French Guiana
Henri Charrière  [b.16 November 1906-d.19 July 1973]  aka Papillion (Butterfly). A Burglar and safe cracker he was convicted 26 October 1931 of the Murder of a pimp named Roland Le Petit [ He admitted being a criminal but denied the murder charge]. He was sentenced to life in prison and ten years of hard labour. He married Georgette Fourel, mayor of the 1st arrondissement of Paris, on December 22, 1931. [They divorced on 8 July 1970 by decision of the Paris High Court]. After a brief imprisonment at the transit prison of Beaulieu in Caen, France, he was transported in 1933 to the prison of St-Laurent-du-Maroni on the Maroni River, in the penal settlement of mainland French Guiana. He claimed to have engaged several  escapes from 1933 to 1941 when he finally succeeded in escaping. In 1942 he was arrested and sent to a brutal penal settlement in El Dorado, Bolivar State, Venezuela. After a year of imprisonment, Charrière was released with identity papers on 3 July 1944. Five years later he was given Venezuelan citizenship; he became a businessman and married again. His 1969 autobiography became a best selling book and later made into a movie with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. French records of his life from 1933 to 1944 present a different account: He left the citadel of Saint-Martin-de-Ré on 29 September 1933 aboard the Martinière and landed on 14 October with the status of "transported" to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. There is little time left in the transportation camp as he is assigned as a nursing assistant to the André-Bouron Colonial Hospital, where he sees many inmates returning from the run and tell him their escape stories from which he will draw inspiration. This place prevents him from the work of logging sites or agricultural concessions that annihilate convicts in a few months. He escaped for the first time on September 5, 1934, but failed in Colombia, a country that returned escaped convicts to France. Judging by the Special Maritime Court, he spent two years in the cells of the St. Joseph's Island Seclusion. Several times transferred, he ended up as a nurse-chief in an Indochinese camp on the Guyanese mainland, the Cascades forest camp from which he escaped on the night of March 18-19, 1944, along with four other companions.]