Hotel Kerobokan (34 page)

– Scott

Scott had helped guards carry the body of the prisoner with TB out of cell
tikus
. The second man had been treated in Sanglah Hospital for AIDS and TB, but ran away before they could take him back to Hotel K. He didn’t want to die in a jail cell. He was found in a graveyard, taken back, as a very sick and weak man, and thrown into cell
tikus
.

One night, not long afterwards, he died in there. The guards found him mid-morning and pulled his body out onto the grass. His face was covered in vomit and ants. It was unsurprising that the rate of TB was high in Hotel K. The sewage water from cell
tikus
streamed past the small canteen where food was cooked and sold.

If you get sick, they put you in a small room, you stay there until you die so that nobody will see you
.

– Emmanuel

The spreading of diseases didn’t just come from the bodies pulled out of cell
tikus
or from the sewage water. Some prisoners locked in cell
tikus
without a toilet would throw a plastic bag of shit through the vent and onto the grass outside Scott and Emmanuel’s cell. Black Monster – Sonia – was the worst culprit.

When the guards came past to count the prisoners, and Sonia’s stinking plastic bag was on the grass, they’d open her cell and make her clean it up. It was a tactic of hers to get out of the cell for a few minutes. Typically, Black Monster put on a bit of a show, throwing water and shit at the guards or at anyone walking past.

This crazy girl, Sonia, threw shit. But not only shit, she put water inside the plastic bag also. It landed in front of my cell on the grass, so everybody can smell it. It makes a lot of problems. She threw shit on guards. And there is nothing they can do. The last time she threw shit at me, and Matthew walking past
.

– Emmanuel

Scott and Emmanuel had spent time in cell
tikus
together. They were put in a cell the width and length of two bathtubs, with no toilet. When they needed to relieve themselves, they used a bottle or a plastic bag. For days, they sat leaning against the wall at opposite ends of the concrete cell, with their legs stretched out in front of them. At night they slept close together on the bare concrete.

You have to lie like a dead man
.

– Emmanuel

Some days, Scott paid the guards 500,000 rupiah ($65) to get out to a visit. Again, he felt discriminated against because most people paid that fee to be let out permanently.

I got put in cell
tikus
with Emmanuel for, like, a month. I got put in there for walking around the jail. Emmanuel got put in there for having a phone. Solitary is terrible. There’s no light in there. I got a light bulb to put in there, just to read, and stuff, at night. The worst feeling about cell
tikus
is that they put you in there and you feel like you are completely forgotten
.

That’s what it feels like; time goes really, really slowly, especially when you see other people moving around and you get to see them doing what they want to do, and you not being able to walk around and you get envy. And envy is a bad feeling
.

– Scott

I couldn’t even, in my wildest dream, imagine we were going to fly in a plane that night
.

– Ruggiero

It was a morning of utter confusion. At around 4.30 am, Ruggiero was abruptly woken by two guards bursting into his cell. ‘What the fuck are you guys doing here?’ he barked. ‘The boss wants to talk to you,’ one of them said. ‘Why? It’s five in the morning. I’m sleeping.’ The guards didn’t know why the boss wanted him, but hustled him out of bed. Ruggiero furtively slipped his phone in his underpants as he stood up. He was wearing only short pyjamas and a T-shirt, but there was no time to change. He slid his feet into a pair of sandals as they ushered him out the door. The Brazilian followed the guards down the concrete path that he’d walked literally thousands of times, and was unaware this time would be his last. As he turned the corner to walk into the offices, though, he knew that something big was in the air.

The office atrium was filled with armed police. Standing bleary eyed and half-dressed in the centre were drug lord Arman, Frenchman Michael, Mexican Vincente and two Nigerians. Ruggiero didn’t have a clue what was going on and quickly asked the others if they knew. They didn’t.

Juri was the next to arrive – in bare feet and wearing only the T-shirt and the shorts he’d slept in, with his dark hair sticking up. He asked the others what was happening and got the same blank response. He asked the guards as they snapped handcuffs on him and started searching his pockets but they didn’t know either. It was a covert operation – the police knew that if the guards knew, the prisoners would be informed.

They don’t tell us nothing, nothing. Just pick up in the morning and go
.

– Juri

Finally, female inmate Nita turned up, looking dishevelled and confused, and wearing only slippers and a nightie. Her hands were already cuffed in front of her, and she, too, asked if anyone knew what was going on. They shrugged. All the way across from Block W, she’d been asking the guards. ‘But they just tell me, “No question, no answer”.’

Police started moving the eight prisoners out into the car park, which was swarming with police, prison guards and journalists. Photographers snapped pictures of the confused, bedraggled prisoners as they were swept along, gripped on either side by police officers. Ruggiero spotted friendly guard Pak Mus. ‘What the fuck’s going on, Pak Mus? What’s happened?’ he asked as he was pulled past. ‘Ruggiero, I don’t know,’ Pak Mus said, looking distressed. ‘Are we going to the police station? Are we going to be moved?’ ‘Ruggiero, I don’t know,’ he repeated, clearly feeling sorry for the Brazilian.

Juri suspected they were being moved when he heard one police officer asking another, ‘Jakarta or Surabaya?’ and pointing at the buses. He quickly asked if he could get a bag from his cell. ‘No. Cannot, cannot.’ But the police officer saw his bare feet and made a concession to his request, sending a
tamping
prisoner to run inside and get his thongs.

I say, ‘Can I take my stuff?’ They say, ‘No. Cannot, cannot’. Not even a toothbrush or a magazine. I say, ‘I get asthma. Maybe I get sick. I always have the puffer?’ ‘Cannot, no’
.

– Juri

The prisoners didn’t yet know it, but the operation had been planned precisely. Ruggiero, Juri and the two Africans were put onto one minibus, and the other four put onto the second, coordinated to match their destinations. Several police with machine guns, and a single guard, climbed onto each bus.

They had one machine gun per prisoner and extra two per bus. So, there were about twelve machine guns, I think
.

– Ruggiero

As they drove out of Hotel K’s car park, the eight prisoners were unaware that they were leaving the jail for good. Ruggiero was excited; the pre-dawn trip broke the tedium. He didn’t know where they were going, but with five prisoners on life sentences and the Hotel K drug lord along for the ride, he knew it wasn’t to freedom. He suspected they might be going to police headquarters, for an interrogation about drugs in jail.

Desperately curious, Ruggiero kept trying to get answers from the police. ‘What’s going on? Where are we going?’ ‘We don’t know,’ they kept repeating. ‘How come you don’t know, man?’ he pushed. ‘We just don’t know’. Ruggiero didn’t believe it. ‘You guys are joking with me … you don’t know! Are we going for a night tour in Bali?’ The bus turned off the potholed roads onto a main highway. Ruggiero kept his eyes glued to the windows, trying to figure out where they were going. When they came to a large roundabout and turned towards the airport, Ruggiero instantly asked, ‘Are we going to the airport?’ ‘We don’t know.’ But it was clear to Ruggiero that that was exactly where the bus was heading.

He surreptitiously felt in his underpants for his phone and sent a text message to the Brazilian consul – ‘We’re arriving at the airport. Can you jump on your bike and come? See what you can do.’ But it was early and the consul didn’t reply. Ruggiero was getting more and more agitated and excited, and turned to Juri. ‘Juri, we are going to fly, man, I don’t know where to, but we are going to fly.’ Juri didn’t believe it. ‘Are you crazy?’ ‘We’re going to the airport, man,’ Ruggiero said, pointing out the window. ‘I know this road. We’re going to be at the terminal in five, ten minutes.’

Several minutes later, they created a spectacle as the armed police piled out of the buses onto the footpath directly in front of the domestic terminal. Trailing out behind them were the prisoners, with their hands cuffed in front of them. Each prisoner was quickly surrounded by three police officers – two holding their arms and one pointing a machine gun at their back.

Fuck, I’m an extremely heavy criminal … four grams of hashish – it’s a heavy offence. Makes a lot of sense, the money the government spent on protection. I’m a threat to society
.

– Ruggiero

Crowds of tourists and local travellers scurried to the sides of the path to let the intimidating group of police and prisoners stride past. They swept towards the glass doors to the domestic terminal. Inside, the prisoners got VIP treatment. There was no waiting, as one by one they were whisked straight through the metal detectors in a tightly choreographed routine in which the police let go of their arms as they approached the machine and grabbed them again on the other side. They were all taken across the busy terminal to a row of plastic chairs, and given bottles of water and brown paper packets of nasi goreng.

The police were friendly but the guys wouldn’t tell us where we were going. I went to the toilet. I was relaxed. I wasn’t worried about anything, just very curious … extremely. Thank God nobody was sentenced to death, because they would, for sure, think it was going to be the execution because it looked like it
.

– Ruggiero

Despite armed police pacing back and forth in front of them, the scruffy, pyjama-clad prisoners looked more vulnerable than menacing. People stood staring. Some curious travellers came up and spoke to them. One young Italian couple walked across to Juri, who was wearing an Italian football T-shirt, asking what was going on.

They asked me, ‘Eh, what happened to you? Where are you going?’ I say, ‘I’m moving. I’m already long time in jail’
.

– Juri

They were all reacting differently to the situation. Nita was fretting, Vincente was casual and laughing, and Michael was, still high from an earlier hit of smack. He turned to Ruggiero asking, ‘Where are we going, man?’ Ruggiero was pumped up, excited to be out in the real world. ‘We’re going to take a flight, my man. I don’t know where to, but take a walk on the wild side,’ he said to Michael. ‘We always get to fly together, don’t we?’ he joked.

After almost two hours, it was time to go. Domestic passengers were called first and filled up the front of the plane. Then the eight prisoners and their massive police entourage, minus machine guns, walked down the aisle past the staring faces of the seated passengers. Three empty rows separated the prisoners and the other passengers. Ruggiero, Juri and the two Nigerians sat in the back rows, while the other four sat a couple of rows in front.

An hour later, Vincente, Michael, Nita and Arman got off the plane in the large Muslim city of Surabaya in central Java, which was near their new jails. The other four flew further north to Jakarta.

When we got to Jakarta Airport, police had machine guns again. I felt like the fucking biggest terrorist in the world, walking outside like this, with all the police with their machine guns and everybody watching. I didn’t even know where I was, I’d never been to Jakarta in my whole life. It was very hot. It took about one and a half hours to get to the fucking prison. When we got there, it was horrible … 2000 people, lot of junkies, dirty place. The guards were very hostile at this new jail, Cipinang. Very hostile
.

– Ruggiero

Juri and Ruggiero were given T-shirts and uniforms, then taken to the Cipinang security chief ’s office and told the rules of the jail. As they left to walk across the grounds to their new cell, a guard suddenly kicked Ruggiero hard in the stomach. He buckled over. The guard then turned to attack Juri.

Boom. He punched me three or four times. I still had the prison T-shirt in my hand, so I couldn’t try to defend myself. He says to me, ‘Here is Jakarta, it’s not Bali’. I say,‘Yeah, I know, I don’t need to get punched’.

– Juri

Back in Bali, Juri’s wife, Ade, turned up for her usual morning visit to Hotel K, handing over the 5000 rupiah fee to get inside. Unusually, the guard refused to take it. She was momentarily confused. The guard looked up from his seat and broke the news that Juri was gone, transferred to another jail, in Jakarta. Ade collapsed. It was devastating news. She’d heard stories about prisoners being viciously bashed as standard procedure on arrival at new prisons. She also knew that Juri’s transfer meant that she and his elderly parents would have to abandon the life they’d created in Bali and start all over again in a new city.

Inside Hotel K, the transfer instilled fear in all the westerners. It was a stark warning that everyone was vulnerable to the whims of the Indonesian Government. Anyone could be plucked from their beds in the dead of night. If slinging cash to the guards had given the prisoners some sense of power over their destinies, this transfer undid that.

For the Hotel K guards, the westerners’ fears created a new blackmail business. Prisoners splashed around hundreds of dollars to have their names removed from alleged transfer lists. The nastier guards enjoyed taunting the prisoners, ‘White monkey, we move you tonight’. Suddenly, prisoners were desperate to stay in Hotel K. It was the devil they knew. With its walls touching paradise, it was a drop-in spot for tourists, and easily accessible for friends and families. And its being filled with westerners meant there was always someone to talk to. Juri and Ruggiero had friends inside Hotel K. They had had their days out, their afternoon drinking parties, their favourite meals delivered from Bali’s best restaurants. But those days were now over and they didn’t know what lay ahead in the big city jail.