DRUG BARON FLEES FROM JAIL

A DRUG baron worth millions has fled from a cushy open prison where
he was sent just SIX years into a 21-year sentence.

Prison bosses were under fire last night after it was revealed
tattooed Roddy McLean, 59, may have escaped abroad.

He has a home in South Africa and is believed to have UKP4.5million
salted away.

McLean went on the run from Leyhill, a minimum security Category D
jail in Gloucestershire, after his transfer from Saughton prison in
Edinburgh.

Jails expert Mark Leech said: "This stinks. I cannot remember a single
case where someone serving this kind of sentence -- and with McLean's
kind of money -- has been sent to an open prison with at least a
decade left to serve."

Mr Leech, editor of The Prisons Handbook guide to the penal system,
added: "It is completely inexplicable."

Last year 82 inmates -- almost a fifth -- fled Leyhill. A jail source
said: "You can basically walk out. The fence is designed to keep the
cows out rather than prisoners in."

McLean, who fled nearly two months ago, got 28 years in 1997 for
trying to smuggle UKP10million of cannabis from Spain to Scotland by
sea.

The sentence was later cut to 21 years. Customs officer Alastair
Soutar was killed in the operation to snare the gang off the coast of
Caithness.

His sister Eleanor Lewis accused prison chiefs of hushing up the
escape. She added: "I'm appalled he was in an open prison in the first
place." His brother Brian said: "I'm disgusted someone as dangerous as
him was in Leyhill."

McLean was assessed by a prison governor in 2001 as being unlikely to
escape.

The Prison Service denied a cover-up and said cops were told the
moment he fled.