Dragons & Butterflies

by Shani Krebs

  When I arrived at Building 14, I was told that my embassy would be coming, so I sat and waited. Eventually, the ambassador, attaché, consular officer and a delegation of South African government members arrived. It was all very formal. I was introduced to the Commissioner of Corrections, Mr Linda Mti, who informed me that the purpose of his visit to Thailand was to exchange ideas and discuss policies between the respective departments and to review the possibility of a prisoner transfer treaty between our countries.

  We were ushered into the studio, where the conversation was being televised and broadcast live to the buildings. We discussed different aspects of prison. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Here I was, sitting in on talks on the fate of South African prisoners with members of the South African government and the Prison Director. My hopes reached an all-time high; this was by far the greatest breakthrough we could have hoped for.

  For days afterwards, I couldn’t sleep. My head was buzzing with visions of my arrival at Johannesburg airport. After my visit that week with Jai, she emailed the good news to my family back home. I emphasised that now was the time to keep up the pressure and to get as much publicity as possible regarding our predicament.

  Birthdays in prison are the most depressing days of the year, and I always became melancholy when mine came around. I was growing old alone – not exactly what most people envisage for themselves. People got married, had kids and then grandchildren. That was how things were normally done. Why had my life turned out so differently? Why do the choices we make have to determine our lives?

  On 15 October 2003 I ‘celebrated’ my tenth birthday behind bars. I was 43. I had asked Jai to bring me 17 Big Macs, which she did, and I shared them with my cellmates. The guys were grateful and wished me well. The only meaning my birthday held for me these days was the knowledge that my family were thinking of me possibly a little bit more on 15 October than on any other day.

  I got two pieces of disturbing news around this time. The first came via my sister: my stepbrother Wessels had committed suicide. He’d stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blown his head off. Fuck, he must have been a deeply disturbed soul to do something so drastic. I was shocked. The second piece of news was that Bertie Lubner had had a quadruple bypass. I was sad to hear this; in my view the man was a saint: he was fighting for my release and now he was fighting for his life. Bertie was devoted to my cause, but still with the understanding that I was innocent of the crimes I’d been accused of. I felt very guilty for having deceived such a decent man. I wanted to tell him the truth, but I couldn’t bring myself to. We twist the truth to protect ourselves, and so I remained silent.

  Whenever renovations were done in Bangkwang, you could be assured that the Director would be pocketing most of the funds allocated for the project. In 2004 the foreign and Thai visit rooms were upgraded. We no longer needed to shout to our visitors through the two sets of bars and a walkway about a metre and a half wide. Glass partitions were erected on the visitors’ side and telephones were installed. It was a far better system and it made our visits more pleasant; at least now we could have a conversation without everybody hearing what we were saying.

  Plans were also under way to demolish Building 1 and to put up an American-type high-security building with state-of-the-art surveillance systems, closed-circuit TV, electronically operated security gates, etc. But first Building 5 had to be renovated and transformed into a high-security block to accommodate all the death row inmates from Building 1. Prisoners with sentences below 33 years would be moved to the provinces, while the lifers would be split up and absorbed into the other buildings. During the demolition of Building 1, besides the noise of machinery all day long, a blanket of dust descended on Building 2, making our lives miserable, not to mention it being a health hazard.

  With the group transferred from Building 1 was an Israeli named Shlomo Cohen. He had murdered his wife in a Bangkok hotel, chopped her into pieces, and then attempted to put her through a blender. When this didn’t work, he put her dismembered body parts in a suitcase, which he threw in a river. His case had been extensively publicised on Thai television, so we knew about him and expected to see him at Bangkwang sooner or later. As a fellow Jew, I welcomed him to stay with me. Although I thought his crime was a most heinous one, who was I to judge him? The drugs I had transported would have destroyed, and maybe even killed, many people. I was no better than a murderer myself. The only prisoners I would discriminate against would be the paedophiles.

  Shlomo turned out to be your typical Israeli, but he was a nice enough guy. I was no longer making use of my Chinese chef; ten years of his oily food had almost killed me. I was now cooking my own meals. Shlomo immediately took over the cooking and introduced me to some tasty Israeli dishes. He was also quite the comedian, and at first we got on pretty well.

  Shlomo stayed with me for three months, during which time he told me his life story. He left out the details of the murder of his wife, about which I never asked. I don’t especially like Israelis; for some reason I never have, and I imagine I never will. After a while, Shlomo started getting on my nerves. Actually, the man was beginning to drive me insane. It didn’t matter what the subject was; he always knew better. He wore thick-rimmed glasses, and one of his eyes was slightly squint, so it looked like he was forever staring at me. It gave me the creeps, besides which I couldn’t help imagining him cutting up his wife – all the blood in the bath, on his hands, and possibly even on his glasses and face.

  One day we had an argument and I asked him to leave my house. He seemed baffled. I added, ‘Fuck off, already.’

  But Shlomo was the type of guy you couldn’t remain angry with for long. He came from a big family, and his three siblings took turns to visit him every year, so he was not short of anything. Obviously, though, he had his own demons to deal with, and I could see he was a troubled soul. The murder of his wife, the mother of his two sons, haunted him every minute of the day. Love is a strange animal, and it can bring out the worst in any man. In the cell, Shlomo slept at the opposite end of the room to me, but in fact the guy hardly slept at all. He was pale and grew thinner by the day. I was sure his conscience troubled him immensely. One night I went to sleep early. I drank a lot of water during the night and, as I was also a restless sleeper, I would visit the toilet often. Around 11.30 I noticed Shlomo was fast asleep; then again, around 1am, on my next visit to the toilet, I saw that he hadn’t moved. He was still in exactly the same position. Much later, after tossing and turning and being unable to sleep, I thought I would check on him. He still hadn’t moved. Rather odd, I thought. When I got up at 4.45am, he was in exactly the same position. It was very strange, but I thought I would first do my morning ablutions routine and finish davening Shacharis before I took any action.

  I strolled over to his bed and shook his leg, softly calling his name: ‘Shlomo, Shlomo.’ He too didn’t budge. What a heavy sleeper, I thought, dead to the world. Then a Dutch guy, Mikhail, who was an amateur Thai boxer, came over to Shlomo’s bed. He too was concerned, and I told him I thought something was seriously wrong. Mikhail said he had seen Shlomo counting out a handful of pills on his bed last night. Well, then, it was obvious: Shlomo had taken an overdose. We could see he was breathing, but there was not much we could do except wait till they opened our cell.

  Some of our other cell members were surfacing by now. One was Philip, Mikhail’s friend and co-accused, who came over and started slapping Shlomo around, trying to wake him up, but to no avail. Philip said that when they opened the door he would take Shlomo to his house and let him sleep it off for the day. ‘No fucking way,’ I told him. ‘This is a matter for the authority to deal with.’

  I called the key-boy in the corridor and told him in Thai that Shlomo had taken a lot of medicine and I thought he was dead. Fortunately, the key-boy managed to alert one of the guards and our cells were opened earlier than usual. Shlomo was put into a wheelchair, which had by now replaced the wheelbarrow as the regular emergency mode
of transport to the hospital. Later that day we got news that, when they couldn’t revive him at Bangkwang, he had been rushed by ambulance to Lard Yao prison hospital. He was still alive. If I had listened to Philip that morning, Shlomo might very well have died.

  During my visit with Jai, I asked her if she would go to Lard Yao and check up on Shlomo, and see if there was anything he needed. Amazingly, Shlomo survived his attempted suicide. He had taken 100 Valium tablets, and that’s a lot of pills. Hashem wasn’t going to let him get off that easily. A troubled conscience was worse than a life sentence. Jai, bless her soul, visited Shlomo regularly until he returned to Building 2 about a month later. He was very pale, but he joined the gym and it wasn’t long before he regained his health.

  Besides being Jewish, and although he was Sephardic and I was an Ashkenazi, Shlomo and I had one other thing in common: our love of movies. Between my family, Jai and the movies I bought from the guards, I had accumulated an extensive collection. Among them was the Saw series. I managed to watch 30 minutes of the first one, but it was far too gruesome for my liking. Shlomo, on the other hand, enjoyed them thoroughly and watched each movie with such intent I imagined he was looking for new ways to chop up his next victim.

  In the third court, Shlomo received a 33-year sentence for the murder of his wife.

  Over the years, Akow the Cripple had devoted almost all his time to playing backgammon, and he had improved dramatically, until he was eventually playing against the top-ranking players. Joseph, an Israeli cellmate, was one of the champions and they often played in my house. As a rule, I never got involved in a big game, but I enjoyed gambling. Whenever the Cripple played, he would attract a crowd taking side bets. The Cripple generally played very safe, never leaving a piece open if he could, whereas Joseph was more of a chancer and would risk pieces being hit. On one occasion, a fierce game between the two of them was under way and, as usual, a crowd had gathered to watch. Joseph was down over ten grand. I watched a few games and was getting frustrated by all the mistakes Joseph was making, so I offered to sit in and play the Cripple myself, hoping to win back my Jewish brother’s money. So Joseph and I partnered up. Unfortunately for us, the dice went in the Cripple’s favour. He threw double after double. Whatever dice he needed to kill me and close his house at the same time, he did on every throw, causing me to lose every game. Within an hour I dropped an additional eight grand. This was so unlike me – why I got involved, I don’t know. I was pissed off, especially as the Cripple would laugh happily every time he caught me. In the end, I decided to cut my losses and come back fighting another day. Luckily, I kept a pool of money that I’d won gambling on the English Premier League, which I used to pay for certain of the privileges I enjoyed. Handing the money over to the Cripple, who had won it fair and square, hurt my pride more than anything else. Joseph had lost I don’t know how many thousands over the months to the Cripple. In his view, Hashem may have taken away the Cripple’s use of his legs, but in return He had blessed him with luck.

  Actually, the Cripple was kicking everybody’s arse. There were other times when I played him, but, although I won some of the games, I never won the money back that he had taken off me that day with Joseph.

  For those with addictions, temptation was always there in prison, enticing you to take a chance. Compulsive gamblers were as bad as, if not worse than, drug addicts. It seemed like a more difficult habit to kick, but at the end of the day it boiled down to the same thing: you have to reach deep to overcome your vices.

  Here I’m reminded of a saying by the poet William Blake, who wrote something about ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’. In my own interpretation, moderation is the key to maintaining a balanced lifestyle. However, in my own experience, abstinence is the only answer. My addiction had not only almost killed me, but it had also destroyed the lives of so many of the people around me. Perhaps Blake meant: why subject yourself to the evils and destructive forces of life before you arrive at the conclusion of your misguided choices?

  On the Thai news channel, we were riveted by the dramatic account of a robbery that had gone down in Phuket. Three Russians had held up a bank, and in the course of events a Thai security guard had been shot and killed. A nationwide hunt for the robbers was under way. After a few days, they were apprehended while trying to make their escape in a small boat. During the arrest, one of the Russians was shot in the leg. Whenever a foreigner was arrested and appeared on TV, we all knew that it was only a matter of time before we would get to meet him. The last stop was always Bangkwang.

  The Russians were tried and sentenced; one was sentenced to death; the second received a life sentence; and the driver of the getaway vehicle was sentenced to 33 years. Because of the notoriety surrounding their case, and out of fear of the Russians attempting an escape, the prison authorities split them up. Yegor came to Building 2, Felix was thrown into Building 6, and the third guy was put on death row in Building 1. Naturally we welcomed Yegor into our room.

  When Pittaya Sangkanakin took over as Director of Bangkwang, he put a stop to all private enterprise in the prison. The guys who sold coffee and soup in the corridor at night and food during the day had to cease their business activities. The Director didn’t want prisoners making money off prisoners, he said; if you disobeyed the regulations, you faced the prospect of being moved to another prison. Dikor, the guy who now ran the gym, and also enjoyed the luxury of a private room and house, became nervous. He wanted to sell the gym. I was not interested. The gym was a headache. Every month you had to run after members to collect their money. Dikor was asking for 10 000 Thai baht, which wasn’t much, considering how much it had cost to build the place, but none of the other foreigners was interested in buying it either, mainly out of fear of being moved. Yegor the Russian was keen, though, as he worked out every day. Many foreigners used the facility, including me when I wasn’t playing football, and losing it would be a huge blow. Exercise was a vital part of relieving stress and preventing depression in prison, and for many inmates it was a form of self-rehabilitation. The foreigners pleaded with me to change my mind. I was the only one who could save the gym, they said, and not get into trouble. Yegor came to me with the suggestion of us being partners and, after giving it some thought, I reluctantly agreed. Knowing how desperate Dikor was, I offered him 8 000 Thai baht, which he grabbed. And so the alleged Russian bank robber and I became the proud owners of the gym.

  In Thailand at this time, there was another very high-profile criminal case in the news. It related to the daring theft, in 1989, of a large quantity of jewels from the palace of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Faisal ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud, in Riyadh. The thief was a Thai worker, and among the stolen items was a rare blue diamond. The estimated value of the jewels taken in the heist was over US$20 million, and the case became known as the ‘Blue Diamond Affair’. The Thai worker managed to get the gems back to Thailand, to his home district of Lampang in the north. Lieutenant General Chalor Kerdthes of the Royal Thai Police was assigned to the case. The worker was arrested and some of the jewels were recovered. Kerdthes himself took the jewels back to Saudi Arabia to return them, but it was discovered that they were fakes – including the blue diamond. Two diplomats, one of whom was Abdullah al-Besri, and a third person were assigned by the Saudi government to travel to Thailand to investigate and to try and track down the real jewels; they were joined there, in November 1989, by a Saudi Arabian businessman close to the Saudi royal family. On 4 January 1990 the businessman was gunned down by masked assassins outside his home, and the following month al-Besri was assassinated in Bangkok, as were two other Saudi diplomats. The Thai police apparently managed to find the jeweller who had swapped the real jewels for the fakes, but before this could be established, the jeweller’s wife and son were killed in an accident.

  The real facts of the case remain a mystery and the jewels have never been recovered, but in 1994 General Kerdthes was arrested on suspicion of the murder of the jeweller’s wife and
son. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to life on one of the charges.

  After his arrest, the General was first held at Bangkok Special Prison, but in 2002 he was moved to Bangkwang and put in Building 2 – my building. The prisoners referred to him as ‘Par Chalor’ (father Chalor), and the respect he commanded from guards and prisoners alike was extraordinary. This was a man who was once at the helm of the country’s police force, responsible for the arrest and assassination of many perpetrators of crime, and now here he was, no better than your common criminal and the equal of any one of us inmates.

  The General was a short, stout man in his sixties. He was slightly balding and had some difficulty in walking. The authorities gave him a house to stay in, and he immediately recruited an entourage of more than ten bodyguards. In the corridor opposite our cell was another room, which had a toilet, a shower area and a curtained-off section where a person could sleep comfortably and enjoy a bit of privacy. This was where the General stayed. Since death row had taken up most of the downstairs section, there were only three rooms at the rear entrance now. The first, as you walked in on the left, was a three-quarter-size room. This was the ‘TB room’. Prisoners who had been hospitalised and treated for tuberculosis would stay here temporarily before being integrated into the general population. Next to theirs was my room, which was a full-size room, and opposite was a small room where six Chinese guys slept. In the corridor there were another 12 prisoners, some Thais, Singaporeans, Taiwanese and my Chinese friend Akow the Cripple. There was also the key-boy, a real motherfucker Thai informer. On many occasions when we were raided by outside guards, they neglected to notice the small section of rooms we occupied. It was a perfect place for the General.