Free Hotel Kerobokan by Kathryn Bonella

They were already chatting with each other, sitting in a circle on the floor. I was there with three other journalists. They had already taken several drugs from the next room and put [them] in the centre of this circle. There were several piles of ecstasy tablets. Iwan just kept sitting there on the floor smiling .
    – Journalist Wayan Juniartha of the Jakarta Post

    Despite his casual attitude, Iwan had a lot to be stressed about. Police searched for three hours, regularly flashing smug smiles at each other as they uncovered a small-scale ecstasy factory. By the end of the night they had found 80,000 ecstasy tablets, six hundred grams of cocaine, several kilograms of powders, one kilogram of heroin, and five pill-pressing and stamping machines. They also discovered fourteen .22 calibre bullets, a pistol and an active hand grenade; basic protection for a drug dealer.

    ‘The arrest was really good news for us because he had been the most wanted criminal for years in Bali,’ a high ranking narcotics detective said. ‘We have been trying to capture him for years, but he was too smart and too elusive. We believe that he is one of the four biggest drug dealers in Bali, the ones with extensive networks and important connections,’ he said .
    – Jakarta Post , March 2002

    At 5 am police finished the raid. They handcuffed Iwan and drove him to the Denpasar police cells, where he was put under tight security. Now he had to start a costly fight for his life. Ironically, Iwan’s long-standing tacit immunity had been wiped at a time when he’d been considering turning legit and moving into the booming Bali villa-building business. But his illegally made wealth would now be needed to pay the courts to let him live.
    Cash flew around wildly. The payments were funnelled through his lawyer to grease the many outstretched palms in the system that needed to be paid. One payment slipped to police was to slash the number of ecstasy pills they would report they’d found. Another was to botch a court demonstration of Iwan’s pill presser, so the pills pressed in front of the judges looked nothing like the 80,000 confiscated pills. This exonerated Iwan from a serious drugs-manufacturing charge, making it easier for the judges to lighten his sentence without showing overt favouritism and so red-flagging their deals.
    ‘Yes! Yes!’ Iwan cried out, leaping off the plastic chair when the judges read out his sentence of thirteen years for drug possession. Death had been a real possibility; the deals had saved him. But his lawyer quickly yanked him back down in his seat, telling him to be quiet. Indiscretion was dangerous. Everyone was watching their back. They all had dirty hands and it was unwise to draw attention to the sentence. If there was suspicion that the judiciary had been compromised, the prosecutors could still appeal for death.

    In his verdict [the judge] stressed that the 48-year-old defendant was not guilty of drug distribution or manufacturing, which were more serious offences that carried heavier sentences .
    – Jakarta Post , March 2001

    In a separate case, Iwan – dubbed ‘Godfather’ by the press – was sentenced to a further three years for the weapons.
    With his cases finally over, Iwan threw himself into new legitimate and old illicit businesses inside Hotel K. He converted a building near the tennis court, previously used by an inmate as a printing factory, into a furniture workshop. He invested $US50,000 of his own money in buying machinery and he paid forty-two prisoners small weekly salaries to work in the factory. It was a win-win situation. Even those with little skill could put their long and boring jail hours to use by endlessly polishing a table leg, ensuring that Iwan’s workshop was soon turning out the finest legs in furniture and attracting clients from as far as Spain and the United States.
    Iwan’s wealthy and smartly dressed clients were welcomed through Hotel K’s front doors like official