Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (9 page)

On the left, facing the prison entrance, is the supply center for the coffee shops, a low building with several sets of open double doors and a long
wooden counter inside. It has the look and feel of an old general store. Next door to it, under the same roof, is the room set aside for Buddhist meditation and prayers, which also holds Islamic services on Fridays.

Opposite the store is the Warden’s office, also single-story, unimpressive, except for its modern mirrored windows.

Ahead of these two buildings is a gate which stays locked, except when trucks make deliveries to the store. To its left is the open building where mail is sorted and foreign embassies can meet their nationals face to face.

To the right of the gate is an older one-story building, more like a guard shack, that houses the Security Chief ‘s office. The odious little man who filled that post for years was always to be seen sitting on a small veranda directly opposite the entrance to the farang’s visiting room. He was notoriously corrupt … he’d pimp out his mother’s corpse if he thought there were any buyers.

You proceeded through a gate at the side of the mail room, where you’d collect visitor’s gifts if you received any, and doubled around towards the visiting rooms. You’d follow an avenue that passes the main gate and the mail room, which runs the length of the prison—from the hospital and temple at one end, to the punishment building at the other.

A heavy steel gate separates the rest of the prison from the visiting area leading to the prison entrance. The gate is in the center of the main guard tower, which dominates the prison. The Thai visiting room is on the left as you approach the tower, the farang room on the right of the gate.

The guard opens the visiting room door after a dozen prisoners bang on it, rattling the flimsy thing in its frame. The visiting room is long, narrow, and dark. Its ceiling reaches up fifteen feet, the fans too high to help reduce the temperature much.

Low wood benches line the waist-high wall separating visitors and inmates. A mesh screen reinforced by iron bars extends from the top of the low wall to the ceiling. An empty gap of three feet—a sort of hallway—
distances visitors, who sit behind another bar and mesh screen barrier facing their incarcerated loved ones.

Getting in early to a visit is crucial. As more and more people arrive, the volume rises, until one has to scream to be heard. West Africans can really crank out the decibels, and normal conversation is made impossible halfway into visiting hours by the crush of shouting Nigerians.

Visitors hand envelopes, cash, items that can be hidden quickly, openly to guards, who deliver them to the prisoners later. The visiting room is the most lucrative position for guards in the prison, and most are kept honest by the profits. No need to screw up a good thing by stealing. Cash is brought in for five percent; drugs cost one-hundred percent markup over the street price.

After your visit, you exit, pass the mail room, pausing to chat with prisoners from other buildings, or pick up your gifts. You then head back to your building, though some prisoners were known to hang out all day socializing without being hassled by guards or blue boys. Within shouting distance of the exit, the official attitude mellows, so as to impress the frequent visiting government and embassy officials with their lenience.

The majority of visits occur in the mornings, to avoid the blistering heat of tropical afternoons. Air conditioning is a myth outside of the Warden’s office. Prisoners normally return from visits before noon.

The prison officially closes at noon for an hour. Most of the farangs buy lunch for a quarter or so from one of the restaurants in the building. These eateries are any spare nook with an electric outlet, where a guard allows an ‘owner’ to set up shop. If there is room for a two-by-four on bricks to use as a cutting board, and a spot for an electric wok, a restaurant can be opened. The more prosperous owners add a folding card table, a rice cooker, the odd chair or two, as opportunity and funds permit. With utensils, dishes, and plates, a man’s in business.

Although these places are strictly ‘caveat emptor,’ the food served is usually plain yet decent. Chicken or pork fried rice, sometimes noodles with
buffalo meat or pork depending on what is available from the building’s coffee shop. Most of them extend credit to farangs, allowing monthly or quarterly payments, as embassy money is paid. Those running restaurants during the day are often the same people selling food and drinks in the dorm corridors at night.

For those who wanted to save money or who preferred different kinds of food, they would form ‘food groups.’ Each member of the group, in theory, contributes a share of money and shares in the labor of cooking and cleaning. With the increased buying power of a group, better deals are to be had for buying in quantity. Thus, three or even two people can eat much better than one alone. Plus, sharing the drudgery lightens the burden.

Small red clay charcoal-burning stoves (really just pots with a perforated divider between upper and lower chambers to hold coals) are for sale at the coffee shop for about two dollars apiece. Cooking pots, dishes, etc. can also be purchased by groups. Both Thai and farangs form separate groups. Due to the discontent of people not paying their fair share, or shirking cleaning and cooking duties, groups are constantly forming and dissolving. This also provides a big part of prison gossip, as everyone moans and complains about their food group partner’s laziness or miserliness.

Prisoners without money—the majority—have their own methods of finding food. Three or four Thai often save their baht and buy onions, chilies, and garlic. They take turns queuing for prison food. Others carefully sift the prison rice and strain the soup. This is then re-cooked with the new spices and vegetables added in. By such stratagems, and others like them, the prison food is made edible, and the poor survive.

At the very bottom of the economic ladder are rural peasants who behave no better than farm animals, and those Thai are completely insane. They wait outside the restaurants and root in the slimy garbage for tidbits in the pile where cooks throw their trash. You see them at mealtime picking bones and gristle out of gutters, blithely ignoring people pissing ‘upstream’
of them into the same gutter a few feet away. Other Thai are revolted by this behavior and treat them with contempt.

After lunch, shade can be found on the far side of the dorms, where most either take a nap in their houses or relax on a bamboo mat on the ground.

Although the Thai are very nonchalant about sitting or sleeping on the ground, all farangs use lawn chairs or buy a house. This is a reaction to the poisonous millipedes and centipedes (two fingers thick), which are all too common and give nasty, venomous bites. These insectile menaces, along with scorpions, spiders, wasps, and other creatures, make sleeping both in the dorms and outside a dangerous act.

At 2:00 PM, one of the guards is awakened by a blue boy, and unlocks the gate to the fenced-in water troughs for showering. Opposite and parallel to the factories are the long, waist-high, concrete troughs holding river water, ostensibly for bathing. The water is opaque, a deep dirty brown-gray, with a thick residue of scummy oil floating on the surface. There are always bits of algae, trash, and other unidentifiable objects that swirl about at shower time: a reminder of the sorry state of the Chao Phaya River, from whence the water is pumped.

Depending on the factory owner’s mood, the factories shut down close to 3:00 PM, giving workers time to bathe and get drinking water before being locked down for the night. Six days a week, a boisterous crowd takes their showers, splashing each other playfully and making a racket.

Farangs, being much more sensitive to the local bacteria, too often get bad skin infections from the dead things rotting in the free prison water, opt to pay for clean bath water. Enterprising Thai with connections to whatever guard controls the water tower (unused except by this bunch), charge about four dollars a month for clean water. They set up large plastic garbage cans purchased for this reason and provide a full can twice a day to customers. Farangs and wealthy Asians bathe together near the toilets where these water
merchants put the cans. As with most things, the farang junkies live without any of these ‘amenities.’ As they spend every penny on drugs, farang heroin addicts live no differently from the poorest Thai peasant.

At 3:30 or 4:00 PM, varying with the guards’ energy level, people gather their belongings and prepare to go into the dorms for the night. Those with ‘houses’ put most of their stuff away under lock and key in cupboards. The majority of prisoners have to use cement and wood lockers, built in a row against a factory wall. The lockers cost about ten dollars. Foreigners normally have one or two apiece, whereas Thai band together to buy and share one as a group.

Before being marched into the dorm, the Thai have to gather in the square in front and to one side of the dorm. Grouped together by cell, they file by two rows of blue boys, who leisurely peek in and poke at their bags, looking for drugs or contraband.

Farangs are exempt from the roll call and can join the line whenever they feel like it. In practice, this means any time before 4:00 PM lockdown. They still have to run the gauntlet of the blue boys. Usually, the blue boys check out the farangs’ bags more thoroughly than their inspection of Thai bags. This can be attributed more to their curiosity than to possible smuggling by farangs.

Once inside, the guards lock down the cells, and then spend twenty minutes or so making their count. Finished they bolt and lock the dorm gates from the outside, not to be seen again until the next morning.

When count clears, the corridor-dwellers wander up and down the hall, selling their wares. Farangs and wealthy prisoners listen to tapes on walk-mans, watch videos on VCRs or TV, read, eat, or play games, while the junkies get high. Those watching TV in the corridor crank up the volume to compete with other TVs until the dorm is filled with a deafening cacophony.

Nights on weekends see Thai boxing on TV, and Thai love to watch and gamble on it. The noise level is extreme as they get very excited, a rare chance
for them to blow off steam. Simultaneously, the casinos in the buildings run games and act as bookies.

Between 11:00 PM and midnight, the blue boys slowly make their way from room to room, ordering TVs off. Once in a while, Westerners pay extra to watch movies all night, depending on what videos the guards have smuggled in.

As prisoners fall asleep, lady-boys (transsexuals) slip under the covers of shared beds in the corridors and quietly satisfy their masters. Farang night-owl types who relish the peace and privacy usually will read or listen to music deep into the night.

The Thai madmen in their chaotic cell grow calm in slumber, a brief respite from their afflictions. Last, the gamblers succumb to drowsiness, and shelve their dreams of easy money until the next session.

Six hours pass, and the cycle begins again.

The Editor’s Arsenal

U
nfortunately, our magazine did not do anywhere near as well as we had hoped. The
Bang Kwang Times
, advertised as “the only magazine in the world smuggled out to subscribers,” disappointed us. It had a substantial audience; the problem was that only two of them paid for it. Our “samizdat” publication was easy to steal. One of our fellow prisoner’s relatives received copies and then posted it on the Internet in the United Kingdom. We did not bother trying to stop it, as it was likely a futile struggle.

Jonathan, my best friend and fellow editor of the
Times
, is a Brit. Rob, a good friend of Jonathan’s, worked at a post office in London. Rob loved it the moment he read the first issue, and he gave his all for the
BKT
. With all the equipment at his disposal, he copied it in color (as many cartoons and illustrations were tinted), then mailed it off to subscribers and potential customers we had selected to try to drum up business. His strategically perfect position at the post office made the whole thing possible, effectively eliminating printing and mailing costs.

We published it every two months—six times a year. It contained all the weirdness we observed in prison, as well as some of the bizarre stuff going on
in Thailand. We bribed a couple of guards to get it out and post it. The system, with an occasional hiccup, worked fairly well.

After the first two issues, production followed a rough pattern.

Jon and I chose subjects and wrote short articles. Regular “features” became established, and we created a standard format.

The corruption and insider scandals reported by the Thai press were a never-ending source of material for our satire and mockery. A wide variety of strange goings-on inside the prison made subjects easy to come by. Two fellow prisoners—Tin, a Malaysian, and Steve, a Brit—were both gifted artists, and they earned extra money to feed their heroin habits by supplying the magazine with amusing cartoons.

The front page banner had the
BKT
logo in one corner (British and United States flags crossed, with prison bars sketched in between them) and a table of contents in the lower right hand corner. The cartoons also became regular contributions. One series concerned the true adventures of a mangy Thai cat that roamed the prison and lost a testicle from a primitive partial neutering by prisoners. Another cruel strip allowed Steve to vent his petty grievances and describe the many warts and antics of our fellow captives. Unsurprisingly, most were not amused.