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SNOWING IN BALI

Gabriel was devastated by his double whammy of bad luck. He was trying to figure it out; make sense of it . . . maybe it was karma for the drugs he had tucked away. Moping around the jail, he was miserable, zombie-like, drinking beers to blur reality, dazed at the idea of waking up in hell every day for the next eight years. Then he got a tip from the prison boss advising him to call Juri’s lawyer.

I call the guy and he comes in all cavalier and swagger, ‘Yeah Gabriel, tell me how much time you want.’ ‘How much time do I want to do?’ ‘Yeah, tell me how much time and I’ll tell you the price.’ I open my mouth and say, ‘I can’t do more than two years.’ I should have said one. Stupid. But anyway, he says, ‘All right, two years, I give you two years for $30,000.’

I call my parents and they’re like, ‘What, more money? Another scam?’ They didn’t want any part of it. And the worst thing I could say to my brother was, ‘More money?’ But I talked him into it. So I ended up paying some crooked lawyer to get my sentence brought down. He got some lady at court to change it from eight years to two, so that when the paperwork came from the court to jail it said two years. The warden knew about it, but it was a secret at the courts. This one lawyer, he was doing a lot of the foreigners’ cases, he was the guy.

– Gabriel

Like most westerners, Gabriel was also flinging money around just to survive, paying for all the basics in Kerobokan Prison like toilet paper, soap, water and food. For his sanity he was also bribing the guards to bring in beers, dishes from his favourite restaurants and for days out. The westerners were injecting a fortune into the coffers of guards, police and the judiciary.