Holy jailbreak! Brother's plot no match for these 2
'Knight' director's kin wouldn't have been first to flee
Given the whole Joker-in-jail storyline of "The Dark Knight" and given that Chicago is Gotham City, the story about the brother of the film's director plotting a jail escape is beyond bizarre.
Officials of the Metropolitan Correctional Center say they found 31 feet of rope made from bed sheets, a body harness, a clip that would have been used to unlock handcuffs and a razor in the prison cell of Matthew Nolan, brother of "Dark Knight" director Christopher Nolan.
Matthew Nolan, arrested last February by FBI agents in Chicago, is wanted in Costa Rica on charges in the 2005 kidnapping and murder of an accountant.
"Holy Bat Brother!" read the online headline from the Wall Street Journal. "Was Director's Kin Plotting Escape?"
From the Tribune:
"Matthew Nolan intended to do what no one has ever done -- escape from the high-rise downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center. ... The MCC is no Blackgate Penitentiary -- one of the prisons in the Batman comics -- but a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman said its records show no one has ever escaped from the jail where gang leaders, mobsters and higher-lever drug dealers await trial. ..."
The assertion that no one had ever escaped from the MCC was repeated in a number of stories about Nolan's alleged plan to escape. But the more I thought about it, the more I doubted it. I had a vague recollection of reading or hearing about an escape maybe 20, 25 years ago.
Sure enough, there was an escape from the MCC -- and the story behind it is definite movie material.
In the spring of 1985, two inmates escaped from the sixth floor of the MCC.
Bernard Welch and Hugh Colomb were being housed in the witness quarters of the MCC because they were telling officials about supposed escape plans being hatched in prisons in Downstate Marion and in Atlanta. In reality, Welch and Colomb were making their own escape plans, and they figured it would be easier to escape from the witness quarters.
The inmates smuggled a barbell from the workout area into the cell they shared and punched a hole in the cinder-block wall. They used a 75-foot cord connected to a floor buffer to rappel down the wall to the grassy plaza below.
Three months later, Welch was arrested in Greensburgh, Pa., in a stolen BMW. Two months after that, Colomb was arrested in Canton, Miss., after he robbed a bank, dropped a shotgun and entered a furniture store and tried to pose as a customer.
At the time of the escape, Colomb was serving a 48-year sentence for armed robbery and assaulting a federal officer, among other crimes. While he was at large, the U.S. Marshals Service offered a reward for his arrest, noting he had a tattoo of a male warrior in loin cloth, a naked woman, a horned beast and a waterfall covering his entire back.
"It's really a unique piece of art," said a Marshals Service spokesman.
As for Welch, even before his escape, he was a figure of some notoriety -- a "one-man crime wave" who "committed literally thousands of burglaries" in the Washington, D.C., area, according to authorities.
Welch passed himself off as an art collector and investor, but he was actually a master burglar. In the 1970s, Welch, aka John William Landis, aka Bernard Miles, aka Myron Henry Snow Jr., aka Norm Hamilton, would drive around in a Mercedes, scouting homes from which he purloined millions of dollars in gold, silver and jewelry. He had a smelting furnace in his home, and he would melt the gold and silver into bars to be sold to bullion dealers.
In 1980, cardiologist Michael Halberstam, the brother of the esteemed journalist David Halberstam, came home and found Welch burglarizing the house. Welch shot Halberstam, who then drove himself to the hospital -- and spotted Welch along the way, and literally ran him down. Halberstam died shortly thereafter.
After Welch was arrested, police searching his Virginia home found nearly 50 boxes of stolen jewelry, furs, antiques, silverware and other items. Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of other stolen items were found in another home, in Duluth, Minn.
In the three months Welch was on the loose in 1985, he returned to his burglarizing ways, according to authorities who said he could have been connected to about 65 burglaries in the Pittsburgh area.
Welch died in 1997 in a medical center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Mo.
In 2005, the Duluth News Tribune caught up with Welch's son.
"I certainly won't tell my kids about my dad," said David Hamilton. "If they ever ask, I will give his name, but no details. . . I'll just say he passed away a long time ago and leave it at that."