The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare

by Farrell, Jeff

  * * *

  ‘Dear Paul, thank you very much for sending me those pictures. I will do what I can to push our embassy to get my father out of there,’ Ruut’s son wrote back in an email. Weeks passed and there was no word from the Dutch Embassy. Ruut would have to sit tight, suffer and count the days to his release, hoping his leg didn’t fall off in the meantime.

  * * *

  A big cheer went up in the yard. ‘Hhhhheeeyyy.’ A group of both gringos and Venos were shaking each other’s hands and waving their arms in the air.

  ‘He’s dead, did you hear?’ said Hanz, beaming.

  ‘Who’s dead?’ I said.

  ‘McKenzie was killed. Shot up. Couple of hours after getting out of Macuto.’

  ‘Yeah? How?’ I was only curious and wouldn’t be sending any wreaths.

  ‘He got day release at the end of his sentence. He was gunned down only a few hours after getting out on the streets.’ Hanz started jumping and cheering now.

  McKenzie’s fate didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t exactly popular in Macuto. What struck me was how so many were jumping up and down in the yard, cheering. Venos and gringos. More prisoners had passed through Macuto than I knew, and many had had a taste of McKenzie’s machete, poked into their ribs as he robbed them of all they had.

  * * *

  If your body didn’t let you down in Los Teques, your mind might. One day a new Veno inmate walked out into the yard. He was a big tall black guy. He stood still for ages with his bottom lip quivering, crippled with fright – or something else. He wouldn’t speak to anyone. Wouldn’t move. It was clear he wasn’t right in the head. Later, during the número, I saw one of the luceros help him over to a bucket and sit him down for the roll call. He was on another planet and didn’t know what was going on.

  ‘This man doesn’t need a prison, he needs a mental hospital. A blind man can see that,’ I said to the lads, Billy and Eddy.

  ‘I know,’ said Eddy. ‘It’s not right. Shouldn’t be here.’ A few days later he was gone: I heard he was moved to the Church wing. Months later I saw him working in the canteen serving food. He’d put on weight and seemed clued in to the world. Months of morning prayer and discipline away from booze and the fear of violence must have sorted him out. Just as well; in Los Teques you could barely get a hold of a doctor let alone a psychiatrist.

  He wasn’t the only one affected by mental torture. For months I’d watched Billy go into a steady spiral of depression. He started having spasms like mini fits. We’d be sitting there talking to him and his arms would bolt forward with his hands stretched out, shaking, and his face froze. ‘Billy, Billy Scissorhands,’ I said, roaring with laughter. It was obvious he was suffering from some sort of stress disorder, and although I was joking I think it helped lighten the moment for him.

  I knew what was going on. It was slowly dawning on him that his lawyer wasn’t doing anything for him. I’d seen him on the phone only a few nights before the spasms, roaring and shouting into the phone. All I could hear was ‘fuck’ this and ‘fuck’ that, while he paced around in circles. I didn’t want to bother him, but he later told me what was happening. His lawyer had phoned him demanding another 5,000 euro or he couldn’t do anything more with his case in trying to get him out on early release. This was after Billy’s family had already pumped about 14,000 euro into him. Billy wasn’t quick off the mark, but he was finally realising the abogado was taking him and his family to the cleaners. He’d have to find another way to get out. To me, the lawyer was a tonic salesman. Buy me and I’ll cure all ailments. He’d been fooling Billy and his family for about three years now. In fairness to them, the lawyer was a smooth talker. He even had the wool pulled over Father Pat’s eyes. But he hadn’t fooled me – he might have had the gift of the gab, but I’d smelled his bullshit.

  Billy soon got another lawyer on the go, one recommended by Vito. He finally copped he was wasting his time with his original abogado. ‘It’s the only thing I can do,’ Billy told me. ‘The guy hasn’t done anything.’ I could see the despair in his eyes. ‘Vito is raving about this woman, Viviana. Says she does great work and gets results, and she can get me out on parole because I’ve done over three years now.’

  ‘Sounds like the right thing, Billy,’ I said. ‘You have to try someone else now.’ I realised it was the same woman who got Terry out, so I knew he was on to something good.

  Macalou, a French-Algerian, had also hired Viviana. He was completely paralysed, wheelchair-bound. He couldn’t even hold a cup. He had arrived in Los Teques on his two feet but then got struck by some muscular disorder. Luckily for him he had a few quid to pay an inmate to feed him, bathe him and bring him to the toilet. He was about my age, a slim guy with a huge smile, which he wore all day despite being stuck in a wheelchair inside Los Teques. We got on great and spoke a lot.

  Viviana said she could get him out on humanitarian grounds. She even organised a court case with a judge to hear his case. But when a cop came into the wing and said there was an ambulancia waiting to take him, he pulled out. There were gringo lags who, no matter how bad Los Teques was, didn’t find it easy to go home and face whatever their demons were – or just had nothing to go home to. Many were drug addicts whose family and friends had long given up on them. Others just enjoyed the steady supply of crack and coke, morning, noon and night – a false paradise they slipped into.

  I never spoke to Macalou about turning down the court case. I knew it was a personal thing, and there were some things no inmate wanted to talk about, no matter how well you got on with them.

  I asked him about Viviana, though. I was hearing yet more good things about her work. ‘A wonderful woman,’ smiled Macalou, his white teeth gleaming, with a couple of gaps between them like the black keys on a piano.

  I was intrigued by the lawyer. I wanted to find out more, to see if she could help get me out of here on parole. What I didn’t know then was I’d soon need her legal help not for that but to pressure the prison chiefs into getting me to the local hospital in an ambulance.

  Chapter 21

  MAÑANA NEVER COMES

  THE GUN WAS SHOT JUST OVER MY RIGHT SHOULDER, LEVEL WITH MY EAR. The crack of the rounds of bullets caught me by surprise. I jolted to the left from where I was sitting on my bucket. My back hit the wall and I lost my balance and toppled over. I only stopped myself from landing on the ground by pushing out my left hand. I sat up, dazed, rebalanced myself, and fixed my glasses, which were to the side. There was a mad buzzing sensation in my right ear. Then a hollow sound with air whistling inside, like my eardrum had sucked in a tornado. Then it went numb.

  A few inmates were sitting in front of me, laughing, watching me nearly fall over. I looked up and there was Carlos holding one of his specials: an Uzi. He was grinning, too. They all thought this was hilarious, great fun – look, we gave the gringo a scare and he hit the deck. He had just fired off a round in honour of a boss from another wing who was getting his libertad and going free. A gunfire salute to show respect to a fellow jefe. Normally you could see the bosses coming into the yard with their guns to give a dozen-shot salute. This caught me on the hop. My ear was sore for days and I could barely hear. I was telling the others, going around with my hand clutching my right ear. It was Thursday, but I had to wait till Tuesday to see the médico in the infirmary – the only day he was scheduled to come in. He was a fat lazy bastard so I wasn’t expecting much. When the day came I went up to Mariano, as usual, to get him to interpret.

  ‘Mariano, you have to come with me to the doctor. My ear, it’s in bits.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll help,’ he said, but his face showed no concern. A lot of people said they weren’t doing well, but you never really took any notice.

  In the infirmary office, the woman cop was there, Morelba. She swivelled around on a chair from a desk where she was filling in some forms. As soon as she saw it was me, her face stiffened. She’d never liked me, remembering it was me who had phoned the British Embassy to hassle her into g
etting Terry out to the hospital.

  Mariano spoke and I listened to Morelba’s curt reply in Spanish, her eyes looking me up and down as if I was taking up valuable space. ‘She says wait five minutes and the doctor will be here,’ said Mariano. He had perfect English as he’d grown up in New York.

  The doctor we called El Gordo (Fat Man) walked into the office, a stethoscope hanging over his chest. It was probably so people thought he was a proper doctor. I doubted he was.

  ‘Tell him what’s wrong,’ said Mariano.

  ‘No oigo,’ (‘I can’t hear’) I said, pointing at my ear. ‘Pain, here.’ He nodded at me to sit down. He then took out a narrow pocket-sized black torch, flicked on the light and bent over to the side of my head, his belly doubling up as he did.

  El Gordo spoke to Mariano as he inspected my ear. ‘He says it’s dirt,’ said Mariano. ‘You need to clean it out.’

  ‘Then why doesn’t he?’

  ‘He says he has no syringes. He says another day.’

  ‘Great place this. Tell him I said he’s a stupid bastard.’

  ‘Probably best I don’t.’

  The doctor handed me a small bottle of liquid. ‘They’re drops,’ said Mariano. ‘Use them twice a day and it’ll clear up the dirt in your ears, that’s what he says.’

  In the wing I sat down on the side of my bunk next to the gays, who were taking turns brushing each other’s hair. I tilted my head to the left and squeezed a few drops into my right ear.

  A couple of hours later, jolts of pain were surging around my skull. I felt like the drops had seeped through my eardrum and into my brain. The pain started at my right ear and shot across to the top of my skull, my body jumping every time in a mini spasm. It was like getting electric-shock treatment. I put my hands on the sides of my head and squeezed in a vain effort to stop the pain.

  Over the next few days I was still taking the drops, but the pain got worse. My jaw started feeling tight and I couldn’t move it properly. The Nigerian in the kitchen, Onyeke, was still bringing down dinners to me in the evening, but I could only open my mouth wide enough to fork in a bit of rice, and I couldn’t chew well. I started giving my dinners to Billy. Then the pain got worse and my jaw almost seized up. I was now down to taking in soft food: a cup of porridge for breakfast and liquids for the rest of the day.

  ‘These drops are making me worse,’ I said to Billy, shoving him over another dinner Onyeke had brought from the canteen in the afternoon. The words were garbled, barely getting out, like I was talking with balls of cotton shoved in my mouth. ‘I’m in bits with a headache. They’re killing me. I need to go to the hospital.’

  Billy’s eyes widened, as if in that moment he knew I was in a bad way and wasn’t making a song and dance out of a little headache.

  ‘What about the drops – still taking them?’

  ‘I ditched them a couple of days ago. Were doing nothin’.’

  ‘You will not get an ambulance, Paul,’ he said, putting his plate of food down on his lap. ‘You won’t get it.’ He had been around Los Teques for a good three years now and knew the score. But it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  More days went on and the surges of pain were still shooting from my right ear to the top of my head. It felt like a corkscrew twisting into my cranium. I was worried I had some kind of brain infection. I’d seen others go like this, such as the Venezuelan who started off ill and losing weight, then got worse and ended up in a wheelchair before croaking in the middle of the night. I started to think, this is it, Paul, your number’s up. You’re a goner.

  I walked over to Hanz after the evening número. He was at the cards table up in the gym, a professional felt table the bosses had smuggled in. ‘Hanz, I need you to do something for me. I want to write some letters home.’ He looked at me, puzzled. I was always writing on my own – why would I need help? I knew the others didn’t know how bad I was.

  ‘What kind of letters?’

  ‘Goodbye letters to my family.’

  ‘No, Paul, you serious?’

  ‘Yes, I need this done,’ I said, standing there over the table as he lowered his hand, not caring now the others saw his play.

  We walked back to my bed and I sat down. I handed my laptop over to him. I’d bought out the shares of the others who had owned it with me when they were short of cash, and was making a little money renting it back to them, and others, to use. ‘I need one for my mother and father and two others for Katie and Dano, my kids, and another for my nephew Michael.’ I lay back, closed my eyes and started dictating.

  ‘Dear Mam and Dad, I’m really sorry,’ I started, listening to Hanz’s fingers tapping on the keyboard. ‘I didn’t think it would come to this. I was sure I’d get out of here. But if you’re reading this it’s because I’m dead.’

  Hanz’s fingers stopped tapping. I opened my eyelids. They felt heavy, like lumps of lead. As I opened my eyes, Hanz’s face slowly emerged, his mouth open. ‘OK, Paul, I’m sure you’ll get through this.’

  ‘Just type, Hanz, this is important to me.’ I closed my eyes again and went on. ‘Firstly, I want to tell you all how much I love you. You, my parents, Katie and Daniel, Sharon . . .’ I finished that open letter to all my family then did one separate email for each of them. Hanz then connected to the Internet with the dongle stick in the USB port and stored the typed letters as saved drafts in his personal email account. ‘Send them to my nephew, Michael, he’ll know what to do if anything happens to me and will pass them on to the rest of my family.’

  ‘OK, Paul, but I’m sure you’re going to pull through.’

  ‘Listen, I might not last – just send them on if I don’t.’

  My health didn’t get any better. A couple of days later I was sitting in the yard on my bucket by the door into the hallway. A luz had been called and the bosses were hiding their guns before número. I sat there with my hand on my ear, rocking back and forth like a loony with the pain. Then the sharp jolt kicked into my ear, shot across to the top of my head and seemed to explode. I jumped up from the bucket. ‘Arggggh, arghhhhhh,’ I shouted, my arms stretched out, shaking. ‘Arrggggggh, arggggggggh.’ I ran around in circles like a chicken that had had its head cut off, screaming like I was possessed, then I ran into the hallway by the cells. My head was tilting from side to side and the wall in the room and the face of a lucero were spinning in front of me as my eyes rolled back in my head. I was possessed like a man in a crazy house.

  ‘No, you can’t be here,’ said the lucero, a Colombian who had the face of a 19-year-old, and probably was. He was waving his hands at me like he was signalling to a plane above. Normally with a search on you’d get a beating for not staying in the yard. But seeing me flailing around waving my arms they knew there was something wrong.

  Two weeks went on and I was still racked with fits of pain in my head. I was still barely eating because of the pain in my jaw. I was losing weight and felt weak.

  Vito came up to me in the yard. He knew I was in bad shape. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Paul, this lawyer I was telling you about, Viviana, she can help you with your pains.’ I’d met her briefly before, through Vito, in the office upstairs one day after meeting with Father Pat, but I hadn’t spoken to her for long. I’d been meaning to get her on board as my lawyer. She had got Terry out on early parole, and Vito said if anyone could get me out on the same ticket, she could. Then I got sidetracked after Carlos blasted his gun next to my ear.

  ‘How can she help me with the pains?’

  ‘You need an ambulance,’ he said, speaking softly. ‘Go to the hospital. She can help you. She has many contacts.’

  ‘Right, let’s do it.’ I didn’t need much persuasion.

  ‘Good, I will organise all. She is coming to see me on Thursday and I will bring you. You talk and you see.’

  It was Viviana who got a court order to put pressure on the prison chiefs to get Macalou an ambulance so he could appear in front of a judge and have his case to be released on humanitarian
grounds heard. I had been impressed and was hopeful I’d get sorted with an ambulance. In the end Macalou refused to budge an inch out of Maxima, but that wasn’t the lawyer’s fault.

  ‘This woman is really good,’ said Vito, as we walked past one of the vermin crackheads in the passageway. His eyes looked like he had woven red threads through the whites. If I was on my own I’d have been on edge. ‘She can get everything started to get you out of here on early parole.’ I felt good about this lawyer and I hadn’t even met her. ‘She works for the people 110 per cent,’ continued Vito, ‘and she knows people, many contacts out there.’

  We walked into the new office for official visits – it made a change from standing in the passageway. There were four tables. On one side were the lawyers, and inmates were on the other. It wasn’t hard to tell which was which. Not many inmates wore suits.

  At the last table on the right sat a woman, alone. ‘There, there is Viviana. At that table. The right.’ My eyes nearly popped out of my head. She was a good-looking bird, wearing tight trousers and a low-cut top. She had luscious long, dark hair and her make-up was all done, with red lipstick. I guessed she was in her 40s.

  ‘Hola,’ she said to Vito, standing up and kissing him on both cheeks in the Latin style, then doing the same to me. I picked up a subtle perfume and savoured it. Nice smells were rare in jail. I had to pick myself up off the floor. It had been well over a year and a half since I’d come that close to such a beautiful woman, or any female, really. Next to us, the lags with their lawyers looked over, glancing at Viviana.

  Vito and Viviana spoke in rapid Spanish and I took in the sight of the room. In the corner a cop sat in a chair, cradling a shotgun like Deputy Dawg. He had a thick black handlebar moustache and was dozing in and out of sleep, his chin on his chest. He had on a wide-brimmed hat like a sombrero and looked like a Mexican bandito you’d see in a spaghetti western.