber; he got out of jail just four months ago. "I feel like Lazarus," he says, risen as he is from the living death of what was once a 56-year sentence. Unlike many ex-cons, however, Teddy has refused to mope, instead is coping by making a virtue out of his background. There is hardly a Bostonian who has not heard his story. He has been invited to lunch at the Harvard Club, addressed Wyndham girls' school, and appeared on radio and television. A twelve-part series under his byline has just finished running in the Boston Globe.

He has plenty to tell. The son of a Greek immigrant, he decided early to go for easy money rather than the legitimate proceeds of the small restaurant chain his father had built up from a pushcart. 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. 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. 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. In about two years, with various accomplices, I made eleven withdrawals. There wasn't much planning—none of that movie stuff with diagrams and stop watches. We'd just pick a likely spot, go in and do the job."

Cheering Section. Eventually fingered by an informer, he got his 56-year sentence in 1952. 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. He made it to New Jersey, where he fell afoul of another stool pigeon. Back he went to Charlestown. Next, he and five others managed to sneak in some guns and build a ladder. The idea was to pin down the lone tower guard with gunfire and climb the ladder over the wall. Everything went as planned, except that at the key moment two of the cons jumped on the ladder and it came crashing down. "This was broad daylight," remembers Green, "and all 300 inmates were watching. It must have been the first break in history with a cheering section. They were hollering: 'Get that ladder up!' When it crashed, everybody yelled, 'Get it up again!' "

They did not; several months in isolation followed. But Green was not cured. In 1955, he sawed his way out of his cell, but the alarm went off before he and his confederates could get any farther. 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. It only ended when Ringleader Green's daughter pleaded with him to surrender; after extracting some promises of reforms, he did. Some promises were kept, but Green was on his way to Alcatraz, the federal pen for troublemakers.