On Saturday October 8 I sat on a barstool at the On-On Billiard Bar in Sanur, Bali, and ordered a Bintang beer. After just one sip I was tapped on the shoulder by a man who identified himself as a police officer asking “do you have something on you?”.
In my pocket was a sliver of hashish meant for the bar’s owner, Giuseppe “Joe” Serafino, who had been plaguing me all day with phone calls and text messages asking for a bit of dope to ease his back pain. We both used to buy a personal stash from someone who frequented his bar, but Joe claimed he was out. I agreed to give him enough for a joint or two, but as soon as I heard the question after the tap on the shoulder, I knew I had been set up.
I’ve been a journalist my entire adult life, and a foreign correspondent with Reuters for most of that time, specialising in so-called “general news” covering wars, conflict, political turmoil and natural disasters across the world. I’ve roughed it from Somalia and Rwanda to Zaire and Sudan, from Kosovo and Timor to Pakistan and Iraq. I’ve literally covered the A to Z of modern conflict, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Nothing quite prepared me for what was to follow.
I determined early on that the only way to cope with this was to treat the saga as just another assignment to a hostile environment, and decided to chronicle my experiences in a weekly “jail mail” newsletter to family and friends. It grew from a distribution list of twenty or so to a circulation of over 500 today. All the early pieces were written by hand and transcribed by a friend into a digital version, but as I became more jail-wise I was able to do more myself, including create this blog (with the invaluable help of Irina Korzh and David Dal Ben) which now contains all the material and is regularly updated.
