The Damage Done: Twelve Years Of Hell In A Bangkok Prison

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You know, there's one American here who has a video set up - and gets all these movies. There's another guy, a Canadian who was John Walker's case partner, he's got a hut built and has Thais who carry water for him, act as servants. Paul Hayward was a tough, pugnacious five-eighth from Newtown, a scrapper in the old Bluebag tradition — who mixed professional boxing with his rugby league career. He did return, in April 1989 – 10 and a half years after having a .38 police pistol held to his temple in his Bangkok hotel. He'd received a pardon for his good behavior by the king of Thailand as part of his 60th birthday celebrations. Earlier it had been reported Hayward had tested HIV positive due to using a contaminated heroin syringe while in jail. Fellows was a trusted foot-soldier for an outfit dubbed the Anti A Team, said to be led by Michael Carroll.

It hurts not being able to see the kids grow up. Bradley's been playing a lot of sport, football on the weekends and Aussie Rules at school. Aussie Rules? I don't even know how to play the game. This book is over all a really great book. It tells an amazing story about a a young man named Warren Fellows who was drug dealer who goes to a horrible to a horrible and terrifying prison and the things he had to go through. This book is for anyone who really likes thrilling and suspenseful book. Neville Biber, forty-five, convictions for stealing, receiving and ‘consorting with habitual criminals’; BL associate, and bulk heroin distributor. Days: My Life and Survival in a Bangkok Prison is a biography book written by Warren Fellows. This book is about Warren Fellows, an Australian man who tried to smuggle heroin from Thailand to Australia, but he got caught. He was sent to Bang Kwang Prison and he had to spend 12 years in prison. He described about how the prison was like and how the prisoners were treated in the prison. The life in the prison was horrible, the prisoners were treated badly by the guards and the condition was very bad. One star for some of the elements of Thai culture that I found interesting. As for the rest....granted, I've been a corrections officer for a while now, so I'm probably just biased, but I just didn't feel sorry for him. It wasn't just that he was trying to enrich himself by running drugs and feeding off of the addictions of drug addicts, although that in itself isn't very endearing, but his behavior prior to his imprisonment just showed Warren Fellows to be loathsome and excremental, as when he seduced the girl he had been more or less hired to watch by someone else who wanted her. She really thought he was how he presented himself and romantically committed herself to him, while he completely used her for his own gratification. As for his assertion that "I didn't deserve" the time he spent in that prison...well.... I won't deign to even involve myself in that discussion, but whether he deserved it or not, it is without doubt he certainly asked for it. He and his crew knew exactly what the consequences would be in the event they were caught. Yes, he had his reasons, but they were just the same excuses such people always make. And they are just that. Excuses.

Sinclair also had well-documented business relationships with some of New South Wales’ organized crime figures. In the course of its 1974 investigations into criminal penetration of the State’s licensed clubs, the Moffitt Royal Commission had found that Sinclair was in partnership with Walter Dean, president of South Sydney Junior Rugby Leagues Club, in no less than three companies which were engaged in questionable contract work for the club. Dean’s most important vehicle for ‘exploitation’ of the club was Aesthetic Arts Pty Ltd which used ‘a number of trade names in its dealings with the club, obviously for concealment’. Together with Dean, Sinclair was a founding director of Aesthetic Arts and through it dealt with Murray Riley, who was in ‘some kind of partnership in aid of . . . Dean’s illicit dealings’. Finished this book in two short sittings. Ok it's not the best written book I have ever read but my the emotions it causes you to experience are intense. It was the "how I felt" that caused a chain reaction of readers, and general rugby league reaction, that I never anticipated or was prepared to receive.

The thing that keeps me going is the hope that one day I’ll get out and see my wife and kids again. Paul Hayward Asked to elaborate on these statements, Edwin Smith stated explicitly that there was some kind of organized crime control at the peak of the Sinclair network: ‘I have always been of the belief that though Sinclair appeared visibly to be the main person in the organization, there were others above him who controlled it. In fact BL said that the people Sinclair answered to were the Mafia’.

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Hayward gets involved in whatever sport can be organised inside. There are about 20 Americans, and basketball, volleyball and gridiron games are played occasionally. Sport is one thing he gets involved in enthusiastically and sometimes prisoners are allowed onto an oval inside the prison walls to play baseball. They have not been allowed onto the oval for some weeks. He would not say why. Fellows, convicted in Thailand, spent these twelve years in Bangkok's infamous Bang Kwang prison, witnessing atrocities committed by both prison officials and his fellow inmates. He survived countless torturous beatings, was forced to eat rats, and endured solitary confinement under terrifyingly inhumane conditions. On a daily basis, Fellows also witnessed the torture and execution of those around him, their screams as common as the insects and vermin in his cell. Many of the prisoners in Bang Kwang turned to heroin--the vice that landed Fellows there in the first place--to escape their daily nightmares, and the prison guards often helped feed this deadly addiction. And the bureaucratic silence continued until the following March when I received a letter from the Australian Embassy in Bangkok saying it had relayed my request to Hayward (and I think a personal letter to him) and he had agreed to it. The waiting went on and on. Half an hour and still no Paul Hayward. The embassy officials had said when they last went out there a week earlier Hayward refused to leave his cell. Oh no, what's happening, I thought. Fellows, so thin, so sad-looking, sat beside him. But Hayward, freshly grown beard suiting him, looked quite well ... and so damned happy to see someone.

Here the foreigners must mix with the Thais and there are 27 in our cell - it' smaller than this room," he added, pointing to the room in which I sat, no bigger than 40 square metres.

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There is an electronics workshop and a workshop for making soft toys and another for furniture. But Hayward and Fellows don't work, they drift through the days.

Fellows revealed in his book that notorious criminal Arthur "Neddy" Smith organised the deal. Smith was in a de facto relationship with Hayward's sister-in-law, and that is how they met. Hayward told me much of what happened during that fateful trip to Bangkok in 1978 and the role he played. He said emphatically: "I have never sold a drug in my life."Not to mention that whenever he talks about the Thai people, it sounds like he thinks they’re a different species. Have you never heard of cultural differences? But talk of Sinclair's book, which went to great lengths to make him a cleanskin, an innocent bystander, won little approval from Hayward and Fellows. A copy had found its way to Bang Kwang. "Sinclair's book?" Hayward said, eyebrows raised. "Let's say it was pretty far-fetched." Hayward – looking fit, with clean, bouncy hair and nervousness but energy in his body - was lucid, repentant, forthcoming and emotional. I left him with two pairs of sports shoes, t-shirts and joggers and some of my own money and returned to my hotel room. Australian Warren Fellows becomes a willing drugs courier at the age of 21 and is finally caught in Thailand with 24 bags of heroin, spending 12 years in a Bangkok prison.