Exclusive | Tears of a clown: Cop killer David Sweat gets emotional in jailhouse interview 10 years after his infamous Escape at Dannemora

A decade after he broke out of Clinton state prison in the infamous “Escape at Dannemora” and led cops on a 23-day manhunt that riveted the nation, convicted killer David Sweat, in an exclusive jailhouse interview with The Post, confessed to his one regret.He should have picked a better partner in crime.“If I hadn’t done it with him, I’d probably still be out,” Sweat, 44, said of fellow escapee Richard Matt.With his wrists cuffed and a thick chain wrapped around his waist, the clean-shaven, bespectacled Sweat spoke publicly for the first time in eight years during a tearful, hour-long interview at the Mid-State Correctional Facility in upstate Marcy.The Post reporter, there for the 10th anniversary of the infamous June 6, 2015 escape, was his first visitor in three years, Sweat claimed.“If I’d known everything about him before, I probably would’ve done it alone,” Sweat said of the 49-year-old Matt.Sweat said he now believes Matt was as a confidential informant for the police back in the 1990s.Matt’s 25-year to life sentence began in July 2008 after he was convicted of kidnapping, torturing and murdering 76-year-old William Rickerson, his former employer, in Niagara County in December 1997.“You can’t trust someone like that .

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and that’s worse than the drinking,” Sweat said.He was referring to Matt’s heavy boozing after the duo found bottles of liquor at an uninhabited cabin following their escape.“I try not to live with regrets and look back, because it is what it is at this point,” Sweat continued in a soft voice.“On the one hand, I’m glad that it helped some guys get better treatment and changed things in [Clinton Correctional Facility], because there was some bad crap going on.“On the other hand, you know, I’m in here for the rest of my life.”He added, “I just wanted to be free.”Sweat now spends his days in an 18-by-5-foot cell.He claims he has been in solitary confinement for 10 years, shuttled between nine d...