Hotel Kerobokan (30 page)

– Mick

The westerners regularly fought with each other, although the fights often finished as quickly as they started. Robert was constantly being belted by someone for yelling, ‘Fucking idiot, fucking idiot!’ like a drunk parrot. Thomas and Gabriel brawled over unpaid smack bills. Mick beat up English Steve and threatened French Michael for not paying money they both owed Thomas for smack, because Thomas owed Mick. Michael’s mum paid the bill and there were no hard feelings.

One afternoon, a blind-drunk Ruggiero sprinted up to Mick, who was sitting on the grass, quietly drawing, to try out a JiuJitsu kick. Mick saw the skinny Brazilian coming at him, and at the last second stuck out his leg, sending him flying.

He always wanted to practise his Jiu-Jitsu. Some people already had a headache with it; they didn’t want any more of his fucking practice
.

– Thomas

I was always out of my head, I was always drunk. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t want to feel anything. I was numb. I didn’t give a fuck anymore
.

– Ruggiero

It was an international mental institution
.

– Mick

Their aggression was a result of frustration, the claustrophobic lifestyle, and the sense of injustice that many felt. But it was exacerbated by the poison they drank every day, like it was water. They had discovered that rapist Garen, who was the main
arak
dealer and who got supplies from the guards, mixed it with methanol and crushed mosquito coils to give it extra kick.

There was a rapist called Garen, a rapist who was like a celebrity. In my country, a rapist cannot leave his cell because people kill him. Not here. He was a disgusting fat guy. He was the one inside selling
arak.
He mixed it with burning mosquito coil and methanol. We drank two or three bottles every day. I didn’t know it was mosquito coil, I found out after. You can’t see green pieces inside. I just knew that I wanted to fight with everyone
.

– Ruggiero

Some westerners tried doing something useful during their endless days. Mick painted pictures for French Michael’s mum to sell, and Ruggiero wrote and sent emails on his laptop at night, and was also studying Buddhism, which was slowly helping him to manage his fiery temper. Robert was an engineer by profession, and in the mornings, before he started drinking, did electrical wiring jobs around the jail. Many of the men played tennis. Several of the Bali Nine prisoners, including those on death row, played for hours every day in the hot sun. Bali Nine boss Myuran Sukumaran sometimes employed a tennis coach to come inside and give him lessons. Hotel K opened its doors to the media for a couple of days, for a tennis match between westerners – the aim being to present Hotel K as a humane rehabilitation facility. Afterwards, Australian Scott was told by the guards to talk to the journalists. So, with his cap on back to front, and looking more like Lleyton Hewitt than a death row inmate, he talked to an excited scrum of reporters and cameramen.

After I finished my tennis match, I felt really funny – like a celebrity, kind of – because after you finish a tennis match, you feel good with yourself. I was glad with the way I played, anyway. Then someone came up to me with a microphone, and then the guard made me speak to them even though I didn’t really want to
.

– Scott, death row inmate

The struggle to have some semblance of a normal life was constant. Juri was looking down a long dark tunnel of life behind bars when he proposed to his Timorese girlfriend, Ade. They had been together for years before Juri’s arrest, and were still in love and going strong. So, Ade agreed to have her wedding in Hotel K.

Like most weddings, it took a lot of organising, although choosing the venue was easy. Their wedding planner was Alit Balong, one of the Laskar bosses, who walked around Hotel K in traditional Balinese dress and carrying a machete. If the westerners wanted something done, they could pay Alit a fee and he could usually do it. He had keys to the blocks, sold crates of beer and Coca-Cola from his cell, and could organise for male inmates to have visits with female inmates. Juri’s family bought all the wedding food and drink from him.

Just pay him and he can do whatever he wants
.

– Juri

Juri and Ade had invited more than one hundred guests, including western inmates and family. Most of the Kerobokan crew came, including several of the Bali Nine, Schapelle, and French Michael and his mum, Helene. The Laskars took charge of security to keep uninvited guests out of the cordoned-off garden area.

Ade’s dress and Juri’s suit were both designed and cut in Italy, and made from Italian raw silk. Juri’s two older sisters and both his parents were excited that the only boy in the family was getting married. Juri’s parents spent a fortune trying to give their son and his bride the perfect wedding, despite its grim location. They would have done anything to give their son some happiness.

That marriage was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. The best man was Steve. I think he and Juri smoked about a gram of smack before they went to the altar … and they were falling over. And, besides this smack, Steve liked to squash Xanax pills and mix with the smack, and sniff together
.

– Ruggiero

As the vows were read at the altar of the prison’s Christian church, with Ade in her white meringue-style silk dress and Juri in a silk suit and tie, best man Steve lolled around like a rag doll, only standing because Ruggiero was gripping the waist of his trousers.

I held him so he could stand up. But I let go and he fell. Juri was destroyed. They were full on smack. And best man Steve was sweating. But we were all having a great time. It was real comic theatre. Robert was drunk, pissed
.

And then comes the priest, and everybody was sweating and the father of one of the Aussie kids taking photos. And then, okay, now the ring, but Steve couldn’t find it. I say, ‘Find the ring, man’. ‘I’m sure I had it here,’ he says. Eventually, he finds it
.

Then there was a new guy who had just arrived there, Simon – a Dutch guy. He had a very nice girlfriend. He had just arrived in jail and was a very horny bastard. While the wedding was going on, they busted him shagging another inmate in the toilet
.

I said, ‘Man, I have to give you a medal because it took me one year before I could lay my hands on a lady here. You’ve been here one week, already shagging at the wedding inside the fucking toilet’
.

How did they catch him?

One of the guards wanted to take a leak. Knocking on the door, saying, ‘Come on,’ and then he heard some noise. He didn’t see the guards coming. But then everything was arranged; he gave the guard 150,000 rupiah
.

– Ruggiero

It’s like a dog kennel. I have never experienced anything like it. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy
.

– Chris, inmate

It’s like we are always dancing on razor blades
.

– Mick

The human spirit somehow adapts to the most extreme situations and people can endure hardships that once would have seemed inconceivable. Being locked up in a small cell for fourteen hours a day – day after day, week after week, month after month – with people you don’t much like or trust, is a nightmare that none of the westerners in Hotel K could ever have been prepared for.

After Gabriel’s botched escape attempt, the westerners were all put in cells together to increase the security. Scotsman Robert, Austrian Thomas and Australians Chris and Mick were moved into Room 13 in Block B – a drunk, a junkie, an ice freak and an angry madman.

In Room 13, the four westerners fought tirelessly – they stole from, drugged, bashed and abused each other. Every night, the cell erupted with battles, but the arguments died down just as quickly as they had started. The inmates could share a joint amicably, despite having been screaming abuse or throwing punches thirty minutes earlier. They didn’t hate each other. They were just four men who were squeezed together in a tiny concrete cell for fourteen hours a day.

The cell, including the toilet area, was about four metres by three metres, and the men had to be creative to fit into it. They slept on three levels – Chris on the top bunk; Mick in the prize position, on the bottom bunk next to a small barred window; and Robert on the floor. He’d drawn the short straw. Most of his mattress was directly underneath the bottom bunk, with the end poking out at the foot of Mick’s bed to give Robert a bit of headroom. Thomas also slept on the floor, at a right angle to the others, with the edges of his and Robert’s pillows touching. During the day, Thomas’s mattress was pushed up on its side against the wall, to clear the doorway.

When Mick, clutching an armful of his belongings, first arrived at his new cell on the afternoon of Gabriel’s escape, he looked around and felt sickened by the filthy concrete box.

It was a pig house. Very dirty; the bathroom was so black, you think you’re still in darkness, with thirty years of shit dried on the floor. Local guys had lived there before and they never clean. They live like that. It was maybe not cleaned for thirty years. It stank worse than shit
.

– Mick

Mick still couldn’t comprehend how his life had spiralled into such a dark hole, so far from his former life in Sydney. He’d driven a Mercedes, lived on the beach in Maroubra and regularly dined at Sydney’s top restaurants. He had worked hard creating a lucrative smash repairs business, sold it because of his bad lungs, and invested his cash in uncut Australian opals. He was selling them in Japan and Singapore, staying in five-star hotels in Asia and building a holiday house in Bali when he was arrested for possession of drugs.

He spent hours down on his hands and knees in Room 13, scrubbing the slimy floor and scraping the black gunk and dried shit off the toilet, using the only cleaning product he had access to – laundry detergent. After a couple of days, he gave cash to Juri’s father to buy him bleach and disinfectant, and eventually the grime vanished and the foul stink faded. Mick also organised for the dirty-grey whitewashed walls to be freshly painted, white tiles to be laid on the bathroom floor and a new toilet to be installed. Killer Saidin did the ceramics jobs around Hotel K, but was so busy that he deputised his boys to do the job, charging Mick about $100. Mick also had a slim wooden cabinet custom-built in Iwan’s workshop that would hold food, books, a TV and DVD player. By cleaning up the filth in Room 13, he was trying to salvage a little dignity and avoid sickness.

Westerners usually put some effort into sprucing up their grim cells, which suited the guards – it gave them another business, of selling the best cells. Often, as soon as a renovation was finished, the guards threatened to move the westerner unless they paid to stay. Guards also charged new prisoners extra cash to be put into a renovated cell. It was fast, easy money, as westerners almost always found hundreds of dollars to avoid the grime-covered, shit-splattered cells.

They use us … they put us in shit room and every time they move us, we fix, we paint, we decorate, and then they move us again and they sell this room to someone else. Each time they move us, we lose everything. Each one of us has made about three rooms. Since I got arrested, I’ve decorated eight rooms, maybe. I make wooden shelves, paint it, clean the sink, put tiles on the floor, paint, decorate, put in a table for the computer, put in a nice bed, nice mattress
.

Did they do that with all the foreigners?

Yeah, yeah. Frederico was even worse. Frederico is more crazy … behind the block, he started making a little swimming pool – a little jacuzzi. He put tiles down and when it was ready, the guards say, ‘Sorry, you’re not allowed to go out the back anymore’. They just waited for him to finish the project and kicked him out. That’s what they do. They see us as their ATM machines
.

– Ruggiero

Even after Mick had renovated Room 13, life inside it was a living nightmare. The four men were locked in at 5.30 pm, and spent the next fourteen hours cooped up together in the oppressively hot and claustrophobic cell. But no matter how intolerable it got, how much they frayed each other’s nerves, there was no escape.

On a usual night, Thomas went straight to the bathroom, to shoot up privately. He’d once given a seedy little show – finding a vein, sticking in the needle, and pumping it in and out to boost the hit – but Mick had warned him against ever doing it in front of him again. ‘If I see a needle, I’ll put it right up your arse,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t do that shit in here again.’ So, Thomas used the bathroom, aware that Mick would carry out his threat. After shooting up, he’d drift out and collapse onto his mattress, fumbling around for a cigarette. He’d light it and leave it dangling precariously between his lips, sitting blissed-out with his eyes shut, ash falling onto his lap, until the cigarette burned down to a butt. Several times Mick or Chris leaped out of bed to grab a cigarette that was smouldering on the mattress after having dropped from Thomas’s lips. His mattress was covered in small black holes.

Chris usually came in drunk and stoned from an afternoon session of drinking
arak
and smoking
shabu
. He was a skinny ice addict, who’d been caught at a cargo office in Denpasar trying to send 42,000 ephedrine tablets packed in water bottles and stashed in a flower pot with concrete mix on top, and one kilogram of ephedrine powder to Australia. He’d admitted to police that they were the raw materials for making ice and ecstasy, and that their intended destination was Australia.

Mick also turned up drunk and stoned from many of the afternoon party sessions. He would make a coffee and then sit on his bed, rolling a joint and passing it around, or smoking some smack, sharing it with Robert and Chris. He would then draw, or read one of his books on metaphysics, pulling down a dark blue sarong he’d tacked to the upper bunk for some sense of privacy. Unfortunately, it wasn’t soundproof.