'Midnight Express' ' Billy Hayes talks Turkey

THE SHOW "Locked Up Abroad," National Geographic Channel, Wednesday at 10

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Hayes, raised in North Babylon, was caught smuggling hash out of Turkey when he was a student at Marquette in 1970. And - yes - quite a story unfolded from there, as the book and Oliver Stone-adapted 1978 movie, "Midnight Express," attest. Hayes explains that the movie was "based" on the book he wrote, but at the time he couldn't "say certain things for legal reasons. . . . Now I have a chance to tell my story." Starkly lit against a black background, Hayes says he got the smuggling idea while working as a hospital orderly and watching doctors set a broken leg in plaster wraps. Why not smuggle hash in a leg cast, he wondered? He made several trips to Turkey, but the fateful one was made immediately after the hijackings of five airliners. Airport security was tight, he was busted and got 41/2 years - extended to 30 after Turkish authorities charged him with smuggling as opposed to mere possession. Sharply deviating from the movie version, Hayes eventually escapes from an island prison in a dinghy.

MY SAY I know what you're thinking because it's probably the same thing I was thinking as I watched this - why believe a one-time drug smuggler who wrote the book for a movie that patently fibbed about what happened to its hero, namely one Billy Hayes? In the movie, Hayes kills a guard to escape. In tonight's film, he rows a boat. (Hayes also has apologized for the movie's negative portrayal of Turks.) That's all glossed over tonight when he says that not everything in the Oscar-winning film was "valid or true." Fair enough. Movies are made by filmmakers and not the guys who write the books they're based on. But Hayes is also a pretty good storyteller. Direct, colorful, emotional and highly specific, this yarn finally feels like the real McCoy.

BOTTOM LINE Filled with dramatic re-creations alongside Hayes' own memory of events, this is a highly watchable hour. You won't be bored.

GRADE B+