Passport To Hell: How I Survived Sadistic Prison Guards and Hardened Criminals in Spain's Toughest Prisons

by Terry Daniels

  Although they weren't particularly pleasing to the eye, my injuries weren't actually as bad as they appeared and I was eventually stitched up and sent home. The doctors even gave me the all-clear for our yearly trip abroad, which had been scheduled for a couple of weeks down the line. However, the scars that the accident left were mental as well as physical. They made me even more determined to leave the country for good and confirmed the fact that I needed to move to Tenerife rather than just visit every year.

  I put in for compensation from the National Farmers Union because they had left the hayrick in the middle of the road with no way of me knowing that it was there. They denied everything and wouldn't accept the blame, which meant that my insurance company had to get involved in a lengthy legal process to try and get them to pay up. It was a lot of stress and over the next two years, my life gradually went from bad to worse. Peter and I had a massive argument and my sister, who I had always done everything with, decided to move away to London with her boyfriend and leave me on my own.

  'Right,' I thought. 'The time is definitely right for me to move.'

  Nothing was working out for me. The crash had left my nerves jangled and I was working full-time as an income support officer again, which was beginning to really drag. I needed a change of scenery. It was time to make my island dream a reality.

  It took me a month to sort out somewhere to stay in Tenerife. I had met a lad called Bruno on a previous holiday, who had a spare room in his apartment and told me that I could live there. My family weren't overly concerned about my move because they had met Bruno before, knew that he was a decent lad and knew that Tenerife was a relatively safe place to live. So as far as they were concerned, they had nothing to worry about.

  Bruno was one of those English people who look and dress foreign. He had lived over there for so long that he had developed an air of Spanishness. This was partly due to the fact that he could speak the language without a hint of an English accent, and partly because he bought all his clothes in Spain, which meant he dressed like a local. He was a loveable character and a lot of fun to be around.

  My initial intention was for Tenerife to be the first of several places that I visited. I had always wanted to go to Thailand and figured that if my time abroad worked out, I could eventually hop from one country to the next. I had big dreams. I wanted to see the world.

  Although my head was filled with visions of moving around from one exotic location to another, I still remained pragmatic. I made a contingency plan and scheduled a flight back to England for two weeks after I had arrived, just in case I struggled to find a means to support myself. I managed to get a job as a PR girl almost straightaway so my return flight was not needed. There are two types of PR: high-end, where all the girls look like models, and low-end, which is usually done by girls who like to party and have fun. I was definitely the latter rather than the former. I worked for a bar called The Coliseum on Veronicas Strip and it was a means to an end rather than something particularly glamorous or exciting. The money wasn't great and I still ideally wanted to work behind the bar.

  When I wasn't busy dragging people into The Coliseum, I would either sit about in the sun or spend my time having a few too many drinks with friends before retiring back to the apartment. Our flat was in the Copacabana Complex, which was filled with people who worked at other nearby resorts. It was small but comfy and housed a mixture of Spanish and English residents.

  I loved my new life on the island. Being away from my parents for the first time gave me such a tremendous sense of freedom. The fact that most of the other people there were on their holidays meant that there was a permanent atmosphere of excitement to the place as well. The holidaymakers had to go home after a couple of weeks, but I was smug in the knowledge that I could enjoy the sun, sea and sangria all year long.

  The only thing that didn't live up to my expectations was my job. As the weeks went by, I grew more and more disillusioned with it. I had always known that PR work didn't pay particularly well but had assumed that I would be able to work my way up the ladder. Other girls that I had seen whilst I was on holiday as a teenager had managed to do this by sticking at it until somebody noticed how much experience they had and offered them a better position. I had underestimated how difficult it was to advance and it seemed as if I was permanently stuck at the bottom of the pile which made me increasingly frustrated.

  I've always loved money. I like designer clothes as most girls do, and there's nothing like walking into a room dressed in an expensive designer label to make you feel on top of the world. Back in those days I was into Naf Naf and Chipie, the clothes the ravers wore. Until I moved to Spain, my dad had always bought me things. He didn't spoil me rotten but if I told him I needed something, he would usually dip into his wallet. Now that I was on the island, I could no longer rely upon his help in times of need. I had some cash at home but I had made a conscious decision to leave it where it was. My mind was made up that I was only going to spend the money that I earned in Tenerife. The problem was, that I was barely getting by. I was drinking and going out almost every night of the week so I had very little left to spend on clothing and accessories.

  Although I was disappointed that I wasn't able to earn more cash, I never lost sight of the reasons I had moved to Tenerife, which were to take advantage of the nightlife, sit in the sun all day and meet good-looking boys. The PR girls were like a family and we always made the most of what little cash we had. We started work at eight or nine o'clock in the evening and by half ten, we were usually drunk. Every time I took somebody into a club, I was allowed to knock back a drink on the house to give me the confidence to approach my next target. Drinking comes hand in hand with doing PR work. If you don't like getting trolleyed then it's not the job for you.

  As well as consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, a lot of the other girls also took cocaine. The island was awash with it and the PR workers seemed to love the stuff. I remember the first time it was offered to me. I had just walked into the office at The Coliseum and there were two, long, white lines laid out on the table.

  ''Ere Terry, have a bit of this.'

  'Nah, I'm alright, I think I'll pass.'

  I still associated taking drugs with the 'world inside a box' night and the demonic clown incident. I should have stuck to my guns and walked away but the little devil on my shoulder started coaxing me into trying some.

  'What's the harm?' it whispered. 'It isn't going to hurt you. Take some. You never know, you might enjoy yourself.'

  'Actually what the hell,' I caved in. 'Pass it over here.'

  Coke is quite a socially acceptable drug. Although it is highly addictive, it doesn't possess the same level of stigma as crack or heroin so I assumed that it was safe for me to take. Think heroin and you think tattered clothes and track marks; think cocaine and you think Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. It has an air of glamour to it and people who indulge in charlie are often seen as having expensive tastes rather than being addicted.

  'Whoa,' I exclaimed, as the back of my throat went numb and I was hit by a sudden wave of energy. I felt wide-awake, on top of my game and ultra-confident. This was a drug and a half.

  They say your first hit of cocaine is something that you can never reproduce and that was definitely the case for me. I tried, night after night, to replicate the effect of the line I had taken at The Coliseum but nothing could come close. I've never done anything in half measures and it didn't even occur to me that I would eventually end up with a habit if I continuously chased an unattainable high. After all, this was coke, not crack. It was nothing I couldn't handle.

  As far as I was concerned, cocaine was the perfect drug. It made me lively, talkative and enthusiastic, which were essential qualities for my role as a PR girl. The only downside was that it cost the equivalent of £40 a gram and prevented me from getting any sleep. It soon reached the stage where I was up for all but three hours of the night, every night of the week.

  Meanwhile, Bruno had got
a new girlfriend and she was always round at our flat, which I didn't like. The flat seemed very crowded with three people in it. I was still very grateful to Bruno for letting me move in with him and didn't have anything against the girl; I just like my space. I wanted to move out, but how could I afford to pay the rent anywhere else? I was snorting and drinking away my earnings quicker than they were coming in.

  Fortunately there was a nearby set of apartments called the Bungamar where the flats cost next to nothing. They were the equivalent of £40 a week and you got exactly what you paid for. The rooms were cockroach-infested and dirty, but beggars can't be choosers and I didn't care where I ended up, just so long as I could carry on getting off my face.

  I moved in with a pretty blonde PR girl called Jackie from the north of England and we both slept in the same room. The fact that we were forced to live together in such a confined space meant that we got to know each other inside out within no time at all. She spent all night clicking her tongue piercing back and forth, which irritated the hell out of me, but apart from that we always got on well.

  The Bungamar really was the pits. It was the place where people ended up when they were at their wits' end. I had travelled to the island full of hope and expectation but by this stage, my dream was beginning to fall apart. I barely had any money, I'd got a raging drug and alcohol problem and I was sick and tired of my job. It was my own fault for having unrealistic expectations of what life on the island would be like. I had assumed that everybody in Tenerife had a happy, carefree existence but the reality was that it was similar to England in a lot of ways. It had just as much petty crime and just as many drugs.

  As the months passed by, I started feeling more and more alone. I spent my first Christmas away from home, by myself, because the other girls had all flown back to England. God knows why I chose to do this. I think I wanted to know what it would be like to celebrate the occasion in another country. I was used to waking up on Christmas morning to a pile of presents and the smell of turkey wafting through from the kitchen but this time I was still awake from the previous night's charlie session and had never felt more isolated. No presents were exchanged and I didn't even have a tree. Life was shit.

  Rather than sitting about and wallowing in self-pity, I decided to go for Christmas dinner with some of the staff from The Coliseum. I knew for a fact it wouldn't be a patch on Mum's roast turkey but then again, very little would. To make matters worse, I was finally coming down off the coke and feeling fragile and exhausted. There was no doubt in my mind that this was going to be the worst Christmas ever.

  Part way through my meal, I fell asleep on the table and somebody had to take me home. I could no longer hide the extent of my drug abuse from my colleagues. It was obvious that I had a problem and it was getting progressively worse and worse. Coke and alcohol were rapidly taking over my life and I would soon be under their complete control.

  Within a matter of weeks, I had started spending £100 a night on drugs and drink and experienced extreme anxiety whenever I was forced to go without. I knew that I had a habit but kept trying to kid myself that it wasn't all that serious, which prevented me from seeking help. Even though I was shovelling all of my wages up my nose, I was still unwilling to dip into the savings I had left at home in England. I had promised myself that I would only spend the cash I earned in Tenerife and wasn't going to go back on my word.

  Antonio always had a bucketload of coke on him so I figured I could save a lot of money by knocking about with him. He was generous with his drugs and regularly gave away free lines, which meant that all of the other PR girls acted as if they were his best friends in the world. Most of the addicts who hung around with older blokes were also having sex with them. They were known as 'drug sluts' and would do whatever it took to get their daily fix. A couple of them genuinely fancied the men who gave them drugs, but the majority were attracted solely to their wallets. A good proportion of these guys were in their mid-to-late forties and looked exactly like Antonio. They weren't what you would call good-looking by anyone's standards.

  Antonio never tried it on with me, which I always thought was weird. He would let me snort his coke without expecting anything in return. This made me suspicious. I knew he must have had an ulterior motive but was unable to put my finger on exactly what it was. The other thing that worried me was the fact that he regularly smoked crack, which was strange considering how fat he managed to remain. I first became aware that he was a crackhead when he whipped out a homemade pipe at his club during an after-hours cocaine session.

  'You want some?' he asked, casually offering it to me as if it was a cup of tea.

  I immediately recoiled.

  'No,' I told him. 'Not for me.'

  Antonio shrugged his shoulders and took a long, hard drag, breathing the thick, white smoke deep down into his lungs.

  'Suit yourself,' he muttered. 'More for us then.'

  Although I still associated taking crack with the stick-thin, zombie-like character of Pookie in New Jack City, I was too strung-out on coke to care. Antonio could smoke whatever the hell he wanted, just so long as he continued to give me access to his mountains of cocaine. If I cut him off and refused to have anything to do with him, I would soon run out of money from having to pay for my own drugs. He was my ticket to free Charlie, which made him an invaluable asset. I carried on milking Antonio for his drugs, ignoring all the signs that I should give him a wide berth. I would sit around in his club after the customers had gone home, dipping into his coke whilst he smoked his crack. Drugs had now become my only motivation for getting up in the morning and he appeared to have an almost limitless supply.

  Despite the scale of my addiction, I was still firmly in denial and thought that I had everything under control. During a trip across to England to spend time with my family, I realised this simply wasn't the case.

  'We can go to Cinderella's while you're back,' my sister told me. 'Come on, it'll be fun.'

  Cinderella's was a big, cheesy nightclub in the middle of a shopping centre in Dunstable. The owners organised a monthly bus from Aylesbury and it was always a good night out. 'Why not?' I thought. Maybe it would help to take my mind off coke. But every minute without drugs seemed like an eternity. Going cold turkey was a lot more difficult than I had expected it to be and part way through the night, I realised that I was going to have to get a fix before I went insane.

  'Excuse me,' I asked a boy I knew from Aylesbury. 'Do you know anybody who can get me any coke?'

  'Nah, sorry,' he told me.

  I felt a sudden wave of anger rushing through my body. What did he mean, 'no'? My hand balled into a fist and the next thing I knew, I was laying into the poor lad for not being able to sort me out. How dare he deny me the substance that I required in order to live my life without feeling like shit? I was absolutely furious. I'm not normally a violent person and hadn't had a fight since I was a teenager, but one of the symptoms of cocaine withdrawal is that it gives you uncontrollable fits of rage. Looking back, it was a very extreme thing to do and I can't apologise to the boy enough.

  The rest of the night remains a blur but I can remember crying and telling Kelly how unhappy I was in Tenerife.

  'I don't want to go back,' I blubbed. 'I want to stay in England; I don't want to go back.'

  I somehow eventually managed to get hold of an eighth of an ounce of coke and two of my friends and I polished off the entire lot in a single sitting. It was originally intended to last us all weekend and had cost £160. I couldn't go on like this; the cycle that I had got into in Tenerife was destroying me. Drugs were a lot more readily available over there due to the presence of Antonio and I would end up losing my health, my money and possibly my life if I didn't move home. It was time to call it quits. I would return for a couple of weeks to put it all to bed and then that would be that. I needed to wake up from my dream before it was too late.

  Chapter 3

  BACK TO TENERIFE

  As I boarded the plane back to
the island, I felt tired, disillusioned and depressed. Part of me was distraught at the prospect of relinquishing my sobriety but part of me couldn't help looking forward to getting back on the coke. I felt full of conflict. I wanted to get my life back to normal and leave the drugs behind but Veronicas was calling out to me.

  'Stay a little longer,' it cooed. 'Get a little higher. What's the worst thing that can happen?'

  I started back at work almost as soon as I touched down in Tenerife and the moment I had my first line of cocaine, I began to feel myself again. I was still homesick and knew that I was taking far too many drugs but neither of those things seemed to matter any more. Maybe I would carry on living on the island after all. Back home in England, I had to pay for every gram of coke I took. On Veronicas, Antonio could hook me up whenever I needed a fix.

  'Perhaps I should stay a little while longer,' I reasoned to myself, 'just to see how things pan out.'

  I soon fell straight back into my old routine of spending all day off my nut. I still had days when I considered packing it all in but it was now only a possibility rather than a certainty. When you're either drunk or high, twenty-four hours a day, any semblance of rationality goes out of the window. The drugs had quickly re-established themselves as my number one priority. Besides, a couple of the local marijuana dealers had put me onto an opportunity to earn myself a bit of extra cash.