Free Hotel Kerobokan by Kathryn Bonella Page A

jail guests. They were escorted down the paths past the many staring faces of the curious prisoners who were usually loitering in the yard or sitting around drinking beers and smoking dope. Anyone new entering Hotel K, especially dapper-looking business-people, provoked interest and broke the monotony. But not all Iwan’s clients were so well-heeled. Some tended to look as scruffy as the inmates in jeans and T-shirts and appeared more suited to sitting on a concrete floor than on Iwan’s expensive designer chairs. When these clients walked into Iwan’s workshop, furniture shopping was the last thing on their minds.
    Behind the front lines of noisy machines and flying sawdust, prisoners were quietly pressing and packing ecstasy pills. It was the ideal set-up. Iwan’s drug clients could breeze in and out without fear of being searched. Police were not allowed inside Hotel K unless they got a warrant, which meant Iwan would get ample warning from the guards on his payroll to hide the drugs. Furniture-moving trucks freely drove in and out of the jail’s service gate; superficial random searches always failed to uncover the tens of thousands of ecstasy pills neatly packed inside his high-end speakers.
    On the street outside, Iwan had also set up a furniture showroom among a row of shanty-style shops that mostly sold cheap mobile phones and cans of Coke. Iwan did deals with his high and low-end clients at the showroom, using an intercom system to talk through the jail walls. Under the guise of going to his showroom, the business magnate easily slipped in and out of Hotel K, with the guards or tamping prisoners working as doormen – standing ready to swing open the wooden doors whenever Iwan walked out and disappeared for the day or night. As part of his deal to run the furniture business, Iwan was issued with an official piece of paper giving him a licence to roam freely. He carried it in his pocket in case he was stopped by the police.

    Several people, including several police officers, suspected his workshop is just a front for his drug business inside the prison .
    –Journalist Wayan Juniartha of the Jakarta Post

    Being the jail’s furniture tycoon had many perks. Twice a year he got generous chunks of time slashed off his sixteen-year sentence, as the prison system recognised his enterprising efforts to set up a vocational program in Hotel K. His illicit business was given a simple nod and a sly wink by the jail boss, who took fifty per cent of the cash earnings from the furniture business and had his pockets regularly filled with wads of drug money.
    Iwan’s largesse ensured the jail doors swung open freely to his family. His Dutch wife, Jolita, who shared a house behind the jail with their kids, two maids, a gardener and a driver, wandered through Hotel K daily, wearing her trademark slash of bright red lipstick. She knew the jail well after doing her own short stint for a drug possession charge. During her court case she was released from Hotel K on two hundred million rupiah ($40,000) bail and put under ‘city arrest’ before being acquitted four months later. But Hotel K had now virtually become an extension of her own backyard. Life as a jail wife wasn’t easy. She couldn’t have failed to realise her husband fooled around; his pony-tailed good looks, charisma, power and money were a heady aphrodisiac for lonely, lusty female prisoners – who were always keen to fill the long boring and empty hours of jail life, in any way they could.

CHAPTER 7
TOUCHING PARADISE

    My heart is crying baby. If I was in jail in fucking New York . . . but I’m in jail in Bali. I know that five minutes outside the front door I had the ocean . ..
    For a surfer, it makes it worse that you are in Bali and the waves are very good right outside your front door. And you’re in jail. I’m two minutes from my own restaurant, from my little swimming pool. From my friends, five minutes from Ku De Ta restaurant and I’m locked