Welcome to Hell (12 page)

This Doctor of Law agreed to include these plus any he himself thought relevant. He said he would write the appeal then bring it to me at the prison to check and sign.

I started to prepare mentally for a new trial.

Although he was recommended by the Thai Law Society, I still didn’t trust this lawyer. But he only had to write an appeal, so I didn’t think there’d be any problems.

Of course, I was wrong again. On the last day of the time limit to lodge the appeal, he came to see me. He told me he had finished the appeal document and filed it with the court.

He then told me that he didn’t think I’d object to anything he’d written, and he’d filed it before coming to visit me to make sure it would be in before the deadline. He’d signed it on my behalf.

He was in a hurry but had left a copy of the appeal with the duty guard. I got the document from the guard as soon as the visit was over.

Not a single point I’d asked to be raised was included.

He didn’t object to anything said or done by the prosecutor. He didn’t raise the issue of legalities in the way in which my trial was conducted. In fact, he didn’t really object to anything.

I’d asked him to say that O’Connor had lied about his name, nationality, occupation and even date of birth, so how could you believe anything he said, if indeed he really had made a statement? The lawyer’s version of my point was that O’Connor and I were enemies, so obviously O’Connor would say nothing that might help to acquit me. Not exactly the same thing.

The appeal he wrote and filed was like something you’d expect from a high school student, not a Doctor of Law.

He said he would apply for bail for me, but as a Doctor of Law he wasn’t prepared to ask for bail to the tune of only a few thousand dollars. He suggested that I contact my family and ask them to send a quarter of a million.

Needless to say, my family didn’t have that sort of money, so there was to be no bail. I was back to square one.

* * *

Almost two years later, I was called to court to hear the verdict. Under the Thai system, a group of five to seven judges review appeal documents in private and make a decision.

The Appeal Court agreed with the decision of the District Court, and upheld the verdict and sentence of 13 years and four months.

Given the weakness of the appeal lodged by my most recent lawyer, it didn’t surprise me that I’d lost.

In Thailand, the District Court is only out to convict, and the Appeal Court is basically there for those who throw themselves at the mercy of the court. Having pleaded not guilty in the District Court, they now plead guilty and ask for a reduction in their sentence. I learned that very few people ever win their cases outright.

For those who lose their appeal or are not satisfied with the Appeal Court’s decision, there is the
Dika
Court or Supreme Court. This is the highest court in Thailand, and generally speaking it’s the best chance anyone has for justice.

Not many people go to the Supreme Court. Money to pay the legal fees is one reason, but the main reason is the time it takes.

On average a trial takes at least three years, an appeal takes another year and a half minimum, and an appeal to the Supreme Court will take about another year. So if you fight your case you’re probably going to be in prison for at least five and a half years, but usually more.

The whole system in Thailand is geared towards forcing the accused to accept the charges and plead guilty.

If you accepted the charges in the police station, the court would cut your sentence by a third. If you then pleaded guilty in court your sentence would be reduced by half. Most of the Thai prisoners accepted and pleaded guilty, guilty or not. It made sense – especially for a less serious charge. Would you prefer one or two years in prison as a guilty person, or five and a half trying to prove your innocence?

However, I decided to stay and fight, so it was back to the jungle for me once again.

14

I was fucked in almost every way possible. It was a nightmare. The injustice of it all was depressing, and getting through each day in prison was more so.

Looking back on it now, I realise that the prison authorities operated a divide and conquer policy. They made some of the Thai prisoners into what were called trustees or blueshirts. These prisoners got better food than the regular prisoners, and a few other privileges, like a room to themselves where they could eat or smoke, unlike the rest of us. Most importantly, they got three months’ remission on their sentences for every year they worked as blueshirts.

These blueshirts constantly curried favour with the commandos. They cleaned their shoes, washed and ironed their uniforms, and ran to buy them a Coke if they asked. They were the guards’ ‘boys’.

As a result, they tended to forget that they were also prisoners like the rest of us, and they ordered us around as they pleased. We had no way of knowing which orders really came from the guards and which didn’t. They also spied on other prisoners constantly, and reported anything and everything. And, of course, they tried to extort money or cigarettes whenever possible.

But their real job was to be the guards’ attack dogs – and they enjoyed their work. If a guard was pissed off at you for any reason, he’d set his dogs on you, and they’d beat you half to death.

In fact, if a guard gave the order, the blueshirts would kill you, and be happy to do it.

One of the other foreigners, Jan from Finland, couldn’t or wouldn’t count in Thai when the guards did the morning count in each room. A few days later, six or seven of the blueshirts set upon him in the yard, and beat him to within an inch of his life.

Another time, a few foreigners went to shower early, outside the allocated time. A guard nearly had a fit when they disobeyed the prison regulations. So he set his dogs on them. The foreigners ended up with a mixture of broken noses, fractured skulls and smashed faces. One was even stabbed in the arm with a spoon. It’s doubtful that they aimed for his arm, so he was very lucky.

The guards themselves didn’t actually do very much. There were about four blueshirts for every commando. The blueshirts opened the cells and locked us up again; the blueshirts searched us; the blueshirts checked the mail; the blueshirts controlled the gates in and out of each section of the prison.

The commandos did as little as possible. They arrived in the morning and a prisoner cooked their breakfast. After they ate their fill, they’d go to their factory or office where another prisoner would give them a massage.

After that, they’d take a nap or sleep off last night’s hangover. Once they woke, they’d sign the factory ledgers or other paperwork and have lunch. Needless to say, they never paid for any meals or drinks.

In fact, they paid for nothing at all. The prisoners bought everything for them. Every office or factory had a TV for the commandos to watch, which ensured that they did absolutely nothing. They spent the hot afternoons watching TV before their shift ended at 5 p.m.

The commandos rotated for the night shift. If they worked nights it really only meant that they slept in the prison instead of at home. A prisoner would actually make up a bed complete with a mosquito net and fan, and a flask of hot water or coffee standing by.

A lot of the commandos who worked nights would be completely drunk when they arrived at 5 p.m. They would stumble around, helped by the blueshirts. When they came to inspect the cells, some were lucky they could still stand, never mind count the prisoners.

I often saw commandos so drunk they’d pissed themselves. I remember one man in particular who arrived in drunk and started kicking and beating the prisoners just for fun, telling them they should respect him because he was a commando. Ten minutes later, he was slumped in his chair surrounded by a puddle of piss.

At the best of times, the commandos were aggressive, but when they were drunk they’d be downright dangerous. They cracked skulls and broke arms. A lot of them had killed a few prisoners while drunk. I saw them do it.

The most vicious guard I ever encountered was called Paiboon. He was the most sadistic commando in Chonburi. I saw him beat prisoners for hours on end. He used to crawl along the floor, hidden by the low wall, then spring up at the bars to catch people smoking or gambling in the cells.

On the night shift, commandos carry a shotgun. If Paiboon caught someone, he’d call them over to the bars and smash them in the head with the butt of the gun. And they’d still have to report to him in the morning for another beating.

His closest rival as far as downright brutality goes was named Jessada. I saw him beat up prisoners using a two-handed baseball-type swing.

One particular incident stands out in my mind. Some Burmese prisoners had tried to escape from another prison. The next day Jessada called all the Burmese in Chonburi together, and systematically beat the shit out of every one of them. They hadn’t done a thing. The escape attempt had happened somewhere miles away, but Jessada kicked the fuck out of them just because they were Burmese. He was a sadistic bastard.

* * *

In all the years I spent in that hell hole, I heard countless stories of the cruelty inflicted on prisoners. When I heard them at first I didn’t believe them. But they were true nonetheless.

I came to learn that prisons in Thailand were run as a business – not by the Thai government, but by the commandos and the prison directors. Everything was designed to make money for the commandos. Whether the prisoners lived or died wasn’t important.

For example, every prisoner was given a prison account so that family, friends or an embassy could deposit money for their loved ones to buy food and other necessities. Therefore, the commandos knew which of the prisoners had money, and exactly how much.

They also controlled the prison shop. Inmates had to use coupons to buy anything in the shop, which the commandos also made themselves and sold at a price 10 per cent higher than their value. The food itself was marked up by another 20 per cent. We were a captive market – literally.

The whole place operated on bribery.

If you wanted to move to a different cell, the commandos charged 500 baht to ‘assist’ you with your request. If you didn’t want to work in one of the factories, you had to pay 300 baht a month.

In some buildings the commandos would sell you a shack built out of bits of old wood, where you could sit out of the scorching sun during the day, for 20,000 baht.

Those who wanted to go to the prison school also had to pay the commandos. I spent months in the school learning to speak basic Thai – and paid for it all myself.

A parole application or a request to the king for a royal pardon was supposed to be free. But in practice, it wasn’t.

You got nothing in a Thai prison unless you paid for it, and the commandos made a killing. In fact, they seemed to think it was their right to extort money from prisoners.

At Christmas or New Year they’d ask for their tip for being a nice commando. If it was their birthday, they’d also expect a few bob too. I had a commando ask me for money to buy his daughter a birthday present because he was broke. She wasn’t my daughter and I really wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, but I ended up giving him the money. It was probably safer.

The thing that made us fear them most, however, was that if they took the notion to do so, they had the power to keep us in here. They had the authority to charge anyone with suspicion of a crime – suspicion of conspiring to escape, suspicion of using drugs, suspicion of gambling, suspicion of fighting.

Any one of these was enough to guarantee at least three months in the soi – solitary confinement. Three months is what the law provides for, but they got around that by simply moving a chosen prisoner from one building to another. I know some men who spent over a year in solitary, just moving around like nomads. Every time they were moved they lost some of their possessions – not that any of us had much to start with. It was a cruel regime.

The commando in charge of each building had ultimate power. He gave out the prison rating. These could be either normal prisoner, good prisoner, very good prisoner, or excellent prisoner. There was an interview every six months or so, but only after a case had been finalised.

The rating was important because it affected an inmate’s chance of getting parole, and also how much of a reduction in sentence you’d get if the king gave an amnesty. If the commandos charged you with suspicion or anything else, they could cut you down a rating. If they were really pissed off, they’d cut you down two.

This could mean a difference of years in prison. I learned that it was usually best just to pay up and shut up.

* * *

A lot of my fellow prisoners had been jailed for drug running. Drugs were a part of prison life. They were in demand throughout the prison and were big business. Given the state of things, it was little wonder that some people wanted to escape from reality.

Prisoners might smuggle in a few pills or even a little heroin, but over 90 per cent of the drugs were brought in and sold by the guards. The commandos would bring in heroin and mix it up with glucose, baking powder, crushed-up paracetamol or anything else handy.

Heroin in Thailand is usually 98 per cent pure, but by the time it was sold to the prisoners, it was five per cent or less – which meant huge profits for the commandos.

Most of the dealers in Chonburi were Nigerian and they survived by selling drugs for the commandos. Some of them lived really well from their drug money. And they had plenty of customers.

Most addicts started by snorting a little heroin just for fun or because they were having a particularly bad day. But because of the price, snorting wasn’t economical, and eventually they’d shoot it up. A few weeks of that and they’d be hooked. I saw lots of people turn into zombies.

They ended up sharing needles with the other junkies. If they were lucky, they’d only catch hepatitis C, but there was a very good chance they’d get HIV or AIDS. Adding AIDS to the conditions we were forced to live in invariably meant that they didn’t last long.

Considering the sheer quantity of heroin sold in the prison, it was impossible to deny that most of it was smuggled in by the commandos. I saw what went on. I knew that no petty thief could stick that amount of heroin down the front of their underwear on the way back from court or a visit. It was the commandos who smuggled it in.

And they were often caught. I know of a commando in Chonburi who was actually caught bringing heroin into the prison but nothing happened to him. He got a slap on the wrist and was transferred to duty on the guard towers. From here, he could still throw his supplies into the yard, and a year later he was back inside the prison doing business as usual.

* * *

The one thing I detested about the commandos most, though, was the way they abused the prisoners’ families. Some of the prisoners’ wives or girlfriends would often complain that they didn’t have the money to pay off the commandos, so a commando would say to them, ‘No problem, I’ll take care of him. Don’t worry about the money. But you can meet me later and we can go together and have something to eat.’

When they’d meet, the bastards would force a prisoner’s wife or girlfriend to have sex with them.

More often than not, the woman would be so afraid of what might happen to her husband if she refused that she’d agree to go. Having used the woman once, the commando would start blackmailing her into being his permanent mistress. Having no respect for a prisoner is one thing, but to do that to his wife or girlfriend is below contempt and downright disgusting.

We were supposed to be the criminals, but the biggest brutes and gangsters in Chonburi were the people who ran the place.

A prison is supposed to be a place of confinement where a convicted person might reflect on his crime and try to rehabilitate himself. There was no such thing as rehabilitation in Chonburi. It was dog eat dog, and only the fittest survived.

Some prisoners left worse than when they first went in; some left as hopeless junkies. Some didn’t make it out at all.

In Thailand, they just wanted to punish you. They wanted to punish, hurt and control you, to abuse you and belittle you – and squeeze as much money out of you as they could in the process. Money was their god, and they cheated, stole, conspired, lied, and killed for it.

* * *

I think most people are in denial when they are first sent to prison. I certainly was.

I remember saying to myself, ‘This isn’t happening,’ or, ‘They can’t do this to me.’ But the fact is that they could do it – and they did.

Although the letter-writing campaign lifted my spirits, I still had to battle depression constantly because Chonburi was hell on earth. As you would expect, suicides were common.

Young prisoners often jumped down the four-storey stairwells to kill themselves. The bodies would be left there in a pool of blood until the police came to take photos. Then they lifted them off like a sack of spuds and threw them into the back of a pick-up truck. They didn’t believe in using stretchers in Thailand.

I saw dozens of people kill themselves. Some prisoners slashed their wrists and bled to death in the rooms. Others drank rat poison or whatever else they could get their hands on. I know one guy who drank a bottle of resin hardener. I saw three or four climb onto the factory roofs and jump.

The number of suicides never surprised me. What surprised me was that there weren’t more.

And yes, there were times when I thought about it myself. But I had four children. I wouldn’t want them to grow up thinking their father was a coward who killed himself in prison because he couldn’t take it.