‘Yes, of course,’ she said. I could have jumped down the phone and kissed her. We had to bring copies of official reports saying our travel documents had been stolen. ‘Go to any police station and you can do it.’ The consulate was closing at 1 p.m. Time was tight.
‘We’ll be there,’ I said, and hung up. ‘It’s all good,’ I said to Billy. ‘They can get the passports for us today.’
‘Jesus,’ said Billy, smiling. This was happening for real.
‘Yeah, but we haven’t much time. We need police reports for our passports. I said they were stolen and that our flights were leaving tonight. So she said she’d do them on the spot.’
* * *
In a police station we found after walking for a few blocks a cop at the reception told us to sit down. I looked at my watch. It was almost 10 a.m. We had to get the passports organised quickly and try to get a flight as soon as possible.
A cop with round-lensed glasses called us into his office. ‘Sí,’ he said, nodding, as Billy explained to him that our documents had been robbed. ‘No problema.’ After about half an hour we walked out with two forms completed. I could see that Colombia was decades ahead of Venezuela when it came to getting things done.
Outside, we piled into a taxi. ‘Consulado de Irlanda,’ I said to the driver, showing him the piece of paper with the address. We drove past modern buildings and shopping malls with McDonald’s and upmarket cafes. I felt safe. Caracas this wasn’t.
The taxi driver got lost and started going around in circles. ‘Here, here,’ I said, pointing at the address. He drove around the same block again. Up ahead I saw a gold Irish harp insignia on a plaque at a building entrance. ‘There, Billy. Look, look, we’re here. The harp.’
‘The harp,’ he said. ‘Heyyyyyyy.’ We started cheering and hugging each other in the taxi. The driver glanced at us in the rear-view mirror. I paid the guy and we stepped out. It was 11.30 a.m. Plenty of time to do our paperwork.
We walked into the offices. A beautiful Colombian woman in a grey suit attended to us. ‘Mr Keany?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Please sit down.’ We spun our story again: that our passports were lifted on the bus to Bogotá. We handed her the police report and passport photos we had organised in Caracas. ‘Everything seems to be in order,’ she said. ‘Just give me a few moments.’
She stepped out.
‘Nearly there, Billy, all looks good.’
* * *
We’re at El Dorado airport. We check our bags in at the Lufthansa desk. A stewardess with a yellow scarf taps our travel details into a keyboard. ‘Mr Keany, Mr O’Reilly. Your boarding passes,’ she says, handing us our documents. I have only a light bag. Billy checks one bag in. I watch it disappear down the baggage belt and under plastic flaps. Visions of my suitcase in Caracas airport flow back to me. Relax, Paul, there’s no coke this time.
‘Paul, let’s go,’ says Billy, ‘it’s done.’
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘I was just thinking. And good work with the tickets.’ Billy had contacted his father and he’d agreed to pay for both our tickets home. Another saviour. I also emailed the flight details to my nephew Mick to let my family know I was homeward bound.
We walk through security and then queue at immigration. I’m still nervous. I’ve no cocaine in my suitcase this time, but officials in Latin American airports still give me the jitters. The official looks at both our passports.
‘Where is your stamp for Colombia?’ he says.
‘What stamp?’ says Billy.
‘Your entry stamp when you arrived?’ I never thought of this one.
‘We came from Venezuela.’
The official calls a woman over. Not again, I think. Let us go. She studies our passports. ‘You must come this way,’ she says in English. No. We step into an office with windows. I look out at passengers passing through to their boarding gates. I want to run and join them.
‘You have no entry stamps. You are illegal in Colombia,’ she says. An official with a gun in a holster stands next to her.
‘We didn’t know,’ I say. ‘We came from Venezuela. They never stopped us at the border and asked us to get our passports stamped.’
‘You are obliged to do it yourself. You are illegals. It is a crime. You have to go to jail.’ The male official steps forward, reaching for his handcuffs. I want to puke.
‘No, hang on,’ I plead. ‘We didn’t know. We’re tourists. We made a mistake.’
Her face softens. She speaks to the immigration cop in fast Spanish. ‘OK. You can pay a fine. That is the only way you will leave for Ireland.’ Thank God. She tells me the price in Colombian pesos and I work out in my head it’s about 300 euro. It’s about what I have left.
She tells me I have to go to the immigration office downstairs in the departures area and pay there. ‘One of you will have to remain here.’
‘I’ll take care of this,’ I say. Billy stays put. I run off down a flight of stairs. It’s 9 p.m. The flight is leaving in 40 minutes. I run up to an office that says ‘inmigración’. I see a shutter slowly being pulled down at the teller window where a woman stands. ‘No, please,’ I say, rapping on the glass with my knuckles. ‘I have to pay a fine, a multa.’ I show her the paper from the immigration official.
‘Sí,’ she says. I hand over 300 euros’ worth of pesos. It is almost every penny I have except for a few loose coins. The gods are with me again. I grab the receipt and run. At the security checkpoint I stand in the queue, almost hopping on my feet in a panic. I pass through and run to the immigration office.
Billy stands inside, his mouth open.
‘I have it. It’s done.’ I’m out of breath.
The woman looks over the receipt. ‘OK, everything is in order. Have a good flight.’
‘I will,’ I say.
We’re at the boarding gate now. I start to relax. We have to empty our pockets and show all our belongings to a security official. I have nothing, only a few loose peso notes and coins. ‘That’s it, Billy,’ I say. ‘That’s it, there’s nothing stopping us now.’
‘You’re right, boy, we’re on our way home.’ We sit down and I watch a European-looking man being led away at the security check. His face has a look of despair I know only too well. ‘Look, Billy, look at him.’ Two cops escort him. Good luck.
The plane takes off and soars into the sky. We made it.
EPILOGUE
WE LANDED IN DUBLIN AIRPORT. BACK ON IRISH SOIL. WE ALIGHTED FROM the plane and I felt a shiver. It was a chilly winter’s afternoon in December. No tropics here. I didn’t believe we were home and dry yet, though. Neither of us wanted to jump for joy. We were still edgy. To me it wasn’t 100 per cent certain we were in the clear. We stood in line inside the airport at the passport checkpoint. What if our name came up on some Interpol system? ‘Two Irish drug smugglers on the run from Venezuela. Detain immediately.’ We’d be handcuffed and frogmarched off by security.
I stepped forward to the Garda immigration officer, a policewoman. Billy was behind me, almost rattling with worry. I handed over my temporary passport through a hatch in a window. The questions started. ‘What happened to your original passport?’
‘Got robbed on a bus on holiday in Colombia,’ I said. The officer looked over the small four-page document for a few moments. Let me through, let me through.
‘No problem,’ she said. Phew.
‘He’s the same,’ I said, pointing back to Billy. ‘He was robbed with me.’
‘OK,’ said the official, nodding with a serious expression, ‘that’s fine.’
We walked on. Finally home and dry. Up ahead in a corridor I saw a large sign on the wall. ‘Céad míle fáilte’ (Irish for ‘A hundred thousand welcomes’). I could have cried.
Billy went to collect his case at the baggage carousel. I saw a guy running towards me. Jesus, who was this?
‘Paul, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, baffled. He was dressed casually and didn’t l
ook like a cop.
‘I know you,’ he said, smiling. ‘We met in Venezuela.’
It suddenly dawned on me. ‘Jeff, Jeff the reporter. You came in to visit me.’ How did he know I’d be here? I thought to myself.
‘Jeff Farrell, yeah, good to see you.’ He said he had recognised me in the immigration queue; he was on his way home from South America and had just got off the same flight from Bogotá as myself and Billy. I couldn’t believe it. The chances of it were one in a million. If you had a dollar on it you’d be a rich man. ‘What are you doing home so early?’ he said, smiling. ‘I thought you had a few years more to do in Los Teques.’
‘We did a runner,’ I laughed. I gave him a quick rundown of our escape across Venezuela to Colombia and home. We agreed to meet again. It was fate we were on the same flight. I had it in my head some day he could help me write down my ‘adventure’ in Venezuela.
I walked into the arrivals hall. Sharon, my sister, was there and started crying, her lip trembling. ‘Welcome home,’ she said, and gave me a big bear hug. Mick then gave me a long embrace. He’d seen me off in the airport before I left for Venezuela; now he was greeting me at home more than two years later. It was weird.
‘This is Billy boy,’ I said, introducing Billy to them. They all shook hands.
My mother met me at the door of my parents’ house. ‘It’s great to see you,’ she said, giving me a big hug. It was fantastic being home: the familiar smells of the house, my mother’s stew cooking in the kitchen.
Inside, I said hello to my father. He was seated at the table in the kitchen where he always sat, the telly up at 100 decibels as usual. ‘It’s great to see you, son,’ he said. It was wonderful to see the pair of them still alive. I doubt I would have, had my ‘holiday’ in Venezuela not been cut short.
Billy was supposed to stay the night, but he got a taste of being home and wanted to go all the way so we put him on a train for the trip. His journey wasn’t quite over.
* * *
I buried myself away for a few weeks. I didn’t feel up to running around and seeing everyone – even my kids. I put a portable TV up in my old bedroom in my parents’ house and that’s where I passed the time – up there on my own. I wasn’t ready for the big world yet.
Finally I came out of my shell. The day after Christmas I went to the local pub where I usually met up with my mates every year. It was all hugs and back claps when I walked in. Dano, my son, suddenly arrived and we had a long embrace – but there was no sign of my daughter, Katie. That would have to wait. I knew there were bridges to be built.
For more than two years it had been my goal to get home and get away from Los Teques and Venezuela. It wasn’t all easy being home, though. The nightmares of that world followed me. For months I couldn’t sleep properly. I kept having one nightmare where dark-skinned people were holding a machete over me ready to chop my head off. When the blade fell I’d wake up in a sweat. In another recurring dream I was arrested in an airport with my suitcase. When the cops went to search it I was sure there were no drugs in it; then when they opened it it was full of white bags of coke. Again, I woke up in a sweat.
I went to a local doctor and he prescribed me sleeping tablets. He later referred me to a hospital consultant when I wanted to continue with the tablets. I told the consultant about all the killings, stabbings and shootings in Los Teques. He said I was suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, like soldiers get on the front line. He said he could see I was trying to rebuild my life and approved a repeat prescription of the tablets, which I took for months.
Not long after my visit to the consultant, I was rushed to hospital one morning, bleeding heavily from my rear end. I was immediately operated on, and five cysts, each the size of an egg, were removed. My back passage was damaged – probably both from hiding condoms stuffed with cash up there and from being gang raped by the Venezuelan anti-drugs cops. I still carry the anger with me over that. Anger and shame. But it’s nice to finally tell others, and not bottle it up. This will be the first time it comes out – to my family, my son and daughter, and everyone. It’ll be like therapy for me. To finally rid me of the shame – shame that I shouldn’t feel. It’s the animals in soldiers’ uniforms who should feel like that, not me; and I want the world to know what’s happening in that justice system in Venezuela. That there is no justice. No one deserves what happened to me on that horrible night. Anyone who thinks I did, I’d tell them they are mad.
When I got home I started to worry I might have caught some sexually transmitted disease from the guards. I got checked for HIV and got the all-clear, but I was told it could take up to five years for something to show up. I think I’ll be OK, though, and it’s not something I dwell on.
One thing I’m sure about after getting home is that I won’t take coke again. I won’t go near it. After two years of abuse to my system from snorting a few lines most nights so I could get to sleep (we were sure it was mixed with horse tranquilliser), I couldn’t look at coke again. I’d get sick. I hardly even drink now, either. I can barely put a pint down my neck. A few beers and I’m exhausted, and it’s home to bed for an early night.
I was worried for a while that officials from Venezuela would come after me for going on the run. That they’d ask the Irish authorities to send me back to finish my sentence. Not now. I’m not looking over my shoulder any more. I’ve served my time as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, there’s no extradition treaty between Venezuela and Ireland – and even if there was, I doubt the Venezuelans would be bothered about me. They have bigger problems.
I never again heard from the gang that hired me to go to Venezuela – and I don’t want to. A mate contacted them after I got banged up because they said they would pay the ten grand for the run, whether I got caught or not. That was the deal. Soon after, the gang contact changed his phone number. I don’t care. I want nothing to do with them. I could be angry with them, but I’m not. I’m more angry with myself for being so stupid.
Soon after getting home I had a look around for some plumbing work. I rang all my contacts on the old construction crew I used to work with. No one called me back. There were no jobs, nixers, nothing. Ireland was in the depths of recession.
I signed up with the local job centre and they put me on a start-your-own-business course. There’s not much work in plumbing, with the construction industry the way it is, so I put my thinking cap on and branched out into offering general DIY services, from painting to installing radiators and so on. I’ve only got a few jobs so far, but it’s a start. Some day in the future I hope to have a decent income – till then I’ll have to make do with little, like many. Still, Ireland in recession is a thousand times better than where I was.
My debts are still there. A few weeks after I got home, my father said, ‘You’d better check the biscuit tin, son.’ It was full of letters from the bank over the loan and from the finance company for the work van I had, which was repossessed after I got locked up. They were all looking for their money. The last letter was dated six months previously. I guess they’d lost interest in me. There were bigger fish to fry who owed millions and billions. I only owed about ten grand to the bank and a few thousand to the finance company – I’m only a tadpole, not a shark.
I’ll try to pay it some day, but I’m not stressed out about it. Not worrying over small things: that’s one thing I learned in Los Teques. I’m lucky to have my life and to be back with my family. That’s the most important thing to me now.
I got a package in the post a month or so after I got home. It was my laptop I’d smuggled into Los Teques. I’d left it with Father Pat before I fled Venezuela, telling him I was going to the coast for the weekend. Soon after I got home I emailed asking him to send it on to me. As always, he came good. Now I had my diaries back: more than 160,000 words from my daily writing while locked up. Phew, I thought, delighted I’d got my hands on them again. If I hadn’t, I couldn’t have written this book.
I’m still in touch with youn
g Billy. Some time ago he heard me talking on the radio about my experience in Los Teques. He said it brought tears to his eyes. He’s a sensitive lad, Billy, and I’d say it’ll take him a while to get over that part of his life.
I was desperate to see Katie, my daughter. She was living with me when I left for Venezuela. I’d left her in the lurch when I got caught. Bridges had to be built. I sent her a few text messages after I got home. She replied, but she didn’t ask to meet. I didn’t want to invade her space and knew she probably needed more time, so I didn’t want to hassle her. A year after I got home, though, I texted her just before her birthday. ‘I missed your last two birthdays,’ I wrote. ‘It’d be nice to meet you for your 20th.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ she replied. It was the best feeling. We met outside a restaurant soon after and had a big hug. I finally had my baby back in my arms – nearly three years after I last saw her. We spoke over lunch and I could see she was flying in her new career as a hairdresser. I was so proud of her. Seeing her was like the final piece of the jigsaw clicking into place. After that I never needed another sleeping tablet. The nightmares ended.
I’m still writing away. Keeping a diary kept me going in Los Teques. Writing is something I enjoy and would like to keep doing. And putting pen to paper to tell you my story helps me heal. All I ask is that you don’t judge me – and, like Katie, give me a second chance. Everyone deserves that.
AFTERWORD
FATHER PAT CONTINUES TO VISIT INMATES IN VENEZUELA’S PRISONS – both gringos and locals from his Caracas parish – putting himself in harm’s way to make life a little better for others. He was adamant his real name should not be used in this book, fearing the authorities would not allow him to continue his welfare work in the jails.
We’re still in touch and I hope we’ll be friends for life.
He has put me in touch with a British prisoner in Los Teques. I’m emailing him and plan to send him a small sum of cash to make things a bit better for him.
The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare Page 31