And yet there were already drugs in this high-security area of the prison, as there had been inmates there for a month or so previous to my arrival. Contrary to what you might expect, the drugs tended to originate from the highest-security wings as that was where you would find the more powerful and influential prisoners with the capacity to organise everything. George told me that the drugs were costing up to ten times as much here as in the old prison. I immediately saw an opportunity and my brain began plotting. I realised that whoever started getting drugs into the prison in volume would control the place. No doubt several other people were thinking the same thing. The transfers had completely split up the gangs and thrown them into disarray – it was as if someone had cleared the board or pressed a reset button and everything would have to begin afresh.
That first morning I was introduced to Cubano. He no longer wished to be called Cubano but instead Brother William as he was now quite religious, or so he claimed. I was sceptical. I had witnessed this so many times before – inmates claiming to have found God and changed their ways. Most often it was all a pretence to try to get time off their sentences for good behaviour. They would claim to be completely changed and reformed by religion, and yet once released they’d revert right back to killing and robbing. It really annoyed me as it was so false.
William, or Cubano as I still thought of him, was quite small and it reminded me of the so-called Napoleon complex, where smaller people have a bigger attitude – like a Jack Russell. Standing before me was a man responsible for literally hundreds upon hundreds of deaths, directly or indirectly. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill for the smallest of reasons. I was amazed that Pedro was on the same wing as us because it was he who had ultimately instigated the downfall and loss of control of Los Cubanos in the old prison. He had revealed all the hiding places for the weapons and named all the key gang members. I could only guess that he had been placed here to gather information on Cubano. He was by Cubano’s side throughout much of the morning, whispering things in his ear, going back and forth to the guards, plotting things with a couple of the others from our group of 15.
Lunch arrived around midday and was served through a slot in the main gate. It consisted of a bowl of soup, a plate of rice with a little sauce, a tiny amount of chicken and a fruit juice to drink. We were locked in our cells at this point, while the three guards went for their lunch. The cells were reopened at around 2.30pm.
Throughout the afternoon, I watched the comings and goings as various guards came to speak with William/ Cubano and also to George. I was familiar with a couple of the guards from the Peni, having previously done business with them. I greeted them and had a quick chat, dropping hints that I might be interested in trying to organise the entry of a couple of items. They were all fairly hesitant and nervous about things now as they were very much in the spotlight, following all the scandals in the Peni. Everything was on camera here, which added to their paranoia. They couldn’t be seen fraternising with us inmates too much, otherwise the police would become suspicious.
We received dinner at 6pm – a plate of rice and two tiny pieces of meat with a little bit of some insipid grey sauce and that was it. We were locked in our cells until the following morning. The first night was spent adjusting to my new surroundings: the noises, smells and being physically locked up again after spending the previous six years in the Peni where our cell doors were open 24 hours a day. For the first time in a very long time I actually felt completely safe as I was locked on my own in a cell that no one, other than the guards, could access. I moved my mattress between the two concrete bunks to see which one offered the best position. Lower down was better as I found the oppressive heat warmed the air higher up in the cell.
I stripped naked and took an indulgent long shower. The cool water flowing over my hot body felt good. In the Peni showers had been something of a luxury, with a diminished water supply meaning we had to shower from large buckets in which we stored the water. It was nice to be in a fresh building and away from all the huge and millions of small cockroaches that infested the Peni. Having showered I stood and let the warm night breeze dry me in a matter of minutes, then lay down to sleep on my bed knowing that absolutely no one was going to knock on my door or try to kill me during the night. I slept well.
I had found out during the next day that half the people from my previous wing were housed in the adjacent wing to ours on a temporary basis until more space became available, as the prison was already nearing its capacity of 4,500 inmates. Not only had people been transferred from the Peni, but also from prisons in the surrounding area that were due to close. I had managed to call out to a couple of my friends as they walked past our wing and they found it hilarious that I had ended up on the same supermax security wing as Cubano. I was less amused. My friends told me that the conditions were bad on their wing, with five people to a cell, running water only a couple of hours a day and no showers in their room, just in the exercise yard. There had also been fights over the poor quality and meagre quantity of food they were receiving. Everyone was pissed off and fed up about this new regime already.
On the morning of the second day a group of social workers and a doctor arrived to check me out because of the TB. They were working their way around the prison, taking everyone’s details. Margarita managed to get in to visit and she brought me in a tub of powdered milk supplementary drink. This proved to be of great help and I actually put on a little bit of weight, even in that first week – the doctors had weighed everyone at least a couple of times in the new healthcare centre for their records.
I decided to start the process of applying for repatriation as soon as we had been transferred here. In the first message I sent out I asked Margarita to please inform Isabel from the embassy that yes, I now wished to be repatriated to Britain to finish the sentence there as the conditions in this new prison were just unbearable. There was no way I could face serving another two or three years without even a pen to write with or a book to read, virtually no visits, no letters or payphone and thus no communication, and being fed rice and soup every day. I was now ready to go home to Britain and face the consequences. Come what may, I had had enough of the prisons in Ecuador.
At this point I didn’t have a lawyer. I had decided to find one from Guayaquil as it was proving difficult and costly for Eva to travel the 425 kilometres from Quito to see me. Anyway, there hadn’t been much call for her services once my sentence was finalised and all options to appeal thus closed.
My original plan with Eva had been to appeal my 12-year sentence after a few years had gone by and get it quietly reduced to six years, for around $20,000. Eva had this deal arranged so that I didn’t even need to pay the money up front. The judges had said that they were happy to reduce the sentence as long as they saw proof that the money was in the country and available, for example in a bank account. Once they had reduced the sentence and I was happy they would receive their money.
I had one half of the money but had been waiting for the funds from the sale of my cells in Quito post-transfer to Guayaquil. However, Ruben, the person with whom I had left the responsibility to sort this out, let me down and never paid me the $10,000 he was supposed to. Had he done so I might well have gone free sooner. I tried to borrow the money from my family but they had lost all faith in the Ecuadorian legal system and all the crooked people involved at that time.
CHAPTER THIRTY
ESCAPE, PART 2
ON THE THIRD or fourth evening following my transfer to the regional prison, I had been sitting in my cell eating dinner. Once I had finished it I had fallen asleep with the cell gate open, something I would never have done in the Peni, nor in Quito, as it was so dangerous. You would have woken up with your throat slit!
I woke up after a couple of hours feeling sick and immediately vomited as I sat upright. Perhaps it was something in the food. I gathered up my bedding and noticed that the gate to my cell was still wide open. What the hell? This was strange. It should have been loc
ked hours ago, after dinner. What was going on, I wondered as I sat there, the smell of the vomit becoming ever more intense. Was this some kind of trap? Had they just forgotten to lock me up?
There was a camera mounted on the wall directly outside my cell, facing along the row of cells towards the guards’ office. There was another one at the other end facing back this way, as well as the large one suspended over the centre of the exercise yard. Surely as soon as I stepped outside the cell I would be seen and provoke a shitstorm. It would almost certainly be classed as an attempted escape. But at the end of the day it wasn’t my fault. I carried my bedding out of the cell and walked the short distance to the wash sinks in the exercise yard. As I stood there washing my sheets I thought, any second now the police will come bursting into the wing. Nothing happened. There were only 15 or so people on the entire wing. My next door neighbour George had noticed me out of my cell.
‘You’re going to get us raided, man. They will think you’re escaping,’ he said.
I had been out of my cell now for some 15 minutes and no one had come to investigate. I was amazed. The cameras were definitely working. Perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered to walk the distance from the central booth where the police monitored the cameras. I sat back in my cell and pondered the implications. I had found a weak point in the security. It must be incredibly boring watching dozens of feeds from security cameras in a prison where everyone is locked up and there is therefore no activity. I wondered if I could manage to escape. The temptation was almost overwhelming, but the more I thought about it the more I realised there was little point in talking such a huge risk with such small odds of succeeding. There was an electric fence around the perimeter and armed police with orders to shoot to kill anyone trying to escape. I was just surprised that my cell door had been left open on a supposedly maximum-security wing.
However, for the next few nights I couldn’t resist testing the system. Having collected my dinner, I would go back to my cell and slide the gate shut but not quite locked so that anyone glancing down the row of cells would think all the gates were closed. Sure enough my cell stayed unlocked again. This was crazy. I started to wonder if they were doing it on purpose to see if I would attempt to escape.
It happened yet again for the third night in a row, so this time I decided to leave it open all the way through until the next morning. When the guard came round to check the numbers and make sure everyone was present he found me asleep in my bed with the cell gate wide open. He woke me up and asked me what the hell was going on. I told him quite calmly that the guard had forgotten to lock me up the previous night. He eyed me suspiciously then slammed the gate shut, having first checked the lock to see if I had put anything there to prevent it locking properly. He stormed off muttering to himself and that was that. I sat and laughed to myself.
The new arrivals on the wing were all troublemakers and it didn’t take long for them to start getting up to mischief as a way to entertain and occupy themselves. At this early stage of the new prison’s occupancy all the empty cells’ gates on the landings above had been left open so we could access any of them. The newly arrived group started seeing what they could break, steal or utilise. We received a stern lecture on how we would be confined to our cells much more from now on as we couldn’t behave.
The guys who had caused the trouble didn’t seem that bothered that now we would be locked up for more hours in the day. I couldn’t work out why until later that day. I was standing at the entrance of my locked cell looking out at a deserted exercise yard when a cell gate on the opposite side slid open a little and one of these new guys cautiously peered out to check the coast was clear, came out of his cell and scurried a couple of cells along. He collected something from the guy in that cell, beat a hasty retreat to his own and quietly slid the gate to, but not closed. He saw me watching, indicated to me to be quiet and gave me the thumbs-up, laughing.
The lock on the cell gate was a fairly basic mechanism and obviously some of these guys had very quickly worked out how to keep it open. Later I asked the guy I’d seen open his gate how he did it. He gave me a demonstration. It only took a few seconds. The gate would even appear locked if tested from the outside. He explained that the cell gates were nearly all the same throughout the entire prison. People in the other security areas were running around all over the place. Someone somewhere is going to use this in an escape attempt, I thought.
Over the next few weeks, as more inmates arrived from the Peni, I was reacquainted with some old faces. One I vaguely recognised was a skinny young-looking guy nicknamed Diablo, or Devil, and he did have a certain look in his eye that was far from saintly. This unassuming kid who was no more than 20 years old had a reputation as an escape artist, having already succeeded in escaping twice from the Peni and once from another prison. Our wing faced on to the highway, which ran past the prison north up the coast and south into the city of Guayaquil. You had a clear view from the upper landing and people would spend hours sitting there daydreaming, watching the world go by. You could also see the position of the nearest watchtowers and the perimeter fences. I began to notice that Diablo and a couple of others would often wander around together, looking up at the fence, gesturing and generally plotting.
One day I passed Diablo in the exercise yard and asked him, ‘What’s the plan then? When are you going?’
He looked momentarily shocked but then laughed nervously and carried on walking. I told him afterwards not to worry, but warned him to be more careful as others were beginning to take notice of his behaviour as well. I also cautioned him about the electric fence in the middle of the two other perimeter fences. He hadn’t even been aware of this and asked me if I thought it carried a lethal voltage. I told him it probably did as otherwise what was the point? He thanked me for the information and headed off to discuss this with the others who planned to go with him. That was the last time we spoke of it as I didn’t want to get involved.
I watched them, over the following weeks, making their preparations in the way of exercises to strengthen themselves for climbing and running. I wished them all the luck in the world. I loved it when someone managed to escape and get away. A buzz of excitement would go round the prison and everyone’s spirits would be lifted for a few days until the monotony set back in.
One evening, it was pouring with rain so heavy that visibility was reduced to a couple of metres. We could hardly see the cells on the opposite side of the exercise yard. It was soon after 10pm – the light in the cell had not long gone out – when we heard some noise and the sound of movement on the landings. I asked my cellmates if they had heard it too and they confirmed that yes, someone was definitely out there. We moved to the door to have a look but I couldn’t see a thing. Some other people had come to their cell doors as well and I could hear them saying someone was escaping. They must have decided to go tonight, using the rain as cover.
Two or three minutes of silence passed, then bam! Several gunshots rang out and we heard bullets hit the metal roof that covered the exercise yard. There were voices shouting from somewhere on the road but we couldn’t make out what was being said because of the rain. An alarm had gone off and further gunshots could be heard. A minute or so later dozens and dozens of heavily armed, very angry-looking police burst into the wing like swarming bees. They were running up and down the landings checking all the doors were secured. We heard them say that they had found open doors and we could hear the occupants who had remained behind being dragged out and beaten.
The wing was absolutely heaving with police and guards now. They brought a list and began checking who was present and who not. We quickly discovered that the two guys from the cell three along from ours had been in on the plan and gone with Diablo and some others. It transpired that they had opened the cell doors by the method I had been shown and scaled the fence of the exercise yard. They covered the razor wire on the top with foam and material cut from their mattresses and dropped down on the other side, where they had bee
n spotted on camera and the police alerted. They had managed to scale the first of the three perimeter fences, by which point a couple of police patrol vehicles had arrived. The officers then opened fire on them, killing one and injuring another. They all surrendered and lay on the ground until the police arrived. They were lucky to not have all been executed on the spot, but times had changed and now it was all on camera and not as easy for the police to get away with. They were all brought back into the prison, two of them to the hospital wing for injuries and the others to maximum security. Diablo was one of them.
There was one final escape though, this time from maximum security. On this occasion the escapee managed to walk right out of the main entrance to the prison, having opened his cell door in the same way. This man was a renowned killer from an infamous case in Ecuador. He was recaptured some two weeks later in the city and brought back to the prison. That was the first and last successful escape attempt from the regional. Not long afterwards they modified all the cell doors and fitted extra locks so there was no way to open them. It seemed that the prison authorities had finally brought to an end years and years of escapes. Never say never though. I’m sure someone will find a weakness in the security and manage it someday.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE REGIONAL
I WAS SOON moved to the adjacent wing, which they had decided to use just for TB sufferers. For the first week, there were only six of us on the entire wing, which was designed to hold 300-plus inmates. We each had our own cell with a shower, which was great because of the heat.
We had now been in this brand new prison for three weeks following our sudden mass transfer on the first day of the month. It was nearly Christmas and, apart from the one occasion when Margarita had managed to see me, by late December none of us had received a visit yet. I had heard nothing from the embassy and Isabel, which was really beginning to worry me. She would always make contact whenever something momentous such as this took place. There was obviously something going on that was preventing her from communicating with me. I assumed the authorities were putting a block on anyone visiting for whatever reason.
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