by Joe Donnelly
In this atmosphere of brutality and corruption, Padilla and his friends strike a deal with Delgado. The deal is Delgado will keep the money and the cocaine, probably to resell, and Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason will say nothing to the DEA about the drugs or cash—it’s their only leverage. When they go to trial, Delgado is supposed to testify that he never saw the coke on display until he opened a black travel bag. The story will be that a jealous Fastie planted the bag as revenge for Padilla flirting with his girlfriend. With Delgado’s testimony, they are assured, they will be home in six months. In the meantime, though, they will have to go to San Juan de Lurigancho prison.
“‘Don’t worry,’” Padilla remembers being told. “‘You’ll be out in four to six months. And the prison is nice. There’s basketball, soccer, a great pool.’”
La Casa Del Diablo
There are, of course, no pools or athletic facilities at Lurigancho. There aren’t even working toilets. Built in the 1960s to house 1,500 inmates, Lurigancho has more than six thousand by the time Padilla is processed. (Today some estimates put the number of prisoners there at more than ten thousand.)
Going in, though, Padilla still has an outlaw’s cocky sense of exemption. Besides, he’s paid off his captors. “It’s just like an adventure,” he remembers thinking. “I’d been in prison. I’d been in jails.”
That feeling doesn’t last long. Padilla says the conditions are “like a dog kennel.” Food is a bowl of rice a day—with beans on the lucky days. “People starved to death.”
The running water, when it runs, comes from a community pump, which the prison often shuts down to clean rats out of the pipes. The water is full of worms and bacteria. Everybody has dysentery.
“If you got the runs, you better find a plug, because everybody’s going to be real pissed if you shit in a cell,” he says. “I had dysentery every day.”
The toilet, a hole in the ground that prisoners line up to use, seems designed to make the most of this affliction. It constantly overflows with shit and piss, so the prisoners resort to relieving themselves onto an ever-growing mound of feces.
“The whole place smells like shit,” says Padilla.
The American prisoners and some other expats live together in the same cellblock, a more modern facility built off the big hall, which is a real-world incarnation of Dante’s Inferno, where murderers, rapists, and the destitute teem together in a bazaar of daily strife. There, Padilla says, you see people starving, drowning in tuberculosis, being beaten and stabbed to death.
Padilla’s description of the prison is in keeping with interviews that a former human rights activist, who is familiar with Lurigancho, has conducted for this story with past and present volunteers in Lima. All have requested anonymity.
One volunteer says the guards have surrendered the place to the prisoners. Everything from cots to a spot in a cell must be purchased. Those with no resources are left to wander the outskirts of the cellblocks, relying on handouts and picking through garbage like zombies.
Another volunteer, who worked at Lurigancho when Padilla was imprisoned there, says, “There were always ugly things… We felt very powerless against the mistreatment.” She says there are constant fights between prison pavilions, wars between inmates, and murders tacitly sanctioned by the guards, who are often paid off to look the other way.
As it becomes increasingly clear that his chances of getting out quickly are about as good as going for a swim in the pool, Padilla’s days are given over to survival, often in a haze of pasta, a particularly toxic paste form of cocaine smuggled into the prison and sold by well-connected inmates. Nights are filled with the sounds of screaming and snoring, and the insane beating of drums from the big hall.
Padilla doesn’t hesitate when asked to describe the worst thing he witnessed. “Watching a whole cell block get killed,” he says. “Watching a .50 caliber machine gun, at least a dozen rifles and a half dozen pistols…until no one is moving. And then, they open up the door and storm it. They shoot everybody.”
The massacre comes, Padilla says, after a handful of prisoners take some guards hostage and demanded better conditions. The inmates release the guards when the prison warden agrees to their demands. The next day, the military comes in and shoots the place up. Padilla believes hundreds of inmates are killed in the attack.
On another occasion, Padilla says confused guards open fire on prisoners returning on a bus from court, killing dozens. “One of the [wounded] guys was in our cell block. He came up to the cell block just covered in blood.”
The prison’s atrocities mostly escape international attention until December 1983, when police shoot and kill a Chicago nun being held hostage by prisoners attempting to flee. Eight prisoners are also killed. Lurigancho gains further notoriety when, in July 1986, police kill anywhere from 124 to 280 (accounts vary) rioting members of the Sendero Luminosa, or Shining Path, Marxist guerillas incarcerated at Lurigancho.
Lurigancho’s tableau of evils, both epic and banal, earn the prison the name La Casa del Diablo, the house of the devil. It remains a hellish place; the Associated Press reports that two people a day still die in Lurigancho from violence or illness.
Despite being imprisoned in the midst of this, Padilla doesn’t slip into despair. Not immediately. It takes something more potent. It takes Diane Pinnix.
Femme Fatale
Quickly after the arrests, Diane Pinnix flies down to Lima, ostensibly to aid and abet Padilla’s release. Before long, though, Peru’s attractions prove irresistible and she starts partying. Padilla worries she’ll get in trouble, the last thing he needs. He decides he has to get out of Lurigancho fast. His chance comes with a Colombian coke dealer named Jimmy, another inmate who’s been supplying pasta for Padilla, Brewer, Thomason, and other cellies to smoke.
During a delivery one day, Jimmy tells the guys how he plans to escape Lurigancho. Jimmy’s lawyer will bribe clerks to get him called to court, but his name will be left off the judge’s docket. At the end of the day, in the chaos of transferring prisoners, Jimmy’s lawyers will hand the soldiers in charge counterfeit documents saying the judge has ordered his immediate release. If the plan works, it’s decided that Pinnix will give Jimmy what’s left of Padilla’s money to set up the same deal.
But Jimmy takes Padilla’s money and never returns to Lurigancho. Nor does Pinnix. Word filters back through the prison grapevine that Diane has been seen on the streets of Lima holding hands and kissing someone who fits the description of Jimmy.
Padilla spirals into a rage. He thinks only of revenge. To exact it, he seeks out a violent man known as Pelone, the boss of a neighboring prison cell. Through Pelone, Padilla orders a hit on Jimmy, an expensive proposition for which he has no money. Padilla promises to pay up when Pelone’s pistolero cousin brings back Jimmy’s finger, the traditional token of a successful hit. Padilla knows that with no money, it might be his life he pays with, but he wants Jimmy dead. In the meantime, he needs pasta to numb his pain. Pelone is more than happy to supply on credit.
Months go by with no success in the hit and Padilla falls deeper into despair. In the back of his mind is an inescapable fact: the pain he is feeling is the same pain he caused his wife, Eileen, and his kids, when he walked out on them for Pinnix. His spirit breaks.
“I gave up because of Diane. Not just because of Diane, but because I was betrayed and that brought on all the betrayal I gave Eileen, my kids. My dedication to God, you know it was just gone. I turned my back and betrayed all of it. Betrayed my soul.”
Padilla rarely leaves his bunk. He interrupts his sleep and sobbing only to smoke pasta. When the pasta runs out, he turns to pills. In his bunk, he dreams of surfing, and of Tahiti and Maui. He gives up his battle with dysentery.
“That’s how I got. I became absolutely disgusting. I stunk. I reeked,” Padilla says. “Richard and James are pretty sure I’m going to die.”
His death seems assured one night when Padilla turns over in his bunk and sees Pelone wearing a leather jacket zipped to the top. Padilla’s cellmates aren’t around, and Pelone has seized the opportunity to come calling for his debts. Pelone pulls a long shank from under his jacket and comes at Padilla. Using his boxing skills, Padilla manages to dodge the first couple of stabs, but Pelone is skilled with a blade, and Padilla soon finds himself staring defenselessly at a shank aimed for his midsection. Just as Pelone is about to thrust, one of Padilla’s cellies miraculously appears, and grabs Pelone’s shoulder before he can stab. The opening gives Padilla enough time to throw a left cross into Pelone’s nose, breaking it, he says. They tumble to the floor, and by then, a group of Padilla’s cellmates storm in and disarm Pelone. The guy who has saved Padilla pays off the four hundred dollar debt to Pelone—a prison fortune—on the condition that Padilla gets his shit together.
In order to survive, Padilla realizes he needs to get back to some idea of God, to find a way to live beyond his fear. He quits doing drugs and starts meditating. He trains in boxing again. But his biggest challenge is still beyond him: the big hall. If he can master that, he thinks, he can master his fear. But he’s not ready. He needs something more than God to hold onto. For Padilla, that could only be a woman.
One day during visitation, a young, indigenous woman named Zoila catches Padilla’s eye. Padilla sees something in her that he hasn’t seen in what seems like forever.
“She was the purest, most wonderful thing that could happen to me,” he says. “She was like a gift from God.”
The note Padilla throws down to Zoila from his cellblock feels like a life preserver. When someone hands her the note and points to Padilla, she smiles and waves. After that, she becomes Padilla’s regular visitor and something like a love affair unfolds.
“She helped me heal so much in the prison. That was grace. I crack when I think about that experience.” And he actually does crack when he tells this story, reinforcing my suspicion that beneath the surface of every tough guy is a heartbroken mama’s boy.
With his dignity on the mend, Padilla knows there’s something he must still do to be worthy of Zoila. After jumping rope one day, he decides it’s time. He asks a prison guard to open the door protecting his cellblock from the big hall. The guard smiles contemptuously and opens the door.
Padilla walks through the maze. He sees men lifting a dead body out of the way. Blood from tuberculosis stains the floors like abstract art. His journey through the hall is quick, but he survives. Before long, he goes back again, this time under the guidance of a man named Chivo, a leader in this strange netherworld of Lurigancho. After a while, Padilla is allowed to pass the big hall with immunity. Something has changed.
Escape
More than three years after they were taken to Lurigancho, Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason finally have their day before the tribunal. As a matter of course, the Peruvian Supreme Court reviews cases after the tribunal renders its verdict—but guilty verdicts are rarely overturned. The tribunal will be the trio’s biggest test. They have a couple of things working for them. First is Zoila, who packs the courtroom with family and friends. They also manage to secure the services of a sympathetic translator, without which they wouldn’t stand a chance.
On the stand, all three stick to the story: Fastie planted the coke in their room and nobody saw it until Delgado opened the black travel bag. Thomason is just a friend who happened to be there. The key witness will be Delgado. Nobody knows whether he’ll keep his bargain to back up the tale.
When Delgado walks into the courtroom, eyes as black and dead as ever, a visceral terror shoots through Padilla’s body. But Delgado takes the stand and, to Padilla’s surprise, gives a brief statement corroborating their account of the arrest. The tribunal has little choice but to render absuelto in all three cases—absolved. It’s the first good news in years.
That evening, Padilla and Brewer are taken to a hotel while Thomason is held back at a holding pen in the Lima neighborhood of Pueblo Libre. He has draft-dodging issues. Jimmy Carter had pardoned all draft dodgers while the men were in prison, but that means little to the Peruvian authorities. There’s no telling how long or how much money it will take to sort this out. The longer it takes, the more likely it is that Padilla’s decade-old San Francisco conviction will turn up like an albatross around his neck.
There are other complications. Padilla and Brewer have recently been implicated in the arrest of a former associate who Jimmy and Pinnix tricked into doing a coke deal with them by saying the proceeds would go to help spring the guys. If that case makes it to court before they’re free, they are done for sure. Padilla and Brewer have to decide whether to make a break for it or wait for Thomason. They stay.
When Padilla and Brewer return to Pueblo Libre the next day, bad news awaits. The Supreme Court will be reviewing the case. Their lawyer mentions Padilla’s “FBI problems.” Freedom is near, they’re told, but it’ll take money. Padilla, Brewer, and Thomason are put in a cell at the Pueblo Libre jail to await the Supreme Court’s review.
Facing more than twenty years each should their verdicts be overturned, Padilla and Brewer know a return to Lurigancho is certain death. They start working on an escape plan. Thomason, facing just three years, wants no part of it.
Months go by in Pueblo Libre while Padilla and Brewer prepare for a moment that might never come. They ask an Episcopalian reverend, an Englishman who has started visiting them in Lurigancho, to bring them towels, maps of the city and the Amazon wilderness beyond it. He also brings them money. They scope out the jail and determine they can get over a wall on the roof if given a chance. They make an effort to befriend their jailers, to show they pose no threat. Brewer swipes a serving spoon and hides it in his shoe.
In June of 1978, soccer-mad Peru makes an unlikely run through the first round of the World Cup being held in neighboring Argentina. During Peru’s match against Scotland to advance to the second round, the atmosphere in Lima is ecstatic, even in the jail. The guards bring in beer and booze and good food, which they share with the Americans. They leave the jail cell open believing the only way out is past them since the steel door leading to the roof is spring-locked.
The partying gets more intense as the game plays. The guards are rapt. Brewer wakes up Padilla, who is sleeping off some whiskey. It’s time to go, he says. Padilla says he’s ready if Brewer can spring the lock to the steel door. They are worried about the loud noise the lock makes when it releases. Then, something incredible happens just as Richards jams the spoon into the lock and springs the steel door open: Peru scores! It’s pandemonium in the jail. Nobody hears the door or them as they scurry up the stairs and onto the roof.
On the roof, Padilla and Brewer scale the wall and look up at the barbed-wire-topped chain link fence. They throw towels over the barbs and hoist themselves up and over onto the freedom side of the two-story wall. They’ll have to jump down onto another rooftop, scramble to the jail’s outside wall and scale that to get to the street. Their plan is to split up and reconvene at the reverend’s church in Miraflores.
At the outside wall, Brewer urges Padilla to jump. Padilla hesitates, and in a flash, Brewer is hurtling down into a patch of light, landing hard on the ground below. Brewer grabs a ladder propped against a shack and hauls it over to the outer wall. Padilla finally jumps into the dark and lands with a thud on a pile of lumber. Pain immediately shoots through his body. He tries to stand but crumples. His ankle swells up immediately. His heel is broken. Padilla crawls and hops to the ladder and pulls himself up, the lower half of his body dead weight. He makes it to the top of the second wall and lets himself fall to the ground.
Out in the street, Brewer tries desperately to hail a cab. Padilla calls to him. Seconds go by like hours. Finally, Brewer sees him and comes racing back, asking what the fuck happened; how did he get so dirty? Padilla tells him he can’t walk. Brewer races back
and hoists Padilla over his shoulder, carrying him across the street into the shelter of an alley. He flags down a car and they make their way to the reverend’s church in Miraflores.
Thirty-one years later, the same reverend answers a call at his home in the English countryside. Retired for twenty years, he asks that his name not be disclosed while he recalls for me the night the two men he’d been visiting in prison for months showed up at his door.
“It was unexpected. One of them had broken a bone in his heel and was having a tough time getting around. I think there was a lot of adrenaline going,” the reverend says with typical English understatement. “We gave them some food and clothing and moved them onto a contact they had… The police came around to find out what part I had in their escape and held my passport for awhile.”
Padilla and Brewer next enlist the cousin of an inmate Padilla befriended in Lurigancho. He is a travel guide with the Peruvian tourism industry with access to an underground network of friends and relatives. The guide’s family, like many others, has suffered at the hands of Delgado and the PIP as the War on Drugs has conflated with political persecution and the other abuses you’d expect in a police state.
A domestic flight, arranged through a sympathetic airline worker, takes Padilla and Brewer to the Amazon River city of Iquitos. They stay for weeks at the lodge of a man who used be a PIP agent, but quit over the agency’s brutal practices. There, the natural beauty of the Amazon and their first taste of real freedom bring Padilla and Brewer to tears. The hum of jungle birds and the roar of big cats at night almost drown out the sounds of snoring, screaming, and drumming at Lurigancho, still echoing in their heads. Padilla thinks of Zoila. He feels she’s out there in her village somewhere in the Amazon wilderness. It breaks his heart that he’ll never be able to thank her enough.