Thomas McFadden

Concur w/ Raghu's 10/25/10 review, much of which is duplicated below:

Rusty Young's 'Marching Powder' is the real-life account of Thomas McFadden, a black Englishman and cocaine trafficker, and his nearly five years in the San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia. What is bizarre and unusual and incredible about the book is the nature of the San Pedro prison. One is used to hearing about notorious third-world prisons where corruption, crime, violence and inhumanity is rampant. Police brutality and corrupt judges are generally the rule. San Pedro has all these and so that is not unusual. But San Pedro also is a prison where the prisoners have to buy their own cells in which they live. The cell is bought just like any other piece of real-estate in the outside world. Inside San Pedro, prisoners live with their wives and children and the children go to school outside as if they are living in a regular suburb! Some prisoners run grocery shops or restaurants. Side by side, there are laboratories which make pure cocaine which is sold to inmates as well as to the outside world. All of this goes on under the nose of the prison guards and governor who are, of course, bribed. As if this is not enough, Thomas McFadden also runs tours of the prison for backpackers visiting La Paz and backpackers get to spending even nights in the prison to get the 'full experience'! The prison also has annual elections where inmates are elected as representatives.
Rusty Young is one of those backpackers who gets to meet Thomas McFadden and eventually ends up spending three months inside the prison and writing this book on San Pedro and Thomas' life inside. McFadden eventually gets released after bribing the judges and spending nearly five years inside.
For people on the outside like us, who live a regular life and mostly being law-abiding citizens, the book is exciting to read as it opens up a world that we are not purview to. I was fascinated by the first chapter itself where McFadden describes the process of packing cocaine in suitcases so that even the sniffer dogs cannot find it and how he surveys an airport and identifies who the drug-busting security personnel were and how he will conduct himself to throw them off his trail. Elsewhere he describes the process of sending small amounts of cocaine by regular postal mail without the customs finding it and how he uses probability as one of the tools. Other interesting aspects of the book are the concern the inmates have for children inside the prison and how they would avoid violence in the presence of children. When a young six-year old girl gets raped and murdered inside the prison, the inmates vow to catch and punish the perpetrator with a sense of determination that is not found in civil society outside.
The book is sympathetic to Thomas McFadden and generally paints Bolivia as a corrupt, violent and cruel society as seen from the prison. But a reader cannot escape the feeling that McFadden was ultimately a cocaine trafficker and he was caught red-handed in Bolivia for which he was sent to prison. The narrative does not indicate that he really repented for the act of trafficking because he trades in cocaine till the time he was released...
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There's something which captures the imagination in a book which is non-fiction but reads as fiction. Being naturally suspicious, I had trouble buying into the facts as presented in the book. So I tried to research the factual aspects of the book, and found various supporting sites, including respected news sources such as BBC, which support McFadden's accounts. So now I believe, which made the book that much more amazing.… (mere)

True-life account of British drug smuggler, Thomas McFadden, who gets busted in Bolivia, and finds himself in the utterly weird San Pedro prison. A jail run largely by the prisoners, where you pay an entry and exit fee (poorer inmates find themselves stuck even after their release date) and where there's a whole micro economy. Wealthy prisoners buy a cell in the 'luxury' area of the jail; those with little means realise they need to generate an income to survive - prisoners open cafes, ply any trade they have or act as menials to earn a few coins from the Mr Bigs.
McFadden soon realises the packets of cocaine he swallowed won't garner him any money, since the prisoners are busily engaged in producing their own...always paying off the guards and police, some of whom actually bid for a posting here with its vast potential earnings.
Everything is available for a bribe...McFadden has a night on the town with a police minder; he finds a girl and has her to stay; he starts arranging prison tours for backpackers.
But life is not all sweet, as we read of dangerous areas full of crazed base smokers, the unpredictability of the authorities, who after happily allowing some activity for a bribe will just as suddenly turn on the prisoners. McFadden gets beaten up, witnesses 'prison justice' on a trio of gang rapists...and starts using cocaine himself. Even the prison cat is addicted. Even the sniffer dogs are kept eagerly at their job, not by treats but access to the subsances they find...
Probably not a book I'd have picked for myself - was given it- and it's an eye-opener, even if you have limited sympathy for the lead character.… (mere)