Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (12 page)

He acted without hesitation. On his orders, his men bought, borrowed, and stole communications equipment, extra weaponry and ammunition, and all the supplies they could carry. Fang commandeered trucks, and drove as deeply into the jungle as their vehicles could traverse.

They marched into exile, knowing that as deserters, they would be summarily shot if apprehended. As for Fang’s family, deserting was only marginally better than being branded a criminal, although the fact that he took all his troops into exile with him ameliorated the sting.

Fang’s situation was precarious. Despite his control of trained and heavily armed men, he was a very small fish in a large and dangerous pond. The list of potential enemies was a long one.

Topping the roll was the Chinese Army, no doubt eager to see justice done and avenge the insult they had received. The regular Burmese Army was perpetually making forays into the no man’s land, searching out the various groups of Burmese disaffected from the military junta running the country. In addition to Burmese rebels were the Karen and other native tribes that fought a rearguard action against the junta, alternately seeking asylum in Thailand or actively fighting, whichever proved more convenient at the time.

The Royal Thai Army was also in the mix. Cowardice and apathy in the ranks kept the Thais from being much of a threat to anyone. But thanks to the money and military hardware supplied by the DEA and CIA, whatever they chose to attack received massive overkill. American prodding kept them making token, yet destructive, efforts to squash the drug trade.

Last, but certainly not least, Khun Sa and other drug lords controlled an ever-shifting patchwork quilt of territory. Tied to the Overseas Chinese Underworld, they had billions of dollars in cash to spend, and operated with a ruthlessness that made the other players seem saintly by comparison. Each of these criminal renegades hired mercenaries and fielded private armies.

As if this was not complicated enough, the tourist trade created its own set of difficulties. Jungle-trekking on elephant-back had become a popular part of many tourist vacations in Thailand. With the thousands of Westerners that visited the Golden Triangle to see Hill Tribes, or sample the dope, came guides, translators, merchants, hangers-on, the inevitable invasion following the trail of cash they liberally spread around. Technically not a military threat, anyone foolish enough to harm the tourists was assured of a swift and terrible vengeance from governments for daring to threaten the lucrative flow of hard currency.

The learning curve was steep, but Fang rose to the challenge.

Like many others before him, he strengthened his army by conscripting men in villages that were weakly defended.

By this simple expedient, he gained both poppy fields and troops. As he was not a harsh commander, and shared everything—good and bad, with his men—no one questioned his rule.

Fang was sharp enough to pick fields and villages far from the regions patrolled by the Chinese Army. He found a spot wellsuited to the needs of a miniature force such as his own. At the edge of the Thai and Laotian borders, frequented by tourists but otherwise unmolested, he dug in and prepared to stay.

The inevitable skirmishes with local drug entrepreneurs ended in his favor, and as he did not harm tourists and paid bribes to the right Thai Army officers, he was left in peace.

Under a form of a safe-pass or truce, Fang would make periodic journeys into Chiang Mai to sell the crudely refined heroin “his” fields and bathtub lab produced.

Keeping a low profile, he managed to survive for years. He took a Hill Tribe woman as his unofficial wife; many of his men did the same. The territory he occupied was not so fertile as to be coveted by the bigger drug lords, and the steady flow of tourists visiting the Hill Tribes in his neighborhood
held the armies in check. This life might have gone on indefinitely, if not for bad luck.

His main buyer in town was a Hong Kong Chinese with 14K Triad ties. Greed motivated the buyer to betray Fang to the police, hoping to share the drugs between them after the bust. He also expected to get a reward from the Chinese, which Fang learned was never paid. The dealer counted on Fang to surrender. The possibility he might fight a police force singlehandedly never entered his mind.

The trap was set in a fancy restaurant on the Ping River. Thai cops had the place surrounded and awaited the dealer to give them the signal to make the arrest. Fang brought two of his most trusted lieutenants, the three of them armed with pistols and grenades.

Something did not feel quite right, and Fang was leery of entering the restaurant. When Fang demanded that the dealer come outside, the man panicked. Instead of delivering the signal, the dealer ran to the back near the river, throwing the police plan off-kilter.

One of Fang’s men was first to spot a cop in hiding, and thinking it was a rival gang member, shot him dead. The element of surprise gone, the ambush failed miserably, and within seconds the alleys and streets near the restaurant became a battlefield.

In a sleepy town like Chiang Mai, news spreads fast, and within minutes of the first shots, TV crews thronged the area, waiting for the gunplay to end. Seven policemen were killed and another dozen wounded. Both of Fang’s men lay dead, and Fang himself was wounded several times over.

Ultimately, he ran out of ammo and was forced to surrender.

The presence of the TV news cameras saved his life.

The reporters filmed every second of Fang’s capture on tape and followed his progress to the main police station in town The police hung him up by the wrists in handcuffs from the bars of a window in a jail cell. The cops took turns beating him with billy clubs for three days. He never recovered his health, but miraculously survived.

Nine years later, we sat listening to his tale. His sister wrote him from time to time, and his grandfather has forgiven him with the passing of the years. Sadly, his father considered him dead and his mother had died years ago. The chance of him ever leaving prison is remote.

The Samurai

T
here were six or seven “Samurai” in Building 2 of Bang Kwang Prison. Prison-wide, they might have numbered twenty-five. The gang is conspicuous by choice: young men whose bodies are disfigured by a startling mass of parallel stripes of self-inflicted scar tissue, forever marking themselves as a group apart from the mainstream.

Why they call themselves Samurai is a mystery. Chances are they had heard the term on one of the numberless Hong Kong made-for-TV productions that form the staple fare on Thai TV stations and adopted it as an appropriate moniker. The Japanese reputation for ruthlessness earned in WWII has not faded in Asia, and their strange cultural combination of bravery and brutality continues to get ambivalent treatment in movies.

The oldest of the Samurai was no more than twenty-three; most were barely eighteen or nineteen. Underneath the swaggering braggadocio they presented to the world were children desperately yearning for their nonexistent mothers. The truth could be heard every night in the cells—for no discipline can prevent troubled dreams.

The prerequisites for membership in the gang were identical to the potent sources of existential despair. Having a heroin addiction was mandatory. You had to have a minimum of two life sentences, preferably ones commuted from death sentences. Lastly, and worst to a Thai, you had to have been abandoned by your family, or be an orphan—in Thailand, a terrible form of social death.

Their initiation ritual was as simple as it was dreadful. The initiate first inflicted hundreds of long horizontal cuts across their bodies, slashed with a razor blade; every possible inch of skin was scarified. The new member was expected to mutilate himself without aid, save for their backs. Their faces, torsos and limbs swelled up around the damage from this abuse, and the angry red puffiness was worn with fierce pride. Ashes were packed into the wounds and left to heal. This created thick mound-like welts over the seventy to eighty percent of the skin they had cut.

The second and final step was to commit a murder ordered by the head Samurai. Once this was accomplished, they were formally admitted to the club.

The gang members did not care if they lived or died; it was the true distinction in a prison full of lifers. They were the only prisoners the guards feared. The blue boys ran the prison through intimidation, but were smart enough to leave the Samurai well alone.

Upon joining this dark fraternity, the new member gave up his name, answering only to a nickname chosen by the leader. These new names were often childish and ridiculous, but no one dared to laugh. The titles had a cartoonish villainy—”Shark,” “Crocodile,” “Evil,” “Beast.” The absurd litany gained a heavy dose of menace by the gang’s youthful psychopathic behavior.

Every building in the prison had a few Samurais, but the majority lived in Building 5, the place designated for the youngest prisoners, many of whom were wildly violent. Samurais were always shifting buildings, as they were frequently moved due to their inevitable disciplinary infractions. The entire
crew made a circuit of the prison buildings perhaps once every two or three years, winding up in the Kondeo (Thai for “person alone”—the single-celled punishment building) for a few months, before beginning a new “tour.”

They lacked any real rules or code of behavior, except one: Members must kill anyone the leader chooses at any time. The head Samurai set the fee for a hit, and the fees earned by the group were shared out, the head Samurai dividing the spoils. If the indiscriminate murders they committed gave any of them qualms, the casual disdain they displayed towards life hid it well.

The Samurai were mostly “street kids” who grew up amidst the squalid desolation of Bangkok’s slums. Dumped into a gutter by the age of five or six, the unwanted offspring of mothers who were drug addicts, prostitutes, or worse, were sold into slavery to the brothels catering to homosexual pedophiles. These children had nowhere to turn for help, as the family is the only source of welfare assistance in Thai society. Street orphans grow up easy prey for the unscrupulous and the perverted.

All but a handful are illiterate. None of them had ever worked a legitimate job. Uniformly skinny, stunted, and often braindamaged from malnutrition in their infancy, they feel an incurable inferiority complex. It manifests itself in their vicious tempers and hair-trigger responses to perceived slights. Their madness ensures they are never more than a second or two away from berserk rage, sealing them into a permanent social isolation.

Abused as children and lacking any abilities or skills, the Samurai only know how to steal and sell their bodies. They are no strangers to violence, unlike their normally passive Thai compatriots. Having been raped and beaten repeatedly when they were young, they are quick to resort to violence themselves when they are old enough or large enough to do so. Colt’s slogan about guns being the “great equalizer” was never more appropriate than when applied to these trigger-happy adolescents, each of whom spent their first ill-gotten gains on handguns. The lethal mix of misery, hate, and small arms landed them, without exception, in prison for serial murders. In fact,
the murders stemmed from fits of pique or were pointless acts added to the fear that the Samurai inspired.

The notoriety of the gang had spread to the streets, thanks to a media hungering for novelty and the bizarre. A twisted kind of hero worship towards them was felt by kids in the slums mistaking infamy for glamour. The Samurai were surrounded by dozens of these wannabes—idiot children, principally drug offenders, who had fallen afoul of the law and wound up in prison. They were held in contempt by the Samurai but were almost as dangerous as their heroes and stood ready to perform disgusting deeds to curry favor.

Fortunately for the rest of us, the Samurai mainly limited themselves to robbing the Nigerians of dope and money. A community several hundred members strong, Nigerians, by a combination of stealth, cunning, and the liberal application of bribes, manage to control the heroin trade inside Thai prisons.

Robbing the Nigerians was a relatively risk-free proposition for the Samurai, as the prison authorities regard the Africans with loathing. Guards would periodically raid the Nigerians cells and lockers, confiscating anything of value, thus subtly encouraging “private enterprise” to do the same. Worst case scenario, a Samurai might suffer a token beating for robbery or stabbing a Nigerian, itself little more than an annoyance rather than a deterrent.

There are few opportunities for the Samurai to display their fearlessness, and most are forced to content themselves with thievery and indulgence in their heroin addictions. Occasionally they are called upon to settle an unpaid gambling debt between the Chinese or are hired to interfere in a drug cartel dispute—ironically, by the same Nigerians they torment. In general, however, they lie around sunning themselves like curiously marked reptiles, oblivious to reality every moment they can manage.

There are few people that have sunk so far down into hopelessness as the Samurai, except in other grim prisons or in wards for the terminally ill in
hospitals bereft of family and friends. They are doomed to die in prison, cursed with the certainty that no one cares for them, save in a negative way. They lack the knowledge of how to give their lives meaning. Their ignorance of the world is profound, their horizons narrowed to the prison walls that enclose them.