Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Killer Saidin, the snake man, was one such character. Saidin had returned to Hotel K after originally serving a short time, and then being released on a legal technicality, for the late 1990s decapitation killing. Two years later he violated his parole by getting involved in a fight at a gambling night. Subsequently, his murder case was brought back to court and he was sentenced to seventeen years. Saidin was quickly promoted to Pemuka, the powerful position above tamping. He was in charge of prisoners, had keys to all the cellblocks and the run of the jail. He liked westerners and often hung out with Ruggiero and Juri, shared a cellblock with the Bali Nine and walked Schapelle to blue room visits.

  It wasn’t officially sanctioned, but Saidin slipped in and out of Hotel K’s doors whenever he liked, often hiring a car and driving two hours to his home to stay with his wife and three young daughters for the night. Despite his crime, he was well-liked. Inmates didn’t judge him for it and, if they did, it worked in his favour, giving him an aura of power. They all knew he kept his machete under a mattress in his cell as a souvenir of his gruesome crime – and that this sent out a warning not to mess with him.

  He was lovely. He was adorable. You know, I have always been naturally attracted to the bad guys. Before I knew who he was, I always hung around with him. We smoke some shabu together and we tell stories. And then someone said to me, ‘You’re not afraid to be with him?’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘He’s the biggest criminal here,’ he told me. Later I said to him, ‘Saidin, did you cut someone’s head off?’ ‘Yeah, I did it. I would have done it again, the motherfucker, I would have lost my job if I didn’t’. I said, ‘I’m so happy to be your friend’. He said, ‘Ruggiero, just by them [the Laskar gang] seeing you next to me, they won’t touch you again’. Laskar wouldn’t touch him, but he didn’t have the power to stop them beating someone else.

  Why would the gang never touch him?

  Because he would get his knife and cut another head off. He doesn’t give a fuck. He was a maniac. Everyone knows his knife is still there. He’s the type of guy who doesn’t talk much, but you don’t fuck with him. Leave the guy alone … he’s psychopathic. Completely cold blooded. I nickname him Gi Gi as in ‘guillotine’ because he cut the head off. It was a private thing. Not many people dared to call him ‘guillotine’.

  – Ruggiero

  Saidin was security for VIPs and dangerous inmates. He was called if someone overdosed and he broke up fights – but his specialty was catching snakes. One morning when a two-metre cobra slithered into one of the women’s cells through a bathroom drain in Block W, Saidin got a phone call asking him to come quickly. He knew the drill; it happened often enough. He ran down the path and into Block W. Instantly he knew which cell it was, as a group of women stood outside, yelling and pointing. Saidin walked down to the cell and went inside. The snake’s head was up; it was angry and ready to bite. Saidin walked back out. He’d have to wait until it settled or he’d be bitten. He had an affinity with snakes, and knew when to leave them alone. He sat chatting to the women, keeping an eye on the cobra through the door. As soon as he saw its head drop, he went in, slid his hands under its middle and slowly up to its head, then scooped it up, curled it around his neck and came out. The women leaped back to let him pass.

  As he casually walked to his cell, he decided to keep this one as another pet. He already had five cobras that he kept in his cell inside large plastic water bottles under his bed or in the bathroom. They were his pets. Every couple of weeks, Saidin left Hotel K to drive to Denpasar and buy four white rats from a pet shop to feed his snakes. He would take the cap off a bottle, and put the live rats in each container for the snakes to swallow live and whole. Most days he took one of his snakes for a walk, wearing it around his shoulders, even wandering into the blue room. Often he let the snakes out in his cell for a play, or put them out in the sun. They’d vanish into the long grass at the back of the cells, usually returning through the bathroom drain a week or so later. The westerners were fascinated by Saidin’s ability to tame snakes and regularly took photos. His four cellmates had gotten used to living with snakes. But one afternoon, one of them became a little too blasé.

  Inmate Nanang was drunk on arak when he took one snake out of its water bottle, and let it run around his body, teasing it by sticking out his tongue, breathing ‘Haaaaa’ into its face. The snake didn’t like it. It sprayed venom into Nanang’s eyes, and then bit him on the neck. Nanang screamed in pain, dropping the snake and clutching his swelling neck, struggling to breathe. Saidin got an emergency phone call and sprinted to his cell. Nanang was lying on the floor, barely conscious, with the cobra on the loose in the block. Saidin carried Nanang out, with the help of his cellmates, and drove him to Sanglah Hospital, where he stayed with him for two weeks until he recovered.

  A convict at Kerobokan Prison, Nanang, 30, on drugs charges was rushed to Sanglah Hospital because he was bitten by his pet cobra. The snake bite wound on the neck of the dark skinned man had been treated by paramedics. According to his family who visited him in hospital, Nanang has always been a snake lover. He enjoyed keeping poisonous snakes of all types in his house before he went into Kerobokan Prison four years ago. His favourite reptiles were cobras and green snakes. It looked like he never stopped his hobby even though now he lives in Kerobokan Prison. Apparently, Nanang keeps quite a large cobra in his prison cell.

  – Denpost, 2 June 2004

  To Saidin, cobras weren’t just pets. When he was bored, he chopped them up and fried them. He’d cut off the head first, then slash a knife along the belly and gut it, taking out the heart and liver to eat raw and wash down with a glass of arak. Wasting none of his precious snake, he fried the flesh and ate it with rice and chilli sauce.

  If the westerners heard I was killing and cooking some snake, they would all come and say, ‘Give me some, give me some’. They’d sit in the cell eating it, and drinking arak. We drank the blood like a shot. It doesn’t taste good, but has good health benefits. Lots of vitamins. Like medicine. But the fried meat is delicious. Like chicken meat.

  – Saidin

  If westerners weren’t keen to eat snakes, there were plenty of other exotic items on the prison menu. Inmates would catch geckos and grill them. During the rainy season, they would also catch frogs, piling them into a bucket and skinning them to fry on gas burners in their cells. Saidin also regularly ate rats that he caught and bludgeoned in his cell.

  Rats are very delicious. I would grill the whole rat first and scrape it to get rid of the fur. Then I’d chop the head and legs off, cut it in the middle to open it up and then cook it again with some spices. You leave the skin on. The skin is nice, just like suckling pig, nice and crunchy. Whenever I saw a big rat in my cell, I chased it and hit it with a piece of wood, a broom stick. Anything.

  – Saidin

  I’ve eaten some weird stuff since I’ve been arrested. I ate bat in Kerobokan, it was very nice. I had it with vegetables. I also drank cobra blood and ate dog. First time the dog was nice, second time it was disgusting, I swear I would never eat it again. The meat was too hard. First time, maybe, it was a better race of dog. And not long ago a guy made a goat head soup, it was really nice, but very strong. Not many westerners had the guts to eat that kind of stuff.

  – Ruggiero

  But it wasn’t only rats, snakes and dogs that kept the prisoners’ minds occupied.

  Hotel K prided itself on being a rehabilitation facility and gave prisoners the chance to run businesses. Iwan had his workshop, a killer named Tommy had opened a printing factory, Australian beauty school student Schapelle had requested permission to open a beauty salon and Bali Nine member Matthew was teaching English. Not only did these activities fill the empty hours, they helped shave time off their sentences. When drug dealer Thomas returned for his second stint, he went back to his Austrian village roots and planted a vegetable garden. He was taking a forced break from drug dealing because he had no cash to buy from suppliers. His savings were long gone. He threw h
imself into his garden, which ran for about fifty metres behind two blocks. Just as he had with his drug business, Thomas gave it one hundred per cent. Every morning he spent hours diligently watering his crops of lettuces, spinach, eggplant, sawi and cherry tomatoes.

  Thomas liked being busy in his garden, where he could retreat into his own world. He sometimes walked around it, spraying insecticide with a metal can on his back and a hose draped over his shoulder, laughing out loud.

  I felt like an astronaut. I was laughing to myself.

  – Thomas

  Always keen to do business, Thomas organised to sell his produce to a supermarket chain in Denpasar. Every morning he noticed that inmates had stolen from his garden, but he always still had plenty to sell to the supermarkets and cook for himself each day. But his vegetables weren’t making him much money. If the supermarkets ordered a box of spinach and two boxes of tomatoes, the guards would deliver it, collect the fee and take fifty per cent. Expenses like seeds, fertilisers and insecticides all came out of Thomas’s half. At the end of a month, he would be left with 25,000 rupiah ($3) for his efforts. So when the Swiss consul, who looked after Austrian citizens in Bali, offered to invest and buy lettuces for his up-market Swiss restaurant in Kuta, Thomas leaped at the chance. The consul invested 500,000 rupiah ($70) and Thomas planted hundreds of lettuces.

  Late one afternoon, Australian Mick, Scottish inmate Robert and Thomas sat drinking arak by the tennis court. Mick casually mentioned he’d read somewhere that the Chinese used human shit as fertiliser. Robert’s ears pricked up. ‘Must work – look how many people they have to feed,’ he said. It had been a throwaway comment from Mick before he ambled off to his cell for a late afternoon joint. Thomas left to shoot up, and think about it. Robert, seeing everything through a drunken haze, worked himself into a frenzy of excitement. He raced over to a couple of locals and offered to pay them in arak if they helped him smother shit over Thomas’s vegetable patch. They agreed, and grabbed a few plastic buckets and sticks to tie to the handles.

  After shifting the concrete slab on top of a septic tank, they ladled buckets of steaming human shit and carried them across to pour over Thomas’s vegetable garden, spilling the stinking slop all over their hands and feet. They emptied three septic tanks. By the time they had finished, the lockup bells were ringing. The women were already padlocked in their cells, and the vapours of hot shit were wafting over the walls and into their block, causing agitation. They were fighting and accusing each other of making a foul smell. But, as the stink grew inescapably stronger, they fast realised it was coming from outside. They didn’t have a clue what was causing it. But it was so nauseatingly vile that they all sat holding their noses or smothering their faces with pillows for the rest of the night.

  The next morning, Mick casually walked across the jail yard to pick up a blank art canvas from Iwan’s workshop near the vegetable garden. He was completely oblivious to the nasty little disturbance he’d caused, but halfway across the smell hit him hard in the face. ‘This is your fault Mick,’ a guard yelled across at him. Mick yanked his T-shirt up to cover his nose, quickly realising that it was his idea that had inflicted the stink on the jail. It clung to the air for more than a week.

  But the human compost worked well and Thomas’s lettuces grew abundantly. He continued to use the shit as fertiliser, but more sparingly, only a bucket or two at a time. It gave them all a laugh to think of the tourists sitting in the expensive Swiss restaurant in Kuta, eating their delicious crispy green lettuce, and having no idea it had been grown in Kerobokan Jail using human shit.

  Although the vegetable garden kept Thomas busy, he hadn’t stopped using smack. But, with very little cash, he was using putaw (low-grade heroin) and sometimes sharing needles. He regularly relied on charity to get food and cigarettes. After about a year, he was dealing again. It began gradually, after a friend had given him a few grams to sell in jail. He used his cut of the profits to invest in more. He started juggling the two businesses, often using his patch of earth to hide his drugs when he wanted a break from carrying them in his underpants. He would dig a hole with his hoe, put the heroin inside and cover it up, leaving it for a couple of hours rather than risk carrying it around. But eyes were always slyly watching and he lost his stash several times. After digging around for it, he’d eventually have to concede it had been stolen.

  One afternoon, Mick walked into Robert’s cell and saw him chasing the dragon with a couple of local inmates. There was a huge bag of smack on the floor. ‘What the fuck? That’s a lot,’ Mick gasped. Robert quickly put a little in some plastic and passed it up to him, saying, ‘Take it, take it and leave’. ‘Okay, thanks,’ Mick said, incredulous that stingy Robert had given it to him so willingly. ‘It was like Christmas.’ But when Mick spotted Thomas agitated and muttering, ‘I’ve been robbed again. My smack is gone, thirty-five grams of smack gone,’ Mick instantly understood why Robert had been so generous, and why he had shooed him out so fast. He hadn’t wanted Mick to create a fuss and attract a crowd of westerners.

  I was so fucking jealous. It was, like, 600,000 rupiah a gram.

  – Mick

  Mick seized the opportunity to get more smack. He walked back to Robert’s cell and asked casually, ‘Where did you get it from, Robert?’ ‘I bought it,’ he said. ‘Mmmm … where did you get the money from?’ Mick asked, menacingly now. ‘A friend sent it from Hong Kong,’ he replied, scooping up another gram, putting it in plastic and passing it to Mick. ‘This is for you,’ he said. The stash of stolen smack was worth $3000. Robert’s cellmate had pinched it from the garden, and during the next few days they sold it across the jail. Inevitably, Thomas found out, but there was nothing he could do. The locals fought in packs and Thomas didn’t stand a chance of winning.

  The westerners could steal from and cheat each other but still be mates. Soon after stealing his smack, Robert went to Thomas, suggesting they try to grow magic mushrooms in his garden. They grew like crazy in Bali, with light rain and a sprinkling of cow shit. Thomas was keen. But the jail boss, aware of their intent, refused their request for permission to bring in cow shit. That only made them more determined. Several of the other westerners were now excited by the idea of growing their own drugs. Typically, they found a way to defy the rules and get the cow shit into the jail.

  Villagers were working on building a new cellblock, and dozens of them arrived in the back of a truck each day with their building equipment. An extra bag of shit wouldn’t be noticed. So, Thomas, Frenchman Michael, Englishman Steve and Robert kicked in 30,000 rupiah each. For the next ten days, the villagers arrived with a bag of cow shit for Thomas to spread over an empty patch of dirt. Like kids on Christmas morning, Steve, Michael and Robert raced over to the garden every day to see if a plantation of magic mushrooms had sprung up during the night. But they were always disappointed.

  Thomas spent months trying to grow the mushrooms, even building a hothouse using bits of wood from Iwan’s workshop to make a box, putting plastic on the top, and then covering it with grass to hide it from the guards. But still, no magic. In a final attempt, Thomas put a bucket of soil in the oppressively hot machine room that housed a large generator for Iwan’s workshop. This also failed. Then, without any nurturing whatsoever, mushrooms started to sprout in a small flower garden in front of the mosque. Robert’s cell was opened first in the morning and he paid a boy 3000 rupiah (40 cents) to run out and pick the lot each day. He occasionally gave the others a few.

  You eat these mushrooms, you fly. In Kerobokan, we ate them raw. You eat fifteen or twenty, and you’re smiling and laughing all day.

  – Thomas

  Thomas was having more success selling drugs than growing them, though. After a year of working in his vegetable garden, he gave it up and switched to dealing only and making small wood carvings in Iwan’s workshop.

  Another way that prisoners beat the boredom of everyday life in Hotel K was by breeding creatures such as fish or birds. Thomas bred catfis
h in his watering ponds. Another inmate farmed ducks. He kept about one hundred next to Thomas’s vegetable garden, but his ducklings were regularly eaten by rats and muses (a nocturnal Indonesian animal with sharp teeth and a long tail). The long wild grass between the two jail walls was riddled with cobras and there were usually a few prisoners, besides Saidin, who would catch them and turn them into pets. One local inmate caught a cobra and put it in a box, but accidentally killed it by feeding it a poisonous toad. A Chinese inmate fished in the ponds all day for green frogs to eat. He baited a piece of string with grasshoppers and used a stick as a rod, moving from one stagnant pond to another each day. He sometimes even fished for them in the bathroom drains. During the rainy season, when the jail over-flowed with large pools of water, several prisoners used makeshift fishing lines to catch eels, frogs and fish.

  Whether they were mad or just plain bad, Hotel K had a strange mix of prisoners. There were some seriously sick people, who, in most jails, would have been isolated, but in Hotel K, rapists, paedophiles and killers lived side by side with someone who had stolen a can of Diet Coke, or who’d been dancing at a club with an ecstasy pill in their pocket. Among the worst were a dentist who’d performed eighty-seven illegal abortions on foetuses, some as old as eight months, at the back of his clinic; another who’d killed twenty people in Timor – ripping the skin off their skulls; and a young man who’d hacked off his girlfriend’s head after finding her cheating. When police pulled him over on his motorbike for a traffic offence, they discovered the girl’s head dangling in a plastic bag from his handlebars.