I kept saying ‘within six months I will be out’, but the more I repeated it, the more I began to doubt my own words. It’s not the despair that kills you: it’s the hope.
3. Into the Darkness
This is a sound you will only ever hear in prison, and one you can never forget. It is the sound of defeat, of loss and helplessness, of utter despair. It is followed shortly afterwards by the grinding of metal on metal as the key to your destiny turns. At this point all control over your life is suspended and you are a prisoner.
5. Into Hell
I knew from time spent in British prisons that you generally only ended up in serious fights if you got into debt, allowed yourself to be victimised or there was something ‘not right’ about you—maybe you were a sex offender or grass. I knew it was going to be slightly different here, as it had already been forcefully explained to me that being a foreigner meant you were regarded as a cash cow and therefore likely to be a target of extortion or robbery.
My mother was a constant worry, with her poor health and now the added stress of my situation. It weighed heavily on my mind.
6. C Wing, García Moreno Prison
So that was my welcome to C wing: riots, a boss murdered and making an enemy of a Colombian sicario, all within a week. And it was starting to seem that I was looking at a sentence of at least 12 years—some people had even suggested it might be 25 years. At this rate, I wouldn’t even last six months.
7. Just Another Day in Paradise
I tried to set a routine, which I have always found passes the time best in prison. Occupy the hours and the days go a lot more quickly.
I had discovered that Arthur, the old boy, was a keen player of cribbage, a card game I had been taught by my father. When I was a child, helping him on a building site in my school holidays, we would play in the pub at lunchtimes. I didn’t get to play games with my father that often so it meant a lot. I remember a police officer telling my dad to get me out of there one lunchtime, thus stopping our game, and me resenting the police after that.
Often the newcomers, particularly the Europeans, would rush to get a good suntan and end up making themselves very ill.
Ideally you should be in perfect health when you started your sentence, with brilliant teeth and 20/20 vision. People who had been in the prison a long time explained to me that they were generally OK for the first three or four years, but after that their health deteriorated.
I tried not to count the days, weeks and months too much as that is a sure way to send yourself crazy in prison. Time becomes meaningless unless you are nearing the end of your sentence or a parole date. I banned calendars from my cell but it is quite satisfying, to know you are one day nearer to hopefully going home if you can only survive.
8. Whisky Galore
They were in the walls, floors, ceilings, doors, fixtures and fittings, furniture, electronics, drains, absolutely everywhere. You have to remember of course that these people were professional smugglers well used to concealing ton upon ton of blocks of cocaine in all manner of spaces.
If you think about it, within the same prison there were people involved in the drug trafficking business from the very bottom to the very top. There were members of mafias from Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Albania, Africa and Britain. We had cartel bosses and capos, captains of boats and planes, mules. Nationalities from all corners of the globe were represented, nearly all of whom knew people hidden away in those remotest corners all wanting to buy that crystalline analgesic white powdery substance: cocaine. Let the game commence!
We had the suppliers, the shippers and the buyers all under one roof, literally. It just needed someone to try to organise everyone into action, which would take a good deal of diplomacy. That someone was me.
10. Sentencia
I kept saying ‘within six months I will be out’, but the more I repeated it, the more I began to doubt my own words. It’s not the despair that kills you: it’s the hope.
11. Monopoly
With all the connections I had I felt it would be fairly simple to organise something, make some cash and keep entertained.
12. Hotel García Moreno
One day Sven baked a chocolate cake but with a secret ingredient—marijuana, and lots of it. This was shared out between his friends and everyone got really high. It was potent. I was going back to my cell with a piece on a plate just as a guard came the opposite way. He was eyeing the chocolatey cake with enthusiasm. I thought it would be funny to give him the cake and see what happened. Luckily, a friend who was with me grabbed it just as I was about to hand it over. He told me if I’d given the guard the cake and he had eaten it the guards would likely have beaten me to death. He probably saved my life that day.
14. Paro!
The visitors would quite often be more than willing to act as hostages as it was their family members who were being held, causing them all to suffer. None of them were ever injured as the visitors were viewed as sacrosanct.
15. Escape, Part 1
Anyone who’s ever been locked up will have spent a good deal of time thinking about how to escape. It is your natural instinct. In prison you tend to have two groups. There are those who would rather sit there and quietly do their time and get out when the given date arrives. The others would prefer to attempt escape and live with the consequences. It tends to be people serving longer sentences with little to lose who are more inclined to attempt escape. If you only have to spend six months behind bars, why risk being shot dead trying to escape?
19. Atenuado Abajo
We stopped outside the gate while an inmate inside the wing produced a set of keys and unlocked a hefty padlock that secured a thick iron chain wrapped around the gate. The guard was then free to open the lock to let me in. This place was insane.
He didn’t invite me in, so we had a brief conversation in the doorway, in which he said he had to be careful as the gang would be watching me closely until I paid my dues and my being too friendly with him could cause him problems if I didn’t pay up. His name was Vasil. He reiterated what most people had already said: don’t get into debt, be very careful of the gang, don’t take drugs and stay healthy. I immediately warmed to him.
I spent the next few weeks settling into the new routine and customs of this prison. Every prison functions slightly differently, has an individual heartbeat and momentum. The trick as an inmate is learning how to adapt to that rhythm, fit in and then turn it to your advantage.
The two gangs would exchange shots across the no man’s land that separated the two halves of the prison on an almost daily basis. I think this was to some extent out of boredom rather than anything else.
22. Three Blind Mice
However, I now saw an opportunity to take revenge on Santiago for Gato’s death. I had vowed never to teach anyone how to cook crack cocaine if they were a user, as this was the ultimate recipe for total disaster and personal destruction. In the past I had shown the recipe to a couple of people after they drove me mad pestering me. I still regret it to this day and feel very bad for having done so, as those people went on to become serious drug addicts, sold all their belongings for drugs, and ended up either dead or destitute. I hated myself for having been the direct cause of this. I therefore reserved this especially for my enemies. I would show Santiago and let him be the agent of his own destruction.
25. TB
I still intensely regret those words. In fact, I will do so for the rest of my life, which has undoubtedly been cut short as a result of having that one injection.
27. Simon
The scam artist ‘lawyer’ would then come up with numerous reasons for needing more money, such as having to pay off the deputies, the secretary of the court, to get documents stamped… There were a hundred and one different reasons that could be used to extort money from the victim.
29. A New Beginning
There was no way I could face serving another two or three years without even a pen to write with or a book to read, virtually no visits, no letters or payphone and thus no communication, and being fed rice and soup every day. I was now ready to go home to Britain and face the consequences. Come what may, I had had enough of the prisons in Ecuador.
31. The Regional
One thing that was causing a great deal of discontent was the lack of visits. Hardly anyone had received one. From the prisoner’s point of view, the most important things are visits, food and water, exercise and gym, communications, be it by phone or letters, and healthcare and safety. If you didn’t get this right you were in for trouble and unrest.
Every time I was taken from my wing to the clinic friends of mine from Atenuado Alto would start chanting my name out of the windows until there was a regular cacophony. No one else received this kind of reception, not even Cubano, who was the boss of an entire gang. The guards would look at me, wondering just who it was they were escorting.
34. HMP Wandsworth
Fyodor Dostoyevsky said: ‘The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.’ He should know. He did four years’ hard labour in Siberia.
When we presented our papers at immigration, the border force officer looked at me with a grin and said, ‘Been a naughty boy have we?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. The English sense of humour—how I’d missed it!
I know prison wherever you are in the world is hard; it’s meant to be. That’s the whole idea—so that by suffering you don’t repeat whatever put you there in the first place. You do have to remember that there are always people worse off than yourself and in far harsher conditions elsewhere. I completely agree that you should stand up for your rights and always fight for better conditions. But prison in Britain is relatively easy. You get fed well and on time, you have clean water to drink, TV, regular visits, clean clothing, bedding, mattresses to sleep on, education, workshops, good gyms in most places and many other benefits.
I hadn’t anticipated that I would experience such a degree of culture shock as I did. I had arrived on 14 November just as the Christmas advertising campaigns were getting into full swing on the TV. I found this all very overwhelming and quite upsetting, having just come from a country where there was such poverty and suffering. The greed and consumerism of our society was very hard to stomach, and to some extent still is. It took a few months for me to become accustomed to everything again, which I had really not anticipated. One very marked change was the massive influence of technology. From what I could see the whole of society had changed, with everyone now seeming to have smartphones and iPads. The drinking culture of Britain had changed a lot, with a vast number of pubs and clubs having closed down, and people drinking at home more these days and communicating instead via social media, which barely existed when I had left for Ecuador.