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don’t have any money, if you want to give me the death sentence, go ahead, if you want to sentence me to life, go ahead, if you can. But I believe in God, if God is with you then, yes, you can kill me or you can put me away for life. But if God is with me, you can’t do that.’
    – Saidin

    When they checked into Hotel K, Saidin and Tony were big news. Their story had been on newspaper front pages for months throughout the investigation and their trials. They were instant VIPs. They bypassed the mandatory head shaving and the check-in stint in the cramped, rat-infested initiation block, and within weeks they were tampings , with more control than most guards.
    The tamping system was used in jails throughout Indonesia. The jail boss elected prisoners to assist the guards in locking and unlocking prisoners, walking them to visits and calling for help. For their roles, these prisoners would have additional time taken off their sentences in the routine biannual remissions handed out by the Indonesian Government. In Hotel K, where the guards preferred playing cards to working, tampings held great power. They had the keys to the blocks, they escorted new prisoners to their cells, and they looked after VIPs. Saidin would later become a Pemuka (leader) – the most powerful position for an inmate, in charge of all the tampings . In Hotel K there were usually only two Pemukas at any time.
    Saidin’s army background and his ability to kill in cold blood gave him status. The machete that he kept under the bed in his cell as a souvenir of his crime only added to his mystique. Though the brothers were of average height and build, they were the most feared men in the jail at the time.
    But Saidin wouldn’t be inside for long. Despite being sentenced to seventeen years, he walked free within months. He got out on a legal glitch. He wasn’t the first; he wouldn’t be the last. He didn’t pay a single rupiah. He’d appealed his sentence, but the Bali courts failed to hear it within the legally required time frame. The permissible detention period expired and the guards at Hotel K had no choice but to open the front door and let Saidin walk free.
    But within two years Saidin would be back inside; this time with more power than ever. Tony would not be there to greet him though, despite having been sentenced to fifteen years – he would be on the run after masterminding the most embarrassing gaffe in Hotel K’s history.

CHAPTER 4
THE GREAT ESCAPE

    As Filipino prisoner Nita Ramos walked back to the women’s block, she had no idea she had just seen her boyfriend Tony, Saidin’s brother, for the last time. They had met in Hotel K a year earlier and regularly spent time together, walking around holding hands or enjoying visits with his family. She was a drug dealer, he was a murderer. Together, they were a power couple. On this Sunday afternoon, when she’d stopped to talk to him briefly in front of the mosque, she had wondered why he was wearing a small black backpack, but didn’t bother asking him about it.
    Neither Nita nor any of the other fifty-three women in Hotel K had any clue of the storm brewing outside the walls of their block. That afternoon, as usual, they were locked up for the night at 4.30 pm, about an hour earlier than the men. Sitting in their small cages, for them it was just another day coming to a close. The initial charge of energy after lockup had not yet subsided. In Nita’s cell, it was hot and noisy. Thirteen foreigners, including six Italian girls caught using ecstasy at a dance party, were crammed inside. Nita sat on her mattress, talking to a young Spanish prisoner, Gina, about her court appearance the next day for stealing her boyfriend’s camera. The other women were all busy doing their own thing; writing letters home, reading books or rinsing out their clothes. They didn’t immediately notice that light plumes of smoke were wafting over the walls of the cellblock.
    But within ten minutes of