Hotel Kerobokan

by Kathryn Bonella

  Our love has given me hope. In the Hindu religion, same-sex weddings are controversial. But some believe marriage is a union of spirits – not male and female.

  – Renae, New Idea

  CHAPTER 10

  PLASTICINE GUARDS

  Kerobokan is the guards’ little kingdom.

  – Thomas

  Kerobokan Prison is repeatedly being caught in humiliating situations, when the chief of security is arrested by the police over drug possession . . . when two security officers from Kerobokan Prison were caught by the police in, let’s say, a red light district, let’s say escorting one of the inmates . . . it keeps happening in Kerobokan.

  Why?

  Corruption, I guess.

  How much do the guards get paid?

  Those guards who actually guard the prison, not the administration or the higher ranking prison officer, the guard guarding the prisoners basically receive less than 3 million [$400] a month.

  – Journalist Wayan Juniartha of the Jakarta Post

  There are two constants in Hotel K – prison guards and prisoners. Every day they live and work together, while often despising one another.

  Hotel K was a paradise for savvy guards on the lookout to make extra money, and, in much the same way, prisoners who had money could manipulate guards for their own purposes. The guards being so poorly paid opened up almost unlimited possibilities for prisoners looking for ways to make jail more liveable.

  ‘Prison guards struggle to survive. Their salary is the bare minimum. When people give them “tips”, they are usually grateful and tend to do their bidding. This is a big problem,’ said Djoko Sasongko, spokesman for the Indonesian Justice Department.

  – South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 1 September 2006

  Your main goal is to get free, but beside that, you still have a little bit of freedom if you pay the money. You can bring cans of beer, movies, girls, whatever you want, but every step you have to pay the money.

  – Den

  While guards were always looking for ways to make extra money, they were also happy to use their power and influence to get sexual gratification. Several male guards regularly slipped into Block W for some quick lunchtime sex. They would give the female cellmates a bit of cash to play cards out the front and keep watch while they had their way with a prisoner.

  It was easier for the lesbian guards who worked in the women’s block. One afternoon, a prisoner returned to her cell and found a female guard sitting on a mattress, kissing and fondling an attractive new female prisoner. The new prisoner was simply lonely, and wanted to use the guard’s mobile phone to ring her boyfriend. Phones were banned in prison – unless you had money, or something else, to offer a guard. In this case, it was sex.

  It didn’t seem to trouble the conscience of the guard herself, who was married with three daughters. This guard was particularly slimy, often pulling prisoners onto her knee and fondling their breasts. She’d give them little treats, like letting them walk to the canteen. One day she took Australian inmate Schapelle Corby out of Block W and across to the tennis court to watch the men having a hit of the ball. The guard had seen the sadness and desperation on Schapelle’s face as she stood at the slightly ajar door of Block W, looking out longingly at those male inmates lucky enough to play tennis. The guard took her by the hand and walked her to the court. One of the players gave her a racquet, and for five minutes she forgot about being cooped up in jail and played tennis. Unlike the locals, westerners such as Schapelle didn’t succumb to sleazy advances, but it was worth smiling and being nice to the guard – just for the chance to be let out again one day.

  For many westerners, that was the crux of the matter. As much as the guards made the inmates feel uncomfortable, or even disgusted, they knew that they could prove useful in the days, weeks and years ahead.

  But, more often than not, it was money that drove the guards. Even a costly mistake, one that could result in an inmate being beaten and put in cell tikus for a month, could be overlooked provided the offending inmate paid up. One night after lockup, Italian inmate Fisco had just injected himself with heroin. He was spaced out, enjoying the high, singing ‘la la la la’ as he washed out the bloody syringe in a glass of water. No-one else was taking any notice. It was a routine night. He finished cleaning and casually tossed the filthy water out through the small barred window. Angry shouting erupted outside. Fisco froze while his cellmates leaped to the window and peered into the dark night to see who was there. It was a guard; his T-shirt splattered in bloody water. He was yelling, ‘Juri! Juri! Juri! Juri!’, aware that Fisco didn’t speak Indonesian and that his cellmate Juri did.

  I got down from the upstairs bunk. I say, ‘What’s happened?’ The guard says, ‘He is using drugs, using heroin’. I say, ‘Yeah, why?’ He say, ‘Cannot, cannot’. So I say to the guy, Fisco, ‘Give him 100,000’. So he gives 100,000 rupiah and the guard goes away.

  – Juri

  It wasn’t only poorly paid guards who used their position for ill-gotten gains. One jail boss regularly made Balinese girls strip and pose naked for photographs at his house, near the jail. Prisoners were permitted to work as cleaners in his house, and this boss took advantage of the fact the girls would do just about anything to escape for a few hours. He kept his nude shots of them in an album. The girls all knew that volunteering to clean his rooms meant they would have to strip naked in front of the ageing pervert. Still, a few hours shopping or time outside with their boyfriends was enough reward for them to take part in the demeaning act.

  While some prisoners would have sex with guards because they wanted something, others would do it out of boredom or because they had formed an attachment to them.

  The inmates sleep with the guards because they like each other; they actually have a relationship, boyfriend and girlfriend, although most of the guards do have wives. The sex happens in the clinic; we pay the doctor. The sex happens in the hall, the offices, empty corners, anywhere.

  – Elsa, female inmate

  One Hotel K security boss had a girlfriend in the jail. The two had met when she checked in, and the boss regularly gave her leave to go to his place – a room he rented separate from the house that came with the job, which accommodated his wife and children. Hotel K really was a sexual playground for the guards, even the gay ones. In the men’s blocks, there were usually gay inmates and several transvestites, known as benchong. They wore wigs, tight sexy shorts, and T-shirts around the jail during the day. Several guards gathered in an office one morning to fondle and kiss one particularly pretty benchong who was checking in. The benchong were usually well-liked, often making prisoners laugh with their antics and girly conversations. ‘Thank God I got my period today, I thought I was pregnant,’ one benchong giggled to another in front of several prisoners one day. In the afternoons they’d often go to their cells to do up their faces, change wigs and put on evening frocks, spraying a cloud of perfume in the air and haughtily walking into it. The benchongs and gays often played sex games together, and sometimes the guards joined in.

  One afternoon, a few inmates were sitting around smoking joints listening to local transvestite Dedi complaining about being broke. It sparked an idea. Dutchman Aris and Australian inmate Mick suggested shooting a gay porn video and selling it on the internet. Dedi was instantly convinced it would make them rich. A gay Nigerian inmate was also keen to do it. They devised a simple scene with the Nigerian inmate acting as a guard, who would pull off the pants of the transvestite and have sex with him on the bed. Mick asked one of the guards, who was married with kids but always sleazily touching men, if he would bring in a spare uniform.

  He did. The next day they were ready to shoot. The guard stood watching, with Mick directing and Aris shooting. Dedi stepped out of the bathroom in a towel and underpants. The huge African ‘guard’ picked Dedi up, carried him to the bed, stripped off his own uniform and then tore off Dedi’s towel. The African already had an erection. Mick and Aris looked at each other. Th
ey’d both seen enough. Aris quickly handed the camera to the real guard and left him excitedly holding the camera with one hand, and fondling the two naked men with the other.

  When the guard came out, he was so excited. His face was as red as a tomato.

  – Mick

  They looked at the footage and it wasn’t any good. So the next day they decided to shoot another scene, with the actual guard acting in this one. Dedi dressed up as Cleopatra, with a wig, a full face of makeup, false eyelashes and wrapped in towels. The guard was dressed in a sheet as Cleopatra’s butler, and the African was a black bushman who would run in and rape Cleopatra. Aris started filming Cleopatra, who was sitting on a batik bedspread, holding a mirror while the butler brushed her hair. Then the bushman came in, stabbed the guard and raped Cleopatra. Mick and Aris filmed it this time, but walked out straight afterwards, leaving the guard and two prisoners all lying naked on the bed and smoking. Their blue movie didn’t reach the internet or make them a dime. But it was fun and broke the tedium.

  Aside from sex, cultivating a relationship with a guard through paying them money could make life a lot more bearable. As part of the great hypocrisy in Hotel K, the guards keeping the prisoners under lock and key were often working as drug couriers themselves, overlooking drug use inside the jail and sometimes even using drugs with the prisoners in their cells. Getting drugs like heroin or shabu was no problem at all. Guards would bring in drugs in their shoes or pockets, usually safe in the knowledge that they would not be searched. The majority of guards were happy to turn a blind eye to all the smuggling, so long as they got a piece of the action. Need a clean syringe? Easy, just order it in.

  Guards also smuggled in bags of the local brew, arak, for prisoners to drink. It was banned but that didn’t stop a nightly traffic of the stuff by a few of the guards. However, while the majority of guards were keen to make some extra money, there were a few who were either against drinking alcohol, or who were honest or didn’t want to risk getting caught. One particular guard smuggled in huge quantities of arak by pulling it up into the watchtower. Each night during his rounds, he climbed into the rarely manned tower to drop down a rope. Below, someone would be ready and waiting to tie the plastic bags of arak. Then he’d haul it up again. To avoid carrying it past other guards, he’d dug a hole under the inner perimeter wall, so he could pull it through. It was a smart strategy, but caused havoc one year when torrential rains washed his small hole into a gaping big one. The wall above it collapsed and two prisoners escaped.

  There was no such thing as the perfect drop in Hotel K. The quality of the arak was largely dependent on how much stuff the guards mixed it with to increase the quantity and make more cash. One sly guard was notorious for diluting arak with water. The prisoners knew, but there was not much they could do – a little booze was better than no booze.

  Of course, some inmates were smarter than others and targeted specific guards to bring in the arak. One in particular was known for bringing in the quality stuff from his village in East Bali, Karangasem, where the purest arak in Bali was distilled.

  All an inmate had to do was fork out the cash, and the next night the guard would bring a plastic bag filled with enough booze for prisoners to get very drunk. Some guards scammed extra cash by selling arak to an inmate, only to then punish him for having it, locking him in the tower. The inmate would stay there until he could afford to pay to get out – so the guard won twice. Another lucrative racket the guards used was walking around confiscating phones, then simply selling them back.

  As in every jail, it wasn’t only the crooked guards who inmates had to keep an eye out for. There were guards who were just plain sadistic and enjoyed torturing prisoners whenever they had the opportunity.

  There was one guard called Fisheyes. When he was young, he was a real motherfucker.

  – Thomas

  Fisheyes was one of the guards who enjoyed punishing and inflicting pain on inmates with his electric stick. He would walk around jabbing people on the arms or legs and stomach to amuse himself. The inmates would reel away in pain. But it would bring a smile to Fisheyes’s face. Other times, if Fisheyes or other guards caught somebody breaking the rules or causing a problem, they’d beat them with a rattan stick, throwing in a few electric shocks for good measure. Fisheyes often used shabu and other drugs, but if you weren’t on the right side of him or paying him off, or if he was just bored, he would wander around checking prisoners for drugs and if he caught one, punishment and pain would follow.

  When eight bosses of the gang Laskar Bali were sentenced to Hotel K, the power politics in the jail changed overnight. Laskar was no ordinary Indonesian gang. It was one of the toughest and most brutal, and bashings were part of their daily activities. The fear of them was such that they took over Hotel K. Not only were prisoners terrified of them, guards were too. Crossing Laskar resulted in swift and brutal retaliation – inside or outside the jail. Such was its power, the gang would often be doing something illegal in their block, like using drugs, and one of the gang members would simply lock down the block so no-one could get inside. When this happened, an unsuspecting guard was sometimes accidentally locked inside the block. But there was nothing the guard could do until someone came and let him out.

  Kerobokan is the only jail where the prisoners totally control the jail. Prisoners have the key of the block. Once I see guard closed inside the block. He cannot get out and had to wait two hours. A prisoner finally comes and opens the door and he can go out. Yeah. That time Kerobokan was like that. Prisoners had full power, you know. Total control.

  – Juri, Italian inmate

  CHAPTER 11

  TERRORISTS CHECK IN

  In jail, there’s not much happening any day. Sometimes you just look in the fish pond and you see fucking frog eggs, everybody is looking at these fucking frog eggs and studying these frog eggs for half an hour. Just looking and wondering … so when Amrozi is coming in with guns and everything, it’s a big story, it’s something to look at, for sure.

  – Thomas

  It was like a movie. There was a helicopter, so many cars escorting. I was inside the block when Amrozi arrived. There was too much crowd, like a football match was going to begin. Everybody was in front of the windows, watching.

  – Den

  Sirens whirring faintly in the distance grew louder by the second as the police convoy carrying the terrorist Amrozi sped towards Hotel K. By the time the armoured cars and motorbikes arrived in a blaze of red flashing lights and screaming sirens, almost all inmates had gathered to watch the spectacle. In the blue room, people were leaping up to look through the doors and windows. At least one couple, a good-looking Argentinean drug dealer in his early twenties, Frederico, and his long-term Israeli girlfriend, used the minutes of distraction for some quick sex on the floor.

  But most were glued to the scene as Amrozi, handcuffed and surrounded by police with machine guns, climbed out of the police van and walked into the office to check in. For months his grinning face had been splashed on the front pages of newspapers. Prisoners were leaping on each others’ shoulders to get a good look at Bali’s most hated man. Hundreds more stood clinging to the fences near their blocks, or hung off them for a higher vantage point. Many stood around on the grass in an angry mob shouting, ‘Kill him, kill him!’ as police corralled them at least twenty-five metres back from the terrorist.

  The 41-year-old Muslim mechanic was despised by the Balinese for his key role in two nightclub bombings in Kuta, which killed two hundred and two people, decimating tourism and wiping out hundreds of local businesses. Amrozi’s flagrant glee afterwards turned him into the smiling monster of the blasts. He cheered and gave the thumbs up to the judge and the victims’ families when he was sentenced to death, two days before checking into Hotel K. Now the smiling assassin would be living among the Balinese. Riots by Balinese prisoners or Amrozi-sympathising Muslims were feared.

  ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him!’ prisoners started yelling aga
in as Amrozi came back out. His hair was cut razor short, but his Muslim beard was left unshaven. Surrounded by police, guards and head tamping inmate Pemuka Saidin, Amrozi walked across the path from the offices to the tower block that housed a new top security cell. The walls were freshly painted white and the floor tiled grey. The only furniture was a metal bed frame with a thin green carpet laid on top as a makeshift mattress. A floral-patterned pillow fluffed up on the bed was a hint of some sympathy towards him inside Hotel K. It had been donated by a Muslim inmate. But it was the only splash of colour in the stark cell. Two small barred windows let in a little light. In the corner was a squat toilet and concrete wash basin. Amrozi would be banned from mixing with all other inmates and locked up twenty-four hours a day, with only rare, court-approved visits with family. Or so it was supposed to be.

  A guard followed the terrorist into the cell with four white plastic bags of his belongings, including traditional Muslim garb and a Koran. In one swift move he put them down, turned around and walked out of there, swinging shut the barred green door and locking it with two large industrial padlocks. As the police filed out, the guard locked two more padlocks: one on the front door of the tower block and another on the gate to the steel picket fence surrounding it. Outside, the inmates were still waiting to watch the police convoy leave. But then the 5.30 pm lockup bells started to ring and they began walking to their cells for the night. Today’s show was over. Tomorrow they’d be back to watching fish eggs.