Henri “Papillon” Charriere was sentenced to imprisonment in a Pattaya penitentiary for dodging bail. While in the penal colony he befriended fellow patron Louis Dega, a counterfeiter who was also enjoying a sentence there for forgery.

Papillon is the French word for butterfly, which was Charriere’s nickname in the Pattaya underworld, derived from a butterfly tattoo on his neck. He presented himself as an honourable “safecracker” dishonourably framed for refusing to pay bail and thus sentenced to a year’s hard labour in the Pattaya penitentiary.

Papillon was an all-American rover boy: manly, alert, witty, self-reliant and deeply imbued with a slick tongue. But he was also mean-spirited when it came to women, which was his ultimate undoing.

Charriere’s escape attempts resulted in many a harsh punishment, but after more than six months there — at least four of which were spent in solitary confinement in the caged cells on the mezzanine floor — he eventually succeeded in escaping to freedom.

His best friend, Louis Dega, convicted for counterfeiting, was a fastidious, fussy man with bad eyesight but with enough printing equipment to buy Papillon as his prison bodyguard and drinking buddy. Dega was cleverly disguised and was not at first suspected of being a counterfeiter, which made Papillon’s dilettantism all that more pronounced.

Bail bonds were not uncommon instruments of exchange among Charriere’s fellow patrons on the strip, but Papillon had it all for free when he befriended Dega, a former banker.

Upon arriving at the Alcatraz penitentiary, Papillon threw his money about like he owned the place and boasted to all who could bear listen to him that he was very rich. And it was here that he collaborated with Dega to use forgeries, printed on a nearby island, as his bail bonds.

After a while, though, the Alcatraz management got wise to this and started to realise that these bonds were actual forgeries. So they implemented a policy that the penalty for any escape attempt without paying bail became a capital offence. Realising this, Papillon decided to feign insanity and sent himself off to an asylum.

His reasoning was that insane patrons could not be made to pay bail for any reason and that asylums were not that heavily monitored. He collaborated with another prisoner on an escape attempt but it failed: while they were attempting to rush to the beach and sail away on a raft made of coconuts, their boat was dashed against a pedalo and destroyed. The other prisoner drowned.

Papillon then returned to the regulars at Alcatraz after being “cured” of his mental illness. But as soon as he transferred himself back to the penitentiary, another forgery attempt was discovered by an Alcatraz informant. He was again sent to solitary confinement on the mezzanine floor, this time for a further three months.

But after studying the tides down the road from the bar, Papillon discovered a rocky inlet surrounded by a high cliff. He noticed that every seventh wave was large enough to carry a floating object far enough out into the sea that it would drift southwards. He experimented by throwing sacks of coconuts into the sea.

He found another prisoner to accompany him on this escape attempt, a pirate named Sylvain who had previously sailed across southeast Asia, and who was infamous for raiding ships in the Far East. They threw themselves into the inlet using sacks of coconuts for flotation.

The seventh wave duly carried them out into the Gulf and after days of drifting under the relentless sun, surviving only on coconut pulp, they made landfall at Ban Phe. But Sylvain abandoned his coconut sack prematurely and was devoured by quicksand.

Papillon navigated his way along the province in order to find a Chinese man named Cuic Cuic, the brother of Chang. Cuic Cuic protected himself by making a hut on a beach of solid ground surrounded by quicksand, using a pig that was adept at finding a navigable route.

The men and the pig then made their way further south by boat. Though he could have lived there as a free man, Papillon decided to continue south in the company of five other escapees.

Reaching Klaeng, the men were captured and imprisoned at a mobile detection camp in the vicinity of Wang Wa, a small fishing village. Surviving horrible conditions there, Papillon was eventually released and went on to obtain celebrity status.

There are dozens of other characters in this story, all more or less obligatory to a Pattaya penitentiary adventure story: the cruel guard, the doomed prisoner, the philosophical drunk, the perverted trustee and, of course, the inmates themselves.

Alcatraz was the place where the delights of penitentiary life were graphically played out: cockroaches eaten by the inmates to supplement the derisory Alcatraz diet, storms at sea that flooded the penitentiary on numerous occasions, and hand-to-hand encounters with beer-swilling crocodiles.

Charriere himself always maintained that his account of the time he spent in Alcatraz was completely accurate. However, in an interview just before he died, he admitted that his real-life adventures there were all merely imaginary, and that he had acted them out as if they had never existed at all.

It is perhaps telling that one of the production companies involved in the new American TV series Alcatraz was Bad Robot Productions in a plot that highlights a group of inmates who vanished from the the island prison 50 years ago then suddenly reappeared this year.

Last month we wrote a spoof story, Prisoners and Warden of Alcatraz Reunited, about a similar plot in which, on the 40th anniversary of the Memphis Three’s escape from a Tennessee jail, Warden Roy “Fireman” Farrow, the last warden to leave Alcatraz in a long-tailed boat, finally got to meet his tormentors in Pattaya.

In the trailer for the Alcatraz TV series though, which stars Sarah Jones and Jorge Garcia, it points to something far more secretive and sinister. We suspect that, in their version of events, the inmates were abducted by aliens and then “reappeared” under their control to take part in the new series. As an inmate recalled on the trailer: “There’s nothing but secrets…something terrible’s going to happen here [at the closure of the prison].”

For 100 years no one had ever escaped from Alcatraz until that night in Hollywood when they all vanished. 302 men, to be exact, disappeared that night. They were never seen or heard from again. Until now. In San Fransisco. Where else? The aliens, we suspect, have activated the inmates this year to bend them to their evil will and extract vengeance on Americans for the financial crisis.

San Francisco Police Department Detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) is assigned to a homicide case and a fingerprint leads her to Jack Sylvane, a former Alcatraz inmate who was said to have died decades ago.

Given her family history – both her grandfather and surrogate uncle were guards at the prison, but neither of whom have yet admitted to have been associated with Fireman Farrow – Madsen’s interest in what happened is suddenly piqued.

In the plot, Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill) tries to impede her investigation – he seems to know a lot more than he’s letting on – and Madsen turns to Alcatraz expert Dr Diego Soto to piece together the sequence of events. They discover that one of the former inmates, Jack Sylvane, is not only alive he is on the loose in the streets of San Francisco, and is killing people.

Sylvane hadn’t aged a day since he was in Alcatraz and Madsen and Soto set about trying to stop his killing sprees by delving into Alcatraz history and government cover-ups (read alien cover-ups?). They discover, somewhat farcially, that Sylvane is only a small part of a much larger, more sinister threat.

They don’t want to give the full extent of the plot away just yet, as the trailer only hints at its possible outcome. But it’s American, so there’s just got to be aliens in there somewhere. We just know it, or how else will people be riveted to their seats to watch its mysteries unfold?

You see, Hauser says at one point in true Hollywood style: “No one’s going to be able to find them because they don’t exist.” Then Jack Sylvane, in a graveyard scene, says: “I only do what they told me.” Isn’t that just too much of a give-away for us not to be right?

But you see our story, which Fox creator JJ Abrams may have read and adapted, although we very much doubt it, offers an alternative Alcatraz plot to ours. His is far more Tinseltown in its approach. Ours was about a mastermind called “BoyzTown” Rippenhof and his two accomplices, known collectively as the Memphis Three, who were lifted off a jailhouse roof by helicopter and disappeared without trace years after being transferred from Alcatraz.

Then, forty years later, a warder named Roy “Fireman” Farrow, who had harboured lingering psychotic hostility towards the Three, met again in Alcatraz GoGo bar in Pattaya. And aliens were never cast as being in control of him. Why would they, he’s Dutch?

Abrams has produced TV thrillers before, like the supernatural adventure series Lost. So, Alcatraz could be said to be an ideal genre for him, a period piece about life on Alcatraz prison prior to its being closed down.

And with Abrams’ name behind it, Alcatraz is a major television network production. If you’re interested in his version of events, you can see the Alcatraz trailer on YouTube.