Extradited (10 page)

I was in a state of utter shock, shaking with teary eyes. ‘I’ll give you money! However much you…’

‘No Andrew!’ George interrupted me.

‘Please, it wasn’t me,’ I stammered. The investigating magistrate handed me a pen and some documents. She couldn’t make any eye contact – I could tell that she didn’t want to lock me up. This decision came from the prosecutor, who knew very little about the case.

‘You have to sign here, Andrew; all this says is that you understand the decision,’ said George.

I held the pen in my hands and looked at the small wad of Greek documents in front of me. I stared at it for a moment and took a breath, stopping myself from any more tears – but I couldn’t do it.

‘No!’ I screamed while bursting into another flood of tears. ‘I can’t. I can’t do it. I don’t understand the decision!’

‘Andrew, you have to do this,’ George added.

The sense of injustice that had been burning inside of me for months was ready to erupt. ‘Do I? Do I really!?’

My attention flipped to the police officer who was standing in the corner of the room. The translator standing next to me flinched as I swung my arm out to point at the officer with a full arm stretch. I heard gasps of surprise in the room. ‘What … is this guy gonna beat me into signing it!? That’s how it works here!’ I roared.

I was sent out of the room to calm down without having signed the document. Sitting in the hallway of the court, I continued to sob as loudly as I could.

Prison
.

I couldn’t even process the thought.

It was dawning on me: I’d be locked up in a foreign prison for days – weeks – months – maybe longer. It was real. It was actually going to happen. Fuck. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might be like.

My hysteria wasn’t purely out of fear; it was also out of frustration. The decision was exactly what we’d been fighting against for over a year; it was disgraceful and inhumane. Granting me bail wouldn’t have changed the prosecutor’s life in the slightest, but her choice to lock me up changed the entire course of mine. I was a twenty-year-old student of good character and with no criminal record. I was an innocent man – all I had ever asked for was the chance to prove it.

I
fainted in the hallway of the courthouse, and I’d never fainted before in my life. The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital to the sound of screams. I could hear them coming from the hallway; two women were crying in states of distress. I opened my eyes and witnessed a nurse rushing down the corridor pushing a hospital bed. It carried a man covered from head to toe in blood and my hair stood on end at the sight. It was as though I’d woken up in hell already.

I was startled when I noticed a group of police officers standing to my left. Confused, with blurry eyes, it all came flooding back. After being briefly examined, the doctor said that it was fine for me to leave, so the police officers handcuffed me and I had to walk slowly through the hospital like a criminal. Staff members and people in the hospital hallway were watching and it was humiliating.

As soon as we were back at the police station I was thrown back into the cell – trapped physically, but also in my own mind. I couldn’t stop shaking and my head pounded with deadening fear. It was difficult to absorb the news, especially as I was alone. I walked up and down the cell in an erratic state of panic and kept repeating to myself,
It’ll be OK, it’ll be OK
. Claustrophobia began
to get the better of me; it was as though the walls were closing in. I didn’t want to sit down, I didn’t want to stand up; all I wanted was for it not to be true.

After a few hours of what I can only describe as self-inflicted mental torture, a police officer opened the cell gate and moved me to the cell next door, which was already full of six or seven men. I was in a vulnerable, numb state and the officer didn’t hesitate to make my situation worse. It was unbearably hot because the window was welded shut – and it didn’t help that we were all squashed together, the majority sleeping on the concrete floor. Being in that situation – just after discovering that I would be thrown in a foreign prison for a crime that I knew I hadn’t committed – added to the torture that I’d already inflicted on myself. It was ridiculous to squeeze us all in there because there were two empty cells in the police station, one on either side – it made absolutely no sense. My parents later told me that one of the officers insinuated that he would take a payment to move me back to the cell on my own. He tried to take advantage of the situation, believing that he could make a profit out of my family. My mum considered paying him, but refused. She’s a woman of principles and didn’t want us to be labelled as those who give bribes. Instead, she returned to the police station with bottles of soft drinks and treats for everyone in the cell – ensuring that the officer could see. I’m proud that she did that; I’d rather have suffered than give the officer anything.

There wasn’t enough room for us all to lie down. When night came, two men had to sleep with their backs up against the wall in a sitting position. When finally drifting off to sleep I dreamed of my old manager from Superdrug (where I used to work part time). It’s strange that I still remember the dream, and I have no idea why she made a cameo appearance in it. She locked me up in a dark underground dungeon with a group of people. An
unknown person was swinging a knife violently and chasing me. The person slaughtered everyone in the dungeon before going missing. Light shone in from the ceiling, where I could see my ex-manager opening a door. ‘Look what you did!’ she shouted. I was the only one left, surrounded by corpses.

I woke up in a puddle of sweat. Most of the men in the cell had been woken up and were staring at me. The one closest to me was wide awake, smoking a cigarette. ‘Why do you scream like this?’ he asked in broken English.

It took me a little while to realise what had happened. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled.

‘You shouted, “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me!”’

It was very difficult to mentally prepare myself for prison. I was a trembling mess and I couldn’t come to terms with it. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. The only thing I had to go by was films, and the depictions of prison that I’d seen were terrifying.

The next day my parents convinced the chief police officer to let them bring in a psychiatrist to prescribe me some medication. I was given pills and liquid drops that were taken orally. I have no idea what the hell they were, but I spent the next two days in Zakynthos Police Station as high as a kite. Luckily I’d been moved back into the cell on my own, but felt sorry for the men in the cell next door. The way they were being treated was outrageous, and I couldn’t think of any reason for it other than racism. ‘Why don’t you put a few of them in here?’ I said to one of the officers – who ignored me.

When my dad came to visit, he told me that I was being taken to a young offenders’ prison rather than a maximum-security prison, which sounded far better. With the medication in my system and the knowledge that I’d be locked up with young offenders, I began to think more positively. Once I was settled in the juvenile prison,
it would just be a waiting game before the trial. What I wasn’t looking forward to was the transfer via Patras again.

The drugs that the psychiatrist gave me were too strong. When I was transferred back to Patras I was completely spaced-out, which made the journey far more enjoyable. I’d been so depressed and anxious that my emotions flew to the other end of the spectrum and I was overcome with joy – it was as though the drugs were a release. The police officers put me into the back of a small police van on my own. The journey was about three hours long and I sang the entire way, even when we were parked on the ferry. I sang – very badly – at the top of my voice so the police officers on board could hear me. My repertoire included some ’90s pop songs and Bob Marley classics, but I also performed my own version of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, Peter Andre’s ‘Mysterious Girl’ and rapped the whole of ‘Forgot about Dre’. I really pissed them off.

By the time I reached Patras I’d sobered up. I was thrown into the same cell that I’d been held in a week earlier and was then told that I would be leaving for Athens in ‘fifteen minutes’. I sat for fifteen minutes – ready to go. Hours passed and I was still sitting there. The sun went down and a policeman finally unlocked the cell door. ‘
Ela
– Come,’ he said. I followed him out of the cell, assuming that I was being transferred to Athens, but he put me in another cell with three Romanian men – Leonarde, his brother Constantin and Remos. In the end, it wasn’t fifteen minutes that I waited – it was four days. On each of these days I was told that I would be transferred to Athens at some point, but the
patsi
were just toying with me. The days passed extremely slowly and the four of us were crammed in together with no space to walk about. I tried my hardest not to let claustrophobia get the better of me, like it had in Zakynthos Police Station days earlier. I just lay on one of the bunks and did nothing else but stare at the ceiling
for the entire four days. It’s funny how many contradictory thoughts can pass when someone has too much time on their hands. I would convince myself that the juvenile prison would be absolutely fine and that I’d sail through before clearing my name in court. Then I would start to worry: what kind of young offenders could be in this prison? Perhaps they were far more immature than adult prisoners and would make my life absolute hell.

T
he next morning I was transferred to Avlona – about an hour’s drive north of Athens. Five prisoners and I were escorted off the vehicle. I was handcuffed to an African man who must have come from a different transfer jail. We walked towards the wide, off-white arch that loomed over the entrance into the complex. I remember squinting at him, using my free arm to block the sweltering sun out of my eyes.

‘
Milas Anglika?
’ I asked him – but my question was ignored. I repeated it in a language that he may have been more acquainted with: ‘So you speak English?’ He was probably more likely to speak English than Greek; I don’t know why I hadn’t asked him in my mother tongue the first time.

‘Yes. We speak the same language. I am fed up with everyone talking to me in the Greek language. I am Nigerian, I understand nothing.’

We walked through the gate onto the site, practically hand in hand. I glanced at the arch above me, which when translated into English said ‘Special Juvenile Detention Centre Avlona’ in thick black lettering.
This isn’t real prison
, I thought, attempting to downplay the situation. After almost two weeks of being held
in scorching police cells and filthy transfer units, all I wanted was to go home. I’d become weak from dehydration, not even able to clench my fists. In the roasting forty-degree heat, I could have passed out again – just like I had in the Zakynthos courthouse.

The guards uncuffed us as we entered a holding cell that was already filled with a few other young offenders. I took another look at the Nigerian man without the glare of the sun obstructing my vision. He was clearly not younger than twenty-one, and looked like he could have had teenage children! I asked him how old he was and he told me that he was twenty-eight – but he looked older than that. He lit a cigarette. ‘You know, you are not a real man until you go to jail.’

I nodded my head and gave a subtle smile, but I didn’t really agree with him. I told him that Avlona was a prison for offenders under the age of twenty-one and asked him why they’d brought him there. He seemed surprised, having no clue that it was a juvenile prison.

‘It is?’ he asked.

Over the next few months I would see far more grey hairs, wrinkles and receding hairlines than you’d expect to find in a young offenders’ prison. But without a passport, illegal immigrants living in Greece appeared to pass for whatever age they wanted to be.

A man walked into the holding cell and introduced himself as Costas ‘the male nurse’, and was the spitting image of the actor Tim Curry. He began to ask each of us medical questions in either Greek or English. When he asked about the recreational use of drugs, the African man looked to the ground as though he was an embarrassed child. Costas asked each of us one by one whether we took drugs.

‘And you?’ he asked the man.

‘
Heroini
,’ he replied.

It was the first time I’d ever met an active heroin user. I pictured him strapping a belt around his bicep and tightening it with his teeth. I imagined his vein throbbing and injecting himself with the translucent brown liquid – like in films.

Some time later, a prison guard escorted me into a small room where I experienced the first of many strip searches. I had to take off all of my clothes, which was degrading, but I knew it was a procedure that they had to complete. The guard looked as though he hated the situation as much as I did.

‘
Archidia
– Testicles,’ he said – trying extremely hard to ensure that we didn’t make any awkward eye contact. He checked me while I held them up, and then asked me to bend forward so he could look to see if there were any drugs in my arse. I put my sweat-drenched clothes back on and he began to rummage through my possessions, throwing away anything that could possibly contain illegal substances. Having been found with no weapons in my sports bag or drugs in my anus, I began the dreaded walk to my cell. With each step that I took, I became more overwhelmed with anxiety. I was taken down a corridor to the right that had off-white walls with dry, cracked paint that was a nicotine-stained yellow.

By this stage, my nostrils had become accustomed to the stench of stale cigarette smoke and warm body odour. The sound of pigeons fluttering and cooing resonated in the hallway. I looked to my left – the top of the entire wall had a series of rectangular, barred windows that started at the beginning of the hallway and continued all the way to the main wing. Each window had a dirty, translucent plastic shutter in front of it – and several pigeons had become trapped in between the shutters and the steel bars. The ones that were alive were suffering slowly – so it seemed that I wasn’t the only one who was being held there unjustly. A few pigeons were dead and rotting, which left a slight stench of decaying flesh in the corridor.

At the time of my arrival, the
Parartima
wing was empty – inmates were either locked up or were working in other areas of the complex. It was a thin hallway with only ten cells; five on each side. There was also a large, shared cell of about ten prisoners, which they called ‘
thalamos
’ – and many of the inmates housed there were from adult prisons. They’d been transferred to Avlona because they were tradesmen and the prison would use them for free labour.

I’d been allocated to cell five. On my walk down the corridor I noticed that the floor was uneven and slightly indented, which left a pool of backlogged sewage water in front of cell one. I had to walk through it wearing flip-flops. The water surrounded my feet, which was the closest I’d been to showering in the six days of forty-degree heat. I’m sure it was infested with germs, but at least it was cool and soothing. I imagined myself jumping into a swimming pool and dunking my head under to hydrate my skin.

My cell was empty because (I would later find out) my cellmates were working as cleaners in another wing. When the guard slowly opened the heavy metal door, the first things that I noticed were the colourful towels that covered the majority of the cell walls. They were suspended from the ceiling for decoration and each one had a different image on it. There was a Native American Indian surrounded by a map of Canada, Warner Bros’ Tasmanian Devil and many others. It gave me an impression of the kind of people that my cellmates were – they’d clearly made an effort so that the cell would be a less depressing place to live – it was a good sign. What I couldn’t figure out was how were they able to stick the towels to the ceiling without them falling down?

The prison guard pointed to one of the top bunks and closed the large steel door behind him. I heard him insert the key, making a loud clunking sound as he turned it. I dropped my sports bag
and pushed it under one of the two metal-framed bunk beds, which met to make an ‘L’ shape.

A sheet hung from the ceiling over a doorway, which led to a wash area. There was a sink, a shower basin, a hose and a toilet at floor level that you had to squat over to use. I walked in and drenched my face with chilled water. When wiping the water from my eyes, I noticed a great deal of pornographic images stuck on the walls of the toilet area.

After showering myself with a cold-water hose and changing into a clean pair of shorts and a T-shirt, I jumped up and pulled myself to my bunk (there were no ladders). I tried to avoid leaving a distinctive wet footprint on my unknown cellmate’s bed, which was directly under mine. I remember lying there and grinding my teeth – it was what I would do when trying to stop myself from sobbing. I turned to my side, feeling the roasting sun burn the back of my neck through the wide, steel-barred window above me. I allowed my heart rate to decrease to a regular pace and my body sunk into the thin, rigid mattress beneath me. I was exhausted – but every time I reached the brink of unconsciousness, the reality of what was happening would hit me. I would suddenly open my eyes and have to take a fast, gasping breath – it was as if I was being suffocated by my own anxieties. I thought of being at home with my family again. Only then was I able to drift off into a light sleep – into my own world, where everything was OK.

Then I heard voices.

When I opened my eyes, three other young men were in the cell with me. They introduced themselves as Fivos, Christos and Yiannis. I jumped down from the top bunk and took a seat at the small plastic garden table in the middle of the cell.

Fivos was the only one who spoke English. He was broad and tall with a defined nose and jawline. He told me that I was
lucky to be put in a cell with ‘the Greeks’, then pointed towards the cell next door. ‘You’re lucky you weren’t put with the stinky Somalians,’ he said.

‘If I was lucky, I wouldn’t be here my friend,’ I told him.

He smirked awkwardly. Fivos didn’t seem like the kind of guy to smile very often. ‘We are all unlucky.
Yiati eisai mesa reh?
– Why are you inside, man?’

When asked this question in prison, the best thing to do is give away as little information as possible. Don’t attempt to defend your innocence, because nobody cares. I was yet to learn this. On my first encounter, I told him that I was innocent and I briefly explained my story to him. He laughed and looked at the others, telling them in Greek what I’d just said. The three of them sniggered together.

‘
Nai kalo!
– Yeh sure!’

Christos looked at me and said something far too fast for me to comprehend. His voice was quite high pitched and yappy like a Greek Chris Tucker. Fivos translated for me. ‘He said all of us did nothing! Everyone here is innocent!’

I’d heard that before. ‘So why are you inside?’

Fivos told me that he was caught with a gun and a copious amount of cannabis. ‘I had one friend who was a fucking
roufianos
.’

‘What’s a
roufianos?
’

‘A rat! He told the police everything to save himself.
Ti na sou po? Malakas einai
– What can I tell you? He’s a wanker.’

I nodded and lit a cigarette that Christos had offered. ‘What about these guys? What’re they in for?’ I exhaled.

‘Christos … well, he is an arsehole. He stole half the fucking cars in Athens with no gloves! Yiannis did the same.’

I looked over to Christos who was nodding and smiling. For a guy with such a tough face, he had a smile that turned him into some kind of jolly cartoon character. He was of medium
height, quite defined and muscular with a short crew cut and several black prison tattoos. The most distinctive was the shadow of a scorpion on the outside of his left forearm – there were also two curved, oriental-looking symbols on his chest, one above each nipple.

He made a gun shape with his thumb and index finger, then pointed it to his head and twisted it. ‘
Malakia
,’ he said, which quite literally means ‘wank’. The gesture was another way of admitting that his crimes were stupid things to do. Actually – it seemed like the word
malakia
is relevant in most sentences in a Greek prison. If someone steals your cigarettes, that is a
malakia
. If you lose your telephone cards, that is a
malakia
. If a judge sentences you to life in prison, that’s a big
malakia
. If anything bad happens, if you embarrass yourself, or if someone says something that’s untrue, there is only one appropriate word. What I found quite funny is that they all seemed to call each other
malaka
– ‘wanker’ when we would say ‘mate’. It sounded strange, like hearing an English guy say to his friend, ‘All right, wanker?’ ‘Yeah, not too bad, tosser, how are you?’

Christos grabbed a sheet from his bed, wrapped it up like a rope and twisted it. He held it tightly with his fists and looked at me with his animated smile. As he did so, I became aware of the tattooed letters on each of his knuckles, which spelled out ‘MAΦIA – mafia’. Fivos spotted where my eyes were directed and laughed. ‘That used to say “
MAΡIA
– Maria”, his ex-girlfriend, but she fucking dumped him so he changed it to mafia,’ Fivos said.

I nervously chuckled as Christos stood up and began to walk over to my side of the cell. Fivos put his arm out, stopping Christos in his tracks.

‘And you see this
Kinezika
– Chinese shit?’ Fivos pointed to each of the oriental-looking symbols that were tattooed on
Christos’s chest. ‘He did this to himself here a few months ago. This one means “life” and this one means “death”, but he is stupid. He did it in a mirror and now they are both fucking backwards!’

I thought it was pretty funny, but I also found it incredible that he knew how to tattoo another person, let alone himself. Catching me by surprise, he tried to wrap the sheet around my neck.

‘Ti kanis reh?
– What are you doing, man?’ I blurted.

He was breathing in and out rapidly, giving me the impression that he wanted me to copy him and hyperventilate.

‘Christos wants to do a trick,’ Fivos told me while lying in his bunk.

‘Ohi reh!
– No, man! He wants to do it!’ I said anxiously, pointing at Yiannis. Yiannis was tall and thin with a shaved head. He didn’t look like a typical Greek; he was darker toned and looked like he could be Indian.

‘
Pame
– Come on then,’ Yiannis said. He started to hyperventilate, taking deep breaths as fast as he possibly could. As the air rapidly flowed in and out of Yiannis’s lungs, Christos loosely wrapped the sheet around his neck. After a minute of quick hyperventilation, Christos pulled both ends of the sheet as hard as he could, strangling Yiannis with all his might. I could see the veins in Christos’s arms throbbing – his solid bicep was bulging. He had angry eyes and his teeth were clenched tightly together as though strangling Yiannis was a therapeutic way to release his anger. I witnessed the entire thing, unsure of whether to be more confused or astonished at what was happening. What disturbed me most was the colour of Yiannis’s face. I didn’t think it was possible for a human’s face to become so rich in different shades of blue and purple. Fivos lay in his bottom bunk – he didn’t seem to care that Christos was killing Yiannis. I turned my head back to witness the strangling. It had been going on for far too long by this point.