I have evidence, videos and photographs,” says the 34-year-old American, gripping a set of prison bars with white knuckles. “Serious stuff.” In this remote corner of Bali, Christian Beasley will not elaborate until his “people on the outside check me out”, but, “maybe”, he says, “we can help each other”. Beasley is one of 573 inmates of Bangli 2 Narcotics Prison, a high-security facility with a maximum capacity of 468, reserved for drug convicts and prison breakers, of which he is both. “With this evidence,” says Beasley, glancing suspiciously from side to side, “we could bring down the whole prison system.” He refuses to elaborate, and I can only speculate as to what it might be. A video of a prisoner being tortured? A judge receiving a fat wad of cash? It feels just as likely to be a conspiracy theory cooked up in a mind unravelled by lifelong mental illness, compounded by years of incarceration, which have included a brutal six-month stint in a punishment block that contravenes the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In Indonesia, many lawmakers consider drug offenders worse public enemies than terrorists. Despite his confinement, Beasley appears clean, albeit thin as a rake, sporting a bob of messy mid-length hair that makes him look a decade younger than he is. I am about to ask him to elaborate on this “evidence” when a guard arrives and says the maximum half-hour visiting time is up, and the prisoner is led away. My interview with Beasley, in October last year – the first and only he has given since he escaped from Bali’s notorious Kerobokan Prison in December 2017 – came about by chance while combing Bali’s prison system for another, far more notorious, and eminently at-large prison breaker. The story of Shaun Davidson’s daring jailbreak has become the stuff of legend. In June 2017, the Australian led a small group of foreign inmates in digging a 15-metre tunnel under the walls of Kerobokan , using only forks and cups. This bid for freedom came shortly before his year-long sentence for overstaying a tourist visa was to expire. There was speculation that Davidson wanted to avoid being repatriated to Australia, where he was charged with significantly more serious drug crimes. In the weeks and months following his escape, Davidson became a global celebrity, using Facebook to taunt his would-be captors by publishing mock-up “wanted” posters in which he described himself as a “gangsta” and a “ladies’ man”. Debated on evening news programmes and talkback radio shows from Sydney to Jakarta to London, his antics earned him comparisons to Frank Abagnale, the career con man played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 film •Catch Me If You Can•. Davidson’s stunts also won him a place on Interpol’s orange list of fugitives who represent “a serious and imminent threat to public safety”. After making contact with Davidson through his Facebook page – the only way to reach him – I established a rapport, and penned dozens of news reports, updates and profiles for tabloid newspapers and magazines in Australia, the United States and Britain. I even brokered a deal for Davidson’s demanded five-figure cash payment with the publisher of an iconic American men’s magazine for a face-to-face interview at his secret hideout, wherever that might be. When Davidson suddenly asked for 40 times the fee in bitcoin, the publisher retracted the offer, Davidson went silent, and I never heard from him again. But I had invested too much time, money and energy to let go. I wrote to Davidson dozens more times through Facebook and other messaging apps in the hope of getting that exclusive interview and the professional recognition that would come with discovering the whereabouts of one of Asia’s highest-profile fugitives. Three years passed with no progress, until I decided to see if I could track down Indian drug smuggler Sayed Mohammed Said and Bulgarian ATM skimmer Dimitar Nikolov Iliev, the prisoners who had escaped with Davidson, only to be recaptured after four days on the run. The exact nature of their relationship is unknown. The trio may have been lifelong comrades, or just as easily temporary allies with a common purpose. But if anyone would know where Davidson had later found sanctuary, it would be these two. And, as it happened, I had a good idea as to where they were being held. I set out at dawn from my hotel in Bali’s capital, Denpasar, on an already hot and sultry morning in October of last year. It is a two-hour drive to Bangli, a sparsely populated east Bali regency few tourists ever see. The Bangli 2 Narcotics Prison, a modern correctional facility with a large exercise yard, is encircled by Bali’s iconic emerald-green rice fields. If you have broken out of a prison elsewhere on the island, this is where you end up. At first glance it looks like a far more humane prison than Kerobokan, which at any given time holds more than four times its capacity of inmates. “It’s much nicer here,” says a Balinese man in the car park. He is visiting his brother who is serving a 10-year drug sentence. “There’s fresh air and you can hear the birds. Not like Kerobokan. It’s horrible there.” Inside, neither Said nor Iliev are on the registrar’s list, and in a single moment my years-long quest to find Davidson fades once again. But, maybe, just maybe, Said and Iliev’s names have been misspelled, as is so often the case with foreigners in Indonesia. So I ask the registrar if there are any foreign inmates on his list. Yes, he says, a 34-year-old American, and his name is Christian Beasley. Tapping Beasley’s name into Google reveals he was arrested in August 2017, a few months after Davidson’s escape – apprehended while trying to pick up a small bag of marijuana he had sent himself in the post. That December, Beasley broke out of Kerobokan by cutting the bars in the ceiling of his cell and climbing the prison’s seven-metre-high walls. He eluded a massive manhunt for five days until police caught up with him on the neighbouring island of Lombok, carrying nothing but some old clothes, a Bible and a piece of cheese. He was sentenced to eight years. Jailbreaks in Indonesia are so common that most do not even make the news. But when escapees are foreigners, global headlines often follow, and Beasley’s story was a textbook example: CBS, Newsweek , the Los Angeles Times and South China Morning Post all covered his escape and recapture . Yet by the time I catch up with him, he is no longer a person of interest, and long past his news cycle. It is unlikely that a publisher is going to pay me minimum wage to document his story, let alone the five-figure sum I was promised for an exclusive with Davidson. But his story, or what little is known of it, begins playing on my mind. It could give me insight into the inner workings of this prison and, just maybe, a new lead on Davidson’s whereabouts. Chinese drug convict on death row in Indonesia escapes from prison Beasley’s sentence seems excessive, even for Indonesia, home to some of the strictest drug laws in the world. It is more than three times the punishment given to Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the radical Indonesian cleric accused of masterminding the 2002 Bali bombings in which 202 people lost their lives. Waving goodbye to the friendly visitor in the car park, standing outside Bangli 2, I figure, hey, with Davidson’s trail gone cold, why not kill a few hours until my driver returns to take me back to the city and see what Beasley has to say for himself? Seeing a prisoner at Kerobokan has always been a walk in the park. On more than 20 visits I have made to the jail over the years to report on high-profile foreign inmates whose scams and crimes landed them there, the security has always seemed comically lax. After placing my belongings on a non-functioning 1960s conveyor-belt scanner, I would be lightly patted down by prison guards, who on most occasions were too lazy to get out of their chairs. Security at Bangli 2, however, is a more serious matter. I am told to leave everything I am carrying except my notepad and pen inside a locker, then stand inside a state-of-the-art full-body scanning capsule. Afterwards, I am directed to a private cubicle and told to strip to my underwear so my clothing and shoes can be screened for drugs. The guard carefully examines the seams of my clothes, removes laces from my shoes and checks for contraband hidden in the soles. I am then asked to turn around, drop my underpants and squat in case I have internally squirrelled in any contraband. I protest, but the guard says it is protocol. Unless I consent, he says, I cannot go in. After enduring the humiliation, I am escorted to a large visiting room bathed in natural light. On the far side is a caged enclosure, where an Indonesian prisoner speaks quietly to a woman who is presumably his wife. Two kids play quietly on the floor nearby but otherwise, the room is bare. It could not be more different to the visiting room at Kerobokan – a long, stuffy space divided in half by metal bars where hundreds of visitors and inmates jostle for elbow room, shouting over each other to be heard. I’m sure you can understand my reluctance to speak because there are a lot of people who want to take advantage of me Christian Beasley Beasley soon appears behind the rows of iron bars that bifurcate the visiting room. After introducing myself, I tell him the simple truth, that I was here looking for two other foreign prisoners who had also escaped and been recaptured, ended up finding him, and got curious. He looks me up and down, admits he is also curious, but sceptical of my motives. “I’m sure you can understand my reluctance to speak because there are a lot of people who want to take advantage of me to enrich themselves,” he says. “Pretty much everyone who comes to see me is working some kind of an angle – journalists, lawyers, officials. They’re always trying to find a way to get leverage for a promotion.” It is the same kind of self-promotion Davidson would spew on Facebook. But while Davidson was a master of his domain who never complained, Beasley appears to be the victim, both in the real world and in his mind. What lawyer or reporter would want to visit him in this godforsaken place? To what end? Beasley refuses to say how he scaled the seven-metre-high walls at Kerobokan, but adds he does know what happened to Iliev and Said: as punishment for trying to escape, they were transferred to Nusa Kambangan Prison, a supermax facility set on a remote island off the coast of Java, colloquially known as “Execution Island” and the “Alcatraz of Indonesia”. “The Smiling Assassin” Amrozi Nurhasyim and two other terrorists convicted of the 2002 Bali bombings were executed by firing squad on Nusa Kambangan in 2008. In 2015, Andrew Chan, a Chinese-Australian caught trying to smuggle heroin out of Bali, suffered the same fate. Despite his initial reluctance, once he gets going, Beasley begins to open up about life before his arrest, and the change of heart confirms my suspicions that I am the first journalist, lawyer, or anyone, really, to visit him in a very long time. “I was living in Bali for four years,” he says in a subdued tone, a voice-over narrator in his own reality show. “I had an online business selling jewellery and handicrafts. Life was good, though I wasn’t getting much sleep. I suffer from really bad insomnia and have been using marijuana for decades to help me sleep. “In Bali, marijuana is hard to find and trying to buy it is dangerous. After making a sale, dealers go straight to the police and inform on their clients to claim a reward, so I was using Xanax. But in 2017 it was getting harder and harder to find. Some days, I would ride around for hours visiting a dozen different pharmacies trying to get some. Then it became impossible to find Xanax and I went nearly a week without sleep. “I was desperate, so I did something really stupid. I ordered 5.7 grams of ganja from an online store in Holland. When I went to pick it up at the post office, the police were waiting for me. They arrested me on the spot.” Despite claiming to have a medical marijuana card in the US and telling the judge he used the drug to overcome insomnia and depression, Beasley was jailed for eight years. Davidson was sentenced to just 12 months for overstaying a tourist visa and possessing a fake identity, in addition to a 100 million rupiah (HK$53,000) fine or an additional five months in jail. Despite coming from an upper-middle-class background, Davidson, who was exceedingly popular among both his fellow inmates and guards in prison, and rumoured to receive regular visits from call girls and Balinese hoodlums, chose to serve the additional five months instead of paying the fine. “I should never have been given a sentence at all,” says Beasley, in a voice peppered with indignation “because there’s a law in Indonesia that makes drug rehabilitation mandatory, like what happened with Josh Baker.” Australian Joshua Baker was caught at Bali airport in October 2017 with 28 grams of a marijuana-tobacco mix and 37 pills of prescription sedative Diazepam. After his lawyer told the court he self-medicated to treat his bipolar disorder, Baker was sentenced to 10 months rehabilitation and thereafter released. Beasley was also represented by a lawyer but claims he was treated more harshly after refusing to pay a bribe to have his sentence slashed, an allegation that mirrors those of countless other foreigners detained by the Indonesian legal system. Beasley’s punishment for escaping from Kerobokan was a five-and-a-half-month stint in its notorious Sel Tikus (the rat cell), where “bad things happened to me”, he says, tensed like a frightened little boy harbouring a secret humiliation. “It was very traumatic. I don’t want to talk about it.” Hotel K , a 2009 book about Kerobokan, by Kathryn Bonella, describes Sel Tikus as “dark and grim”, so small that prisoners have “barely enough space to stretch” their legs. In 2012, Indonesia’s Antara news agency reported suspected mobile phone and motorbike thief Edi Suwito was tortured to death by 13 other prisoners inside the rat cell. The autopsy revealed they had used a sheet to tie Suwito’s scrotum to his big toe, pummelled him with a metal rod and burned him with cigarettes. The most recent news of Sel Tikus dates back to August 2017, when the manhunt for Davidson and his accomplices was in full swing. When a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald , one of a dozen-odd Australian journalists dispatched to Bali to report on Davidson’s escapades, asked if the fugitives would be placed in the rat cell when they were recaptured, corrections chief Surung Pasaribu replied, “Don’t make them afraid,” intoning the terror the name alone evokes in prisoners. At this point, Beasley leans in towards the bars and, in a hushed voice, tells me he has information, “videos and photographs”, that could bring the whole Indonesian prison system to its knees. It will be “bigger than The Act of Killing ”, he says, referencing the 2012 documentary that exposed the murder of over a million suspected communists in the country back in the 1960s. I do not get the chance to cross-examine him or process the disjointed anecdotes scribbled on my notepad before visiting time is over. On the way out, Beasley says, “I have a sleeping disorder. Every day here seems like an eternity. Look at me. Just look at what they have done to me. I’ve lost everything.” Beasley’s time in Sel Tikus was not his first traumatic experience in captivity. At the age of four, he was kidnapped from his San Diego home by Children of the Underground, a group that claimed to shelter alleged victims of child abuse by hiding them in safe houses. The group took Beasley and held him for 18 months until police found him in a log cabin in Vermont, nearly 5,000km from his home. In the days that follow my meeting with Beasley, his bizarre past and pleas for help keep me up at night, in a way Davidson’s showboating never did. I reached this place at the bitter end of a failed quest to discover the whereabouts of a criminal mastermind who is now as hidden as Keyser Söze. But serendipity, providence, whatever, brought me into earshot of an altogether different character, a sickly young man whose life has been destroyed by one stupid mistake. On December 22, 2017, a few days after Beasley was recaptured by police, Fox News reported that a senior White House official had told them that after seeing an earlier piece about Beasley on television, then US president Donald Trump had asked for additional information regarding the charges and conditions of his captivity. But nothing came of it. A day after my meeting with Beasley, I travel to Kerobokan Prison, to speak to Tommy Schaefer, a 27-year-old US citizen sentenced to 18 years for the 2014 killing of his girlfriend’s mother , whose body he stuffed into a suitcase. Beasley told me Schaefer was his only friend at Kerobokan. “Christian was my best buddy,” shouts Schaefer, a tall, solemn figure whose black skin and hyper-violent résumé have made him a pariah among the prison’s misfits, thugs and con men. Even for them, bludgeoning his girlfriend’s mother to death with a glass fruit bowl and breaking her arms and legs to squeeze her limp body into a suitcase is a bit much. “He seemed OK when he was here but it was shocking for him to accept he’d been locked up over weed,” says Schaefer. “He has really bad insomnia and was taking a lot of different stuff to make him sleep. Sometimes it confused him.” Over 100 inmates escape Indonesian jail in mass prison break Schaefer says the rat cell where Beasley spent five and a half months following his recapture is, “renovated now, but it was really dirty before. I could get into trouble just for talking about it. They put you in a cell that’s about three metres wide by four metres long with at least three other prisoners and you never get to leave until you complete your punishment. There’s no sunlight. You live, sleep and go to the toilet in the same cell. It’s so small you have to take turns sleeping or sleep on top of each other. I was there for six days. It was horrible. But Christian was there for five or six months. When he came out he was traumatised, pale, really skinny. It would’ve been really tough for him because he has such a big heart”. With so many past and present traumas weighing down on his shoulders, time in an overcrowded and underfunded prison is certain to have amplified Beasley’s ailments, says Dr Delwyn Bartlett, an insomnia specialist at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research, in Sydney, Australia. “From a very young age, the subject would never have felt safe. He’d be in a permanently heightened state, which is probably why he has trouble sleeping,” Bartlett says. “Being kept in a tiny cell like the one you describe would obviously only compound his problems. “The subject requires urgent medical treatment from a team of doctors, psychologists and sleep specialists. If he doesn’t receive treatment, his physical health and emotional well-being will continue to degenerate.” Beasley told me he had not had any medical treatment since he was arrested, in 2017. And Schaefer, who contracted tuberculosis at Kerobokan and infected me during our interview, says it took two months to get a mucus test to confirm he had the lung disease and receive proper treatment – and that only happened after the US consulate general in Surabaya intervened on his behalf. I contact Kerobokan Prison to ask about Sel Tikus and whether the records show that Beasley was assaulted by other prisoners or guards while interned there and receive no reply. The Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights in Jakarta also fail to reply to inquiries. An Indonesian journalist who assists me says they have no interest in answering questions about a drug convict. Five months after my visit with Beasley, I return to Bangli 2 Narcotics Prison to see if his situation has improved. To my horror, the registrar informs me that Beasley was transferred to Nusa Kambangan prison, a place normally reserved for death-row inmates and Indonesia’s most hardened and dangerous criminals, late last year. “I remember Christian because he always had problems,” a representative for Bangli 2 Narcotics Prison says on condition of anonymity. “He had insomnia and he didn’t really interact with the guards. He had a bad attitude and wasn’t polite. He didn’t like it here because it’s really strict and he asked to move to another prison. “But narcotics prisoners are not allowed to be moved to other prisons in Bali, so the only place we could suggest for him was Nusa Kambangan, and Christian agreed. I think he agreed because he didn’t even know what Nusa Kambangan was.” This is hard to believe. Beasley had revealed that Iliev and Said had been transferred to Nusa Kambangan, he knew its nickname was Execution Island, and there is no doubt he knew of its reputation. Then the representative offers some contradictory information. “In Bangli, he was trying to run away but the guards found out about his plans,” he says, while maintaining it was Beasley’s decision to be transferred to Nusa Kambangan. “It was his decision and he made it on his own without telling his family.” Various attempts to contact the office of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights in Central Java, which oversees Nusa Kambangan Island, yield no results. After three days, a representative there says they cannot offer any information on Beasley unless we know the number of his prison cell. I have no way to obtain that information. Next I contact the US embassy in Jakarta and share the information about Beasley’s transfer to Nusa Kambangan Island and his medical needs. The reply I receive is a template, a facsimile of the template they sent to me six months earlier, only with a different place name. Beasley is now as unreachable as Davidson, and it hurts in an altogether more urgent way as I read the cold, impersonal statement. “We are aware of media reports that a US citizen is being detained in Nusa Kambangan prison,” a US embassy representative states. “The safety and security of US citizens abroad is the US Department of State’s highest priority. [However] due to privacy considerations, we have no further comment.”