by Rusty Young
And finally, for those who couldn’t find a ticket to survival within the legitimate economy, there was an even bigger black-market economy in which inmates could continue to practise their other trade – being criminals.
They say that prisons don’t actually help to reform prisoners; that, in fact, they make them worse because all the time they are mixing with other convicted felons, which allows them to make new contacts and share knowledge and skills that help them to commit bigger and better crimes once they get out. Well, if prisons are no more than schools for further criminality, then San Pedro prison was the International University of Cocaine, where you could study under some of South America’s leading professors: laboratory chemists, expert accountants and worldly businessmen.
And at this particular university, students didn’t even have to wait until they graduated and got back out into the wide world in order to start practising their careers. We had all the necessary conditions to work right there on the inside, including investment capital, factories, a captive labour force, transport couriers, telephones and faxes, as well as friendly police who got their cut for looking the other way.
There were all sorts of scams going on inside the prison, but the main business was definitely drugs; that was what most of us had been convicted for and that was the most profitable product to sell. Trading in cocaine was so common that in San Pedro it was simply known as negocios – ‘business’. Everyone in prison talked about negocios, which was natural enough – they all needed money and, for many, that was the only way they knew how to get it.
Reasonable cash could be made by supplying the local demand, including the La Paz market and inside the prison itself, but of course the highest profits were to be made in exportation. And in the case of exporting cocaine, the fact that I was a foreigner worked to my advantage, for a change. Bolivia, being one of the biggest cocaine producers in the world and San Pedro prison being where many of the sellers were concentrated, there was no shortage of people willing and able to export; however, what these people didn’t have were buyers at the other end. And that was what I did have. I knew the European market, and my people with ready cash had exactly the opposite problem: they didn’t have sellers. Because of this, the other inmates were always making me business proposals that involved using my contacts. At first, I wasn’t interested. I knew there was definitely money to be made, which would have been helpful when I got out, but I had recently sent five thousand dollars to the judge and I believed that I would be leaving San Pedro shortly anyway. My lawyers promised me it would be before Christmas. There was no point in taking any stupid risks that might jeopardise my chances.
The fact of being stuck in prison meant that the risks were definitely higher, since I would have no choice other than to rely on outside people whom I hadn’t met. It had always been my policy not to work with people I didn’t know, and I already knew that you could trust barely anyone in Bolivia – I had learned that the hard way with Colonel Lanza, who I still intended to kill when I got out – but it was even more obvious in prison where people were desperate and would betray you for only a few bolivianos.
First, there was a chance that someone might try to set you up with the police. More likely, though, they would just rip you off. That could be done easily enough – once you have hooked up the buyer and the seller and they have done the exchange, how can you make sure you’re going to get your cut? Your business partners could say that the deal didn’t go through or that they hadn’t received the money, or they could just disappear completely. And what are you going to do about it when you’re locked up in prison? We had telephones and we could send the merchandise directly from the prison, but once it left our hands, how could we solve any problems?
Fortunately, Juan Carlos Abregon was one person I could trust.
14
ABREGON: BROTHERS IN CRIME
Juan Carlos Abregon was a smart man. He always had cash and if he didn’t, then he could get his hands on some, if he wanted to. I don’t know how he did it, but he always managed somehow. Apparently, he had been busted for his part in a drug ring in the city of Santa Cruz, although they never got him with anything, so maybe he still had some funds stashed away somewhere. From what people told me, his fortune had gone up and down over the years. Even when it went down, like now, when he was in prison, he always came up with some new plan to get rich and, more often than not, he pulled it off.
Abregon was also a tough man, you could tell that much straight away. He wasn’t big, but even if you had never met him before, you could tell that he was tough by his eyes and his silence. Physically, he was no different from most of the men from Santa Cruz: he was of medium height with dark skin and a small pot belly from eating so well. He also had the obligatory moustache that all the men from those parts had at the time. No one was exactly afraid of him, but he was given a certain amount of respect for being dangerous, although I didn’t know what he had done to earn his reputation. Occasionally he got moody and would refuse to speak to anyone. But when that happened, you just knew to stay out of his way. Mostly, he was friendly enough; he shook hands and made small talk with people he passed in the corridors. So, tough and moody, yes. But dangerous, no.
It took a while for us to become friends, or even to meet each other, for that matter. He didn’t associate much with other prisoners, so no one really knew him too well, which may have been part of the reason why he had maintained his reputation for being dangerous. Abregon never had many visitors to his room except for one girl who came to see him a few times a week. She was quite a lot younger than he was, and apart from the fact that her name was Raquel and that she was from Santa Cruz, no one knew anything about her. Whenever she came to see him, the door would remain locked until it was time for visitors to leave, at which point he would walk her to the main gate and wait with her in the queue until she left.
Abregon later told me that Raquel was his wife, although it seemed to me, from the way they acted, that they hadn’t known each other for very long, maybe since just before he went to prison, or maybe even while he was inside. He never told me the full story, not even when we became brothers. Anyway, it seemed that Raquel was going to stick by him. Anyone whose wife or girlfriend stands by them and visits them all the time in prison is a lucky man.
When Abregon and I did finally meet, we established a kind of mutual respect immediately. He already knew who I was, because all the foreigners in the prison stood out a mile, and I knew about him by reputation. After a few months we became good friends, and eventually I was one of the very few people he allowed into his room. Even then, we never really discussed personal things too much. Abregon was fairly secretive about his past and we always spoke about things in a general, roundabout kind of way. I liked the way that he talked negocios, though; he talked about it a lot, but he never boasted about his direct involvement because he never needed to.
In fact, he never told me anything about himself even when, after several more months of friendship, we made a brotherhood pact: we swore that we would always do whatever we could to look after each other, and whichever one of us got out first couldn’t rest until the other one was free.
It was strange to have someone that I could count on as a brother, but who wouldn’t tell me anything important about his life. However, that was the way it was with us and the fact that he was so serious and disciplined about it made me even more confident that I could trust him in everything. I knew that he would never get me in trouble if something went wrong with any of our joint negocios, which is why I agreed to do that first prison deal.
Having my credit card and the money sent by my friends in Europe meant that I wasn’t forced to get a job in the prison or become involved in negocios. However, Abregon’s first proposal was too good to refuse – he would put up all the money and organise everything, while I simply had to find a reliable buyer in Europe who could be trusted to pay when the merchandise arrived. We would split the profit fifty-fifty. I could use the
money to pay my lawyers, bribe the judges or save it for when I got out.
The deal came off. There were some small hitches and we had to pay a few people more than expected, but the deal went through and Abregon received our sixty thousand dollars. I asked for my share straight away. I paid five thousand dollars to my lawyers, and sent another ten thousand for the judge – making the total five thousand more than he had asked. My lawyers were now one hundred per cent confident I’d get off. It was only a matter of waiting a little while longer. But the trouble was where to keep the rest of the cash in the meantime. At any time the police could raid my room (particularly if anyone found out about the money) or I might be sent to Chon-chocoro, the maximum-security prison, before my trial began. Abregon had legal bank accounts outside where he could safeguard the money for me. So, that’s what I did with my remaining fifteen thousand. Abregon put some of his in the bank, but no one ever messed with him – not even the police – so he often kept a lot of money in his room for when he needed it on short notice.
Not long after that first deal, Abregon’s brother-in-law suggested another scam, which was also very easy money: bringing stolen cars across the border from Chile and rebirthing them. Bolivia was a far poorer country than Chile, so the price you could get for stolen cars was a lot lower, but it was far easier and safer to get rid of them because the controls on secondhand car sales were almost non-existent. With a little help from the police, you could be the legal owner holding all the right papers. And how would anyone from another country ever trace a stolen car in a place like Bolivia?
It sounded too good to be true and I wondered why other people weren’t doing it. The answer: capital. Abregon explained to me that lots of people knew about it, but not everyone could do it because you needed to put up a significant investment to buy the cars in the first place, which most people didn’t have. However, once you had that money, you could make a lot more and then, by reinvesting the profits and doing it on a bigger and bigger scale, even more money could be made. I was reluctant because it required me to hand over ten thousand dollars to Raquel’s brother, who I didn’t know. I would have only five thousand dollars remaining in the bank, but Abregon convinced me that after two or three times I would have enough money to bribe my way out of prison on the spot and then live like a king on the outside.
15
A NIGHT ON THE TOWN
Once I had established myself, life in prison wasn’t too hard. I had my own comfortable cell with a warm bed, kitchen facilities, a stereo system, a mobile phone and a television. I had bought new clothes, was back to full health and never hungry, and the other inmates had stopped attacking me. I also had the protection of the governor, and with all the cocaine parties and my new friends, those first few months passed fairly quickly. I kept my spirits up because I was constantly learning new things and, best of all, I had my freedom to look forward to and hopefully a big chunk of money from the secondhand car deal to go with it.
However, I noticed that things really started to slow down around late October. It had been six months since I had arrived, and obtaining my freedom was taking a lot longer than my lawyers had first promised. I know I shouldn’t complain, because prison life was pretty soft. The only obligation was to be out of bed for the morning roll call, known as the lista. After that, the guards almost never entered the prison complex, so I could do anything I wanted: I could sleep all day, study Spanish, cook a meal, smoke dope, read, talk with Ricardo, get drunk, watch television or sniff cocaine with Jack.
So, as far as prisons go, San Pedro was a good one. But it was still a prison. I was still stuck there all day, every day; I still had to sleep on the same mattress every night; I still had to wake up every morning surrounded by the same four walls and look up at the same ceiling. And although I was now free to move around the other sections during the day, I didn’t feel completely safe doing so. The other prisoners still resented me for being a foreigner, so I kept to myself a lot of the time. When I wasn’t taking cocaine with Jack, I spent entire days locked in my room doing almost nothing. It felt like I was slowly going crazy from being in the one place all the time and never meeting anybody new.
The worst days were Thursdays and Sundays, which were visitors’ days. You might think that I would have enjoyed the contact with the outside world, but I didn’t. There were certainly more people around on those days – families queued up outside the gates from early in the morning and stayed until the last bell, and in between times the place was filled with the colourful dresses and lovely smiles and laughter of wives, girlfriends and children. But all this only made me feel lonelier. I had no family in South America, so no one came to visit me. The few inmates I had made friends with were busy with their own families and didn’t want to be disturbed. I needed to do something about it.
One Saturday I was feeling even more restless than usual. It had been months since I had been dancing and talked with pretty girls, so I decided that I would go out and find some action. I took a shower, dressed in a casual shirt with my best suit, which I’d had drycleaned by one of the wives, put on some cologne, and went to speak with the major on duty about taking supervised prison leave for a night on the town. The major said that it would cost me one hundred dollars, plus the cost of my police escort, which I calculated would probably be another thirty dollars. I agreed to the price. I left San Pedro prison that afternoon at three o’clock through the main prison gates, in full view of all the other inmates. I had twelve hours of prison leave before I had to be back in my cell.
My escort was a short, stocky policeman called Jaime. He had strict instructions to keep an eye on me and make sure that I returned to the prison on time. The first thing I wanted to do was eat a nice meal, so I ordered the taxi driver to take us to the most expensive hotel in La Paz. On the way, we stopped at a jewellery store on the Prado so that I could buy a watch to replace the one the FELCN police had stolen from me. When Jaime wasn’t looking on the way out, I bought him a cheap watch also and gave it to him as a present in the taxi. Our relationship was off to a good start.
We must have made an odd couple walking past the hotel reception – a Bolivian dressed casually in old jeans and a red T-shirt accompanying a foreigner dressed in a smart suit.
‘A table for two, please,’ I said to the head waiter as we entered the restaurant. He raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.
Two waiters showed us to a table and pulled out our chairs so that we could sit down. Then another waiter came over and handed us leather-bound menus and explained the specials of the day in great detail. Finally, a fourth waiter brought me the wine list. It felt strange dealing with these situations again and I almost didn’t know how to act. At first, I couldn’t get used to having such well-mannered people dressed in bow ties treating me with such courtesy. In the San Pedro restaurants, I only ever heard grunts and the sound of my cutlery being thrown down on the table in front of me. I had forgotten how, outside prison, free people will treat you like a king if you pay them enough, and I almost felt guilty about all the fuss the waiters were making over me. In fact, I became paranoid that they were being too nice, calling me ‘señor’ all the time and bowing every time I said something.
They must know, I thought.
It took me several hours to get rid of the feeling that I had a big sign on my forehead saying ‘Prisoner’, so that everyone who saw me knew immediately that I was a cocaine trafficker. Of course, there is no way they could actually have known, but I kept looking suspiciously at the waiters to see if they were watching me, just in case. Jaime was also looking around, but with a look of absolute amazement on his face.
He must have been about thirty-five but for some reason was still only a private. I had seen him around the prison gates many times, but he was always fairly quiet and stayed out of everyone’s way so I had never had much to do with him. I couldn’t work him out but I could tell that he was very serious and responsible, which is probably why the major had chosen him to accomp
any me.
I doubt that Jaime had ever been to a restaurant of that quality in his whole life; the meal would have cost him a month’s salary. He didn’t know which spoon to use for the soup, and he slouched in his chair and forgot to use the napkin. I was tempted to correct his manners, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment by arguing with the person I would be spending the next twelve hours with. Besides, I didn’t want to spoil his fun either – although he was awkward with his table manners, he was obviously enjoying himself a great deal.
‘Would you like a beer, señor?’ asked the waiter. ‘Paceña?’
As soon as I thought of Paceña beer, I remembered Colonel Lanza instructing me on how to pour beer in La Paz. And when I thought of the colonel and what he had done to me at the airport, I found myself screwing the napkin tightly around my fingers, cutting off the circulation. I tried not to think about Lanza because it made me so angry. Besides, it wouldn’t be too long before I would get my revenge. Instead of a beer, I ordered an imported Chilean red from the wine menu. For the entrée, we had camarones al ajillo – prawns in a rich garlic sauce – a luxury in a landlocked country like Bolivia.
By the time the main course arrived, we had already finished the bottle of wine. I was finally beginning to relax and think like a normal person again, but when I got up to go to the toilet, Jaime jerked to attention and asked me where I was going. He insisted on accompanying me to the bathroom.
I guess he’s only doing his job, I thought. Nevertheless, having a policeman look over my shoulder when I was standing at the urinal destroyed the illusion of freedom. I decided to look on the bright side, though. At least I’m not handcuffed, I thought, as we returned to our seats.
