Trial and error

I was sitting on Sunday in the garden of our block, sipping a coffee and gazing into nothingness, when my eyes fell on “Omar Khayyam”, an Iranian serving life for heroin trafficking.

He is forty-something and was apparently part of a gang of four busted about six years ago and all sentenced to “the full stretch”, as it is known here. Their numbers meant they swiftly took over running the foreigners block until 2015, when three of them were moved to various prisons in Java, because they were considered trouble makers who were continuing to deal and run trafficking rings from behind bars.

Omar Khayyam remains a senior member of the block committee and while all my dealings with him have been friendly and fair — and all those I’ve seen him conduct — many of the old timers here can’t speak his name without bringing up some misdeed from when the Iranians ran the block.

That is a big problem in this place; the history runs as long as your sentence.

The past week has again been one filled with tension and squabbling and while perhaps this is the default setting, it seems to me that it is a powder keg waiting to explode.

I think the committee does a good job — certainly the members do more work than most of the other inmates — but they are constantly being second guessed and undermined by prisoners who do nothing for the collective good.

The latest drama involves “Bonnie and Clyde”, a young American couple who murdered Bonnie’s mother at a five star Bali resort a couple of years ago and are now serving 10 and 18 years respectively.

The pair has a tempestuous relationship — she is in the women’s section, he in my block — and also a child born in prison 18 months ago. She was the spoilt child of a wealthy Chicago mixed race couple, he from the wrong side of the tracks.

It was a brutal and callous murder they committed — and so poorly planned they had no chance of ever getting away with it — but listening to them both you’d think they’d been victims of some terrible miscarriage of justice. They complain constantly about how corrupt the Indonesian legal system is, but if they had been tried in America there is no doubt they would have got life or even the death sentence.

Last weekend Clyde uploaded to YouTube a series of “selfie” videos made by Bonnie in which she takes full responsibility for the murder and says Clyde’s only involvement was reluctantly helping to dispose of the body. Incriminating text messages on their phones, she says, were planted by her while he slept. Newspapers in Chicago went to town on the videos (“Chilling confession from behind bars”, etc, etc) and also noted that the pair seems to have it easy in Kerobokan Prison, with access to mobile phones and the Internet.

Of course this was too much for the authorities once they were made aware of it, and they hauled Clyde in for questioning, insisting he hand over his phone. He had anticipated the fallout and had hidden it, but selfishly did not bother telling the rest of us what he’d done and so the wrath of the guards descended on us all. Before the raid, the block committee spoke to him and told him he had to give up his phone or else we were all going to suffer. He refused, and the subsequent raid yielded three expensive smartphones and a few chargers as well.

Nobody complained about the videos per se — anyone is entitled to try and get their case re-assessed — but even to my newcomer’s mind he should have told us what was going down and, failing that, given up his phone for the common good.

The authorities have not punished him, but it is an open secret that when his child has to leave prison at two years old, he is going to be moved to Java, away from Bonnie and the support network he has built up. She will also be moved to a women’s only prison in Java.

The committee decided that as punishment for jeopardizing the entire block, he would be evicted from his room and have to sleep in the aula (hall). If he wanted a room, he’d have to buy his way back in. This punishment has already been handed down to two others since I’ve been here — one for fighting, one for theft — as both incidents prompted raids from the guards that affected the entire block.

The fighter — a wide-boy coke dealer I call “The Kray Twins” as a result of his split personality — has now joined forces with the two other evictees to try and overthrow the committee and get their punishments revoked. This has split the block and almost every night this week we’ve had a meeting to try and thrash it out, but it always descends into chaos with everyone dragging up slights and fights from the past.

I’ve intervened a couple of times, noting mostly that everyone keeps talking about how we have to stand together, but then undermines the committee on every decision they disagree with. As a result, both camps now want me to join their committee, allegedly as a voice of reason.

I’m staying out of it for now. For starters, I don’t yet have any pull with the guards or know fully how this place functions, but in any case, I’d be more likely to throw my lot in with the incumbents.

The Kray Twins has actually bought his way back into his room already (the money goes towards improving the block) but keeps threatening to alert the guards to all the drug taking and dealing going on. It seems to me he is on thin ice (sic) as he spends most nights on the meth pipe and shouting deals down the telephone. There is a lot of “my guard is more powerful than your guard” in here.

Looking at Omar Khayyam on Sunday, I was hit by despair thinking this was all he could expect for the rest of his life. Every single day from now on would be the same, and his universe wouldn’t change from what he sees around him.

It’s a horrible thought, and brought me back to my own trial and what sentence awaits.

Neither of the scheduled witnesses showed up in court last week, but they were peripheral to the case and so we accepted their police statements without demur.

One was a waitress at the bar where I was arrested — and she was only to state that she hadn’t seen the police plant anything on me — while the other was an unfortunate itinerant DVD seller who was expected to give similar testimony.

The trial resumes on Tuesday, February 14, and this time Joe will give his testimony, after which the prosecution rests and my team begin the defense.

Joe’s testimony will be crucial in giving the prosecutor and judge the leeway to ask for and hand down a lenient sentence. We have already seen a copy of his witness statement and have a couple issues with it: he says that (under police duress) he gave my name and number as “someone who knew how to obtain hashish”, and that he called me asking if I had some, at which point I agreed to bring him some to his bar.

The “someone who knew how to obtain hashish” is obviously obfuscation as we both used to buy from the same supplier, and he actually called me five or six times (and SMSd me a similar number of times) asking for some hash, but I kept telling him to bugger off before finally agreeing to give him a sliver.

My lawyer will obviously put this to him and we expect he will agree the facts (the police have already admitted the number of attempts to coerce me), but our only concern is that as far as we know at this stage, his statement in his own trial is that he obtained his hashish from a mystery man at McDonalds and had no idea who “my” dealer was.

He may well have changed his trial statement to the truth, but given he has already changed his police testimony five times, my lawyer says he will have no problem showing him to be a serial liar. We also have a sword of Damocles to wield; he told police he has no criminal record, but we know he has a prior conviction for possession of marijuana in Australia.