Welcome to Hell

Welcome to Hell

Colin Martin

Dedication

I’d like to dedicate this book to everybody that helped me during the eight years I was in prison but especially to John Mulcahy and John Kealy. I wouldn’t have made it without them.

Prologue

My name is Colin Martin, but that’s not so important. What is important is what happened to me and what you’re about to read – because it could easily have been you.

I’ve just been released from Lard Yao prison in Bangkok. I was jailed there for murder, but I was not guilty.

I was attacked by a man who was trying to kill me, so I fought back to save my life. Who wouldn’t? The next thing I knew, the man was dead and I was in jail.

You’ve probably heard horror stories of life in a Thai jail. So had I. When I was first sent to prison, I asked one of my fellow prisoners, a Swiss guy called Bruno, if it was really that bad. It couldn’t be as bad as they made it out, could it?

Bruno gave a dry laugh.

‘Welcome to hell,’ he said.

I spent eight years in jail, and I can tell you, hell is no exaggeration. It depends on what your concept of hell is. This experience was every bit as bad as I imagine hell to be. I shouldn’t have been in prison in the first place. I was tortured by police until I made a false confession.

Once in prison, I was beaten endlessly by the guards. I went for days without eating because the food was so revolting. I was forced to wear shackles on my legs for two years. I almost died from tuberculosis which the prison officials left untreated.

I saw things nobody should have to see.

I saw prisoners murdered. I saw prisoners rape each other.

It was a living nightmare – one I couldn’t wake myself up from.

Some memories of what happened are clearer in my mind than others. One in particular stands out.

On my first day at the prison, I was stripped naked and searched along with the other new prisoners. There were about 15 of us, lined up in a row. Another 100 or so existing prisoners were there watching.

A guard singled one of the new prisoners out – and told him to masturbate.

‘What?’ the guy said.

‘Masturbate, and do it now!’

The guy just stood there, as shocked as I was.

‘Dear God,’ I thought. ‘What kind of a prison is this?’

Three quick, hard jabs with the guard’s baton, and the poor guy lifted his penis and started to masturbate. I knew that if he ordered me to do that there was going to be a problem. I would smash the bastard in the mouth.

Thankfully, he didn’t, and moved on.

The commando started walking back and forth along the line of new prisoners.

‘You think you’re Mafia. You think you’re tough. You think you’re big men,’ he said. ‘You’re not. I am the boss here!’

He walked on, pounding his chest.

‘I’m the boss, and you
will
obey me. If I tell you to shit, you
will
shit! Nobody fucks with me. Fuck with me and you die!’

I believed him. Anyone who was sadistic enough to humiliate a man by making him masturbate in front of 100 prisoners was a sick bastard, and capable of getting his kicks by killing someone just as easily.

The Thai justice system is brutal, but it’s also a big business. In any way they possibly can, the cops, lawyers, guards and prison directors will cheat you out of your money.

When I was first arrested, I was told that if I paid 300,000 baht (around US $12,000) I’d be released. If I’d paid, I would have walked free. But I didn’t have the money, so I went to prison. It was as simple as that.

I now know there have been many cases like mine.

In Thailand, you don’t even have to commit a crime to find yourself in prison. Sometimes they’ll bang you up because there’s a chance you’ll be able to pay them a few baht – or because you can’t. You just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I’ll give you an example.

Kevin, an Englishman, was on his way home after a night out and stopped off for a last beer before bed. While sitting in the bar, he was propositioned by a prostitute. He declined her services.

Five minutes later she returned – with a cop in tow. She accused Kevin of stealing her cigarettes. Kevin was searched and no cigarettes were found. As this lady was in some distress over the loss of her cigarettes, Kevin was duly asked to pay 3,000 baht to sort the problem out.

He refused. He hadn’t taken the cigarettes and, even if he had, a packet of cigarettes is only worth 30 baht.

Kevin was arrested, charged with theft, and sent to jail.

After two weeks of prison, he paid.

It’s always worst for foreigners. If there’s ever a dispute between a Thai and a foreigner, the foreigner will be the one arrested. It’s not that the cops take the Thai’s side or that they dislike foreigners.

I gradually came to understand that it’s about money.

Foreigners have it, Thais don’t. For the cops, there’s no point in arresting a Thai. He doesn’t have any money. The cop will always arrest the foreigner because he can pay. And chances are, after a day or two in the Thai justice system, he will.

In Thailand, justice is simply a matter of mathematics.

1

My life has been far from average. But before this nightmare began, that’s exactly what it was. I was an ordinary businessman, and I led a perfectly normal life.

My family originally came from County Monaghan in Ireland but moved to Liverpool to secure work. They were an average working-class family: not rich, not poor.

My father, Tommy Senior, started out as a bread man. He delivered bread around the working-class estates of Merseyside, but he eventually got himself qualified as a welder and worked in the shipyards and factories for a few years.

He left Liverpool after being offered work on some new factories, and eventually he ended up working on nuclear power plants.

My mother’s name was Maisie. As was traditional in those days, she stayed at home and looked after her children.

I was the third of five. My sister Mary was the eldest, followed by my brother Tommy. Then there were my younger brothers Brendan and Paul.

We had a relatively privileged childhood. When I was six years old my parents bought their first house in Manchester where we lived through most of my school years. During this time my father went away to work in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria and throughout Europe.

He was a driven man. Eventually, with his best friend, he opened his own company, Martin and Goodwin, which contracted work for construction machinery.

Like most Irish emigrants, my parents kept in close touch with our extended family in Ireland. We used to go to Ireland every year for our holidays, as most Irish families did.

I suppose my parents had always dreamed of returning to Ireland and opening their own business at home.

This dream eventually came true for them in 1975 when they bought a pub in Carrickmacross in County Monaghan.

That summer, we all packed up and moved to Ireland. My father sold his share of the partnership with Tony Goodwin, and bought what was then called Murray’s pub.

While my father and mother got on with the daily business of running the pub, we kids took the town by storm – especially the boys. I was about 15 years old but I settled very quickly in Carrickmacross.

Despite moving houses and cities a few times, all in all, I’d say that most of my youth was normal.

* * *

It was the career path I followed that led me to Thailand. After I left school I went to England and worked on building sites for a few years, and at Heathrow Airport for a while. There were no jobs in Ireland at the time. Many young people emigrated in order to find work.

I eventually got a job as an apprentice pipe fitter.

As part of my training I had to learn the basics of welding. Anything I built would have to be welded. I have to admit that I’d never wanted to follow my father into welding. In fact, it was the last thing I wanted to do, so I was really shocked to find out that I was actually very good at it.

I worked for various companies over the next few years, and at 21 I was given a chance to go and work offshore on the oil rigs and pipeline barges in the North Sea.

This was mostly seasonal work, six or seven months per year during the good weather. In the winter months the North Sea is too rough to lay any pipelines, so I’d be at home for a good part of the year. At home, I’d study and take courses.

After some four years I finally made it to the position of a pipeline welder, which isn’t easy. These welders are regarded as the best in the world and the competition for work is fierce.

A pipeline welder is allowed zero mistakes, and zero defects. Every single weld must be 100 per cent X-rayed and tested. If too many of your welds fail the tests, you’re fired. With the costs involved in laying a pipeline, there isn’t any room for error.

I earned a lot of money and made a lot of good friends during the years I worked offshore but, when my son Jason was born, I quit. My own father had worked away from home during my childhood and I didn’t want to miss my children growing up.

I’d met Jason’s mother, Paula, a couple of years previously, and we’d been going steady. Paula was from Crossmaglen in South Armagh, just over the border in Northern Ireland.

We decided not to rush into marriage and it wasn’t until three years later, when she was pregnant with my second son Carl, that we decided to tie the knot.

When my son Jason was born, I worked around the local area – in Dundalk, Castleblayney, and Newry, as well as in Dublin.

But there wasn’t really that much money for welders in Ireland at that time, so I was forced to start working in Europe – in countries like Holland, Belgium and Germany.

This caused tensions at home. My wife used to hate the telephone ringing, because it usually meant that someone was offering me a job somewhere.

Sometimes I’d go as a welder, sometimes as a foreman and sometimes as a supervisor. Sometimes I wouldn’t go at all. It all depended on the money and how badly I needed it. If the money was right, I’d be on the plane in the morning. As I say, my wife hated the phone ringing.

I firmly believed in making as much money as possible while I was young. Sometimes the more experience and skill you had under your belt the harder it was to get work.

My attitude has always been to make money while I was still physically fit enough to do it.

I was never interested in a nine-to-five job. A guy can give 20 years of his life to a company, but if there’s a problem or no work he’s out the door, just like everyone else. I wasn’t interested in that. I have always worked for me.

I performed a service; a company employed me and paid for that service, but if the money wasn’t good enough or I didn’t like the terms, I’d go and work for somebody else.

This principle stood by me. It allowed me to travel and encouraged me to build my own business.

* * *

I ended up working in Holland as a self-employed supervisor. Companies would hire me to supervise their construction projects or to advise on them. Sometimes they would ask me for extra manpower and I’d try and find the people they needed.

After a year or so of this, I decided to open my own company and to supply manpower directly. So, shortly after I married Paula, I moved the family over to Holland.

I opened my own company, and called it Spectac Welding and Construction (Holland). It was a difficult move.

The company mostly supplied manpower services to the construction industry. If times were hard, I would work as a welder to make ends meet, but my heart was always in the company.

We were a happy family. My wife was happy with the move to Holland. My son Jason learnt Dutch and attended a private school. My second son Carl was still too young for school, but it wasn’t long before he was joined at home by a sister – Nicole.

We were an average family making our way in the world. I had my fair share of ups and downs, but Spectac eventually got established and became a profitable company. I was a contented man.

* * *

I spent a lot of my time looking for new contracts, because once one job finished the workers would become free, and I’d need somewhere new to place them.

I noticed an advertisement in the Dutch press in the summer of 1994. It was from a company based in Thailand called Offshore Construction Services – OCS. I assumed at the time that this was a legitimate firm, but was to discover later that the name had been either hi-jacked, stolen or made up by a group of fraudsters.

In this advertisement they explained that there was a severe shortage of trained engineering personnel in Asia, and they were trying to interest any European companies with skills in this area.

At first I didn’t take much notice. I thought the advert was aimed at larger construction companies. OCS wouldn’t be interested in doing business with a small company like mine.

A couple of months later this advertisement appeared again. This time when I read it I thought, ‘What the hell?’

I sent off a letter of introduction and a prospectus, which outlined the type of services and personnel we could supply. I didn’t know if OCS would reply, but it was worth a shot.

After a month or so, I received a reply from OCS stating that they were impressed with the quality of our personnel and would like a meeting to discuss this further.

I was delighted. A contract with a big company like that would really help build my reputation. I flew to Thailand straight away.

No one told me that Bangkok was the crime capital of Asia. My knowledge of the city was superficial. I knew nothing of the Thai black market and the implicit dangers involved in operating there. In time I would learn that Bangkok was a city where everything had its price. I was oblivious to the fact that money laundering and organized crime were the lifeblood of the Thai economy. While blood letting between gangs was rare, Bangkok had a dark and dangerous underbelly that visitors seldom see. By the time I arrived there, organised crime had discovered the attractions of the city and its corrupt authorities. The city had become a haven for all sorts of criminals. If I’d known there was a large foreign criminal fraternity at work in Bangkok, I wouldn’t have travelled there. I always thought that Bangkok was an easy-going kind of place. But it wasn’t – that was my fatal mistake.

Bangkok, conveniently wedged between South and East Asia and boasting a well developed transport and communications infrastructure, made an ideal venue for gangs who wanted to do a little networking, organise drug deals or diversify into elaborate frauds. These mobsters mingled with Bangkok’s large expatriate business community and the army of Chinese, Taiwanese, Russians, Koreans, Europeans, Nigerians, Colombians, Australians and New Zealanders. They dressed up as businessmen and sometimes investors, and many of the criminals were long-time residents. These criminals controlled the black market and were responsible for fraud in the region. They could arrange anything.

If they weren’t dealing in heroin, they produced counterfeit goods and clothes. Brands such as Nike, Polo, Lacoste, Christian Dior and Microsoft were mass produced by fakers in factories across the city. The Thais were so good that they even started faking pharmaceutical products, fake cigarettes and alcohol. They could even make bogus computer parts. These criminals were immune from prosecution because of slow court procedures and under-the-table payments to friendly police officers who turned a blind eye. Crime mingled like a virus in the blood-stream of Bangkok. I know this now, but back then I was completely blind to the dangers of the Far East.

I couldn’t get lost in Bangkok now if I tried but I was like a lot of first-time visitors when I first arrived. Although I had travelled across several countries, I had never seen anything like it. I have to admit that I was overcome by the sheer volume of people living there. The airport seemed manic; it was a sea of people. There were people everywhere, all shouting and jostling past each other. But I remember the heat more than anything else.

As I travelled to my hotel the afternoon I arrived, my clothes began to dampen with sweat. I never experienced heat like it. Bangkok’s average daytime temperature is very rarely much below 30 degrees centigrade at any time of year, and the night-time temperature is not much cooler. But there was no sun; the sky that day was grey and overcast. The heat, combined with the humidity and pollution that hung in the air, made it almost impossible to breathe.

I also recall being struck by the city’s expanse: the endless high-rise buildings, the busy expressway flyovers and what I can only describe as the commotion. Bangkok city intimidated and fascinated me.

Prostitutes stood on every street corner. There were people everywhere. There was no free space. There were billboards of western companies advertising in English, yet you only needed to look a little under the surface to see it was Asian.

In between the skyscrapers, there were Temples and Spirit Houses built for good luck alongside almost every major building. The place was alive. I saw a file of Buddhist monks making their way through the traffic with an elephant.

Even the traffic was overwhelming. As I sat in the taxi, I found myself trapped in a permanent traffic jam, which my driver called a
rot dtit
. Jammed traffic is a fact of life in Bangkok. Simple journeys that should take 20 minutes end up taking over an hour, even out side of rush hour.

Thai people rarely walk any significant distance; which has led to an explosion in cars, buses, taxis and
tuk-tuks
– a traditional form of transport consisting of a carriage pulled by bicycle. But these only accumulated to make the traffic jams and pollution worse.

The combined effect of the traffic, heat, humidity, noise, dirt, pollution and the unappealing look of the city made me want to leave Bangkok almost as soon as I’d arrived. I couldn’t wait to reach the sanctuary of my hotel, which I knew would have air-conditioning. But part of me admired the city and my interest was aroused. As I checked into my hotel that afternoon, I remember thinking that this was a city full of opportunities.

I was picked up at my hotel by a man from OCS who introduced himself as Ronnie Hayes. He was Australian, in his late fifties, slim, about six foot (the same height as me) with a shock of grey hair.

He was dressed in a sharp suit – probably designer, I thought – and he wore a lot of gold jewellery. A bit flashy for my taste, but he pulled it off.

Hayes said he was head of the engineering department. We had lunch and arranged to meet at the OCS office the next morning in downtown Bangkok. It was only later that I discovered this was a false name.

The offices were as you’d expect – busy and professional, with about 15 secretaries and other office personnel working at computer stations and going about their daily business.

I was introduced to the personnel officer, the offshore co-ordinator, the accounts officer and to Gerald O’Connor, the company’s managing director.

O’Connor was five foot seven, and built like a rugby player. He was much younger than Hayes, in his late thirties – about my age, in fact.

We had a productive meeting and discussed safety qualifications, work permits, schedules, and planning.

I had over eight years’ experience working offshore and Spectac already had some highly qualified offshore workers, so nothing that was discussed would have been too difficult for us. It was proposed that in all, Spectac would supply 250 men to various OCS projects with a relief crew of another 250 men for the changeover every month.