It was one wrong move that landed him in Thailand’s most brutal prison for nearly two decades.
Jonathan Wheeler was 32 when he sold his motorbike to fund his airplane ticket and jetted half way across the world in search of a new life.
But he had little idea at the time that it wouldn’t be until 20 years later that he would return to British soil, having spent the majority of it in a cell in Thailand’s most notorious prison.
The asbestos removal worker, from Holbury, Hampshire, had initially decided to visit the popular tourist destination for a month but quickly grew in love with Thai boxing and developed a dream of running a restaurant and boxing camp in the mountains in the south of the country.
In a desperate attempt to make his dream a reality, he recklessly agreed to smuggle 4lb of heroin from Bangkok to Taiwan – at the time valued at more than £1m. The £10,000 offered to him for the job would have set him up to buy his restaurant.
But he hadn’t even passed security at the airport when officers descended upon him and he was locked away.
What followed was almost two decades in some of Thailand’s most hellish prisons including the ‘Bangkok Hilton’ Khlong Prem Prison and the brutal Bang Kwang Central Prison, dubbed the ‘Big Tiger’.
Now, as he recounts his horrifying experiences behind the prison walls in his new book ‘The Tiger Cage: 18 Years in a Thai Prison’, the 64-year-old has spoken to MailOnline about his ordeal. From watching inmates attack each other with cleavers, to the ‘corridor casinos’ run by the prison guards, and a four-year relationship with a teacher while inside, there is little Mr Wheeler hasn’t seen.
A photograph taken inside Bang Kwang on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Jonathan Wheeler (right) spent 18 years in the prison
During his time inside, he trained and taught boxing to inmates. He says it helped him keep ‘mentally and physically fit’ during what felt like an endless sentence
Mr Wheeler finally returned to the UK in 2012 after serving 18 years of his 50-year sentence
‘We arrived at the airport by motorcycle taxi, and I saw a lot of police vehicles lined up. I said “that’s a lot of police cars” but I was told that’s normal,’ Mr Wheeler recalled.
‘But it wasn’t. The police knew I was on the way. I didn’t even reach the X-ray before plain clothes officers were on me.’ He still believes he was ‘snitched on’ by another Brit with links high up in the police.
When Mr Wheeler agreed to smuggle the drugs, he hadn’t realised exactly how much trouble it could land him in.
Had he not pleaded guilty from the beginning, he could have faced the death penalty – which would have involved being shot in the back. Instead, holding his hands up from the start, his sentence was brought down to 50 years.
‘What messes your head up is you don’t know when it’s going to end, because the end date is 50 years away,’ Mr Wheeler said as he opened up about the experience.
‘So I was 33, the end date is 83. That’s the worst part, not knowing when it’s going to end.
‘At Bang Kwang, you have to have a minimum 33 year and four-month sentence at least to be taken there. That’s why they call it the Big Tiger. It eats men alive.
‘It wears you down, a lot of people die in there.’
A photograph taken by Mr Wheeler from inside the prison. It shows an inmate preparing to taken drugs, which was rife in the prison
Mr Wheeler experienced life in both the Bangkok ‘Hilton’ prison and the ‘Big Tiger’ after being caught attempting to smuggle more than £1m worth of heroin into Taiwan
His new book delves into the brutal events he witnessed inside the prison walls, and how he coped with the most trying times including being in solitary confinement
Jonathan was finally released early after an amnesty was granted on the Queen of Thailand’s 80th birthday in 2012. He believes authorities handed him the lengthy sentence to make an example of him, as he points out that there were murderers in the cell with him that had shorter sentences.
‘I’m just a lab rat that they made an example out of.
‘I was first at the prison they call the Hilton for 16 months. The first room I was in was full of bedbugs and we were piled in a room where I couldn’t even lay down it was that packed.
‘There was around 12 people in a room that was about 12 feet by 10 feet. Before that, there were around 40 of us in another room.
‘In Bang Kwang, there’s about 18 people in a room.
‘We used to pay off the building chief about £250 every month between us to keep the numbers down to about 11.
‘You’re let out the cell at about half six in the morning till about half three in the afternoon.
‘The prisoners run the place, it’s all about power and money in there.
‘The Thai building chiefs, they put bids in to buy prison buildings because they realised what they can make out of it underhand with the drugs. The heroin, crystal meth, little corner shops selling food, everything, people even buy women’s underwear in there, and the building chiefs tax it all.
The entrance of Bang Kwang Central Prison, where those with the most severe and long prison sentences are held
Dinner is served. A photograph of the food served inside Bang Kwang. Mr Wheeler said the rice would often be mixed with stones among other things
‘You could buy anything in the prison, you could buy cleavers for 100 baht (£2).
‘I was lucky, my brother would send me £150 a month. Without money, I probably wouldn’t have gotten through it.
‘The prison food is pretty bad, stones in the rice and that sort of stuff. The cells had cockroaches and bedbugs.
‘People would be lined up to do heroin in the toilets.’
Under the extradition treaty, Mr Wheeler would have had the chance to be moved to finish his sentence in the UK. However, he decided against it as he knew he would have a higher chance of getting out early if he stayed in Thailand.
But the conditions were vicious. Speaking about the level of drugs and HIV transmission, he said: ‘It was only when I got to Bang Kwang that I realised how bad the heroin was.
‘To be at Bang Kwang you’ve got to have such a long sentence that nobody really cares anymore, because it was basically like a death sentence anyway.
‘There was a lot of HIV there. That’s when I started to realise the horrors of it all.’
Looking back at the violent episodes he witnessed within the prison grounds, he recalled: ‘The most violence you would see was from the guards themselves. They were cruel.
‘There was one time the guards beat a prisoner nearly to death. He was actually left with brain damage, he was severely beaten. It was so bad that another guy who saw it had a heart attack and died a few days later because of the trauma of what he had witnessed.
‘Another time, I saw a guy run up holding what I thought was a pestle from a pestle and mortar. It wasn’t.
‘It was a cleaver, and he hit another guy right in the skull because he hadn’t paid his gambling debt. That was the first thing we saw that morning.
‘Another guy, he was showering, had shampoo on his face so he couldn’t see.
‘They came into the shower and used a big iron bar and smashed his head in. He died before they could get him out of the building.
‘These were usually people who didn’t pay their gambling debts.
A view of the toilets in Bang Kwang prison. In one recollection, Mr Wheeler told of how a prisoner was beaten to death while in the showers
‘In the daytime, the prison was a casino. You had to pay to get in. You had to pay to get back in to where you slept.
‘So you got to pay money to get into the casino. They’d play high low, with dice and all this stuff. And prisoners would rack up big gambling debts.
‘At night as well, you had to pay to get out of your room and into the corridor.
‘And it was the guards that would set all this up.’
Part of the reason Mr Wheeler decided to stay in Bang Kwang despite the brutal conditions was the amount of time they were able to spend outside.
He was able to box, and he was able to teach boxing. He says it gave him ‘purpose’ inside, and it was how he coped with the lengthy sentence. He began running a boxing school inside the prison and was able to give out certificates.
And so naturally, for him, the worst part was being stuck inside a cell and he feared he would be holed indoors if he were in the UK.
Which is why his most trying times came the two times he found himself in solitary confinement.
A view from inside the Bang Kwang prison facility. The prison has for decades been known as the ‘Big Tiger’ because it ‘eats men alive’
On one occasion, he was left in solitary for over four months and had began to ‘lose his mind’, and one day decided to wait for a guard to come around to hurl a bowl of dirty water onto him.
He said: ‘I was in solitary confinement, I’m claustrophobic and they left me in there too long. They put these 4kg shackles on you the entire time too.
‘I was left there for four and a half months and I was losing the plot.
‘The only way to get out was hospital. So what I done was wait for the guard to come round in his best uniform, and I splattered my bowl of dirty water I’d washed my bottom with at him.
‘They thought I’d gone crazy and I was taken to the prison hospital for a few weeks.’
The hospital rooms were spacious and offered a break from the chaos of the cells. Prisoners would use any opportunity to secure themselves a bed in the hospital.
During another period when Mr Wheeler was thrown into solitary confinement for months on end, he covered himself in toothpaste.
He ended up covered in blisters and it got him out of solitary and into a hospital bed.
A lethal injection room used for those on the death penalty. Until 2003, executions were carried out at the prison by an executioner shooting the prisoner in the back
A view inside one of the holding cells at the lethal injection building at Bang Kwang
Mr Wheeler, who was saved from receiving the death penalty after pleading guilty, has now written a book detailing his experiences and reflecting on the one regrettable move he took which changed the course of his life
Mr Wheeler had a daughter who was two and a half years old when he left for Thailand. He has met her since returning but the pair have distanced in recent years.
He told of how he missed his family.
‘I regret letting my mum down, my family down. They’re the ones that suffer. They wanted me to come back on the treaty, it was hard to explain to them but space. I needed space. And I wouldn’t have got that here.
‘My daughter was two and a half when I left. We kept in touch all the way through. I was in touch with her when I first came out. She has since distanced herself but there’s no hard feelings.’
Despite being holed up with no view of the country beyond the four prison walls, Mr Wheeler managed to hold a four-year romance with a teacher.
‘I had a girlfriend for a few years, an international schoolteacher Louise. She’s the one that paid for my ticket back from Thailand once I got out. I still see her now.
‘When I was inside we would get what we’d call banana visitors to the prison.
‘She was teaching in Bangkok at the time, teaching English as a foreign language. Some people she knew met some visiting prisoners.
‘So that’s how we met. She’d visited a few people before me, but we got on really good, and she went “can I come next week” and it went on from there.
‘About three months in, she got another job in north Japan, she was teaching there.
‘We kept in touch all through that. On her holiday in Bangkok she’d come and see me a couple times.
‘We were together for about four years.
‘It faded off from about 2003. She thought I’d lost the plot when my friend died.’
