Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (23 page)

The storm quieted with the thunder distant and no longer menacing, though the lightning continued to bathe the countryside in bursts of photo-flash light. A sudden gust of wind sent a shudder crashing against a wall; someone screamed, and Bruce and I both jumped.

An offensive miasma of ammonia tinged with bad gas pervaded the room.

Bruce and I shook our heads in unison. “Not again!”

“Somebody must ‘a been scared shitless.”

I laughed weakly at his lame witticism. It apparently did much worse damage than that.

One of the Thais was whimpering, and an awful smell emanated from one spot. Our amazement was total when the whimperer called to us, and said over and over “Dead, (he’s) dead; (he’s) dead… “

Sure enough, an old man in the bed next to the whimperer, was the color of wax, and starting to cool. His face was set in a grimace of pain or distaste, though which emotion one could not tell.

We roused the blue boys again with difficulty, but this time they refused to meet our eyes, and they kept their distance from us. More than twenty minutes passed before the guard responded, and his attitude was part disbelief, part terror.

The guard and blue boys shrank from us when we tried to engage them in polite banter, and they fled as soon as the message of the latest death had been conveyed. They had not the nerve to rob the dead a second time with us present, and the old man lay untouched.

We finished the bag of cookies and started in on a delicious banana bread cake that sat on the old man’s dresser. We agreed that there was no sense in letting insects or the blue boys eat it, and appropriated it to save our unexpected appetite.

Neither of us contemplated our strange urges, but simply flowed with them. We were ravenous, wide awake, filled with incredible energy, and
overwhelmed with an endorphin-rush. It was obvious our euphoria was related to the deaths.

We could not sleep, and we did not bother to try. I talked as we paced.

“Do you remember that old
Twilight Zone
episode; maybe it was on
Night Gallery
, about psychic vampires? Where they lived off dying people in a hospital?”

Bruce thought for a while. “Yeah, I think so, or something like it. I know what you mean. This is a really strange high.”

“Mmm Hmm. I feel like I’m feeding tonight.”

We laughed nervously with a distinct flavor of unease in it.

Eventually we tired, and lay down on our beds. I listened to the radio on my walkman and Bruce played a cassette tape on his. It was midnight before I turned off my radio and got ready for sleep. Bruce had earlier succumbed to slumber, and was snoring slightly.

A few hours later, I found myself groggy but awake for no apparent reason. I glanced over and saw Bruce in the neighboring bed, had also been awakened.

The noise of the storm had returned, less violent than before, but still loud and insistent. The ward was much cooler, even chilly. A sensation of indefinable ‘wrongness’ hovered, my senses demanding I exercise caution and simultaneously investigate the source of trouble.

A minute or two passed before I discovered what had interrupted my sleep. The bell downstairs rang out, announcing a death on the tuberculosis ward. The guard apparently would not answer and they rang the bell at random intervals, trying to rouse him. A few rings more, and sleep returned, lulled by the warmth of the bed, and the sighing of the wind.

Fortunately, neither of us needed medical care for the duration of our prison term there. It was clear the enmity we had earned would likely have been the death of us if we were out in the country somewhere.

That strange burst of energy gave us something we were better off without.

Notes

*
I had to fight the United States Embassy for my transfer back to an American prison. The United States Justice Department wanted me to do eight years in Thai prison, not four, and my hunger strike was to force them to take me back.

Held for Ransom

Y
ou knew from the moment you met him that he was extraordinary. Johann’s intelligence flashed from his blue-gray eyes and his craggy features, emphasizing the knowledge he had gained through hard experience. A shock of brown hair forever tousled, curling over his forehead, lent him a boyish air. Six foot three, gangly, in repose he exuded an aura of caged energy.

His genius lay in his art; pen and ink drawings were his chief mode of expression. His talent is of the kind that is enhanced by limitations, as a great haiku achieves enlightened insights transcending poetic strictures. When Johann was in Kondeo, he made a study of his torment in close confinement—interstitial landscapes of boxes, tunnels, and mazes of bars. All were rendered in blue ink—the only material at hand. He experimented with old tea bags, coffee dregs, the odd pigments, and tints of prison substances. These drawings were strangely reminiscent of the phases artists go through— Picasso’s ‘Blue Period,’ or Chagall’s flirtation with pastels.

He had mastered different mediums: watercolor, acrylic, oil, charcoal, and pastels. He had seen his art featured in a Viennese gallery and he had
admirers and collectors of sophistication, including a president of a major Austrian bank.

Johann’s ability as an artist was of the kind seen in a mere handful per generation and remarkable that it was appreciated in a place as self-absorbed as Bang Kwang Prison.

Whether he drew nymphs and satyrs frolicking in a sensual forest glade or convocations of demons, his work was consummately professional. Anyone that viewed it could not help but be impressed.

His art was so obviously valuable that even the tight-fisted Chinese Mafioso within the prison clamored for it, paying unheard of sums in the hundreds of dollars for a single picture.

In addition to this not inconsiderable source of income, Johann was lucky that his mother back in Austria steadfastly helped him. She sent him $500 a month in a place where the guards earned less than $100 over the same period.

To help him survive, she also sent a heavy parcel of food every month, its contents perfected by trial and error over the years. Sauces and pastas, dehydrated soups and mixes, dried fruits, a cornucopia of European culinary treats.

In spite of it all (or perhaps because of it, “found money,” and all that), Johann was eternally broke—the result of maintaining a heavy heroin addiction.

The majority of foreigners and natives alike (easily sixty percent of the prisoner population) had a habit with China White Number 4. Johann had plenty of company, and was unique only in that he managed to pay his debts. This was unlike many others who spent their days pleading with dealers to extend them more credit; to give them the poison that kept the horrific withdrawal symptoms at bay.

He, too, was often forced to engage in that curious, vicious dance of addict and dealer, played daily by thousands in the prison.

Sometimes the addict was fortunate enough to have valuable goods to pawn. Top quality Western clothes, tennis shoes, sun glasses, food parcels, electronics, jewelry. Anything and everything received from a junkie’s family and friends found itself pawed and fondled by covetous Africans who were careful never to taste the drug they sold.

In each building in Bang Kwang Prison, the Nigerians banded together and formed ‘cartels’ that set the price and weight of heroin doses, known as “bindles.” They’d buy three or four “houses” communally, to be used by the group as a place to stay during the day. These houses were small square areas, separated from each other by waist-high plywood partitions that were built against the wall of the dorm building. The row of houses was sheltered from the fierce sun by a long asbestos-tile roof, which also slanted off the dorm wall. The houses were furnished with chairs, lockers, an electrical outlet, and a propeller fan. The Nigerians made their houses into one large space lined with everyone’s lockers, and used by all—typically in groups of twenty or thirty Nigerians per building.

These places were kept dark with heavy canvas awnings hung over the entrance and sides for privacy. They had a cave-like feel to them, a gloomy ambience in keeping with their grim trade. Westerners called the places “Little Lagos,” after the commercial capital of Nigeria.

Throughout the day, like supplicants to some dread temple, junkies approached Little Lagos with their possessions. A “market price” would be established, which was always a pitiful fraction of an item’s retail cost. The junkie would try three or four dealers, hoping to get a better price. Eventually, he had face the fact that no better offer would be made, and, sometimes angry, more often sad or resigned; the belonging would be sold or pawned for heroin.

Those without goods to sell or pawn relied on credit extended based on their monthly stipends. Americans, British, French, Germans, and other Westerners received funds from their embassies, which were aware that
without assistance, their nationals would die. The amounts provided differed somewhat, but seldom exceeded $100 a month.

A carefully designed system of quiet extortion was practiced by the prison authorities—squeezing every possible penny from the farangs. The money, having to cover clothes, medicine, drinking water and food, toiletries, etc., was never sufficient. Drug addicts were reduced to extreme penury, often forced to choose between a drug fix and a meal. Naturally, the drug would win every time.

The funds would arrive at certain times, set by the visiting schedules of embassy personnel and the missionaries. Visiting days would see the gate into each building mobbed by hordes of dealers, awaiting the return of addicts with goodies and parcels. Often a junkie would face three or four dealers at once, each squabbling with the others over whatever their parcel or gift bags contained. All too frequently the junkie would leave the melee empty-handed, condemned to starve and suffer, still owing money to the dealers.

To avoid this fate, junkies would approach other Westerners on visiting days to carry back cartons of cigarettes or coffee (the main “currencies”) for them, bypassing the stripping inflicted by rapacious creditors.

In cases where they had nothing to pawn, and whose monthly funds had already been spent or promised several times over, addicts were forced into creative ruses.

Secretly approaching different dealers for dope on credit worked for a while, but the credit was quickly exhausted for most users’ habits. Some would carry around a forged letter supposedly ‘proving’ that more money was on the way from home, trying to beg for a loan.

Elaborate ‘sob stories’ would be crafted by addicts, begging for money or dope, and were tested on anyone willing to listen. This included other prisoners, the missionaries, friends, and relatives, both in person and through the mail. Of course, this relentless con-jobbing left the embassies and
missionaries very cynical, and made life difficult for everyone else who was legitimately trying to get a little help.

When all else failed, in absolute desperation, terrible depths of degradation were plumbed. Junkies sold sexual favors for a fix. Junkies acted as ‘mules’ by carrying dope up their rectum from the visiting room back to the buildings. Junkies stole everything not nailed down and guarded. Junkies sold things they had borrowed or did not own to naïve buyers. Junkies made family members believe their death by violence or illness was imminent without money. These and other sordid behaviors were commonplace.

Johann was fortunate enough in that he never hit rock bottom. Generally, he maintained a twenty dollar a day drug habit with his usage jumping to fifty or one-hundred dollar parties on ‘pay day.’

It was a rare month, however, that Johann did not have to sell some of his food parcel and scramble for money after having spent his monthly stipend. Debts were juggled, extended for months, keeping junkies in perpetual difficulty with cash. The agony of trying to make a clean break was beyond all but the ironwilled.

At the height of the dry season one year, temperatures regularly topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit for weeks on end, and the weaker prisoners collapsed and sometimes died of heat stroke. Johann had a streak of bad luck.

Usually, German missionaries received the money sent by Johann’s mother, and would do basic shopping for him, as well as such errands as buying art supplies or other requests.

This time, though, the two German women who regularly visited were both back in Germany with their husbands on their semi-annual vacations. Worse, the Austrian Embassy never came to the prison, relying on the missionaries to handle what little official business Johann might need to conduct.

The monthly money had not arrived, and Johann was frantic, as no one could explain why the Embassy did not answer his letters, and he had
overextended himself buying heroin the previous month. Creditors—made short-tempered by the heat, were demanding he pay up, and scoffed at his insistence that the money mysteriously had not arrived, believing he was merely defrauding them of payment … understandably so.

His entire food parcel had gone, every piece of art he owned was pawned, and all but the clothes on his back were security for loans. Johann had ransacked his house for things to cash in, but to no avail. Not a single item remained that could bring more than a dollar.