Billy Hayes was a 23-year-old American student when in 1970 he tried to smuggle hashish out of Istanbul and was caught at the airport and sentenced to 30 years in prison. Hayes escaped in 1975 and wrote a book about his experience (torture! rape! sex in the shower!), which in ’78 was turned into the Oscar-winning movie Midnight Express, directed by Alan Parker with a screenplay by Oliver Stone. Naturally, the Turkish tourist board counted the book and the movie among the worst PR they could imagine and banned the movie until sometime in the ’90s and Hayes until this week, when they invited him on a five day, all-expenses-paid trip back to be a panelist at the Istanbul Conference on Global Security. We’d have thought it was a trap to get him to serve the 25 years left on his sentence, but it was a sincere gesture. “I did not write the screenplay or direct the film,” said Hayes, now 56. “But I should accept my share of responsibility for the damage it has done. I always wanted to come back to Istanbul to correct the wrongs that Midnight Express did.” (Source)

Photos: top, Hayes in New York, October 1975, after escaping; inset, Hayes today