Hotel Kerobokan (16 page)

–
Jakarta Post,
14 September 2006

Last week anti-terror officers learned that Samudra had been recruiting young people in cyberspace, chatting with them through a laptop smuggled into his prison cell in Kerobokan, Bali.

–
New Straits Times
, September 2006

In his Hotel K cell, Samudra also wrote his autobiography,
Me Against The Terrorist
. The book sold out its first print run of 4000, earning him royalties – not confiscated under any proceeds of crime legislation – to fund future terror attacks. Cash was vital to the terrorist network, and via mobile phone and the internet he successfully got sympathisers to empty their pockets. He also recommended the use of online credit card fraud as the cutting-edge way to raise cash for terror, and devoted a chapter of his book to this practice. But the terrorists weren’t limited to talking to a niche market. Samudra, Mukhlas and Amrozi also kept high media profiles, doing countless sanctioned print and television interviews with journalists around the world.

Samudra and Amrozi also made smaller amounts of cash from businesses inside Hotel K: Samudra selling his scented oils; and Amrozi selling phone credit, using inmates as sales boys. Austrian drug dealer Thomas was a regular customer for phone credit, burning it up fast in his business. He avoided dealing directly with Amrozi until the day he got ripped off. He complained to the sales boy that he’d been sold a spent phone card and the boy took him across to the tower. The terrorist was sunning himself in the pen. Through the fence, Thomas told him about the problem. Amrozi simply turned, apologised and offered to swap it.

But while the terrorists were busy recruiting, they’d had one of their own turn his back on them. Amrozi’s younger brother, Ali Imron, had turned police informant and exposed the matrix behind the blasts. He gave details of his own role – mixing more than a ton of chemicals into bombs and packing the lethal explosives into fluorescent pink, green and blue plastic filing cabinets fixed to the floor of a white Mitsubishi van. Then, on the chosen night, he drove the white van and two suicide bombers to Kuta, and parked the van five hundred metres up the road from the target clubs and the crowds of tourists out for a night of dancing. Ali Imron also confessed to training the two suicide bombers; the first got out of the van and walked along the street in his explosive vest, down to Paddy’s Bar and onto the crowded dance floor, where he detonated it. Terrified survivors fled out onto the street and straight into the second bigger van bomb explosion; all timed and choreographed perfectly to maximise the carnage.

But Ali Imron was now sorry for his part in the massacre, crying in court and apologising. For his treachery, his two brothers and Samudra harassed him through the walls of the tower, yelling insults and taunting him with a mantra that his corpse wouldn’t be fragrant after death if he didn’t die a martyr. But the repentant killer didn’t recant. He was on a good wicket. His change of heart had saved him from a death sentence; instead he’d been given a life sentence in jails with revolving doors to the good life outside.

One day, while most people believed Amrozi’s little brother was languishing in a stinking, rat-infested cell in Hotel K next to his big brother, he was actually drinking coffee at Starbucks and eating dinner at the Hard Rock Café in a new entertainment movie complex beside Plaza Indonesia, one of Jakarta’s most exclusive shopping malls. He was sitting with police boss Pak Gorries and several black-clad armed police. He regularly spent hours out of jail in this way, as part of Indonesia’s anti-terror strategy. The assumption was that police would get more information from him sitting in Starbucks than in a jail cell. So, while his brothers were eating slop, he was sipping lattés, eating cheeseburgers and browsing in the windows of luxury designer shops alongside Jakarta’s most elite shoppers.

Pestered by the two reporters as to why he was drinking with the police chief, Ali Imron was reported as saying this was not the first time. ‘I often wander around with Pak [Mr] Gorries,’ Detik quoted him as saying. But one of the plain clothed policemen immediately silenced him. ‘You have no right to talk,’ Detik reported.

–
Courier Mail
, 3 September 2004

What, do you think that going out for a walk is forbidden? Brig-Gen Gorries said. I walk often with Pak [Brig-Gen] Gorries, Ali Imron said, his head lowered and flanked by several black-clad armed police.

–
PNG Post Courier
, 3 September 2004

Inside Hotel K, the bombers’ influence persisted, visible in ways as subtle as guards growing goatee beards. The initial anger among the inmates had waned into complacency, with them all busily absorbed in their own daily headaches. But Balinese people outside the prison were fuming that the terrorists were still alive nearly three years after the massacre, and called for a stop to the unending appeals and for the guns to come out. But instead the terrorists struck again in the triple suicide blasts that Samudra directed from his Hotel K cell. It was twelve days before the third anniversary of the first blasts. Two men blew themselves up in a strip of casual fish restaurants on the beach at Jimbaran Bay, and a third in a steak house in the tourist heart of Kuta. Twenty-three people were killed, including the three suicide bombers.

Balinese anger turned to fury. The paradise island was a zone of death and destruction again. No-one felt safe. Nowhere was safe now – even beaches were a target. All hotels searched the bags of all guests. Restaurants and shops ran metal detectors over customers’ bodies and bags. The island was a war zone, as far from an idyllic tropical island as it could get. Bali was braced for more attacks at the three-year memorial services for the first blasts. Security was visibly heavy. Snipers were perched on rooftops, hundreds of police lined the small lanes leading to the service, and five armoured vans were parked close by. But no bombs exploded that day. It was the Balinese anger that finally blew, outside Hotel K later that afternoon.

‘Kill Amrozi, kill, kill, kill’, ‘Bring back our peaceful Bali’, ‘Kill Amrozi now’. More than 1500 people were taking out their fury on Hotel K, kicking the front fence, tearing at the gates and pelting stones onto the roof. Eight Balinese
gamelan
groups – one hundred and fifty musicians – were beating drums and xylophones, creating loud rhythmic music, invigorating the locals into a hypnotic frenzy. Protesters thrashed the front iron gates back and forth until they ripped off, stomping on them and screaming, ‘Kill Amrozi!’ Others attacked the low concrete fence stretching along the road, kicking it until it collapsed.

Fired by the beating of drums, the crowd surged towards the front doors but was blocked by three hundred riot police standing with shields and batons along the front wall. One protester charged forwards wielding a long iron spear above his head. He threw it at a concrete slab, screaming: ‘Bali has already been destroyed. It will make no difference if we raze this prison to the ground.’ In nearby streets, it was chaos. Traffic was gridlocked. Police had shut all roads leading to the jail. Local traders had also shut up shop, fearing an escalation of violence. But the insanity outside had instilled a calm within Hotel K. Prisoners sat listening to the stones crashing onto the roof and the screams of the protesters, desperately hoping they’d break down the front wall and create an easy escape route. They were ready to run. Some had even packed their bags.

But it wasn’t to be. The riot fired for two hours and then fizzled out. The Balinese police boss knew the hypnotic power of music for his people and when he finally got the
gamelan
troupes to stop playing, the emotional tension instantly vanished. Protesters soon dispersed, leaving behind a demolished fence and gate, and a single banner flapping on a pole with the poignant message. ‘Hello SBY [Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono]. Kill the person who has hurt Bali [Amrozi].’

‘It is a natural response from a wounded community that has been treated insensitively by the central government. In fact, it is a mild response compared to the anger that is seething in our hearts,’ a protest leader Madra Adnyana said.

–
Jakarta Post
, 13 October 2005

But their protest had missed its mark. The death row trio had been smuggled out of Hotel K wearing black hoods and hustled into armoured cars, a day earlier. Police were aware that the protest outside Hotel K was planned and had feared a security nightmare on the anniversary. An entourage of two hundred police armed with machine guns escorted the hooded men to the tourist island’s main airport in Denpasar. They were immediately put on a police charter flight to Cilicap, a Muslim-dominated coastal town. Then, from the small local harbour, they took a final ten-minute boat ride across the water to their new home, the notorious penal colony Nusakambangan. Dubbed Indonesia’s Alcatraz, it was a bushy, sun-kissed tropical island with a nasty scar of seven maximum-security prisons stretching along its coastal road.

The terrorists spent another three years living on Nusakambangan while their lawyers appealed. Throughout these years, the celebrity terrorists were permitted to do many more press and television interviews, spreading their twisted ideals, including holding a press conference close to the end. Then finally, one night six years after the Kuta blasts, thirty paramilitary police masked in black balaclavas entered their death row cells, shackled the three hand and foot, and led them shuffling out of the jail to waiting trucks. Separately, they were driven three kilometres in convoy to a clearing. There they were tied to wooden posts several metres apart, with Amrozi in the middle. They were then shot dead.

The explosive bang of thirty-six simultaneous shots, fired by three teams of twelve specially trained shooters, echoed across Nusakambangan. The sound of the bullets that pierced the terrorists’ hearts sent shivers down the spines of at least one hundred and sixteen prisoners in Indonesia’s jails, who were threatened with the same fate. Hundreds of kilometres away in Bali, it was an icy reality check for three young Australians and a Nigerian who were living under the shadow of death in Hotel K. The execution line was moving. Australian death row inmate Scott Rush was shocked.

Honestly, I didn’t think they were going to and then, just all of a sudden, bang, they’ve done it. Like, they talk about it, they talk about it, they move them, they’re not going to do it and then one day it just comes up. You know. Like they’re not going to do it when they say they are and then they just surprise them. I watched it on TV. I had to see it to believe it.

Was it a feeling of, as long as they don’t shoot them, I am safe?

Yeah, kind of.

– Scott

Another death row inmate at Hotel K, Nigerian Emmanuel, was similarly shaken.

Every day for five days before they killed them, water was coming out from my eyes. I wasn’t crying, it was just water coming from my eyes from morning to night. But as soon as they killed them, it stopped. On Sunday this water stopped from my eyes. I don’t know exactly why. I knew something was wrong. But I didn’t know what.

– Emmanuel

Kerobokan is drugs paradise. Drugs all the time. No special time for drugs. Drugs twenty-four hours. You smoke cigarette, you smoke
shabu.
The party was daily. Every single day right after lunch we’d sit outside and get pissed, those who want to smoke
shabu,
smoke
shabu,
those who want to use smack, use smack. That’s on a daily basis.

– Ruggiero

They will never stop drugs, impossible. It’s a free market. Everybody is smoking
shabu
in almost every room.

– Den

Honestly, Kerobokan is full of drugs. The dealers are working with the prison guards, that’s Indonesia.

– Saidin

French inmate Filo was throwing a drugs party in his cell at 4 pm. The Frenchman was as famous for his off-the-wall party antics as for his blue room blow jobs. At a party a few weeks earlier, he’d set fire to the bare skin of English inmate Steve, sending him to casualty with third-degree burns and all of the other partying inmates to cell
tikus
. Today, to make it up to Steve and his other friends, Filo had invited them to a celebration of his birthday. He had two bags of drugs to share – one bag of smack and one of coke. Several of his friends were now walking across the jail to his cellblock, Block B. It was time to party. It would end with a bang.

When Brazilian Ruggiero turned up first, Filo held up two bags of white powder, one in each hand. ‘Smack or coke?’ he asked. Ruggiero didn’t do heroin, so opted for coke. Filo dropped one of the bags on the table, and hid the other in a small compartment he’d carved into a step in case guards showed up. He then got down to business, chopping several lines on a CD cover. Ruggiero sprang from the bed as soon as he finished and quickly inhaled a line through a straw. Instantly he felt an excruciating pain in his head and slid down the wall to the floor. Several other western inmates had turned up, but no-one noticed Ruggiero’s unusual behaviour. They were too busy taking their own turns to snort.

As more westerners walked across to Block B, a couple of guards noticed the convergence and headed the same way, guessing the foreigners were up to something. The guards reached the cell at the same time as Australian inmate Mick, who was too late now to join the party. The cell door was being held shut by a German inmate, Joachim, to keep guards out, while French inmate Michael, Englishman Steve and Filo snorted lines. Ruggiero was still slumped against the wall, feeling worse. He was shaking his head and making strange noises, trying to clear the haze closing in around him. Still none of the others noticed, too preoccupied by doing lines and then dashing across to hold the door to keep the guards out, taking it in turns like it was a party game.