The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare

by Farrell, Jeff

  * * *

  In a coastal town we whizzed through narrow side streets, past run-down colonial buildings with peeled paint and broken plaster. I kept looking at buildings as we passed, thinking, ‘Is this the prison? Is this the prison?’ One had three floors with barred windows. I was sure it was the jail, but we drove right past it.

  The jeep jerked to a sharp left and we pulled into a dusty courtyard. I stepped out with the young soldier. The yard was surrounded by little rooms with solid-looking doors painted in a dirty red, about 15 of them. They looked a bit like chalets in a holiday camp. I was sure this was to be my next home.

  We walked past a group of youths dressed in shorts and T-shirts sitting on a path. They were handcuffed to each other. The guards lurched me forward into an office inside a building. An enormous fan whirred lazily above. It looked like the chopper blades of an antique helicopter turning in slow motion, stirring sticky air. A fat guard sat asleep in a chair, his head slumped forward; another sat at a desk shuffling papers.

  One of the guards in charge spoke to me, pointing at the floor. I sat down on the concrete. After about half an hour, it was time to go through the red tape again. I held out my sweaty palms while one of the younger officers ran an ink roller back and forth over them. I planted my hands down on a sheet of white paper. I was getting good at this. The guard pushed a biro into my hand. I signed a squiggle at the bottom. A digital camera was hooked up to a computer with a chunky monitor (I was back on the set of Kojak again). Snap. The guards led me back outside. I had thought this was the prison. I was wrong again.

  We soon sped through more side streets and came to a halt in another yard. We drove through big double doors. Inside, two guards stood behind a small counter: one a big woman who filled out her National Guard uniform; the other a huge fat fucker, a dark-skinned moreno.

  The woman, who had a horrible grin, poked around my toiletry bag. She pulled out the bottle of talcum powder. My heart started racing. She popped off the lid and lifted it to her nose for a sniff. Satisfied it was only talc, she screwed the lid back on. Thank God.

  The cop led me by the arm into a toilet to the right. We squeezed into a little cubicle. Oh no. Don’t let it happen again. I tensed. My stomach tightened. I was sure now all the men in the olive-green uniforms were bugger boys. The guard slipped his fat hands into a pair of white surgical gloves. He then reached around for my belt and my trousers dropped around my ankles. Jesus. He pushed my upper body over and my head was hovering over the toilet bowl. I could feel my mind start to drift off to another place, to hide. I felt something slip into my rear end and poke about. What an invasion. But it was over quick. I heard the tight snap of the gloves coming off. The guard had only penetrated with his finger and was probably looking to see whether I had money hidden there. I’d later learn that was where the inmates stashed their cash, hidden up their ass in a condom. I stood back up straight. Fatso stood there giving my manhood a good look over. I pulled my trousers up, and he put his hands in my pockets and fished out a 50,000-bolo note (about ten euro), which I didn’t even know was there. He stuffed it in his own pocket.

  Back out at the counter after the anal exploration, the guards signed me over. Señor irlandés. El gringo. Droga mula. Property of Macuto jail.

  Chapter 4

  HOLIDAY IN THE SUN

  I’D NEVER REALLY TAKEN DRUGS. JUST A BIT OF COKE HERE AND THERE AT parties. Or off the back of a pub toilet with one of me mates. Only the odd weekend. I enjoyed the buzz of it. But I don’t have an addictive personality, so I could walk away from coke and not look at it again for weeks.

  In the early to mid-2000s in Dublin the place was awash with the stuff. The Irish economy was booming. The Celtic Tiger, they called it. Anyone with a half-decent job enjoyed a flash lifestyle. Short weekend hops around the world. Paris in spring, even Paddy’s Day in New York. A holiday home or two in Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria or whichever country was on the up and where a ‘bargain’ home could be found. Sales of new cars soared. Mercs and Beemers rolled off car lots. Upmarket department stores like Brown Thomas on Dublin’s Grafton Street heaved at the weekends. Shoppers nosed for big labels. Prada. Dolce & Gabbana. Take your pick. The pubs in Dublin city were teeming at night, too, revellers partying Monday to Sunday.

  The excessive lifestyle didn’t just mean goods and booze. It also meant coke. One newspaper story doing the rounds ran a yarn about a college study that found 100 per cent of banknotes in Ireland had traces of cocaine on them. The international press picked up on it. One paper had the witty headline ‘Snow Me the Money’. Anti-drugs folk seized on the finding and said the cocaine problem in Ireland was an ‘epidemic’, pointing out just 65 per cent of dollar notes in the US had traces of cocaine. When hounded by the press for comment, one Irish minister came out and denied there was a problem. The funny thing, though, was that the Irish police, the Garda, said that convictions for cocaine-related crimes were up fourfold on previous years while seizures were up 20 per cent.

  The demand for coke was fuelling gangland crime, too. The front pages of the daily tabloids regularly splashed with a story about one gang member blowing away a rival criminal in battles over turf to sell coke in working-class Dublin suburbs.

  Overall, it was a time in Ireland when most had spare cash in their pockets and were enjoying the good life. For many that meant doing a few lines of coke at the weekend. It was dirt cheap because so many were buying it. One opposition politician in Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, lamenting about the epidemic in the country noted that a line of coke was cheaper than a pint.

  Although I wasn’t rich myself in the boom years, I was doing all right. I had started running my own plumbing business. There was loads of work. I was doing mostly small stuff, such as house extensions. I had work lined up months in advance. I was a one-man band – just myself and a little van. I was living back home with my folks in Coolock, a working-class area in Dublin’s northside, sleeping in a box room. I had moved in to help my finances till I got the business properly moving. My expenses were low, so I had spare cash for a few lines of coke. When I did it it was mostly down in the local pub on a Friday night. Myself and a couple of other lads off the sites – brickies, sparks and so on – would chip in for a ‘one-er’. That was a small bag of coke that cost 100 euro. We used to call a fellow we knew and he’d be down in minutes in his car to deliver it. Deals on Wheels, we’d call it. Dressed in scruffy overalls, we then took turns going into the jacks, the toilets, for a sniff, scooping the coke from the bag with a key or a coin. You’d hear fellows giggling away in the next cubicle. Everyone was at it.

  I was in my early 40s and living a carefree lifestyle. I had no real worries or anyone to look after but myself. I had two children from a former marriage, both in their mid-teens – my son, Daniel, and my daughter, Katie. I was making payments to their mother, my ex-wife, for their upkeep, of course, but the fact that they didn’t live with me meant I was a free man. I suppose many might see it as an immature lifestyle. Maybe it was. But I loved my children and they were very important to me. It wasn’t just the case that I’d help moneywise with their schooling and clothes; they would stay with me a lot, too. They loved being around their nana and granddad in the house and hanging out with their cousins who lived across the road, where my sister Sharon lived with her kids.

  Then one day I got a call from Katie that would change that.

  ‘Da, can I go and live with you?’

  ‘Of course you can, but did something happen?’

  ‘I just want to move down to Dublin.’

  I had divorced her mother many years ago. Katie had been living with her and her new husband in a house in the Midlands. I suspected from phone calls in the past that she wasn’t getting much space at home. So, reading between the lines, that’s why I thought she wanted to move out. She was a teenager and was pretty much saying she wanted a bit more freedom, which she said she wasn’t getting there. Nights out at local discos and that, I supposed.
>
  ‘Grand,’ I said.

  The only problem was I now had to go and rent an apartment. I found a two-bed flat down in Coolock not far from the Cadbury’s chocolate factory. It cost me a grand a month. I had bills on top, too, and Katie’s upkeep to take care of when she moved in. It was great living with her, watching her grow into a woman. Her whole life ahead of her. Her dreams of being a hairdresser. Anyway, the apartment and everything weren’t a problem. The only other overheads I had were a personal loan of about 10,000 euro and 12,000 for a van I’d bought for the job. Work was flying, so it was all easy to cover.

  Then the bubble burst. The economy plummeted. The headlines in the papers and on the telly were all about a property crash. It turned out the Irish hadn’t been rich after all – it was all credit, banks throwing money at people for years. Everyone knew, but no one had wanted to believe it at the time. Now billionaire property developers were dropping like flies. Houses that had once been homes but were now commodities to trade and make a ‘killing’ on were badly hit. Houses that had been bought for, say, 400,000 euro had now dropped to about half that value in real terms. Negative equity was rife. The whole economy had revolved around the artificial price of a house. The banks stopped lending. When the dust started to settle, it turned out they were one of the biggest culprits. One bank chief, it turned out, had given himself over 100 million euro in personal loans at one point from account holders’ money. It was all terrible.

  Everyone started tightening their belts. House extensions, where I got most of my plumbing work, weren’t at the top of anyone’s list. My phone stopped ringing. Work dried up. My van sat in the parking space in my apartment block. ‘Paul Keany – Plumber’ it read on the side. Now it should have read ‘Paul Keany – Needs Work’.

  I still had money for a few pints on a Friday night. But sharing a bag of coke with the mates went out the window when I was worried about having enough money to pay my loans and keep myself and Katie going.

  I was in the local pub one night, standing out in the smoking area having a cigarette. One of the usual dealers walked up to me.

  ‘Paul, I have a one-er for you.’

  ‘I’ll pass. Too rich for my wallet.’

  ‘Business bad for you too?’

  ‘Nothing on the books.’

  Silence hung in the air between the two of us. He was staring at me, like he was sizing me up for something. ‘Paul, if you need a few quid I know lads who go for holidays in the sun and make good money to take home a little package.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘About ten grand.’

  ‘What would be in the package?’

  ‘Ignorance is bliss.’

  ‘Seems too good to be true,’ I said, but it was obvious where this was going. ‘To where?’

  ‘Latin America, probably Mexico, but could be Spain.’

  I stood there with my thoughts swishing around my head. It sounded like easy money. I was thinking it would clear the loan on the van and lessen my load a little. I was always up for adventure, and a risk, and wasn’t too worried about the idea of getting caught, but I didn’t commit there and then.

  I threw my cigarette butt on the ground and stamped on it. ‘OK, I’m interested, but I want to talk a bit more.’

  ‘Easy, I’ll organise a meeting with a fella for you.’

  I’m no angel. I’ve had a few run-ins with the law. When I was 27 I got done for assaulting a copper in Dublin. I was on my stag night with about 15 mates. We walked into a pub on Abbey Street and the publican told us to leave. We didn’t. Next minute, a motorbike copper arrived in his leathers and ordered us to get out. We did. Outside on the street, I went to walk into the next pub. I was in great spirits with my mates. Getting married and a baby boy on the way. I wanted to keep the party going.

  The copper grabbed me by the shoulder. ‘You can’t go in there.’

  ‘Get the fuck off me,’ I said, pushing his arm away. Harder than I thought. He stumbled into his motorbike. Shit. All of a sudden the police were everywhere. I was bundled into a van and spent a few hours in Store Street Garda station. I got a £20 fine.

  That was more than 15 years ago, and despite my brush with the police I didn’t have any criminal history involving drugs. Wasn’t my game.

  A few days later I was standing outside in the car park of a local pub in Coolock. A guy pulled up in a red Toyota. A short, stocky fellow got out, walked over and shook my hand. ‘I believe you’re interested in going on a holiday for us?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I laughed.

  ‘Let’s take a seat.’ We sat down on the boot of his car, the pair of us dressed in dark-blue overalls. His name was Kevin and he was a brickie. No big player in the drug business, a part-timer, I’d heard. He and a few of his mates would chip in and buy a few kilos of coke abroad every couple of years. Sell it on. Make a few quid.

  ‘It’s simple. Holiday in the sun. Ten-grand pay. You get there and wait for a phone call. We give you a few thousand spending money for you to kill a bit of time. Just wait for the call. Somebody gives you a case with a package and you take it home.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘We don’t know yet, we just need to know if you’re in first.’

  I sat there with my arms folded, looking at the ground. We didn’t speak for a few moments. ‘What if I get caught?’

  ‘We’ll sort you out, and if you come home with nothing we’ll give you a few quid anyway. Win, lose or draw, you’ll be taken care of.’

  ‘All right, OK, that’s cool,’ I said. I knew the ‘win, lose or draw’ was bullshit, but I went along with it. I was sure I could pull off the run. ‘I’m in.’

  A couple of weeks passed and my mobile phone rang again. It was Kevin. ‘Right, we have a destination: Venezuela.’

  ‘Venezuela,’ I said. A pause. I didn’t want to sound like I’d never heard of it, but I hadn’t and said nothing.

  He gave me a date. ‘Do you mind getting the tickets yourself? Go onto the Internet and get them on a credit card. We’ll sort you out after. It’s just we don’t want any trace leading back to us.’

  ‘All right.’ I went onto my computer at home to find out about Venezuela. Capital: Caracas. Weather: sunny. Language: Spanish. Sandy white beaches. Great nightlife. Other than the language, all sounded good to me.

  The next day Kevin called around to my apartment. We sat in my office, which was a desk and a couple of chairs in the corner of my bedroom.

  ‘You got the flight all right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘A week from now.’

  ‘Perfect. How much?’

  ‘Eight hundred.’

  He handed me a roll of euro notes from his pockets, all creased: fifties, twenties, hundreds, the whole lot. He counted out 800 on the bed and then handed me another bunch of cash.

  ‘That’s two grand in all for flights and spending money to keep you going. Just get there and check into a hotel in Caracas. Keep your phone on. Wait for the call.’

  I needed a smokescreen for family and friends. I had a mate who had a couple of pubs in the south of Spain, which made it easy. I told everyone I was going for a holiday in the sun to help Vinnie out down in Marbella for two weeks. That’s how long my trip to Venezuela was for. Katie was going on holiday to Spain for two weeks as well, a couple of days before I was due to leave, so the timing of my trip was perfect.

  * * *

  Dublin Airport. It was just after 8 a.m. I walked into the departures hall. In the corner of my eye I saw a bookshop. I walked in and picked up a Spanish phrase book. I had a flick through it. ‘La cuenta – the bill’ said one phrase. That’ll come in handy, I thought, and bought the book along with a crime novel. I checked my case in with Air France for the flight to Caracas with a stop-off in Charles de Gaulle in Paris. I passed through security into departures, not giving much thought to the danger of the trip. I was actually excited about the whole thing. It was
like being in a James Bond film or something: spies and drug dealers, murky dealings in foreign climes. At the time the Banged Up Abroad series on TV was all the rage, Western drug mules locked up in hellhole jails in the tropics – but that wouldn’t happen to me.

  Chapter 5

  DODGING WESTERN UNION

  A BLACK GUARD STOOD BESIDE THE SET OF STEEL GATES. ‘HALLO, MY FRIEND,’ he said leeringly, putting on a nice-guy act with the little English he had. Probably buttering up the gringo in the hope of a few quid. I looked back at another cop behind the counter. He nodded towards the cells ahead and ran his finger across his neck in a slicing motion as if to say, ‘You’re for the chop.’ The guard ushered me inside to the wing area.

  Arms hung out of cell bars. Dark faces peered out, the whites of their eyes standing out from the gloom like torches shining out of a black hole. Sheets were tied to bars across the cells and stretched out as makeshift hammocks. The prison chant hollered out, ya-ya-ya-hoohhh, like animals howling. The whole place was like a zoo – a filthy one, reeking of piss.

  We stepped through barred gates to the left and into a small rectangular yard. I was led into a wing. It was poky but clean and tidy, with TVs, a fridge and a small stove. It looked like it was where I’d be held, thank God, rather than the zoo. Standing there with the black slacks and dress shoes on, I probably looked like a coke kingpin the guards could bribe for cash: not the mule that I was. The cell was a two-room set-up with four single beds and a bunk. A guy walked up to me, a jovial fellow in his 40s with grey hair coiffed to the side. He spoke, but all I could make out from him was that his name was Fulvio and he was from ‘Italia’. He picked up a scrap of paper and started scribbling on it. ‘Aquí’ and ‘allá’ (‘here’ and ‘there’) he said, drawing a picture of a courtroom and a building with bars he told me was Los Teques prison. I could make out he was fighting his conviction for being a drug mule, and the guards shipped him back and forth the short distance from this jail to the courtroom rather than the hour or so’s hike to the main prison, Los Teques.