I caught a glimpse of a towering guy, about 6 ft 2 in., with a bald head in a room next to us. ‘Jefe, boss,’ said Fulvio.
The jefe was dressed in shorts and a vest and walked over to me. Another inmate, a slim guy with short, curly hair, stood beside him. ‘Western Union, you phone home . . . You friend, you family,’ he said in broken English. He spoke with a nasal, high-pitched voice, like he had a sock shoved up his nose. ‘You pay 2,000 euro for stay here.’
I nearly choked. ‘You must be fucking mad,’ I said in rapid English.
‘I . . . no . . . understand, very fast . . . Western Union, 2,000 euro,’ he repeated. The boss looked down at me with a menacing glare. I knew what was going on – the boys were hounding the gringo for a big payout. It was game on straight away. A mobile phone was handed to me. I had to think and act fast. There was no one I could phone and ask for that sum of cash. Nor did I want to. If I’d had that kind of money I wouldn’t be here in the first place. I whipped up a plan in my head. The two guys stood watching me; the jefe had his arms folded. I held the phone and tapped in the number of my Irish mobile phone, which had been seized by the cops at the airport.
‘Hallo, this is Paul from BBL Plumbing. I’m not here at the moment to take your call, but if you would like to leave your name and number I will get back to you shortly.’ That was my voicemail greeting. The pair leaned forward, listening in.
‘Hi, this is Paul,’ I said into my voicemail. In rapid English, with my strongest Dublin accent, I said, ‘How-a-ya, Ma, Da, this is Paul. I need to organise 2,000 euro to be sent over to me.’ The boss shoved a piece of paper in my hand. I read out the account details for a banco in Caracas. These guys were prepared. ‘Make sure you get that to me as quick as you can,’ I added to the voicemail message I was leaving for myself, slowly this time. I stabbed at the call-end button and handed the phone back.
‘I no understand,’ said Nasal Voice. ‘Very fast.’ Great.
‘I was just organising the money from my family,’ I said.
Nasal Voice spoke to the wing boss, who looked at me. He seemed pleased and was probably spending the 2,000 euro in his head.
I walked around the narrow yard a bit to stretch my legs. I was exhausted from the day in the back of the jeep, driving here, there and everywhere. The hunger pains started gnawing at me again. My stomach started to contract and protest – probably wondering what the food strike was about. It was Tuesday evening. I worked out in my head it’d been five days since I’d eaten – my last meal was the steak sandwich at the airport the Friday before. Seemed like a distant memory now, both the food and getting caught with six kilos of cocaine.
In the wing, the boss and the lads started chopping meat and rattling pots and pans for dinner. I didn’t have to wait long for mine. But rather than dining with the cellmates, the food came wrapped in tinfoil, shoved through the cell bars by one of the guards. I was delirious. I pulled back the wrapping. It was chicken mixed in with white rice. I sat down on the ground with Fulvio and started to eat. I gobbled up all the food. It tasted amazing, and I savoured the food in my mouth before swallowing, like I was eating the chicken for the first time in my life. Then I was sorry I’d eaten so quickly. I felt queasy. My stomach had obviously shrunk in the past five days without food.
Fulvio poured himself mango juice into a cup from a bottle the guards had put through the bars. He finished it in a couple of gulps and handed me the mug. I filled it up and downed some juice. My mouth felt like it was having a party with all the flavours after five days of a little water that tasted like it had been squeezed out of a sweaty towel.
Fulvio didn’t speak English, but we chatted away and developed a bond with gestures. It was good to connect with someone again. The two of us were just laughing all the time, and it was nice to be with someone outside the clique of the inmates in the wing. I could make out Fulvio was only a short-term inmate here.
Fulvio spoke away in Italian and Spanish, saying something about policía and making gestures towards the four lads who were cooking away on a two-hob stove in a small kitchenette. I could make out they were probably crooked cops or politicians or something. That was why they had the privilege of having their own food, which they stored in a fridge, and were locked up in a ‘home-from-home’ prison wing. The four of them ate together at a small table to the blare of televisions, one in each of the two main rooms and another in the corner. The boss and the others then connected a video game to the TV. They raced cars around a track while sitting on the lower bed of the bunks in one room. The cell boss, who Fulvio said was called Mario, waved at me to come over and join them. I was the flavour of the moment given that I’d bring in a windfall for him, he believed. Anyway, I waved him off – I hated computer games.
Fulvio gestured, asking why I was locked up here. ‘Aeropuerto,’ I said to Fulvio, stretching out my arms like a plane. ‘Drogas.’ But why I was locked up didn’t need any further explanation. Fulvio knew the score. He said most gringos jailed in Venezuela were all in for the same thing: smuggling coke.
‘Todos,’ (‘All’) he said.
Afterwards, I took another stretch in the tiny yard. It was dark outside. I was ready to sleep. In the cell, Fulvio was pulling out a couple of thin mattresses and pillows that were kept in a large hole in the wall, doubled over. The four single beds, two in each room, were for the inmates higher up the pecking order. I rolled out the long, narrow mattress that was known as a colchoneta, which Fulvio had handed to me. I put it on the floor and lay down. Fulvio stretched out next to me. There were four of us on the floor in all. I had my first proper sleep in days, my head propped up on a stained pillow that stank of sweat and piss.
* * *
‘Visita,’ a guard said to me, standing at the bars looking into the yard. ‘Embajada’ (‘Embassy’). Lovely jubbly; I’d been here a few days and now a diplomat had come to get me out of here. I allowed myself that giddy thought, knowing I wasn’t going anywhere.
An old guy stood on the opposite side of the bars. He was in his late 60s, a small, tanned guy with a shock of white hair. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘My name is Richard McCabe. I’m the Irish consul. The Irish Embassy in Mexico, which deals with Venezuela, informed me you were here.’ He spoke in an accent that wasn’t Irish. More Yank than Paddy. Probably an Irish-American. ‘I’ve been asked to drop in. How are they treating you, OK?’ he said.
‘I’m OK, yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ve had a bit of food here and I’m alive.’ I didn’t go into detail about being gang raped or cuffed to the stairs for days with no food in the drugs HQ. I knew our conversation wasn’t private. A baboon-faced inmate with a machete tucked into his trousers stood next to me, the blade visibly poking out of his waistband, making both me and the consul nervous.
The visit was brief. He told me that there was nothing the Irish government could do for me, but that he would pass on legal papers and mail from my family. He would also call them and tell them how I was doing. So much for a lift home in the Irish government jet. The machete-wielding prisoner was on my side of the bars, but McCabe still seemed rattled. It looked to me like he was keen to leave.
I watched him rush off nervously from behind the bars. The consul didn’t bring food, money, nothing – not that he had to. He stayed only a few minutes. The visit was a waste of time, really, but I didn’t hold it against him for dashing off. I was grateful he would call my family. During our brief chat he also told me the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs in Dublin had been in touch with my family after being informed by Venezuelan officials I’d been arrested in Venezuela for drug smuggling.
* * *
Nasal Voice struck up a bit of a conversation in his poxy English. He was explaining that Macuto was a remand prison and the main jail where inmates were held was Los Teques, where he’d come from after spending years there. For what, I couldn’t figure out. He made it clear the set-up here was a holiday camp compared to there. ‘That big prison. I no like big prison. For me, very bad. I like her
e, Macuto.’ I picked up he was at the end of his sentence and was on a day-release programme on which he studied English and other subjects in a nearby school.
The baboon-faced inmate walked in, sat down and spoke to the cell boss, looking over at me. He held a machete in his hand with a long, pointy blade. Fulvio later told me that was McKenzie. Why that was his name, I didn’t know. I didn’t imagine many Scots had set sail for the Caribbean shores of Venezuela. With his black skin, he certainly didn’t look like his forefathers hailed from the rainy land where the sun came out less than in Ireland.
‘Bad, bad man,’ said Fulvio. McKenzie was the top-dog inmate in the prison cells in front I’d seen when I arrived, where the main body of inmates were held in decrepit conditions. At night you could hear screams and roars echoing around the wings. McKenzie was poking them with his trusted machete, I learned, spiking and stabbing at the inmates to keep them in check, and God only knows what else he did. I was off-limits, though; I could see the cell boss Mario talking and looking at me. I was the prize gringo prisoner, from whom he believed he’d get a big pay day down a Western Union cable. Later I’d learn that’s why I’d been housed with this bunch, living in relative luxury compared to the rest of the jail. And McKenzie’s reign over Macuto in the other two cell blocks, where about fifty prisoners were held, was infamous in the jail system.
* * *
Mario walked up to me, wagging his finger in my face. It was about a week after I’d arrived and, as I knew, not a red cent from me had hit his bank account. He looked pissed as he spoke. Nasal Voice gave me the rough translation. ‘Money, no money come, Western Union.’
I shrugged. ‘Mama, Papa, old,’ I said, walking around the cell with an imaginary cane. ‘Deaf, deaf,’ I said loudly, pointing to my ear. I listened to Nasal Voice interpret and picked up the couple of words I knew. ‘Padres . . . muy viejos,’ (‘Parents . . . very old’).
Mario handed me the mobile phone and I went through the motions again. I tapped out my Irish mobile phone number. My voicemail greeting started: ‘Hallo, this is Paul from BBL Plumbing . . .’ I left myself another message. ‘Look, Ma, Da, I really need this money – the 2,000 euro – please get it to me quickly.’ Mario handed me the piece of paper with the banco details and I read them off again. I then said goodbye to my other self and hung up.
How long I’d get away with this act I didn’t know, but I could see Mario was pissed off. McKenzie, who wandered in occasionally taking a break from his pastime of stabbing and cutting the mainstream inmates in the dungeon cells, sat there watching me. He was waving his machete in the air like a conductor in a symphony, pointing at me with the long blade.
‘No,’ said Mario, waving him off from chopping me into pieces. His hopes were still strong for the big pay day and getting 2,000 euro out of me. I had a plan: if my neck did ever end up on McKenzie’s chopping block, I would offer Mario the coke I’d scooped up in the airport into the talcum-powder bottle. It was worth more than enough for a ‘get-out-alive’ card. In Ireland and the UK, some 300 g would fetch about 30,000 euro. Here, maybe a third of that, but still enough.
If that didn’t work, I had Plan B: grabbing the machete off McKenzie if he went for me and stabbing him. I’d have to hurt him – and bad. So bad he’d have to be taken out of the jail and hospitalised. Otherwise, he’d come back gunning for me.
* * *
Myself and Fulvio hung around all day doing nothing much: sitting on the stone floor and talking, not really knowing what the other was saying. But his good humour kept me going when the prospect of eight years locked up in that country hung over me. He just sat there most of the time in howls of laughter. The evenings were similar. But on Saturdays the bosses played the video games incessantly for about 12 hours a day. They hooked the game console up to the TV and played in two teams in a baseball tournament, chalking up their points on a piece of paper with a marker. I’d roar out every few minutes, mimicking the English spoken in the game after one of them scored. ‘Strike one’ and ‘home run’ I’d shout out, to howls of laughter from Fulvio. They hadn’t a clue what I was doing, glancing over at me with puzzled faces. After a while, Mario would make the shape of a gun with his hand, point it at me and go ‘bang bang’.
* * *
I asked Nasal Voice for something to write on. ‘Pen,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes, write, you write,’ he said, soon getting me a pencil and a piece of paper. I sat on the floor scribbling furiously and started what would be the first entry in my diary. I wrote about getting caught at the airport and the first night at the drugs HQ, and about what my family must have been thinking of me. What was I to them now? Drug-smuggler vermin? I also wanted to get something down for them in case anything happened to me and I never got home alive. The cell boyos looked over amazed as I scribbled away, absorbed in something as simple as a pencil and paper. Reading and writing was considered a waste of time in most of Latin America, particularly if there was a TV to be watched.
* * *
Mario stood in front of me again, with Nasal Voice in tow. It was my second week inside, and the wing boss wasn’t pleased. Not a cent had landed in the Western Union account, obviously. He stood there saying, ‘Otra llamada, otra llamada’ (‘Another call, another call’).
‘No money, Western Union,’ said Nasal Voice. ‘You must pay for stay.’
‘I’ll do it again,’ I said.
The boss shoved his mobile phone into my hand. I was ready to do my act in ringing my own mobile-phone number – but the boss had an ace up his sleeve. He handed me a piece of paper with another Irish number written on it. My eyes scanned left to right across ‘00 353’, the Irish international code, then the ‘1’ for Dublin. It couldn’t be? I read on, and the other seven digits were the home phone number for my parents. I looked up at Mario. He was grinning. The gringo had been rumbled. There was nothing I could do but type in the phone number. My finger reluctantly prodded the rubber keypad. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t phoned my mother since I’d been caught. Although at 45 I was no kid, I knew both she and my father, in their 70s, would be sick with worry.
‘My father, deaf, deaf, old,’ I said to Nasal Voice, pointing at my ear in a valiant attempt to avoid making the call. Nasal Voice turned to Mario and I heard him say ‘muy viejos’ (‘very old’). It didn’t matter, of course.
‘Make call,’ said Nasal Voice. I shrugged and rang the number.
‘Hallo?’ my father shouted, as he always did on the phone.
‘Da, it’s Paul,’ I said, but sure enough he didn’t hear me well.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Paul, Da, it’s Paul,’ I shouted, while Mario and Nasal Voice stood there looking at each other as I roared into the phone.
‘Ah, Paul, Paul,’ he said. I heard him shouting for my mother. ‘It’s Paul. It’s Paul.’
‘Hallo,’ my mother said.
‘Hi, Ma, look, as you know I’m in jail in Venezuela. Sorry about this. Hopefully you can find it in your heart to forgive me.’ God, what had I done to her?
‘It doesn’t matter. A mistake was made, a mistake was done,’ she said in her typical forgiving way. ‘Just as long as you’re all right.’ I could hear sadness in her voice, and it was hard. I felt a lump in my throat.
‘Look, I’m going to have to read you out something,’ I looked down at Mario’s bank details. ‘There’s a couple of lads in here in the jail looking for money off me.’ I read out the account number and address in Caracas, making sure to pepper my conversation with lots of ‘Western Union’ and ‘2,000 euro’, the keywords the two clowns were listening out for. ‘Just write that down, Ma.’
‘What do you want me to do with this?’ she said.
I replied in rapid English. ‘Nothing, Ma, throw it away. I’m not paying these scum a penny.’ I knew Mario and Nasal Voice wouldn’t understand. I then hung up.
‘I don’t know. Very fast for me. I don’t understand,’ said Nasal Voice. My strategy seemed to
have worked: Mario looked pleased, believing the money was coming down the line soon. My life was safe – for now.
I wondered how they had got my parents’ Irish home phone number. It struck me that the only way could have been from the drug-squad officials in the airport from where I’d phoned my nephew. I had never written it down on any form. The airport officials must have colluded with the prison guards in Macuto for a slice of the gringo’s dollars, along with the cell bosses. One big racket. The whole justice system seemed a joke.
* * *
Mario handed me his phone. ‘Para ti, gringo,’ (‘For you’) he said. I thought this was odd. Who’d be calling me here?
‘Yeah?’ I answered.
‘Paul, it’s Paddy.’ My brother, Jaysus.
‘Where’d you get this number?’
‘From Ma, they wrote it down after you phoned home. Listen, how are you?’
‘I’m hanging in, grand.’ There was no point in worrying anyone at home.
‘I got a call from the British Embassy the other day. They phoned me to say, “We’re sorry to inform you, but your brother Paul Keany has been arrested in Venezuela for the illegal importation of drugs.”’
‘No way.’
‘Yeah, the other day.’ Paddy lived in England, but how the British Embassy got his contact details I couldn’t figure out. But great, I thought, I might be able to get the diplomatic clout of Mighty Blighty behind me; the Irish consul had made it clear that the Paddies had no power.
Mario was glaring at me. He was probably starting to wonder if I was playing him. I decided to hang up. ‘Look, Paddy, I’d better go.’
The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare Page 6