The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare

by Farrell, Jeff

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s crazy here, you have to pay to stay.’ I asked her for 350 euro.

  ‘No problem,’ she replied quickly, ‘I’ll send that tomorrow after work.’ I gave her the name and address for a girl in Colombia, which Mike had given me. I told Sharon 200 of the 350 euro would be gone on the ‘entry fee’. The other 150 euro was to get me going with bedding, a plate and bowl, and a few other basics. If that sounded odd, she didn’t say.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the big prison in Los Teques, outside Caracas.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Grand.’ I doubted she believed me. I just didn’t see the point in telling the truth.

  ‘OK.’

  I’d mentioned to my mother in the phone call from Macuto that I could get sprung from jail for 20 grand. That was what one of the hocus-pocus lawyers said. I had told the family that and it stuck in their heads. Sharon said she’d spoken to one of my mates, Ryan, who ran a construction company and had made a good few quid in the boom years. ‘He says he’ll get you the 20 grand, or we’ll get someone to put the money up. And we’ve been talking to solicitors.’ They had it in their heads I could pay off someone and sail out the front door.

  ‘No one sends a penny unless it’s 100 per cent sure,’ I said. ‘And tell no one to come over. I don’t want anyone visiting me. The place is a death-trap – all of Caracas.’

  I didn’t know it when I called, but Katie was there too and she got on the phone.

  ‘Da,’ said Katie. A lump swelled in my throat. ‘How are ya?’

  ‘I’m all right, darling, I’m all right.’ Katie, I’m so sorry, I thought.

  ‘You’ll be home in no time,’ she said through tears. ‘We’ll sort it.’

  ‘Look, Katie, I’ve been caught here. I’ll be here for a few years, darling. Nothing can be done.’ What had I done to her, leaving her in the lurch like that?

  She had moved in with my sister after the rent ran out on the apartment where we lived. I remembered I had a couple of grand in a bank account at home. It was a slush fund to pay bills and the rent on the apartment. I wanted her to have it. ‘You know my bank account number – empty it. You have the pin number,’ I said, shouting into the phone. I was standing in the yard with one finger in my ear to block out the noise of chatter, laughter and music.

  I stood there, taking in my thoughts while speaking to my sister and Katie. It was very hard. But I had to prepare myself mentally for this place. If I was thinking, ‘When will I get out? When will I get out?’ I’d drive myself mad. That’s why I didn’t want to hear any illusions from my family that I could grease a few palms and walk out the prison gate. Or get out any way other than serving my time. As I gathered my thoughts, I took in my surroundings. There were fellas walking around off their heads on crack, like zombies – extras off the set of Dawn of the Dead.

  I spoke to Katie for a few minutes more, just chatting about her hairdressing apprenticeship, but it was heartbreaking talking to her. I knew I’d let her down. We agreed to talk another day; it was too noisy anyway.

  ‘Bye, Da,’ said Katie. I didn’t know it then, but it would be the last time she would speak to me.

  Chapter 8

  TOOLS OF THE TRADE

  MUFFLED SCREAMS FILTERED INTO THE YARD. THE SHRIEKS OF A MAN WHO knew his life would be over in minutes. We could hear him trying to flee banditos armed with crudely made knives – cell bars broken off and filed down to deadly weapons. The scurrying of feet. Then it stopped and we knew they’d caught him. He must have known he couldn’t escape their blades inside the walls of the cramped wing. But a rat cornered will do what it can to save its skin. More screams. They had him. He was now yelping like a dog.

  A hush had fallen over the yard as we listened. I was sitting on a bucket next to Silvio. ‘Cuchillo,’ (‘Knife’) said inmates in the yard. ‘Somebody’s having their last day,’ said Silvio. Moments before there had been the usual joking and laughing in the yard and horsing around. Not then. The only talk was in hushed tones as we sat there looking at each other or just staring at the ground. Helpless. The man’s life delivered up to the demons of Los Teques, coming to an end in this concrete circus. His shrieks then gave way to a slow, steady whimpering as his life ebbed away. It all went on for about 20 minutes. Then silence.

  This wasn’t in the Maxima wing, however, thank God. It was in the Number 7 cell block next door. The cries had been wafting in through the vents in the wall that separated our yard from that wing, the narrow slats bringing air into their windowless dungeon and sending us back the sounds of this man as he was gasping in his last breaths. His shrieks rattled me. Even though the cries were coming from the next wing and I couldn’t see the man, the sounds were amplified in my head, as if I were in there watching the knives sink into his flesh. Hearing those horrific, inescapable sounds strengthened my goal: to get parole after 18 months and get out of here. I sat there and told myself that Los Teques would not claim my life. I planned to keep my head down and my nose clean, to do my time and get out. I wasn’t going to get sidetracked with drugs or other crap.

  I looked around the yard. The luceros, the henchmen, stood there swinging their knives, chewing gum. Just another day. The salsa music had been turned down so they could listen to the cries. Like they enjoyed it, getting a kick out of hearing a man die.

  The next day, word came down explaining what was behind the killing. I was sitting with Eddy, Silvio and Ricardo chatting in the yard. We sat on a wooden bench like a church pew, shaded from the sun by jeans hanging from a plastic cord above that served as a washing line. ‘He had been robbing off the other prisoners,’ said Eddy. ‘So the others ran after him and stabbed him.’

  ‘Robbing what?’ I said

  ‘Who knows?’ shrugged Eddy. ‘Money. A bar of soap from someone’s bucket.’

  ‘They’d knife him to death just for that?’ I said. I was horrified.

  ‘Your bucket is all you have, mate. Another man’s things are sacred here.’

  Silvio and Eddy gave me an overview of Los Teques. There were seven proper wings in all, each cell block called a pabellón, or pavilion, by the Veno inmates, and named by their numbers. Wing 1 and Wing 2 were just that, but some had nicknames according to the English-speaking lags I spoke to. Wing 3 was La Iglesia, or the Church, and was run by Bible-bashing evangelicals: no drugs, sex, no vices at all were allowed there. Wing 4 was called the Special; Wing 5, where I was held, was known as Maxima, or ‘maximum’, while Wing 6 was Mostrico. None of those names had any meaning that I could see. Wing 7, which was next door to us and where most of the worst crackheads and murderers seemed to be held, we called the Bandito wing. Few got out alive, I’d heard. It was a bit like Hotel California – you can check in, but you can never check out.

  Then there were the overspill areas, which housed outcast inmates or were turned into wings because of overcrowding. There was the enfermería, or clinic, which was an annexe next to a medical office. It was supposed to be for sick inmates to recover in, but about 50 prisoners had been moved in and now called it home. Then there was the Fresa, or Strawberry, wing, a small area under the stairs in the passageway where about 30 gays had holed up. It was also known as the Pink wing. In most cell blocks they weren’t accepted and would be beaten and thrown into the passageways, so they had to make their own home. Maxima was the exception – it took in all the prison’s outcasts: ex-cops, kiddy fiddlers, rapists, the whole lot. Their causa money was good in Maxima, I supposed. Fidel, the jefe, was said to be a rapist, so I supposed his moral standards weren’t high.

  Los Teques held between 1,000 and 1,200 inmates, depending on who you spoke to, all crammed into a jail built for about 350. About 200 prisoners were foreigners – all drug mules, of course, just like me.

  Each cell block had its own army-style council that ruled over their wing. At the top was the jefe, or boss, and below him two underbosses we called ‘highlites’, who were like lieuten
ants. Beneath them were a handful of subordinates, like sergeants. They were all armed: revolvers, shotguns, pistols, homemade pipe guns and even grenades. At the very bottom of the pecking order were the luceros, or foot soldiers. Armed only with knives, they were the eyes and ears of the bosses. They watched over us plebs out in the yard or wherever we were while the jefe and his underlings went about the important business of bagging coke, hiding guns and the like.

  All inmates paid a causa to the boss of their cell block and his ‘soldiers’. Anyone who didn’t would be beaten and thrown into the passageway, where the outcasts who slept there would cut them up with knives. The jefes were powerful and held the rule of law over each cell block. Inside the jail they ran the show. There was a handful of prison cops, but they were mostly powerless, armed with batons and antique-looking pistols. They were no match for the firepower of the jefes and they knew it. ‘They run for cover when the jefes start shooting,’ laughed Eddy.

  The National Guard were in charge of the jail perimeter. Their job was to count heads, lock gates and make sure no one escaped. They had a hands-off approach to what went on inside the prison. Their turf was the jail boundaries – who and what came in and out of the jail – and they also carried out cell-block searches.

  The wing bosses lived cushy lives: or, at least, as good as it could get in jail. Inmates cooked their food and washed their clothes; they probably made a personal fortune from the causa, feathering their nests for when they got out; and they sat around all day watching TV and calling the shots as to what us common inmates did all day, be it cleaning or playing statues in the yard.

  The jefes were bitter rivals, but by and large they respected each other. Nobody wanted a war. Not the jefes, not the general inmates, no one. That’s why the wings were carefully segregated. Cell blocks would only go to the canteen one wing at a time to avoid a possible shoot-out.

  When a blow-up did happen the consequences were grave: scores riddled with bullets and ripped apart by knives. Silvio told me about a battle the previous Easter that left a reported 12 dead. ‘Up there, on the roof,’ he said, nodding up from the yard to a high ledge about 20 ft above. ‘They blasted away at each other for hours. Two wings. Grenades went off. The roof was destroyed. Nobody’s been allowed up since. They’re still trying to repair it.’ God, get me out of here.

  The good news, if it could be called that, was that random killings didn’t usually happen in most wings, including Maxima. That was why we paid the causa. As much as I detested the luceros who walked around the yard swinging knives, and the highlites and jefes who carried guns, it all made some sort of sick sense. It created order. Nobody laid a finger on you in the wing. Only the padrino and the ‘made men’ could, but even this seemed to be rare. A beating was reserved for inmates who stepped out of line. ‘Fuck around,’ said Eddy, ‘and they’ll fuck with you, my friend.’

  The reasons for getting your number called for a beating ranged from the trivial, in my eyes, to the bizarre. Some things were sacred, as Eddy said. You never opened up another prisoner’s bucket, where you kept your few worldly possessions – a few toiletries and probably a small bit of cash and, for the Venos, a nice shirt and runners for visit day. Anybody could pop off a lid and rifle through another inmate’s things. But they didn’t. There was respect. It might be respect motivated by fear – but it worked. In Maxima, there was order.

  Beatings were also doled out to kiddy fiddlers. When they arrived in the wing they were beaten to a pulp and carried into the yard. They had their own spot in the corner where flies buzzed around the bins. There was no stigma attached to rapists in Maxima, though. It seemed as though Fidel deemed them a better class of prisoner.

  His second in command was Carlos. He was about 6 ft 2 in., bald and ripped with muscle. The lags said he was a bank robber. They also said he was the real wing boss and called the shots but preferred to keep a low profile. He was knocking off one of the female cops who worked up in the offices. Everyone knew. She’d walk into Maxima and a luz would be called. Whoever was in the hallway watching TV would have to clear off into the patio. She’d disappear into Cell 1, where all the bosses slept, and into Carlos’s ‘buggy’ behind the black curtains drawn around his bed. A buggy was a bed cordoned off with curtains to allow privacy for inmates and their wives on conjugal visits. He probably had the best bed to get on, a big double. His buggy was kitted out with a big TV and free weights, which he pumped to keep his body toned and fit.

  But Carlos stayed in the background. He was outside of Maxima a lot, walking around with the handle of his silver Colt sticking out of his belt. Nobody touched him. According to the inmates, most days at lunchtime he spent up in the computer room. The chica cop would arrive, then they’d lock the door and only giggles would be heard. There were no secrets in Los Teques. Not even behind closed doors.

  Down the chain again was the Chief, a native Indian guy who ran a little shop next to the hallway. He was from the Amazon jungle in the south-west of Venezuela. He was barrel-chested with long wild hair and flared nostrils. He looked like a Maori: you could picture him on a rugby pitch with the Kiwis doing the All Blacks’ war dance.

  Most of the guns were smuggled into the wing, but the jefes couldn’t rely on smuggled weapons alone to keep their little platoons armed. They had their own in-house toolmakers putting together DIY guns and knives. In Maxima the toolmaker was El Perro, or the Dogman. He made knives and guns for the bosses and luceros. The material came from the hardware in the cell block. Perro would use a rectangle of metal he’d cut out of a toilet door to make knives. He’d use a strip about two inches wide and eight inches long. He’d then spend the next two days sitting on a chair he had made for himself especially, where he sat filing the steel. It was high with a small desk attached, like a classroom table. He would sit up there in the yard looking down at us like an umpire at a tennis match. After two days the rectangular strip of metal would be filed down to a nice point at one end and have a comfortable handle at the other. He was meticulous with his work. He would even attach a nice embroidered cloth around the handle for comfort and a long strip of material so the luceros could tie the knife around their wrists. I doubt anyone stabbed by such a knife appreciated the quality of the Dogman’s work.

  He also turned his hand to making improvised pipe guns. He would cut down the tubular bars on the cell doors for that. They were cylindrical and empty inside and were perfect for gun barrels. With other pieces of metal he ripped off doors, he would make an intricate chamber where a bullet could be popped in. This rectangular section would then be connected to the barrel made from the hollow cell bars. In the bullet section a shotgun shell would be loaded in and would sit neatly against a spring. In the hands of the bosses it became a deadly weapon. They would pull back a big elastic band like a bungee cord at the rear end of the gun, as if they were pulling back a catapult, release it, and the bullet would shoot out – in this case a shotgun shell zipping through the inside of a cell bar. The force was enough to rip through a man’s body at close range.

  All in all, El Perro was responsible for arming the Maxima henchmen, and because of that he was popular with the boss and given his own bed in a cell. There were only about thirty-five beds, a mixture of singles and bunks, in the three cells in the wing, reserved for the bosses and their sidekicks. The other 70 to 80 of us squeezed onto the floor at night. So El Perro was doing well. The jefe didn’t really like him, nobody did, but he was useful. The Dogman earned his name from crawling around the wing on his hands and knees howling like a lunatic when he was on the crack cocaine.

  He was forever asking me for my false front teeth, which I took out sometimes to clean. El Perro had barely a tooth in his head, just a couple of molars in his upper gums, which was why he had the other nickname of Vampy. ‘Para mí, para mí,’ (‘For me, for me’) he would say, pointing at my plastic teeth any time I took them out for a good rinse.

  ‘Piss off,’ was my answer.

  He also gave the pri
son guards a headache, I’d say. They were in and out of the wing regularly replacing toilet and cell doors after he’d stripped them down to metal skeletons.

  The danger in Los Teques was mostly outside the wing in the corridors where the crackhead cell-block outcasts lived, sleeping on the floor and pissing and shitting in a corner. No one wanted them in any cell block or pavilion. They had no money, no families who visited them, nothing. They survived by holding up inmates in the passageways with crude knives, two or three at a time shaking down a prisoner for a few bolos or a cigarette.

  * * *

  It was a Sunday and the visits were on again. The director started to open up the rancho as a place for us PWVs (Prisoners Without Visitors), mainly the foreigners, to go. For people who had no one to shag down in the cells was what she really meant. At about 11 a.m., as the visitors started flowing into Maxima, I decided to get out from behind the curtain, walk to the rancho to stretch my legs and have a smoke. I went with another inmate, an Italian from Sicily we called Vito. He was a thin, tall guy with grey hair and reminded me of jailed mafia boss John Gotti. In the passageway we stopped at the barred gate and waited for the cop to open it up. We could see the visitors coming in, women and children, waiting for another barred gate ahead to open so they could enter the passageways. I could make out two women at the front of the queue, a younger woman and an older lady. But I couldn’t really see their faces. You weren’t allowed to look at visitors, especially women. So myself and Vito just chatted away with our eyes to the ground, taking peeps through the bars.

  Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye I could make out one inmate coming down the stairs to the left from one of the wings upstairs. At the bottom step he suddenly charged to the gates. The two women were standing on the opposite side. He pulled something from his belt. I instinctively looked up. He had a revolver in his hand. He pointed it at the younger woman’s head. Boom-boom-boom. Three piercing shots rang out, echoing through the bare stone passageways. The woman’s head exploded, like a tomato shot by an arrow. Bits of it splattered on the older lady’s face. The woman slumped down on her knees and then collapsed, her body twitching like a fish on the end of a hook. The older lady went down on her knees too, wailing and screeching, ‘Wah, wah.’ Her hands were cradling what was left of the woman’s head. Blood was everywhere. The cops jumped up and grabbed the guy. Myself and Vito looked at the sight, then at each other. ‘What the fuck was that?’ I said to him. Two troops ran in. The cop at the gate where we were standing started shouting at us to go back: ‘Regresa, regresa’ (‘Go back, go back’).