The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (25 page)

I wasn’t so sure. As the weeks went on I watched him from the corner of my eye, seeing his right arm move the odd time. I was sure he was pulling a fast one. We spoke a lot and became friends. ‘That was some stroke you had, Terry, a stroke of genius.’ He started grinning. Sly old bugger.

‘You get the right lawyer on the go and things happen,’ he smiled.

‘Who?’

‘Viviana,’ he said, ‘she’s famous in here. Gets things done. Not like the others.’ She had put papers through for Terry to get early parole on medical grounds. He was just waiting for the judges to sign his papers and release him to a family in Caracas approved by the courts.

The lawyer’s name stuck in my mind. I made a mental note to meet her.

We talked a lot, and as the weeks went on Terry put me on the inside track to his plans. We had long chats, and I told him endlessly I wanted to get out on early parole, which I could apply for after 18 months in jail: that was my plan. I told him I had little faith in the dodgy lawyer getting Bruce and a few others out on cancer.

‘Get a stroke,’ he said.

‘A stroke?’

‘Yeah, just like me,’ he laughed, grinning from ear to ear.

‘You mean you didn’t really have one?’

‘Not quite: I took a turn and they took me to hospital. But it was only a minor stroke. I knew it. I’d had one before and knew the signs. My right side had already dropped a bit from the stroke I had years ago; my eye had gone stiff as a board then.’

‘So what did they do at the hospital here?’

‘Nothing. A doctor shone a torch in my right eye and it didn’t move. I knew it wouldn’t, it was like that from before. So he told the prison I’d had a full-blown stroke. I got a solicitor on the go and I’m waiting to get out.’

‘You sly old dog,’ I said, laughing.

A cop walked in with the lista. Terry tilted his head a bit more to the right.

‘It’s easy – you pull off a stroke, have a few spasms on the ground. They take you off to the hospital and then you escape.’

‘How?’ I said, moving in closer.

‘Get to hospital and get out.’

‘The doctors will know straight away I haven’t had a stroke – I can’t fool them.’

‘Listen, this is how it works. I’ve been in and out of the hospital in Los Teques town. Once they brought me in during the week, but there was no doctor for days. There are barely any nurses; the families that visit do all the work, cleaning and feeding the patients. No security. They had an armed guard on me, but when the Saturday came he said to me he was taking the weekend off and left.’

‘Some security,’ I laughed.

‘Yes, I was on my own till Monday morning. All you do is get in there on a stroke, and when you see a chance run out the door, have a guy waiting for you in a car outside, have a false passport, and away you go off to the border in Colombia.’

‘That easy?’

‘Yes, Paul, if I was a younger man I would have left like that.’

‘All I need is the passport,’ I said, staring at the ground for inspiration.

‘That’s all.’

Easier said than done.

I had another plan to get out now and was in good spirits. I put my thinking cap on and wondered how I’d get my hands on a passport. I knew my own was in the hands of the authorities, probably with the cops in Interpol. I’d no chance of getting it back. I’d heard of some of the lags paying up to 1,000 dollars to cops who’d promised to get them their passports. But it came to nothing, other than making the cops richer. I wasn’t falling into that trap. Silvio was always my port of call for anything I needed. The next day I went up to him in the yard.

‘I need a passport.’

‘A passport?’ His eyes studied me for a moment as if he was about to ask me why, but he didn’t. ‘Roberto would be your man. He has Italian connections in Caracas who’d know.’

‘Right, good idea.’ I followed Silvio over to Roberto. He was sitting in a chair in the yard, one of the in-house barbers shaving a little zigzag design in the back of his head. In jail or not, Roberto cared about how he looked. And he seemed to have a bottomless pit of cash for the finer things in prison life.

Silvio spoke to him in Italian. ‘Passport?’ said Roberto, looking at me now, his eyebrows raised. He waved off the barber and the whirr of the electric razor stopped. He fell into deep thought and spoke to Silvio.

‘He says yeah, but it’d take time,’ said Silvio.

‘How long?’

‘It could be a week, a month, he can’t say yet.’

‘How much would it cost me?’

‘Two million bolos, he says.’

I thought for a minute, working it out in my head. It was about 400 euro, a lot, but money for old rope if it got me out of this dive. ‘Tell him it’s a deal. I don’t have the cash, but I’ll get it.’

‘
Sí,
’ said Roberto, nodding his head when Silvio interpreted.

The next morning I sat out in the yard scribbling names of people who might lend me some cash. One was a childhood friend who lived in New York and had a good job in banking. I hadn’t seen him in a few years, since he’d come home to Dublin for a visit, but we had been good mates and I was confident he’d come through for me. I’d already asked my family for one Western Union – the 350 euro from my sister when I first got to Los Teques – so I didn’t want to bother them again. I decided to tap friends. While I was jotting down names it dawned on me that people might be forgetting about me. I’d been banged up for a year now with little contact from anyone, which was what I wanted, but I hoped I wasn’t history to people back home altogether.

I now had my own mobile phone, which I’d paid one of the wing bosses to get for me. I paid over the odds to include his commission and a backhander to a cop to smuggle it in. I had also chipped in with a few inmates and a couple of luceros and bought a laptop with a dongle-stick Internet connection. I had the world at my fingertips from right inside the wing, so it was easy for me to put out an SOS to my mates for cash.

* * *

The cop did the headcount in the evening with his usual armed escort of National Guards, one of them with a gruff face ticking off a roll-call sheet on a clipboard. I watched him shake his head at the cop when the roll call was finished. ‘
Falta de una.
’ (‘One missing.’) It wasn’t that unusual. Often Macedonia would be out in the yard where the cops had their cars parked, doing his job on bin duties, and they forgot about him. The headcount was done again, the 140-odd inmates looking wearier this time, sitting on their buckets, the rims digging into their arses.

But the same number turned up again. It looked like I wasn’t the only one plotting to get out of Los Teques. The lags started shrugging their shoulders. The troops and the cop pulled out. ‘Conejo, Conejo’ was on everyone’s lips. ‘Conejo, the Rabbit,’ said Silvio. ‘They don’t know where he is.’ The Rabbit earned his nickname because he had two badly bucked front teeth.

The National Guard troops and the cop shortly after walked back into the wing. ‘
Sotea,
’ shouted a guard. Conejo, wherever he was, was in deep shit. Not only would the troops and cops be gunning for him, so would the cell-block jefes. His absence at the headcount prompted a search – which the padrinos hated.

The whole prison population was hauled up to the roof, wing by wing. Another headcount was called. But still no Conejo. Reds and oranges started to streak the sky as the sun set. It was getting dark and chilly. All I had on were shorts and a T-shirt. My arse cheeks were going numb sitting on the ground.

I started singing, ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run,’ and shouting, ‘“What’s up, Doc?” I said, “What’s up, Doc?”’ The gringo inmates were cracking up laughing. ‘Well, where de likkle wabbit go?’ I added, mimicking the Walt Disney cartoon. I lost interest in cracking jokes when drizzly rain fell. Everyone was getting tired and irritated. After hours passed, we got the orders to get back to the cells, wing by wing.

I couldn’t believe they hadn’t found this guy. He didn’t seem like a bright spark who had the brains to escape. He had what were known as ‘trusted privileges’, because in a past life he’d been a mechanic. Most inmates like him were immediately put to work in the driveway by the gate to the jail, fixing the prison fleet of a couple of buses. Often, however, I’d look down from the roof and I could see them, noting them bent over into the engine of one of the prison workers’ cars. I could also see they enjoyed perks like fried-chicken fast food and other takeaways courtesy of the troops for fixing their motors. Anyway, it looked like the Conejo had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

‘Where the hell did he go? Did he escape?’ I said to Ricardo.

‘No way, he’s an idiot.’ Dumb? I had thought so, but wasn’t so sure now.

The next day it filtered back that the Conejo escaped out the front gate holding onto the bottom of one of the army trucks as it pulled out of the jail. They found him quickly, though, in his mother’s house . . . He was bundled into a police car and brought back to Los Teques the next afternoon. I gave him kudos for having the brains to escape, but he didn’t have enough to stay hidden when he got out. Still, he had the
cojones
to pull it off.

Not long afterwards, we were hauled up to the roof yet again after the troops were down one on their headcount. ‘They say he’s one of the prisoners in Wing 1. They think he’s still in the jail,’ said Eddy, sitting on his hunkers on the roof beside me. For three nights it went on. It didn’t make sense. Nobody could hide in the prison for that long. On the fourth day I expected we’d all be called up for another evening under the stars while the cops and troops searched for the inmate. Eddy and Silvio started talking after the headcount in the wing. ‘No roof tonight; they found him.’

‘Found him where?’ I said.

‘The cops started looking on the Internet when they couldn’t find the guy. They found a video on YouTube made in Wing 1 and saw him.’

‘You must be joking me?’

‘No, they saw the guy’s face. Then you see prisoners’ hands holding automatic weapons and shooting his arms and legs off.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. Now I came to think of it, the night before he went missing there had been a burst of gunfire from outside. This must have been the execution.

‘It happens, Paul,’ said Silvio. ‘They are evil people in there.’

‘How did they get his body out?’ I said.

‘The inmates cut up his body and put it into three buckets. The cops went into the wing and found them after seeing the video.’ I was sick. These people were more animal and inhumane than I could ever imagine.

BILLY WAS FOREVER ON A DATING WEBSITE HE COULD ACCESS THROUGH his phone. An inmate in the Church, where you’re supposed to be a Christian celibate, had put him on to it. He was texting one particular girl back and forth for weeks. I was sitting with Eddy one afternoon in the canteen on visit day and got to see the fruits of Billy’s labour.

‘Look at the beaut Billy boy’s with,’ I said. Billy had a knockout of a girl on his arm, grinning from ear to ear like he’d won a million in the lottery.

Eddy swung his head around. ‘Gordon Bennett, there’s a sight to behold.’ The pair of them walked over and sat down on the stone bench next to us. Myself and Eddy were in the canteen on a Sunday visit day playing cards. The director opened it up for us PWVs to go to when the overcrowding got worse than usual.

‘
Hola,
’ said the girl, smiling. ‘I am Angela.’ That she was, with an angelic face and long, slick black hair that cascaded down her back. I started calling her Pocahontas. She was a beautiful, slim girl. We all fell in love with her at first sight.

She told us she was 18 and had a child. Most girls in this part of the world of a certain social class did by that age. After a bit of chitchat the pair of them disappeared off to the ‘buggies’ – the beds in the cells that had each been cordoned off with curtains, like a hospital bed, for the inmates to have a conjugal shag.

That evening both the Venezuelans and the gringos wanted to know where Billy had met his stunning bird. ‘Mate, some princess,’ said Eddy, ‘where’d you get her from?’

‘On the phones, a dating site.’

‘She’s a corker, Billy,’ I said. ‘But what’s she doing with you? – it’s like Beauty and the Beast.’ All the gringos cracked up laughing. He was a hairy boy, Billy, with woolly shoulders and a carpet of hair on his chest. I used to call him ‘Teddy Bear’ for his furry body. The Colombian chica, though, was mesmerised by his sparkling green eyes and thought he was cuddly.

The funny thing was that the Veno women hated body hair. The queues for the toilets on the mornings of visits were endless with inmates waiting to shave off their pubic hair and under their arms, getting ready for the arrival of their missus. A few even did their legs. The Venos took their conjugal rights seriously. When their partners brought in their kids I noticed they’d be three and four years old, yet the guy had been locked up for about four years. It was obvious the oats were sown behind bars.

All the gringo lags were getting in on the dating-site act after Billy’s top score. Eddy quickly had women on the go coming in to visit him. Billy was also back on it too, fishing to see if he could get something else moving. And he did. He was all excited one Sunday on the morning of visits. ‘Another bird, Paul, and she’s coming in with her sister,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

‘Well, aren’t you the man,’ I said.

We were sitting in behind the curtains and a lucero came in. ‘Billy,
visita.
’

Billy stood up, swaggered over to the curtain and started twitching it for a peek out first. He looked back at me. His face dropped. ‘I can’t go out there, Paul, she’s horrible.’

‘What do you mean horrible?’

‘The size of the two of them?’ We all jumped to our feet and poked our heads out too, like theatre actors peeking out at their audience. There were two girls the size of beached whales stuffed into the plastic chairs for the visits. Venezuelan women were famous for winning Miss World competitions, but this pair would more likely make the Guinness Book of World Records for being the heaviest women in Latin America.