A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton (7 page)

Man-on-man action reportedly takes place during the lockdown after midnight when most inmates are asleep and the temperature has cooled down. The couple claims a spot in the corner of their cell. They set up a love nest with pieces of cloth to shield them from the prying eyes of their cellmates. Those who can afford a partner and a spot for a love nest are rich. Less discreet couples do it underneath a big blanket, poke their heads out when they finish and pretend nothing had happened.

Several
nongs
who were heterosexual men with wives and kids when they first arrived became feminised versions of themselves after assuming the role of
nong
for too long. Some even become full-fledged
kathoeys.
The family of one
nong
, name Sithi, received quite a shock when they visited him after several years without contact.

Out of the blue, he was informed that his parents, wife and child had come to see him. For any other inmate, this news would have been welcomed with nothing but joy. It was as much a cause of concern as of happiness for Sithi, however, when he met them.

He paid his respects to his parents at their feet and hugged his wife and child. They were in shock and remained silent, however, because the smooth-skinned man with hairless arms and legs they saw was a stranger to them. Sithi sheepishly assured his parents that he was their son.

Although they can be strained, contact visits are important in giving the inmates hope that they can be reunited with their families one day. Such visits take place twice a year and are special occasions for the prisoners. It gives them something to live for.

During one such occasion, a wheelchair-bound
elderly Chinese man was waiting for his relatives who used to fly to Thailand to visit him every year without fail. This time, however, there was no sign of them. He suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the prison hospital. He passed away there. Perhaps, what he saw around him—people hugging, crying tears of joy and eating together—and the thought that he had been forgotten brought on the attack. His relatives arrived minutes later and, instead of a happy reunion, they tearfully collected his body.

It can be lonely inside even though it is overcrowded. There are about 20 inmates sharing one cell and sometimes more. The lack of privacy is one way to prevent bad incidents from happening, however. If there is a fight, there will be witnesses. If a detainee seems suicidal, others will try to talk him out of it. Those thinking of escaping will find plenty of inmates who try to stop them as they know that if there is a break-out, their lives will become harder because the rules will be enforced more strictly. Lights are on all night during the lockdown and this troubles many inmates, especially the foreigners who complain that they cannot sleep and that the lights damage their eyes.

At the other extreme are the hardened criminals. These men continue to make a living inside from committing acts of violence or even murder. They call themselves samurai and rich inmates hire them to kill or assault their opponents. Moneylenders hire them to teach their debtors a lesson if they miss a repayment.

They have nothing left to lose and their chances of getting out are slim. They are either serving life sentences or have cases awaiting should they get out. They are not afraid of getting a longer sentence or being downgraded as they are already classified as the lowest in the prison. They don’t mind failing to get a sentence reduction when a mass royal pardon takes place. They don’t care about having their rights to see visitors taken away as their families have already disowned them.

However they choose to spend their time, there is a lot of it. So the inmates find activities to distract themselves from the tedium of captivity. Some of them exercise, play musical instruments, watch TV or pet the many cats that live there too. The cats were brought in originally to combat a rat problem. Over time, their numbers have multiplied. These days, the animals serve as companions to the inmates more than predators of vermin. A fight can break out if an inmate harms a cat that is dear to another.

Some inmates train the cats to carry small items, such as packets of instant coffee or cigarettes, to their friends in the next cell. They attach the items with adhesive tape onto the cat’s neck. Some years ago, an inmate was caught using his cat as a drug-runner. He taped the delivery onto its belly and somehow the feline managed to take the drug to his client in another building.

Some of them use the downtime to assert their sense of self and gain recognition from their peers though, for example, getting tattoos. In Thai culture, tattoos have magic powers. Having a tattoo is like carrying a talisman on your body. In ancient times, soldiers believed tattoos could protect them against sharp weapons, making their skin impenetrable and them indestructible. Fast-forward to the present day Bangkok Hilton and it serves a new purpose. Some young, good-looking newcomers told me they didn’t care about aesthetics or occult powers as long as the ink on their bodies made them less desirable targets for rape by the senior inmates. Tattoos can also represent gang insignia.

Some inmates also pass the time by engaging in a very disturbing activity: genital mutilation. I’ve been told that there are three types of penis mutilation in Bang Kwang. The first is called ‘Benz-surgery’, whereby the head is scarred so that it will look like the Mercedes-Benz logo when it heals. Inmates who get their genitals scarred in this way claim they are men’s men. Well, the prison version. How they come to that conclusion is beyond me.

The second type is called ‘bury pearls’. The skin is cut, small balls are inserted and it is sewn up again. In the past, the inmates used to break plastic bottle caps into pieces and then rub those bits against the cement floor until they became tiny balls. Now they use ready-made plastic balls. Some inmates are sick enough to ‘bury pearls’ several times. This takes a long time since they have to allow the skin to heal between one insertion and the next. Some make two cuts to put in two balls at once to save time.

The third kind is called ‘install bud’. The name doesn’t really reflect how it is done. Basically, they make several small cuts on the penis, which turn into scars. This makes the skin uneven and scary-looking.

Of course, those who make mistakes are permanently disfigured—though not in the way they wanted to be. These ‘operations’ are carried out in secrecy and the equipment is not sanitary. Often they have inflammation and swelling. They cannot wear pants so they wear sarongs while their cuts are healing. The more serious cases are sent to the prison hospital.

It is beyond me why these inmates choose to mutilate themselves when the prison provides more productive options for them. Those who do these things don’t seem to think that they are harming themselves but see this hideous practice as a way to assert themselves among their peers and to show their bravado.

Bang Kwang holds the country’s most hardened criminals and tension between them is high as they all try to prove they are the strongest. Clashes are commonplace and often bloody fights erupt, sometimes resulting in death. The attackers are penalised according to the severity of their actions. They may be shackled, put in solitary confinement or refused visitors for one to three months. Those who kill someone inside are prosecuted by the courts and get an additional sentence. Some lifers or death row inmates couldn’t care less if they get another year in jail.

In general, what the inmates fear most is being downgraded to a lower category. The inmates are classified into six categories according to how well they behave: excellent, very good, good, normal, bad and very bad. Some deserve to be put into a seventh category as they have killed a lot of people. Bang Kwang holds the upgrading test twice every year.

When a mass royal pardon is handed out, those in the first class will have their sentences cut by half. Those in the second class will get a two-thirds reduction. The third class gets a one-third cut. The fourth class get a quarter off and the bad inmates a fifth. The very bad ones get none.

In the past, the convicts viewed killers and rapists as the lowest kind and their penalty was to be raped, bullied and looked down upon by their fellow inmates because they were not real men and had committed atrocities against pedmae (mother’s gender).

Some prisoners got back at their opponents by finding ways to attack them without their knowing. A prison guard told me once that an injured inmate came to him for help with a soft tin box covering his head. As he got closer to him, his nose detected a revolting smell and he could see human excrement dripping from the box. The guard quickly ordered the trustees to remove the box from the man’s head but they were understandably reluctant to do so. The choice of human waste box was obviously to inflict maximum humiliation on his victim.

The trustees cleaned him up as much as they could. The box was little bigger than the man’s head and there were jagged edges designed to scratch his face as it was being removed. So they carefully and slowly took it off.

This smelly, vicious attack was a new twist on an old trick. Underhand attackers usually put sacks of thick cloth over the heads of their targets before beating them up instead of having face-to-face fistfights. Obviously, they get away with this because their victims cannot identify who attacked them.

Not all prisoners are so clever. The afternoon before I was put in charge of the trustees, or the ‘blue shirts’ as they are called by the ordinary inmates in brown, a friendly senior guard named Paisarn called me into his office for a briefing. He told me of a stabbing incident in which a man ran back to his cell after badly wounding a bully. The poor guy held out the homemade knife he had made from a metal rod threateningly while yelling: ‘I’ll fight whoever the heck walks in. I’ll fight!’

Until this day, I don’t understand why he ran back into his cell. Paisarn was unmoved and coldly called out: ‘Drop your weapon and I promise no one will hurt you. Otherwise I will be forced to teach you a lesson.’

Standing behind him were blue-shirted inmates who were eager to deliver a hiding on his behalf. Although he was scared, the poor guy kept repeating his pitiful threat. With a nod from Paisarn, the trustees produced thick bamboo sticks and inserted them through the spaces between the bars. They manipulated the sticks deftly to hit him repeatedly. He was smacked around from one side of the cell to the other like a piece of sweat-soaked rag until he gave up with a whimper.

Paisarn stopped short of revealing what happened next to the man, rolled a cigarette and puffed on it. Then he said: ‘The man may have been wronged by the guy he stabbed for all I care but we have rules here and we need to enforce them. He didn’t drop the weapon so I had to make him.’

He then told me of a similar incident where the attacker had climbed onto the roof of an outdoor toilet and vowed to fight to the death only to have stones hurled at him by the trustees.

He continued: ‘You see my point is, some people just need to be hurt first before they can listen to you… and another thing you need to know is to let them be—but not too comfortably. They can complain about how hard their life inside is. Just remind them that this place is designed to punish them and they have no right to demand things because they are the bad guys.’

So I asked him: ‘What should I do if things get out of hand—like if there is a big gang fight or a riot?’

He replied: ‘You wouldn’t rub gold onto rough stone, would you? It’s beneath you to get involved. The best policy is to wait until it has cleared. Let the trustees handle the troublemakers. They’re a tough bunch and that’s what they are for. If anyone is hurt or worse, you can always say it was done in the melee by trustees acting outside your orders. This is no game and you can’t be a hero. One guard tried to stop a fight. He got stabbed in the hand and lost the use of it forever. Think about what your wife and children would do if anything should happen to you.’

I soon came to realise what it felt like to have an army of my own but I was conscious about how I wielded a force that is a double-edged sword. Back then, the trustees were selected from ‘excellent’ class inmates who had a background in military or police service. They had to be well-behaved to be assigned the title.

Prisoners outnumbered guards dramatically, so the trustees were valuable in keeping control as well as infiltrating criminal activities. I found most of them to be decent people. While they were rewarded with their own less-crowded lodgings and better sentence reductions whenever a mass amnesty took place, they were also the target of attacks by drug-dealers and others who saw them as betraying their own kind.

After arresting drug-dealers inside, I would be summoned to Nonthaburi court, as the prison is within its jurisdiction. The most common question from the judge was: ‘How does a forbidden substance get smuggled into the prison in the first place? Given the protocol of screening everything, is it possible the prison guards helped to bring it in?’

I would reply: ‘Your honour, the prisoners still have contact with outsiders and guards. Of these people, surely some do facilitate drug-smuggling.’

After two young prison guards were arrested for smuggling drugs into the prison, I caught a number of drug-dealers inside using the intelligence they gave me.

The status of trustees is different now. Their role has been reduced but still inmates vie for the title because of the extra sentence reduction. Some affluent Thai inmates pull strings to become trustees, so they are not necessarily a brutal force any more.

Certain groups of inmates, who are considered to be a different class, are the
farang
(foreigners). In general, they are left to their own devices and have a place to gather during the day. They read books, write letters and relax. The
farangs
are considered big complainers in the eyes of the prison guards and they are always finding fault with the living conditions. The African inmates tend to make claims about human rights violations, especially over the use of shackles, as they represent slavery. When dealing with complaints from foreign inmates, obviously the authorities take into account bilateral relations in making any compromises.