The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (17 page)

‘
Baño, ocupado? Ocupado?
’ (‘Toilet, busy? Busy?’) I gave a rap on the door with my knuckles. There was no lock on the steel door and you had to knock. No answer. I stepped in and started taking a leak. I heard a shuffle of feet behind me. I swivelled my neck around to look back at the door. Two of the cell-block outcasts who lived in the passageway stood there: one was black with an afro mop, while the other had fine, straight hair and odd-looking eyes spaced closely together.

I quickly pulled up my zip. This was trouble.

My eyes glanced down at their hands; they were both tooled up. One held a long, thin DIY knife that looked like a kebab skewer; the other’s weapon looked like a piece of a pipe filed to a sharp point.

The adrenalin started pumping. My hands tensed. I instinctively felt for the pen I had in my pocket; it might the only thing to use as a weapon.

‘
Tú, ropa, ahora,
’ (‘You, clothes, now’) said the guy with the afro, gesturing for me to let him search me. The other stood at the door keeping watch.

‘No,’ I said, turning around and waving him off. I wasn’t letting these two shits shake me down. My eyes darted down to their knives. I thought of shouting for help, but there was no point. It was the jungle and you had to defend yourself.

The guy with the afro lunged forward. I put my hands out to defend myself, slamming into his chest and pushing him away. He stumbled back, but his right arm swung around in a fast arc. I felt a thump just below my left armpit. I instinctively went for the pen. I pulled it out, and before he could regain his balance I plunged it towards his right eye, bringing the pen down from a height over my head. I missed, but the tip sunk into the space between his eye and the upper bridge of his nose. ‘Aggh, aggh,’ he started grunting and groaning like an animal, flailing around grabbing at his eyes, his hands trembling. The other outcast ran off, knowing the cries of his accomplice might bring the workers running in.

I had to get out of there. If the prison staff or the kitchen workers came in I knew I’d be in trouble. Didn’t matter if I was only defending myself. The Afro boy was still groaning, falling against the wall and slumping down on his knees.

I stepped out and walked quickly into the canteen. Silvio looked up at me.

‘I’m going back to Maxima. I’m after getting into a fight.’

His eyes looked like they’d seen something frightening. He stood up. ‘I saw the two going in; I meant to warn you.’

‘I better get back to the wing.’

‘Go.’

I walked out to the gates to the passageway that led down to Maxima. A cop was on guard. The gates were only opened at certain times and I knew they’d open up in the next few minutes at this time of day. I stood there looking casual. I felt a warm wetness below my left armpit. I was wearing a dark T-shirt but looked down and saw a damp mark. I folded my arms, feeling moistness on my fingers, worried the cop seated at the gates would see the blood and haul me off for an interrogation.

Minutes passed like hours. Waves of pain started to kick in under my arm with the rush of adrenalin wearing off. I gritted my teeth. I was panicking, expecting one of the cell-block outcasts to come back; they wouldn’t fight in front of the cop, but I didn’t want to take the chance.

After about five minutes, the cop stood up and opened the gate. Thank God. His keys rattled in the rusty lock. I walked as quick as I could down the passageway. I banged on the wing door. The eyeball of the lag on lookout peered out of the spyhole.

‘Maxima,’ I said. The door swung back and I stepped in. I saw Eddy. ‘I just stabbed someone in the face with a pen.’

‘You wha’?’ he said, his eyebrows rising up like two birds taking flight.

‘And I’ve been stabbed, here under my arm.’

‘Who did it? Who did it?’ he said quickly, excited.

‘Couple of the scumbags in the passageway. Followed me into the pisser in the canteen. One of them lunged at me with a knife and got me.’

‘Let’s go to Fidel, see what he says.’

Fidel was sitting on his bed in Cell 1. Eddy told him in Spanish what had happened. Any run-ins with prisoners in other cell blocks had to be reported in case they grew into something bigger.

I just nodded at Fidel. ‘
Cuchillo grande
’ (‘Big knife’).

‘What’d he look like?’ said Eddy.

‘Afro hairstyle. Early 40s.’

‘He says not to go out on your own again. He says if it’s who he thinks it is he’ll be gunning for revenge.’

‘Right, I wanna get this sorted out,’ I said, nodding to my arms, which were still folded. Eddy led me over to another lag, who pulled down a DIY first-aid kit in a cardboard box from a ledge. There were bandages, a few pills and cotton buds.

I lifted up my T-shirt, gritting my teeth as I stretched up my left arm to get it off. There was a red puncture hole in my skin and messy blotches of blood.

‘
Nada, nada,
’ laughed the inmate.

‘Nothing, he says, only a scratch,’ said Eddy.

‘Good, tell him to do something.’ The DIY doctor wiped the wound with some homemade disinfectant made out of vinegar and put on a bandage.

That was that. I’d survived my first attack in Los Teques, but now I had to be on the lookout for a revenge stabbing.

I’D BEEN COOPED UP FOR THE LAST FEW MONTHS IN THE MAXIMA WING, the cantina and the classroom. That was it. That’s how narrow my life had become. Thank God for the yard and the view out into the sky. I don’t know what I would have done locked up in a dark dungeon like the Number 7 wing where there wasn’t even a window and natural light.

There was a roof area above, next door to the Maxima yard. Silvio had been telling me it had been open to inmates in the whole prison in the past. There was a big recreation area for sports and you could hang out all day and lie in the sun. It was hard to believe.

But access had been shut down the Easter before after a gun battle between cell blocks broke out on the roof. Silvio said the riot left about half a dozen dead. The warring inmates battled with automatic weapons and even grenades, leaving much of the roof damaged. I’d heard construction work going on for months, drills whirring and the hollow crack of hammers.

The director was keen to reopen the roof, seeing it as another way of improving the lot of the inmates in Los Teques. She believed that if she opened up the jail and gave the prisoners the run of it we would all end up one happy family. Rows between cell blocks would then be resolved by the jefes with a gentleman’s handshake. I liked her thinking, but brotherly love seemed in short supply in Venezuela . . . let alone inside a jail filled with inmates armed to the teeth.

The plan was to open up the roof on different days for selected wings. It would be open to us in Maxima on Mondays and Thursdays from early afternoon till headcount in the evening. When the first Monday came I was all excited about the trip up. We all were; we were looking forward to a bit of space.

In the afternoon it was our turn. I walked up the stairs in the passageway and emerged onto the roof. There was a basketball court, all marked out professionally and with new hoops; a small football pitch drawn out with white-painted lines on the concrete, and two proper netted goalposts; and a volleyball net at one end. It was a huge area the size of a football pitch. As I stood there, an inmate ran past me jogging. Another was lying down on the ground with his top off, sunbathing, while another prisoner was doing pull-ups on exercise bars. Lovely jubbly, I thought, taking it all in – this is a change. I’d only been on the roof during the National Guard prison searches. I hadn’t had much of a view with my face pressed into the ground.

I looked out at the view at the front of the jail. There were gentle hills covered in a thick cluster of trees sloping down to rusty-red fields criss-crossed with narrow roads. To the left was a barrio, a mishmash of crudely made houses, three or four storeys high, each floor jutting out above the other, each building looking like it would topple. I also got a look down to the driveway of the jail, where I’d been in and out to the courts on a prison bus. National Guard troops stood around a hut with corrugated-iron window frames sticking out of pale-blue walls. One guard was texting on his phone.

Security was high. A wall ran around the perimeter at waist height with wire fences about 30 ft high topped with coils of razor-sharp barbed wire. National Guard troops posted at watchtowers dotted around the prison looked down upon us, polishing M16 rifles. They looked like they’d be happy if we made a run for it so they could try out their shooting skills and pick us off the roof like sitting ducks in a blood sport. If I’d ever hoped I’d have a chance of getting out over the walls of Los Teques, it was dashed now. I’d have to think of other ways.

I walked over to an area where there were a couple of gringos – made obvious by their lighter shade of skin and fair hair. I met Bruce, an Aussie, a couple of Yanks and a Canadian. I was dead keen to meet a few new gringos. We started chatting.

‘How much you get caught with, Irishman?’ asked Bruce straight off.

‘Six kilos – got eight years.’

They’d all been caught in Simón Bolívar airport.

‘Fuck, man, yeah, eight years,’ said Dan, one of the Yanks. ‘If we’re lucky we can get out in two.’ Everyone was thinking that way: apply for parole after 18 months and get out a few months after.

The others took off and I was left there chatting with Bruce. We got on well. We had similar interests, such as rugby and cricket. He was also a big surfer. He was in his early 40s, a few years younger than me, and told me he had left behind a young son and daughter in Australia after he’d got caught in the airport in Maiquetía. I really felt sorry for him. It cut me up that I was away from Daniel and Katie and the rest of my family, but my kids were now in their late teens. Bruce’s were only nine and ten years old. It would have eaten me up to be locked up here with children at home that age and not being able to watch them grow up.

‘Ain’t easy,’ he said. ‘Take each day as it comes. Start missing your life too much and you’ll end up slitting your throat in there.’ Bruce suddenly lowered his voice. ‘You know, there are ways to get out of here other than waiting around a couple of years to try and get parole.’

My ears pricked up. ‘Like what?’

‘Get cancer.’

‘Get what?’ I thought I wasn’t hearing him right.

‘Cancer,’ Bruce continued. He told me himself and a couple of other gringo inmates had hatched a plan to get diagnosed with it. They knew a lawyer who was in cahoots with a doctor who was in cahoots with a judge. You feigned sickness, the external doctor was called in and would diagnose you with cancer, then the lawyer would get the judge to issue a release on humanitarian grounds for the prisoner to be released to an appointed family. Then you’d start chemo in a local hospital. From there, you did a runner. The whole package didn’t come cheap, said Bruce. It was ten thousand dollars down and ten thousand after you got out. ‘There’s a few of us in it – Ryan, a Yankee, got out just a few weeks ago. Slipped out from the hospital into Caracas. Disappeared into the night.’

Now I was really up for it. It was an awful lot of money that I didn’t have, but I was all ears. ‘Put me down as interested,’ I said quickly, ‘but I wanna meet this lawyer, I’m not handing over any ten grand to someone I haven’t met.’

‘He’ll visit in the next couple of weeks. Play our cards right, we could be out in a few months.’

I was really excited, but cautiously – I didn’t yet know if I could trust Bruce or this lawyer. I’d already heard stories about prisoners paying thousands to solicitors and dodgy officials on the promise of freedom only for the cash to disappear into a black hole. Bruce seemed trustworthy, though. I decided to play it all by ear. So as well as early parole, I now had a Plan B to get out of this Latin dungeon.

Bruce was an intelligent, well-read guy. Before we parted he lent me a non-fiction book set in a jail in Britain in the late 1600s. It was all about how the inmates had to pay to survive on the inside and how the prison was overrun with death and squalor. I later read it, thinking nothing had changed in the prison world in the last few hundred years.

* * *

Roberto showed his cards. A pair of jacks and a pair of queens. ‘Hey, I win, my friends, I win. All is mine.’ He was sitting playing poker with myself and Eddy.

‘So what, mate?’ said Eddy. ‘One game. One hand. Many more to come.’ Roberto gathered up his winnings from the little blue-painted stool we were playing on in the yard: rings off Coke cans.

New Yawk Mike walked over. ‘Paul, man, your money’s here.’

‘Great,’ I said, standing up. I stood up and followed him out into Cell 1 where the jefe was sitting on his bed watching his portable TV. He sat up and started counting out a big bundle of notes. Mike punched in the exchange rate of the 350 euro Western Union money my sister had sent me on a chunky calculator the bosses probably used when toting up their coke deals. There were so many zeros I had to squint to read it. The 350 euro actually turned me into a millionaire, something like 2,500,000 bolos. Out of that sum I had to pay the wing ‘entry fee’ of 200 euro, leaving me with 150 euro for myself – to last me for how long I didn’t know.

The bosses converted the money using the bank exchange rate of euro to bolo. The thing was, though, that the euro was worth twice as much on the street rate, which is where the bosses would have changed my money. So I got my 350 euro in bolos at the bank rate and the jefe and his sidekicks pocketed the same amount. Carlos sat beside Fidel, his Colt next to him. I didn’t think complaining would get me far.

I then rolled out the plan I had to get out of sleeping in the toilet. ‘Mike, tell Fidel I’ll pay him the whole entry fee right now if he gets me out of the toilet.’ I had to get out of there – waking up on cardboard soaked in piss was driving me mad.

‘All of it?’ said Mike, his eyes widening. Most lags paid it in dribs and drabs.

‘Every bit of it, here and now. Just get me a spot on the cell floor to sleep.’ He spoke to Fidel. I watched his eyes widen looking at the cash in the three neat bundles on the bed. A big grin broke across Fidel’s face.