Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Right now, I’m empty, lost and numb. I used to have a clear fresh sparkle radiating within, showing through my laugh and my eyes, I never had a problem looking in the mirror, I knew who I was, I didn’t question myself. Lately now, two years on from that fatal date, and after repeated blows, I’m finding a confusing, distant reflection in the mirror; it’s dull, my eyes don’t seem to speak any more, they’re lifeless, as though my soul is drying up. Where have I gone, where am I going? I can feel I’m gradually losing the essence that makes me me. It’s strange and it hurts, indescribably, to become aware of your own fading soul reflected through your eyes each time you look in the mirror.

  – Schapelle Corby, My Story

  Five years on, Schapelle’s soul has faded further. And her fragile grip on sanity regularly slips. Often she wanders around lost in a daze, heavily dosed up on medications for depression and psychosis. Her family is terrified she will die in Hotel K. She’s seen so many horrific things that she’s shut down. Finding a dead prisoner hanging by a noose one morning barely caused her to react. I saw her shortly afterwards, and she was totally calm. Her detachment was chilling. Life inside Hotel K has changed her indescribably. Almost all the westerners I have spoken to say the same thing; it’s a living nightmare that slowly eats away at you until the person you once were simply vanishes.

  Hotel Kerobokan gives a graphic insight into the daily life and shows why this prison is ‘a gradual killing-you process’ – as one prisoner described it. The walls of Hotel K talk through the prisoners’ stories of murders, suicides, escapes, bashings, vicious gangs, rampant sex and the prolific drugs. Hotel Kerobokan exposes the dark heart of the jail that breaks people down and slowly destroys their will to live.

  It’s like the end of the world. It’s crazy. You feel dead when you’re breathing. You just want to get drunk to take your mind out of this place.

  – Mick, Australian inmate

  So many times I drive past those walls; I could never have imagined what happens inside. What happens inside goes far beyond my imagination before.

  – Ruggiero, Brazilian inmate

  CHAPTER 1

  WELCOME TO HOTEL

  KEROBOKAN

  It was late but Hotel Kerobokan was crawling with activity; guards skulking along pathways, unlocking cells and releasing prisoners who were walking fast across the jail. Tonight was sex night and Hotel K was busier than a Bangkok brothel. Any inmate who’d paid up that afternoon could get out for some action. Pouring in through the front door were hookers, girlfriends, wives and mistresses.

  Austrian inmate Thomas Borsitzki was feeling frisky as he walked down the path towards the newly built and still empty Block K. He had gone two and a half years without sex, and tonight he was treating himself to a young Balinese woman. As he approached Room 1 in the cellblock, its small barred windows blazed with light, spotlighting the crude scene taking place inside. There was nothing but a thin, dirty mattress on the concrete floor. And a prisoner banging away at a hooker.

  Already eight men were hanging around under the stars outside the block, waiting for their turn on the mattress.

  The men, mostly westerners, would go into the cell one after the other; some spending five minutes in there, some a little longer. But if anyone took more than thirty minutes, the waiting prisoners would get angry and impatient, and urge the next in line to walk in and interrupt. In between clients, the hooker would put on a purple sarong. It was her one nod to decorum.

  The Hotel K brothel was no more than a bare concrete cell. Inside, mosquitoes swarmed in clouds, attracted to the bright fluorescent light. It was hot. It stank of sex. Used condoms were discarded on the floor. The mattress was old, and the light made it possible to see the sticky wet spots left by those before. But it was jail. A comfortable bed, clean sheets and privacy were out-of-reach luxuries from a different life, a parallel universe. Here, it was a war of survival and different rules applied. Most of the men were either too high on drugs or too smashed on the local brew, arak, to notice much anyway. They were horny. This was sex. Nothing else mattered.

  But sex night wasn’t only for hookers. The grassy sports area near the small Christian church was also alive with the shifting shadows of couples having sex. Mosquito coils burned across the area like spot fires. Some prisoners would drag their mattresses out for comfort. One Italian inmate enjoyed sex with his fiancée on his mattress, and then left it out to rent to other inmates for a few thousand rupiah a turn.

  Bringing in your own woman was cheaper than using a hooker. Prices fluctuated depending on how much an inmate could afford, but most paid the guards approximately 80,000 rupiah ($11) to be let out for sex under the stars with a woman they knew. A hooker, on the other hand, could cost an inmate up to 800,000 rupiah ($105).

  Inmates would usually greet their lovers holding an unromantic sex package of two mosquito coils and a packet of cigarettes, which they would have just bought from a room in Cellblock B, where one prisoner ran a little shop from his cell. He put together the mosquito coils and cigarette packages for a set price so he could quickly slip them out the window on sex nights without completely waking up. Until sunrise, customers would continue to bang on the bars of his window to get their hands on one of the packages.

  Thomas was a smack addict who usually spent all his money on drugs, but earlier this particular day, when a guard had come around with photos of a pretty young Balinese girl, he decided to splurge on a hooker. Now he stood waiting in line in the humid night air with the other men, chainsmoking Marlboro cigarettes and sometimes watching the sex show through the window.

  Finally it was his turn. Once he was inside the cell, the hooker slipped off her purple sarong and let it fall in a crumpled heap on the floor in the corner. Thomas tore off his shorts and got down on the mattress. She lay back, only asking him not to do anal sex because she was sore from being forced to do it earlier. Thomas spent thirty minutes with the girl, despite being promised a few hours. But it was enough.

  It was only a quick serve. I was promised all night, but it was not like I was promised. It was maybe thirty minutes before another guy came in. Anyway, if you don’t sleep with a woman in maybe two and a half years, half an hour is no problem.

  – Thomas

  As Thomas walked back to his cell, several guards were still wandering around, calling out, ‘Like a lady? Like a lady?’, trying to drum up some last-minute business. Every customer was cash in their pockets. The guards’ cut from a busy night could easily match their monthly wages. And tonight, the sex action would go on until sunrise.

  Welcome to Hotel Kerobokan.

  CHAPTER 2

  THOMAS

  People couldn’t imagine what is behind those walls at Kerobokan.

  – Ruggiero, Brazilian inmate

  It’s a mental camp. In this place, you get worse, not better.

  – Mick, Australian inmate

  Austrian drug dealer Thomas slammed down the phone in his Balinese bungalow. It was bad news. His friend had just heard a news flash on his car radio that a Bangladeshi man had been busted at Bali’s Denpasar Airport with two kilograms of smack in his bag. Thomas snatched up the phone again, dialled his supplier in Bangkok, and got straight to the point.

  ‘Aptu Galang, is that our boy’s name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bangladeshi?’ he asked, hoping like hell he wasn’t.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit,’ he cursed. ‘They’ve busted him at the airport.’

  Time was now the enemy. The man in Bangkok had to move fast. He quickly, but calmly, walked out the front door of the Bangkok hotel and vanished, leaving behind only his fake ID.

  In Bali, Thomas was safe … for now. He was still invisible. They’d played it by the book, everything done strictly on a need-to-know basis, keeping the links to the network unexposed, ensuring the Bangladeshi courier knew little. If the courier talked to police, which was likely, he could reveal nothing. He had no names. He only knew anonymous
shadowy figures and a single contact point, the abandoned Bangkok hotel room, where several hours earlier he’d picked up the bags of smack and his plane ticket to Bali.

  The boy’s ignorance was their insurance – the rules designed to protect the players. If he had successfully slipped through Bali customs, he would have checked into a cheap, random hotel in Kuta, phoned his Bangkok contact to give him the name of the hotel, and waited. The man in Bangkok would then phone Thomas, give him the details, and Thomas would collect the drugs and give the boy his $400 carrier fee.

  It was a narrow escape. Thomas lost two kilograms of smack, but he’d been lucky. Even with the slick system, it was only his friend’s chance hearing of the news report that had saved him from a police sting. No doubt, police would have told Aptu to call his contact in Bangkok with the name of a hotel, setting a trap for the person collecting the drugs in Bali. Thomas would have been caught. But this time, Thomas’s call to abort the operation came first and ensured the boy’s call went unanswered, echoing around an empty Bangkok hotel room.

  But as with any gambler, the close call didn’t stop Thomas. He accepted the risks. He gambled with his life and freedom every day, and knew it. Drugs were his business. Thomas felt the odds were on his side if the relay team running the drugs each took their turn with skill. But in this case, the Bangladeshi boy had lacked it. He was a 20-year-old kid who lost his nerve. He panicked. He red-flagged himself by walking through the diplomatic channel to try to avert a baggage search. It was a rookie mistake, as the skilfully packed bags of smack would have sailed easily through a routine baggage search. But the suspicion the boy aroused by taking the alternate route meant that his bags were torn apart.

  This was 1991 – before the death sentence was used in drug cases in Indonesia. But the boy went down hard. Aptu Galang was sentenced to twenty years in jail, the justice system only going easy on those who could afford to pay cash to the authorities. The boy had no money. And his anonymous boss, Thomas, was unable to sling any cash to the courts without losing his invisibility and risk joining his boy in Hotel K.

  Did I feel bad for him? Yeah, of course. This happened but I cannot do anything. I cannot go to the police station and help him. He also didn’t have money. If he had money, maybe he get ten years. But I cannot go to police station, I cannot go to court.

  – Thomas

  The drug world was dog eat dog, as Thomas was about to find out. He would soon be busted himself and was destined to meet his courier, Aptu, in Hotel Kerobokan.

  After three or four months, they catch me in Bali. So I meet the boy in jail. Actually, he didn’t know who I am and this was the first time I saw him also. I didn’t know who he is, but after people say the name ‘Aptu’, I realised – okay, he’s my boy. He realised I was the boss. It was no problem but sometimes he liked to drink and he would yell, ‘Thomas boss’, like that. I say, ‘Shut up, you don’t need to talk too much. Stupid’. He was not angry. He was nice with me.

  – Thomas

  Thomas was busted one hot afternoon while lying on his couch watching television in his beach bungalow. It started with loud banging on his front door. As he stood up to get it, more than a dozen police kicked the door in and exploded through it. They were angrily yelling and pointing machine guns, swarming in and spreading throughout his bungalow. They tore it apart, opening cupboards, hurling stuff to the floor, flipping his bed and rifling through his drawers. Pinned against the wall by two officers, Thomas stood watching, acutely aware that he’d been lucky yet again.

  If the police had turned up an hour earlier, he would have been sitting on the floor repackaging a delivery of one and a half kilograms of smack. But he’d finished and had taken his usual precaution of stashing it in a nearby locker, returning to his bungalow just minutes before the bust.

  Having been tipped off by one of Thomas’s drug dealer competitors, the police were expecting to find kilograms of drugs. Grassing on him had been a dirty tactic to try to eradicate Thomas from the Bali smack market. But the police only found thirteen grams of heroin in the bungalow, tucked in the bottom of a bedroom cupboard. Thomas knew it was a small enough find for him to cut a deal and get off lightly.

  He paid thirty million rupiah ($21,500) to the prosecutors via his lawyer and was sentenced to only eight months in jail. But during his stint in the police cells, Thomas was caught with a gram of heroin that his girlfriend had slipped to him during a visit to smoke later. So, the 25-year-old Austrian went down for a further eight months.

  When Thomas checked into Hotel K in the early 1990s, it was a reptile and rat-infested swamp. He was escorted by a guard through the jail, past local prisoners slashing the grass with sickles, and was put inside a concrete cell, which he would share with a local prisoner. It was a basic cell with four concrete walls, a tiled floor, a single shit-covered squat toilet in the corner and a small barred window. Thomas noticed his cellmate had spread newspapers in the corner to create a makeshift bed, so unrolled his small camping mattress along the opposite wall. After two months of sleeping on a bare concrete floor in the police cells, that night’s conditions were relatively luxurious.

  Hotel Kerobokan, Bali’s largest prison, was built quickly and cheaply in 1976, in the name of progress. It replaced a jail in Denpasar that had been torn down to make way for a large shopping mall. Shoddy workmanship meant that over the years, some perimeter walls in Hotel K would randomly crumble, giving inmates of the maximum-security prison an easy escape route. Although designed as a men’s jail, a small walled-off section was built inside to incarcerate up to thirty-nine women and children in ten small concrete cages. This would eventually be used only for women and transvestites.

  The jail was filled to its three hundred and twenty inmate capacity when Thomas checked in, but within a few short years, after the drug boom in Bali in the late 1990s, it would become massively overcrowded. By then, with almost 1000 inmates consistently squeezed into the jail, both the women’s and men’s sections would come to house almost three times their official capacity.

  But during Thomas’s first stretch, space was not so precious and he often even had a cell to himself. He spent his days sitting on his thin mattress and doing drug deals on his mobile phone. Despite his competitor’s tactic to get rid of him, Thomas easily kept dealing from inside. He’d call his supplier in Bangkok and organise smack deliveries to random cheap hotel rooms, then instruct his girlfriend to pick them up. She also regularly brought smack into Hotel K for Thomas to use and to sell to inmates, smuggling it in by inserting it inside her vagina. She and Thomas had a choreographed routine. During a visit she’d go to the toilet, extract the plastic-wrapped smack, and put it in the handle of a plastic saucepan used to flush the squat toilet. Thomas would then go in and retrieve the smack, sticking it up his arse to take it back to his cell without detection.

  In later years, guards would be more pliable and complicit in the drug business, but they hadn’t yet worked out how lucrative drug running in and out of Hotel K could be for them.

  One afternoon, Thomas’s toilet tag routine was spotted by Pak Belu, who was one of the more cruel guards, known for walking around the jail and randomly shocking prisoners with his electric stick, smirking as they jumped from the shock. He stopped Thomas on his way back to his cell, and asked for the drugs. ‘I don’t have, I don’t have,’ Thomas replied, leaping back after an electrical jab. Pak Belu put down his stick and started patting Thomas down. Thomas was wearing only a T-shirt, shorts and thongs, so Pak Belu quickly finished the search and was perplexed to find nothing.

  But it wouldn’t be long before Thomas was caught and suffered his first Hotel K punishment.

  It happened when he agreed to do a small favour for a local prisoner, Wayan. Smack was scarce and Wayan asked Thomas to buy some for him from Nigerian inmate Hurani, who hated the locals and refused to sell to them. Thomas did so. That would have been the end of it, but a huge Javanese inmate, Joko, doing time for a string of violent robberies, wa
nted revenge when he saw Wayan with the smack. He assumed Wayan had bought the smack from Balinese dealer Vassak – who had told Joko that morning he did not have any smack left to sell. Joko believed Vassak had lied to him and that he’d chosen to sell to Wayan and not to him. Upset and angry, Joko snatched the smack from Wayan’s hands, took it to the security boss and grassed on him.

  Joko is angry and goes to the front office and says, ‘Okay, I got this stuff from Wayan’. But he didn’t know that I actually gave it to him. They call this guy [Wayan] to the boss’s office and they beat him, and after, they say, ‘Who did you get it from?’ He says, ‘I got it from Thomas’.

  – Thomas

  Thomas was called to the office, instructed to remove his T-shirt, and viciously beaten. The second-in-charge of Hotel K, the security boss, hit Thomas’s legs and back over and over with a rattan stick, as several guards stood around the room watching. Thomas yelled out in agony, but knew fighting back would only prolong the beating. He was also outnumbered. Guards circled him, threw punches and kicked him. Pak Belu prodded him numerous times with his electric stick. Ignoring his screams, the guards persisted, using iron bars to hit him, until he was a broken heap on the floor.