Free Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison by T. M. Hoy

visiting area. There are three or four per shift in each building, but they sleep all day, get massages and sexual favors from lady-boys, and do the least possible. Their wages are so low, typically ninety dollars a month, that they have to work second jobs. They use the prison job as a sinecure. A small room in a quietcorner of the factory building near the chow hall is considered their sleeping quarters. They live there during the week, only going home to villages outside Bangkok mostly on the weekends to save money. Their meals are provided free as a favor by one or another of the inmate ‘restaurateurs.’ Their extra pay is the money they ‘earn’ from bribes paid to them to go shopping for farangs or for other kinds of smuggling.
    Building guards are left out of the real cash, though, as the lion’s share of smuggling takes place in the visiting area, with the guards assigned there acting as the conduit between visitors and inmates.
    At least half the Nigerians get visits twice a week, sometimes more often. There is a sizable expat Nigerian community in Bangkok, and besides tribal connections, the hundreds of prisoners involved in drug dealing maintain a kind of outside ‘support staff ‘ that handles their money, shopping, and other needs.
    Westerners get regular visits as well. Sometimes, these are backpackers and budget travelers responding to posters put up in cheap guest houses in Kao San Road. Relatives and friends—mainly of the Brits—put up these flyers periodically asking guest house residents to have pity and visit the listed prisoners. These poorer visitors became known as ‘banana visits,’ as they seldom bring valuable goodies, instead giving inexpensive fruit or snacks.
    A prisoner with a visitor gets the message over the intercom system in a mangled version blurted out once. You either learn to recognize your name quickly or you do without visits. Passing through the dorm building’s front gate, a concrete path leads between immaculately tended lawns and bushes bordering the twenty-foot high walls of other buildings. It’s a short path, three buildings on either side, before one reaches a cluster of one-story offices.
    On the left, facing the prison entrance, is the supply center for the coffee shops, a low building with several sets of open double doors and a longwooden counter inside. It has the look and feel of an old general store. Next door to it, under the same roof, is the room set aside for Buddhist meditation and prayers, which also holds Islamic services on Fridays.
    Opposite the store is the Warden’s office, also single-story, unimpressive, except for its modern mirrored windows.
    Ahead of these two buildings is a gate which stays locked, except when trucks make deliveries to the store. To its left is the open building where mail is sorted and foreign embassies can meet their nationals face to face.
    To the right of the gate is an older one-story building, more like a guard shack, that houses the Security Chief ‘s office. The odious little man who filled that post for years was always to be seen sitting on a small veranda directly opposite the entrance to the farang’s visiting room. He was notoriously corrupt … he’d pimp out his mother’s corpse if he thought there were any buyers.
    You proceeded through a gate at the side of the mail room, where you’d collect visitor’s gifts if you received any, and doubled around towards the visiting rooms. You’d follow an avenue that passes the main gate and the mail room, which runs the length of the prison—from the hospital and temple at one end, to the punishment building at the other.
    A heavy steel gate separates the rest of the prison from the visiting area leading to the prison entrance. The gate is in the center of the main guard tower, which dominates the prison. The Thai visiting room is on the left as you approach the tower, the farang room on the right of the gate.
    The guard opens the visiting room door after a