Ulster Fugitive Says He’s Glad Hiding Is Over : Captured: From a jail cell, the prison escapee once labeled Britain’s ‘most wanted man’ denies he’s a murderer and IRA terrorist. He wants to stay in the United States.

On a foggy June morning in San Diego, the man a London tabloid once described as “Britain’s most wanted man” got a phone call at his 32-foot houseboat. It was the police.

There was something wrong with his car, out in the parking lot nearby, they said. Could he please come check? Officers were waiting.

After nine years on the run, a journey that took Kevin Barry John Artt across the ocean and into a secret new life in a new land, the law was waiting. But he was unsuspecting.

“I loved that car,” Artt said last week. “It was my baby,” a white 1980 Toyota Celica convertible, the heart and soul of the new identity he had created for himself in California.

In San Diego, no one knew his real name, knew he had been convicted of the murder of a prison warden and labeled an Irish Republican Army terrorist. No one knew he had escaped from Northern Ireland’s most notorious prison in a famed jailbreak. In California, he was Kevin Thomas Keohane, savvy car salesman, sharp dresser and proud father of a little girl.

Throwing on his Southern California uniform--a baseball cap, T-shirt, swim shorts and flip-flops--he ambled off the boat and up to the parking lot.

From every direction, U.S. agents surrounded him and told him to put his hands on his beloved car--setting the stage for a U.S. court case that promises to explore the depths of the political strife, the unrelenting religious anguish, that plagues Northern Ireland.

“I can’t honestly say I felt relieved at being arrested,” Artt, 34, said last week in a two-hour talk in jail, his first newspaper interview since arrest. “But I do now feel relieved. I can be myself again. I’ve been running from this for a long time.”

He added: “I want to prove my innocence. I want to stay here in the United States. I don’t want to be returned to Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom. I want to continue my life here. I was wrongly convicted of a murder I did not commit. What I’m really guilty of is being Catholic in Northern Ireland.”

Artt said he was beaten by British authorities and coerced into signing a bogus confession, then convicted of murder at a sham trial. He said he is no terrorist. A 1987 article in The Sun, the tabloid that labeled him “most wanted,” was “absolutely ridiculous,” he said.

Artt said he is an IRA “sympathizer” but does not formally belong to the IRA and has never committed violence in its name. The underground IRA is trying to oust British troops from Northern Ireland, which remains a part of Great Britain. The Catholic minority in Northern Ireland has long chafed under Protestant rule.

If he’s sent home, Artt said, he is certain he will die at the hands of authorities eager to avenge the Nov. 26, 1978, killing of Albert Miles, deputy warden of Belfast’s infamous Maze, the main prison for hundreds of convicted IRA activists. Artt was serving a life sentence for Miles’ murder when he escaped from Maze with 37 other men in 1983.

“They would find some way to assassinate me,” Artt said of British jailers. “They’d say I tried to escape or something, and then shoot me.”

British authorities have demanded Artt’s extradition. First, though, Artt faces charges in U.S. District Court in San Francisco of passport fraud, a charge that could bring up to five years in U.S. prison.

Artt said last week, “I’m as far from being a terrorist as any human being can be. I’m a total pacifist. Art, poems--I’m into total awareness, love, peace and equality.”

That’s what makes Southern California so wonderful, he said. In San Diego, where he migrated in 1986, no one cared about his religion, or his background.

In San Diego, Artt worked at a variety of jobs but kept coming back to the car business. He was good at selling cars. One month, he said, he sold 28 Fords for a Pacific Beach dealership, earning $9,800 that month alone.

“He was a very personable fellow,” said a friend who knew Artt in San Diego as Keohane, a fellow car salesman.

“The person we saw here was not the same guy they attribute all these (crimes) to,” the friend said last week, asking to remain unnamed. “He was a very nice guy, a very friendly fellow who built a good relationship with his customers. As a salesperson, Kevin was a doggone good one.”

The money he made enabled Artt to rejoice in American materialism. “Furniture, clothes, a motorcycle, boats, toys--that was me,” Artt said.

He fell in love, with a pretty 19-year-old, Jill Janssen. They never married but had a girl, now 4. “My very beautiful daughter,” Artt said last week.

The family of three moved from La Mesa to Carlsbad. One night, Artt’s mutt, Beggar O’Malley, was hit by a car. Artt held the dog in his arms, nursing it, before taking it to the veterinarian to have it put to death, Janssen said.

“Kevin is a very gentle man,” Janssen said. “I’ve heard ‘IRA terrorist’ so many times that, at this point, I think I’ll scream. Nobody knows Kevin the way I know Kevin and there is a character about him that is genuine and real. He’s into peace.”

Janssen, now 24, declined to talk about what Artt had told her about his past. They separated two years ago but she still talks to him virtually every day--he calls her collect from jail.

“It’s important to me that people know I’ve taken up his cause because I’ve decided Kevin is worth it,” she said, adding, “I know he did not murder Albert Miles. Kevin never lied about things of importance. I can count on Kevin to be honest and truthful to me.”

The son of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, it has always been the straight path--and the way of nonviolence--that beckoned, Artt said.

Born out of wedlock, Artt was raised in a Belfast suburb by a Catholic aunt and uncle, whose business was bombed several times by Protestant militants.

At 16, Artt left home and went to work for an unlicensed taxi company that drove Catholics between Belfast’s Catholic neighborhoods.

Miles, the deputy prison warden, was shot and killed in November, 1978, at his Belfast home. A week later, Artt was arrested. Though charged with no crime, he was detained for a week and interrogated day and night, detectives insisting he had killed the warden. He said he knew nothing about the crime.

“They beat me, verbally assaulted me, degraded me, called me every name,” Artt said. “They hit me about the head.”

After a week, Artt was released. He went back to the taxi business, married and became the father of a son, now 12. “Barry Paul,” Artt said. “Paul after the Pope, Barry after me.” The marriage has since been annulled.

One evening, just after coming home, Artt heard the doorbell ring, then a scream, then the crack of gunshots. Running downstairs, he saw his landlord badly wounded. Police asked Artt to make a statement and took him to headquarters, where a detective told him, “That was meant for you, Artt . . . I’m sorry they didn’t get you.”

Artt asked last week, “How did they know it was meant for me so soon after it had happened? That led to my developing suspicions,” a belief in government complicity in attacks on his life.

More attacks followed, he said. He was chased through the streets by a man wielding a pistol but escaped. One night, he claims, was beaten by police and another night, his car was bombed. Artt said last week, however, that he could not remember the dates the various attacks occurred.

Three years after the Miles killing, Artt was again arrested. He was held in isolation, he said, denied a lawyer and interrogated around the clock by detectives, who screamed at him and yelled obscenities. Once, Artt said, he was suddenly beaten about the head.

After a few days, another man was brought in and named Artt as his accomplice in the killing, an accusation that was later retracted. Artt denied the charge. But detectives told him his only chance of ever being released was to sign a confession.

If he confessed, detectives told him, he would be eligible for parole in six or seven years. If he didn’t, he was going to prison for 30 years.

So, Artt said, he signed.

It wasn’t until two years later, in 1983, that Artt finally went to trial--a non-jury trial of 38 men with evidence based in large part on the testimony of a sole informant. The only evidence against Artt was the confession, according to legal papers filed in San Francisco by Artt’s U.S. defense attorneys.

Artt disputed the confession but was unable to persuade the judge it was the product of abuse. He was convicted Aug. 4, 1983, and sentenced to life in prison.

Of 35 convictions from that trial, 18 were overturned in 1986, according to one of Artt’s U.S. attorneys, San Francisco lawyer George Harris. Artt’s was not one of the 18.

Guards at the Maze prison, where Miles had been well-liked, were eager to greet Artt, Harris said in the legal papers. “One guard told him flatly: ‘You’re dead,’ ” Harris said in the briefs.

“I prayed to St. Jude, the saint of hopeless causes,” Artt said last week. “I prayed for an escape. Little did I know what was in store. A miracle.”

Two weeks after being moved to Maze, Artt was approached at lunch, told there would be a massive jailbreak in two hours and asked if he wanted to take part. He did.

Artt denied any role in planning the break. “I knew nothing about it until it happened,” he said.

Shortly after lunch on Sept. 25, 1983, prisoners took over the block, throwing pillowcases over guards and gang-tackling them. Inmates piled into a truck backed up to an door outside the building but still inside prison walls, Artt said.

The truck sped to a control gate, where guards stopped it. The inmates piled off the truck. Five men, including Artt, jumped into a nearby car. The car rammed into a gate and stuck there. One of the men stayed put but the other four, including Artt, jumped out again.

A sentry shot one of the men. Artt and the other two ran out the prison gates and down the only road. He cut through various back yards and stumbled under a dense thicket, where he stayed until night fell. “I didn’t actually have a plan,” he said.

Creeping out that night from the thicket, Artt tiptoed down back alleys and found an unlocked shed in the back of a yard. Inside the shed were a bicycle and a brown ladies’ sweater. It was cold, so he put on the sweater and pedaled off down the road--where he ran into a police roadblock.

There, he told officers his name was “William Johnson,” a name he figured would not identify him as either Catholic or Protestant. Police took him to a nearby station and, after about an hour, let him go. And he was off to Belfast, believing “it was just a godsend that I got away.”

The chief inspector of prisons once described the break as “the most serious escape in the recent history of the United Kingdom prison services.” Figures vary, but about a dozen of the 38 remain at large, authorities said.

Artt declined to talk at all about how he made his way from Belfast to the United States, or what he did from the day of escape in 1983 through 1986.

In 1986, he said, he was living in San Francisco. He saw someone he recognized from Belfast and, fearing for his life, changed his name to Kevin Thomas Keohane and moved to San Diego later that year.

According to U.S. prosecutors, Artt assumed the name of a boy who died in 1970 and used his identity to obtain a passport, filling out an application at a post office in Daly City, just south of San Francisco.

Authorities zeroed in on Artt after matching his prison fingerprints in Belfast with the prints Kevin Thomas Keohane gave when applying for a California license to sell cars, according to legal papers filed by prosecutors.

A second man who took part in the 1983 escape from Maze, James Joseph Smyth, was also arrested June 3, and faces similar passport and extradition cases in San Francisco federal court. Smyth was serving a 20-year term at Maze for the attempted murder of a police officer.

Smyth’s case is set for a Feb. 22 trial. He remains free on $1.5-million bail. No trial date is yet set in Artt’s case. He has been denied bail.

At an Oct. 6 hearing in San Francisco before U.S. District Judge Charles Legge, Artt outlined his defense, saying he broke out of Maze prison, fled and then falsified a U.S. passport because those were the only choices he had to save his life.

It will be up to Legge to decide whether to allow any such evidence at Artt’s trial. The judge has not yet issued a ruling.

Prosecutors claim Artt’s so-called “necessity” defense has no legal merit. Assistant U.S. Atty. Mark Zanides called it “bunk,” saying in an interview that Artt was required under U.S. law to turn himself in once on American soil, and to count on U.S. authorities to protect his rights.

Defense attorneys take a broader view, saying Artt was convicted improperly in Belfast and claiming in legal papers that justice demands he be able to tell his story to a jury in the United States.

U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy II (D-Mass.), who has taken an interest in the case, issued a statement last month that said Artt and Smyth are entitled to “full protection under U.S. laws.”

Last week, wearing a bright yellow jail jumpsuit, sitting in a cinder-block room at an Alameda County jail in Dublin--a facility east of Oakland that houses some inmates with cases at the San Francisco federal court--Artt said he finds a humorous irony in his situation.

“I’m sitting in a jail in a town called Dublin,” he said. “I guess (prosecutors) have a sense of humor.”

“But,” he said, “this is very serious. I hope to see justice in the United States. . . . I firmly believe that if I’m given a fair hearing, there’s no way on earth they’ll send me back.”