Vangelis Rochamis, Greece’s notorious prison-breaker known also as the Greek “Papillion” passed away at 73.
With his robberies and especially with is numerous escapes from prisons, criminal Rochamis occupied the Greek authorities for more than two decades.
He stayed 22 years in total in prison and managed to escape more than ten times. He created his own myth with his legendary prison breaks.
The iron bars in the prisons of Korydallos, Halkida, Corfu and Alikarnasos were not hard enough to keep him inside.
For years, he was a permanent target of the prosecuting authorities.
He was born in Evia in 1951. A child of a large family, he started working to support himself at the age of 16.
During his military service in Syros (1971) and because he was not granted permission to visit his newborn daughter, he escaped from the camp. He was also accused of stealing a moped and clashed with his superiors in the military whereupon he received a temporary deferral as an I-5.
For the theft, he was sentenced to three and a half months in Korydallos prison.
In 1976 he was imprisoned for the theft he carried out at the post office of his village. Towards the end of the 70s he got an informal divorce from his wife and went to Cyprus for a few months.
In 1980 he was arrested for attempting to sell stolen televisions and imprisoned in Korydallos.
In December 1981, he starred in the first prisoners’ stand in prisons, developing a political, assertive role. For his action in the uprising, he was tried in 1986 and sentenced to 27 months in prison.
He was convicted of robbery, theft, damage to foreign property, carrying and using weapons.
Friends helped him in his escapes, while women helped him hide.
He played cat and mouse with police and there is a characteristic incident from the mid-1980s. While police were looking for him in a large-scale coordinated operation, Rochamis was having fun in a night club. Neither the club owners nor the audience snitched him to authorities.
He was released from prison with a decision of the Judicial Council in 2000.
After he release he lived in a village in Evia.
He died in a hospital in Halkida.
Perception of Rochamis by the Greek society
In the 1980’s ans 1990’s the interest of the mass media, which treated him ambiguously, was constant, with the society to look at him as an “anti-hero” who fought the police and exposed the prison system from within, as someone who ridiculed the police and the legal order..
An important role in this favorable perception was played by the fact that he was never convicted of a crime of taking a human life.
Still today a part of the society believes that he was unjustifiably imprisoned for so many years claiming that “he was not a murderer, he had never killed anyone.”
Upon the new of his death, some Greeks praised him even as a kind of “Robin Hood” who would help poor families with the money he stole.
Vangelis Rochamis became synonymous with indomitable masculinity, a newspaper wrote.
