Free Hotel Kerobokan by Kathryn Bonella Page B

inside. I feel like I’m buried alive .
    The crazy thing is that here in Bali we party every day, surf, eat, take a pill, go dancing. Outside the Kerobokan walls, it’s Bali. If you go through that wall, it’s hell; locked in a small room everyday from seven at night until eight in the morning, thirteen hours, tiny fucking room. Not a hot shower. You struggle to eat every day … the most difficult thing in jail in this country is that you have to struggle every day for food. You don’t eat the food they give you. I wouldn’t feed my dog with it. Every day is a struggle .
    – Ruggiero, Brazilian inmate

    Brazilian inmate Ruggiero’s soul was drying up. He had to get out of Hotel K and for weeks now he’d been working on a crafty escape plan. Each night in his cell he’d been loudly strumming his guitar and singing at the top of his lungs ‘I know it’s only rock’n’roll but I like it’, over and over, like a maniac. He sang for hours every night; prisoners in other cells thought he was just a crazy Brazilian. But his raucous singing was deliberate. It was to mask the noise of his Italian cellmate, Ferrari, sawing through the eight steel bars on their cell window.
    Since the moment of his arrest, the Brazilian civil engineer and surfer had only one focus – to get his life back. First he’d tried to pay his way to freedom. But when that failed, escape became his new obsession. He wasn’t rash about it; he didn’t want to fail. He was working it step by step, like an engineering job, which, in a way, it was. Getting to the point of sawing the bars took weeks of preparation. Step one had been to empty his cell of six local prisoners who couldn’t be trusted to keep the plan quiet. It wasn’t hard for the hot-blooded Latino to scare the hell out of them by acting like a crazed lunatic, screaming, bashing the walls and threatening to kill them all. He kept this up every night until all six asked to move cells.

    I pretended to be a madman. I eventually got all six so shit scared of me that they left .
    – Ruggiero

    Next, he had to get the blade inside. Not too difficult, though the first attempt failed. Ruggiero had paid a friend to bring it to the jail, but he was busted when he rode up on his motorbike and handed it in a plastic bag to a Balinese inmate sweeping out the front. Drug transactions were routinely done in this way. But this day, a guard dozing on a wooden bench out the front saw it. He knew if he nabbed something illegal, it would mean a cash sling. So when he found out the blade was for a wealthy westerner, he confiscated it and went to talk to the Brazilian. For two million rupiah ($270) he agreed not to report it, but he still refused to let it inside. It was only a small setback for Ruggiero, as a few days later the local inmate simply used a more covert tactic, smuggling it in inside a papaya.

    You know how Kerobokan is, it’s a joke. You can bring an elephant inside if you want!
    – Ruggiero

    Ruggiero realised he needed an accomplice to help him cut the bars. When Italian Ferrari checked in, it was a lucky break. By chance, he cut metal bars as part of his job at home as a mechanic. Ferrari had been on his honeymoon in Bali when he bought a little straw of smack from a Balinese kid at the hotel pool. It was a police set-up. As soon as the kid left, officers pounced. It turned into an expensive honeymoon. Ferrari paid $70,000 and got just four months in Hotel K – enough time to help Ruggiero, and get out. So, for a daily fee of a couple of straws of smack, Ferrari began to saw his way through the bars. Night after night, Ruggiero and Ferrari would sing and saw in a rhythm. Before morning, they would glue the bars back into place and wait for lockup to continue the job.
    Ruggiero spent about $18,000 on setting up his escape, investing in a false French passport, green contact lenses and a long-haired wig – ‘I looked like a fucking freak but it was the only one my girlfriend could