Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  In the morning before the blocks were opened for roll call, Pak Giri would arrive at Thomas’s window to collect several noodle packets, each filled with fifty straws, to take home with him. Thomas didn’t want to risk inmates stealing it, so kept only one packet at a time in jail – which he guarded closely, often stuffing it into his underpants. Whenever he needed more straws, Pak Giri would bring them in. Pak Giri also smuggled out the bigger packets and delivered them to Thomas’s outside customers. In a day’s work, the guard could almost double his monthly salary.

  How much did you pay Pak Giri?

  It depends how much he brings in and out. Maybe if he brings in two hundred grams, and he makes two or three deliveries, he gets two million in his pocket [$270]. For an Indonesian, that’s good. One or two million in his pocket, he’s happy. All afternoon, he smiles.

  – Thomas

  Foreign inmates were forever phoning Thomas to buy a few straws of smack. He’d pay a local prisoner 5000 rupiah (70 cents) to deliver it to a foreigner’s cell, so he didn’t make himself too conspicuous by pacing up and down the pathways – although most guards turned a blind eye anyway.

  Most of the guards, they knew already. If I was sitting with them, talking, I say, ‘I want to use’. I go into the toilet, I use smack, I come out and talk again with him. No problem.

  – Thomas

  The Hotel K market was ruthlessly competitive, with the high rollers always watching their backs. While Arman was keen to take over Thomas’s business, Ketut and his cohort guard, Fisheyes, were losing their existing smack business, and made bringing down Thomas their target. Fisheyes was one of the most dangerous guards. He always had his eyes on the lookout for a chance to sabotage other dealers who were outside his partnership with Ketut, or to confiscate their drugs to use and sell. Being an insider meant the sly guard usually got wind of the latest hiding spots and searched for drugs where other guards didn’t even think to look.

  One afternoon, Thomas was loitering between the tennis court and Block W with a bit of heroin in his pocket. He spotted Fisheyes slinking out of the steel door of Block W after a rendezvous with his inmate girlfriend. To avoid him, Thomas walked briskly down the path behind Iwan’s workshop. But Fisheyes strode after him, shouting: ‘Come here, come here!’ He trapped Thomas behind the workshop and started frisking him. Thomas put his hands in the air while Fisheyes rifled his pockets and patted him down. Fisheyes found nothing at first, but then caught on. ‘What’s in your hand, Thomas?’ Thomas held his fist high in the air and refused to open it. Fisheyes yanked at his arm. Thomas turned slightly and used his bony hip to knock him away. Then, in a split second, Thomas stuffed the packet of heroin in his mouth. Fisheyes was furious. He flew at Thomas and grabbed him around the throat, trying to stop him swallowing it. But Thomas was a pro and the evidence quickly vanished.

  If he doesn’t have evidence, he can fuck off. I say, okay, if you want to talk to the boss, I also want to talk. If you be quiet, I be quiet. I knew he sold shabu and smack, and in the end he didn’t make a problem for me. But he’s an asshole. He’s a very big asshole.

  – Thomas

  But a couple of weeks later, Fisheyes stung Thomas. The guard was sleeping on a chair outside the printing factory as Thomas snuck past to hide his new supply of one hundred and fifty grams of shabu.

  I got sent shabu – it was Sunday or a holiday and one of my guards brought it in. I kept my drugs in the printing factory at this time. So I gave the shabu to one boy, who had a key to the factory and he put it inside. But this fucking bastard Pak Juli Fisheyes, he was sitting outside. One or two hours later, Ketut Dana says to me: ‘Pak Juli wants to make problem for you. He wants to call the big boss to check the printing factory.’

  I say, ‘Okay, you help me’, because he was close to this bastard Fisheyes. They were smoking together, making money together, they were close. I say, ‘Can you tell him, if he wants, I give him ten grams. If he shuts up’. Ketut goes and comes back. ‘No, he don’t want. He wants all of it.’ So I say, ‘I got it on credit, I can’t give all. I’ll give him twenty grams to shut up’. He goes again and comes and say, okay, he only wants thirty grams. So I give him thirty grams – much money. This time is maybe 400,000 or 500,000 rupiah [$70] for one gram. But after a few days it was finished, and he kept coming back and asking me, ‘Give me a little bit for smoking, give me a little bit for smoking’. He is a real motherfucker, actually. On one hand he use; on the other hand, he catches people who are not with him.

  – Thomas

  Thomas realised it had been a set-up between Fisheyes and Ketut to take his shabu. Despite this, Thomas later smoked shabu with Fisheyes in Arman’s cell. Fisheyes was one of several guards who would often sit in the cells and smoke with prisoners. Shabu was the drug of choice for working guards, as it gave them energy and made the mind race, unlike dope or heroin, which made them sleepy.

  Many times he came in this room and was sitting there and smoking. So, I also came there, and I was smoking together with him. Because I am not one hundred per cent experienced in this shabu, he lit the fire for me for smoking and I held the bong. But he still was a headache because he always wants something. He wants to buy half gram, or says, give me 200,000 rupiah. He always gave me a headache.

  – Thomas

  Erratic drug censure in Hotel K meant drug users and dealers always had to stay on red alert. There were devious guards like Fisheyes and guards watching for drugs so they could get a cash sling to keep quiet. And there were always some guards who took it to the boss. But the constantly changing jail chiefs mostly opted to keep the prolific drug trade quiet, rarely choosing to involve the police. If a prisoner was caught with drugs, it was usually dealt with internally by confiscating them and locking the prisoner in cell tikus, until they paid to get out. Advertising the jail’s thriving drug culture was not in the interests of the jail and its bosses.

  Cunning prisoners devised a circus of stunts to get drugs inside. Prisoners got people to simply throw drugs over the wall in tennis balls, or cigarette packets weighted with a stone, coordinating the timing by phone.

  He says, ‘I’m here’. I say, ‘Okay, throw’.

  – Thomas

  Some fished for drugs by casting a line over the wall with a nail tied to it for weight. After someone outside tied the drugs on, they’d reel it back inside. Suppliers posing as visitors often brought drugs into the blue room, in hollowed-out loaves of bread, hidden underneath a batch of cakes or tucked in their shoes. Local prisoners sometimes pretended to sweep the front courtyard so they could collect a drug package left under a bush. But the easiest, most efficient technique – the one high rollers mostly used – was to pay a guard, or a prisoner who had licence to come and go.

  Police had no jurisdiction inside Hotel K without a warrant and were virtually impotent when it came to catching prisoners with drugs. In the time it took to obtain a warrant, the collaborating guards would phone their inmate dealers, warning them of the pending raid. By the time the police got inside, the bigger dealers were always prepared and would have disposed of their huge drug stashes.

  Bali Police narcotics officers cancelled their planned raid of Kerobokan State Penitentiary on Thursday afternoon after prison officials warned them the raid might trigger a riot. Three truckloads of officers arrived at the prison’s main gate around 3pm. The officers were ready to enter the prison to conduct a search for illegal drugs when the prison officials informed them the inmates were getting agitated and were likely to resist the search.

  – Jakarta Post, 19 June 2009

  Although prisoners had protection and insurance inside Hotel K, dangers still lurked for them outside if their customers were caught by the police. Aware of the heavy trafficking in and out of the jail, police set up surveillance directly outside the front of the jail, where they did have jurisdiction. Prisoners and guards running drugs in and out of the jail and doing transactions in the car park had to be careful.

  There are man
y ways drug dealers use to deceive the police. One of them is by hiding the evidence in a torn slipper. This trick was used by suspect Sunardi, owning 1.4grams of heroin. The prosecutor stated that Sunardi was captured in the Kerobokan Jail parking lot. Police got information that there would be a drug transaction in the parking lot. They executed surveillance and saw the accused showed a suspicious attitude. The police approached the accused and frisked him. At first the police found nothing on the body of the accused. But on seeing the slipper of the accused was open, the police examined it and found a small plastic package that was later tested and proven to be heroin.

  – Denpost, 3 December 2005

  The blue room was one of the busiest places for drug transactions. Drug deals were as common as blow jobs. Prisoners would take their drugs to a visit, to sell to their friends or customers. Many of the westerners regularly did a bit of trade to help pay their drug bills. But their customers put them at risk the moment they stepped foot outside the front door of Hotel K. Some avoided that risk by shooting up in the blue room toilet or popping an ecstasy pill before they left.

  Suspect James Loho, 24, was nabbed by police in theparking area of Bali’s biggest prison after buying drugs inside, last Thursday. Police had been watching the prison after a drug felon involved in a case they were handling revealed the source of the stuff came from Kerobokan Jail. The police carried out surveillance, watching every visitor closely. At around 4 pm on Thursday, the suspect came to the prison with an excuseto visit. Thirty minutes later he came out. Several police approached the suspect because of his suspicious body language. When approached by the police, the suspect’s behaviour got even weirder. When the officer reached in his pocket, a plastic bag containing putaw [low grade heroin] was found. The suspect confessed he bought the illegal stuff from one of the prisoners for 400,000 rupiah.

  – Denpost, 27 May 2006

  Brazilian Ruggiero had one strict rule for any friends who came in to buy drugs from him in the blue room; necessary for his self-protection.

  I always say, ‘The only condition I make is you put it in your pussy, not in your pocket. If you get searched and arrested, I get a problem’. Most of the time it’s a girl coming in, my Swedish friend or American friend, they wear a skirt, they come prepared. They just … shhh … in an eye blink, it disappears up. A small littleball like this. Usually they take five, ten grams.

  Bit dangerous, though, if it leaks?

  Noooo. It’s professionally done, professional. I’m not in jail for nothing, baby. I’ve done it many times.

  – Ruggiero

  CHAPTER 13

  ROLLING THE DICE

  I hate the fucking police, they fucked my life up. I don’t do anything bad to anybody. I am not criminal, I am a normal person and I do business. I don’t force anybody to take drugs. And if somebody has never used drugs, he can never get them for thefirst time from my hand. It’s a normal business. They should make it legal, they should make it fucking cheap, so there is no criminal, so people can go in the shop and buy it. It is bullshit, actually.

  I never do anything criminal. I came this way. You never know in your life where it is going, maybe you go this way, and you start a business, you don’t think anything bad, or anything criminal. You just want to make some money; okay, you do something.

  You didn’t think it was criminal when you started selling drugs?

  I knew it was illegal but I didn’t think it was criminal. Criminal is if I steal something, if I hurt somebody, if I do something wrong, if I make corruption – because corruption is stealing, this is criminal. But doing business is criminal? I don’t think it is criminal. Cigarettes are not good for health, alcohol is not good for your health, the chemicals they put in the food is not good for health. So they choose, the fucking government, they choose what you can do and what you cannot do. And normal sense, it does not make. What is the problem if we sit here and smoke ganja together? What is theproblem? Who would it hurt? What’s the problem? But if they catch you, they put you threeyears in jail, four years, ten years in jail. Bullshit.

  – Thomas

  The Denpasar Police apprehended a 35-year-old Caucasian man, Thomas Borsitzki, who is allegedly one of the top illicit drug suppliers in Indonesia. They found some 13 grams of pure heroin stashed inside a black-striped brown bag in his rented bungalow in Canggu area, 15 kilometres west of Denpasar. Borsitzki had been on the local police watch-list since the 1990s, after authorities began to suspect that he was closely connected with international drug smuggling syndicates.

  – Jakarta Post, March 2002

  For those involved in the drug business, it became an addiction to the game, the money and the buzz. It was worth the risks and the inevitable jail time. Most of the high rollers in Hotel K had done time before. Just as being inside didn’t stop them playing, the moment they were released, they were back at it again outside. Iwan, Arman, Thomas and Nitahad all been jailed more than once. Arman’s convictions also kept multiplying while he was in jail. Nita was re-arrested for dealing only weeks after her release, while she was waitingin immigration housing for her passport so she could be deported. Nita was about to go home – go free. Instead, she went straight back to jail. With no cash left to make deals, she got a further ten years. She was suicidal, and for weeks didn’t leave her cell in Block B. But when she started coping again, she also started selling again.

  Thomas had returned for his second stint in Hotel K after ten years of business in a snakes and ladders-style drug dealing career; climbing, and then spiralling down to rock bottom, rolling the dice on his fate every day. After he was freed from Hotel K in the early 1990s, he was deported, like all non-Indonesian ex-cons, and his passport was red stamped so he couldn’t return. He chose to fly to Bangkok rather than back home to Austria, and spent a few weeks networking. He bought a false German passport and then flew straight back to Indonesia. There he embarked on a life of constantly moving around to stay under the radar and invisible to police as he built a drug cartel that would, at one point, dictate the price of heroin in Jakarta.

  Thomas had started his drug career in Austria during his teenage years, riding trains to Italy to buy a hundred grams of hashish to sell and smoke with his friends while they drove around to discos in the small farming village where he lived with his grandparents. ‘I was already a little bit naughty when I was young.’ By the time he was sixteen years old, he was smoking heroin, hashish and marijuana. By nineteen, he was facing a drug charge, but left Austria to begin a backpacking trip before it went to court. He flew to India and made Asia his new home. He dabbled in various businesses, but the drug trade was the one that would consume his life.

  Soon after leaving Austria, he met an English woman in Bali who was ten years older than him. They had a child together, and both worked for an export company, sourcing clothes, statues, wood carvings and masks to send to England to be sold at North London’s Camden market. Although Bali was their base, Thomas and his girlfriend were gypsies, endlessly moving between India, Nepal, Thailand and Bali. They used drugs regularly, and Thomas always flew with a smorgasbord of hash, dope and smack for their enjoyment, preferring to buy in Bangkok.

  I didn’t want to buy drugs in Indonesia at that time because it was always a little bit dangerous. Bangkok was very open. Everyone was using, tourists very openly using.

  How did you carry the drugs on the plane?

  I put it in my arse. At this time, it was not for business or anything. Only was fun and enjoy. I just pack in plastic and put some cream or something and push it up. When you first put it inside, you can feel it moving up, but automatically it goes right up and you can’t feel it anymore. It’s a safe way to carry.

  After, I start getting to know people in Bali and start to bring maybe fifty gram, one hundred gram from Bangkok to Bali to try selling. This time I would eat it because it was too much to put up my arse. I first swallowed with water because I didn’t know. But you cannot use water because your stomach is too full.
You squash some banana and roll plastic ball of heroin in it so it’s a bit slippery. Some use yoghurt, some use banana or something like that.

  Actually, only two, three times I eat it myself. But when the business started to work, I didn’t want to bring it myself anymore. So my friend in Bangkok buys the goods for me, and arranges a carrier for me. Mostly at this time I used Bali people.

  I used other people to do the packing. This is their specialist job. You use fine sandwich plastic from the supermarket and put one and a half spoonfuls of heroin on the plastic, and fold it many times. It can’t be rough. If one packet opens, you die. Then you use a cigarette lighter to melt it shut so it can’t fall out. If you burn the plastic too much it turns black; sometimes this makes people feel sick and vomit. But if it’s packed well, it doesn’t make you feel like vomiting.

  If they start to vomit, it’s difficult to eat any more. You have to stop. You can’t keep going. And if a courier can’t eat a minimum of five or six hundred grams, they can’t go because it is not worth the trip for such a small amount. They have to start again. So you wait until it comes out the next day, and eat it again. Maybe delayed two days.

  I had one woman – she could eat only about three hundred grams. She could not eat more. But she wanted to go and we had already bought her ticket. Money alreadyspent, so we put in her bra and we put inside her. She can’t eat much but she makes it even by putting it elsewhere. They must carry six hundred and fifty grams minimum. I had maybe five or six women. One actually was good, she can eat a lot and she put inside and she was big inside. Was good.