Word: klong
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...been dubbed the "Merchant of Death" by Russian media. Last year, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after allegedly offering to sell weapons to U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officers posing as members of the Colombian rebel group FARC. While the U.S. seeks his extradition, Bout is being held at Klong Prem prison in Thailand, the same place where Petukhov and his crew are now jailed. (See the top 10 underreported stories...
...makes a fair job of conveying the sheer tedium of prison life, in the sense that reading his book feels like a jail sentence. After describing the already well-documented horrors of Klong Prem Central Prison (rats, roaches, squat toilets), Botts spends his time smoking heroin and giving his fellow convicts amusing nicknames. "The Brit looked like a gravedigger with his wide stained teeth and sinister smile," he writes. "We named him the Gravedigger...
...According to a front-cover quote from David McMillan, the author of Escape - another Klong Prem memoir, released in 2007 by the same publisher - Botts "opens his real-life experiences like a knife opening a cadaver." In fact, Botts' account is unharrowing. His description of a prison shack in what he calls "the garden," a flyblown island of mud and compacted human waste where the cons passed their days, reminded me of a scuzzy bungalow I once stayed in on Koh Samui...
...problem with Nightmare in Bangkok, and books like it, is that it is hard to sympathize with the narrator. Botts, who is eventually transferred to a U.S. prison and granted parole after spending less than five years at Klong Prem, is not a lovable rogue but a thief and heroin trafficker, and his time behind bars prompts little self-reflection. Seeming to sense this, he closes the book with a lame attempt to recast his dismal life as a parable about overcoming addiction, with the suggestion that he should never have been jailed. I agree with him that criminalizing drug...
...Klong Prem's reputation as one of the world's most productive writer-in-residence programs looks set to flourish. One current inmate said to be writing his story is suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout. One that I hope will do the same is Harry Nicolaides, an Australian arrested for supposedly insulting Thailand's crown prince in a self-published novel called Verisimilitude that sold only seven copies. Already famous for turning criminals into writers, is Thailand now turning writers into criminals? Now that's worth writing a book about...