Pelliccia Tells of Chain-Gang Brutality He Fled

Vincent Pelliccia cast off the last legal shackles of a long-ago crime Wednesday, signing a pardon and toasting his freedom with champagne while recounting how he escaped from a Virginia chain gang 41 years ago.

Pelliccia, who had earlier refused to discuss the escape, said he used a hacksaw smuggled in by a friend to cut off his shackles, then fled all day and night through the swamps in clothes he stole from a clothesline.

Painful Memory

It was a painful memory, reluctantly recalled by the retired Newhall electrician in his lawyer’s Los Angeles office, as he signed a pardon given him Tuesday by Virginia Gov. Gerald L. Baliles. The pardon lifts a 9 1/2-year prison sentence that awaited Pelliccia two weeks ago when he was arrested as a fugitive.

“The chain gang was a time in American history when society wanted vengeance,” Pelliccia said of the four months in 1946 that he spent breaking rocks with a sledgehammer 10 hours a day for road construction.

He said that, when he wasn’t breaking rocks, he slept, chained to other convicts, in a barracks. His toilet was a bucket next to his bed.

After serving another prison term for burglary in Rhode Island, Pelliccia, now 62, turned his life around in 1953, raised five children, worked for Warner Bros. and the Burbank Studios and stayed out of trouble for more than three decades.

“A person has a right to escape from injustice,” he said, making no apology for fleeing the South Hill, Va., camp when he was 19. After the escape, he made his way back to his family in Providence, R. I. Pelliccia was fresh out of the Army when he was convicted in 1945 in Norfolk of breaking into a drugstore and a bowling alley. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the burglaries, which netted him less than $2,000, he said.

“I ran out of money; I didn’t have a profession,” he said in his heavy New England twang. He found it impossible to live on $20 a week in Army benefits, he said. “It didn’t take long for the $20 to go.”

The flight from the chain gang was his second escape. Pelliccia attributed his earlier escape from the Norfolk, Va., County Jail in 1945 to “American ingenuity.” The jail was considered “escape-proof” at the time, he said, but he managed to get out with two other men by cutting through the bars next to a shower and removing some bricks. He was caught in Michigan, sent back to Virginia and sentenced to the chain gang.

“I don’t claim to be a saint,” Pelliccia said of his criminal youth. “But there were a lot of injustices 40 years ago,” he said, adding that he wants to keep many details of his past to himself.

Pelliccia moved to Southern California in 1959, hearing there was “gold in the streets.” He said the economy was bad in Rhode Island, where he had worked as a traffic engineer and later owned an Italian restaurant.

He kept his past a secret from his children, but the secret became public when he was arrested Aug. 4. Los Angeles police were investigating a man that Pelliccia knew slightly when a computer check revealed the 1946 warrant for Pelliccia’s arrest.

Thousands of former co-workers and sympathizers rallied to his support, raising money for his legal expenses by selling bumper stickers and T-shirts and circulating petitions calling on the governor of Virginia to pardon him. The pardon came through unexpectedly Tuesday, even as Pelliccia was appealing in a municipal court for release on bond while he fought extradition.

The Virginia governor, calling Pelliccia’s “an unusual case,” pardoned him on the condition that he stay out of trouble with the law for the next 9 1/2 years, the time remaining on his Virginia sentence.

Banners on Home

When Pelliccia returned to his Newhall home Tuesday night, his neighbors had decorated his house with welcoming banners.

The pardon was a surprise for Pelliccia, who said he was gearing up for a legal battle of at least a year.

As he sipped champagne with relatives and his lawyers Wednesday, offers of television and radio appearances poured in, along with inquiries from movie producers about the rights to his story. When the excitement dies down, he plans to proceed with his original plan to sell his home and retire to Florida to be near his son and indulge his love of fishing.

“I’m glad this happened, but it’s been one hell of a roller-coaster ride,” he said.