Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Steve, dubbed the ‘Ecstasy King’ in the press, had been caught at a Denpasar post office, claiming two packages sent from London. He was asked to open them in a routine inspection; the first package contained nearly three thousand pills inside a shampoo bottle; the second held another three thousand pills wrapped in two shirts. Police then raided his home and found two thousand more tablets hidden in his ceiling. Steve’s tablets were all stamped with distinctive heart, deer or butterfly logos and were much bigger than local pills. During his court case, it made news that hundreds of the pills went missing from police evidence. In fact, more than three thousand pills vanished, and that afternoon in Hotel K, Steve instantly recognised the pills from Arman’s boy, as his own.

  The case of British man Steve Turner, 38, was also leaving a trail at the police department, where some evidence of ecstasy tablets went missing. The original number of ecstasy tablets was 8175, now only 7847. When the evidence arrived at court, 328 tablets were missing. The case ended with the questioning of two police officers about the matter.

  – Denpost, 30 June 2003

  Inside Hotel K, Arman’s drug business was booming, but life had consequently become more violent for inmates. Anyone else caught dealing to the internal market was bashed. Anyone who couldn’t pay their drug bills was also punished. Groups of muscle-bound Laskar enforcers constantly prowled around after those in debt, making threats, smacking them around a bit as a warning or, if that had already failed, bashing them viciously. With Laskar and Arman pushing drugs and offering unlimited credit to westerners, many inmates let their drug bills spiral out of control. If they couldn’t pay up when Arman called in the cash, the consequences were deadly.

  The guys get fucked up on smack or shabu, or whatever, and they give them more and more and more and more. Just give drugs, drugs, drugs to the foreigners and they lose control of the bill. Eventually they have to pay fifteen million, twenty million. Then if they couldn’t pay, they’d beat them up. One time what they did to the Australian kids you wouldn’t believe, and this Italian kid, they beat him up.

  – Ruggiero

  If they know that you are a drug user, they force you to buy drugs from them.

  – Nita

  Many of the westerners who lost control of their drug bills got cash from their parents or friends to avoid being bashed. Juri’s elderly parents had moved their lives from Italy to Bali so that they could visit him daily, doing anything they could to make his life more bearable, including giving him money, unaware their hard-earned cash was spent on drugs. Juri lied in any way necessary to get cash from friends and family for his heroin bill, acutely aware of his fate if he failed to pay. Everyone had seen what had happened to Dutch inmate Aris.

  Aris had been loading up his drug tab for weeks. He had a huge pile of credit notes that Arman’s bookkeeper gave him each time he scored. Arman had given Aris thousands of dollars of credit because Aris had promised to get MDMA powder sent from Holland for him. Arman and Iwan would use it to make thousands of ecstasy pills in Iwan’s workshop. But with no sign of the powder, Arman called in his credit. Aris didn’t have the cash, and had let his bill run out of control, spending money he didn’t have. Now he had nowhere to run. The Laskars beat him almost to death.

  They took Aris, the Dutch guy, and tied him to the bars like Jesus Christ with some electric cable, took a stick and beat him hard. They beat him very hard. Laskar are all animals, they are very savage. This guard, Pak Mus, saved him. It was apel [roll call] time and I told him, ‘He is down the block, being beaten. Stop the shit, Pak Mus,’ and Pak Mus brought him back. Nothing happened to the guys who were beating him. They probably would have hanged him there if Pak Mus didn’t go.

  – Ruggiero

  Typically, Hotel K wanted to avoid bad publicity, and refused to send the badly injured Aris to hospital because too many questions would be asked. Instead, Aris was locked in his cell. For two days he complained of dizziness, and for two weeks he couldn’t stand up. He wept from the pain. It prompted Mick to raise cash from a few of the westerners to buy Aris a gram of smack to ease his agony. His wife was being refused visits so that she couldn’t see his atrocious injuries and report them. To stop her daily attempts to visit him, she was told that Aris didn’t want to see her; that he had another woman. But she didn’t believe it. She knew something was wrong. She was distressed and threatened to phone the Dutch consulate. The Laskars gave Aris a mobile phone and instructed him to call his wife.

  ‘You tell her you have a girlfriend, you don’t want to see her, and don’t make a fucking problem,’ one of the Laskars told Aris. ‘Okay, no problem,’ he quickly agreed. He was in no shape to argue; his eyes were puffed into slits and his body was black and blue. He told his wife the lies. She broke down crying, refusing to believe him. ‘No, no, I’m coming to see you. I love you.’ Aris felt her pain. But he was surrounded by Laskars and, for both their sakes, he had to make her believe him. ‘I don’t love you anymore. Leave me alone, get on with your life,’ he told her. A long wailing noise came through the phone and then it went dead. She didn’t visit him again.

  But Aris got off lightly. He had lived. It was a dark secret among the inmates that the deaths around the jail, set up to look like suicides – such as Beny’s, rarely were. Suspicious deaths were common in Hotel K. At 7.30 am one day, guard Agung Mas had unlocked the women’s cells and was doing the day’s first roll call. She mentioned to Nita that she’d felt there was something strange about the main hall when she’d walked past it earlier, and was going to take a closer look. Unusually, she left Block W’s steel door open, so Nita trailed behind her, and Schapelle, who’d overheard the conversation, also tagged along in her pyjamas. This was a rare chance to walk in the prison grounds and out of the claustrophobic Block W on a fresh, quiet morning; anything slightly different was a relief.

  But there was no chance to enjoy it. Through the hall window, they saw a prisoner hanging in a noose in the centre of the room. One end of a sarong was tied around his neck, and the rest of it was twisted up and tied to a rafter poking through the broken ceiling. His feet were dangling centimetres off the floor.

  The female guard, Schapelle and Nita all knew the prisoner. It was Agus, who’d been a Hotel K inmate for a couple of years. He’d arrived fit and well-built, but inside jail had deteriorated into a skinny heroin addict. He’d been a gregarious drink-seller in the blue room, often telling new inmates to be careful of drugs in Hotel K because he was now an addict, but had never once touched any drug before checking in.

  Now, hanging in the hall, he looked normal, almost as if he were sleeping. His skin was still its usual colour. The only hint of something sinister was his tightly clenched fists and the fact that his block was still locked. The question of how he got out of his locked block during the night would never be asked, let alone answered. Schapelle and Nita stayed calm, numb to the kind of chilling sights to which they’d become far too accustomed inside jail. Very quickly, they were surrounded by a crowd of men as news of Agus’s death spread through the blocks. Schapelle and Nita turned, and pushed past to go back to Block W. A female guard was standing at the block’s door to stop a stirred-up bunch of women from walking outside for a look.

  The inmates all knew this was a murder. The rest of the blue room drink-seller boys were shaken and upset. Not only was it a stark warning to pay their drug debts, but they had lost their good friend Agus. This was the real and dark heart of Hotel K – no matter what PR stunts it turned on for photographers and reporters.

  Life goes on and, after a few months, a killing inside the hall happened again. One prisoner man was hung with a sarong and plastic string. Everybody was shocked. According to the security, he kill himself by overdosing on drugs. Police came and investigated the case, and took the dead body outside the jail for an autopsy. According to news from the security, somebody killed and hanged him in the hall. The condition and situation of the jail is very dangerous.

  – Nita


  Nita knew more than anyone how dangerous Laskar was, but got mixed up with them when she crossed Arman. She’d agreed to supply him with a fifty-gram sample of shabu from her supplier in the Philippines so he could trial a new source. But Nita no longer had a shabu supplier in the Philippines and all she was ever going to get from the deal was a smoke of shabu. Nita called her cellmate Sassa’s boyfriend, Antonio, in another Bali jail, telling him she had a French customer wanting to buy fifty grams. But Antonio ripped Nita off. He sent fifty packets with only half a gram in each. Not realising she’d been short changed, Nita passed it to Arman, who’d already paid the twenty-five million rupiah ($3300). She hadn’t weighed it and had smoked a gram with the girls in her cell. It didn’t take long for the drug lord to weigh it, cast an eye over it and see that it was only twenty-five grams. He also recognised it as his own shabu – Antonio had originally bought it from Arman. Nita and Sassa would suffer a vicious reprisal.

  Arman sent the enforcers down to Block W. Seven men strode through the steel door, carrying a plank of wood and calling out for Nita and Sassa. Women scampered out of their way as they stormed along the path. They found Nita and Sassa cowering in their bathroom. Both women were grabbed roughly by the arms and dragged out, terrified. On the grass between the hall and the front wall of Block W, Nita was attacked. They took turns kicking and punching her body, legs and feet. Nita crouched down, trying to shield her face with her hands. Sassa stood watching and sobbing for her friend, terrified of her own fate, while a Laskar roughly gripped her arm so she couldn’t run. Finally, they let Nita go. She stumbled away, with blood covering her face and her legs shaking violently. There was nothing she could do to help Sassa. The men had grander plans for her; she was young and ripe. They stripped her naked and gang raped her while a crowd of about twenty inmates stood around watching. An hour later, she walked back into Block W, clutching her stomach and crying. Her shirt was on back-to-front and her trousers were undone. As she walked along the path to her cell, women silently watched, backing away to let her through. No-one wanted to be next.

  Nita spoke to the jail boss, telling him she was scared for her life. He advised her to move jails. It was too dangerous for her to stay in Hotel K and he couldn’t protect her; Laskar had all the power. Nita would soon be transferred.

  CHAPTER 17

  SEX ON THE BEACH

  Jail is a gradual killing-you process. Slowly, by slowly, your clothes get more odour and you don’t care about much anymore. You get less and less contact with the outside world and you have less money, so it’s not easy.

  It takes away something from you?

  Yeah, but I punch back all the time. They will never break me down.

  – Ruggiero

  Money is powerful. If you have money, you can go outside the jail to meet your friend; [go] shopping. Just ask permission to the head of the jail and pay money, and they allow you to go out.

  – Den

  One morning, Ruggiero was on a high, but it had nothing to do with drugs. He grabbed cash from inside a secret drawer that he’d built into a table and walked across the yard to the front door. The jail monotony was going to be broken today. He was heading out for a trip to the dentist – or that’s what he was doing officially. As soon as the police escort showed up, Ruggiero climbed into the car and they took off. The car didn’t turn right towards his dentist in Denpasar; it turned left and went straight to Canggu Beach.

  Ruggiero could stay out enjoying life until 5 pm. The Brazilian had done this at least twelve times – whenever he had the cash. It was an expensive day, usually costing more than $200, split between the right people, but a sanity-aiding trip outside Hotel K was worth it. On the way, Ruggiero phoned his girlfriend, confirming he was en route.

  When they arrived, the three police and the guard sat at the beach bar, eating nasi goreng and drinking cans of soft drinks, putting it all on Ruggiero’s tab. Ruggiero sat with his girlfriend, enjoying a plate of his favourite garlic prawns and drinking a glass of beer. After lunch, Ruggiero held his girlfriend’s hand and walked down to the water’s edge and along the sand. Small things had become so indescribably precious to him.

  The more times Ruggiero went out with the police and behaved, the more lax the security got. The first few times were strict. He really had gone to the dentist with a quick side trip to the beach on the way back to jail. But as the police started to trust him, he was given more freedom, until the dentist was just a cover. The same police chief took care of him each time, bringing with him two other obliging officers. On earlier trips, Ruggiero had been banned from entering the water, in case he escaped or drowned, but one afternoon the police chief finally allowed him to go for a surf.

  I got to know this one policeman, he became my good friend. I say, ‘Oh, go to a bar with me’, we went to a bar . . . then after a few times he allowed me to take a dive in the ocean. One day I even took the board and went for a paddle in Canggu. They were shit waves, very bumpy. But it was pretty big and they were afraid I was going to be sucked out into the ocean and wouldn’t show up again. They said afterwards, we’re afraid you’re going to drown.

  – Ruggiero

  On another occasion, Ruggiero phoned his girlfriend, asking her to meet him at a nice little four-star hotel, not far from Hotel K. ‘Can you bring me a bit of shabu?’ she asked. ‘Yeah, of course, no problem,’ he said.

  The next morning, Ruggiero walked out the front of Hotel K with shabu in his top shirt pocket, and greeted the three police. Officially, he was being escorted to the dentist again. He got in the car and they sped off to the hotel to meet his girlfriend. While two of the police sat by the pool, drinking soft drinks on Ruggiero’s tab, he and his girl paid cash to use a room. The officer who’d drawn the short straw sat outside the door.

  Later that day, Ruggiero went for lunch at Echo Beach to meet some mates he had phoned earlier.

  When I arrive at the bar, there is, like, ten friends there. I call everybody to say, ‘Come’. I take some coke and make lines in the toilet. Everybody drinks whisky, everyone is waiting for me.

  – Ruggiero

  Some afternoons he took his girlfriend to the beach – but he needed to use a little ingenuity to have some private time.

  We had a little corner of the beach that had some privacy . . . a bush. We go behind the bush. I say to the cop, ‘I am Ruggiero, you can trust me completely, I would never escape, I wouldn’t do that to you’. He’s been out with me, like, six times. And the guard from jail, also the same guard. He could trust me because they knew I wouldn’t do anything.

  Then one day I took a rope, like, a fishing rope, I say, ‘Listen, I find a very nice spot, behind a nice bush, where I intend to spend some time with a girl’. The guard always wants to see me [so that he knows Ruggiero hasn’t done a runner].

  So I climbed a little branch that was free, I tied the rope on my shirt up there. I said, ‘Listen,’ – because I had my hand phone with me – ‘whenever you want to – instead of seeing me – just call my number’.

  So I was there with my phone, he calls me … I am in the bush with the girl, and I do like this [pulls the rope that shakes the shirt on the branch].

  They see the shirt shaking. So the police know I am there.

  I did this the first time. The second time I took this rope, very thin one, and I put the thing up and I made a joke. I went far away, like one hundred and fifty metres, along the beach. I disappeared and took the rope and the phone with me, and he would call me. And then, when it was time to come back, I say, ‘Motherfucker, I don’t want to come back. Catch me if you can’.

  Then when he went down there, there was nothing. Where is he? I was over here … I came back. It was just a joke. ‘Don’t do that to me again,’ he told me.

  – Ruggiero

  But whatever fun Ruggiero had, there was always a reality check when he was taken back to jail.

  There’s two sides of the coin. You know. Sometimes fuck … so nice outside, then back in
jail. The time outside runs so fast. I have my friends . . . many of my friends don’t like to go to [the] jail, it’s not a nice place to go, so I call my Swedish friends and people come out to the beach, and have big party and drink whisky, sometimes I take some coke and we have a line inside the toilet.

  I’m in jail and I’m the one who brings the drugs.

  – Ruggiero

  But letting prisoners out for a few hours could represent a risk for the guards and police involved if they got caught. In fact, the consequences for several of them could have been dire if Ruggiero had lost the plot on the occasion that he was allowed out and given a fully loaded machine gun.

  You know the craziest thing? Once I went out to the hotel and my girlfriend wanted a photo with our guards. No problem, they say. So there is one guard on one side of me and my girlfriend, and the other guard next to me and the other taking the photo. And the one who was taking the photo had the machine gun. And he put the machine gun down to take the photo.

  I say, ‘Wait, wait, wait, get the gun for the photo, it would look nice’, so he gave me the gun.

  I’m holding the machine gun for the photo, then I was pointing it straight at the other cop. I say, ‘This cannot be loaded’. After he took the photo, I said, ‘Man, is this shit loaded?’ He said, ‘Yes’. I said, ‘Are you joking?’ I take the clip out and it was fully loaded, and the gun was in my hands. The guy gives me a fully loaded machine gun. He said, ‘Give it to me, man’. He was a very nice guy, but I say, ‘You stupid man, don’t ever give a prisoner a gun’. But they say, ‘You’re a very nice guy, we can trust you’.