Hotel Kerobokan (28 page)

– Juri

Most afternoons, the westerners would gather on the grass outside their blocks, drinking beer, smoking dope and listening to techno music on a portable CD player. Mick would play with an inmate’s pet musang (a small cat-like animal), blowing dope in its face to get it stoned; Juri would sleep in the sun after smoking smack in his cell; Ruggiero would drink beers and cook up a barbecue for everyone, pulling beers out of his crate and passing them around. ‘Do you want any drugs?’ he usually asked his guests. ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t mind a line of coke’, they would say. Ruggiero enjoyed playing host, often taking out his guitar and singing. Scottish sailor Robert would usually be passed out drunk on the concrete bench or retelling his story about losing his ship on the China Seas. One of Arman’s boys would walk around selling ecstasy pills from a plastic bag in his pocket, with most digging into their pockets or taking a credit note to buy one or two.

American big-wave surfer Gabriel was often drunk and high, and would sit around in his bright pink hibiscus-flowered surf shorts and metallic blue sunglasses, with his wavy, long sunbleached hair hanging down his bare back. He sat with his phone in one hand, a beer in the other and a cigarette dangling from his lips. This was a typical wasted afternoon.

But, in an instant, a relaxed day could turn very tense. One afternoon, the Kerobokan crew was lounging about in the sun when Mick caught a glimpse of Gabriel up in the watchtower. They all turned to see him sitting up there in his blue sunglasses, drinking a can of beer. Freedom was just a jump away. A sudden energy and excitement rippled through the group. But they all bet the American wouldn’t have the guts to do it.

Gabriel had been mulling over his escape plan for several days. He could just walk through a hole in the inner wall, climb up into the watchtower and jump. It was easy. But the plan would only be viable until the hole in the wall was filled. It had crumbled a few days earlier at the spot where the guard who smuggled in
arak
had dug a small tunnel under the fence to pull the plastic bags of booze through. Torrential tropical rains had washed away more soil, turning the tunnel into a ravine, and causing the old concrete wall above it to collapse – not for the first or the last time. In a snap decision that afternoon, Gabriel had thrown a few things into a little black backpack, torn two sheets off his bed, walked through the hole in the wall, and across the snake-riddled grass and up into the unused watch-tower.

We call it the monkey post. If the guards hear this, they don’t like it. But it’s what prisoners call it. It’s mostly empty. The guards don’t sit in the watchtowers, they sit near the kitchen playing cards or drinking, passing the time
.

– Thomas

Had Gabriel not been so high and drunk, he might have had second thoughts about his escape plan, particularly as he had only five months left to serve. But in his addled state of mind, he made a decision he’d live to regret. He finished four cans of Bintang beer while he waited for two men lingering on the street below to disappear. When they moved he was ready to fly. He abseiled down the two bedsheets he had tied to a concrete post on the tower. When he hit the ground, he tore down the sheets, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and started walking up the road. With his dark sunglasses, his pink hibiscus-patterned surf shorts and his long hair, he looked more like a tourist than a Hotel K escapee. But before he could hail a taxi, freedom was snatched from him.

A mob of twenty Laskars, guards and local prisoners had seen him escaping and left the jail to chase him up the road. One prisoner tore around the corner on a motorbike and aimed it straight at Gabriel, hitting him hard and knocking him flying into a rice field. The prisoner dropped his bike, ran over to Gabriel and started kicking him in the guts. Within moments, they had circled the American and were viciously kicking and punching him. Gabriel didn’t stand a chance. Typically, the Balinese were fighting in a pack. All he could do was shield his head with his arms. By the time they dragged him back down the road and into Hotel K, he was barely conscious and had deep bloody gashes on his head and face.

Laskar, guards, people in the street – they were all bashing him. You know how it is in Bali; when they catch a thief, they all beat him up until he dies, then throw him in the garbage truck. They are mean people. They are cowards. If I fight with someone and I have a friend who wants to join me, I say, ‘No, I fight one on one’. Not two on one. They fight as many as possible against one
.

– Ruggiero

On the way inside with Gabriel, the group pushed past Juri’s mum, who had arrived for a visit, giving her a nasty shock when she saw the familiar face of her son’s cellmate covered in blood. It was a stark reminder of where her youngest child was living. In the blue room, visitors and prisoners had watched the flurry as the mob had sprinted from all directions across the jail to the front door and out into the street. Brazilian Ruggiero had run towards the front door too and had seen them carrying his long-time friend inside. He trailed behind as the Laskars took Gabriel through the blue room and into the security boss’s office, where they threw him down on the tiled floor. Gabriel lay motionless, slipping in and out of consciousness as they continued attacking him; beating him with a stick, kicking and punching him. Ruggiero stood near the door, catching glimpses of the vicious attack and becoming more and more agitated and distressed.

His head was broken and they would come and kick his head. Then this one guy, this motherfucker who smoked so much
shabu
his eyes don’t focus, has an iron hammer and he bangs the soul of his feet and his anklebone. A kind of little torture. It was too much. I couldn’t stay still anymore. I went in the room and said, ‘Motherfucker, you have to hit me too’. Then they pushed me out. But they didn’t touch me. They broke his anklebone. They are mean people, they are very mean
.

– Ruggiero

The atmosphere in the blue room was tense and excited. People were standing up and looking through the windows into the room where Gabriel was being attacked. They could hear screams, thumping and whacking. It was not done covertly. When prisoners left the blue room to go back to their blocks, they walked right past the wide-open door, and could see Gabriel sprawled on the floor being bashed with short iron bars.

It was a vicious beating. The inmates knew it might not stop until Gabriel was dead. The mob wouldn’t mean to kill him, but most were high on ice so wouldn’t know when to stop. Gabriel needed outside help fast. Foreigners had consulates and this was exactly when they called on them. Ruggiero and Mick both phoned the US Embassy for help, telling them to come quickly. Within fifteen minutes the consul arrived, marching angrily into the room. He was suddenly in the line of fire, getting punched, until they realised who he was. Schapelle convinced the Block W guards to let her go to the canteen to buy a bottle of Fanta. She took a detour to peek into the room. Gabriel was in a terrible state, unconscious and bleeding on the floor. The consul was still being pushed and shoved, arguing that Gabriel had to be taken to hospital. The guards were refusing to allow it. Schapelle raced back to Block W and phoned her sister, Mercedes, asking her to call the Red Cross and the Australian Consulate, fast.

The US consul kept arguing with the Laskars and guards, and eventually they agreed to allow Gabriel to go to hospital. None of Gabriel’s mates knew if he would survive the night.

His escape plan was totally fucked. He saw the wall was down and a couple of days before he went, he said to me, ‘I’m going to go, man, look, the wall is down, you can get out’. I said, ‘Okay, man, I hope you do it’. But it was 1 pm … full traffic on the roads and he jumps from the wall. He just decided to go, he was off his face
.

– Ruggiero

Gabriel was a 42-year-old American building contractor, who had moved to Bali to enjoy surfing and partying. Every day he rode the waves, high on heroin. It was a perfect Bali life for him, until one afternoon when the police raided his villa, and found sixty grams of smack hidden in his wetsuit and a gram of cocaine in his underpants. Gabriel didn’t stop the partying lifestyle in Hotel K. He lived in an alcohol and drug fuelled haze, addicted to smack and falling into spiralling debt. Blue room drug sales earned him a bit of cash, but he mostly relied on his mum in California for handouts. But she had suddenly cut off the cash flow when she learned Gabriel was using it for drugs. Arman called in his credit; Gabriel couldn’t pay. He was being threatened. He was desperate. His mum wouldn’t send more money; his lacklustre escape attempt had been a stunt to rattle her so that she would send more cash. It worked. She did. But he hadn’t anticipated that the price he would pay would be a vicious attack, or that they would shave off the long hair he’d had for twenty-five years.

After a few hours in hospital having his wounds stitched up, Gabriel was sent straight back to Hotel K and thrown into a tower isolation cell. On her way across the jail to church, early the next morning, Schapelle could hear Gabriel’s faint moans and calls for help. She was being escorted by guards, so could do nothing. On her way back, Gabriel was quiet. Schapelle looked at the ground, trying to be inconspicuous, as she loudly called out to him that she was trying to get help for him. Later she organised a little care package and sent it to him via a prisoner, with a small note saying that she was praying for him.

Gabriel’s leap from the tower was costly for the other western men. In a security crackdown that lasted several months, all western men were moved into the same block, and locked in their cells all day. Their only outings were for visits, or to have a sneaky twenty minutes in the sun if they paid the right guard. Gabriel’s escape had been embarrassing for Hotel K, particularly as it had come only two months after the Taiwanese inmate, Tommy, had escaped.

The wall also had to be fixed and the westerners were asked to pay for it, like they paid for most things, even the septic tank being emptied.

They are crazy. They want me to pay for something that holds me in, stops me going free. The guys who came around asking had balls. They also wanted us to pay to put more barbed wire around our block. ‘You guys pay for the barbed wire.’ ‘Yeah, kiss my arse.’

– Ruggiero

For months the gaping hole in the maximum-security jail’s inner wall was covered by tacked-up sheets of metal. A murderer ran to freedom through the wall a couple of months after Gabriel’s failed escape attempt.

A convict at Kerobokan Prison, Rudi Setyawan, who was serving an 11-year sentence for murder, escaped yesterday at around 3.30 pm through the prison’s southern wall that collapsed last year. ‘The wall was temporarily covered with sheet metal material. After he managed to sneak out of his block, he headed towards the temporary wall and ran away,’ said Prison boss Bromo. ‘We hope to find him,’ he stressed
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–
Denpost
, 19 March 2005

The locals often found ways to escape over the walls or under them, through sewerage drains. But most were recaptured within hours, often in brothels or their family villages, and were sent back to Hotel K and brutally bashed.

A Kerobokan prisoner, Ketut Agus Suarjana, 28, was caught by prison guards yesterday after enjoying 13 hours of freedom. Agus was thought to have escaped at 5.30 am and was caught at [6.30 pm] when he was about to cross a road near a shopping complex in Denpasar. According to a source in prison, Ketut Agus Suarjana escaped after climbing a wall near the emergency gate using a rope and black cloth tied together
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–
Denpost
, June 2002

Another inmate climbed over the wall, using a bamboo pole with grooves for footholds. He was caught as soon as he landed outside, and suffered the same fate as Gabriel. He was dragged past inmates and visitors, including Schapelle and her sister, Mercedes, in the busy blue room, in soiled underpants, with bloody welts across his back and with a shattered, bleeding nose. The prospect of escape was not worth it unless the plan was foolproof. But the lure of freedom was strong.

Escape was something every westerner daydreamed about for a while. Schapelle visualised a helicopter flying over Hotel K, dangling a swing that would scoop her up and take her home. Mick’s vision was a bit more realistic. He imagined sawing through the bars, pole-vaulting the wall, and riding on a motorbike into the Balinese sunset. He got as far as having a blade brought inside the prison in a French breadstick.

But foreigners rarely actually tried to escape. They were aware of the brutal consequences if they didn’t make it. Local inmates, many of whom hated and were jealous of the westerners, were quick to seize on the chance to bash them if they saw them trying to escape. If westerners did escape, life afterwards would never be free. They would be fugitives, running, looking over their shoulder, unable to see their families. Most inmates longed for the day they’d walk free; anyone with money never stopped trying to do deals, to work the system to find loopholes to slide through to get out early. The quest for freedom was part of life. Many spent years convinced they were going to go free in a month or two.

Clinging to hopes of imminent release was the way many survived. If they imagined truly being stuck in Hotel K for fifteen or twenty years, or for life, they would go crazy. But the hope wasn’t merely wild fantasy. It was often realistic. Unlike most countries, where an inmate’s sentence was set, no-one really knew how long they would serve in Indonesia. The system of twice-yearly remissions for good behaviour was erratic. For a sling of cash, an inmate could sometimes get six months slashed in a year. In Indonesia, where killers often walked free after two or three years, anything was possible.

Sentences could be radically cut. Juri’s was reduced from life to fifteen years. Frenchman Michael’s was cut from life to twenty years. Sentencing could also mysteriously be changed in the paperwork. Englishman Steve Turner waved a $35,000 wand to magically convert his six-year sentence into three years. The judges publicly sentenced him to six years, while quietly writing three years in the official paperwork. This avoided questions being raised over why he was doing three years for possession of thousands of ecstasy tablets, while poor locals routinely served four years for possession of one or two. Gabriel’s eight-year sentence was cut to two years and Argentinean Frederico’s from five years to two in their court papers before they reached Hotel K. Everyone’s sentence was potentially pliable. This gave even those on life and death sentences something to cling to – the hope that the prison doors could suddenly swing open and set them free.