Forget the knotted bed sheets or tunnel. A New York prisoner found a much easier way to bust out of jail: ask guards for the exit.

The inmate, who was wearing a suit and tie for a court appearance on charges of multiple store robberies, simply wandered out an open door and into a courtroom on Wednesday, the New York Post reported.

There, a court officer mistook jailbird Ronald Tackman for a lawyer, asking: "Counselor, what are you doing here?" the Daily News reported.

Tackman didn't miss a beat, the Post said, asking: "Which way is out?"

The hapless guard then showed the escapee the way to the lobby.

Next the dapper jailbird went to his 81-year-old mother's Manhattan home to change clothes, and left, she said.

"He came home. He was all dressed up — I figured he was discharged from prison. He changed his clothes and that was it," she said on NY1 television.

Court officers' embarrassment only increased when it was revealed that Tackman, who turned 56 Thursday, was a known master of disguise, the tabloids said.

"The guy is a celebrity as far as the penal system," the Daily News quoted a court source as saying.

Past exploits include wearing a hat, sunglasses or a plastic nose, and using ingenious methods of making fake firearms.

In 1985, while being transported to serve out a robbery sentence, he took a guard hostage with a fake gun carved out of soap, the Post reported.

He also fooled victims with pretend guns made from a cigarette lighter and even a comb, the News said.

However, Tackman's lawyer Joseph Heinzmann said the fugitive was no real danger and probably fled in panic because he potentially faced a life sentence for the robberies.

"He never raised his fists at a police officer. He's not accused in this case of having a gun, firing a gun, or using any violence at all. And his escape was aided by wit, not by force or by weapons," Heinzmann said on NY1.

Heinzmann said his client, who escaped on the eve of his birthday, was not in good health.

A five-year-old boy in the US has shot dead an alligator 20 times his size.

Simon Hughes from Texas was on a hunting trip with his father when he saw the giant 3.7m-long, 365kg reptile.

The schoolboy shouted "holy moly" and grabbed his junior-sized .410-gauge shotgun before killing the massive alligator with a single shot, the Houston Chronicle reports.

"I wasn't afraid for a second — next year I'm going to kill me a bigger alligator," he told a local TV network.

Simon said he planned to take the alligator's mounted head into his school for show-and-tell.

“My friends were proud of me and I was proud of myself ... it's humungous,” he said.

Simon's father taught his son to shoot when he was four years old and he also knows how to drive a four-wheel-drive.

His mother, Toni Hughes, said she was not as comfortable with reptiles as her son.

"It sort of scares you to death because there are alligators, there are snakes, all sorts of things out there," she said.

"What we thought was massive was a [3m] alligator, and this one just dwarfs the [3m] ... it's just so massive and prehistoric looking."

A San Francisco art student, according to an article by Karl Zinsmeister in The American Enterprise, "recently satisfied one of his course requirements by blindfolding and gagging a volunteer, having sex with him, defecating, then giving and receiving an enema, all on an open-air stage in the company of other class members, two professors, and passersby." When the traumatized volunteer later complained about his public ordeal, the young "artist" indignantly hissed, "I’m just shocked and appalled that you can’t do certain things in art school." He explained that his work was "an exploration of the notion of the master-slave dialectic in Hegel." Of course it was. How obtuse of us to have missed the point.