Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Another Balinese man, Tanjung, was in Hotel K for the murder of five people. He had been working as a taxi driver in Bali when he went on a two-week holiday and let a friend drive his taxi. But when he returned and went to pick up the car, the friend refused to give it back. Tanjung went to his boss to complain. But his boss blew Tanjung off, telling him, ‘You know what … you always scratch the car, damage the car, the guy drives better than you. You don’t work for me anymore.’ Tanjung walked away quietly, but he was seething – and plotting his revenge. A day later he borrowed a car, bought drums of petrol, drove to his boss’s house and knocked on the door. As soon as the man answered it, Tanjung bashed him. He then stole the house keys, locked the doors from the outside and, with the terrified family stuck inside, he walked around the outside pouring petrol. Then he lit a match. The boss, his wife and their three young children were burned alive. Tanjung stood listening to their screams, not leaving until he was sure they were dead.

  In Hotel K his psychopathic tendencies flared at the slightest provocation. One afternoon he was running one of his regular illegal gambling games, throwing three dice from a little Chinese cup, when a female guard turned up. She confiscated the dice, the cup and the cash, and walked off. Tanjung flipped. He snatched a piece of wood, and sprinted after the guard, screaming that he was going to split her head open. It was only the other prisoners struggling to hold him back that stopped him.

  The guy’s skinny, but it took a good six people to hold him. He is a fucking maniac, he’s very dangerous. Never know when he can flip. These guys are totally brainless. They have all the characteristics of a psychopath.

  – Ruggiero

  CHAPTER 15

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

  High on almost all inmates’ priorities list was making a quick buck. It followed that gambling was another favourite pastime in Hotel K – although gambling was illegal in Indonesia. Many prisoners were doing time for playing cards or betting on cockfights, but, like the drug dealers, the gamblers continued carrying out their crimes inside. Almost every night, girls were playing cards for money in their cells. In some of the men’s blocks, inmates set up mini roulette tables and the card sharks ran poker games, frequently aligning themselves with guards to rip off new inmates – often, wealthy Chinese. Night-shift guards would release the players from their cells, and they would sit together at a table playing poker, giving each other signals in order to strip new unwitting inmates of their cash.

  Whatever an inmate’s vice, in Hotel K there was bound to be a way to feed it. Most inmates welcomed the distraction.

  In jail it’s boring. You wake up; you see the same face day after day after day after day. Same food, day after day after day after day, people talk the same shit, day after day after day.

  – Ruggiero

  When African inmate Benoit invited Ruggiero to spend a night with him in his cell, promising a surprise, the Brazilian thought, ‘What the hell?’ Benoit wasn’t your run-of-the-mill prisoner. He wore heavy gold chains around his neck and wrists, and dressed in faux-designer Louis Vuitton or Armani shirts. He aspired to be a music mogul, dressing as if he were already in Los Angeles.

  No one would fuck with him because he’s a fucking Godzilla. He’s a fucking King Kong.

  – Ruggiero

  When the lockup bells rang, Ruggiero walked across to Benoit’s cell. He was busy hanging black curtains on the barred door and windows, making the cell pitch-black. As soon as the guard locked the door, Benoit turned off the fluorescent cell light, then switched on a red light and opened the locked bathroom door. Strung across the ceiling were fine strings with many $100 notes hanging off them. Ruggiero instantly realised it was a money-making factory. ‘If the Queen of England can make pounds, I can make fucking dollars, man,’ Benoit bragged. The show was just starting. He took a piece of black paper out of a box and, in one swift movement, ran it through a tray of clear liquid then hung it up on the string. Ruggiero excitedly stood watching. Next, Benoit started blowing the black piece of paper with a hair dryer. Before Ruggiero’s eyes, the black faded and it morphed into a $100 note. The dazzling night-time show completely convinced him that he had seen money growing on those bathroom strings.

  We made many hundred-dollar bills that night. We made a good $10,000.

  – Ruggiero

  As part of the show, Benoit had explained that the black paper was a negative and by imprinting it with a real one hundred dollar bill, and then developing it, using rare and expensive chemicals imported from Switzerland, he could make cash. He boasted that he could make one genuine-looking fake hundred dollar bill from every real one. Ruggiero was convinced, and quickly spread the word. This was exactly what Benoit had intended. He needed a jail buzz to snag investors.

  Benoit was one of three Africans doing time for a fake American-dollar scam. All three were now acting in sync in Hotel K to find investors among the wealthy drug bosses. Benoit was working with Afong and the third African, named Karim, was also doing private bathroom shows for select audiences. The word quickly spread, luring instinctively sceptical criminals into the makeshift darkrooms. Drug boss Iwan sent a guard to check it out for him. Other guards also heard the news and were knocking on the cell throughout the night, begging, ‘Please make us the money’. The Africans had credibility because their crimes and court cases had been high profile in Bali, with the local press reporting they had been caught making billions of dollars.

  Three suitcases containing basic material, paper which had been 80 per cent processed, two bottles of liquid used in the making of the fake money were confiscated. The fake money was estimated to be around five billion dollars.

  – Denpasar Nusa, 11 January 2002

  The Africans told potential investors that if they paid 500 million rupiah ($70,000) to import the rare chemicals from Switzerland, their money would be doubled overnight. The first to give it a go was one of Pemuka Ketut’s drug bosses, who was doing three months in Hotel K for shabu possession. He invested no more than twenty five million rupiah ($3000) to test the scheme’s veracity. Iwan and Arman held off, waiting to see the results. Meanwhile, Karim was targeting another inmate, Toto, whose brother was a wealthy drug boss outside. Toto and his cellmate Den went to Karim’s cell to watch a dip, hang and blow show. At the end of it, Karim gave them one of the $100 notes to take away and have exchanged in a bank to prove the scam was legitimate. Two weeks later, Toto finished his sentence and walked free. He soon found a wealthy friend of his brothers to invest $70,000.

  We thought it was real, I’m not joking. Toto and I believed it because Karim made the money in front of us … like magic. Then he gave us that money to exchange. Success – it was real. So we believed him. He knew Toto was a big shot. It’s Toto’s brother who takes care of Vincente. He has a lot of cafés, restaurants and hotels in Bali. It was easy for Toto to find investors.

  – Den

  The three Africans only had one chance to lure investors before their smoke-and-mirrors scam was exposed. They knew that as soon as people realised they were not getting any cash back, the news of a hoax would spread like wildfire. Once exposed, they wouldn’t be able to con the same captive market. Karim almost lost Toto and the investor when the other two were revealed as con artists. Four weeks after Ketut’s boss had handed over the $3000 to magically be turned into $6000 there was still nothing. Day after day, Afong and Benoit continued to make excuses. Finally the drug boss had to admit he’d foolishly been duped. He was furious. He told Ketut to punish Afong. The stocky, tattooed killer walked into the African’s cell and made him very sorry. He left him quivering in the corner, with a boot imprint in the side of his head.

  Finally the drug boss had to admit he’d foolishly been duped. He was furious. He told Ketut to punish Afong. The stocky, tattooed killer walked into the African’s cell and made him very sorry. He left him quivering in the corner, with a boot imprint in the side of his head.

  Afong, he’s a homo from Cameroon. He cheated t
he boss of Ketut.

  – Den

  Karim had to go into crisis management mode to keep Toto and his rich client on the hook. He strategically distanced himself from the other two Africans, acting furious that they were ripping people off and giving the fake money game a bad name.

  Karim say to me, ‘Don’t make friends with Afong and Benoit. They are number one motherfuckers. They will cheat you of the money’. In front of people they are enemies. But, actually, they are in the same group. They are all working together. It’s the same business, but nobody knew. We still believed Karim because Mick stayed in his room. So we did a deal secretly and nobody else knew.

  – Den

  Karim threw in a late change of plan to save himself from the same brutal fate that Afong had suffered. He told Toto and the investor that he could not manufacture such a vast amount of money in his cell, so an African friend of his from Jakarta would do it outside. Toto and the investor fell straight into Karim’s trap. They met the Jakarta friend and contrived to do a deal directly, cutting Karim out of the deal and saving on his cut. Karim’s plan was sophisticated in its simplicity. He knew their criminal instincts would ensure they’d cut him out of the deal if they could. This was his insurance.

  The investor – Toto’s brother’s rich friend – transferred 400 million rupiah ($53,000) to a bank account ostensibly to pay for the chemicals, which would be couriered from Zurich to Bali. After four days, a parcel arrived, and Toto, the investor and the African from Jakarta checked into a hotel room, to use as the darkroom to make the money. The investor handed over a final cash payment to the African. The African then got to work, putting the black paper into an aluminium box and pouring in the chemicals. Then they had to leave it to soak in the dark. He stressed to them that there must be no light, so no-one should open it for twenty-four hours. The three of them then left the hotel, and planned to meet the next day to blow dry the sheets of black paper and turn them into hundreds of crisp $100 bills.

  The next afternoon, Toto and his investor showed up, but the African didn’t. They waited for around two hours until they could no longer deny they’d been played like idiots. The furious investor flung open the aluminium box. Inside was a soggy wad of disintegrating black paper, which he scooped up and hurled at the wall, screaming, ‘Motherfucker!’ The pair stormed out and went straight to the blue room at Hotel K to confront Karim. Karim simply used his insurance tactic, claiming that he’d been the one who was ripped off when they cut him out of the deal. But it was obvious this was an act, when he suddenly became flush with cash.

  After that case, Karim became rich. He didn’t have money or anything before, he just ate noodles everyday. No visits for a year and a half. After that, his girlfriend came from Australia, bringing lots of things. His life started to change just within fifteen days, one month. So where did the money come from?

  The investor was really pissed off with Toto. Toto was fucked, but he thinks, ‘Oh well, that’s not my money’. Actually, it was not Karim who is stupid. We are stupid to believe he can make money. But we didn’t know the reality. We see in the newspaper that these black people got busted for billions of dollars of counterfeit money. Then they show us how they make money. But the reality was they put [on it] some kind of chemical to dye real money black, then bleach it out and the original money comes back.

  – Den

  If the duped inmates had read the follow-up press stories about the Africans’ cases, it would have saved them a lot of wasted time. Although, time to waste was something they all had in vast amounts.

  The Head of the police research unit explained that after preliminary tests on the evidence, which were papers and liquid, the result was nil. The black liquid could not turn the sheets of black paper into dollar notes as said before. It’s true that the black liquid is still going through further tests at forensic lab, but the result later will only be used as comparison. ‘Because we’re convinced already, based on proof after tests were done, there’s not the slightest indication pointing at dollar note counterfeiting,’ he explained.

  – Nusa news, 15 January 2002

  Karim escaped any reprisals after one lame attempt to plant photocopied dollars in his cell and alert the guards to a counterfeiting racket, failed to arouse any interest. But often prisoners who did the wrong thing were subjected to bashings or humiliating punishments – dished out by guards or other inmates. There was an open drain filled with sewage, inside which inmates were sometimes forced to swim. The psychopathic killer from Timor who had ripped the skin off his victims’ skulls worked as a debt collector around the jail, and used the drain to coerce payments.

  It was a river of shit; all the oily stuff from the kitchen and the toilets. The guys who didn’t pay their debts were forced to go in there and swim to the other side, head under. The debt collector hangs at the side with a knife. The guy swimming is covered in shit.

  There was one guy who borrowed money from one of the westerners and he wouldn’t pay back the money, so they forced him to swim about forty metres in all this human shit. I went and watched and had a great time. Shame I couldn’t take any photos.

  Did he come out covered in shit?

  Yeah, from head to toe. And then after they come out, they say no shower, you sit in the sun for a little while. Then the smell is going to stay with him for a while.

  You could die from the diseases you catch?

  People don’t give a fuck in there.

  – Ruggiero

  CHAPTER 16

  AN EYE FOR AN EYE

  I saw a guy get his eyeball cut out with a knife. This was Laskar against Laskar. His name is Bambang. Don’t know what he did. But all Laskar fight against one Laskar if he fights with the boss of Laskar. All cowards. When he came back from hospital he had a patch. I started calling him Johnny Depp. He’s a crazy motherfucker. The day he left prison, he killed someone outside.

  – Ruggiero

  Overnight, Hotel K’s world turned more dark and sinister after eight men from Bali’s most violent gang, Laskar Bali, including its number one boss, checked in. There were already more than a dozen gang members inside. Laskar instilled fear in prisoners and guards. Their well-known violent activities on the outside – and now the inside – had everyone jumpy. Stabbings, bashings, rapes and killings became a bigger part of life. The guards no longer had any power. Laskar was the law.

  Suddenly when they went to jail, Laskar Bali owned the jail.

  – Journalist Wayan Juniartha of the Jakarta Post

  Kerobokan was waaay more violent when Laskar came inside. What happened was that the guards just retired. They let them do whatever they wanted . . . as they pleased.

  – Ruggiero

  One afternoon, Nita was escorting inmate Sari across from Block W to the blue room. Standing on the top of the steps to the hall was a Laskar gang member. ‘Oh, you’re pretty,’ he said menacingly. Both women quickened their pace. ‘Come here, I want to talk to you,’ he yelled. Nita felt an icy shiver run down her spine. You couldn’t disobey Laskar. The two women stopped. The boy pointed at Sari, saying, ‘You come in here’, then looked at Nita and barked, ‘You wait there’.

  Sari walked up the steps and disappeared into the hall. Moments later, her anguished screams pierced the air. Nita wiped away her tears as she stood there uselessly, feeling a stinging hatred for the vicious gang that now terrorised Hotel K. There was nothing she could do to help Sari. Even when a female guard came over, both stood helplessly listening to the sobs. Half an hour later, Sari came out, dishevelled and distressed.

  She was crying. I ask what’s happened. What did they do? She tells me that three men force her to do sex with them.

  – Nita

  Nita ushered Sari towards the blue room, suggesting she still go for a short visit to see her friend. The female guard slipped a light jacket around her trembling shoulders. A few minutes later Sari left the blue room too traumatised to be among strangers. She gripped Nita’s hand as she walked back a
cross the jail. The rapists were smugly watching them from the top of the hall steps. Sari was doing three months for petty theft. One of the rapists was her new jail boyfriend.

  Back in Block W, all the women were feeling Sari’s distress as she lay silently in the corner of her cell. No-one could comfort her. If they offered her a glass of water, she ignored it. If they stroked her arm gently, she pulled away. For two days, she didn’t move. But when she finally got up, she walked straight out the door without a word and across to the guards’ table. She was bitterly angry at the evil bastards who had raped her and wanted to report them to the police. But the guards shook their heads. Sari checked out a week later. No-one was punished.

  The guard told her it’s better to keep silent, otherwise the gang will hit you. I also tell to the security, but they don’t want to get involved in this matter.

  – Nita

  The incident sent fear through Block W. The women were scared to walk the perilous path across to the blue room to collect their mail. Many now rigidly stuck to the footpaths, avoiding the short cut past the hall. As part of her job as tamping, Nita walked back and forth escorting prisoners several times a day; now she always took the long route, usually pretending to buy something at the canteen so that the Laskars loitering in the hall didn’t see her fear.