Jim Algie Read online

  Blindfolded, and with chains around their ankles, the condemned man or woman would be escorted by guards into the death chamber. There, their hands were tied together with the sacred white thread that monks use to bless devotees and to ward off evil, so they could clutch three unopened lotus blossoms, three joss-sticks and a small orange candle, as if they were going to pray at a Buddhist temple. While Chavoret waited behind the gun, the guards would then tie the inmate to a wooden cross with his hands above his head, and put a white screen between him and the machine-gun, which was bolted to the floor and pointed at his back. Finally, a doctor put a target on the screen where the prisoner’s heart was, so the executioner could take aim and fire.

  That was how the death penalty was carried out after the government outlawed beheading in 1932, and before Thailand switched to lethal injection in late 2003.

  Chavoret recalled the condemned men and women being led in to the chamber. “I heard it all—crying, begging and cursing. But some of them just walked in without a word. They were ready to die.”

  Until being diagnosed with cancer in 2010, these were the kind of tales that the former rock ‘n’ roll musician recounted for rapt audiences at Thai universities and remand centres for juvenile delinquents, which he also included in his 2007 autobiography, The Last Executioner.

  Until recently, Chavoret also volunteered as a tour guide at the Corrections Museum once a month. The museum is on the grounds of Romanee Lart Park, not far from the Golden Mount and Khaosan Road in Bangkok. On display are knives and syringes made by former inmates, along with implements of torture once used in Siamese jails. On the ground floor, there’s a huge rattan ball—like the ones used in takraw, the Asian version of volleyball—with sharp nails protruding from the inside. Curled up inside the ball is a mannequin of a prisoner. To punish the inmates or amuse themselves, the authorities would let an elephant kick the ball around. After it got bored, the tusker would often trample the bloody ball and squash the prisoner. This type of torture (and others like it) was outlawed by King Rama V at the end of the 19th century.

  Filled with flowerbeds, shrubs, joggers and school kids, the park was once the site of Bangkok’s most draconian jail, as evidenced by the vacant row of jail cells on the north side and the guard towers that stand like stone sentinels. Built by the French at the end of the 19th century, most of the Maha Chai

  These tableaux of execution scenes, including the original machine-gun used to execute inmates at Bang Kwang Central Prison, are on permanent exhibit at the Corrections Museum. Also pictured is Chavoret Jaruboon, the last executioner.

  penitentiary was demolished in the 1980s. Some of the inmates were transferred to Bang Kwang Central Prison, such as convicted heroin trafficker-turned-author Warren Fellows who did ‘hard time’ in both penal facilities, and wrote an autobiography about his experiences titled The Damage Done: 12 Years Of Hell In A Thai Prison.

  To punish certain convicts, he wrote, they were locked in a ‘dark room’ for 23 hours and 55 minutes a day. These hellholes were so cramped there was not even enough room for all of them to lie down, so they had to take turns sleeping. Left there for months at a time, he and his fellow inmates caught cockroaches and mashed them up with a little fish sauce to supplement their meagre ration of one bowl of gruel per day. During one such punishment stay, the author recalled hearing a scratching noise that went on for hours. It turned out to be a Thai inmate sharpening a nail so that he could attack another prisoner. Screams bounced off the walls as he stabbed his victim again and again, but the guards did not remove the corpse until the next day.

  In his autobiography, which remains a perennial bestseller on the backpacker trail in Southeast Asia, the sadism of the prison guards goes far beyond anything in the book and film that raised the bar for the foreign-jails-are-hell genre—Midnight Express. In one particularly nauseating episode, Fellows (who was first imprisoned at Maha Chai in the late 1970s) wrote how a guard forced a bunch of the convicts to stand in a septic tank, chin deep in excrement for many hours, because they’d been playing a dice game in their cell.

  The popularity of his book has had some positive effects, such as the banning of the ‘dark rooms’. The prison’s former director Pittaya Sanghanakin took great pains to announce some of these improvements at what must have been the most bizarre anniversary celebration ever held at any correctional facility. In 2002, Bang Kwang Central Prison—located just outside Bangkok in Nonthaburi province—celebrated its 72nd anniversary (an auspicious occasion given the 12-year cycles and 12 different animals in Chinese astrology). The Corrections Department set up a stage across from Bang Kwang for Thai bands, retinues of sexy female dancers, comedians and beauty pageant contestants. Commenting on the festivities, Pittaya said, “The people around here have supported us, so we wanted to do something in return for them.” Up and down the roads near the jail, scarecrows wearing the prison’s blue uniform, straw hats and happy faces had been tied to power poles. “Since the inmates are not allowed out of their cells,” Pittaya said, “we thought that they could enjoy the festivities through these effigies.”

  For many of the foreign inmates watching the events unfold on closed-circuit television, the celebration was a kind of torture. One of them, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “What’s there to celebrate? Seventy-two years of injustice?”

  For many of the locals visiting the two-day party, the biggest lure was the display of archaic torture instruments, complete with life-size mannequins, on loan from the Corrections Museum. These included the original machine-gun used at Bang Kwang, a tableau of two machete-wielding executioners dressed in red outfits about to lop the head off a blindfolded prisoner, and a mannequin whose arms and legs were locked in a pillory so splinters could be hammered under the nails of his hands and feet. Watching families, beauty queens and rich matriarchs walking their poodles past these exhibits was a crash course in the country’s bizarre contrasts.

  Perhaps these exhibits were intended to show how much more humane the prison system has become. Aside from some of the improvements, such as introducing bachelor’s degree correspondence courses (with instructors coming into the jail to oversee the final exams), the director said the biggest problem facing the Thai penal system was overcrowding—to the point where cells at Bang Kwang intended for four people actually hold twenty. In the early 1990s, there were 90,000 prisoners doing time in Thailand. Now there are three times that many (around 70 per cent on drug-related charges). The Corrections Department has been trying to decrease these numbers, he said, by arranging early releases for the elderly and those serving less than 30 years.

  Only a few days after the jail’s anniversary, however, Amnesty International filed a report titled ‘Widespread Abuses in the Administration of Justice’ in Thailand, accusing warders of severely violating prisoners’ basic rights, and using torture as punishment for minor infractions. The report cited an incident in May 2001 where a Thai inmate named Sinchai Salee was punched, kicked and smacked with batons by several guards until he lost consciousness and eventually died. Earlier, the 30-something Sinchai had got into an argument with a guard because he wanted to nail a water bottle to the wall of his cell. Amnesty reported that many of these punishments were doled out by ‘trusties’—other inmates who receive special privileges from the warders in return for keeping, and sometimes disturbing, the peace. The report also noted that, in direct contravention of Thai law, the men on Bang Kwang’s death-row have to clank around with heavy leg irons on 24 hours a day. These shackles are welded together.

  When the Corrections Department admitted for the first time ever that some of these abuses were true, the story made front-page news in Thailand. Siva Saengmanee, the Correction Department’s director-general at the time, said they had received numerous complaints about warders ruling over their charges with iron fists and guards extorting money from prisoners or demanding sexual favours from visiting wives and daughters.

  “It is the responsibility of prison of
ficials to turn convicts into valuable members of society, not ruin their morale by handing out unauthorised punishments,” Siva said during a press conference.

  In The Last Executioner, Chavoret blamed the persistent problem of corruption in the prison system on the poor pay the guards bring home—a rookie only makes about 7,000 baht a month—and pointed out that some guards have been punished and wound up in prison. A case in point is Prayuth Sanun. To supplement his meagre wage, he began working as a bouncer in a bar, where he fell in with a gang of drug-dealers. Nabbed with 700,000 methamphetamine pills, an M16 and a load of cash, the former guard has now languished on death row for nearly a decade.

  Although he has never downplayed the corruption of some guards, Chavoret said there have been some genuine moments of levity and compassion prior to executions. One example he cited was of a Thai woman who had been arrested 12 different times for trafficking in narcotics before finally getting the death sentence. When the female guards escorting her to the chamber—that bore a sign in Thai euphemistically referring to it as the ‘room to end all suffering’—could not control her, a male guard stepped in to hold her hand, asking if he could be her last boyfriend. That made her laugh and she kissed him on the cheek. Arm in arm, the guard escorted her on a blind date with death.

  The former executioner often resorted to Buddhist teachings to soothe the infuriated men sentenced to death. In the case of the serial rapist Sane Oongaew, that showed remarkable restraint on his part. Sane and several cohorts raped and strangled a ten-year-old girl to death in Samut Prakarn province back in 1971. The autopsy report revealed that she was covered with bruises and abrasions, her hymen had been shredded, semen clogged her vagina and clay had been stuffed down her throat all the way to the larynx. Sane’s cohorts confessed, but he steadfastly denied any complicity in the sex crime and homicide. When the superintendent read out the execution order to him, Sane screamed, “I didn’t fucking do it! I don’t know a goddamn thing about it. I will haunt you all for the rest of your lives. Let me see the face of the detective in charge! Where’s the son of a bitch?”

  Chavoret walked over to remind him of the Buddhist teaching about thinking positive thoughts before you die so as to be reborn in a better place. “Just think of it as bad karma coming back to you for what you have done. If you are positive when you ‘go’ you will end up in a better place, so empty your mind of anger and negativity.” That calmed him down a little. For a last will and testament Sane wrote a letter to his father, repeating the Buddhist tenet that the only certainties in life are birth, ageing, pain and death, while reminding him to visit his brother Narat who had confessed to his role in the rape and murder.

  “Dear Dad,

  “I just want to say goodbye to you. I hope you won’t be too sad. Just think of it as a natural occurrence. We’re bound to be born, age, be hurt and die anyway. Please look after my wife and don’t let her struggle. Tell her not to take another husband. Don’t bury my body, keep it for three years. Don’t forget, dad, to visit Narat as often as you can.”

  Much of the violence in Thai jails, the former executioner said, is the result of chronic under-funding. The daily food budget is still less than one US dollar per day. Without money coming in from relatives and friends for inmates to buy food in the prison shops (usually run by gangsters continuing their lives of crimes from the other side) and medical supplies, inmates are prey to starvation and opportunistic illnesses. They also end up doing odd jobs for other inmates—sexual services included—to make ends meet.

  For many of the 700-plus foreign convicts incarcerated in Bang Kwang, the country’s largest maximum-security penitentiary (population: 7,000), the worst part of prison life is the boredom. Visits from tourists are reprieves from that tedium. Partly because of the popularity of Warren Fellows’ memoir, Bang Kwang has become a strange stopover for travellers.

  Garth Hattan, the former rock drummer and convicted heroin trafficker who served eight years there, said the inmates refer to some of the visitors as ‘banana tourists’ “because they make us feel like monkeys in a cage. Some women even asked me to take off my shirt for them, or they say shit like, ‘How could you have been so stupid?’ Some of them have also asked me to where to score drugs or how to set up deals.”

  The magazine columns Garth wrote are crammed with similar tales and bytes of humour rare in the prison genre. One guard, trying to suck up to a former security chief Garth described as the ‘evil love child of Pol Pot and Imelda Marcos’, discovered a stash of what looked like marijuana in Garth’s locker. The guards rolled up ‘bombers’ to test the weed, which turned out to be green tea.

  Many of the inmates, particularly the poor Asians, have to work inside the technically illegal sweatshops or do laundry and perform sexual favours for the other inmates. “You may assume that being indigenous to Thailand, kathoeys (ladyboys) would be the sole purveyors of the prison sex trade, but you’d be amazed to see what levels some ostensibly normal guys have plunged to just to get a little extra chicken with their rice. It’s as if walking through these gates, no matter how turbo-hetero they claim to be, gives them a license to—poof!—turn into ‘Bang Kwang Barbie’ (Malibu Barbie’s twisted Siamese sister),” wrote the Californian in another column.

  The prison authorities knew that Garth’s then-fiancée, Susan Aldous (also known as ‘The Angel of Bang Kwang’), was smuggling his columns out to be published in our magazine, but they didn’t mind because he included enough cautionary anecdotes about mixing high times with lowlifes to deglamourise prison life and the backpacker chic of doing drugs in Thailand.

  “There’s a message in here somewhere and it’s not just targeted at you hell-man adventure cowboys, and you ennui-plagued, insouciant heiresses-in-waiting who are out to shock the world—maybe your parents—by taking the fateful walk from the conventional wild side into something you feel exudes a truly radical allure—like an impulsive jaunt into narco-trafficking, for instance.

  “There’s no glamour here, no promise of success, no proverbial pot of gold to pick up on the other side, just a sweaty inanimate existence riddled with the futile dreams of what could’ve been, mingled with the aching regret of having let so many good people down—especially yourself. Enjoy your travels, and never put yourself in a position that would jeopardise your freedom to do so.”

  In recent years, the number of ‘banana tourists’ and backpackers has declined, said Susan. “The prison authorities have made it more difficult to visit inmates so you don’t see so many of the Khaosan Road types, or the messages on notice boards in guesthouses about visiting prisoners. If you want to visit an inmate now you have to dress up a little and act like a friend or relative.”

  Transfer agreements between many Western countries, and more recently with Nigeria, have ensured that there are less black and white men in the jail. “The atmosphere at Bang Kwang has changed in recent years,” noted Susan, “because of all the transfer agreements, but there’s a lot more inmates from Laos, Vietnam and Hong Kong who tend to blend in and are forgotten. Their governments don’t care and they don’t get much attention.”

  Until a few years ago, African men made up the overwhelming majority of foreign prisoners. When I visited a 25-year-old Nigerian inmate, who had been sentenced to 50 years for serving as a heroin courier, or ‘mule’, he told me, “Compared to life in Nigeria, this prison isn’t so bad. Some of the crime syndicates we work for make a special deal with our families, so if we get caught the syndicates give our families about 20 dollars per month for the time we serve in jail. In Nigeria that’s not a bad income. At least I can feel like I’m still taking care of my wife and three children.”

  Beautifully landscaped with flowers and hedges, the visiting area demonstrates the Thai penchant for painting the happiest of faces on the grimmest of backdrops. Recently, the authorities have also put in plexi-glass and telephones, which, if the connections were better, would make it easier to talk to a prisoner. It’s an improvement from the ol
d days of having to yell through a pair of wire fences separating a four-metre gulley in the midst of ten other yelling matches. During one such visit, Garth shouted, “This place is still hell, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it was when Warren Fellows was here. A few of the older dudes and guards remember him as being a terrible junkie.”

  Garth and Warren are not the only ones who have turned headlines into bylines. A glut of prison memoirs has emerged from Thailand, such as Susan Gregory’s Forget You Had a Daughter, Debbie Singh’s You’ll Never Walk Alone (her brother received ten years in jail for fencing a check worth a thousand dollars) and a few forgettable films like Brokedown Palace—principally shot in the Philippines with Claire Danes and Kate Beckinsdale as the leads—in addition to an Australian mini-series for TV called The Bangkok Hilton featuring a young Nicole Kidman.

  All of these shows and books play excruciating variations on the Thai-jails-are-hell theme. The only book to break out of that creative cellblock is David McMillan’s Escape. Believed to be the only Westerner to ever successfully escape from the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ (a nickname give to many Thai jails, but in this case Khlong Prem), McMillan (a pseudonym) comes across as a pathological criminal and unrepentant drug dealer who, nonetheless, pulled off a death-defying escape that required as much cunning as courage a decade before the book came out in 2007. After sawing through the bars of his cell window, he used a piece of wood and straps to abseil down the wall. He bridged an internal moat with a ladder he’d made out of bamboo and picture frames, which also allowed him to scale an electrified fence. By dawn he was creeping across an outer wall, using an umbrella to shield his face from the guards up in the watchtowers. If he had been spotted, chances are he would’ve met the same fate as the four Thai inmates who commandeered a garbage truck inside Khlong Prem Prison in 2000. As they tried to ram their way through the front gates, the guards shot all four of them.