One night sleeping out in the yard one of the lads was passing around a joint, marijuana sprinkled with crack cocaine. They called it a ruso, which meant Russian in Spanish. Supposedly it was smoked in Russian prisons all the time. While I might take the odd snort of coke, crack was another league, and I wanted to steer clear of it. But I was lying on the ground, cold and miserable, trying to sleep. ‘Fumas, fumas,’ (‘Smoke, smoke’) said a Veno, offering me the joint. I took it from him – anything to escape the drudgery. I sucked in a deep drag, filled my lungs and slowly exhaled. In minutes I was out of my wagon. I lay back and felt my legs curling up. I sat up with a fright and looked down at them. They were straight. It was weird. It was my first and last time taking crack. I could see what it did to the stoners. Turned them into zombies. I didn’t want to go down that road.
The next day, myself and the gringos were squashed up behind the curtain as usual with the other PWVs. A lucero stuck his head through the plastic curtain. He rattled off a torrent of Spanish.
‘It’s a secuestro,’ said Silvio, shaking his head. ‘The cycle goes on.’ He put his head in his hands and looked like he was going to cry.
‘A what? What’s that?’ I said.
‘Secuestro, a kidnapping,’ he said. ‘They’ve kidnapped the whole jail.’
‘How?’ This didn’t make sense.
‘They put a chain around the gates in the passageway outside. No one gets in or out of the wings. Everyone who’s here stays here till it’s over. All the families.’
‘So another sleepover?’
‘Yes, but we can’t even go to the canteen to eat. Nothing. Can’t leave the wing.’
‘This is bullshit. What the hell do they want?’
‘Usual thing, Paul. It’s about conditions, or getting court cases moving so people can get their hearings and get out or get a sentence. There are people in here for months who’ve only been charged.’
I couldn’t believe it. You were in danger of losing your life in this dump and you might even be innocent of whatever you’d been charged with. What made me even sicker was that the Venos were basically kidnapping their own families as ammunition to get what they wanted.
For eight days it went on. A bit of rice went around the odd time, which had been cooked up on the little stove in the wing. And some mornings coffee was made, which you had if you had a few bolos to pay for it. The families didn’t suffer, though. There was a fridge in the hallway in the wing full of frozen food. Meat, chicken, the whole lot. I’m sure the bosses ate well out of it too. There wasn’t much to do to pass the time, but I did start writing again with a vengeance: a crime book set in Dublin, as well as my diaries, in a copybook I’d bought from the shop in our cell block. All day we sat behind the curtain and all night we slept in the yard. I hated the visitors and I hated Venos even more now.
When it was finally over I couldn’t see anything was different in the jail. It was still crowded, the food was still muck and there didn’t seem to be any greater number of inmates getting out to the courts that I could see.
* * *
‘Irlandés, visita.’ It was a lucero, a skinny little guy with curly hair and a thin moustache. I waved him away. Nobody visited me, only Father Pat, and he never came when the prison was open to visitors; he only came outside general-public hours with a special chaplain permission. That way he didn’t have to queue up outside with the families and have to be patted down when he got through the gates. The lucero had to be mistaken.
‘A mí no me visitan.’ (‘Nobody comes to visit me.’) My Spanish was coming on. The lucero stepped out from behind the curtain back into the yard. It was Sunday, and visit day. I was sitting on my bucket behind the curtain, counting the cracks in the wall.
Canario, another lucero, walked in now. He was holding a black revolver.
‘Visita,’ he barked, ‘llegate.’ (‘Visit, get here now.’) He wasn’t asking. I shrugged and stood up. I followed him out to the hallway. In front of me stood a guy in his early 30s with blonde hair.
‘How ya doing?’ he said. ‘I’m a friend of Father Pat’s.’ A Dublin accent. A Paddy.
‘How are ya?’ I said, intrigued. So the luceros were right; I did have a visitor.
His name was Jeff Farrell, an Irish reporter working out of Caracas. He wanted to hear a bit of my experience for a story. We sat down on a bench and spoke. Farrell had two shopping bags of food. ‘Father Pat said I should bring you something.’
‘Fair play to you,’ I said, shaking his hand.
‘The National Guard took a carton of orange juice off me out of one of the bags.’
‘They’re like that. They say it’s the rules, but it’s probably just that they like orange juice and don’t want to pay for it.’ We both laughed.
He asked a lot of questions about life in the prison. I told him about the murders and beatings. His eyes seemed to light up. A reporter got his story.
We spoke a bit more. The scene in the hallway must have been comical for him. The little Christmas tree in the corner was flashing with lights. Latin music was blaring out of a stereo, and a lucero was dancing salsa with a pipe gun dangling from his side. It was great chatting with someone from home. ‘I better go,’ he said after a while.
‘OK, it was good talking. Billy, the other Irish lad, he’s off in the canteen. He’ll be sorry he missed you. I’ll tell him you were in.’ I walked Farrell to the wing door. When we got out into the corridor I told him to march behind me up the passageway. ‘That way they’ll think you’re a prisoner and won’t hassle you.’ I was afraid one of the animals would jump out of Wing 7 and knife him, but I didn’t tell him that.
Not long afterwards, he rang me in the wing. ‘Any chance you could get your family back home to give me a photo of you for a story for the papers?’
‘No way,’ I said. The last thing I wanted was my mug all over the papers in Ireland. My family were going through enough grief as it was, I imagined. Weeks later I got word that Farrell had done a story about me on Irish national radio, RTÉ. He just called me ‘Paul, from Coolock’ – where I live in Dublin. No surname. Fair enough.
Chapter 13
HONOUR AMONG BANDITOS
TROUBLE WAS BREWING. VISITS WERE ON AND WORD WENT AROUND THERE’D be a blow-up between the wings after the families went home at 4 p.m. What the strife was about we weren’t sure. There’d been talk about a shoot-out between the cell blocks for months, so I didn’t think anything of it. The root of the row always seemed trivial to me. Often an inmate accused a prisoner from another cell block of checking out his girlfriend on a visit. The visit ‘code of conduct’ had been breached and respeto had to be upheld.
Unpaid drugs debts might also spark trouble between the cell blocks. If, for example, an inmate fled a wing over a bill he couldn’t pay for crack or coke and holed up in another cell block, the jefe there would have to force him to honour the debt to his former padrino. If he didn’t, this was another cause to take up armas. It was all about honour. Pride. Saving face. But the worst of all scenarios for the trouble in the air that day would be if one cell-block ‘army council’ plotted to take over a rival wing. This was grave. It would mean all-out war – a fight to the death. It was all about turf. If a jefe and his henchmen had, say, 150 inmates in their wing, they made cash from the causa and selling drugs to that number. If the bosses took over another wing with the same number of prisoners, the jefe and his sidekicks doubled their lolly. In the end, it was all down to the dinero.
But in that moment we were safe. A blow-up would never happen during visits. The familia was sacred in Venezuela. That was the rule in Los Teques, and in every prison in Venezuela. If it was broken, it meant death.
When the visitors finally cleared, we PWVs were allowed out from behind the curtain. I started walking around the yard to stretch my legs. I’d been cramped up on my bucket for about eight hours and they felt wobbly.
‘There’s a good chance there could be trouble, Paul,’ said Billy, his brow f
urrowed. He’d been locked up for a year and knew the telltale signs: the bosses were jittery and on the phone to the jefes in other wings.
I shrugged it off. ‘It’ll be grand, Billy, all huffing and puffing.’
I continued pacing up and down the yard. I then sat down and started writing my diary, which I was doing daily. I thought some day my tales from Los Teques could be turned into a book. ‘Who would believe this place, Paul?’ said Silvio. ‘Nobody. They will think you made it up.’ He was probably right, but I still kept it going.
Something suddenly whistled past my ear. Zzzzziiiipppp. I spun around and saw a large hole in the door frame next to me. Zzzzziiiipppp, again. Then it registered: oh shit, we were being fired upon. Automatic gunfire crackled. Rat-ta-ta, rat-ta-ta. Bullets pounded into the yard, slamming into the wall and sending up puffs of dust.
‘Nos disparan,’ shouted the Venos, ‘nos disparan.’ (‘They’re shooting at us.’)
Inmates from Wing 2 above had an aerial view of our yard and were taking potshots, pointing gun barrels through their cell bars at us. We were sitting ducks in the yard. There was a scramble for the cover of the cells. I jumped to my feet and bolted for the door. I noticed the luceros and the bosses were first through – and they were armed. Big men. One of the lags fell into me, knocking me over in the stampede. My shoulder was shoved into the door frame. I got back on my feet quickly and ran in through the door and into Cell 1. I saw Silvio, Billy, Eddy and Ricardo had taken cover there.
Bullets now pounded into the main wing door. We were being fired upon by inmates from outside in the passageway. It was probably Wing 1. A steady volley of bullets from an automatic weapon. Drrr-drrrrr, like a drill whirring into the steel door. I knew it was reinforced, but I was still worried it would give way. My heart was racing. My fists were clenched. I thought these might be my last moments. I’d be killed in a hail of bullets. Katie and Dano, sorry. Ma, Da, sorry. That’s all I could think.
Silvio was panicking the most. It didn’t help my nerves. ‘I tell you, this place is crazy, crazy I tell you. These people, they will never learn.’ The bullets still pounding. No, no. If they stormed in they’d kill us first. The white men. The gringos. I was sure.
A lucero armed with a pipe gun ran up to the wall next to us. It divided our cell block and Wing 1, which was beside us. He started barking orders, waving the barrel of his DIY shotgun. I didn’t understand. A few of the Venos ran over, got down on their hunkers and put their ears to the wall. ‘Llegate, llegate,’ (‘Get here, get here’) shouted the lucero at me. ‘Bombas, bombas.’ Good God. It dawned on me.
‘Grenades,’ said Billy, his face stiff with fright. Oh Jesus, we were dead.
‘This is terrible, terrible,’ said Silvio, his lip quivering, ‘terrible, I tell you.’ He’d been coking up all afternoon and his eyeballs were dancing around in his head. Mad paranoid. The crackheads were even running around screaming, clawing at the walls like loonies. On the ground in fetal positions, scratching at their faces. Their demons coming to life.
‘Llegate, llegate,’ said the lucero again. Jesus, he wanted me to put my ears to the bricks, listening out to see if the inmates in Wing 1 were dropping grenades into the cavities of the wall, planning to blow it up and storm into the wing. I looked at the Venos on their hunkers, horrified. I couldn’t believe they were obeying the lucero. If they heard a rustling in the bricks it’d be lights out. They would be blown to bits. Dumb bastards. The lucero started shouting at me again. ‘Llegate, llegate.’ Maybe it was because I was older than the rest and had less living to do.
‘No, no,’ I said to the lucero, waving him off. He could shoot me if he wanted, I wasn’t going.
We stood there, our band of gringos, cowering down on our hunkers when a Veno at the wall jumped back. ‘Grenade!’ More bullets pounded at the door. On our feet again ready to run to the yard in case they stormed in. Then I heard a volley of bullets slam into the yard, ricocheting off buckets with a ping and flying everywhere. Shells the size of small carrots were scattered on the ground. Good God, it was the National Guard. The verde boys were spraying bullets from the watchtowers, firing into the prison probably for the fun of it.
Fidel ran up to the wing door into the passageway, an Uzi in hand. A few of the luceros and underbosses followed him, slinking in against the wall for cover and scurrying over to the door. The narrow lookout hatch was pulled back. Fidel poked the barrel of the Uzi, fired off a round and crouched down. The other wing returned fire, bullets slamming into the door. The boss took cover and a lucero took over, firing back out. One of them was laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I could see they were worried but that they were also enjoying the buzz – like grown-up cowboys and Indians. The bosses continued shooting out into the passageway, firing off rounds then ducking below the hatch. But it was senseless, blind shooting. Monkeys with guns.
I was in a panic. My knees felt weak. I didn’t know what to do if the prisoners from Wing 1 stormed in. I didn’t have a gun to fight back with.
Minutes ticked by like days. I was exhausted with fear and panic. I looked in Billy’s face at one point. Our eyes met, like we knew this might be it. Two Irishmen thousands of miles from home, ending our lives inside the walls of a prison.
The bosses were now running low on ammo. Marksmen they were not. The blind shooting in the passageway was draining their bullets. They ran back and forth from the wing door into the cells, pulling out magazines of cartridges hidden in the insides of a sheet hanging up dividing two beds. I personally didn’t care if they were killed, but as long as they had guns and bullets we had a chance of living. In that moment, the causa was worth every penny.
The shooting eased off. A couple of bullets ricocheted out in the yard and a few more sprays of bullets hit the wing door. Then the cell phones started ringing. The bosses were shouting into their mobiles, waving their hands in the air. ‘It could be a truce,’ said Silvio, listening in. His face, normally tanned, was drained of colour.
The shooting stopped. I gave out a slow, heavy breath. I felt a knot in my stomach loosen. My hands unclenched. The Venos at the wall got off their knees, but the crackheads were still curling into balls on the floor, scratching at their faces.
‘I think it is over, oh please God,’ said Silvio.
‘Jesus, yeah,’ said Billy. ‘They’re probably out of ammo.’
It was coming on to 5 p.m.: time for número. The shoot-out was over, but surely the National Guard wouldn’t come in and do a headcount after what had happened? The bosses believed they would. The luceros started shoving us out into the yard. I stepped out, ducking my head left and right, looking up to see whether an inmate would pop his head out over the roof above and start blasting. The ground in the yard was covered in bullet cases, the wall peppered with holes big enough to stick two fingers into.
Luceros started ordering Venos to run around and pick up the bullet cases. They scrambled around the ground, gathering them and dumping them into a rubbish bin. ‘They think if they hide them the National Guard won’t know they’ve guns,’ said Billy, sniggering. I couldn’t believe it, but he was serious.
The bosses started waving at us to take our seats around the wall for the headcount. I noticed they weren’t hiding their weapons this time; I could see their handguns poking up from under their shirts.
The troops filed in and started the headcount. Three guards were armed with the usual pump-action shotguns, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied no one had escaped in the melee, they pulled out after the número. Not a word said or a search for guns and ammo. Nada. It was as if nothing had happened.
‘There might be a baseball game on the telly,’ laughed Eddy. He was always one for the one-liners, and he was probably right. They were mad for the sport.
That night, for the first time, a lookout man was put on the door into the yard, watching for any shooters from Wing 2 who might climb down from the roof and blast us as we slept. I walked over to my space on the floor, roll
ed out my colchoneta and lay down among the carpet of bodies. In minutes I fell into a merciful sleep.
* * *
I was starting to get to know a bit more about Billy and how he got into this mess. He had racked up debts of a few grand with a local dealer in his home town from getting ecstasy and coke on the slate. The dealer told him if he did a drug run for them to Venezuela he could clear them, and he wasn’t exactly asking. Holiday in the sun and expenses paid. The holiday worked out all right, but not the run.
‘How much were you going to get paid?’ I said.
‘Three grand.’
‘Three grand?’ I said, my voice raised. ‘Is that all?’ I couldn’t believe he was carrying three kilos of coke worth over two hundred thousand euro back home for such a small pay-off. The ten grand I was going to get paid wasn’t much either, but three grand . . .
‘I had a great aul time on the holiday,’ said Billy, grinning. He arrived in Caracas and headed off to a beach resort. Palm trees and cocktails. Bikini-clad women.
At the end of the trip he picked up his suitcase with the ‘merchandise’ in Caracas. He got to the airport, and game over. Barely made it in the front door before the cops moved in and, like me, hauled him off to the antidrogas building on the coast. I didn’t ask him if he got a late-night visit from the bugger squad. I’d decided I wouldn’t tell anyone what happened to me there, so I couldn’t. I was always curious, though, whether others had been raped there too. No one ever said. I knew for sure, though, it didn’t happen in Los Teques. The cell-block bosses would probably shoot you if you did that. It proved to me that the National Guard were the lowest scum in Venezuela.
‘How long were you there for?’
‘A night. Went to court next day.’
‘I was there for five days. No food and water.’
The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare Page 16