13

THE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY
OF COCAINE

Once I was friends with the governor, I managed to get the FELCN police to return my possessions. A taxista called me to the front gate where several boxes were waiting for me. When I sorted through the boxes, I noticed that most of the valuable items were missing: my money, my best clothes and my gold jewellery, including my good luck ring. Surprisingly, however, they gave me back my industrial hair dryer and steamer, which were worth over a thousand dollars each. They probably didn’t know what they were.

My machines were still in pieces from when the colonel’s men had dismantled them at the airport. I reassembled them but, unfortunately, I didn’t have them for very long. Ricardo had told me about surprise raids the police sometimes conducted, known as requisas. He told me to be careful when they searched my room, because they often planted drugs, then asked for a bribe to make them disappear, especially with foreigners and new prisoners. The best way to avoid this was to demand that a witness be present during the search.

The first time the police performed a requisa in my room, I didn’t have time to call a witness. Immediately, four policemen crowded around my steamer, blocking my view.

‘Stand still. Right there!’ they ordered me when I tried to get closer to make sure they couldn’t plant anything.

I stood by helplessly as, one by one, they inspected inside the head mechanism while the others stood back, nodding and whispering to each other. Any second, I was expecting one of them to produce a bag of cocaine. But they didn’t. They continued pointing and whispering to each other as if they had found something suspicious, although they weren’t quite sure what. It took me some time to realise that it wasn’t anything hidden inside the steamer that they were concerned with, but the steamer itself. They started backing away from it.

‘Careful. Don’t get too close,’ the policeman who had made the original finding warned his friend who was sneaking up for another look.

They backed away towards the kitchenette, leaving me standing in the middle of the room wondering what was going on. They spoke in hushed tones, so I couldn’t pick up much. However, I did hear one word repeated several times: bomba. I laughed to myself.

‘It’s not a bomb,’ I said loudly, smiling in relief. ‘I’ll show you.’ I bent down, picked up the power cable and went to plug it in at the wall but two of the police crash-tackled me to the ground before I could get there. The lieutenant then jumped on top of me, digging his knee into my neck.

At that exact moment, the major in charge of the prison requisa appeared in the doorway. He took one look at me choking on the ground and immediately demanded an explanation. The lieutenant did a re-enactment of what had just happened, completely exaggerating the part where I went to plug in the steamer. He made me look like a suicidal terrorist making a desperate leap with a fuse in my hand, and himself look like an action hero who had stopped me. The major glared at me. He wouldn’t go near the machine, but he wouldn’t let me get up to tell my side of the story either. Since the policemen were still sitting on top of me, I couldn’t show him how the machine worked. I did my best to explain without the use of my hands, but admittedly, I was never good at doing sound effects and my impression of the noise the steamer made did sound rather like a bomb exploding.

My machines were confiscated and the governor couldn’t get them back for me. I didn’t want to push him. There was still so much more for me to learn about the way things worked and I might need his help in more important matters.

San Pedro wasn’t like any other prison – it was like a small city with its own unique set of rules and its own bizarre economy. For a start, you couldn’t count on the prison administration for anything, not even to maintain the buildings, so everything that needed to be done or bought was done or bought by the prisoners themselves. And because of this, anyone who wasn’t independently wealthy had to have a job.

At the very top of the prison economy were the big businessmen who continued to manage their empires using specially installed fax and phone lines. Among them was San Pedro’s most notorious inmate. Barbachoca – ‘Red Beard’ – had been charged with trafficking 4.2 tonnes of cocaine after his aeroplane, which the newspapers called ‘el narco avion’, was intercepted in Lima, in Peru.

The prison middle class was made up of those inmates lucky enough to have had a trade or profession on the outside that they could continue to practise on the inside. There were cooks, painters, restaurateurs, carpenters, electricians, cleaners, accountants and doctors. There were artesanos who sold their artwork and tiny handicrafts – such as paintings and figurines – to visitors. There was even a lawyer in for fraud, who, although he obviously couldn’t accompany them to court, offered cheap legal advice to the inmates. Basically, anything you wanted done or anything you wanted to buy, you could, and if they didn’t have it, someone could get it in for you for a small commission. But in fact, many of the services were actually cheaper than on the outside, so sometimes bargain hunters came into the prison to visit imprisoned barbers and dentists who offered cut-price deals to attract trade.

At the very bottom of the economy were those who didn’t have a trade or profession, but who performed the countless small jobs around the place that needed to be done. These ranged from being one of the messengers – known as taxistas – who informed inmates when they had a visitor waiting at the gate, to people who shined shoes or sold tokens for the phone cabins. These prisoners made next to nothing, but at least they managed to stay alive.

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.