Eleven Days In Hell

Eleven Days In Hell

Long before “El Chapo” tunneled out of a prison in Mexico... A decade before Pablo Escobar held an entire nation hostage... “El Viejo”, FRED GOMEZ CARRASCO was the deadly king of the cocaine and heroin trade from Guadalajara to San Diego and eastward to Chicago.

In Huntsville, Texas, ten civilians, a guard and a priest, all employees of the prison system, are unknowingly set on a collision course with Carrasco and his desperate henchman, culminating in the longest prison-siege in American history and a deadly, Texas-sized shootout.

At the beginning of the siege, Governor DOLPH BRISCO, gave Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) Director, JIM ESTELLE, complete authority to end the siege. Estelle and the captives fully understood that in Texas, the lives of hostages would never be exchanged for the freedom of inmates.

Carrasco and Estelle played a dramatic game of “Texas Hold-em” with the lives of the hostages at stake. Estelle surrounded himself with an elite team of law enforcement professionals whose mission was to end the siege quickly with as little loss of life as possible.

The seven female hostages were “steel magnolias”, exhibiting more courage in the face of death than most of their male counterparts. Hours before the shootout that ended in their death, VON BESEDA and JUDY STANDLEY, joked to one another about who would play them in “the movie”. Afterwards, they placed their wedding rings and final messages to their families into envelopes and stoically proceeded to their fate in the moveable shield dubbed by the press the “Trojan Taco”.

THE TONE:

Set at the end of the Vietnam war just before the resignation of President Nixon, Eleven Days in Hell captures the gritty atmosphere of Texas Prisons. It depicts the struggle of the “system” to contain a desperate man at the pinnacle of the drug trade, who is determined to kill or die to escape captivity.

For forty-six years this story has languished in dusty file cabinets and state archives. We can tell a story that Hollywood missed; overshadowed at the time by the impending resignation of the President of the United States, Richard Nixon.

As last stands go, the take-down of the “Trojan Taco” is the O.K. Corral of the Twentieth Century. But instead of US Marshall’s with slightly higher morals than the outlaws they faced, a group of honorable lawmen resolved to save their friends and co-workers or die, in this brutally true story.

The gun-battle was twenty-times longer than the thirty-second shootout at O.K. Corral. The gunfight, coupled with the tense, harrowing descent down the ramp preceding the assault, will be a powerful set-piece action scene. It details the extreme circumstances that led to the death of two librarians and two of the hostage-takers, but the incredible and unlikely rescue of the remaining hostages.