El Infierno Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. Looking Down the Line

  2. The Bust

  3. Into the Darkness

  4. We Come to a Full Stop

  5. Into Hell

  6. C Wing, Garcia Moreno Prison

  7. Just Another Day in Paradise

  8. Whisky Galore

  9. Nicky

  10. Sentencia

  11. Monopoly

  12. Hotel Garcia Moreno

  13. Another Bloody Sunday

  14. Paro!

  15. Escape, Part 1

  16. Ghosted

  17. The Road is Long

  18. La Peni

  19. Atenuado Abajo

  20. Exodus

  21. The Last Supper

  22. Three Blind Mice

  23. Changing Places

  24. Division of the Gangs

  25. TB

  26. The Most Painful Loss

  27. Simon

  28. Traslado – Transfer

  29. A New Beginning

  30. Escape, Part 2

  31. The Regional

  32. Back into the Fray

  33. Adios

  34. HMP Wandsworth

  35. Home

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  “Gato’s head snapped back… We could make out the shots of several 9mms, a couple of 38s and one or two 45s. I hurled myself through the doorway and into the room. I didn’t look back.”

  Caught in an Ecuador hotel room with 8kg of cocaine, Pieter Tritton was no mule or dupe. He had planned and organised everything. The consequence: a 12-year sentence inside one of the world’s deadliest prison systems, where gun fights, executions and riots are a part of everyday life. As a Brit banged up abroad, Pieter had to learn how to survive – and fast – because one wrong move would mean death.

  This is the insider account of what it’s like to live in a place worse than hell and come out a changed man on the other side.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Pieter Tritton walked out of Wandsworth Prison on 26 August 2015, after serving the last two years of his sentence there. He has returned to his home town and with the help of a loving family and friends is building a new life.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother Joan Anderson and to all the friends who didn’t make it home.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LOOKING DOWN THE LINE

  I’M SITTING IN a garden in the blazing heat of a French summer, trying to recall all the events of the last decade or so. Eleven years have passed since I last sat at this table. I’m a very different person to the one who left our house in France all those years ago. I’m sick, for one thing, and I have a very different perspective on life. This is what happened, a story I could never have invented.

  I arrived at the same house in the middle of France sometime in June 2005 after being smuggled out of Britain by the Turkish mafia in the boot of an old Mercedes car. Most of the people smuggling is in the opposite direction these days.

  I had had to leave Britain in a hurry, as things were getting too hot for me. A few months earlier there had been a huge bust of an apartment in Edinburgh, in which the police had uncovered a ‘cocaine laboratory’. They had arrested two Colombians, and seized cocaine, precursor chemicals, mixing agents, a 15-ton floor-standing press and lots of other equipment, along with pieces of a tent groundsheet. This raid had hit the headlines big time. It was mentioned on all channels of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, and covered by nearly every national newspaper.

  Following months and months of heavy surveillance, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA, had received various pieces of intelligence from all the informants in the case. The key informant had tipped them off that something was about to take place in Edinburgh. Two Colombians I knew arrived at a flat in Leith, the docks area of the city, in which I had been staying occasionally. I had left the flat having spotted two plain-clothes police officers in an unmarked car watching the building to the rear. I took a taxi to the Balmoral Hotel on Princes Street, leaving the white Transit van I had on hire parked directly across the road from the flat. I had told the Colombians I would call them in the morning, at 10am. I had a restless night, hardly able to sleep for worrying about what might be happening.

  I awoke the following morning, ate breakfast, showered and packed my bag. At this point I called the Colombians to see how the job was progressing, but all their phones were off. My mouth began to dry up, a feeling of intense anxiety spreading through my body. They never turned their phones off. My instincts were screaming at me so loudly I thought the people in the next room might hear them.

  The police were working hard to try to implicate me in this whole scenario and it had got to the point where I didn’t feel like taking a chance. So I decided to disappear to France to sit it out and see what happened. I had to stop using all my phones, bank cards and any other electronics that could leave a trail.

  I arrived in a cold, dank Calais where my Turkish couriers said goodbye and promised to sort me out with a car soon, as one of them owed me money. I decided to hire a French car to get by with until they turned up with a vehicle. After much wrangling, I persuaded the hire company to let me pay cash and leave cash deposits and I was mobile.

  I arrived at our house, which my father had bought some 25 years previously, the next day and settled in, relieved to have at least put some distance between me and all the trouble. I called my girlfriend, Nicky, and asked her to collect a car the Turks now had ready for me, and to drive it over to France. I also asked if she could collect my clothes from the flat I had been living in behind my parents’ house. Once she had the car packed I told her to drive to Dover, bringing her daughter Emily with her, so they could have a holiday for a few days. I arranged to meet her in Paris and return the hire car to an office there at the same time. We would then all drive back south to the French house and have a week or so there, before she and Emily flew back to England from the local airport.

  Nicky made it to Paris and checked into a hotel in a suburb in the north, and I arrived the following day. We chatted on the terrace of a cafe while watching Emily exploring a park next to the hotel. It was nice to be in their company once again.

  The following day, we drove the Renault the Turks had provided all the way back to the house. Over the next few days I showed them round. Emily was quickly bored by the countryside and yearned to be back in Paris. After a few days she began to demand to go home or back to Paris or else she would run away. We asked her what she wanted to do, but it was always the same reply: ‘Go home or go back to Paris.’

  Next morning when Nicky and I came down for breakfast there was no sign of Emily. She had done a runner. We started to panic at the thought of this pretty fifteen-year-old trying to hitch-hike her way to Paris, not speaking any French. We jumped in the car and started to search the area, passing through villages and towns asking anyone we saw if they had noticed a young girl of her description. No one had.

  After driving around for several hours and calling her phone repeatedly to no avail, we decided to contact the police. Not exactly the people I most wanted to talk to, but we had no choice. We found a very friendly officer at a local police station who spoke reasonable English and made a full report of what had happened. It was getting dark by now and Nicky was distraught. The gendarmes took the situation very seriously and began searching the area. They told us to go home and wait. We made our way back to the house, hoping and praying she would be there. It was a terrible experience.

  We pulled up outside the house to find lights on that hadn’t been when we had departed. We raced
into the house, calling Emily’s name, and found her snuggled up in her bed asleep. We woke her up to make sure she was OK and to find out where she had gone. It turned out that she had just gone up to the village a quarter of a mile away and sat on the steps of the church, chatting to a young English boy who was there on holiday. She told us she had seen us driving past several times on our search for her. I was fairly mad with her. I called the police to let them know she was back. What seemed like minutes later a riot van full of gendarmes arrived at the house.

  Great, I thought. Just what I bloody need! I’m in hiding from the British police and now I’ve got a houseful of French ones.

  They insisted on talking to Emily on her own to ensure that everything was OK at home with us. Once they were satisfied, they left. I decided to put Nicky and Emily on the next flight back to England. Emily was upset and really not enjoying herself, and I didn‘t want a repeat performance happening, thus drawing even more attention from the gendarmes. We said our farewells and off they went. That was the last time I ever saw Emily.

  Why have I started my story with this minor incident? To say sorry, Emily. Sorry for all that happened next. Sorry for your mum’s arrest. Sorry for the prison sentence she got and never deserved. And sorry for all those years you and she missed together. And you are just one of the many people I want to say sorry to, for all the pain and anguish I caused.

  Some days after they left, I spoke to one of my partners. Using a pay phone for anonymity, I dialled the number with trepidation, just imagining all those computers about to click into action at the first syllable of my voice. Voice recognition was a real worry. I generally wouldn’t talk on a phone in a car, hotel room or any building – anywhere I thought they might be able to intercept the call. However, at times it was, to some extent, unavoidable, and this was one of those times. I listened to the phone begin to ring, wondering if I shouldn’t just hang up now while I still could and call it a day altogether.

  Following the raid on the apartment in Scotland the police were already extremely keen to interview me. On one occasion, I had called the police station in Edinburgh to speak to one of the officers heading up the case after they had threatened to cause my sister, Sarah, a lot of problems, even though she had no involvement in or even knowledge of what I had been doing. When I was finally connected the officer to whom I was speaking asked in a friendly manner if I could ‘please come in for a wee chat’. To which I replied, ‘I’m afraid I’m not in Scotland at the moment and probably won’t be coming back up there for quite some time as I am a little busy at the moment.’ In a very civil manner, I then asked, ‘Please leave my sister out of this whole situation. She is not involved and you know she’s not.’

  ‘Right you are then. We will think about it but would very much like you to pop in to answer some questions the next chance you get,’ said the officer, barely able to stop himself from exploding.

  I really could feel the long arm of the law reaching right down the phone line and taking a firm grip around my throat. After that, I had known it was just a question of time before the forensic test results came back to them, at which point they would most certainly come looking for me. I called the Turks and asked for a one-way lift out of England.

  I had only been out of prison a couple of years having been first arrested in England in May 2000, the day after Nicky’s birthday. The police had discovered 5,000 ecstasy tablets, along with several kilos of marijuana, 2kg of amphetamines and a couple of ounces of cocaine. The end result, after spending nearly two years on remand at Gloucester prison, was a five-year prison sentence, most of which I spent in category A maximum security conditions. I served nearly three years and was given parole. It was during this time I had decided that if I was going to traffic drugs then it would only be cocaine – small volume, high value – and I was going right to the source, Colombia, in order to buy it. I would then arrange the shipping and sale once it was back in Britain.

  After my release in 2003, I set about looking for a good connection. It was not long before I was introduced to Nico, who was a Colombian, had all the necessary contacts and who could make the arrangements in his country. Hence our partnership was formed.

  ‘Hello, hello.’ Nico’s voice hit my eardrum, jolting me out of my thoughts.

  ‘Nico, it’s me.’

  ‘Hey man, where you bin?’ Nico asked, in his heavy Colombian accent. ‘I bin really worried about chu man, where you bin? I thought chu was dead!’

  ‘I had to get out of the country after all the trouble up in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Yeah man, la policia is going crazy for you. They got a hard on for you my friend. Better not come back here soon. Where you staying?’

  Again with the questions. It had been happening too much of late and a few of us had begun to have some doubts about Nico. He and a couple of other South Americans had been arrested earlier on in 2004 when the police raided a flat they were using as a small laboratory and discovered three kilos of pure cocaine and a hydraulic press, along with various chemicals. All the others had received prison sentences but Nico had somehow managed to get released after six months with no charge. Following his release, Nico became extremely inquisitive and would ask strange questions that generally in the drugs business you just don’t ask, such as, ‘what car you driving?’, ‘where you going?’, ‘where you been?’ – just weird questions. Something was wrong.

  I avoided the question. ‘Is there anything ready over in Colombia with El Comandante?’ I asked. This was the nickname of our man over in Colombia – an ex-marine turned paramilitary of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

  ‘Yeah, Comandante has a small one ready with just a couple. You wanna go over, get outta the way for a while and organise that?’

  So there was a small job ready and waiting to be collected, if I felt up to organising everything. On this occasion, it was supposed to be two kilos of finest Peruvian flake cocaine impregnated in the groundsheet of a small tent. It had already been transported from Cali in Colombia to Quito in Ecuador. All I had to do was pay for it there and find a ‘mule’, or passenger, to carry it back to England. I had access to both these – the mule and the money – I just didn’t want to go back to prison. They had way too much evidence on me in England. But I decided to give it one last go.

  When Nico and the others had been arrested we had an agreement between the three partners – Nico, me and one other – that if anyone got locked up it was the responsibility of whoever was free to look after the families of the others in prison. I kept my word and paid all their bills for the six months Nico was away and presented him with £40,000 in cash when he was freed. A welcome home gesture.

  Nico had been the one who had shown me the system of impregnation. At the time this technique was fairly new. People had been soaking clothes in a solution containing the cocaine for a long time. The problem with that was the smell was easily detected by a sniffer dog. It also crystallised on the material and would make it stiffer and therefore quite noticeable.

  The method we used was a lot more advanced but also far harder to do. The cocaine was dissolved in a solution of various chemicals and then combined with a type of plastic while it too was in a liquid state. This then had to be dried, ensuring the plastic was as thin as possible. Once dry, you had a piece of plastic very similar to the rubber used for inner tubes of mountain bikes. It had no smell, could not be detected by X-ray or scanner and we put in a chemical to counteract the reactive test the police use. These sheets were then incorporated into the lining of something. In our case, it was the middle layer of the groundsheet for a tent. We could put in as much as five kilograms of cocaine in one go.

  Once the tent arrived at its destination we would go through a reverse process, again using various solvents and acids, to extract the cocaine. Only the pure cocaine would come out. We would normally lose 10–15 per cent in volume in the process. This method was extremely good and is still in use, only today cocaine can be put in virtually anyth
ing and then extracted – polystyrene, plastics, paper, wood, perfume, wine, vodka, cosmetics and even glass. There are so many ways now. If you picked up the item you would have absolutely no idea that you were holding two or three kilos of pure cocaine, worth nearly £100,000 at today’s wholesale prices in London. That’s one hell of an expensive tent.

  The job seemed straightforward and the risks minimal as only five people knew my approximate whereabouts, four of whom were family. I decided that it would also give me a chance to meet up with El Comandante. I wanted a face-to-face with him in order to plan out our next operation and change the location to somewhere in Europe, but not France. The reason for not working in France was the fact that my family had a house there. Don’t shit where you eat.

  I arranged for a friend from the UK to fly over with £25,000. We spent an enjoyable weekend drinking wine and catching up on events back home in Britain, including the newspaper reports of the bust in Edinburgh. When my friend left I headed up to Paris to go to the airport and buy tickets to Quito, using cash to avoid leaving any trail. Over the next couple of days, having bought the tickets, I stayed in a boutique hotel at the top of the Champs-Élysées just the other side of the Arc de Triomphe. I used my time to find an amenable bureau de change where I could change £20,000 into euros with no questions asked and no ID required. This, as you can imagine, is a very delicate procedure, even more so post-9/11 when cash is immediately viewed as suspicious. Thanks to the €500 note, the euro was the perfect currency for my purposes. In dollars, of course, the biggest denomination is the hundred dollar bill, meaning the neat little package of cash I needed to carry would have to be five times bigger.

  I spent a good few hours wandering up and down the Champs-Élysées reconnoitring the various bureaux, looking for an independent one as shady in appearance as possible. The big chains such as Travelex were out, and it took me a while to find a bureau I liked the look of. It was located halfway down a touristy street, recessed from the road in a gloomy-looking small arcade that did not look very busy. Behind the 2-inch bulletproof glass sat a large Arab-looking man dragging on a Gauloises, sporting a chunky gold Rolex on his fat wrist. He had a slightly nervous look about him. Perfect. I approached the counter and pulled out an already separated bundle of some £600.