A Rescue, Not Escape, Prison Sweethearts to Argue at Trial

Ron McIntosh, by all accounts, is a very good salesman.

A few years ago, he made $4,000 in commissions in one month by selling cars, and then he helped found a company that sold $18 million worth of investments in gold and silver in 18 months. It was an impressive feat except that he broke securities law and landed in prison for the second time.

The question now is whether McIntosh’s sales skills remain intact. For in a trial that will begin Monday in federal court here, he faces the biggest sales job of his life.

McIntosh and his sweetheart, Samantha Dorinda Lopez, must persuade 12 jurors that when he walked away from federal custody last October, then returned last Nov. 5 to the federal prison at Pleasanton in a helicopter and set it down in the yard just long enough to pick up Lopez, it was not an escape, but a rescue.

In recent interviews at county jail, where they have been held since their arrest, McIntosh and Lopez professed their love like teen-agers. They talked in the most detail to date about their life in prison, the dramatic escape and their arrest 10 days later at the Birdcage Walk shopping mall in suburban Sacramento, where they were about to pick up engagement rings.

“On the surface that’s what it looked like, a love story, and it is. But it is a lot more involved than that,” Lopez said.

The Federal Correctional Institute at Pleasanton, set in the rolling hills an hour’s drive southeast of San Francisco, looks like a cross between a condo complex and a college campus. Nearby residents call it Club Fed.

Lopez said Pleasanton’s appearance is deceiving. She alleged that while she worked in the prison’s business office, she discovered that money has been misappropriated by the prison administration. As a result, she claimed, her life was threatened by prison staff. That convinced McIntosh that he needed “to save her life.”

“Pure fantasy,” a Bureau of Prisons official said, scoffing at claims of corruption at Pleasanton.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Mark Zanides sees the case as so straight-forward--and the facts so damning--that he plans to spend no more than a day presenting his evidence. His job will be to keep the jurors’ attention focused on the facts of the escape. He would not discuss the case before the trial, except to say, “Just look at the record,” referring to McIntosh’s and Lopez’s criminal careers.

Lot to Lose

McIntosh had a lot to lose. He would have been out by 1988. Now, he faces 25 years to life if he is convicted of air piracy and helping Lopez escape. She was serving a 50-year sentence but would have been eligible for parole in about five years. She faces a five-year term if she is convicted of escape.

McIntosh’s court-appointed attorney, Judd Iversen, is preparing a complex defense based on claims that McIntosh thought he had a moral obligation to help Lopez. His concern was made more real because he suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome from his combat duty in Vietnam, Iversen said.

Lopez’s lawyer, Deputy U.S. Public Defender Geoffrey A. Hansen, was at Pleasanton on Friday going through business records in an effort to verify his client’s claims of misdeeds at the prison.

McIntosh and Lopez met while working in the business office at Pleasanton, a co-ed prison where women outnumber men 3 to 1. She had been there for a few years when he arrived in 1985. They soon became “walkies,” inmate-sweethearts who share time walking in the prison exercise yard.

Lopez, 37, was first married at 16 to a seminary student and divorced by age 25 with three kids in rural Georgia. She found herself in jail for crimes that started out petty--shoplifting and check forgery--and escalated to a bank robbery in which the bank executive’s family was held hostage.

By then, she started calling herself Samantha, after the television series witch, when she was married to her third husband. Despite her claim that her involvement in the bank robbery was minimal, the crime netted her 50 years in prison. Now, she insists she has changed, goes by her real name, and talks of involvement in the prison church.

McIntosh, 42, was born in Glendale, raised in Seattle. He is well-spoken, as is Lopez, but can barely read or write. A suburbanite and family man before his legal troubles, he cannot control himself when the subject of his two children is brought up.

Convicted of 2 Cons

He said he never meant to break the law but has been twice convicted of cons--first for a commodities law violation in Seattle and more recently for violating parole by selling securities without a license in what authorities here called an $18-million fraud. The fraud case was heard by then-Superior Court Judge Eugene F. Lynch, who since has been elevated to the federal court where he is presiding over the escape trial.

McIntosh was a barber when he was drafted and sent to Vietnam in 1968. Now he is balding and overweight. But as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, he made daring rescues while under fire. He did not, however, readjust well to civilian life, the lawyer said, adding that the “rescue” was a reenactment of his wartime feats.

McIntosh describes it in military terms. “Why wouldn’t it work? It was so simple. It is a standard mission that pilots do every day in a war zone.”

The escape plan began to take shape several months before November when he received a transfer order to Lompoc. Since he had only a few months left to serve, authorities assumed, as was their practice with short-timers, that he would follow the rules and could ride a Greyhound unescorted from nearby Livermore to Lompoc.

They were wrong. The inmate who drove him from the prison let him off across the street from the bus depot. McIntosh said he simply turned away from the depot and started walking. He hitchhiked and took BART trains and buses, making his way to some land north of San Francisco where he had stashed a Chevrolet Blazer and some cash.

Then he found a charter helicopter company that used a helicopter that he knew would be powerful enough for the job. He rented the copter in San Jose, using a ruse that he was a developer who wanted to inspect property near Pleasanton.

Denies Hijacking Copter

What happened next is in dispute. McIntosh claims he did not hijack the helicopter at gunpoint, as the government has charged. He says he got the controls by conning the pilot into landing and giving him $1,500 for his trouble.

The point is an important one, because if the jury believes McIntosh, he would be acquitted of the main charge, air piracy, which carries a 25-year term.

“I have to credit his creativity, but it is idiocy,” said attorney Peter Axelrod, who represents the San Jose company that owns the helicopter. The pilot, Axelrod said, is suffering such stress because of the hijacking, McIntosh’s “outrageous” claims and the pending trial that he is unable to fly and has grounded himself.

Lopez, meanwhile, was to be in a prearranged spot on Nov. 5. Before he left Pleasanton, he had told Lopez to spend time every morning for a week in the prison yard, though both maintain that he never told her of his plan to break her out. Once he was in control of the copter, he simply flew it into the yard and Lopez climbed aboard. No shots were fired.

The couple landed a few miles away, got into the Blazer and drove to Sacramento. They thought the Blazer had been spotted. So they sold it. Part of the payment was two guns. They left their apartment after a few days and moved from motel to motel, doing nothing of particular interest.

They said they were trying to figure out how to get their claims of Pleasanton corruption to the proper authority, one that would investigate the prison.

And they ordered wedding rings, engraved with initials of their pet names, Bear and Lady Bear. When they returned to pick up the rings, federal agents were waiting. At their arrest, marshals said, McIntosh was trying to open a briefcase that held the guns. McIntosh said that, too, is untrue.