Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  The guards usually opened their offices for sex at around 3 pm, once they’d closed for the day’s administration work. If a prisoner had requested it, a guard could organise a hooker for the room for around 800,000 rupiah ($110). They’d show a selection of photos of three or four girls to pick from, who were usually from a local brothel, or they’d use a Block W inmate who used to work as a callgirl at a karaoke club but now took bookings within Hotel K. Most offices had only carpet or desks to use for sex – the mattress in the clinic was a luxury. On busy nights prisoners would line up waiting for their turn in the rooms. Prisoners were in and out fast. In the mornings, guards often found condoms left on the floor. Some guards gave their keys to a trusted prisoner to do the deals and split the profits. Brazilian inmate Ruggiero had two sets of keys to offices, which he’d sell in the afternoon, sometimes during visits, or at night, at hourly or half-hourly rates varying from 50,000 rupiah ($7) to 300,000 rupiah ($40), depending on the wealth of his client. He regularly used one room himself.

  An Australian drug courier, Martin Stephens, caught at Denpasar Airport with more than three kilograms of heroin strapped to him, was one of Ruggiero’s friends and a good customer. He would book the office for rendezvous with his Indonesian fiancée, Christine. They’d met in the jail while she was visiting someone else. She was a slightly older woman, who had an eight-year-old daughter. He was part of a high-profile drug syndicate dubbed the ‘Bali Nine’, comprising nine young Australians. When the two made eye contact across the visitors’ room, he amorously poked his tongue out and that was it. Despite his life sentence, she began the rigorous routine of visiting her boyfriend daily in Hotel K.

  Each morning she’d stand out the front of the jail in the blazing sun among a crowd of visitors, all pushing and shoving to get in first. Then she’d pay the 5000 rupiah (70 cent) fee to get inside the front door, some days having her bags rifled and her body searched. Inside, she’d pay the guards another 5000 rupiah to bring Martin from his cell. Her daily ritual was to bring his breakfast – fried chicken and chicken paprika were his favourites. Then she’d wait. When Martin arrived, they’d sit on the tiled floor, sweating, crammed among three hundred or so others, vanishing into their own little world wearing earpieces to listen to music. Oblivious to the people around them, including his devoted mother, Michelle, who would often be sitting right beside them, they’d passionately kiss. In the late afternoon or at night, Martin would pay to allow Christine to come in for sex. The two guards at the front door usually took 50,000 rupiah each, and he also paid Ruggiero for the office. The price went up when police were stationed out the front of Hotel K in a security boost. It simply meant an extra sling to the cops. However, Ruggiero sometimes waived Martin’s fee, offering him a gratis corner, so long as he didn’t mind sharing an office.

  The owner of the office [a guard] gave me the keys and I rented it out. The next day he comes to me and I say I made 1.2 million [$160]. I keep 200,000 [$27] and I give him a million, or something like this. I rented it sometimes during visits.

  If Martin had a visit with his girlfriend, I’d say, ‘You want to go in?’ I unlock and they go in. Martin was lucky because the girl I used to shag always came inside with his girlfriend because they knew each other from outside. So, whenever I go to the room, I give him a corner and we use the same room.

  Having sex at the same time?

  Yes, you go there, I go there. I didn’t look at him. We’re in a jail, man, we’re not in a fucking villa. What you think we’re going to expect, a nice soft bed with air con, and champagne? Wake up to reality, it’s a war for survival.

  – Ruggiero

  Despite being sentenced to life, Martin’s wish to one day have children with Christine could easily be accomplished in Hotel K. They were both keen. He was desperate for some semblance of the normal life he’d thrown away; she was one of a universal club of females who fell in love with prisoners, despite little hope of ever having a normal life.

  ‘God teaches loyalty and I will be loyal to Martin until we are old. I was attracted to Martin the first time I met him because he is a nice person,’ she said.

  – The Daily Telegraph, 26 December 2006

  ‘I do believe miracles exist and that could happen to Martin too. I rest it in God’s hands and I will keep coming to the jail until he is free.’ She said when they first met in June last year, he gave her a silver friendship ring. She told of how Stephens had proposed to her. ‘He just asked me. He said, “We have to get married soon and have children”,’ she said.

  – AAP, 22 December 2006

  Prison governor Ilham Djaya said authorities would allow a [wedding] ceremony to go ahead. ‘Yes they can, there is no prohibition to it. Only one small problem – they cannot go on a honeymoon.’ Nor are conjugal visits allowed, officially.

  – AAP, 20 December 2006

  Unofficial conjugal visits in the stinking hot visiting room were rife, but guards didn’t make any money from them as they were tacitly allowed. Poorer prisoners, who couldn’t afford to pay for sex nights or office rooms, and horny westerners took advantage of this freedom. The visiting room was about the size of three quarters of a tennis court, with large white tiles on the floor, open concrete drains running down both sides, and a plastic heat-absorbing roof that magnified the sun’s rays and turned it into a sauna.

  Most days, more than three hundred people sat crammed together on the hard floor, often fanning themselves with anything they could find to move the cloying air. Strangers had to almost sit on top of one another. If people sat cross-legged, their knees touched. Spines of people sitting back-to-back connected. But the sticky closeness didn’t smother the sexual activity. Kissing, groping, hand jobs, blow jobs and full sex rippled through the room. In one direction, a girl’s head would jerk up and down for a while, then she’d pull out a mirror and wipe her mouth, completely ignoring the people next to her and the kids running around. Across the room, girls sat straddling guys, thrusting backwards and forwards; strangely wearing their jeans done up. To the uninitiated, it appeared to be dry humping. But the illusion was simple. A female prisoner ran a business sewing trapdoors into the crotches of girls’ jeans. The girls could go to a visit wearing no underpants and just flip open the flap for easy access.

  Some prisoners didn’t even bother trying to be discreet. One inmate, a French drug-dealer named Filo, didn’t care how much he exposed himself. He would sit against the wall while his Indonesian girlfriend gave him a blow job in full view of everyone, with it sometimes turning into full sex. His graphic displays became a running joke among other western inmates. Daily, he embarrassed the people sitting on the floor around him. He didn’t care. He would just pull out his erection and his girlfriend would go to work, sometimes draping herself on top of him, her summer dress covering her backside but the jerking back and forth of her long bare legs doing little to disguise what they were up to.

  His girlfriend would suck his dick. He was famous for it.

  – Thomas

  Apart from providing a place for quick sex, the blue room was a line to the outside world; a means for prisoners to stay in touch with friends, family, lovers, spouses and children. Visiting times got shorter over the years, but prisoners could sling the guards cash to stay there for up to three hours. It was a place where new relationships started, like that of drug mule Martin and Christine, and where old ones flourished; where husbands and wives met, and where male and female prisoners spent officially sanctioned time together.

  But jail relationships came in many tangled forms. Nothing was off limits. Some prisoners perilously juggled a string of lovers, hookers and spouses, often exposing their web of liaisons in the blue room. They were bored. They had opportunities. It wasn’t unusual for a male inmate to meet a hooker in a morning visit, and his wife and kids in the afternoon. One inmate regularly sat with his European wife, while his jealous inmate girlfriend, who he regularly had sex with behind the furniture-making workshop, sat across the roo
m staring at them with killer eyes. His wife was apparently oblivious. A young female prisoner met her fiancé in the blue room most mornings and her prison lover there in the afternoons.

  The juggling didn’t always go smoothly. One morning the blue room erupted into a volatile scene when a man turned up unexpectedly to surprise his incarcerated wife. When he handed the guard the 5000 rupiah fee to collect her from Block W, the guard pointed across to a corner of the blue room where she was already sitting. The man turned to look and got a nasty shock. His wife was on the floor, straddling and kissing a male prisoner. He stood stunned at the guard’s table for a moment. At the same time a woman arrived to surprise her inmate husband. She spotted him instantly and flew across to the corner where the guard had pointed a moment earlier. Her husband was intimately entwined with another woman.

  It turned out to be a set-up. Both the husband and wife had been asked to visit that morning by another prisoner, who’d been watching their cheating spouses in the blue room for weeks. The four started angrily yelling abuse. Everyone in the packed room turned to look. Several guards rushed over. They knew what was going on; as did most inmates. It was only news to the prisoners’ spouses. The guards snatched the prisoners by their arms, and marched them out of the blue room and across the jail yard. For punishment they were put into two of the isolation cells behind the tower; sex in the blue room was condoned but not when it turned into a public spectacle.

  The prisoner who’d set up the stunt had watched it excitedly from the sidelines. It successfully broke up two marriages. But the cheating couple carried on their sexual relationship, making the most of the week they were locked in adjoining isolation cells by paying guards to let them slip into one cell and snuggle up together each night.

  Another blue room tryst broke the heart of a female prisoner and sent her spiralling into a deep depression. She had unwittingly instigated it by inviting a lonely cellmate to join her when she went to the blue room to see her husband. She hoped it would lift the woman’s spirits and brighten her day. As the weeks passed, she was unaware of the spark she’d ignited. She had no clue her husband and her cellmate were conspiring to meet alone in the blue room. If her husband’s dwindling visits gave her any hint something was wrong, she ignored it. By the time she discovered the betrayal, it was too late. The woman, who everyone believed was a lesbian, had checked out of Hotel K and walked into the arms of her new lover. His visits to his wife dried up completely. Still inside Hotel K, she quickly morphed into a sad, lonely figure – similar to the woman she’d naively tried to help. They’d traded places.

  But relationships in Hotel K didn’t always bring heartbreak. For some, they brought joy and filled in the empty hours with romance. Girlish squeals of delight could be heard in the women’s block when a boy selling crushed ice delivered a rose or a box of chocolates from a prisoner in the men’s block. Women wrote love letters and gave them either to the ice boy or the rice boy to deliver to the men’s blocks. Although the men and women prisoners had no hope of being together once Block W was locked for the night at 4.30 pm, many girls sat in their cells obsessively texting their boyfriends for hours or chatting on the phone, happy to know he was close by, just over the wall.

  The men could sometimes pay an amenable guard to allow them to enter Block W during the day, despite it officially being off limits to male prisoners. One prisoner went in several days in a row to spend time in his wife’s cell playing with their new baby. Brazilian Ruggiero was besotted with Australian Schapelle Corby. He would sometimes slip into Block W to deliver a handful of little chocolates or massage her feet after she’d had a tough day in court. He sent her flowers, boxes of chocolates and a book on Buddhism, and regularly sidled up to her in the blue room, promising more chocolates, begging her to kiss his lips and professing his love. Despite his efforts, his love went unrequited.

  For some women, jail relationships simply improved life in practical ways. It was not uncommon for the women to have several lovers in the men’s block without any emotional ties. Poorer women would target wealthier male prisoners, providing sex, washing their clothes and cooking them food, in exchange for drugs, like shabu, money, and regular call-outs to the blue room to give them a break from claustrophobic Block W. The women who were too poor to own mobile phones wrote letters and couriered them via the rice or the ice boys over to the men.

  She writes: ‘I love you, my darling. I miss you, I need sugar, I need coffee, I want to have shabu.’ Men who have drugs can easily find a girlfriend. If you give her a little bit of shabu, she loves you very much.

  – Thomas

  There were also Hotel K relationships that gave prisoners status. Australian inmate Mick and his younger Balinese girlfriend, Trisna, had been casual lovers outside before they were both sentenced to fifteen years for hashish possession – a charge they both vehemently claim was a set-up. Mick would pay the guards to allow them to meet on the lawns, to eat lunch or stretch out under the trees and enjoy each other’s company. Trisna’s relationship with Mick was very important to her, as being with a westerner gave her status in the jail hierarchy. Poor Balinese girls were usually on the bottom rung. They earned money or food by working for the wealthier girls, doing menial tasks like washing their clothes, cooking or giving foot massages. So, Trisna fiercely protected her relationship with her Australian boyfriend.

  Her days lying in the shade with him sent a clear message to other inmates that they were together. It was what she wanted. Mick was aware of the politics but didn’t mind. He knew that when she begged him to let her wash his dirty clothes, which he preferred to do himself, it was to stake her claim. Washing a man’s clothes was a standard method that the women used to mark their man. Ignoring these signals could be perilous, as one pretty new girl quickly learned. She started stopping to chat to Mick whenever she saw him on her way back from visits in the blue room. Trisna saw red. Her status was threatened. She stormed into the woman’s cell and bashed her up. The woman didn’t fight back. She was caught completely off guard. But she learned her lesson. Mick was perplexed when she scuttled past the next day without lifting her head. But nothing stayed secret for long and he quickly heard about Trisna’s jealous rage. He didn’t bring it up, it wasn’t worth it. But the possessiveness was one way. Mick knew Trisna regularly had girlfriends in Block W, including at one point, Nita.

  Like Nita and Trisna, many women had both boyfriends and girlfriends. While straight women had to make do with texting at night, bisexual women enjoyed the best of both worlds. Block W was crammed full of lesbians, and many women turned to other women for sex for the first time in Hotel K. Some tried it just days after checking in, despite having boyfriends or husbands outside or in the men’s block.

  One woman whose husband was just over the wall in the men’s block developed a crush on a female prisoner. Too shy to approach her, she wrote a letter professing her love and then asked the rice boy to deliver it to her cell at the end of the path. It was either a misunderstanding, or for his own entertainment, that he wheeled his rice cart straight out of Block W and across to the tennis court, where the woman’s husband was leaning against the fence and chatting. He was taken aback when the rice boy handed him a letter from his wife. She’d never written to him before. He tore it open and started reading, clearly surprised by its content.

  The quick switch to being lesbian or bisexual was not only a convenience, it was also sometimes a comfort for vulnerable, scared women. Javanese woman Wanda had never been with a woman before checking into Hotel K, but she quickly turned. She was ripe for the picking after being badly hurt by men. She had married young to a man who regularly bashed her, until the day he left her and their two small children for another woman. Wanda moved to Bali to work as a singer in a karaoke club and make money to support the children, who were still living in Java with her mother. But she picked the wrong man again. When her new boyfriend was caught with drugs, he sacrificed her in a deal with police. To buy his freedom he gave th
e police some cash and gave them Wanda by planting twenty-three ecstasy tablets at her house. It was a commonly used ‘changing heads’ system. In the police cells, Wanda was hassled for sex by police promising to get her off. But she refused, and was sentenced to four years and ten months jail.

  Wanda entered Block W a hurt and fragile woman. At night she wept for her children. During the days she often didn’t eat. She spent her first Ramadan with no visits. She had no family and no friends in Bali. But the women comforted her, cheered her up with food, and gave her massages and affection. She was easily seduced into the nurturing bosom of the lesbians, the physical connection easing the pain in her heart.

  Wanda was petite and beautiful. She was fought over by the lesbians. Renae Lawrence, the only woman in the Australian Bali Nine drug syndicate, who was a lesbian before checking into Hotel K, made a play for Wanda. She visited her cell, gave her food and tried to make her laugh. Renae’s girlfriend, Eda, was bitterly jealous. She refused to even speak to Wanda. One day, Renae’s flirting tipped Eda over the edge; she snapped after Renae offered Wanda a slice of cheesecake. Eda and Renae started laying into each other in their cell. With everyone locked in for the night, all the women were forced to listen to the screaming and the violence until it suddenly went quiet. Eda had collapsed. A doctor was called, but she was okay. Eda soon checked out of Hotel K.

  The other lesbians called Renae Lawrence the playboy of the women’s block. She was big, muscular and masculine, had money and was western. Women threw themselves at her. Renae could comfortably accommodate the girls, having paid guards to have a soft double bed delivered to her cell. Renae soon fell in love with a cellmate, Ira, who she believed was ‘the one’. And despite still having fifteen years left to serve, and Ira now being free, Renae hoped to marry her in a Hindu wedding ceremony inside Hotel K.