The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare

by Farrell, Jeff

  * * *

  Earlier, I’d walked into the airport. It was no Heathrow – just a couple of badly lit poky halls with yellowed walls. The law was everywhere. Police busied about checking IDs. National Guard troops armed with machine guns roamed. I wasn’t bothered; I was sure all would go well.

  In the departures area I saw a worker in a red jumpsuit wrapping cases in cling film. I paid him a few euro to do mine; I liked the extra security. I walked over to the Air France check-in desk. The stewardess was a typical Venezuelan beauty with sallow skin and perfect sheen hair.

  ‘Inglés?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said with a warm smile.

  I handed over the black suitcase. She checked it in. No problem. I watched it disappear behind a plastic curtain. That was it. Down the chute. Home and dry. All was going to plan. I could already see my debts at home disappearing off my bank statement. And I felt OK; I was sure the case was packed well. Only a proper search would suss it out.

  I went through a few formalities, queuing up to pay a departure tax. I fished out a few scrunched-up notes of the local currency – bolívares fuertes – from my pocket. I then passed through immigration and flashed my passport at an official. He curtly nodded, his eyes barely looking at me. Not a hitch. It was all plain sailing.

  I had a couple of hours to go until my 2 p.m. flight to Charles de Gaulle. I walked around the duty-free shop. The usual cheap cigarettes and booze, mostly locally brewed rum and Scottish whisky, which upper-class Venezuelans are fond of. On the short walk down to the terminal I stopped at one of the bars. It was busy enough, but I saw there was room for one more at the bar and eased myself onto a stool. I ordered a steak sandwich and a local Polar beer. It was good and hit the nail on the head. I opened up the only book I’d found in English in a shop in Caracas: Snoop Dogg’s autobiography.

  * * *

  The officers led me away from the baggage area. I was brought to the main building of the airport, where the drug squad had its office. I was seated at a table in a room with an antique-looking printer and a filing cabinet. It looked like a spare room rather than an interrogation room. I was left alone. The officers only popped their heads in now and again. Some security. A couple of cops appeared at the door along with the interpreter, who was around when anything important was happening. They were there to strip search me, he explained. First I had to empty all my belongings out on the table. I had a bunch of cash in my wallet in a mix of currencies: 500 euro, 200 dollars and 100 sterling. And of course my mobile phone. All in all, the tools of an international trader – or drug mule, in my case. I then whipped off my shirt and slacks and threw the tie on the ground. So much for my formal dress throwing the drug squad off the scent. I was told to lower my boxer shorts as well. I had to bend over and spread my cheeks.

  ‘Have you swallowed any drugs?’ said the interpreter.

  ‘Don’t you think there’s enough in the case?’

  He laughed.

  I put my clothes back on but left the tie on the ground. No use for it now.

  The other guard sorted through my belongings on the table and scribbled a report. I knew I’d never see the cash or the phone again – and I didn’t.

  ‘Can I make a call home?’ I asked the interpreter. He gave me my mobile phone back, warning me I couldn’t ring any drug-smuggler friends. ‘Family,’ I said.

  ‘Two minutes only,’ he said, still holding a poker face.

  I scrolled through the contacts. Mick, my nephew’s name, came up. I knew I could rely on him to break the news to the rest of the family without giving them a heart attack. At 19, he was young but had a good head on his shoulders. I dialled the number. After a few rings he answered. I was relieved. I knew it might be another ten years before I could talk to anyone from home again. It’d be a phone call neither of us would forget in a hurry. ‘Mick, listen, this is your Uncle Paul.’

  ‘Ah, Paul, where are you? Can I pick you up or anything?’ said Mick, thinking I wanted a lift from the airport in Dublin. I kept in mind that I’d told everyone I was off sunning myself in Spain on a working holiday, helping a mate in his nightclub.

  ‘No, Mick, just shut up and listen. Right, I’ve got two minutes to say what I have to say.’

  ‘Why, what’s wrong? What?’

  ‘Mick, just shut up. You know the way I’m supposed to be in Spain on a working holiday?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Well, I’m not. I’m in a country in South America called Venezuela and I’ve just been arrested in the airport on drug-trafficking charges and I’m looking at about ten years in jail.’

  ‘No, Paul, you’re joking,’ he said, but with a serious voice.

  ‘Mick, I’m not joking. Now listen: I want you to tell all that I’ve said to your mother and of course Nana and Granddad.’ I knew he could drop in to them because my mother and father lived just over the road.

  ‘What the fuck am I going to say to them? Jesus Christ!’ His voice started breaking up.

  ‘Just tell the truth, it’s the only way. And tell them I love them and I’m sorry.’

  ‘OK, Paul, look . . .’

  ‘I have to go, Mick. Goodbye.’ The two minutes was almost gone. I had to hang up. I was close to tears, and I could tell Mick was too. I had a lump in my throat. All I could think of was my daughter, Katie, and my son, Daniel. How would they take it? Those thoughts were tearing me apart.

  The cop took the phone off me and put it down on the table. Forms were pulled out that I had to sign. I was prompted to stick my thumb in a sponge soaked with black ink and plant it beside my signature. One of the guards brought in a set of flat weighing scales to check the haul and prove to me they weren’t cheating with the amount they were writing down. They plonked the two large bags of flat-packed cocaine in front of me.

  ‘Six kilos,’ said the interpreter. I shrugged. What did they think I was going to do – deny it and say I’d only three? Anyway, the sentence would have been the same, I’d learn.

  I sat in that chair and watched the next few years rush past my eyes. This was a big seizure of contraband. The pricks who’d hired me had told me it was one or two kilos. Six fucking kilos . . . I knew I’d pay a heavy price for this: there’d be no three-year suspended sentence and a slap on the wrist. Not in South America. Ten to fifteen years I might get, and raped by the prison ‘daddy’. I was 45; I might get out when I was 60. I felt as sick as a dog.

  The two guards walked out of the room, one of them carrying the scales. Oddly, the cops left me alone with the bags of cocaine lying on the table in front of me. They had a street value of over 500,000 euro back in Ireland and the UK. A bit of this would be a nice currency in prison. Just before the guards had walked into the room with the scales, they had brought in some stuff for me: a spare shirt and a toiletry bag. Apart from a toothbrush, it contained a large bottle of talcum powder. The irony – someone must have been having a joke.

  I realised the dire straits I was in, sitting here facing ten years locked up in a fleapit prison in the tropics. I decided to make the best of a bad situation with the coke sitting in front of me. I got on my feet and pulled off the top of the talc bottle on the floor. It came off easily, no simple feat given I was handcuffed, albeit at the front. I emptied the talc into a wastepaper bin. The cocaine on the table was mostly a fine powder, so I scooped it up into the talc bottle. It had spilled out of one of the thin, fragile plastic bags the guards had accidentally ripped when they roughly lifted it onto the scales. I brushed the cocaine into the talc bottle, filling it up. On the side it said the volume was 300 g – that would do. I put the top back on. I heard noises outside. Feet shuffling. Gotta hurry. I put the bottle back into the toiletry bag. I sat back down, sweating.

  I waited for the guards to come back and do the next round of red tape with forms and the like. I noticed a dusty coat of fine coke powder on the table – probably from where I had spilt it filling up the talc bottle. Shit. I picked up a piece of paper off the floor and, usi
ng it like a credit card, I formed lines with the coke. I leaned over and sniffed up two, which was probably too much, because in no time I was out of my fucking mind. My mouth and head were numb. It was pure, unadulterated coke; the high purity was full throttle. I’m not big into coke, I never really liked it, but facing ten years banged up in a Latin American prison puts a different perspective on things.

  The door opened. A drug-squad cop stepped in. I sat there buzzing. He lifted up the two wide bags. He saw a small bit of coke had come out on to the table, like a salt cellar had spilled over. I panicked. I was found out. But the guard just brushed it off the table with the palm of his hand, then walked away with the haul. I can only imagine what would have happened had I been caught.

  I was left to sit there alone and stew a bit more. The door opened and another officer popped his head in and, with gestures, offered me food – the leftovers of a fast-food chicken meal in a box he held in his hand. I said no. Between the coke and a jail term hanging over me, I was too wound-up to have an appetite.

  A new bunch of cops came in, more National Guard troops. They weren’t as lax as the guards who had been dealing with me so far – they were serious-looking guys with frowning faces. One of the guards slipped off my handcuffs and handed me over to them. It was time for me to go. I got an air that I was their catch – the trophy prisoner. I stood up and the three guards marched me upstairs and back into the airport, carrying the plastic bag with the toothbrush, the talcum-powder bottle of coke and the shirt. The airport was almost deserted – just a few cleaners pushing mops. No one paid me any attention. A gringo in handcuffs – no big deal.

  We walked through the main entrance, a guard on either side of me. I was still off my head on the coke and didn’t really care where we were going. My eyes darted back and forth. My body was numb. My mind was flying. I’d no idea what time it was; all I knew was that hours had passed since I’d arrived at the airport at about midday. It was dusk now.

  The guards loaded me into the back of a white jeep with the ‘Antidrogas’ logo in black on the side. One of the troopers, a skinny guy in his late 20s, jumped into the back, while the other sat up front next to the driver. There were only a few cars around, a couple of taxis. The military vehicle sped off through the airport, past a billboard showing President Hugo Chávez in a red beret and smiling. I felt like he was laughing at me.

  The jeep sped along the coast. I sat handcuffed in the back, looking out the window. The guards spoke rapid-fire Spanish. It blew over my head. I looked outside to the left at high-rise hotels. Dirty whitewashed walls next to houses with neat Spanish-colonial fronts, tin shacks and pescadería fish restaurants, every few minutes giving way to a gap through which I caught glimpses of a calm sea.

  Chapter 2

  INSIDE I’M CRYING

  WE PULLED UP AT A SECURITY CHECKPOINT AT A DOCKYARD. MASSES OF RED, orange and yellow rusty containers were stacked two and three high. A sentry waved out of a security checkpoint and a barrier rose up. We passed through an open gate next to a yard ringed with a high fence. On the right, a wide road on a steep incline led to what looked like a car-ferry terminal above, where a few vehicles were parked. I thought we were going up the ramp, but the jeep then jerked left and came to a stop in the yard. I could make out from a sign on a wall that this was the drug squad’s headquarters: Comando Antidrogas of the Guardia Nacional in Vargas state. Not that I cared where I was, really. I was still buzzing.

  The guard escorted me out of the back of the jeep and marched me to a large hangar-style gate like a giant accordion. Inside, the guards spoke to other national troops dressed in the same olive-green military uniforms. I was led to a steel staircase and was sat down a few steps from the bottom. The guard cuffed my hands to a metal banister. I sat there taking in my surroundings as the guards busied about. I was seated on one of two steel staircases that rose up both sides of this tall, airy building. In front of me there was a guard at a table writing in a notebook. There were a few offices behind him and anti-drug troops passing back and forth.

  The hours ticked away into the night, and I watched guards walk in and out with an array of weapons from one of the rooms, which was obviously an armoury. Kalashnikovs, rifles, pistols and shotguns – they signed them out with the officer at the table and disappeared outside, presumably going for shoot-outs with the small-time drug gangs that ruled over the barrios at night. In the yard outside I heard engines rev up.

  Some of the guards spoke to me. I didn’t understand much Spanish but could make out ‘gringo’, ‘drogas’ and ‘ocho años’ (‘eight years’). They walked away howling with laughter, knowing the typical sentence handed down to drug mules. Others just asked, ‘Gringo, cuánta droga?’ (‘How much of the drug?’). ‘Six,’ I answered, holding up the same number of fingers. Another walked up to me with a revolver and pushed out the chamber, showing me there were no bullets. He popped the chamber back in, pointed the barrel at my head and slowly started pulling the trigger. I buried my head into my forearms, which were cuffed to the banisters. My body tensed with fear. Click. More howls of laughter. All the guards did it to me at times, but the main culprit was a little guy with a moustache. I named him El Diablo, or the Devil. I could see there were no bullets in the chambers, but they didn’t look like well-trained cops and I was afraid they could easily have left a round in by mistake and blown my head off. I shouted ‘wankers’ at them while they kept playing Venezuelan roulette with my head.

  Shortly after the target-practice session with my skull, a guard emerged from the blue doors of a room where I think there was a small kitchen. The cop, an older guy, put a paper cup of water down next to me. He spoke in a friendly voice. The Spanish went over my head. He seemed like the only guard who was a decent human being, though, so I said, ‘Bed, bed, sleep,’ tilting my head onto my hand to get the message across. ‘No,’ he shrugged. I was exhausted now and was sure a cell awaited me with a bed – or even just a floor to sleep on. I was wrong.

  My ass was grinding into the metal staircase, but I was thankful the guards had now uncuffed one of my hands from the banister. Whiling the hours away, my mind went off into dark thoughts. I was both paranoid and still buzzing from the coke, which didn’t help. How could I have been so stupid to do this for ten grand? I wanted to be at home, having a pint down in the local pub with my mates. Then there was my family. What would they be thinking? Had Mick broken the news to my parents, that I had been caught drug smuggling? They were old, both my mother and father in their 70s. I wondered whether they would die while I spent years rotting in a cesspit prison in Latin America. And what would my son and daughter, Dano and Katie, think?

  It was well into the night now, and I started to drift in and out of sleep, drowsy from the sticky air. The main body of troops had gone now. There was only the guard seated at the desk in front, a chubby guy with curly hair and a moustache. In what I thought was a mess room behind him I could hear other cops: the clink of glasses, their boisterous voices drifting out, getting rowdier as the night went on. Still, I dozed off.

  A nudge woke me up from a groggy sleep. It was dark now, the only dim light from a bare bulb over one of the offices. The guard had stood up from the table and was in front of me. He was fatter than I’d thought, with a belly hanging out over his waistband. He had a cigarette dangling from his lip, red embers glowing. He spoke in whispers to another guard standing beside him. I didn’t understand. The building was quiet now. I thought the whispers were to avoid waking the other cops, who I presumed were sleeping.

  They uncuffed me from the banister. I stood up and the guard cuffed my hands behind my back. My legs and ass were sore and stiff. I was sure the staircase on the other side of the building led up to a network of prisons and cells. There I’d finally get a bed – or at least a floor to stretch out on.

  But no – the two guards led me to a shower area in a room to the right. It was a tiny space with a toilet cubicle at one side and a pipe sticking out of the wall that served
as a shower. More whispers. I then saw two other guards waiting inside the door – younger guys. What’s going on here? I must be getting a wash – hosed and scrubbed down like you see in the prison movies. The guards started to laugh. More whispers. Giggles.

  I was led forward and they made me face one of the walls. Two of the guards suddenly grabbed me at my waist. Fear jolted through me like a bolt of electricity. This was no wash. Jesus, what were they going to do to me?

  I was pushed forward, my face shoved into the corner, touching the wall now. I heard the door close. The laughter grew louder.

  Oh my God. What were they doing to me? If I screamed, would anyone come?

  My upper body was pushed over so it was parallel with the floor. I started shouting, ‘What’s the story? What’s the story?’ My heart was racing. I knew this was bad. A hand reached around my waist. I was shifting back and forth, struggling against the strength of the three or four men who were now grabbing at my shoulders. I kicked back at them with my hard shoes on. A stick or some hard object lashed out against my legs. I felt short, sharp pains. I started to shout again, ‘What’s the story?’ Hands grabbed my shoulders to still me. More laughter and giggles. A hand with some kind of material wrapped around it groped my face. I tried to bite the finger. A fist ploughed into the back of my neck. A rag was shoved into my mouth. I was breathing fast and heavily, gagging. My nostrils flared. I felt my belt open. My slacks dropped down. I instinctively knew what was going to happen, but I couldn’t process it. It was like I was watching myself from a distance. An onlooker. Then I felt slimy shit like gel rubbed around my ass. Cold. Wet.

  No. It can’t be.

  ‘Ha, ha, gringo,’ one of them said.