Hotel Kerobokan (24 page)

I remember once I was at the front door and Agung Aseng came to the guards’ door and asked, ‘May I come in? May I come in?’ . . . He was supposed to be in jail. He’d been out for two days and came to spend the night in jail.

Nobody dares close Agung Aseng’s cell door. Every night he had a party, barbecue, smoke marijuana, supply whisky for the guards. Every night. Outside every block there is a small garden. After 5 pm everyone has to go inside the block and the block is locked. But not his. His was always open. And whoever he wants to come, he tells the guards, ‘Go and pick him up at his block’.

– Ruggiero

He brings a woman to his room; he brings his people, his friends from outside and inside. Free. No limits. Mostly, he went out to sleep at home. Every morning he would come back just to close the eyes of the government. In Kerobokan, everybody is working for Agung Aseng.

– Den

If the guards tried to impose authority, they were bashed. Trying to lock boss Agung Aseng in his cell one night caused a guard to be viciously beaten. Two other guards stood by watching, helplessly. Assisting him would only have meant them being bashed too. Another guard was beaten up by an angry Laskar inmate for refusing to let him walk out the front door. The inmate was not punished.

The guards and their families lived under threat; all knew Laskar could mobilise its members with a phone call. Just as they did at nightclubs, a Laskar pack would descend on Hotel K to answer a call. Several times, dozens of Laskars turned up inside Hotel K to bare their teeth. A rumour that Agung and his men would be moved to a prison outside Bali brought more than twenty gangsters.

They were sitting on the lawn, drinking
arak
there to protest. The guards could not do anything. Maybe twenty, thirty people came. Sometimes they came to one block, they sit [on] the grass and drink
arak
and guards cannot speak, because how many people in Laskar – a thousand people. Guards don’t want to die.

– Thomas

Laskar was jail mafia, brutally enforcing its own laws, sometimes collaborating with the guards to bash inmates. If a prisoner was caught escaping, failing to pay drug bills or had committed atrocious crimes, the Laskars would take the Hotel K law into their own hands. During an afternoon visit, a Laskar member doing time for killing a man dragged a new inmate through the blue room and into the large office atrium. He forced the inmate to his knees and lifted his hand ready to crack him across the skull, then stopped. He caught a glimpse of Schapelle and her visitor watching him through the door. He left the prisoner trembling on his knees and walked across to explain that the inmate was a paedophile. He was about to get his first prison bashing.

Laskar also did personal security jobs for prisoners. If someone had a phone, an MP3 player, cash, or anything else, stolen, they could pay Laskar to get it back. The Laskar enforcers were always keen to do a little business on the side. One westerner paid the gang to punish a new inmate who had ripped him off a year earlier. The new inmate had promised to use his court connections to get the westerner’s sentence cut on appeal. The westerner was desperate. He paid him 175 million rupiah ($23,000), but his sentence was increased by two years. The local man had stolen the money. So when the new inmate was caught with hashish and put in Hotel K, he was a walking bullseye. Several times the Laskars hurt him badly, trying to extract the stolen cash for the westerner inmate.

They locked him in the room and beat the shit out of him.

– Inmate

While the Laskars often had a reason for their violent attacks, a lot of the aggressive young recruits, often high on drugs or drunk on
arak
and power, terrorised inmates just for the hell of it.

They are brainless. Big guys, big body, small brains, probably small cock. Totally brainless people.

– Ruggiero

Ruggiero’s outspoken nature and hot Latin temperament didn’t serve him well with the gang. He clashed often with Laskar, initially refusing to swallow their constant harassment. But it was a losing battle.

I had already been beaten up so many times by the gang there, because I fight against Laskar a few times. It was very uneven. Kick me in the face, hit me with a stick. Because I wouldn’t take any shit from them. I buy ten beers and they want to confiscate five. They do whatever they want.

One day I was playing tennis with the Australian Chris, and Laskar Bali came and broke the racquets. They were drunk. If someone brings me food – say, two apples – they take one. If I punch the guy to get the apple back, ten Laskar guys punch me; in the end, I say, ‘Keep the apple’. It [got] to that stage. They are all maniacs. The problem is, Balinese are cowards. You don’t fight one on one. One on one is okay. The biggest monkey there, no problem. But they don’t do one on one.

– Ruggiero

It wasn’t just the inmates and guards who Laskar terrorised – there was also anarchy within its own ranks. Gang member Bambang had his eye gauged out with a sickle and his arms slashed, before he was dragged a few hundred metres up the road outside the jail and his body dumped in a ditch. A passing motorist spotted him, covered in blood and unconscious but still breathing, early the next morning.

Laskar’s biggest and most lucrative job in Hotel K was providing protection for drug dealer Arman. The dealer and the gang had struck a deal to make them both lots of money, by turning Arman into the sole drug dealer, crushing anyone else who dared try selling to the inside market. Laskar enabled Arman to fulfil his wish to become Hotel K’s drug lord. He was selling huge quantities of drugs inside and outside, paying Laskar for protection, and prisoners and guards to work as couriers, supplying bars and clubs across Bali.

Arman was making at least 100 million rupiah [$13,000] a day, sometimes 300 million [$39,000]. Many times I saw the guy folding up a whole lot of money. He sold
shabu,
heroin, ecstasy, ganja, hashish, cocaine, everything.

The whole block worked for Arman. All the guards got money from him. So, by any chance, if the police intend to come inside here to search, he was the first one to know about it. There were ten telephones inside the block. It was very well-organised. But it was Laskar who gave him such autonomy, you know. Of course he paid Laskar. They go inside, they go in the block, they could have a hit on the pipe, whatever, and they go back out. They take ten grams, twenty grams, outside to sell.

It was a big business. They sold one hundred grams of
shabu
a day inside and outside. The market inside is one tenth of it. He sold inside maybe ten, fifteen grams between just the foreigners who buy one gram a day. They buy smack or
shabu
every day. Plus there’s all the people inside who are buying to sell in a visit. Many of my Swedish friends come: ‘Can I get two grams
shabu
?’ ‘Okay.’ She comes in, I give her a kiss, give to her, she gives me money and goes home.

The guards love it. They carry money outside, get paid one million. Bring drugs inside, get two million. Their wage is one million a month. But they bring one little thing inside and they get two million. Fuck, I’d do it every day. They cannot stop corruption in a place where the salary is so low.

– Ruggiero

For sure, one hundred per cent, Arman paid the jail officers. Everybody knew he was continually busy in his room, always smoking, smoking, and no problems. The guards go and smoke in Arman’s cell. There were quite a few guards in Bali who like
shabu
. Mostly, in Bali they didn’t like heroin; most guards like ecstasy and
shabu
because afterwards they’re still fit, no sleeping.
Shabu
is vitamin A – it makes you active.

– Thomas

Agung Aseng mainly went to jail to collect the gang’s huge weekly payment of protection money. Cash flowed as freely as the drugs and everyone was in for a cut, including police. A rumour circulated the jail that
Poldabes
, a Denpasar police station, was supplying confiscated drugs to Arman to sell for them. This was confirmed one afternoon when Englishman Steve Turner bought a few ecstasy pills from one of Arman’s boys, who walked around the jail selling pills from his pocket. Steve was sitting on the grass with a group of westerners when he looked at the pills and leaped up yelling, ‘They’re mine! It’s my shit, he’s selling my shit’.

Steve, dubbed the ‘Ecstasy King’ in the press, had been caught at a Denpasar post office, claiming two packages sent from London. He was asked to open them in a routine inspection; the first package contained nearly three thousand pills inside a shampoo bottle; the second held another three thousand pills wrapped in two shirts. Police then raided his home and found two thousand more tablets hidden in his ceiling. Steve’s tablets were all stamped with distinctive heart, deer or butterfly logos and were much bigger than local pills. During his court case, it made news that hundreds of the pills went missing from police evidence. In fact, more than three thousand pills vanished, and that afternoon in Hotel K, Steve instantly recognised the pills from Arman’s boy, as his own.

The case of British man Steve Turner, 38, was also leaving a trail at the police department, where some evidence of ecstasy tablets went missing. The original number of ecstasy tablets was 8175, now only 7847. When the evidence arrived at court, 328 tablets were missing. The case ended with the questioning of two police officers about the matter.

–
Denpost
, 30 June 2003

Inside Hotel K, Arman’s drug business was booming, but life had consequently become more violent for inmates. Anyone else caught dealing to the internal market was bashed. Anyone who couldn’t pay their drug bills was also punished. Groups of muscle-bound Laskar enforcers constantly prowled around after those in debt, making threats, smacking them around a bit as a warning or, if that had already failed, bashing them viciously. With Laskar and Arman pushing drugs and offering unlimited credit to westerners, many inmates let their drug bills spiral out of control. If they couldn’t pay up when Arman called in the cash, the consequences were deadly.

The guys get fucked up on smack or
shabu,
or whatever, and they give them more and more and more and more. Just give drugs, drugs, drugs to the foreigners and they lose control of the bill. Eventually they have to pay fifteen million, twenty million. Then if they couldn’t pay, they’d beat them up. One time what they did to the Australian kids you wouldn’t believe, and this Italian kid, they beat him up.

– Ruggiero

If they know that you are a drug user, they force you to buy drugs from them.

– Nita

Many of the westerners who lost control of their drug bills got cash from their parents or friends to avoid being bashed. Juri’s elderly parents had moved their lives from Italy to Bali so that they could visit him daily, doing anything they could to make his life more bearable, including giving him money, unaware their hard-earned cash was spent on drugs. Juri lied in any way necessary to get cash from friends and family for his heroin bill, acutely aware of his fate if he failed to pay. Everyone had seen what had happened to Dutch inmate Aris.

Aris had been loading up his drug tab for weeks. He had a huge pile of credit notes that Arman’s bookkeeper gave him each time he scored. Arman had given Aris thousands of dollars of credit because Aris had promised to get MDMA powder sent from Holland for him. Arman and Iwan would use it to make thousands of ecstasy pills in Iwan’s workshop. But with no sign of the powder, Arman called in his credit. Aris didn’t have the cash, and had let his bill run out of control, spending money he didn’t have. Now he had nowhere to run. The Laskars beat him almost to death.

They took Aris, the Dutch guy, and tied him to the bars like Jesus Christ with some electric cable, took a stick and beat him hard. They beat him very hard. Laskar are all animals, they are very savage. This guard, Pak Mus, saved him. It was
apel
[roll call] time and I told him, ‘He is down the block, being beaten. Stop the shit, Pak Mus,’ and Pak Mus brought him back. Nothing happened to the guys who were beating him. They probably would have hanged him there if Pak Mus didn’t go.

– Ruggiero

Typically, Hotel K wanted to avoid bad publicity, and refused to send the badly injured Aris to hospital because too many questions would be asked. Instead, Aris was locked in his cell. For two days he complained of dizziness, and for two weeks he couldn’t stand up. He wept from the pain. It prompted Mick to raise cash from a few of the westerners to buy Aris a gram of smack to ease his agony. His wife was being refused visits so that she couldn’t see his atrocious injuries and report them. To stop her daily attempts to visit him, she was told that Aris didn’t want to see her; that he had another woman. But she didn’t believe it. She knew something was wrong. She was distressed and threatened to phone the Dutch consulate. The Laskars gave Aris a mobile phone and instructed him to call his wife.

‘You tell her you have a girlfriend, you don’t want to see her, and don’t make a fucking problem,’ one of the Laskars told Aris. ‘Okay, no problem,’ he quickly agreed. He was in no shape to argue; his eyes were puffed into slits and his body was black and blue. He told his wife the lies. She broke down crying, refusing to believe him. ‘No, no, I’m coming to see you. I love you.’ Aris felt her pain. But he was surrounded by Laskars and, for both their sakes, he had to make her believe him. ‘I don’t love you anymore. Leave me alone, get on with your life,’ he told her. A long wailing noise came through the phone and then it went dead. She didn’t visit him again.

But Aris got off lightly. He had lived. It was a dark secret among the inmates that the deaths around the jail, set up to look like suicides – such as Beny’s, rarely were. Suspicious deaths were common in Hotel K. At 7.30 am one day, guard Agung Mas had unlocked the women’s cells and was doing the day’s first roll call. She mentioned to Nita that she’d felt there was something strange about the main hall when she’d walked past it earlier, and was going to take a closer look. Unusually, she left Block W’s steel door open, so Nita trailed behind her, and Schapelle, who’d overheard the conversation, also tagged along in her pyjamas. This was a rare chance to walk in the prison grounds and out of the claustrophobic Block W on a fresh, quiet morning; anything slightly different was a relief.