Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (18 page)

The throng rushed by the main office in the factory building, heading directly for us. The frontrunners of the multitude babbled happily when they spotted Kwai’s body. They raced towards his corpse, energizing the rest of them. The noise of the frenzied bunch of sightseers finally woke the guard in the shack.

Stray wisps of hair, unkempt from his sleep, framed a face contorted in shock and disbelief. He sat bolt upright, staring wildly about at the mob that was materializing on every side of him. He took in these apparitions, slack-jawed; then caught a glimpse of the pool of blood spread out, bathing Kwai. Bug-eyed, jowls wobbling madly, he was a caricature of surprise—pure Chaplin. Jon and I, despite the circumstances, broke out laughing at the sight.

The press of bodies was soon too great to be contained between the trough and the wall of the dorm. They milled about, shoving and pushing each other to get a better view of the crime scene.

We hurriedly rolled our belongings up in the blanket and pushed our way to the water cistern abutting the prison wall in a corner of the square. It was opposite the dorm, on the same side as the trough, a basketball court-length away from it. We were still struggling through the crowd when the guards and their prisoner reached our spot.

The Samurai-in-training, dripping gore, passed an arm’s length away from us in the loose grip of his captors. Up close he was a slight figure, dressed in crimson-drenched rags, dwarfed by those holding him. He held his head up proudly. The aura he projected was that of a conquering hero; a man glorying in his Warholic ‘fifteen minutes of fame.’ His fierce gaze never deviated, locked on a vision in the distance only he could see. We extricated ourselves from the sweaty horde and gratefully put our backs against the high wall.

The paunchy guard, desperate to avoid appearing derelict in his duties, rushed out of his shack and plunged into the mob. He put on a passable show of anger, making as if to ‘apprehend’ the miscreant. His failure to contribute anything was all too apparent; his superiors brushed him aside without a second glance.

The apprentice Samurai and his guards reached Kwai, the guards motioning to the blue boys for room. They jumped to push back the rabble, and our vision of the scene was temporarily obscured.

It is standard police procedure in Thailand to have a confessed criminal reenact the crime for the authorities. They performed the same ritual, a reflex habit. The Samurai obliged the guards, and a camera was duly produced to record the mummery. Snapshots were taken as he was led slowly through the sequence of events. His recreation of the crime was macabre; an eerie one-man replay of the murder we had just witnessed. The apprentice seemed remote from the proceedings, his movements slow, robotic. Whether he felt a lethargy induced by the end of the adrenalin rush, or true indifference was impossible to guess.

As the bizarre modeling show started to wind down, the Building Chief made his entrance with all the pomp he could muster, flanked by a dozen guards. He turned his portliness to good advantage, moving with magisterial dignity, substantial rather than just fat. The crowd hushed, the Chief surveying the scene with detached calm.

He spotted the Samurai gang, whose smooth and confident arrival had preceded his own by only few minutes. We were astonished by their cheek. To dare to stand there, coldly staring down at the brains they had bashed out of a man still warm!

Our astonishment morphed into shock. The Chief casually asked the Samurai accomplices to step forward, and they did so without hesitation. The Chief—far from delivering the stern rebuke we expected, smiled at them, and actually shook their hands! Jon and I stared at them with loathing and disbelief. The Thais, however, were gleeful, close to applause.

In a booming voice, the Chief announced a sentence of thirty days in the ‘Box’ for the apprentice, with no punishment at all for the others. I could not believe my ears. I repeated it three or four times until one of our Thai neighbors confirmed that, yes, indeed, the apprentice had received this ludicrously lenient punishment for murder. It was the equivalent of receiving a twenty dollar fine for running over a group of schoolchildren in a crosswalk.

The Boxes were three cells built in the back corner of the building’s walls, another forty feet away from the bathing trough behind the guard shack. They were six feet long, three feet wide, and five feet high—oddly shaped concrete coffins.

In the hot season, to be locked in the Box was often a death sentence, as a prisoner was baked alive as the cement absorbed the furnace heat of the sun. In the cool season, which had just begun, the Thais considered it little more than an annoyance. Without further ceremony, a troop of blue boys escorted the apprentice to the Box, who scooted in unassisted.

The Chief went back to his office, his entourage in tow, the signal that the show was over. The crowd slowly dissipated into knots and clumps of individuals, their mood unmistakably jovial.

Kwai had been fairly well-liked. He had done nothing wrong. He had been ruthlessly murdered. His killers had confessed to the deed; yet, they had been all but pardoned, practically lauded for the sordid crime.

By comparison, any Thai guilty of stealing even something as small as a piece of candy received five or ten strikes with a heavy bamboo cane on their legs and ass. This invariably left the offender bleeding, and made their every motion an agony for weeks.

A month in the Box was a travesty—a grotesque mockery of justice. It was inexplicable, and to those who liked Kwai, monstrous.

Why the apprentice tried to flee to Building 4, as we later learned, remained a minor unsolved mystery. He had burst through the gate guard-room, and the guard, playing checkers with a blue boy, thought him a victim fleeing attackers. They did not bother interrupting their game to pursue him. He was eventually brought back by a guard who grabbed him for being out of bounds, and belatedly noticed he was soaked with blood.

Kwai’s body was trampled by prisoners and guards alike. Not the slightest effort was made to keep the scene from being destroyed, much less to keep it pristine for an investigation. Obviously, there would be no investigation.

One of the guards ordered the body removed, and five blue boys roughly wrapped up the corpse in a sheet and dragged it onto a cart to be taken to the hospital to await the coroner. Another group of blue boys washed away the blood and gore.

Within an hour of their first appearance, the throng had dispersed, and no trace of the crime remained.

Jonathan and I walked back to our spot, stunned into speechlessness by the outcome of things. We numbly set up our camp by the dorm again, filled with outrage. We could not begin to guess at the reason for such perversity.

We did not remain ignorant of the cause of Kwai’s death for long. Shortly after, we had finished listlessly picking at a bag of fried rice for lunch, when Singh—a portly little Indian so fond of gossip (a prison version of a town crier), wandered by. For the price of a cigarette and a cup or two of tea, he was delighted with the opportunity to tell us the tale.

It so happened that the Assistant Building Chief loved betting on Thai boxing matches—along with the other sixty million of his countrymen addicted to the sport. Kwai had allowed the Chief a generous line of gambling credit. When he exhausted that credit, he was forced to pay cash, or not bet at all. When his money ran out, he brought in gold jewelry, including some of his wife’s pieces he filched from her dresser drawer.

The Assistant Chief was certain his luck would eventually change. This belief cost him his worldly possessions.

It was not long before his wife discovered the jewelry was missing, and in a rage demanded he get the items back immediately, or else. What precisely might happen if things came to the ‘or else’ was unclear, but Thai women are notorious for cutting off their husbands’ and boyfriends’ penises while they sleep if they are gravely offended. The Assistant Chief decided
that
was a bet he had rather not take. Instead, he explained the situation to Kwai, asking for some kind of repayment plan that included the return of his wife’s jewelry.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the jewelry was long gone. Kwai had smuggled it out of the prison and gave it to his wife, as well as most of the money. She was a spendthrift and had blown her husband’s winnings on fancy clothes and wild parties. Before Kwai and the Assistant Chief could work out a solution, disaster struck.

Suspecting he was too gutless to take care of things to her satisfaction, the Assistant Chief ‘s wife had secretly gone to the Building Chief, insisting he resolve things in her favor. After all, it was just a dispute involving a prisoner, someone so far beneath her socially that it did not need to be given a thought.

The Chief agreed, and to calm the distraught woman, he promised her jewelry would be returned in a day or two. This rash oath was the cause of the death of a man. When the Chief made inquiries and discovered the jewelry no longer existed, he exploded in fury. By giving his word to his assistant’s wife, the Chief was liable to replace the gold out of his own pocket, if necessary.

The expedient solution was to seize Kwai’s belongings to offset any expenses of the Chief. With luck, he might profit from it.

It was the Thai horror of confrontation that made his decision a fatal one. Rather than endure embarrassing protests and anger from a man of means wrongfully deprived of his property, it was less troublesome just to kill him. The Chief had a quick chat with the head Samurai, and the casino owner’s fate was sealed. A new trainee wanting to join the Samurai was given his initiation task. His success in murdering Kwai earned him membership into that gang of psychopaths.

The dead man’s room and lockers were plundered by blue boys working at the behest of the Chief. They provided a substantial quantity of valuables, easily ten times the Chief ‘s debt.

Singh, who was accurate most of the time, said the Samurai’s fee was modest. They took the job for 250 baht (ten dollars) in cash, a box of a dozen stale donuts sitting on the Chief ‘s desk at the time, and the right to rob the Nigerians of dope and cash that month without repercussions.

When Eddie Broke the Bank

‘E
ddie’ had used so many aliases he had forgotten his own name, or so he claimed. He was balding, bearded, bespectacled, in excellent physical condition, and a Frenchman. He was an intellectual who nevertheless gave the impression he had led an active life—a minor paradox. Nothing was known about his case and only fragments of his former existence had been discovered, despite the best efforts of devious and resourceful prison gossips.

Vague rumors, never confirmed, claimed he was a former Army man, a player in the last days of the French-Algerian colonial adventure. These tales described him as a gunrunner or mercenary in Francophone Africa.

The one slender fact known was a tidbit the French Embassy let slip. He was wanted to face charges in France for crimes committed in Africa— charges serious enough that he was in no hurry to sign the Prisoner Transfer Treaty and go home.

He was the best chess player in Bang Kwang, no small feat as many people there could play a decent game. He was faultlessly polite, spoke English well, and his combination of dry humor and sang froid made him an agreeable companion, though he was essentially a loner. Anyone sensitive to
psychological subtleties felt that great depths of knowledge and character were concealed beneath his genially bland facade.

Nobody suspected Eddie might be a gambler. His money situation— yet another mystery, was apparently sufficient for his survival with a modicum of comfort. Whether he had the means to support a gambling habit, who could say?

Thus when he paid the hundred baht fee to the guard to sleep in the dorm corridor one night, a number of farang eyebrows were raised. The only reasons a farang might elect to spend a night out of the cells were to have sex with a lady-boy or to gamble in the casino. Knowing Eddie, the former reason was out of the question, while the latter was merely improbable.

One of the main revenue generators for prison officials, the ‘casino’ was controlled by the Thai-Chinese. Gambling is illegal in Thailand, though it is a vice common throughout Asia. ‘Old Asia Hands’ all swear it is the source of major grief to those of Chinese descent, much like alcohol is for the Russians and Irish. The strict ban bears this up, as do the observations of those who have spent time in the Far East. Fortunes changed hands in these games in the prison, and the authorities made certain to get their share.

Chinese from Hong Kong and Mainland China, Taiwanese, Malaysian Chinese, Thai Chinese, and Singaporeans were the most addicted patrons of the casino, though Asians from every country played occasionally. Few Westerners ever joined in, most having heroin habits that precluded any other expensive vice.

Every building has a cell set aside as a gambling den. Building 2 is said to host the games with the highest stakes. More than eighty percent of the foreigners—Westerners, Africans, and Asians, lived in #2 (not including the Nigerians, who were spread out among the buildings by the authorities). The Orientals in particular were wealthy, many of them tied in to Asian drug gangs, triads, and cartels.