Infamous Pentridge and Geelong inmate Michael Pantic lifts lid on life of crime, miracle prison escape

A notorious Pentridge inmate with the IQ of Albert Einstein has lifted the lid on one of Victoria’s most daring escapes, revealing how he and a feared outlaw tunnelled through brick and scaled the walls of Geelong’s maximum security prison.

Michael Pantic was a notorious inmate in the feared H Division block of Pentridge Prison (pictured)

A notorious inmate who claims to have the IQ of Albert Einstein has lifted the lid on one of Victoria’s most daring escapes, revealing how he and a feared outlaw tunnelled through brick and scaled the walls of Geelong’s maximum security prison.

For more than four decades the Shawshank Redemption-style jailbreak of Edwin “Teddy” Eastwood and career con Michael Pantic has been told through the lens of the infamous Faraday kidnapper.

Eastwood was largely credited as the mastermind behind the escape in 1976, with his accomplice living in the shadow of the story.

That was until the Geelong Advertiser tracked him down to set the record straight, with Pantic breaking his silence on the plot and his life of crime for the first time.

“It was my idea,” Pantic said.

“It’s something I always had my eye on, I had escaped from prisons and lots of boys homes before then.

“The first thing you do when you walk into a joint is work out where the back door is.”

ESCAPE. NEWS. 29, JAN, 2023. Melbourne’s heritage list Pentridge Prison re opens to the public. Picture: Pentridge Prison

PANTIC’S journey to Geelong from the hellish H Division block of Pentridge Prison is as fascinating as the escape itself.

A wild attack on a prison officer in the legendary Melbourne jail would spark the chain of events leading him down the Princes Freeway.

“He was a rotten little turd of a man,” Pantic said.

“He used to stand right up against your face and yell abuse and spit on you, and they all put up with it.

“I didn’t. One day I flattened him.”

He was placed in a straight jacket for nine months following the assault and housed in an observation cell next to Ronald Ryan – the last person to be legally executed in Victoria.

He had been found guilty of killing Pentridge warder George Hodson during an escape attempt before meeting his maker via the hangman in 1967.

Ronald Ryan was hanged in Pentridge prison, Melbourne in 1967 for murder of a prison warder. News Limited. Victoria / Crime

“I was talking to Ronny the morning they took him off to hang him,” he said.

“He was a good bloke.”

It was at this time Pantic claims he was tested “by a battery of psychiatrists” who discovered he had the IQ of a genius – 162.

For context, Einstein’s hovered at around 160.

“That made me more of a puzzle,” he said.

Pantic recalls prison officers taking him from his Pentridge cell on a cold night in 1976 and shifting him to Geelong – renowned as one of the hardest maximum security prisons at the time.

“I was the only person ever thrown out of H Division because I refused to get with the program,” he said.

The notorious H Division at Pentridge Prison. Interior. Neg: DM04205

PANTIC was a fine chess player.

He was also brilliant at finding a weakness in prison systems.

He spent the best part of 20 years behind bars from the age of 16 to 36 largely for stealing cars and robbing banks.

“I was basically just a pain in the arse,” he said.

“We used to steal fast cars and get the cops to chase us for a bit of fun.

“If we could get $40,000 out of a bank we were doing bloody well and would come away gleefully.”

Pantic, a German migrant, believes his life of crime began from his first day at a Melbourne primary school as a five-year-old.

He recalled “really wrecking” one boy who was mocking him about his European heritage.

“That was the day I learned that if you have got to fight, you fight to f***ing win,” he said.

“You hit first if you can, you hit from behind if you can and when you get them down you f***ing hurt them and you make them feel the pain.

“Then they never come back, nor do their mates.”

He claims his first brush with the law came when he was about 10 years old.

He fled his Ferntree Gully home and “went bush” to South Australia, intent on living off the land with an Indigenous community.

He was later arrested for stealing a police car in Kaniva near the South Australian border, but his penchant to head bush would never leave him.

It would eventually get him caught after the Geelong escape.

PANTIC said prisoners who needed the highest observation at the Geelong Prison, on the corner of Swanson and Myers street, were put in the cells “nearest the circle.”

Eastwood, 26 at the time, was serving a 15-year stint for the 1972 kidnapping of a teacher and six students at Faraday.

He was running the radio inside the prison and was housed in the first off the circle.

The cell next to him, according to Pantic, was empty.

Teddy Eastwood’s Geelong Cell, number 23.

The walls had been ripped out and replaced by steel gates and some locks that led to a laundry yard.

“So there was my cell, Teddy Eastwood’s cell and then a passage through to the laundry yard,” he said.

“If you could get through there to that walk through all you had to do was get rid of some old fashioned locks and you were out of the yard and gone.”

The pair eventually got talking.

“Teddy seemed quite relaxed about serving his time for kidnapping all those kids,” he said.

“It just never occurred to him he was in the best spot in the entire prison to go over the wall until I mentioned it.”

They’d spend the next 10 days tunnelling through the walls, brick by brick.

THE Geelong jail was made out of blue stone blocks, but the walls between them had been rebuilt in double brick with a lot of paint.

“Getting through my cell to his cell was easy,” he said.

“It took time but it wasn’t hard.”

They used a butter knife and a fork to begin scraping out “fairly piss poor mortar” from between the bricks.

“The hardest part to get through was the bloody 47 coats of paint that had been put on there,” Pantic said.

He decided to dig his tunnel under his steel bed.

Michael Pantic’s cell at the Geelong prison, and the bricks he removed to make the tunnel.

Pulling it out every night, he would go to work at the floor level.

“Ted was tunnelling through to the walk through and I was tunnelling through to his cell.”

Pantic said there were three layers of brick with the mortar to get through, and it was all done at night.

They would replace each brick every morning before muster, painting over their tracks with stolen paint hidden in toothpaste tubes.

Pantic recalled the monitoring of their cells “from the screws” was sporadic.

Some would check through the peek holes, but many wouldn’t.

“You had to have one eye on the trap door, and your ears on the screw tiptoeing to your door,” he said.

“It took time.”

ABOUT a week before they had completed their dig, Pantic’s heart would skip a beat.

All prisoners were called to the yard so the warden could flip each cell from top-to-bottom.

“I thought we were dead,” Pantic said.

“The screws didn’t think to search down below the bed where they would have found a hole about to take my body size through it.”

They missed it.

That week, Pantic made a couple of makeshift keys for the locks and they planned to make their break for it.

The night was December 16, 1976.

“We left at about 1am from memory,” he said.

“We had to give ourselves time to get through the gate and into the laundry yard and then over the wall.”

It took just 20 minutes to get through the locks on the gates.

Scaling the blue stone wall, they jumped an estimated 4.5m to the ground.

Geelong gaol. Planner, 7 events

“It wasn’t that easy as they were rounded at the top,” he said.

“We didn’t have anything to get down, we just jumped.”

With his feet touching the ground, Pantic said the first thing that went through his mind was “where is the bloody car?”.

“I could steal anything in those days,” he said.

He found one and hot-wired it.

The engine started.

“I told Teddy to get behind the wheel and he said he couldn’t drive,” he laughed.

Pantic floored it.

They were free.

“That was about the time we started yelling ‘you bloody beauty’,” he said.

“Up until then it had been pretty stressful.”

THEY drove through the night until day break, dumping the car in a bit of scrub near Lake Daylesford.

He pulled some leaves and grass over the car and started listening to the radio.

“Sure enough, we were on it,” he said.

“Dangerous escapees on the run la di dah da.”

And by his own admission, Pantic was dangerous. Eastwood, too.

“I was known not to tolerate police bullies and had been known to shoot at the f***ing police,” he said.

“And Ted was the Faraday kidnapper.”

If they were to evade capture they needed to split up.

“My modus operandi was always just to head for the hills,” he said.

“If I could get to the bush no one would catch up with me.”

He decided to head to the Mount Dandenong Ranges and plan his next move.

Eastwood went his own way.

Three months later he would kidnap a teacher and students at the Wooreen State School in a ransom attempt before being shot and caught by police.

Edwin John Eastwood is carried from Essendon after being caught kidnapping children and their teacher from Wooreen Primary School.

WHILE hiding out in the mountains near Ferntree Gully “looking pretty scungy”, Pantic said he had to take a risk.

He’d been on the run for eight days and was hungry and tired.

“I needed to do something other than stay in the mountains,” he said.

He remembered an old prison teacher from Pentridge who lived in the area.

The pair had struck up a “very close” friendship while he was behind bars.

He found the house and was convinced he would assist with some food, water and warm clothes.

“I was feeling as grotty as anything, I was sweaty and dirty,” he said.

“I thought I would go down there, say g’day and hopefully have a shower and something to eat.”

He parked his stolen car in the driveway.

“He made me feel welcome. He was the type of bloke that if he didn’t want me there he would tell me. So I took it on face value that I was OK,” he explains.

“I had a shower and he put some food on the table.”

Little did he know he’d got a child to call the cops from a pay phone, informing them the state’s equal most wanted fugitive was sitting inside their living room.

“I had just got through half a sandwich when a thousand coppers descended on the place,” he said.

A press clipping from the Sydney Morning Herald on the capture of Michael Pantic.

“That kind of treachery sticks with you for life.”

He was arrested and sent back to prison on Christmas Eve, 1976.

PANTIC is now an old man living in country Victoria.

He has health issues and has continued to have run-ins with the law.

Asked whether he wished he had put his intelligence to better use over the years, the 76 year-old was blunt in his response.

“Not really,” he said.

“I’ve done everything in life by letting my mind take control of the situation.

“But I do realise now I just never learned how to think.”

Originally published as Infamous Pentridge and Geelong inmate Michael Pantic lifts lid on life of crime, miracle prison escape