Hotel Kerobokan (19 page)

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Jakarta Post
, March 2002

For those involved in the drug business, it became an addiction to the game, the money and the buzz. It was worth the risks and the inevitable jail time. Most of the high rollers in Hotel K had done time before. Just as being inside didn’t stop them playing, the moment they were released, they were back at it again outside. Iwan, Arman, Thomas and Nitahad all been jailed more than once. Arman’s convictions also kept multiplying while he was in jail. Nita was re-arrested for dealing only weeks after her release, while she was waitingin immigration housing for her passport so she could be deported. Nita was about to go home – go free. Instead, she went straight back to jail. With no cash left to make deals, she got a further ten years. She was suicidal, and for weeks didn’t leave her cell in Block B. But when she started coping again, she also started selling again.

Thomas had returned for his second stint in Hotel K after ten years of business in a snakes and ladders-style drug dealing career; climbing, and then spiralling down to rock bottom, rolling the dice on his fate every day. After he was freed from Hotel K in the early 1990s, he was deported, like all non-Indonesian ex-cons, and his passport was red stamped so he couldn’t return. He chose to fly to Bangkok rather than back home to Austria, and spent a few weeks networking. He bought a false German passport and then flew straight back to Indonesia. There he embarked on a life of constantly moving around to stay under the radar and invisible to police as he built a drug cartel that would, at one point, dictate the price of heroin in Jakarta.

Thomas had started his drug career in Austria during his teenage years, riding trains to Italy to buy a hundred grams of hashish to sell and smoke with his friends while they drove around to discos in the small farming village where he lived with his grandparents. ‘I was already a little bit naughty when I was young.’ By the time he was sixteen years old, he was smoking heroin, hashish and marijuana. By nineteen, he was facing a drug charge, but left Austria to begin a backpacking trip before it went to court. He flew to India and made Asia his new home. He dabbled in various businesses, but the drug trade was the one that would consume his life.

Soon after leaving Austria, he met an English woman in Bali who was ten years older than him. They had a child together, and both worked for an export company, sourcing clothes, statues, wood carvings and masks to send to England to be sold at North London’s Camden market. Although Bali was their base, Thomas and his girlfriend were gypsies, endlessly moving between India, Nepal, Thailand and Bali. They used drugs regularly, and Thomas always flew with a smorgasbord of hash, dope and smack for their enjoyment, preferring to buy in Bangkok.

I didn’t want to buy drugs in Indonesia at that time because it was always a little bit dangerous. Bangkok was very open. Everyone was using, tourists very openly using
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How did you carry the drugs on the plane?

I put it in my arse. At this time, it was not for business or anything. Only was fun and enjoy. I just pack in plastic and put some cream or something and push it up. When you first put it inside, you can feel it moving up, but automatically it goes right up and you can’t feel it anymore. It’s a safe way to carry
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After, I start getting to know people in Bali and start to bring maybe fifty gram, one hundred gram from Bangkok to Bali to try selling. This time I would eat it because it was too much to put up my arse. I first swallowed with water because I didn’t know. But you cannot use water because your stomach is too full. You squash some banana and roll plastic ball of heroin in it so it’s a bit slippery. Some use yoghurt, some use banana or something like that
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Actually, only two, three times I eat it myself. But when the business started to work, I didn’t want to bring it myself anymore. So my friend in Bangkok buys the goods for me, and arranges a carrier for me. Mostly at this time I used Bali people
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I used other people to do the packing. This is their specialist job. You use fine sandwich plastic from the supermarket and put one and a half spoonfuls of heroin on the plastic, and fold it many times. It can’t be rough. If one packet opens, you die. Then you use a cigarette lighter to melt it shut so it can’t fall out. If you burn the plastic too much it turns black; sometimes this makes people feel sick and vomit. But if it’s packed well, it doesn’t make you feel like vomiting
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If they start to vomit, it’s difficult to eat any more. You have to stop. You can’t keep going. And if a courier can’t eat a minimum of five or six hundred grams, they can’t go because it is not worth the trip for such a small amount. They have to start again. So you wait until it comes out the next day, and eat it again. Maybe delayed two days
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I had one woman – she could eat only about three hundred grams. She could not eat more. But she wanted to go and we had already bought her ticket. Money alreadyspent, so we put in her bra and we put inside her. She can’t eat much but she makes it even by putting it elsewhere. They must carry six hundred and fifty grams minimum. I had maybe five or six women. One actually was good, she can eat a lot and she put inside and she was big inside. Was good
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Does the courier wash it before giving it to you?

Yeah! Expensive shit!

– Thomas

To safely move his drugs from Bangkok to Indonesia, Thomas used professionals, preferring to use Balinese, African and Nepalese people, who he found could usually swallow large amounts. Thomas built up his drug cartel over five years after his first stint in Hotel K, and climbed to the top of the lucrative drug business in Jakarta, doing incredibly well financially.

Maybe every month I sold five or six kilograms of heroin. I made $90,000, $100,000 a month, so I live well. I had good life. I couldn’t use all the money. I could do whatever I wanted to do and the money still wasn’t finished. You can eat what you want, you can buy what you want but still you have money left for savings
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– Thomas

Thomas decided to plan for his future and invested his vast amounts of cash. He flew to Singapore with $100,000 in his money belt, mostly in Singapore’s top $10,000 notes to avoid a bulky stash. The first bank, wary of laundering dirty cash, knocked him back, but he easily opened an account in a Chinese bank, using his false passport. Then every few months his girlfriend would fly to Singapore to top up their savings and enjoy a bit of luxuryshopping. By the time Thomas was arrested next, he had saved nearly half a million dollars and was well on his way to securing his financial future.

I was thinking, okay, I want to put one million dollars in overseas saving account in pound sterling – this time was about four per cent interest, $2300 interesta month for my security. I never wanted to buy car and house. To stay in one place, for me wasn’t good. Two or three months, I change. So I was thinking it’s better to put money in the bank – one million. This is my security. I thought, maybe if they don’t catch me I work only five, six months more. And after that I thought, maybe I start to make anotherbusiness – maybe driving a taxi
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– Thomas

Thomas was always careful not to be too flashy, but had bought himself a gold Cartier watch worth $30,000. When this watch was stolen, it could well have been an omen that the good life was about to come to an end for him.

My $30,000 Cartier watch was stolen in Bangkok by a Pakistani friend who I’d known for seven or eight years, who came to my home nearly every day. I take a shower in the hotel, I put the watch on the bed, one gold ring on the bed, and when I come out he was gone
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– Thomas

Thomas was wealthy, but he was living off his wits. The dice were always rolling. He had become accustomed to living on the run, always looking over his shoulder, using his instincts to evade police and moving fast when he felt the need. When his cartel was at itspeak, he sensed it was necessary to get out of Indonesia and lie low in Bangkok for a bit. It was nothing specific, just a sense that things were a bit hot. But he didn’t act on it. Hehesitated. He was waiting on a delivery from his Nepalese courier, Buddhi, who had just flown in from Bangkok to Jakarta with a kilogram of heroin inside him.

It was a routine delivery. Buddhi breezed through customs, checked into a random cheap hotel and phoned its name through to Bangkok, doing everything by the book for his usual $500 fee. Thomas called Bangkok for the hotel name and then phoned Buddhi. He still hadn’t expelled all the capsules, so Thomas arranged to pick them up around midday the next day, to give him time to pass the capsules of heroin and wash off the shit.

Pretty disgusting job, isn’t it? Yeah, but money doesn’t smell
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– Thomas

Meanwhile, a Chinese drug customer, David, was impatiently waiting for his smack order. Thomas broke a cardinal rule. He told him that at that moment his boy was in the hotel waiting to excrete the heroin and, in a costly slip of the tongue, named the hotel. His timing couldn’t have been worse. Later that night, David was arrested with fifty grams of heroin. In trying to save himself, he gave up Thomas, supplying his home address and, most crucially, the sitting duck – the Nepalese boy waiting in the hotel. Police raided the hotel and arrested Buddhi, who instantly admitted that the heroin was for his boss, Thomas, not for himself.

At 6 am the next day, several Jakarta drug police went to Thomas’s house, and set up a sting to get inside. Another one of his customers had been caught with a small amount of heroin and she had also told police that Thomas was her dealer. Police used her to knock on his door to lure him out. The moment he opened the door, police pounced. They charged in and tore his house apart. But, as usual, Thomas kept very little stuff near him. Police uncovered only twelve grams of heroin, but also seized an incriminating $80,000 in cash. Thomas tried to negotiate. ‘How about we split the cash? And don’t write any investigation.’ They cops weren’t interested. ‘Okay, you take it all, take the 130 million but don’t write it,’ he urged. ‘No, not possible,’ they said. Thomas knew he needed to cut a deal fast or he’d have big problems. ‘Okay, I give you 200 million.’ ‘No, not possible.’ ‘Okay, how much you need?’ ‘Not possible.’

Thomas was unaware that Buddhi was in custody and had pointed the finger at him. The Jakarta police boss had ordered his arrest. The case was already too big for these low-ranking officers to take his money, no matter how much they wanted to. But a knock-back in the first instance didn’t necessarily end negotiations. In fact, it was just the start. It simply meant that Thomas would need to deal with the police superiors – and splash a lot more cash.

He hired the most expensive and the best lawyer around, whose non-negotiable start-up fee was $60,000. He was former president Suharto’s family lawyer, and was used by Bali’s former governor ‘Mr OK’ to exonerate him of corruption charges. This lawyer was known as a magician who could create life-saving magic, coming up with masterful ways to get his clients off the hook. He would always find some slippery little loophole for them to slide through. He found one for Thomas.

The Nepalese boy, the Chinese man and the lady all knew him as ‘Thomas’. But he was not ‘Thomas’. By this time he had switched from using his German passport to using a false English passport and having a new stolen identity. He was now Richard Edward Crawley. In one masterstroke, the lawyer had come up with the perfect way for the judge to drop the charges against Thomas for Buddhi’s one kilogram of heroin, and the other two customers’ grams, without red-flagging a bribe. The judge convicted and sentenced Thomas, or Richard Edward Crawley, to only eight months for the twelve grams they found at his home. Cash had saved Thomas from a life sentence, or even the death penalty. But the lawyer’s fees and bribe money blew out his million-dollar dream.

If you have big problem, you need big money. I had to pay about $240,000 but I got only eight months for over a kilogram of heroin. I paid it to [my lawyer] and he paid it to the judge, the prosecutors and the police. He was a middleman. But by myself I can’t contact the same way a good lawyer can do it. I never could have done it by myself, even with money. I couldn’t have done it
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If it’s too exposed, the judges and prosecutors are afraid. You can’t talk too much. Newspaper and TV people came, but I sat in court hunched over with my head down. I didn’t want them to take photos of me; I didn’t want to talk to them, so the judge will not be afraid to deal. I knew if I had money I could pay, no problem, but only if you shut up, you’re quiet and in court you’re nice, polite to them. And hopefully they will receive your money, and they will help you, hopefully no problems. In the process, less you talk, less risk, more possibilities
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– Thomas

His Nepalese courier, Buddhi, wasn’t so fortunate. He was sentenced to thirteen years jail, but riskily appealed and got life. He started his sentence in the notorious Cipinang Jail, where Thomas was also incarcerated. But Buddhi was then moved to Nusakambangan Island, and shared his days with hundreds of international drug bosses and drug couriers, including one of the most notorious: a black African man nicknamed ‘Doctor’, who got caught at an airport carrying a dead baby stuffed with heroin.

The Cartier gold watch was long gone as Thomas sat crammed into one of Cipinang Jail’s isolation cells for the first three months of his eight-month sentence. It was smaller in length than a bathtub and he couldn’t straighten his legs out properly. There were no breaks outside and no facilities to wash himself, only a guard occasionally spraying a hose through the door. After twelve weeks, he was moved out of isolation and into a small cell tightly packed with fourteen prisoners.

For the entire eight months, Thomas slept on concrete, which turned the skin on his hips and shoulders black. His body was also covered in weeping sores, a problem shared by all fourteen cellmates, and he scratched at a painfully itchy rash twenty-four hours a day. Several times the guards had viciously bashed him for as little as giving an insolent glance in their direction. With 3000 skinny and often heroin-addicted inmates loitering aimlessly around, the Cipinang yards resembled a concentration camp. Fortunately for him, Thomas was only doing eight months.