MY WAY:Michael Barrett sits back and reflects on how as a young man (below, left) he led a breakout of 10 inmates, including brother-in-law Robert Lewis (below, right).

DOWN AND OUT: Busting out of this Long Island City prison in 1982 was as easy as removing a window and sliding down knotted bedsheets. (
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MY WAY: Michael Barrett sits back and reflects on how as a young man (left) he led a breakout of 10 inmates, including brother-in-law Robert Lewis (right). (
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Escape isn’t easy when you’re from the South Bronx.

That’s how Michael Barrett sees it, at least.

In the 1960s, the Kelly Street delinquent got mixed up with the law early and often — fighting, stealing, selling drugs.

Pretty soon, he was deemed incorrigible — spending more time in state prisons than schoolrooms. “It was either carried by six or tried by 12 . It’s as simple as that,” he said.

He soon became a thug prince, rubbing shoulders with kingpins and celebrities in smoky gambling dens and half-lit lounges.

But after doing a seven-year prison stint on an assault charge, he slipped up again in September 1981 — busted for possession of 19 ounces of cocaine. “It was 14 ounces after the cops got done with it,” he said.

The bust eventually landed him in Queensboro Correctional Facility, a medium-security state prison in Long Island City.

Barrett took one look at the joint and knew his stay would be brief.

“It was basically a converted warehouse. I said, ‘Oh lord, I’m out of here!’ ”

In less than a month, he was. Thirty years ago, Barrett led the largest escape ever from a New York prison. It was brazen and prompted by a simple calculation.

“I’m looking at 15 years to life on a felony drug charge. I just did seven years — that’s 84 months, 61,000 hours, 2,555 days . . . I used to know how many seconds,” Barrett said. “I had to get out of here.”

As luck would have it, security at Queensboro was questionable.

“We’d be playing handball, and at exactly 7 p.m. another ball would come over the wall. Inside was everything you needed — cocaine, marijuana, whatever. Bam!”

The “handball express” turned out to be critical in supplying the currency to get his scheme rolling. It was a simple plan — unscrew a security window, slide down a rope and make a run for it.

Weeks before the escape, Barrett was already making preparations, particularly after learning that an inmate was sneaking into a sergeant’s office to use a private telephone hooked up to the prison network. Those calls were not, Barrett believed, recorded, unlike inmate conversations.

To check it out, he tied shirts to his elbows and knees, clambered up into the ceiling, and quietly wormed his way through the rafters down to the office.

“I had the guy show me how to connect the red, green and yellow wires,” he said, chuckling at his own audacity.

He managed to hook up a wire through the ceiling to the phone’s network of wires, and “acquired” his own phone by paying off a maintenance worker. “I kept it under my pillow.”

He would use this private line to make sure he had a getaway car once free. And he kept it all in the family, enlisting nephews Randy and Dave.

Barrett then assembled a crew, as his objective was to have as many inmates with him as possible during the jailbreak — to take the heat off himself.

“Imagine if it had just been my picture alone on the cover of the newspaper,” he said.

So he found nine men, including brother-in-law Robert Lewis and at least four other friends he knew from stints upstate. He gave some of them sweatsuits — prisoners were allowed their own clothes, and Barrett had plenty that friends and family brought him. Sweats would be more discreet on the street than the state-issued “greens.”

But they still needed a screwdriver.

He had a friend talk to one of the prison’s maintenance men, who agreed to supply the tool — for a price.

“Cocaine rules,” Barrett said.

“Things like [a screwdriver, a phone] are not hard to get; you just need to be in a position to tell somebody,” he adds. “Every jail I’ve been to, there are people there who get you things, all kinds of things. Every place I’ve been to, I had a big electric frying pan.”

Two days before the Sept. 6, 1982, breakout, Barrett began to work on the window inside the third-floor room of Reggie Harris, a friend convicted of criminal possession of a weapon.

“It wasn’t just removing a screen. We took the whole frame out of the wall. That took a lot of hours.”

By Sunday night, the frame was out, and then put back so as not to arouse suspicion. “We hung greeting cards all around the frame and waited.”

It was Labor Day, but for Barrett and his crew, it was Breakout Day.

They needed to fashion a rope.

“When everyone was watching TV, we took their bedsheets. We wet them down and braided them,” Barrett said.

As they made their final preparations, one of the men pounded on a makeshift drum set of vegetable cans. “That was so nobody heard anything.”

They kept close watch.

“There were 70-80 people milling around . . . any one of them would tell to score some points. They wanted to get out of jail for free — so we had to watch everybody.” Especially the guards.

“There was one . . . he was a homeboy from Harlem, 139th and Lenox. He’s walking along, passing the window . . . and if he happens to look left — we’d have to grab his ass and tie him up. That’s another charge. Kidnapping, assault . . . who knows what else — there’s people in here for murder.”

The guard didn’t look left.

The ringleader wasn’t the first to escape.

“We ain’t no real mountain climbers and this was some makeshift s–t! But I was damn sure going to be the second.”

One man, Michael Duckett, broke his foot. “He let go too soon,” Barrett shrugged.

The Post reported the “daring break for freedom” the next day: “The 10 shimmied down a rope made from torn bedsheets in a classic jailbreak borrowed straight from Hollywood.”

A Lincoln Town Car never looked this good.

“I had my sweatsuit on and a towel wrapped around my neck like a boxer. I’m running up Queens Boulevard. My car sees me. I run across and get in. There’s my two nephews coming to get their uncle!”

Barrett said he dropped one escapee off at a Manhattan subway station on 59th Street and another — Harris, who would turn himself in the next day — at Central Park West and West 97th Street.

His next stop was 145th Street in Harlem. “I picked up two bundles of cash from a pool hall my family owned at the time.”, got back in the car and see a girl who visited me in jail a few weeks ago. I said, ‘Shhh, don’t say anything.’ ”

Eighty officers from the State Police, the Correction Department and the Parole Division were initially assigned to capture the escapees.

Within 72 hours of the escape, seven of the men surrendered or were nabbed. Two more were caught in November. But as weeks turned into months, Barrett managed to elude a seven-member joint task force.

His time on the lam was as calculated as his escape. At first he hid out for about a month at a friend’s place in Far Rockaway. “I did nothing. I rested, regrouped.”

But hiding out didn’t help his cash-flow problems. “You got to have money,” he said.

He went to Washington, DC — less heat there — and found the perfect place to relocate, a luxury building on 16th Street NW filled with Howard University students living off campus.

“I grew my afro longer. I looked young — I fit right in,” he said. “I never looked over my shoulder.”

He rented an apartment for about $900 a month, and his driver, Raymond, signed the lease.

By the end of October 1982, his heroin business was up and running. Back to making money, but no escape after all.

Seven months later, he heard the inevitable knock. “Oh, s–t!” screamed Barrett, who was lounging comfortably in his pajamas.

He quickly threw on a pair of corduroys but couldn’t find his sneakers. He dangled barefoot from his ninth-floor terrace. Below him a squadron of cops formed a perimeter around the building.

“I didn’t jump. I just let go into thin air,” he recalled.

He landed on the eighth floor, where he broke through the terrace door, ambled down the stairs and made it outside.

He made it almost three blocks and decided to duck under a porch and hide.

“Someone must have seen me because the cops just stood there. One of them said, ‘Come on out.’ ”

It was March 21, 1983 — more than six months after his flight — and his last gasp at freedom ended with a whimper.

On a park bench outside of Riverbank State Park in Harlem recently, Barrett, now 63, is at ease in a pair of faded jeans, crisp Nike sneakers and a Yankee hat, worn slightly askew.

He’s sharp as a shiv, quick to laugh, and said his life is now about following the straight and narrow.

But his eyes still have a hustler’s twinkle, and he makes no apologies for his career path.

“In the South Bronx, you’re going to survive one way or another. You’re either going to be a victim, or something else. Yes, I felt bad sometimes. My brother used dope. My uncle. But what am I going to do? It’s not my fault they wanted to use.”

He said he picked up the heroin trade from his brother, Georgie. It was 1963 and the city’s heroin epidemic was about to take hold, and Barrett — all of 14 — wanted his piece of the pie.

“Fort Apache — that movie was what was happening on the sidewalk,” he said. “That was the next phase of my life.”

He talked about the dope-dealing gang of 13 he ran with in the ’60s called “The Kids” — unique because young people weren’t selling heroin. Maybe two of them — himself included — are still alive.

He graduated to buying dope from the French Connection — the infamous drug triangle that moved heroin into the United States by way of Turkey and France.

Suddenly there were Frenchmen on Kelly Street. He said he made $15,000 a week, easy. “I used to have $1,000 bills in my pocket. People never even saw a $1,000 bill!”

He sold a half-kilo of cocaine a night at The Big Track, an after-hours gambling den where drug kingpins like “American Gangster” Frank Lucas and Frank “Black Caesar” Matthews would play dice games for “twenty stacks” — $20,000.

And he lived the high life, hanging out with the likes of comedian Redd Foxx at the Playboy Club.

“I tell one of the bunnies to get Redd a drink, and Redd looks at me and says, ‘I don’t want no drink . . . but I’ll take some of that other s–t you’re selling.’

I said, ‘Oh, you want that?’ ”

‘‘That was the afternoon of all afternoons. Redd was chewing on a cigarette and said, ‘Goddamn! Where’d you get this s–t from?’ He says, ‘That s–t makes me want to f–k a chili. A frozen chili at that!’ ”

Barrett served 17 years after his capture in 1983, 15 to life for the drug charge, two to four for the escape — which the state Department of Corrections said is still the largest from one of its facilities.

“They had me in Attica, Clinton, Auburn, Sullivan, Shawanagunk. You think they were going to leave me in one place too long?”

He was released in 1998, landed a job in construction, worked for Local 79, the Mason Tenders.

In 2001, he cleared rubble and dug ditches at Ground Zero.

“I found a 12-by-12 piece of the floor that was bent like a pretzel,” he recalled. “It looked like ‘Escape from New York’ down there, the sides of the buildings sticking out of the ground.”

He claims to have developed a range of illnesses, including post-traumatic-stress disorder, asthma and other respiratory ailments, sleep apnea and retinitis. He said he had a polyp removed from his lungs.

“But I went from zero to hero,” he reasoned.

The drug money is long gone. He’s now on disability and is trying to market 9/11 commemorative T-shirts. He said he’s awaiting money from a billion-dollar first-responders fund.

“Times change, things change. People don’t even believe that I had thousand-dollar bills in my pockets, so what does it matter?” he said.

“I have four kids, seven grandkids and two great-grandsons. My life is for them now.”