You’ve been having the time of your life in Thailand, zipping through the neon-lit
streets of Bangkok in Tuk-tuks and enjoying the craziest nightlife you’ve ever seen.
You’ve swum in crystal-clear azure waters next to crab-eating macaques, partied on the
beach until sunrise with people from all over the globe.
You’ve ridden a scooter through verdant mountains in the North until you found friendly
small towns where dreadlocked Thais entertain hordes of youngsters, who like you have escaped
their humdrum existence back home.
You never want this trip to end, but that cash you saved working nights at the Amazon
warehouse is running out.
One more night in Chiang Mai and then to Bangkok and then home.
How terribly depressing.
But that night you meet a man in dimly-lit joint called, “Lucky Bar”.
You tell him your story, and he says, “I know how you can make some cash.”
The scenario we have just depicted has happened before, and as you have probably guessed,
the fast cash that is offered will mean you will become a courier, but not the kind of
courier job you might see on Indeed.com.
You will be what’s sometimes called a mule, a drug mule, and that involves taking drugs
from one country to another and receiving a few thousand dollars for the trip.
If you go to any main airport in Thailand you’ll find bookshops stacked with true
stories about people who have been arrested after doing this job.
Like you, they only wanted to stay a while more in Thailand.
The country is a hub for drug trafficking.
These days drugs such as methamphetamine are made in super-labs in Myanmar and then taken
by local mules into northern Thailand.
Someone then has to get the drugs out of the country.
In the days when the so-called “Golden Triangle” was the epicenter of opium production, the
main drug that travelled from Thailand to all over the world was heroin.
So, that’s a major reason a lot of foreigners have ended up serving serious time in a Thai
prison.
Some for trafficking huge amounts, some for just dealing in resort towns renowned for
their frenetic and sometimes sleazy nightlife, such as Phuket or Pattaya.
When it comes to being locked up abroad, Thailand wins easily for the most books written about
that experience.
Then there’s the corruption.
We’ll tell you the true story of an Iranian-Swedish man named Benny Moafi who travelled from Sweden
and opened a restaurant and pub in Phuket, on the beautiful Andaman coast of Thailand.
His story will shock you, because any law-abiding citizen could have found himself in his shoes.
Expatriates and Thais who live in Phuket know that if you own a place that is part of the
nightlife then you will likely have to pay the police some cash each month.
This is just a tax, life a mafia tax.
In Thailand, they might call it tea-money.
It amounts to millions in bribes.
Benny didn’t want to pay.
Why should he, he ran a legitimate business.
It’s a long story, but he was set-up for a crime he didn’t commit and ended up spending
almost ten years in Thai prisons.
We’ll tell you the good news first.
During his incarceration he learned to read and write Thai.
He then got a Thai law degree.
Once he understood the law, he started suing the prisons he was in for certain flagrant
abuses of prisoners’ rights.
Even better, he took everyone involved in the crime against him down over a number of
years.
Benny filed 207 legal cases and over 1,200 complaints against lawyers, the Royal Thai
Police and the Department of Corrections, and many of those corrupt people were convicted
of crimes.
By the way, when the cops had him at the station prior to his incarceration they said pay us
400,000 baht ($13,000) and we’ll let you go.
With no evidence against him except a photocopy of a gun (yes, not a real gun.
It was never seen), and a very sketchy witness who was working with the cops, Benny thought
he would win his case.
He was wrong.
But he spent months in a dirty jail and lost a lot of weight.
He then decided to pay the 400,000.
This is what he said about that: “I was sick in jail, and I lost 20 kilos
in weight.
I decided I’d pay the money; I gave a lawyer my money but he stole it.
He took my car, too.
I later sued him and got him disbarred.”
He said police and lawyers took his house, his cars, his gold, everything he owned.
During his time in prison he had 17 lawyers and he said all of them took his money but
did nothing to help him.
Only one lawyer helped him out in the end.
That’s one out of 18 lawyers that wasn’t corrupt.
Being incarcerated is bad enough, but imagine being sent down as an innocent man?
Imagine if they told you that you could pay your way out?
Imagine there are no lawyers that aren’t corrupt.
This is only one reason why you don’t want to end up on the wrong side of the Thai cops.
Benny was even convicted for not having a license for the photocopy of that gun.
This is Crime-Land at its worst.
But how about prison itself?
Benny said he was tortured many times, had some of his teeth kicked out and received
stitches on many occasions.
He’s an exceptional case, though, because he annoyed the wardens by suing the prisons
all the time.
Something like a banana in a Thai prison is three times more expensive than on the outside,
so Benny sued one prison for that and won.
Men wear shackles at times and Benny thought that breached certain laws pertaining to human
rights.
He sued again.
One warden even announced to all the imprisoned men that if Benny were to be killed no one
would be prosecuted.
But no one killed him, because he was beating the system.
The prisoners liked him for that.
He even sued one prison for not having TVs and the place soon got them.
He found a legal loophole in Correctional Law and he used it.
That didn’t make him popular with the warden.
As for the conditions, in some of those prison books men talk about having to drink dirty
river water.
And we can tell you that if you’re in one of Bangkok’s prisons, the Chao Phraya river
water is not exactly clean.
The food is so bad it’s barely edible, so what all this means is people can sell prisoners
food and clean water but with a mark up.
Guards are paid little, so for them the exploitation of prisoners is a second income.
This is what Benny said about that: “They made the food so disgusting that it
couldn’t be eaten, so then the guards could sell the uneaten food as pig feed.
Everything is for sale inside, it’s not the Department of Corrections, but the Department
of Corruption.”
Ok, that’s just Benny’s story.
There are many, many more tales of horror.
And we should say that there are more stories of westerners being conned out of money and
either ending up dead or in prison.
This is how an Irishman named Colin Martin described his police interrogation:
“They threatened to kill me if I didn't confess and at one time held a gun to my head
and told me they would shoot me if I didn't sign a statement they had prepared in Thai.
Then they would say I was shot whilst trying to escape.”
His book was called, “Welcome to Hell.”
Let’s give you more examples.
You’ve been arrested and don’t really know what’s going on.
No one speaks English and you are being told to sign papers.
Plenty of people have signed something that was a confession and they didn’t even know
it.
You get sent to prison and taken to a cell.
You are in welded shackles that will stay on until you are sentenced.
This might take months or years and in court you might have no idea what’s going on anyway
if you don’t speak Thai or have a translator.
Some inmates are shackled until their sentence ends, and there are numerous cases of the
metal causing cuts leading to dangerous infections.
Some prisoners say just the sound of shackles is disturbing as it sounds like slaves in
ancient Rome.
Let’s say you’re going to stay at perhaps Thailand’s most notorious prison, Bang Kwang,
aka, The Bangkok Hilton.
The Thais sometimes call it the Big Tiger, because some of those that go in don’t come
out.
This is no exaggeration.
If you don’t have money being sent in, then you don’t have access to essential nutritious
food.
On your first night you might sleep in a cell with 60 men or more.
You are packed together like fish in a tin.
It’s so hot your skin itches.
The mosquitos are all over you.
You have diarrhea because having no cash you had to eat that fish-head soup.
Now imagine stepping over all those men to the one toilet in the corner.
And you’re in shackles?
Hit someone, annoy them, make a loud noise as you excrete water into that hole in the
ground, and you might just get a beating.
Many foreigners have written that on their first night they wanted to take their own
life.
Now imagine this, you wake up and the guy next to you is dead?
Is that a big deal?
According to many people who’ve done hard time in the Big Tiger, no it isn’t.
Read the books of the rather posh Britain man, David McMillan, a man that became an
international drug smuggler, and he will tell you death stinks up Thai prisons a lot.
He said some people just can’t take it, but try and escape and get caught and the
result will be having your legs smashed with bats.
You’ll never walk right again.
Is this legal?
Hell no, but it goes on.
By the way, McMillan holds a record in that he is the only man ever to escape from Bangkok's
notorious Klong Prem prison.
He was well aware that if caught he might have an “accident” and become disabled
for life.
Getting a beating by prison trustees isn’t just a slap around the face.
Some books detail how trustees would sometimes beat a man to death for everyone to see.
That’s how they kept the place controlled.
You can find recent reports of prisoners dying after being “disciplined.”
In 2018, a Thai woman made a complaint after her husband died at the hands of guards.
She demanded to see his body, and then said, “I was shocked when I saw his body.
My question is how could prison guards do this to prisoners?”
Human Rights Watch said the barbaric practice of severe beatings leads to the death of prisoners
way too often and the Thai authorities just look the other way.
Another punishment was being forced to stand all day in a large sewage tank, so basically
up to your neck in hot feces all day.
We should say that this particularly terrible punishment has not been reported for many
years.
It’s not surprising many prisoners turn to heroin, and guess who brings that in?
The guards, of course.
The confiscated heroin that the men are in for ends up back in the prison for quadruple
its street value.
Like the USA, Thailand’s prisons are mostly filled with men on drug charges.
It’s said to be about 70 percent of prisoners in Thailand.
It can be small amounts, too.
One young first offender in Chiang Mai served four years for five pills of “Ya-Bar”.
In Thai that translates as “Crazy Medicine”.
It’s methamphetamine.
HIV is rife in the system because so many men share needles.
One prisoner said the prison hospital is the worst place there.
He said those who go there often don’t come back.
What about a typical day, when no one is being beat up.
You know, just a normal day.
Well, you wake up at 6 am and go to the trough with other men where you use a bowl to pour
water over yourself.
A disgusting breakfast is served and anyone with money in their account won’t eat it.
Many men in there are poor and have no cash.
Thai prisons are filled with African drug mules who have no contact back home, and also
with hill tribe members that have no access to money.
In some prisons there are paid jobs, though.
Anyway, you eat, and after that you stand and sing Thailand’s national anthem.
Westerners with money don’t work and have said that they paid for a less packed cell
and paid poorer folks to do work for them, such as cleaning clothes or cooking food.
With cash, you can buy food stuff, but it’s limited.
Westerners will often try and live together, so like U.S. prisons there is some segregation
of ethnicity.
On the good side, Thai prisons don’t have gang violence that could be compared to the
U.S., but make no mistake, there are murderous Thai gangsters in prison that will kill you
over a cigarette.
Billy Moore, who wrote the book that got turned into a movie called, “A Prayer Before Dawn”,
said on his first night in a Chiang Mai prison an inmate died in his cell.
He said in one week he saw 25 men get carried out of the prison.
He said in an interview, “I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing; murder, rape, corruption
and the inhumane degradation.
You couldn’t even invent or conjure up the things I saw.”
It sounds unbelievable, but just in 2019 an American man went into Thai immigration jail,
you know, the place you might end up for overstaying a visa, and he wound up dead.
A British man who shared the same cell said the American had been bullied by other men
and beaten daily.
He was no snitch, or a gang member, and the Brit just said the gang didn’t like the
fact he was American.
There was another case recently of a British man who went to Immigration jail and described
it as a “prisoner of war camp."
He was in for working without the correct visa.
He said he saw daily beatings and the guards would just watch as it happened.
He said about the guards, “If you didn’t understand what they were saying – which
most people didn’t – they’d just beat you up.”
And some guys were stuck in there for years because they had no way of paying for a flight
out of Thailand.
The sentences are what you call quite harsh, too, and it’s well-known that people can
do just a few years for a single murder in Thailand and a lifetime for possession of
drugs.
A British man not long ago got 50 years for having 200 ecstasy pills.
In 2019, a Thai killer of five women dubbed “Thailand’s Jack the Ripper” was released
after 14 years and then killed again right after getting out.
But imagine being innocent and all this happening to you.
Imagine if the cops set you up and the courts didn’t help.
This is what Benny Moafi said about his feelings after being released after nine years and
eight months.
“I’m angry inside.
You know if I’d have paid that money I wouldn’t have spent a day in jail.
The corrupt policeman called me khee niew [stingy] for not paying the bribe.”
Benny remained in Thailand and started a law practice to help foreigners who found themselves
in trouble.
His story about learning law and going after every corrupt official and lawyer who did
him wrong gained him a lot of respect from many Thai people, who themselves are only
too aware of the injustice system in their country.
To make matters even worse, when Thai and foreign activists and journalists have written
about corruption they have been sued for defamation and have faced prison time.
Sleeping with 60 men and eating pig food makes doing time a lot harder when you’re innocent.
You might wonder if American prisons with their gangs and violence and bullying are
better than Thai prisons.
Watch these episodes now and then decide, “How To Survive Inside Prison?” and “This
Man Spent 43 Years In Isolation - How Long Until A Person Goes Crazy?”