Gunman Frees Federal Inmate From Two Guards in San Pedro

A young Venezuelan drug trafficker serving a 20-year sentence escaped Tuesday from two unarmed escort officers from Terminal Island Federal Correctional Institution when an accomplice took the prisoner from them at gunpoint in downtown San Pedro.

The escapee was identified as Alberto Montes-Cardenas, 24, who was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Miami in July, 1983, on two counts of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and one count of possession of pistol silencer devices.

There was no clue to the identity of the gunman, who hustled Montes-Cardenas into a dark brown van and drove off at high speed, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Marshal’s office.

Chief Deputy Marshal Samuel Cicchino said the operation apparently was well planned. “Anything that works like that is planned pretty well,” he said.

Jack Bean, executive assistant to the warden of the medium security prison on Terminal Island, said Montes-Cardenas was suffering from an eye problem that could not be treated at the institution’s hospital.

For that reason, Bean said, Montes-Cardenas was being taken to a contract physician in downtown San Pedro, not far from the 950-inmate prison.

Bean said that escorts taking inmates to outside medical facilities ordinarily do not carry firearms. “It (the confrontation by an armed accomplice) is simply not something we expect under normal circumstances,” he said.

Cicchino said Montes-Cardenas was driven to the medical office parking lot in a prison van. He said that as the handcuffed prisoner was being removed from the prison van in the West 7th Street parking lot at about 10:30 a.m., a man brandishing a 9-millimeter pistol jumped out of another van parked nearby.

He ordered the two guards to lie down on the pavement and they immediately obeyed. Montes-Cardenas, handcuffed and wearing prison khakis, and his accomplice dashed to the van, a dark brown Ford Econoline with an orange stripe on its side, and sped away.

The escape was the most spectacular here since April, 1983, when two Latin Americans serving time at Terminal Island on drug charges escaped by scrambling over a chain link fence, diving into the water and getting picked up by a waiting speedboat.

Bean said the only escape of a Terminal Island inmate since that time occurred last June 8 when inmate Larry Lee Horvath broke away from a private security guard in an admitting room of San Pedro Peninsula Hospital, where he was about to undergo medical treatment. He said Horvath has been recaptured.

Montes-Cardenas was described as white, 5 feet 7 inches tall, weighing 167 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair. He has a skin discoloration on his forehead. The gunman was described only as white, about 6 feet tall and weighing about 180 pounds.