A Secret History of the Bangkok Hilton (12 page)

I spent many nights, tossing and turning on the floor because the weather was too hot and the light was on all the time. Once I was unfortunate enough to sleep opposite the toilet while a cellmate was taking a dump. He was urinating at the same time and he ‘sprayed’ a little bit on my feet. We ended up having a fist fight.

Inmates with business acumen make money through various ventures such as loan-sharking, gambling and lotteries. Each of us was allowed to use up to 200 baht in coupons a day but I saw many freely using cash. Although I didn’t know how much cash was being smuggled into Bang Kwang, I reckon it must be in the millions, given that heavy gamblers incurred hundreds of thousands of baht in debt. Gamblers who were on a losing streak had to come up with money quickly or else they would feel the house’s wrath when ‘samurais’ were paid to beat or stab them. Most of the samurai were drug addicts and dealers who would take any dirty job for money to fund their addiction. They usually worked for the drug lords in Bang Kwang.

These drug lords could conduct their business with ease, especially when their merchandise was being sent in on the back of a singha (lion) or prison guard. They use this nickname for guards because the symbol of the Corrections Department is a male deity riding a lion.

The gangs in charge of their respective buildings collect money from the operators of illegal businesses to bribe the guards who, in return, tell them in advance when the next raid will take place so all trace of illegal activities and prohibited items are hidden away. However, my treasured collection of clippings on miscarriages of justice was seized and burnt during a raid as the authorities feared that I would use the information against the prison. I had hoped to use them to raise awareness of flaws in the justice system.

Whenever the guards pushed lock-up time back by one hour, I knew there would be an execution that day. In the sleeping quarters, just a wire mesh in the middle separated the cells of death row inmates from the others. I saw what happened on the other side when prison guards came to pick up inmates who would soon be shot dead. It must be torture for them to be fettered all the time. Toilets in their cells broke because they accidentally dropped their shackles on them time after time. That says something about how heavy the chains are.

They had different ways to distract themselves from thinking about their impending doom: meditation, study, music or drugs. Few I met accepted their fate or appeared to be willing to die.

I remember a serial rapist-murderer who proclaimed while being collected, ‘I killed four and they get only one (pointing at himself) so I win.’ He startled me with his absence of remorse as he cockily walked to his death.

Many buckled from fear so much they couldn’t walk properly. On my side of the quarters, there were those who placed bets on who would go next. They followed the progress of death row cases through the grapevine. Those convicted of serious charges or repeat offenders were unlikely to be spared.

While I had to fight off evils and temptations around me, an inner hell was brewing. The bitterness I felt from the injustice of my situation and being disowned by friends and family consumed me. The longer I spent behind bars, the less frequent their visits became. My relatives resented me for bringing shame on the family name while friends wanted nothing to do with me for fear the police would suspect they were drug dealers.

My immediate family lived in Trang, some 800km from the prison, so I couldn’t blame them for not visiting me enough. I couldn’t help but pity myself though when I saw the families of foreigners who flew across oceans to meet their sons. No guards ever demanded money from me. The fact that I rarely received visitors told them I didn’t have a baht to spare.

Gradually I channelled my energy from grieving into my own survival. Inmates in my position usually either become servants to drug lords or resort to dishonest means to line their own pockets. I opted to make others feel indebted to me by doing them favours and, in return, I lived on their tokens of gratitude. I taught the Thai language to hill tribe people from the north, young Muslims whose mother tongue is Yawa as well as several Nigerians. I was assigned to escort inmates who were called out to see visitors. I built friendships with them and they kindly gave me some leftovers, as did the guards who noticed that I was trying to make myself useful. The inmates I met were not all evil—well, not all the time at least. They knew how to be grateful and a giver when they were shown kindness first. I also played a pivotal role in a campaign to raise the literacy rate among the prisoners through non-formal education.

My track record eventually earned me a ‘job’ at the prison hospital. There I took care of patients and assisted the doctor in performing minor medical procedures. It was safer there than an ordinary ward. The downside was the strong smell of disinfectant and the sight of dying patients. I never really got used to that.

Many times I stepped on puddles of faeces and urine left by terminally ill patients who had lost bladder control among other bodily and mental functions. They went back and forth between Jekyll and Hyde. During lucid moments, they thanked the doctors and me profusely for our care. They poured out to us how bitter they felt at being forgotten. In moments of great pain, they threw tantrums and became very aggressive towards us. Some suffered so much, they cursed everyone until the last minutes of their lives as they faded into oblivion. Seeing how people decayed physically and mentally was deeply saddening.

Mentally unstable inmates were put in a separate section. Some of them liked to cut their own stomachs or arms or randomly attack people. The really aggressive ones were chained to building columns when the section was full.

When I felt like I was about to lose my mind, I talked to the doctor. Our sessions fell into a routine of me retelling my ordeal and him being condescending and giving me strong medicine. He said, ‘You may be innocent, as you insist, but can you be sure about what you did in your past life? You might have been a drug dealer who got away back then and karma is making you pay now.’

I stopped seeing him eventually. I was sick of the way he dealt with me. His drugs also made me feel drowsy. In hindsight, he probably thought of me as another nut and, therefore, not to be taken seriously.

I was there when riots broke out in Bang Kwang. I can’t get out of my head images of an inmate who was shot dead in the face with his left eye hanging out of its socket or the body of a man beaten to death who turned grotesquely purple. I also remember putting bloody and bruised bodies into coffins or bags with my bare hands. They are not my worst nightmares, however.

The worst come from seeing the guards beat up wounded rioters even as they lay defenseless on the hospital beds. They behaved like barbaric hunters going after their helpless prey while yelling profanities. The rioters pleaded for mercy by putting their hands in prayer and waied them but the guards were after blood. The doctor in charge that day was disgusted by them as was I, but we were too afraid to try to stop them. The rioters were left in worse condition than when they had been carried in and the doctors and I had to clean up the mess. We knew they were troublemakers but they didn’t deserve to be attacked like that.

Many times I had to sleep in the same room as a corpse or two because nobody came to pick up the deceased at weekends or during long holidays. The cloths that covered them couldn’t prevent the strong smell that filled the room. When the guards wanted to collect fingerprints from the bodies for their records, I was ordered to massage and pry open the clutched hands of the dead.

Aids has claimed many lives there too. It spread through sexual contact and shared needles. Back then inmates died of cholera too, which could have been prevented if clean water had been available. Deaths as a result of murders or fights rarely happened. Some say if you are overexposed to scenes of cruelty, suffering or things that would normally make you cringe, you become desensitized to them. I disagree.

The depressing air of the hospital made me think about what I could look forward to in my own life. Pin was in regular contact over the years but no amount of meaningful conversation during her visits could qualify me as her father. Nok kept in touch with me by letter but our correspondence became infrequent. The only purpose in life I had was to build the family that I should have done 20 years before. I owed Pin two parents. She was already a grown woman but I hoped it was better late than never.

The Supreme Court carried out a verification of the hotel where Amnat claimed the first two undercover stings took place. It turned out neither room 423, where he said Nok and I counted banknotes, nor the restaurant where he said his men met us existed. The High Court ruled there was not enough evidence to support the existence of the first two buying stings. When it came to the third one, however, it ruled that it had happened as described in the arrest reports Nok and I had signed. The same sentence was upheld for both of us. The case was finalised in November 1986.

Our sentence was commuted to 40 years by a mass royal pardon. Nok and I received second cuts in our sentences through individual royal pardons. Now we each had four years left. By 2003, we would be eligible for parole.

I asked the guard in charge of the building I was in to help me with my parole application but he refused saying that as a drug offender I was not entitled to it. I argued that I had been denied equal treatment in sentence reduction from the beginning and my fate was up to the parole commission to decide, not him.

In a letter written on my behalf by my daughter, I summarised my case and stated that I was eligible for parole. I dictated the gist of the letter to Pin over weeks of visits. Later, I was told a letter from the prime minister’s office was sent to the Corrections Department, asking about my parole. A few prison officials came and asked me what I had done but I denied having any knowledge of the letter. I was eventually granted parole in 2003.

In my experience, drug offenders have either been excluded from mass pardon or are given smaller sentence reductions than other prisoners. Many of those who were jailed after me got out before I did. A drug dealer is more despicable than a murderer or a rapist, I suppose. I had it worse than anyone because I served time for a crime I didn’t commit.

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that the severity of the punishment should be in proportion to the crime but giving criminals a chance to get out and redeem themselves is equally important. I’m not sure the lawmakers see it that way. There are those who are the personification of evil in Bang Kwang but there are those who don’t deserve to be there too. Two decades behind bars is interminable. How can anyone expect a person to start over after serving that length of time?

I walked out with nothing much. Most of my belongings had been either confiscated or lost. My fellow inmates contributed to my ‘departure fund’. Several who owed me fees for writing petitions for royal pardons finally coughed up.

Sitting on a kerb, I shivered under the midday sun. It was 2003 and finally the Big Tiger had released what was left of me from its fangs but I was so damaged I couldn’t feel any joy at all. At an age when I should have been planning my retirement, I was starting from scratch—and with very bleak prospects. I felt utterly hopeless and just wanted to vanish. My mind was engulfed by worries about the future. My biggest fear was that I would become an old person who depended on others for survival. My punishment had not ended.

Things were not as bad as they seemed, however. A prison guard offered me a room in his house for a while and helped me to find a cheap place later. I got a job almost right away when a fellow inmate recommended me for a job as a clerk in one his cousin’s language schools.

I was released at the time of the War on Drugs launched by former premier Thaksin Shinawatra. It resulted in the deaths of more than 2,200 drug suspects during its first two months, so you could understand why I was anxious. Given my conviction, I feared a policeman would pick me off the street and charge me with another bogus drug offence. Or they could just shoot me dead and blame it on self-defence during a gunfight so they could add one more to the scoreboard. I don’t think I was being paranoid given my experience with the police and the fact that they stood to be rewarded with three baht for each
yaba
pill they ‘confiscated’. I decided to live on the outskirts of Bangkok, where things are quieter and cheaper.

At our reunion, Pin said I looked even thinner than the last time we met. I wasted no time and asked her to live with me, telling her I would support her through higher education. She agreed and said goodbye to Nhe and her uncle Athit, who always introduced her as one of his own. Her childhood friends don’t know that Nok and I are her biological parents. Besides always wearing hand-me-downs, Pin said she had a normal childhood and had no recollection of her time behind bars.

The next step was to get Nok out. I visited her to ask if she wanted my help in getting parole. We were co-defendants and had received the same sentence reductions so she was eligible for parole. It turned out she wasn’t aware of her entitlement and didn’t even seem to care.

She said, ‘How’s life on the outside a better choice for me? I’m too old to start over. Here, at least, I have food and a roof over my head. I’ve lived here this long, so I don’t mind more. Please just let me be.’

When I told her that Pin lived with me and that she was more than welcome to join us, her face showed she was having second thoughts.

Nok and I kept in touch through letters but our correspondence gradually became infrequent. I wanted to ask her how she got by but the rules at her prison prohibited her from telling me. She wasn’t allowed to talk about what was going on there. She claimed later she couldn’t even tell me that life in there was bearable and she watched lot of TV to kill time. It took about a month for her letters to reach me as letter screening and writing rules are taken seriously at her prison.

After she was released on parole, I learnt that she went to stay at a temple in Nonthaburi and entered the monastic life. I thought she wanted to live the rest of her life there to offset her bad karma. She eventually decided to join us and maintain her spirituality through praying and meditation. I know she didn’t want to miss out on a chance to be with her daughter.