The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (7 page)

I still had money for a few pints on a Friday night. But sharing a bag of coke with the mates went out the window when I was worried about having enough money to pay my loans and keep myself and Katie going.

I was in the local pub one night, standing out in the smoking area having a cigarette. One of the usual dealers walked up to me.

‘Paul, I have a one-er for you.’

‘I’ll pass. Too rich for my wallet.’

‘Business bad for you too?’

‘Nothing on the books.’

Silence hung in the air between the two of us. He was staring at me, like he was sizing me up for something. ‘Paul, if you need a few quid I know lads who go for holidays in the sun and make good money to take home a little package.’

‘How much?’

‘About ten grand.’

‘What would be in the package?’

‘Ignorance is bliss.’

‘Seems too good to be true,’ I said, but it was obvious where this was going. ‘To where?’

‘Latin America, probably Mexico, but could be Spain.’

I stood there with my thoughts swishing around my head. It sounded like easy money. I was thinking it would clear the loan on the van and lessen my load a little. I was always up for adventure, and a risk, and wasn’t too worried about the idea of getting caught, but I didn’t commit there and then.

I threw my cigarette butt on the ground and stamped on it. ‘OK, I’m interested, but I want to talk a bit more.’

‘Easy, I’ll organise a meeting with a fella for you.’

I’m no angel. I’ve had a few run-ins with the law. When I was 27 I got done for assaulting a copper in Dublin. I was on my stag night with about 15 mates. We walked into a pub on Abbey Street and the publican told us to leave. We didn’t. Next minute, a motorbike copper arrived in his leathers and ordered us to get out. We did. Outside on the street, I went to walk into the next pub. I was in great spirits with my mates. Getting married and a baby boy on the way. I wanted to keep the party going.

The copper grabbed me by the shoulder. ‘You can’t go in there.’

‘Get the fuck off me,’ I said, pushing his arm away. Harder than I thought. He stumbled into his motorbike. Shit. All of a sudden the police were everywhere. I was bundled into a van and spent a few hours in Store Street Garda station. I got a £20 fine.

That was more than 15 years ago, and despite my brush with the police I didn’t have any criminal history involving drugs. Wasn’t my game.

A few days later I was standing outside in the car park of a local pub in Coolock. A guy pulled up in a red Toyota. A short, stocky fellow got out, walked over and shook my hand. ‘I believe you’re interested in going on a holiday for us?’

‘Something like that,’ I laughed.

‘Let’s take a seat.’ We sat down on the boot of his car, the pair of us dressed in dark-blue overalls. His name was Kevin and he was a brickie. No big player in the drug business, a part-timer, I’d heard. He and a few of his mates would chip in and buy a few kilos of coke abroad every couple of years. Sell it on. Make a few quid.

‘It’s simple. Holiday in the sun. Ten-grand pay. You get there and wait for a phone call. We give you a few thousand spending money for you to kill a bit of time. Just wait for the call. Somebody gives you a case with a package and you take it home.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Where to?’

‘We don’t know yet, we just need to know if you’re in first.’

I sat there with my arms folded, looking at the ground. We didn’t speak for a few moments. ‘What if I get caught?’

‘We’ll sort you out, and if you come home with nothing we’ll give you a few quid anyway. Win, lose or draw, you’ll be taken care of.’

‘All right, OK, that’s cool,’ I said. I knew the ‘win, lose or draw’ was bullshit, but I went along with it. I was sure I could pull off the run. ‘I’m in.’

A couple of weeks passed and my mobile phone rang again. It was Kevin. ‘Right, we have a destination: Venezuela.’

‘Venezuela,’ I said. A pause. I didn’t want to sound like I’d never heard of it, but I hadn’t and said nothing.

He gave me a date. ‘Do you mind getting the tickets yourself? Go onto the Internet and get them on a credit card. We’ll sort you out after. It’s just we don’t want any trace leading back to us.’

‘All right.’ I went onto my computer at home to find out about Venezuela. Capital: Caracas. Weather: sunny. Language: Spanish. Sandy white beaches. Great nightlife. Other than the language, all sounded good to me.

The next day Kevin called around to my apartment. We sat in my office, which was a desk and a couple of chairs in the corner of my bedroom.

‘You got the flight all right?’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A week from now.’

‘Perfect. How much?’

‘Eight hundred.’

He handed me a roll of euro notes from his pockets, all creased: fifties, twenties, hundreds, the whole lot. He counted out 800 on the bed and then handed me another bunch of cash.

‘That’s two grand in all for flights and spending money to keep you going. Just get there and check into a hotel in Caracas. Keep your phone on. Wait for the call.’

I needed a smokescreen for family and friends. I had a mate who had a couple of pubs in the south of Spain, which made it easy. I told everyone I was going for a holiday in the sun to help Vinnie out down in Marbella for two weeks. That’s how long my trip to Venezuela was for. Katie was going on holiday to Spain for two weeks as well, a couple of days before I was due to leave, so the timing of my trip was perfect.

* * *

Dublin Airport. It was just after 8 a.m. I walked into the departures hall. In the corner of my eye I saw a bookshop. I walked in and picked up a Spanish phrase book. I had a flick through it. ‘
La cuenta
– the bill’ said one phrase. That’ll come in handy, I thought, and bought the book along with a crime novel. I checked my case in with Air France for the flight to Caracas with a stop-off in Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I passed through security into departures, not giving much thought to the danger of the trip. I was actually excited about the whole thing. It was like being in a James Bond film or something: spies and drug dealers, murky dealings in foreign climes. At the time the
Banged Up Abroad
series on TV was all the rage, Western drug mules locked up in hellhole jails in the tropics – but that wouldn’t happen to me.

A BLACK GUARD STOOD BESIDE THE SET OF STEEL GATES. ‘HALLO, MY FRIEND,’ he said leeringly, putting on a nice-guy act with the little English he had. Probably buttering up the gringo in the hope of a few quid. I looked back at another cop behind the counter. He nodded towards the cells ahead and ran his finger across his neck in a slicing motion as if to say, ‘You’re for the chop.’ The guard ushered me inside to the wing area.

Arms hung out of cell bars. Dark faces peered out, the whites of their eyes standing out from the gloom like torches shining out of a black hole. Sheets were tied to bars across the cells and stretched out as makeshift hammocks. The prison chant hollered out, ya-ya-ya-hoohhh, like animals howling. The whole place was like a zoo – a filthy one, reeking of piss.

We stepped through barred gates to the left and into a small rectangular yard. I was led into a wing. It was poky but clean and tidy, with TVs, a fridge and a small stove. It looked like it was where I’d be held, thank God, rather than the zoo. Standing there with the black slacks and dress shoes on, I probably looked like a coke kingpin the guards could bribe for cash: not the mule that I was. The cell was a two-room set-up with four single beds and a bunk. A guy walked up to me, a jovial fellow in his 40s with grey hair coiffed to the side. He spoke, but all I could make out from him was that his name was Fulvio and he was from ‘Italia’. He picked up a scrap of paper and started scribbling on it. ‘
Aquí
’ and ‘
allá
’ (‘here’ and ‘there’) he said, drawing a picture of a courtroom and a building with bars he told me was Los Teques prison. I could make out he was fighting his conviction for being a drug mule, and the guards shipped him back and forth the short distance from this jail to the courtroom rather than the hour or so’s hike to the main prison, Los Teques.

I caught a glimpse of a towering guy, about 6 ft 2 in., with a bald head in a room next to us. ‘Jefe, boss,’ said Fulvio.

The jefe was dressed in shorts and a vest and walked over to me. Another inmate, a slim guy with short, curly hair, stood beside him. ‘Western Union, you phone home . . . You friend, you family,’ he said in broken English. He spoke with a nasal, high-pitched voice, like he had a sock shoved up his nose. ‘You pay 2,000 euro for stay here.’

I nearly choked. ‘You must be fucking mad,’ I said in rapid English.

‘I . . . no . . . understand, very fast . . . Western Union, 2,000 euro,’ he repeated. The boss looked down at me with a menacing glare. I knew what was going on – the boys were hounding the gringo for a big payout. It was game on straight away. A mobile phone was handed to me. I had to think and act fast. There was no one I could phone and ask for that sum of cash. Nor did I want to. If I’d had that kind of money I wouldn’t be here in the first place. I whipped up a plan in my head. The two guys stood watching me; the jefe had his arms folded. I held the phone and tapped in the number of my Irish mobile phone, which had been seized by the cops at the airport.

‘Hallo, this is Paul from BBL Plumbing. I’m not here at the moment to take your call, but if you would like to leave your name and number I will get back to you shortly.’ That was my voicemail greeting. The pair leaned forward, listening in.

‘Hi, this is Paul,’ I said into my voicemail. In rapid English, with my strongest Dublin accent, I said, ‘How-a-ya, Ma, Da, this is Paul. I need to organise 2,000 euro to be sent over to me.’ The boss shoved a piece of paper in my hand. I read out the account details for a
banco
in Caracas. These guys were prepared. ‘Make sure you get that to me as quick as you can,’ I added to the voicemail message I was leaving for myself, slowly this time. I stabbed at the call-end button and handed the phone back.

‘I no understand,’ said Nasal Voice. ‘Very fast.’ Great.

‘I was just organising the money from my family,’ I said.

Nasal Voice spoke to the wing boss, who looked at me. He seemed pleased and was probably spending the 2,000 euro in his head.

I walked around the narrow yard a bit to stretch my legs. I was exhausted from the day in the back of the jeep, driving here, there and everywhere. The hunger pains started gnawing at me again. My stomach started to contract and protest – probably wondering what the food strike was about. It was Tuesday evening. I worked out in my head it’d been five days since I’d eaten – my last meal was the steak sandwich at the airport the Friday before. Seemed like a distant memory now, both the food and getting caught with six kilos of cocaine.

In the wing, the boss and the lads started chopping meat and rattling pots and pans for dinner. I didn’t have to wait long for mine. But rather than dining with the cellmates, the food came wrapped in tinfoil, shoved through the cell bars by one of the guards. I was delirious. I pulled back the wrapping. It was chicken mixed in with white rice. I sat down on the ground with Fulvio and started to eat. I gobbled up all the food. It tasted amazing, and I savoured the food in my mouth before swallowing, like I was eating the chicken for the first time in my life. Then I was sorry I’d eaten so quickly. I felt queasy. My stomach had obviously shrunk in the past five days without food.

Fulvio poured himself mango juice into a cup from a bottle the guards had put through the bars. He finished it in a couple of gulps and handed me the mug. I filled it up and downed some juice. My mouth felt like it was having a party with all the flavours after five days of a little water that tasted like it had been squeezed out of a sweaty towel.

Fulvio didn’t speak English, but we chatted away and developed a bond with gestures. It was good to connect with someone again. The two of us were just laughing all the time, and it was nice to be with someone outside the clique of the inmates in the wing. I could make out Fulvio was only a short-term inmate here.

Fulvio spoke away in Italian and Spanish, saying something about
policía
and making gestures towards the four lads who were cooking away on a two-hob stove in a small kitchenette. I could make out they were probably crooked cops or politicians or something. That was why they had the privilege of having their own food, which they stored in a fridge, and were locked up in a ‘home-from-home’ prison wing. The four of them ate together at a small table to the blare of televisions, one in each of the two main rooms and another in the corner. The boss and the others then connected a video game to the TV. They raced cars around a track while sitting on the lower bed of the bunks in one room. The cell boss, who Fulvio said was called Mario, waved at me to come over and join them. I was the flavour of the moment given that I’d bring in a windfall for him, he believed. Anyway, I waved him off – I hated computer games.

Fulvio gestured, asking why I was locked up here. ‘
Aeropuerto
,’ I said to Fulvio, stretching out my arms like a plane. ‘
Drogas.
’ But why I was locked up didn’t need any further explanation. Fulvio knew the score. He said most gringos jailed in Venezuela were all in for the same thing: smuggling coke.

‘
Todos
,’ (‘All’) he said.

Afterwards, I took another stretch in the tiny yard. It was dark outside. I was ready to sleep. In the cell, Fulvio was pulling out a couple of thin mattresses and pillows that were kept in a large hole in the wall, doubled over. The four single beds, two in each room, were for the inmates higher up the pecking order. I rolled out the long, narrow mattress that was known as a
colchoneta
, which Fulvio had handed to me. I put it on the floor and lay down. Fulvio stretched out next to me. There were four of us on the floor in all. I had my first proper sleep in days, my head propped up on a stained pillow that stank of sweat and piss.