Original subtitles

I was being paid to take a risk.

This whole thing was a Russian roulette game.

What you're hoping for is to not have the bullet in the chamber.

Cocaine was basically a whole new thing.

Suddenly, I was in a situation I really wasn't ready for.

Talk about a red flag.

There was a very high chance I was going to die in that prison.

That place would tantamount to a death sentence.

I drove to Miami in the summer of 1995 after having just what I would call the

year from hell.

I was going to the University of Washington.

I was thinking, you know, go on to graduate school.

Plans have a way of changing.

Well, my last year in school there, my father was dying from leukemia.

Finally had to bail out of school.

Went back to take care of my father.

He died in front of me.

By the end of that experience, I was pretty much worn out and very depressed.

I was ready for the soothing ocean breezes of Miami for a while, really

some time healing.

I was fortunate I had a friend down there, a good friend of mine, and I

hang out with him in his apartment for a while.

Basically had a pretty stress -free environment, which is really what I

at the time.

And South Beach was a lot of drugs, a lot of cocaine, a lot of ecstasy.

And I thought, I'm just going to spend my inheritance.

It was a rather small inheritance, but I'm just going to kind of blow it in one

big fandango.

An ideal night might be to take drugs and have lots of sex and to be as

hedonistic as you want to be.

I just hung out and went to clubs, and I love to get high.

The problem is I kept it going for too long.

I went from being a person who enjoyed the party to falling into drug abuse.

And bit by bit, of course, I was going broke.

Most anybody looking on would say, well, dude, why don't you just go out and get

a job?

Which is right, it's correct, but using all the drugs. At that point, I had kind

of a drug addict's thinking.

I had a friend. He knew that I was in bad financial straits.

He was involved with some people who were taking marijuana from Mexico.

The price for doing that was $5 ,000, and he wanted to know if I'd be

interested. $5 ,000 would have been enough to make me economically stable.

Of course, I knew it would be a gamble, but I decided it was a gamble that was

worth taking for me.

So I flew down to Mexico with empty suitcases.

So from what my friend told me, it was a pretty simple plan.

We would fill the suitcases up with marijuana, and the three of us would be

flying out back to Miami.

It was my first meeting of my employer, called Dutch.

It was his marijuana.

and he was in charge of the other guys.

First thing he did, he looked at me and he said, well, you're kind of a big guy.

You're kind of a big guy, huh?

Dutch had what I would call a pimp mouth.

He had the ability to talk people into doing things that were really not

necessarily in their best interest, which is the definition of a pimp.

But when we first met, I was hoodwinked for a while.

Huh?

So we were talking, and we went over the basics of the plan.

Dan, you're going to be on the first flight with Spider, and that's the one.

All right? Just play it cool. Get the job done.

I'm out of here.

Check y 'all later.

By that point, I was committed to it, and it was time to get down to business.

They brought the weed. It was, like, vacuum -packed in bricks, each brick

four kilos.

We crampacked them into the suitcase, and hopefully the suitcases wouldn't pop

open along the way.

I should have been nervous because I was being paid to take a risk, and this

whole thing was about kind of a Russian roulette game.

Obviously, what you're hoping for is to not have the bullet in the chamber.

So going to the airport, I keep my eyes open for dogs and police.

There wasn't any that I could see.

I just went up and got in line and waited my turn.

My heart rate was going up, but for the most part, I was at least hopeful.

Finally, she took the bag.

We flew into Miami, and everything went smoothly.

At the end of the trip, I received $5 ,000.

I thought that was a done deal.

Boy, was I mistaken.

Back in Miami Beach, my life was going very well. I was very much on an

And I was doing construction work, and I blew my back out.

And I'd never had such pain before.

The gist of it was that I was bedridden for about three months.

And what money I had went to doctors.

I couldn't pay the bill.

Again, I was broke, and that was a pretty fearful proposition to me.

It brought me to a point of desperation, and knowing the people that I'd known,

I decided to give them a call to see if there was a way that I could make some

money.

So I talked to Dutch, and he told me he had something different going on.

All right, I'll see you there.

What's up, Dan?

Tell me, what's going on?

He told me his old enterprise of taking marijuana from Mexico had come to an end

because he kept having people get arrested.

I got something new in the works.

I'm running out of South America.

He didn't have many details to it, and I don't think he knew the details at that

point in his own self. The only thing we got to do, step up.

What are you talking about?

It's cocaine.

It put me in a lot of consternation about switching over to that product,

especially since I'd had a family member who had a horrific problem with cocaine

years earlier.

Dutch told me that it would be just as easy as it had been to take marijuana

of Mexico City.

My situation was so messed up that it was easy for me to just fall back on

this.

or whatever words you want to use.

Big money.

Just went ahead and made this very, it turns out, fateful decision to go ahead

and do this.

Are you into what?

All right.

That's what I'm talking about.

He told me that there was going to be a partner, and at first he mentioned a

name, and the name didn't register.

A guy named Jake.

Who? Jake.

And then just by happenstance...

The fella comes walking by.

I had

met

Jake before through a mutual friend.

He struck me as being borderline psychotic.

He liked to smoke cocaine.

And when he smoked cocaine, his... normal borderline psychosis would jump

into full -blown psychosis.

He'd have what they call word salad, and then he would just have all this very

jumbled up verbiage that would come out of his brain.

That made some sort of sense to him, but would not make sense to anybody that

might have been listening to him at the time.

He just really didn't give a rat's ass about anything, and he always brought a

lot of attention to himself.

That's the guy right there.

That guy is a complete screw -up. I was adamant about it. I said, I will flat

out not work with that man.

Dutch's reaction was, okay.

I'll take care of that.

All right?

I thought that was the end of the story. I thought that he was going to move on

to some sort of plan B, and that's how I took it.

Approximately a month later, I was ready to fly down to Ecuador.

Dutch was waiting down there.

We knew that we were going to spend a little bit of time being tourists, and

then we knew that we were going to receive the cocaine and fly to

At the end of the trip, I would have received $7 ,000.

I thought from my experience before that it was going to be relatively easy.

Boy, was I wrong about that.

And as it turns out, it was like being a lamb led to slaughter, and, you know, a

stupid lamb at that.

The instructions that I had were that I was going to be picked up by a guy named

John Black, which I'd never heard of this guy before, so I was fine with me.

So I'm there a little while, and then I'm there a little while longer, and

is this guy?

But I'm waiting for John Black.

And then all of a sudden, in through the door, who do I see?

You've got to be kidding me. You're going to love it here, man.

I was angry enough that I gave various thoughts to just getting on the next

plane that I could get onto and getting out of there.

But then again, my own greed and desperation kicked in. My thought was,

will try my best to deal with this asshole.

So we started heading towards our hotel.

So we got to the hotel. We checked in.

It ends up that I'm sharing a room with this guy.

I thought, thanks a lot, Dutch.

Thanks for blowing smoke up my ass.

Dutch had put himself over in another hotel.

He kind of distanced himself in case anything bad did happen.

He could certainly have some sort of plausible denial about knowing us.

My thinking now is always, wouldn't it be nice if he was as careful for other

people as he always was for himself?

I was not at all happy with the situation in general. I'm certainly not

about being with this guy.

But I was strapped for cash, and I couldn't get another room.

Pretty much just settled in and waited to receive the cocaine sometime in the

next week or so.

Dan, I used your toothbrush because I forgot mine. I hope that's cool.

So I spent several days in Quito enjoying the town and looking around.

I wanted to project a tourist profile so that we might have some sort of

plausible reason for being there.

In the evening, Jake and I just hung out around the hotel room.

I was really surprised because he was very mellow, didn't do anything stupid.

And I thought, okay, well, maybe things will just go smoothly and be all right.

So at the end of the week, fun and game times were over, and it was time to get

down to business.

The instructions we had were that Jake and I were to check out of the hotel we

were in and go outside and wait on the street corner for Dutch.

Come on, let's go.

Everything's all right. Everything's fine. Everything's been going smoothly.

All of a sudden, Jake is like, oh, either way, we can't go out.

What?

What? He says, well, I've racked up all these long -distance phone bills.

It was at least $600 or $700 worth of phone bill that he couldn't cover.

Moron. I was just totally nonplussed. I was just totally crestfallen. I couldn't

believe what I was hearing.

It's like, you've got to be kidding me.

We are about to go out and smuggle cocaine and you're in here racking up a

bill that you can't pay?

So the dilemma I had was I had to run.

Let go.

But I knew there was a very good chance that the hotel personnel were going to

call the police.

Talk about a red flag.

Committing a crime right before you're going out to try to smuggle cocaine.

That was absolutely really stupid.

I knew it was just a matter of time until his carelessness would affect me

well.

Finally, Dutch pulls up with the Colombian guy.

This is the guy with all the drugs.

I was ready to get to cocaine and go about our business.

In the SUV, Dutch told us to not pay any attention to the Colombian guy.

Stop looking at him. Look out the window or something. I could tell he was kind

of nervous and kind of agitated.

Cocaine was basically a whole new thing.

We pulled up to a fairly deserted spot.

My thought was just get the cocaine and then get out of there.

And there were the four suitcases.

They had cocaine built into the side.

What y 'all waiting for, man? Grab the stuff.

Let's go. Hurry up.

Jake and I got back to our new hotel.

We opened the bags up.

I was really impressed by the workmanship.

They had put the cocaine into the innards of that metal band.

I thought, wow, yeah, we're good to go.

We sprayed the insides of the bags with like a masking agent.

Then we packed it full of the stuff that an average tourist would buy.

The idea is somebody opens it up, it's like, oh, okay, here's your touristy

stuff, and okay, you're good to go, pass on your way.

The plan was for Jake to go to the airport the next morning.

Dutch would meet him there and see him off.

And then I was scheduled to go out the day after.

Jake had gone to the airport that morning.

I was down to sleep, I didn't hear him go.

But the next thing I knew of anything was being woken up out of sound sleep.

I remember the quote very vividly. Dutch said, well, buddy boy just went down.

He told me what he had seen because he'd been observing the whole thing.

The bags were red flagged because other people had been caught before that with

the exact type of bags, the exact manufacturer.

He stood out.

He was pulled out of the line.

And then it was, you better get your ass out of there. You better get your ass

out of there.

I realized I was in a pretty precarious position.

police on my trail at any minute.

I just wanted to go and find a place to lie low at that point.

So I went ahead and I checked into the third hotel.

So I gave a call to Dutch on his cell and he arranged a meeting.

With Dutch.

So Dutch and I were in the bar, we were having a beer and deciding what we

should do.

I wondered if Jake was going to start squealing on everybody around him.

And that made it pretty much impossible to leave Ecuador with the cocaine.

Dutch told me, we're going on to plan B here.

He had been in contact with the people that he got the cocaine from.

and made a deal that I would get the cocaine back to them.

They were going to give most of the money back.

Dutch would give me a fee.

You just get them to buy it back, you get rid of it, and you get paid. And

that's an opportunity too good to be missed.

That sounded like a good plan to me.

At least I'd get something out of it.

So by the end of our conversation, what we had decided on was that I was going

to go back to my hotel and wait to be contacted by the Colombians.

And he was going to go back to Miami and wait for me.

When Dutch and I parted, I expected to see him back in Miami Beach sometime in

the next week or so.

It was inconceivable to me that if I was going to see him, it was going to be in

hell on earth.

Next morning, I was waiting for the Colombians, and they were supposed to

by and pick up their gear and pay me a little bit of money.

And then it would have been over.

That was a good plan.

A better plan probably would have been for me just to dump the stuff and get

of there. But in reality, and I didn't know it at that time, but in reality, I

was already screwed.

I waited some more, and then it was obvious that they weren't coming.

I just wished that they'd been kind of straightforward with me from the

beginning.

I was back to square one in a sense. What do I do now?

So I was looking at the pros and cons of the situation and pretty much

vacillating between dump the stuff and go or saying, man, I got $80 ,000

in my lap.

I decided what I was going to do was to get the cocaine out and stash it, go

back to Miami, and come back and get it another day.

I couldn't do that manually, so I went out and started looking for tool shops.

finally found one and bought a hacksaw.

It was interesting trying to bust that thing up. It's very well made. It was

pretty stout.

So I had to half -saw through the steel and trying not to cut through and bust

open all the packages.

It's a lot of work. It took me hours to do.

I extracted out of the suitcase about 11 or 12 packages, and I threw one package

aside.

I stamped the cocaine up in that drop ceiling.

After all of that, I really wanted to get high.

And I had a big fat sack of cocaine.

There's a famous moment from Scarface where he slams his face in a big mound

cocaine.

Started doing, you know, the kind of massive doses that people like cocaine

wouldn't, you know, dream about.

I had a lot of it, and I had no plans of hanging on to it, so I was able to be

very wasteful with it.

That evening, I did a lot of cocaine and was drinking and had a big time.

It's a thought in my mind that next morning I would be flying out and going

home, and by sometime the next afternoon, I'd be sitting on the beach

Next morning, I'm getting ready to go to the airport.

I had a round -trip ticket from Miami to Quito, so I decided to use that just to

go back to Miami.

Packing my bag, I made, you know, one of several critical errors.

I was trying to decide what to do with the airline ticket from Quito to

Amsterdam.

And, of course, it was the same ticket that Jake had when he was arrested.

I could have thrown it away, but this was something I could have redeemed for,

oh, I think it was about $1 ,200.

So I decided to stash it away in my luggage.

And that ended up being a huge mistake for me.

I decided to keep doing cocaine until I left.

Another one of my clever plans, but weren't too very clever.

And then I took a little bit with me, and then I threw a bunch down the

Went out, found a taxi.

I was really glad that I was going to be going home soon.

Besides this very stressful period, I never really made money, and I left

a lot of drugs.

The only thing that was on my mind is to get out of this place.

I did my last line right before I went into the airport.

And I threw it in the trash.

I walked into the airport, and of course I had no drugs, other than the cocaine

I had in my bloodstream.

I expected to just go ahead and get on the plane, and within four or five hours

to be sitting on the beach in Miami.

Went up and got in line.

And, of course, I'm jittery from the cocaine I take him.

I gave my ticket to the counter personnel.

This woman was like, okay, let's look at who you are. What was your passport

there again?

And it was one moment, please.

And a call into the intercom.

Next thing I knew, I had this woman coming up and accosting me.

And he took me to the little room up there.

First, I wasn't particularly worried.

I had no drugs on me, and I didn't think there was enough of a connection that

they really had enough to hold me.

And first, she just threw out the names Dutch and Jake.

Suddenly, I was capped in a situation I really wasn't ready for.

I don't know who you're talking about, and I don't know what this is all about.

But then she kept going on.

and with more and more detail.

You and Jake stayed at Hotel Sebastian for a week. Jake checked out. So did

Do you remember now?

Just from the information she had, I knew that Jake had been talking.

It made me very nervous.

Then the woman started telling me about Dutch.

Dutch stayed at Hotel Jorge.

Putting two and two together, chances are that he's gone down too.

Partly then I probably went into shock.

You're in the middle of a situation and you're scrambling and not necessarily

knowing what to do.

So after that, they had another seemingly higher official come in.

The agents who had been rifling through my bags started bringing over

what they had found.

And then he started going through the magazine I had.

I had my ticket from Quito to Amsterdam in there. And, of course, it was the

same ticket that Jake would have had.

It was physical evidence that actually put me into the conspiracy.

It's pretty clear, even to a three -year -old.

I was nervous, and I was doing cocaine, so my heart rate was going up.

And when he pulled that out,

Then I really said, all right, my little house of cards is falling.

You know, if I didn't know I was screwed before, I certainly knew I was screwed

then.

Tell me how we're going to do that.

And they started saying to me, if you are cooperative and you do this and do

that, then things will go well for you. I'm scrambling around in my own brain,

trying to figure out, okay, what's the best thing to do? What's the best thing

to say?

In a moment that I really wished I had back, I told them the hotel that I'd

stayed in.

And, of course, that was the hotel that had the ride hitting the cocaine.

So the DEA agent takes me out of the airport, and I'm driving his SUV, and

taking me to jail to be processed.

The cocaine was hidden really well. I just wasn't planning for any sort of a

search.

The DEA agent gets a phone call.

Turns to me and goes, they tossed my room.

They found the cocaine.

Inside, I kind of caved in.

I was pretty sure that I was in for some bad times.

They took me into the main part of the jail, and it was unlike anything I'd

seen, unlike anything I was ever prepared for.

It was a scene from hell, a scene from Dante's Inferno.

Everybody there was armed with knives and machetes.

And there was prisoners looking at me, you know, fresh meat.

It was like being swarmed on by rats.

There was human shit and piss raining down on everybody below.

Luckily, they didn't put me in the general population. They took me to the

Interpol cells.

I just was really glad to get locked down.

We go into the Interpol cell.

Dutch and Jake were in there.

Part of me was very angry at them.

I felt more betrayed with Jake.

What the hell did you talk about?

I was just incensed with him.

He had given me up on a silver platter.

I placed the blame on Dutch for having this guy along to begin with.

The Interpol cells were locked down, but the other prisoners were still allowed

to run free.

They were kicking the door.

They were sticking the carving knife through the window.

And going, mañana, mañana, mañana.

So basically saying, okay, tomorrow they're opening up the doors.

Look what you've got to look forward to.

It was pretty intimidating.

This Puerto Rican guy in there, and he'd been watching everything.

And he'd been there for a month, and he was able to really kind of break things

down for us and to tell us they like to descend on foreigners so they can see

how much money they can get out of you.

So basically, tomorrow, be aggressive and go out and take care of your

Yeah, sure, I was afraid, but also I was very prepared to do whatever I would

have needed to do.

The next morning, Dutch starts kicking the door.

It

wasn't

exactly the reaction people were looking for. I think they expected everybody to

be in there just, you know, timid and coward and wetting themselves.

But then we opened up the door.

I basically went out and went around saying, how serious do you want to be?

You're basically going to take whatever comes at you.

Was I afraid? Yeah, sure, I was afraid.

But also, your mind kind of goes elsewhere.

It was good to have Dutch by because there was an imposing presence in there.

Just for my momentary survival, it was good to have them nearby.

But it did the trick.

It did the trick. After that, we had relative peace.

I didn't really know what was going on, and I didn't know just exactly what was

going to happen. But a couple of days later, I was able to get to a phone, and

called my sister, and I explained to her, well, I explained to her that I was

prison. It's a long story, but I'm okay.

It was quite a shock to her.

But when I talked to her, we really didn't have a lot of time to talk about

emotional mishmash of any sort of sort. It was pretty much strictly business.

It was hard to convey to her that I wasn't wearing jumpsuits and that I

being fed and that I wasn't having any of the amenities that you expect to find

in any sort of civilized prison.

Pretty much everything that one wanted to have, beyond a bowl of dirty rice,

going to be paid for. And I had her wire me a couple of hundred dollars.

So the money that I was sent was absolutely vital to my survival.

After about a week or so, the guards came along and took Jake and Dutch away.

Happened pretty rapidly.

There was no cheerful goodbye or anything.

There was just, okay, bye, see you.

See you, Dutch.

I had no idea where they were going, and I had no...

idea really what reason they had for going off and I was being left behind.

I very much knew that I was alone and I wasn't any part of any group there.

And I was going to live by myself or I was going to die by myself.

And at that point, there was a very high chance I was going to die in that

prison.

Penel Garcia Moreno, which is their equivalent of a Super Mac.

They had the highest security prisoners there. Certainly it was a step up. It

made me very nervous.

The prison layout was four pavilions or wings.

Pavillon B and Pavillon D were more for the murderers and rapists and

kidnappers.

Luckily, I was able to go over to Pavillon C, which was mainly for

prisoners and drug traffickers.

For anybody who came in there, especially any foreigner and especially

who'd never been in that kind of experience before, it was a very

experience.

And I knew I was going to be there for a while.

How long, I didn't know.

After a couple months, I was called down to the infirmary.

Dutch had been able to spread a little bit of money around, and he was able to

come over to the prison.

So I came down and talked to him, and we talked about his case.

What's up, dude?

Hey, Dutch.

How you bearing up in there, man?

I do great, man. You got to get me the hell out of here.

Fast.

See, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.

Dutch, because he wasn't caught with drugs, had a reasonable chance to get

free. I can walk, but I need you to play ball.

What are you talking about? He told me what he wanted was that I was going to

the intellectual author of the crime.

That it was your idea.

That I was going to make it explicit that I was guilty, guilty, guilty, and

was innocent, innocent, innocent.

I can't believe this. What are you talking about? Look, it's not a big deal

you to help me out here.

All right?

You're going to.

Or you're going to have a problem.

If I didn't, he was going to spend a couple of hundred dollars to have me

murdered.

Don't make me have you murdered then.

But you know that I can.

And you know that I will.

So when he said those things to me, I took them to be a very real threat.

Because for a couple hundred dollars, it was very much possible to do just that.

And that's basically what it came down to.

I came in to their courtroom.

sat down. I was introduced to my lawyer for the first time. I'd never seen him

before.

With the testimony that I gave in Dutch's favor, Dutch was able to get

I ended up being the intellectual author.

So I ended up with 10 years, which of course for their system actually meant

five years of doing time.

Living in that environment, it was pretty unlikely that the average person

going to live for five years.

Five years at a time, to me, was tantamount to a death sentence.

By the time I was doing two years, and then three years, and then on and on, it

became worse and worse for me mentally.

Even though I tried to pretty much just dull myself to everything around me.

There was really nothing to do but to either kind of sit and stare at the

which some people did, or to spend your time doing drugs.

It was just very, very sick patterns of drug abuse.

The place was flooded with alcohol. It was flooded with cocaine.

I used those substances really pretty much day by day as much as I could to

the time.

And that's literally it. I would try to kill a day and then kill another day.

I was living in a place about the size of the average bathroom, and I had no

mental stimulation, and that was a way to make a neuron fire.

It was pretty much all degradation.

So finally, a police officer came and picked me up, and we passed through the

gates, and I witnessed that in this car, without any handcuffs on, as a free

man.

And although I had some expectations before then of feeling great

and excitement, the truth of the matter is, is after three and a half years of

living in this perpetual grayness, I pretty much just took the greatness with

me.

Really, the whole of the story is inexorably linked with substance abuse.

Without the factor of substance abuse, it's pretty much impossible that I'm

finding myself in the position of going to prison in the first place.

For the past two years, I've been in a rehab center working on sobriety.

I still feel the effects of all the drugs I did there. I just don't have a

of joy and have that greatness that's been brought home.

I still look forward to going out and being the sort of viable human being

I want to be and having some of the things that I still hope for.

And that's what I'm working towards.

And if you want to catch up on previous episodes of Bangs Up Abroad, like the

prison in Taiwan or the Peruvian jail, then head online to 5 .tv slash demand5.