In 1977 Billy Hayes, with the assistance of William Hoffer, wrote a best-selling account of his arrest and imprisonment in a Turkish prison entitled Midnight Express. Hayes, an American student on vacation in Turkey, had been apprehended at the Istanbul Airport on October 6, 1970, trying to smuggle 2.2 kilos of hashish out of the country (it was concealed under his clothes and taped to his body). He was sentenced to four years and two months for possession but in 1974, the Turkish High Court in Ankara overturned his original sentence, found him guilty of smuggling and sentenced him to serve an additional 30 years. Hayes’s 1977 account of the brutal prison conditions he endured with his fellow inmates and his eventual escape to Greece in 1975 was a riveting cautionary tale for its era. Not surprisingly, Hollywood came calling and Columbia Pictures eventually acquired the film rights, releasing the big screen adaptation of Midnight Express in October 1978.