by Rusty Young
Setting up a restaurant was a lot cheaper than setting up a shop because I didn’t have to invest money to purchase stock, apart from the food for the day. I didn’t need to provide tables or chairs either, because the section already had them. We had signed a deal with the Bolivian distributors of Coca-Cola – we would sell only their soft drinks and, in return, they loaned us tables, chairs and umbrellas, as well as providing cash that was to be used for improving the inmates’ living conditions. I only needed a cooker, some plates and some plastic knives and forks, which I already owned. The restaurant soon started to do well, and it was obvious that I would need some help, which is how I became close friends with Mike.
Mike was one of the biggest personalities in the prison. When I met him, he was fifty years old and had grey hair that ran down past his waist. He tied it in a ponytail, which made him look like an old hippy. Two years later, after the night he went crazy, he shaved off all his hair in order to start his life over again. When people kept commenting on how young he looked, he decided to lower his age to forty and keep his hair that way.
Mike was one of the few English-speaking foreigners in San Pedro. He came from Canada, but he spoke German, Russian, Spanish and Arabic as well. But you never knew whether he was telling the truth or not, because Mike was also a compulsive liar. Before prison, he’d had the most exciting life of anyone I’ve ever known. He had dined at the Bolivian president’s home. He had been an international spy and a hired assassin. He used to deal cocaine to Hollywood movie stars. He’d been on first-name terms with the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. He had taught mathematics at a Canadian university before the physics department headhunted him to work on their black hole research team. He had a law degree. He knew how to assemble bombs. His ex-girlfriend was a famous model.
Most compulsive liars become very boring after a while. They repeat the same lies over and over until you can recount their stories better than they can. And you also start to notice inconsistencies in their stories. But Mike had an excellent memory, which made it very hard to disprove anything he said. He remembered every little lie he ever told and they never contradicted each other. In fact, he even started weaving them together.
‘I thought you had a wife and kid then?’ I’d jump in, trying to catch him out. But I never could. He was too quick for me.
‘Yes. That’s how I met Pablo Escobar in the first place. He was a friend of my wife’s sister. They met in Panama when she was a diamond trader. Remember, I told you about the diamonds?’ Mike was good. In fact, he was very good.
Mike was also a coke junkie. He had been caught with fifty grams of cocaine when the police carried out a dawn raid on his house in the south of La Paz. It wasn’t even a proper raid; they just walked through the door, which was left open, and crept into his room on tippy toes, trying to stop their boots from squeaking so as not to wake him. The drugs were on the bedside table and Mike was half-asleep next to them. From the moment the police first interrogated him until his sentencing hearing, Mike’s defence didn’t change: he claimed the fifty grams were for personal use. The judge didn’t believe him, but if you had known Mike, you would have known that that amount wouldn’t have lasted him a month.
Mike said he was clean now, but I never believed him. Everything went at full speed when he was around. I had real trouble keeping up with him. He couldn’t sit still for one minute; he spoke at a million miles an hour; and he worked flat out all day in my restaurant, even when there were no customers.
‘These Bolivians are lazy,’ he would say. ‘I can’t stand it. They do nothing all day except eat and complain. Look at them. They’re fat.’
Not everyone in San Pedro got along with Mike, because he was so highly strung. His personality also made it tough to work with him in the restaurant, especially since the kitchen area was small and crowded. However, once you knew how to handle him, Mike was quite a good employee. For a start, he was an excellent chef: he could produce a delicious meal using a few simple ingredients, and he always seemed to know how much salt to add or how many more minutes the fries needed cooking. He hated it if he thought I was interferring.
‘You’ve hidden the salt again, McFadden. I can’t work under these conditions,’ he said one time when I moved some things during the morning preparation.
‘I’m only trying to help.’
‘Well, you’re not helping. You’re slowing me down,’ he complained, throwing a tea towel over his shoulder and then flapping his arms like a distressed bird.
Mike was very polite and professional in the way he dealt with customers. He was meticulously clean; he tucked his ponytail into the back of his jeans so that it wouldn’t get in the way, and he always wore an apron while he cooked. And like all good chefs, he couldn’t stand anyone being near him when he was cooking.
‘I can’t have this stress hanging over me all the time, McFadden. When I was working on Fifth Avenue in New York, they gave me complete creative control.’
Mike also had eyes in the back of his head. He could be crouched down, getting something out of the refrigerator, but he would still know exactly where I was and what I was doing. I would sneak over to eat a french fry when he wasn’t looking, but he always caught me.
‘That’s it, McFadden. Get out of my kitchen. Out!’ He’d stamp his foot and then point to the door in the same way as Ricardo did, except that Mike was serious. ‘I’ve warned you before about touching my french fries.’
‘Your french fries?’ I’d laugh, wondering how he always got me. ‘I paid for them.’
But Mike had an answer for everything: ‘Well, they’re my fries while I’m cooking them. Now get out!’
Then I’d politely remind him that I was the owner of the restaurant and he was my employee.
‘OK, then, McFadden. You just sit there and keep out of the way. I’ll call you when I need you to serve up.’
I was supposed to be the boss, but somehow I ended up as waiter and drinks boy. I didn’t mind, though; Mike made me laugh. While Mike cooked, I sat in the corner and cut the onions or peeled potatoes and listened to him go on and on. He would talk the whole time and do at least four things at once, without ever losing his concentration. I never got bored listening to him, either. He fascinated me, even when I knew that he was lying. He had an entire imaginary world that he had created for himself and sometimes he lived in it, or reminisced about it, and he always added new details and elaborated his stories until they almost got to the point of being ridiculous, but not quite.
‘And I said to Pablo, I said, “Pablo, don’t be fucking with me. This is Canadian Mike you’re talking to here.” And you know what? He listened. Pablo actually listened, for a change. He never listened to anybody else, but he used to listen to me. You know why? I’ve got a theory I developed from when I was a psychologist in Montreal: I think it was because Pablo wasn’t used to anyone standing up to him. In fact, I’m convinced of it. He’d been surrounded by yes men his whole life, when all along he was just waiting for somebody to say no. And you want to know something else about Pablo? Listen to this …’
Mike was funny. He didn’t know it himself, but Mike was very funny. He took himself way too seriously, which is what made him so funny. His funniest obsession by far was hygiene. One time I bought a bucket and some special soap for rinsing his hands, but he said you could only use the water once before it got infected with bacteria. Between orders, he would run to the bathroom to wash his hands and change the water. He always came back even more energetic than before. That guy could sniff a lot. And he had been doing it for so long that it was his normal state of mind, so you hardly noticed. He never admitted to it and even if you had caught him in the act, he would have denied it, because Mike had convinced himself that he wasn’t doing coke anymore.
30
NIGHT SHIFT IN THE COCAINE
LABORATORIES
It was also during my period as a shopkeeper and restaurateur that I made friends with the bigger dealers and finally
got to see the cocaine laboratories. The first time I saw them operating, I was so fascinated that they offered me a job working there. It didn’t pay well, but I learned a lot and it kept me out of trouble at night.
I was amazed at how easy it was to make cocaine. Very few people were needed and the equipment used was nothing fancy or scientific: a few buckets, hoses, pieces of cloth, strainers, several lamps and some flat trays for drying the crystals. In fact, the hardest part seemed to be getting hold of the chemicals, which were expensive and hard to find since they had been made illegal as part of the United States’ ‘war on drugs’. But once you had those, the process was surprisingly simple.
The coke came into the prison in the form of pasta básica, a thick, off-white-coloured paste extracted from coca leaves by soaking them in kerosene or gasoline and then adding alcohol, followed by sodium bicarbonate. This process was always carried out where the coca was grown, mainly in Bolivia’s Chapare region. Most of the pasta was then sold and transported to the labs in Peru and Colombia, but a small amount managed to find its way into San Pedro prison. It was usually smuggled through the main gate by the inmates’ wives. Among the hundreds of boxes and sacks of food that arrived to supply the prisoners’ daily needs, it wasn’t difficult to hide a few kilos in bags of sugar or rice, or hollowed-out fruit. The liquid chemicals were more difficult to get in, but the searches were never thorough, especially if the guards had been bribed in advance. Besides, if anyone was caught, the penalty was simply a bigger bribe.
The laboratories were run out of inmates’ rooms at night. The bigger ones could produce several kilos a night, but there were also smaller operators who ran cruder laboratories using makeshift equipment and substitute chemicals, although the quality was never as high.
The whole process, from pasta básica to the white cocaine crystals that you sniff, could take several nights’ work if it was done carefully, or one night if they were in a rush. The pasta básica was first treated with water and sulphuric acid, then stirred to separate out the cocaine solution, before being siphoned off using a hose. Once that concentrated paste had been filtered and dried, you had cocaine base – basé– which was sold to the inmates to be smoked. Or if you added more chemicals, such as hydrogen chloride, ether or acetone, you could then filter it through strainers and pieces of cloth to refine it further and get a better product. The resulting substance would be left to crystallise properly, leaving you with pure cocaine crystals. This final drying process took many hours, which was why they did everything at night, when the other inmates were asleep and there was no chance of the police coming into the prison. The paste was usually dried under lamps or heated to make it crystallise faster.
The chemist – known as the cocinero – supervised each of these steps, but went to sleep in between times. Nevertheless, someone had to be awake the whole time in order to keep an eye on how things were going. My job was to stir the mixture regularly, making sure that it was consistent and dried evenly and that the right temperature was maintained. If any of it settled on the bottom of the tray, it could burn and ruin the whole batch. A single mistake would cost thousands of dollars, so I had to set the alarm clock and wake the cocinero up every hour to check, or whenever something looked like it was going wrong.
The actual steps involved in making cocaine seemed simple when you watched someone who knew what he was doing. But there was a lot of skill and experience involved for the cocinero to get the exact chemical balance, knowing how long to allow for each stage, and when to add more of a chemical. The top cocineros earned good money, but the actual laboratory workers, like myself, were never paid much, and only when the money from a sale came through. Or you could take the salary option I did, which was to be paid in cocaine. At the end of a night, you might be given ten or twenty grams, depending on how much had been produced and how generous the bosses were feeling. Inside the prison, that quantity wasn’t worth much, but if you knew how to get it out of the prison, there was definitely some money to be made.
The final product went out of San Pedro the same way it came in – through the main gates. Sometimes, school children were used as the mules, since they were less likely to be searched properly. Or more innovative techniques might be used, such as the one I later invented, which was virtually undetectable.
31
THE VELASCOS
Because I was running the tour business, a restaurant and my own shop, the other inmates seemed to think that I was made of money. In fact, I wasn’t; buying supplies for the shop and paying off the guards used up most of my cash flow. That was the only money I had left since I’d called on every contact around the world that owed me money to help me fund my court appeal, which had been unsuccessful. The appeal judges had confirmed my original sentence. I had only one appeal avenue left: the Supreme Court in Sucre, the nation’s capital. Those judges were going to be expensive but the inmates were always begging me to lend them something. And very often, it was hard to refuse. Especially if they were good friends, like the Velascos.
The Velascos were into all sorts of money-making scams in the prison. One of them was receiving and distributing counterfeit banknotes, which was big business in Bolivia. Fake bills were circulating in every part of the economy. You had to look out for them at the markets, in shops, and especially with the moneychangers along the Prado. I even heard that employees in the banks were in on it. Some of the cash teller machines dispensed the occasional fake 100-boliviano bill, especially on weekends, and then the banks refused to accept responsibility when they reopened for business on Monday.
Fakes were so common that it was standard practice for anyone receiving cash to check it thoroughly. Mostly, the copies were easy to distinguish, if you knew what to look for – the feel of the paper or the colour – but the quality was getting better and there were always people who got fooled or forgot to check, especially tourists. I never heard of a traveller making it through the country without getting stung at least once.
Obviously, the inmates in San Pedro knew to be wary. There were even rumours of a counterfeiting press inside the prison. I doubt that this was true, but it made everyone more suspicious. There was a shortage of coins in Bolivia, which meant that people were always running about looking for someone to break up larger bills. But many of the shopkeepers refused to change them because they were worried about fakes.
Although it was impossible to get fakes past the suspicious eyes of the inmates, San Pedro was still the ideal distribution centre. Trading in counterfeits seemed to go hand in hand with all the other types of illegal activity already going on, and there was always someone down on their luck who was willing to have a go at passing off a few fakes. Inmates would send their friends and wives out with loads of notes, either to sell them on or to try their luck themselves. They were hard to get rid of, but it was worth a shot – if you pulled it off, it was money for free.
It worked well enough for the Velascos until Angela, the son’s new wife, got busted by the lieutenant. One visitors’ day, he pulled her aside for a search at the gate on the way out and went straight for her wallet, which was filled with fakes. She was then held in the prison office for questioning. The lieutenant needed fifteen hundred dollars to make the problem disappear.
‘You have to help my son, Thomas,’ Jose Luis begged me. ‘Please. For the family.’
‘Hey man, I’ve got nothing.’
No one ever said ‘no’ directly when asked to lend money. That would have been considered rude. You simply had to say you didn’t have anything, even if you did. The trouble was that when you genuinely had nothing, no one ever believed you.
‘I would if I could, believe me. But I have no money. Honestly. Everyone owes me from the shop.’ And on this occasion, I wasn’t lying. Apart from two hundred dollars that I needed myself, I had nothing.
‘But we’ll pay you interest. However much you want. You just say the amount.’
‘But I don’t have money. Nada. I’m sorry. I can’t help
. Honestly.’
I wanted to help Angela, but I wasn’t prepared to mortgage my properties in order to do so; they were everything I owned in the world. It was clear, however, that Jose Luis still didn’t believe me. He didn’t say as much, because it was part of the same prison etiquette that the person asking for the loan couldn’t directly accuse you of lying when you said you had nothing. He would just continue on as if you hadn’t said anything in the first place.
‘You’ve known Angela for years,’ Jose Luis persisted. ‘We’ve asked everyone. You’re our last hope.’
Then the son, Jorge, knocked at my door. He was on the point of tears and it took him a while to compose himself. He had been negotiating with the lieutenant and believed that he would now accept one thousand dollars. Then he started crying. I pulled out a chair and guided him gently towards it.
Jorge sat with his head bowed, staring down at my table and crying quietly. The tears ran down the bridge of his nose and clung to its tip until the next one came along, making the two combined drops too heavy, and they would fall into a small pool directly beneath his nose. Having a grown man cry like that in my room made me feel ashamed for not helping.
While Jorge sat weeping, his father continued to beg. The whole family would be in prison. What hope would any of them have, then? He assured me that they did have the money, just not on them. They had made phone calls and it would be brought later that day, but the lieutenant needed it right now or Angela would be charged. And if I didn’t believe that their relatives had money, then Angela knew hundreds of people in Sweden who could wire it over. One thousand dollars meant nothing in Sweden. Three days. Maximum four. Still, I resisted.
Finally, Jorge raised his head as if to speak. He had stopped crying, but his eyes were red and there was still a silvery trail over his nose where the tears had run. He looked straight at me.