Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
The Real Story Behind "The Midnight Express" | Billy Hayes
15 Apr 2025
What led Billy Hayes to smuggle hashish?
I'd be one of those young, rich guys who their dads are billionaires. Maybe it would have changed my attitude towards life. I'd like to have given it a try, but I didn't have the choice. And it...
I get so caught up in this shit. It's been 50 years. He showed up. He knew, he knew you were going, he knew there's no way this, this gets, I convinced him to, I coaxed him into staying for the past three or four years here, but I know damn well, he's not dying. He's not going to be able to die. He brought me a photo album.
He had cut the back of a big photo album, pictures of my family, my friends, my beautiful sister in a cheerleader outfit. In the back of the photo album, he cut it open and he pasted 27 $100 bills in the back of this photo album, fixed it up perfect and brought it into me.
When you have visits, normally you're between glass and stuff, but you can get certain visits out in the side room if you've got family or the council comes and you talk. And whatever they give you, you have to bring back into the jail. And of course, the guards search everything before they take it in. And I had this photo album. And when I went back into the prison, I went past the guard.
They said, what have you got here? I said, oh, I've got a gun and some hash. You have to be around for a while. You gotta know the guard. You gotta be able to play the game. And they kind of like laughed at that. And they looked at the photo album and I showed him, here's my beautiful sister in a Chilean. And he said, your father, he works in New York. Can I get a job?
If I get to New York, can your father get me a job? It's like, guys, whatever you like. And I took the photo album and brought it back into the prison. And I just laid it on my bunk, left it there, showed other people. Here's my sister. Here's my family. Wanting people to see this and feel OK about it because I didn't want to have to like everybody hiding it.
Prison is so, well, you know, prison is so boring. The same people, the same, same clothes. We, we didn't, we didn't have outfits in prison. Everybody wears their own clothes. So everybody's in their, in their own clothes. And there's, they're talking about the same shit every day. They got the same food, the same, it just becomes so fucking boring. I put the photo up in my bed.
I let people go through it and look at it. I wanted them to feel all right with it. because I knew that I'm gonna eventually cut out that money and use that money to get out. And that's what I did. And I got myself transferred to an island prison, 26 kilometers off the coast in the Sea of Marmara. And I knew this prison was considered half open. People work there.
It's a prison island and they bring produce, boats from the mainland come over. Turkey has incredible fruits and vegetables. I don't even know what they are. I know the names in Turkish. And we brought them up and we on the island supposedly Short-termers went to the island, so they're not going to escape because they've only got, what, a half a year or a year, whatever.
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