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WHITE CHRISTMAS

Hotel Kerobokan was just a cash cow for the Indonesians who were involved in it, from the cops, to courts to the jailers. They don't see $30,000 in their life, and then all of a sudden there's this blitz by the cops and they're all getting the money – the judge, the warden and the staff at the jail. These people had made this Kerobokan a machine to make money.

They set out in a way to extort money from westerners with their little bit of drugs, that's the way I saw it. It wasn't so much they were trying to stop crime or drugs, they were trying to get these people, like me . . . to try to get all the money out of them, scare them into having their families send money.

The cops were busting everybody doing anything. People were coming in once a week, from all different countries – Greece, France, Brazil, Peru, Australia, you name it, Africa – and every one of them like me, thinking the same thing: we need to raise money to bribe these people to let us go home. Everybody had a plan or a deal to make. I didn't know any foreigner in there who didn't have a deal worked out about how they were going to get out of this mess.

It's incredible just how much money they make. I had to pay the warden $1000 just to go to [a better part of] the jail; the chief of police took my $2000 set of golf clubs; I paid them to type up my paperwork; it's just pay, pay, pay. They are just bloodsuckers. It cost me $200,000, that whole thing.

– Gabriel

Rafael went only once to visit the guys in Kerobokan, arriving with armfuls of bags of food from the Bali Deli. The guys swarmed, happy to see him, passing on letters to send, asking him to buy phone credit. Ruggiero offered to sell Rafael cheap drugs, explaining the jail was a frenetic drugs market with the best and cheapest prices on the island. Ruggiero was already