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- PROLOGUE -

So we rolled the dice.

And lost.

The Venezuelan attitude to prison is to let the inmates pretty much police themselves. The brutal Venezuelan National Guard - who police the jails - just sit and watch from their gun towers on the perimeter fence of the prison, polishing their machine guns, just putting a bullet through your head if you try to escape.

The police were totally corrupt, completely bent. They were the main artery for guns, drugs and all contraband coming into the jails. The very cops that nicked us were smuggling in every conceivable kind of drug and selling them to inmates. Three kilos of the drugs seized from us went 'missing' while in police custody. You don't have to be a professor to work out what they did with it. Everything had a price and literally everything was for sale. Even life itself.

Everybody carried knives all the time. If you didn't have one, you were dead. It really was as basic as that. But the prisons were also full of machine guns, pistols and even hand grenades. At least five or six men were murdered in any one week in Venezuela's most gruesome jail, Yare. Paul and I spent eighteen months there, so you can do the math on how many deaths we saw during our time; on one night alone in Yare, we witnessed sixty men get massacred in a barbaric prison riot where gunfire was ringing out all night.