The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare

by Farrell, Jeff

  But the same number turned up again. It looked like I wasn’t the only one plotting to get out of Los Teques. The lags started shrugging their shoulders. The troops and the cop pulled out. ‘Conejo, Conejo’ was on everyone’s lips. ‘Conejo, the Rabbit,’ said Silvio. ‘They don’t know where he is.’ The Rabbit earned his nickname because he had two badly bucked front teeth.

  The National Guard troops and the cop shortly after walked back into the wing. ‘Sotea,’ shouted a guard. Conejo, wherever he was, was in deep shit. Not only would the troops and cops be gunning for him, so would the cell-block jefes. His absence at the headcount prompted a search – which the padrinos hated.

  The whole prison population was hauled up to the roof, wing by wing. Another headcount was called. But still no Conejo. Reds and oranges started to streak the sky as the sun set. It was getting dark and chilly. All I had on were shorts and a T-shirt. My arse cheeks were going numb sitting on the ground.

  I started singing, ‘Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run,’ and shouting, ‘“What’s up, Doc?” I said, “What’s up, Doc?”’ The gringo inmates were cracking up laughing. ‘Well, where de likkle wabbit go?’ I added, mimicking the Walt Disney cartoon. I lost interest in cracking jokes when drizzly rain fell. Everyone was getting tired and irritated. After hours passed, we got the orders to get back to the cells, wing by wing.

  I couldn’t believe they hadn’t found this guy. He didn’t seem like a bright spark who had the brains to escape. He had what were known as ‘trusted privileges’, because in a past life he’d been a mechanic. Most inmates like him were immediately put to work in the driveway by the gate to the jail, fixing the prison fleet of a couple of buses. Often, however, I’d look down from the roof and I could see them, noting them bent over into the engine of one of the prison workers’ cars. I could also see they enjoyed perks like fried-chicken fast food and other takeaways courtesy of the troops for fixing their motors. Anyway, it looked like the Conejo had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.

  ‘Where the hell did he go? Did he escape?’ I said to Ricardo.

  ‘No way, he’s an idiot.’ Dumb? I had thought so, but wasn’t so sure now.

  The next day it filtered back that the Conejo escaped out the front gate holding onto the bottom of one of the army trucks as it pulled out of the jail. They found him quickly, though, in his mother’s house . . . He was bundled into a police car and brought back to Los Teques the next afternoon. I gave him kudos for having the brains to escape, but he didn’t have enough to stay hidden when he got out. Still, he had the cojones to pull it off.

  Not long afterwards, we were hauled up to the roof yet again after the troops were down one on their headcount. ‘They say he’s one of the prisoners in Wing 1. They think he’s still in the jail,’ said Eddy, sitting on his hunkers on the roof beside me. For three nights it went on. It didn’t make sense. Nobody could hide in the prison for that long. On the fourth day I expected we’d all be called up for another evening under the stars while the cops and troops searched for the inmate. Eddy and Silvio started talking after the headcount in the wing. ‘No roof tonight; they found him.’

  ‘Found him where?’ I said.

  ‘The cops started looking on the Internet when they couldn’t find the guy. They found a video on YouTube made in Wing 1 and saw him.’

  ‘You must be joking me?’

  ‘No, they saw the guy’s face. Then you see prisoners’ hands holding automatic weapons and shooting his arms and legs off.’

  ‘That’s disgusting,’ I said. Now I came to think of it, the night before he went missing there had been a burst of gunfire from outside. This must have been the execution.

  ‘It happens, Paul,’ said Silvio. ‘They are evil people in there.’

  ‘How did they get his body out?’ I said.

  ‘The inmates cut up his body and put it into three buckets. The cops went into the wing and found them after seeing the video.’ I was sick. These people were more animal and inhumane than I could ever imagine.

  Chapter 17

  LOVE CALLS

  BILLY WAS FOREVER ON A DATING WEBSITE HE COULD ACCESS THROUGH his phone. An inmate in the Church, where you’re supposed to be a Christian celibate, had put him on to it. He was texting one particular girl back and forth for weeks. I was sitting with Eddy one afternoon in the canteen on visit day and got to see the fruits of Billy’s labour.

  ‘Look at the beaut Billy boy’s with,’ I said. Billy had a knockout of a girl on his arm, grinning from ear to ear like he’d won a million in the lottery.

  Eddy swung his head around. ‘Gordon Bennett, there’s a sight to behold.’ The pair of them walked over and sat down on the stone bench next to us. Myself and Eddy were in the canteen on a Sunday visit day playing cards. The director opened it up for us PWVs to go to when the overcrowding got worse than usual.

  ‘Hola,’ said the girl, smiling. ‘I am Angela.’ That she was, with an angelic face and long, slick black hair that cascaded down her back. I started calling her Pocahontas. She was a beautiful, slim girl. We all fell in love with her at first sight.

  She told us she was 18 and had a child. Most girls in this part of the world of a certain social class did by that age. After a bit of chitchat the pair of them disappeared off to the ‘buggies’ – the beds in the cells that had each been cordoned off with curtains, like a hospital bed, for the inmates to have a conjugal shag.

  That evening both the Venezuelans and the gringos wanted to know where Billy had met his stunning bird. ‘Mate, some princess,’ said Eddy, ‘where’d you get her from?’

  ‘On the phones, a dating site.’

  ‘She’s a corker, Billy,’ I said. ‘But what’s she doing with you? – it’s like Beauty and the Beast.’ All the gringos cracked up laughing. He was a hairy boy, Billy, with woolly shoulders and a carpet of hair on his chest. I used to call him ‘Teddy Bear’ for his furry body. The Colombian chica, though, was mesmerised by his sparkling green eyes and thought he was cuddly.

  The funny thing was that the Veno women hated body hair. The queues for the toilets on the mornings of visits were endless with inmates waiting to shave off their pubic hair and under their arms, getting ready for the arrival of their missus. A few even did their legs. The Venos took their conjugal rights seriously. When their partners brought in their kids I noticed they’d be three and four years old, yet the guy had been locked up for about four years. It was obvious the oats were sown behind bars.

  All the gringo lags were getting in on the dating-site act after Billy’s top score. Eddy quickly had women on the go coming in to visit him. Billy was also back on it too, fishing to see if he could get something else moving. And he did. He was all excited one Sunday on the morning of visits. ‘Another bird, Paul, and she’s coming in with her sister,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Well, aren’t you the man,’ I said.

  We were sitting in behind the curtains and a lucero came in. ‘Billy, visita.’

  Billy stood up, swaggered over to the curtain and started twitching it for a peek out first. He looked back at me. His face dropped. ‘I can’t go out there, Paul, she’s horrible.’

  ‘What do you mean horrible?’

  ‘The size of the two of them?’ We all jumped to our feet and poked our heads out too, like theatre actors peeking out at their audience. There were two girls the size of beached whales stuffed into the plastic chairs for the visits. Venezuelan women were famous for winning Miss World competitions, but this pair would more likely make the Guinness Book of World Records for being the heaviest women in Latin America.

  ‘Hahaha, Billy, you’d better go out,’ I said.

  He sat down, refusing to budge. ‘No, no way.’

  Minutes later the lucero came in again. ‘Visita, ahora,’ he barked. It was the height of disrespect to leave a visitor waiting.

  ‘Billy, go.’

  He shrugged and pushed through the curtains into the yard.

  That ev
ening when the visits all went home Billy was still reeling from having the fattest women in Venezuela in to see him. Nobody ever remarked on a visit. It was a no-no and shameful among the Venezuelans. But they made an exception that day. They were bent over double laughing, calling out fea (ugly) and gorda (fat). Even the jefe was laughing.

  ‘Yeah, funny, haha,’ said Billy.

  Of course I was interested in getting it on with a girl myself. Months locked up with men didn’t do much for a man’s sex life, a straight one’s at least. There were putas, prostitutes, who did the rounds in the prison. I might have been tempted, only they were rotten and pricey. They wanted 100,000 bolos, about 20 euro, for a go of them. No way was I paying that for a quick shag when the same amount of cash would keep me going for a week with food, bottled water and the causa. I might have paid had they been nice and not jail bicycles, but they were.

  All the Veno lags were always trying to set me up with a girl. New Yawk Mike even said he’d get me a proper prostitute off the street for about 200,000 bolos, or 40 euro. ‘Paul, I can get you a beautiful queen.’

  ‘Right, I’ll go for it. Tell me when she’s here.’ I would have been up for it had he produced the goods, but he didn’t. As usual it was mañana seguro. Tomorrow for sure.

  Apart from that the Venos were always trying to hook up a gringo inmate with one of their family, be it a sister or a niece. Word had it that there was even an inmate up in Mostrico wing who was renting out his mother and his sister for sex to make a few quid. I never knew for sure, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. It would have been just another level of sickness among the Venezuelans. What I did know for sure was that there was one lag who set the Maxima boss, Fidel, up with his nineteen-year-old daughter. On visit day they’d disappear into the boss’s bed. To me it was shameful that a man would give his daughter up like that, and probably just to score a brownie point with the jefe for an easier life.

  The Colombian lad who’d arrived with me in the army bus on the first day in Los Teques once invited me out from behind the curtain on visit day to meet his family. There was his mother, his girlfriend and his cousin. His cousin was soltera (single), he said. She was in her early 30s and pretty, with brown eyes and elegant cheekbones. She also spoke some English.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asked.

  ‘Ireland,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Europe, I travel there,’ she said, ‘but mostly Spain for work. I am a travel agent.’ I enjoyed the chat, but I wasn’t going to get sucked into making it a regular visit with a trip to the ‘buggies’. I didn’t want to get sidetracked in jail with women, drugs, drink, nothing. My focus was on getting out and that was that. Aiming for early parole after 18 months and walking out the jail gate.

  I did, however, start texting back and forth on the phone with a South African girl who was locked up in the Los Teques women’s prison, close to our jail, and I enjoyed the contact. One of the gringo inmates, Henrik from South Africa, had given me her number. He was a tall lad with blonde hair and a heavy beard. He’d got her phone number from one of his countrymen holed up in another wing. The girl’s name was Zenolia du Plooy. I later typed her name into a search engine on the laptop I shared with a few of the lads. There were stories all over the South African media about how she’d been caught with cocaine in the airport in Venezuela. After chatting to her, it looked like she had gotten roped into some dodgy caper. After a while the texts fizzled out. I didn’t see the point; it wasn’t like I could ever visit her.

  She told me she had some rare disease and there was no medication for it in Venezuela. Her family had to have it sent over to her every month on a plane and were campaigning for her to be released on humanitarian grounds. Waste of time, I thought; there was no humanity here.

  * * *

  Straight love wasn’t the only kind of romance going on inside Los Teques. The gays in the prison had their own wing under the stairs in the passageway. We called it the Pink Room, or the Fresa (strawberry) wing. There were about 20 or 30 gays. Many didn’t have a choice but to be there. In most wings gays were castigated – beaten up and fired into the passageway. Not that they were total fairies that you could push around. Many were in for murder – so cross one and you might not wake up from a night’s sleep.

  In Maxima they were welcome, along with the outcasts from other wings such as kiddy fiddlers, rapists and ex-cops. Their causa money was good. Most slept together at the end of the cell near my bed, squashed onto the floor.

  I actually got on well with the gays. When I was sitting on my bed one day typing on my laptop, one of them, Chico, came up and asked me for a use of it. ‘Facebook, por favor.’ He was as camp as Christmas with a high-pitched voice; he’d make gay chat show host Graham Norton look like an alpha male. So I gave him the use of it. In return he gave me a massage. He would light candles around my bunk bed and had all the proper massage oils. He didn’t grope where it wasn’t wanted. It was actually great – my back and shoulders were always aching. Even though I had my own bed now, sitting on the buckets for hours on end behind the curtains on visit days was killing me, my body scrunched up in there in the small space beside the toilet that was getting more cramped every week. I could probably get a gig in a circus as a contortionist after Los Teques.

  I used to teach another gay a few English words. He was taking classes in the jail and was keen to learn. I didn’t mind and just taught him a few basics, such as ‘what is your name?’ One day out in the yard he came over and stood in front of me when I was sitting with Vito and Roberto playing cards. ‘Te quiero mucho,’ (‘I love you’) he said, with his hand on his heart. I burst out laughing along with the lads and he ran off in a sulk.

  ‘Haha, you’re in there,’ said Billy.

  ‘Not a journey I want to take,’ I said.

  One day I noticed another gay who had checked into Hotel Los Teques had a shapely rear end like he’d stuffed two small cushions down the back of his trousers. ‘He’s a nice ass. But it looks a bit odd. How’d he get that?’ I said.

  ‘Paid for it,’ said Silvio.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Plastic surgery.’ It was huge business with women in Venezuela. Even gays got silicone pumped into their rear end. This lag’s ass looked like a double-D cup.

  Another day one of the visitors brought in a newspaper, as they always did. Any clippings about gringos caught in the airport with drugs we always read. One story that really caught our interest was a report about a Romanian drug mule who was a transvestite, according to the newspaper. We were all curious about that one.

  ‘I wonder did they get the male or female cops to search him,’ laughed Billy. A few days later we got word a totally camp gay had arrived in the jail.

  ‘It’s him, it must be him – or it,’ laughed Silvio. A few hours later the Romanian lad walked out into the yard. He was gay all right; he had plucked eyebrows and manicured nails. But a transvestite? We doubted it. The boss gave him a spot down at the back of my cell with the other gays. He was a bit of a lost soul, didn’t click with them that well. He’d only a bit of Spanish, which probably didn’t help. He was quickly moved up to the Strawberry wing – but not before taking a liking to Ralph, one of the German lads.

  ‘You’re in there, Ralph, the gay boy fancies you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, sure, see how it goes,’ he said casually.

  ‘You what?’ We all looked at each other, puzzled.

  Not long after, Ralph was seen nipping in and out of the Pink Room on his way back and forth to his kitchen job. He wasn’t shy about it. ‘Best sex I ever had. A man knows what a man wants.’ I doubted he was gay or bisexual – just wasn’t fussy and wanted a bit of strange.

  But the other lags weren’t pleased. ‘How he could do that?’ said Billy, his face scrunched up in disgust.

  ‘Ah, sure, who cares as long as it’s only in here,’ I said. What happened in prison stayed in prison, I believed.

  The cops took a dim view, however. They didn’t l
ike the idea that one of the lags who cooked their food was having sex with the gays. A muscular Nigerian guy in the kitchen, Onyeke, told me. He was a wizard with spices and even made the usual prison food of sardines taste good. So he filled me in about Ralph and the aguas plotting to get him out of the kitchen. ‘The cops don’t like the German playing around with the gay boy. He will lose his job.’

  I later told Ralph. The kitchen was one of the best jobs in the prison. You got to eat well and it paid OK with a few bolos. ‘Ah, no, it’s fine – I know all the cops, they know me,’ said Ralph. Maybe – but within weeks he got the boot, and Ralph’s fling of passion with the Romanian came to an end.

  The director actually loved the Romanian. He picked up Spanish quick and she gave him a job as her runner, flying around with letters and other messages for her. It seemed to me that she liked to surround herself with gays. They were well up the pecking order with the director and got plum office jobs doing admin. She even put three gays who were professional stylists to good use, doing her hair, nails and make-up every morning.

  * * *

  Terry’s lawyer was still on the case to get him released on early parole due to his health. Weeks had passed and nothing had happened, as was often the case with anything to do with the courts in Venezuela. To speed things up, he wanted to send out a message to the powers that be that his health had taken a turn for the worse. He wanted to get to a hospital and get a check-up, and in there he’d act up for the doctors, who’d hopefully tell the prison director he was too ill for jail. He believed then that the judge on his case would get word of this and speed through his release papers. Fat chance, but worth a try.