The Cocaine Diaries: A Venezuelan Prison Nightmare (6 page)

I was delighted by the chance to speak English. ‘What’s the story here? I’ve been sat cuffed to a staircase for four days with no food and been abused.’ (I didn’t say how, exactly, and wouldn’t to any living soul in that country.)

‘I know,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s Venezuela.’

We stepped into a room – an informal court. The judge and lawyers, dressed in casual clothes, sat around tables for what was a preliminary hearing. The interpreter spoke to a big black woman who was introduced as my lawyer. I didn’t understand her words, but through the interpreter she was dismissing my complaints about my treatment in the drug-squad HQ with a wave of her hand, as if to say, ‘You committed a crime, tough.’

‘Sorry for your troubles,’ said the interpreter, his voice shaky. He seemed more nervous about the court case than I was and looked like he was going to start crying.

The preliminary hearing, which went on for about 15 minutes, was functional. I sat there and the interpreter spoke to me from time to time. I felt like a fly on the wall. I had to remind myself that it was me they were talking about – it felt like someone else. To pass the time, I watched the female judge. She was stunning, with luscious dark skin and sheen jet-black hair, and she was dressed in tight jeans. She looked like a Miss Venezuela and reminded me why the South American country has racked up the highest number of Miss World winners.

‘If you plead guilty you will get eight years,’ said the interpreter after the lawyer spoke with him. He had a look of shock on his face, as if he was going to do the time himself. He wasn’t hardened to the ways of the Venezuelan justice system, I guessed. ‘If you plead not guilty, you’ll get eight years and maybe even up to fifteen,’ he added.

I pleaded guilty. Eight years was a long time. Fifteen was worse. Here I was on the far side of the world, in a country where I didn’t speak the language and which wasn’t picking up any human rights medals for its treatment of prisoners.

* * *

Later, back at the drugs HQ, I was brought back to what had been home for the past four days: the staircase with the grated steel steps. My arm was cuffed back to the banister. There was still no food, only the odd cup of water brought by one or two cops who seemed more human than the others.

Hours passed and I looked up through a window high on the wall above the offices. It gave me a rectangular peephole out to the sky. I saw it was pitch black outside. All the activity with the guards had died down. There was just one cop seated at a desk in front of me, dozing, with his chin resting on his chest. My mind started going into escape mode. I took a bit of the coke from my stash with my free hand, tapping it from the talc bottle onto my knee and hoovering it up with my nose. I wanted to stay up all night and be alert for the best chance to break free. I asked the guard who’d been dozing at the desk on duty if I could use the toilet.

‘
Baño, baño,
’ (‘Toilet, toilet’) I said. It was just about the only Spanish word I’d learned. I’d use the little sliver of soap in my pocket I’d taken from a previous toilet visit. I took it out at the sink and lathered it on my wrist with some water, thinking I could easily slither out of the cuffs later on. The plan didn’t work. On the way out of the cubicle, the guard put the cuffs on tighter than ever. I felt my hands would turn blue because of the blood cut off. He led me back to the stairs and cuffed me to the banister again. I sat there throughout the night trying to ease my hands out, like a failed Harry Houdini. So much for my plan to flee, stowing away on a ship and drifting off into the Caribbean to the Atlantic and beyond and jumping ship in Cape Town or somewhere.

* * *

I woke up the next morning, wrecked. My wrists were covered in scrapes and marks from the cuffs. I was glad I had a long shirt on so the guards wouldn’t see I’d been trying to get out and do a runner. One of them stood in front of me, talking. With a couple of movements of his arm I made out we were going somewhere. I knew it was time to go. The cuffs came off. I stood up and grabbed the plastic bag containing my only worldly possessions: the Irish rugby shirt, the toothbrush, the few toiletries, the prized ‘talc’ powder of 300-odd grams of coke. Where I was going I had no idea. But I wasn’t sorry to leave. Anywhere was better than here.

* * *

In a coastal town we whizzed through narrow side streets, past run-down colonial buildings with peeled paint and broken plaster. I kept looking at buildings as we passed, thinking, ‘Is this the prison? Is this the prison?’ One had three floors with barred windows. I was sure it was the jail, but we drove right past it.

The jeep jerked to a sharp left and we pulled into a dusty courtyard. I stepped out with the young soldier. The yard was surrounded by little rooms with solid-looking doors painted in a dirty red, about 15 of them. They looked a bit like chalets in a holiday camp. I was sure this was to be my next home.

We walked past a group of youths dressed in shorts and T-shirts sitting on a path. They were handcuffed to each other. The guards lurched me forward into an office inside a building. An enormous fan whirred lazily above. It looked like the chopper blades of an antique helicopter turning in slow motion, stirring sticky air. A fat guard sat asleep in a chair, his head slumped forward; another sat at a desk shuffling papers.

One of the guards in charge spoke to me, pointing at the floor. I sat down on the concrete. After about half an hour, it was time to go through the red tape again. I held out my sweaty palms while one of the younger officers ran an ink roller back and forth over them. I planted my hands down on a sheet of white paper. I was getting good at this. The guard pushed a biro into my hand. I signed a squiggle at the bottom. A digital camera was hooked up to a computer with a chunky monitor (I was back on the set of
Kojak
again).
Snap.
The guards led me back outside. I had thought this was the prison. I was wrong again.

We soon sped through more side streets and came to a halt in another yard. We drove through big double doors. Inside, two guards stood behind a small counter: one a big woman who filled out her National Guard uniform; the other a huge fat fucker, a dark-skinned
moreno
.

The woman, who had a horrible grin, poked around my toiletry bag. She pulled out the bottle of talcum powder. My heart started racing. She popped off the lid and lifted it to her nose for a sniff. Satisfied it was only talc, she screwed the lid back on. Thank God.

The cop led me by the arm into a toilet to the right. We squeezed into a little cubicle. Oh no. Don’t let it happen again. I tensed. My stomach tightened. I was sure now all the men in the olive-green uniforms were bugger boys. The guard slipped his fat hands into a pair of white surgical gloves. He then reached around for my belt and my trousers dropped around my ankles. Jesus. He pushed my upper body over and my head was hovering over the toilet bowl. I could feel my mind start to drift off to another place, to hide. I felt something slip into my rear end and poke about. What an invasion. But it was over quick. I heard the tight snap of the gloves coming off. The guard had only penetrated with his finger and was probably looking to see whether I had money hidden there. I’d later learn that was where the inmates stashed their cash, hidden up their ass in a condom. I stood back up straight. Fatso stood there giving my manhood a good look over. I pulled my trousers up, and he put his hands in my pockets and fished out a 50,000-bolo note (about ten euro), which I didn’t even know was there. He stuffed it in his own pocket.

Back out at the counter after the anal exploration, the guards signed me over.
Señor irlandés. El gringo. Droga mula.
Property of Macuto jail.

I’D NEVER REALLY TAKEN DRUGS. JUST A BIT OF COKE HERE AND THERE AT parties. Or off the back of a pub toilet with one of me mates. Only the odd weekend. I enjoyed the buzz of it. But I don’t have an addictive personality, so I could walk away from coke and not look at it again for weeks.

In the early to mid-2000s in Dublin the place was awash with the stuff. The Irish economy was booming. The Celtic Tiger, they called it. Anyone with a half-decent job enjoyed a flash lifestyle. Short weekend hops around the world. Paris in spring, even Paddy’s Day in New York. A holiday home or two in Spain, Turkey, Bulgaria or whichever country was on the up and where a ‘bargain’ home could be found. Sales of new cars soared. Mercs and Beemers rolled off car lots. Upmarket department stores like Brown Thomas on Dublin’s Grafton Street heaved at the weekends. Shoppers nosed for big labels. Prada. Dolce & Gabbana. Take your pick. The pubs in Dublin city were teeming at night, too, revellers partying Monday to Sunday.

The excessive lifestyle didn’t just mean goods and booze. It also meant coke. One newspaper story doing the rounds ran a yarn about a college study that found 100 per cent of banknotes in Ireland had traces of cocaine on them. The international press picked up on it. One paper had the witty headline ‘Snow Me the Money’. Anti-drugs folk seized on the finding and said the cocaine problem in Ireland was an ‘epidemic’, pointing out just 65 per cent of dollar notes in the US had traces of cocaine. When hounded by the press for comment, one Irish minister came out and denied there was a problem. The funny thing, though, was that the Irish police, the Garda, said that convictions for cocaine-related crimes were up fourfold on previous years while seizures were up 20 per cent.

The demand for coke was fuelling gangland crime, too. The front pages of the daily tabloids regularly splashed with a story about one gang member blowing away a rival criminal in battles over turf to sell coke in working-class Dublin suburbs.

Overall, it was a time in Ireland when most had spare cash in their pockets and were enjoying the good life. For many that meant doing a few lines of coke at the weekend. It was dirt cheap because so many were buying it. One opposition politician in Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament, lamenting about the epidemic in the country noted that a line of coke was cheaper than a pint.

Although I wasn’t rich myself in the boom years, I was doing all right. I had started running my own plumbing business. There was loads of work. I was doing mostly small stuff, such as house extensions. I had work lined up months in advance. I was a one-man band – just myself and a little van. I was living back home with my folks in Coolock, a working-class area in Dublin’s northside, sleeping in a box room. I had moved in to help my finances till I got the business properly moving. My expenses were low, so I had spare cash for a few lines of coke. When I did it it was mostly down in the local pub on a Friday night. Myself and a couple of other lads off the sites – brickies, sparks and so on – would chip in for a ‘one-er’. That was a small bag of coke that cost 100 euro. We used to call a fellow we knew and he’d be down in minutes in his car to deliver it. Deals on Wheels, we’d call it. Dressed in scruffy overalls, we then took turns going into the jacks, the toilets, for a sniff, scooping the coke from the bag with a key or a coin. You’d hear fellows giggling away in the next cubicle. Everyone was at it.

I was in my early 40s and living a carefree lifestyle. I had no real worries or anyone to look after but myself. I had two children from a former marriage, both in their mid-teens – my son, Daniel, and my daughter, Katie. I was making payments to their mother, my ex-wife, for their upkeep, of course, but the fact that they didn’t live with me meant I was a free man. I suppose many might see it as an immature lifestyle. Maybe it was. But I loved my children and they were very important to me. It wasn’t just the case that I’d help moneywise with their schooling and clothes; they would stay with me a lot, too. They loved being around their nana and granddad in the house and hanging out with their cousins who lived across the road, where my sister Sharon lived with her kids.

Then one day I got a call from Katie that would change that.

‘Da, can I go and live with you?’

‘Of course you can, but did something happen?’

‘I just want to move down to Dublin.’

I had divorced her mother many years ago. Katie had been living with her and her new husband in a house in the Midlands. I suspected from phone calls in the past that she wasn’t getting much space at home. So, reading between the lines, that’s why I thought she wanted to move out. She was a teenager and was pretty much saying she wanted a bit more freedom, which she said she wasn’t getting there. Nights out at local discos and that, I supposed.

‘Grand,’ I said.

The only problem was I now had to go and rent an apartment. I found a two-bed flat down in Coolock not far from the Cadbury’s chocolate factory. It cost me a grand a month. I had bills on top, too, and Katie’s upkeep to take care of when she moved in. It was great living with her, watching her grow into a woman. Her whole life ahead of her. Her dreams of being a hairdresser. Anyway, the apartment and everything weren’t a problem. The only other overheads I had were a personal loan of about 10,000 euro and 12,000 for a van I’d bought for the job. Work was flying, so it was all easy to cover.

Then the bubble burst. The economy plummeted. The headlines in the papers and on the telly were all about a property crash. It turned out the Irish hadn’t been rich after all – it was all credit, banks throwing money at people for years. Everyone knew, but no one had wanted to believe it at the time. Now billionaire property developers were dropping like flies. Houses that had once been homes but were now commodities to trade and make a ‘killing’ on were badly hit. Houses that had been bought for, say, 400,000 euro had now dropped to about half that value in real terms. Negative equity was rife. The whole economy had revolved around the artificial price of a house. The banks stopped lending. When the dust started to settle, it turned out they were one of the biggest culprits. One bank chief, it turned out, had given himself over 100 million euro in personal loans at one point from account holders’ money. It was all terrible.

Everyone started tightening their belts. House extensions, where I got most of my plumbing work, weren’t at the top of anyone’s list. My phone stopped ringing. Work dried up. My van sat in the parking space in my apartment block. ‘Paul Keany – Plumber’ it read on the side. Now it should have read ‘Paul Keany – Needs Work’.