#27 | January 29 - February 11, 1998  

by Stanley Williams
Special to the eXile

A message to all expats: Watch your back.

What happened to me can happen to you. I spent 22 months in the Russian remand system, on an all-expenses paid tour of Moscow's jails-what I call the Intourist special-just for walking down the street.

Most Westerners, and especially Americans, think that if they get in trouble here, they can always get out of it. Especially if they're innocent. They see people who are really guilty get out, people like Karen Henderson, and they think that as long as they don't do anything wrong, they'll be all right.

I used to think like that too. But then, on March 3, 1996, I was detained at the scene of a drug bust, then brought to my apartment, where a small quantity of marijuana was found. Beginning from that moment, I spent all my time behind bars- until just after this past New Year, when I was cleared of all charges.

I did time with killers, racketeers, and thieves. I was packed in overcrowded cells, and I sometimes ate nothing but oatmeal and soup for six months at a time. I had no visitors except for the people from the embassy. There was no press furor while I was inside. That was a conscious decision. I wanted to be cool about it, not hysterical. But now that it's over, I want people in this city to know what I went through.

Going into my ordeal, I suppose I had an advantage that other eXpats in my position wouldn't have had. I grew up in a pretty bad neighborhood- the south side of Newark, New Jersey, just beyond the airport. If a plane ran off the Newark runway into my neighborhood and caught fire, passengers would probably have stayed inside and burned rather than risk it on my block. As part of the airport construction, in fact, a luxury high-rise apartment building-housing for stewardesses-was built right in the middle of my neighborhood. Within a year the stewardesses were all gone. They preferred the commute.

Stanley before. This is what a man looks like before 1,400 consecutive servings of kasha. Note the bright eyes, alert bearing, good taste in shirt.

I went to a high school where people carried guns and things were pretty tense. That was why I worked so hard at getting into "high" society. I'd go to wine tastings and art openings to get away. That was how I got into music-DJing at clubs and mixing music.

By 1976 I was spending most of my time in New York instead of Newark. I worked with Polygram records in the early '80s doing marketing and promotions, then worked at opening clubs. We did this one club called Area in New York, which was sort of a place for artists who would show their stuff, put it up on the walls, and we'd hold theme parties around it- decorate it like the set of Alien, dance on antique furniture, that kind of thing. We had celebrities from all over the world coming around, people like Madonna, Rod Stewart...I even DJ-ed John Kennedy Jr.'s 31st birthday party. Real heavy lifting.

I worked in the industry throughout the 80s, spent some time in the Virgin Islands, came back to New York in the 90s, and in 1993 got an offer to come out to Moscow to do some work for the opening of the Metellitsa club.

I got the call one day, and three days later I was on a plane. I started working the same night I got here. I'd always thought that Moscow was bread lines and fat old ladies. But I get to Metellitsa, and suddenly I'm surrounded by all these beautiful women! Where did they come from? And everybody everywhere had money.

I was here for good after that. I started up a company called Brave New Marketing and got involved with all kinds of things, including opening a CD store here. I worked with Jacko's and bunch of other clubs, and did promotions for live musical acts like Grace Jones, Reel-to-Reel, Swap, and Crystal Waters. Everything was going great. I definitely had no plans to go home.

On the night I first got picked up I'd gone to the hotel Sevastopol, to the club Relax, to see if I could do something for them. They were setting up an African student night, and I was seeing if maybe they needed some help with that.

That meeting ended inconclusively, and I left and headed for home. I was supposed to meet a girl down the street just afterward, and I was waiting for her when I got picked up by the police. I don't want to get into the particulars of what exactly happened, but basically I just happened to be standing on the street at a time when the police were doing a "clean sweep" of African students in the area.

At first they were very nice. They came up to me and asked me, "What's your name?" "Stanley Williams," I said. "What are you doing here?" I told them. I thought it was just another visa check, so I didn't take it that seriously.

But then they told me to get in the car, and I started to think, "Hey, something more serious is going on." They'd asked me my address, and they set off for my apartment 20 kilometers away, near Preobrazhenskaya Ploschad. When they got there, they searched my place. Now, I can't say they found my bag of pot, but I can say they found a bag of pot. Under Russian law, that was enough to detain me.

I was taken back all the way across the city, to a police station near the Patricia Lumumba University, and put in jail. They didn't let me contact the embassy or anyone at all there. It was totally primitive. You slept on a wooden board and ate nothing but tea in the morning, one bowl of soup for lunch, and two slices of bread with water at night. I was starving after just a week. Finally I smuggled a note to a friend of mine out, through a guy in my cell who was being released. If that guy reads this, I want to thank him- he did a lot to help me through that first period.

The friend who got my note contacted American Citizen services at the embassy, and they came to my jail right away. The embassy representative told me I was being charged with possession of marijuana and that an investigation had been opened, which meant that they wanted to hold me. I could be held, they said, for up to 30 days before I was either released or moved.

So I sat tight. I ended up staying in that one jail, eating nothing but tea and soup, for a full month. What I didn't know was that on the night of my arrest, during that "clean sweep," they had arrested a Nigerian woman who had a huge amount of narcotics in her apartment. They'd also arrested about 15 other people.

Anyway, the police during that time didn't know what to do with me. So when they interrogated the Nigerian woman, they kept asking her to testify against me. They told her they would drop the charges against her, if she testified to knowing me and dealing drugs with me. After four interrogation sessions she apparently broke, and I had an additional charge slapped on.

Incidentally, that Nigerian woman didn't get her deal. After she told the truth and said she didn't really know me, they left her in jail, waiting for a verdict.

After the 30 days were up, I was transferred to Butirka.

When they transfer you between jails in Russia you're put in a truck without windows, and never told where you're going. It's like having a hood placed over your head and dragged through the streets.

When I came to Butirka, I thought I was in another world. I came through huge 40-foot gate and was tossed in an obshag, or common cell. There were about 30 guys in a room with 12 beds. It was so cramped, we slept in shifts. We had guys sleeping next to the toilet, on the floor. My room was segregated-all African and Asian, but no whites. That was for our own protection.

It was like hell on earth. I thought I had gone back to the time of slavery. I was looking at these guys packed in the corner like rats, all crushed up against each other, living in filth. Nobody helped each other, nobody supported each other. Most of these guys had come from places with almost no exposure to higher culture. They had nothing of what we would call a normal sense of self. I'd ask them, "Do you have a lawyer?" "No." "Does anyone know you're here?" "No." "How do you live like this?" I'd ask. And they didn't ever have an answer.

We were the lowest of the low in Butirka. We were served second-generation food, leftovers and scraps-the guards were selling our food to the other prisoners as extras. When we went out to exercise, they'd take 18 guys at a time and put us in a yard where there was space for maybe four people. And we'd stand there, one hour a day, like fools, packed into this tiny space.

It was hell, it really was, but I just kept thinking that I had to get through it, I had to be positive. I was raised in that kind of atmosphere-I suppose if I'd come from some place like Idaho, it would have been much harder for me. But I just kept thinking, "If I don't get through this, I'm not going to make it!"

At the time, they kept telling me that my trial was coming up soon, so I kept thinking-in fact I thought this through the entire two years I was in-that it was all going to be over soon. So I didn't give up hope, and after six weeks in Butirka, the embassy somehow managed to get me transferred to Lefortovo.

I don't care what people say-the KGB hasn't changed. Lefortovo was a totally different world. It's like the word itself-"Lefortovo." A fort. No one goes in, no one goes out. There are thousands of prisoners in Butirka, but only 150 in Lefortovo. You sit in comfortable 3-bed rooms with two other prisoners, and you speak to no one except your cellmates for your entire stay there.

Compared to Butirka, this was paradise. Even the prisoners were higher class. The people I sat with were some very serious cats. You had plane hijackers, bankers, spies, heads of pyramid schemes, terrorists, those kinds of people. I was in for a little bag of pot, which maybe counts for crime to some people, but there was a guy in Lefortovo who was in for bringing in two containers of marijuana.

Stanley after. More weathered, more intellectual, with a permanently unfazed demeanor. Not much can shock a man after Matrosskaya Tishina.

My story was pretty dull compared to the ones these guys could tell. The hijacker, for instance, was an Iranian who had tried to take a plane from Azerbaidjan to Norway. When he had the plane land in Kiev to refuel, the Ukranian spetz-sluzhbi asked him to release all the women and children. He tried to comply, but the women and children wouldn't go. They wanted a free trip to Norway! He ended up taking them there, and all his hostages got set up for a week in expensive Norwegian hotels.

My best friend was a Russian who had been caught spying for a certain foreign power. This friend, who was doing an additional five years for an escape attempt after he was shot in a Siberian prison camp for going over the wall, spoke English and taught me a lot of things. Mostly he taught me to stay calm and be positive, to stick to a routine. That was important, because it was very dull in there. There was no TV and the only radio was a news channel, which I didn't understand very well. And you get bored of talking to the same two people pretty fast.

But the worst thing about Lefortovo was the food.

My health was failing rapidly. I ate oatmeal and soup every day. I later found out that Stalinist penal administrators had worked out a formula for serving the absolute minimum amount of food needed to keep a person alive. Not only is it cheap, but it saps the resolve. In Butirka it was tea with one teaspoon of sugar in the morning, a bowl of shi at lunch with another bowl of kasha, and at night, for dinner, you had more kasha. At Lefortovo you at least had a choice-macaroni or a choice of two types of kasha in the morning, and soup with a few chunks of meat in it for lunch (this was the only meat I saw in my prison tour). And the bread we had everywhere was the worst quality bread-not even second or third-class bread, but twelfth class. You got heartburn immediately, but you had to eat it to survive.

After prison, I know what a dog feels like. A dog eats the same thing every day. He's like a plant, or a vegetable. And Lefortovo, with its static regime in addition to the diet, was the most most effective place for transforming people into those stable vegetables.

So Lefortovo preserved me, while I served out what turned out to be the biggest part of my sentence. After 11 months, I was suddenly transferred out. There had been a reorganization of Moscow remand prisons, and the FSB wanted more space in Lefortovo for its own prisoners.

When the time came for me to leave Lefortovo, I thought they were releasing me. But it turned out that I was only heading on to meaner pastures, at Matrosskaya Tishina.

In the meantime, my case had been progressing, as you can guess, very slowly. It wasn't until I was transferred out of Lefortovo that the criminal investigation was closed in my case. That meant that after a year in jail, I found myself only at the beginning of my wait for a court date.

My lawyer was confident that all the obvious inconsistencies and discrepancies of the investigation could easily be brought out, once we went to trial. But things don't work that fast in Russia. I still had a long way to go, even though American Citizen services kept telling me that they had been reassured that my case would be heard soon. That was too bad, because my life had just taken a real turn for the worse. I ended up going to court eight times before I was heard.

Butirka gets all the press, but among remand prisons, Matrosskaya Tishina is the worst by far. The meanest, nastiest dudes in the city are in that place. I mean really vicious criminals. I was in there with killers, and I mean not even guys who were charged with just one murder or even two, but guys who had ten, twelve counts. There was one guy in my cell who had twelve counts of murder on him. I can't even say his name- I can only call him my buddy. And all I'll say about my buddy is that he slept with a teddy bear.

I had to learn prison all over again in that place. That's where my Russian language skills came from. I had to learn all kinds of things in order to adapt.

I was in a cell with 8 beds that held 12 people. So it wasn't as crowded as Butirka. But otherwise it was just as bad or worse. Like Butirka, everyone in the cell was terrified of tuberculosis. That was because if one person in the cell got it, they would quarantine the entire cell in a special room elsewhere in the prison. So if anyone started coughing, everyone in the cell knew it might mean a death sentence for all of them. Because once you were quarantined with someone with TB, you were almost certain to get it yourself. And only Lefortovo had any kind of decent medical services. At Butirka and Matrosskaya Tishina, you were screwed.

That wasn't my only problem. As I said, the prisoners here were much more dangerous than the ones I'd had to deal with in Butirka. I might have been in real trouble, except that the prison had its own law. Fighting wasn't allowed, and that was enforced by the prisoners. The reason was that everyone knew that if there was a fight, somebody had to die. So all conflicts were solved more or less democratically.

Here's an example. At one point a prisoner came in who had been come kind of dissident in the 1980s, and was now back inside for something semi-political-I never really understood what it was, since he was very vague about it. He was a well-educated guy and spoke English, so I talked to him a lot. But the other prisoners didn't like types like this, so he was a problem from the start. In fact, I had to keep from talking to him too much, because it was dangerous for me. He broke rules, like about when to go to the bathroom, where to put your things, etc. He also brought lice into the cell with him, for which he was punished by being forced to sleep next to the toilet.

The cell used just about every method short of killing him to try to get him in line, but he wouldn't, so finally they sent out a message to the rest of the prison about him, asking whether or not they should have him moved out. The next day an answer came back: "Don't move him. Maybe he just doesn't get it yet."

Eventually that situation worked itself out. But that was the way things worked there. It was a bratva-a brotherhood. It protected you, but you were also subject to it. They accepted me in, even though I was a black foreigner, but I was like a non-voting member. I think the fact that I was an American made them better-behaved, in a weird way. It was like they were all trying to put their best act on for me, and they all thought I was very smart.

But every family has its arguments. After sitting with those guys for a while I woke up one day and decided I wanted out. I was tired of them. I didn't know at the time that I had the cushiest cell in the prison. And my leaving was kind of a tricky thing, because the whole bratva system could have made life very tough for me because of it. The guys in my cell were outraged and insulted and if they'd wanted, they could have passed a note out which would have made sure that every other cell in the prison gave me a hard time. I would have been banned everywhere. So I'm not really sure whether I made the right choice, but in any case, I asked to get out, and the guards arranged it.

I was sent to a cell that but was the same size, but had 21 people in it. And it was a total madhouse. I was dealing with people who were serious bad dudes, worse than the first group, absolutely no remorse.

It was a nightmare. It was summer in there, and hot, no air at all. You can't imagine how uncomfortable it was. I couldn't even get comfortable enough to read. No position, sitting or standing, felt right. And every time anyone moved, we all had to move- and when your skin is raw and sweaty and it's so hot and stuffy and you've been trying for days to find a position to get comfortable in, you want to kill anyon who so much as touches you.

Even in company as rough as that, I got really irritable and hyperagressive. I couldn't sleep at all. It was hell. So after three days, I asked to go back to my old cell-and the guards arranged it for me.

I wouldn't have gotten back to that old cell if I hadn't been an American. That's because American citizen services had been pressuring the Russians the whole time to make my health the main priority. We were willing to cooperate with the legal system and not make a fuss, so long as I was treated well inside. This was one place where the full weight of the U.S. really made a difference.

So when I went back into the cell, my old cellmates were obviously still angry. But they also could tell I had to have had some powerful friends somewhere, which prevented my return from being too much of a problem. From there on, I stuck it out until my trial.

After almost ten months in Matrosskaya Tishina, my case finally came up, and I was acquitted of all charges. After more than 22 months, I was simply pronounced innocent and let go.

The Hungry Duck gave me a job as a DJ, and that's where I am now. I still have no plans to go home. After all, I didn't fight all that time just to leave once I got out.

One thing that I was bitter about, in getting out, was how many of my friends deserted me once I went in. One by one they all forgot me. The only one who helped me was Marc Barrie of Russian T-Shirts, who tried to bring me food and keep me connected to the world. My family and I were never really in touch-they're simple people, and they haven't really understood my life since I started travelling around the world. So I didn't see even them, and they were the only personal visitors I was allowed to have, legally.

I want to thank the U.S. embassy for helping me through this ordeal. And I want to send a message to all of you in the expatriate community. Be smart. Don't overestimate your position in life. The worst really can happen-and you have to be prepared. Otherwise, you shouldn't even be here in the first place. I think my story also proves something else. Not all Americans are pampered, cowards. When we want to be, we're as tough as anyone. Russians who think they're the only ones who can handle adversity should remember that many of us Americans have known harder times than the first missed car payment. And we've got our own prisons. Doubters should check out Riker's island sometime.

It's true, you have to be tough here in Moscow. But it's not beyond us. I'm proof of that.