The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (21 page)

Inmates from Wing 2 above had an aerial view of our yard and were taking potshots, pointing gun barrels through their cell bars at us. We were sitting ducks in the yard. There was a scramble for the cover of the cells. I jumped to my feet and bolted for the door. I noticed the luceros and the bosses were first through – and they were armed. Big men. One of the lags fell into me, knocking me over in the stampede. My shoulder was shoved into the door frame. I got back on my feet quickly and ran in through the door and into Cell 1. I saw Silvio, Billy, Eddy and Ricardo had taken cover there.

Bullets now pounded into the main wing door. We were being fired upon by inmates from outside in the passageway. It was probably Wing 1. A steady volley of bullets from an automatic weapon.
Drrr-drrrrr
, like a drill whirring into the steel door. I knew it was reinforced, but I was still worried it would give way. My heart was racing. My fists were clenched. I thought these might be my last moments. I’d be killed in a hail of bullets. Katie and Dano, sorry. Ma, Da, sorry. That’s all I could think.

Silvio was panicking the most. It didn’t help my nerves. ‘I tell you, this place is crazy, crazy I tell you. These people, they will never learn.’ The bullets still pounding. No, no. If they stormed in they’d kill us first. The white men. The gringos. I was sure.

A lucero armed with a pipe gun ran up to the wall next to us. It divided our cell block and Wing 1, which was beside us. He started barking orders, waving the barrel of his DIY shotgun. I didn’t understand. A few of the Venos ran over, got down on their hunkers and put their ears to the wall. ‘
Llegate, llegate,
’ (‘Get here, get here’) shouted the lucero at me. ‘
Bombas, bombas.
’ Good God. It dawned on me.

‘Grenades,’ said Billy, his face stiff with fright. Oh Jesus, we were dead.

‘This is terrible, terrible,’ said Silvio, his lip quivering, ‘terrible, I tell you.’ He’d been coking up all afternoon and his eyeballs were dancing around in his head. Mad paranoid. The crackheads were even running around screaming, clawing at the walls like loonies. On the ground in fetal positions, scratching at their faces. Their demons coming to life.

‘
Llegate, llegate,
’ said the lucero again. Jesus, he wanted me to put my ears to the bricks, listening out to see if the inmates in Wing 1 were dropping grenades into the cavities of the wall, planning to blow it up and storm into the wing. I looked at the Venos on their hunkers, horrified. I couldn’t believe they were obeying the lucero. If they heard a rustling in the bricks it’d be lights out. They would be blown to bits. Dumb bastards. The lucero started shouting at me again. ‘
Llegate, llegate.
’ Maybe it was because I was older than the rest and had less living to do.

‘No, no,’ I said to the lucero, waving him off. He could shoot me if he wanted, I wasn’t going.

We stood there, our band of gringos, cowering down on our hunkers when a Veno at the wall jumped back. ‘Grenade!’ More bullets pounded at the door. On our feet again ready to run to the yard in case they stormed in. Then I heard a volley of bullets slam into the yard, ricocheting off buckets with a ping and flying everywhere. Shells the size of small carrots were scattered on the ground. Good God, it was the National Guard. The verde boys were spraying bullets from the watchtowers, firing into the prison probably for the fun of it.

Fidel ran up to the wing door into the passageway, an Uzi in hand. A few of the luceros and underbosses followed him, slinking in against the wall for cover and scurrying over to the door. The narrow lookout hatch was pulled back. Fidel poked the barrel of the Uzi, fired off a round and crouched down. The other wing returned fire, bullets slamming into the door. The boss took cover and a lucero took over, firing back out. One of them was laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I could see they were worried but that they were also enjoying the buzz – like grown-up cowboys and Indians. The bosses continued shooting out into the passageway, firing off rounds then ducking below the hatch. But it was senseless, blind shooting. Monkeys with guns.

I was in a panic. My knees felt weak. I didn’t know what to do if the prisoners from Wing 1 stormed in. I didn’t have a gun to fight back with.

Minutes ticked by like days. I was exhausted with fear and panic. I looked in Billy’s face at one point. Our eyes met, like we knew this might be it. Two Irishmen thousands of miles from home, ending our lives inside the walls of a prison.

The bosses were now running low on ammo. Marksmen they were not. The blind shooting in the passageway was draining their bullets. They ran back and forth from the wing door into the cells, pulling out magazines of cartridges hidden in the insides of a sheet hanging up dividing two beds. I personally didn’t care if they were killed, but as long as they had guns and bullets we had a chance of living. In that moment, the causa was worth every penny.

The shooting eased off. A couple of bullets ricocheted out in the yard and a few more sprays of bullets hit the wing door. Then the cell phones started ringing. The bosses were shouting into their mobiles, waving their hands in the air. ‘It could be a truce,’ said Silvio, listening in. His face, normally tanned, was drained of colour.

The shooting stopped. I gave out a slow, heavy breath. I felt a knot in my stomach loosen. My hands unclenched. The Venos at the wall got off their knees, but the crackheads were still curling into balls on the floor, scratching at their faces.

‘I think it is over, oh please God,’ said Silvio.

‘Jesus, yeah,’ said Billy. ‘They’re probably out of ammo.’

It was coming on to 5 p.m.: time for número. The shoot-out was over, but surely the National Guard wouldn’t come in and do a headcount after what had happened? The bosses believed they would. The luceros started shoving us out into the yard. I stepped out, ducking my head left and right, looking up to see whether an inmate would pop his head out over the roof above and start blasting. The ground in the yard was covered in bullet cases, the wall peppered with holes big enough to stick two fingers into.

Luceros started ordering Venos to run around and pick up the bullet cases. They scrambled around the ground, gathering them and dumping them into a rubbish bin. ‘They think if they hide them the National Guard won’t know they’ve guns,’ said Billy, sniggering. I couldn’t believe it, but he was serious.

The bosses started waving at us to take our seats around the wall for the headcount. I noticed they weren’t hiding their weapons this time; I could see their handguns poking up from under their shirts.

The troops filed in and started the headcount. Three guards were armed with the usual pump-action shotguns, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied no one had escaped in the melee, they pulled out after the número. Not a word said or a search for guns and ammo. Nada. It was as if nothing had happened.

‘There might be a baseball game on the telly,’ laughed Eddy. He was always one for the one-liners, and he was probably right. They were mad for the sport.

That night, for the first time, a lookout man was put on the door into the yard, watching for any shooters from Wing 2 who might climb down from the roof and blast us as we slept. I walked over to my space on the floor, rolled out my colchoneta and lay down among the carpet of bodies. In minutes I fell into a merciful sleep.

* * *

I was starting to get to know a bit more about Billy and how he got into this mess. He had racked up debts of a few grand with a local dealer in his home town from getting ecstasy and coke on the slate. The dealer told him if he did a drug run for them to Venezuela he could clear them, and he wasn’t exactly asking. Holiday in the sun and expenses paid. The holiday worked out all right, but not the run.

‘How much were you going to get paid?’ I said.

‘Three grand.’

‘Three grand?’ I said, my voice raised. ‘Is that all?’ I couldn’t believe he was carrying three kilos of coke worth over two hundred thousand euro back home for such a small pay-off. The ten grand I was going to get paid wasn’t much either, but three grand . . .

‘I had a great aul time on the holiday,’ said Billy, grinning. He arrived in Caracas and headed off to a beach resort. Palm trees and cocktails. Bikini-clad women.

At the end of the trip he picked up his suitcase with the ‘merchandise’ in Caracas. He got to the airport, and game over. Barely made it in the front door before the cops moved in and, like me, hauled him off to the antidrogas building on the coast. I didn’t ask him if he got a late-night visit from the bugger squad. I’d decided I wouldn’t tell anyone what happened to me there, so I couldn’t. I was always curious, though, whether others had been raped there too. No one ever said. I knew for sure, though, it didn’t happen in Los Teques. The cell-block bosses would probably shoot you if you did that. It proved to me that the National Guard were the lowest scum in Venezuela.

‘How long were you there for?’

‘A night. Went to court next day.’

‘I was there for five days. No food and water.’

Billy had fallen in with the wrong crowd at home. His parents were worried sick about him. They were on the phone constantly to Father Pat, wondering how Billy was, and forever sending him money to bring in to their son. Billy had decent Spanish and could have picked up work in the prison to make a few quid, but he couldn’t be bothered. He was a lazy lad, preferring to watch DVDs and snort coke. He wouldn’t work on batteries, as the fella says. We talked a lot, but all he was really into was girls.

‘What’d you work as at home?’ he said, changing the subject.

‘Plumber.’

‘Ah, be-Jaysus, boy, I was a carpenter. An apprentice. In my second year. Only getting about 100 euro a week. Wasn’t enough to keep the lifestyle going.’ His habit wasn’t in line with his income and he ended up in debt. He was twenty-seven now and had spent two years in Los Teques, the best years of his life trickling down the drain. And there was a chance he mightn’t get out alive to live the rest.

I WAS SURE THERE WOULD BE SOME FALLOUT FROM THE SHOOT-OUT – AND there was. A few days later we got the news. It would mean my life getting even smaller. A lucero walked into the yard and stood up on top of a paint tin after número. We all turned to look. He started speaking, but I just stood there clueless as usual. A few minutes later I walked over to Silvio and he filled me in. ‘Nobody leaves the wing till further notice, that’s what he says.’

‘Not even to Spanish classes?’

‘Nowhere; we can’t go out.’ He explained that one of the inmates in Wing 1 got a bullet in the shoot-out. Probably courtesy of the jefes in Maxima who were shooting out of our wing door in their direction. The garita lookout in our cell block had seen one of the lags getting carried out of Wing 1 after the shoot-out ended, slumped over the shoulder of another inmate. He later died of the injuries. This was bad news. Wing 1 would be looking to settle the score. The cell-block bosses knew it, and that’s why we had to batten the hatches and lie low.

But still, to me, it was pure bad luck for the guy that he got killed. There was no marksmanship in the shoot-out. The bosses were just all blind shooting. They didn’t seem to know that bullets didn’t go around corners or through doors and walls.

So now we paid the price with a lockdown. I felt Los Teques starting to get even smaller. Now the only time we could leave the wing was to go to the canteen. The kitchen workers from our wing even had to be escorted from Maxima up the passageway by a cop to get them there safely. Some started sleeping there to avoid the perilous walk back. A shooter could appear from anywhere. I noticed the bread rolls in the mornings were all bow-shaped and flattened – the inmates in the cantina who had no colchonetas there had kipped on bags of rolls the night before.

But despite the lockdown, the killings didn’t stop. Executions went on. One morning I was walking back from the canteen with Silvio and a few others and we came across a body on the ground in the passageway. The inmate was lying on his side, his eyes open yet lifeless, his tongue dangling out. It was a weird sight I’ll never forget, and nothing like dead bodies you see in movies. A pool of dark blood had formed around his stomach, blotching his vest. He looked like he was in his early 20s and was dressed in shorts. ‘Jesus, look,’ I said, pointing at him. It was a horrible sight, but I stopped and looked in the same way people slow down to see a traffic accident.

‘Keep going,’ said Silvio, pushing me on. There wasn’t a cop in sight, but if you stuck around you might get blamed for the killing.

We all gathered out in the yard. The lags knew there would be a backlash from the prison chiefs. You didn’t just kill somebody without someone asking questions – even in Los Teques. Life was cheap, but if someone was murdered it was a headache for the authorities. Directors didn’t like murders on their watch.

The story was that a lucero from Maxima was walking by him and the lag made a gun sign at him with his hand. The lucero had a beef with him from another jail. The next morning, the lucero rammed a knife into his guts. Word was that Fidel the jefe had given the lucero the green light to take out the prisoner who lived in the passageway.

In the yard, one of the underbosses, Gómez, a Veno with buck teeth, stood up on a concrete block and started a speech. I couldn’t make it out, but I knew there was heavy shit coming. I stood beside Eddy. ‘What’s the story, what’s going on?’

‘The cops are going to come down and interview us and nobody is to say a word if they know what’s good for their health.’ Eddy relayed Gómez’s words to me. He told us the boss said that in the past a lag was killed and all the inmates in the wing were taken to court and given a six-month sentence on top of their original term – and grounds for parole removed.

‘Ah no, no way,’ I said.

‘Yes way, that’s what he says. That’s what happens, that’s what they do. Gómez says if we stick together and say nobody saw anything we might be all right.’ Might be? I couldn’t believe it: there was my plan to get out after two years up in the air.