Curious Worldview

Jeff Farrell | Venezuela... Latin American Correspondent & 'Cocaine Dairies'

• Ryan Faulkner • Episode 221

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When Irish journalist Jeff Farrell arrived in Venezuela during the Chávez years as a Latin American correspondent, he couldn't have chanced a more serendipitous encounter that lead to one of the most harrowing stories he'd ever tell. That encounter was with the Irish drug mule, Paul Keeney, and his story that followed became the bestselling book, 'Cocaine Diaries', which pulls back the curtain on the nightmarish reality of Venezuela's prison system: the corruption, the violence, the abuse and the absurdity.

Jeff discusses the extraordinary risks facing foreign correspondents trying to report from Venezuela today, where journalists are turned back at the airport and armed civilian militias called 'colectivos' who patrol the streets. We discuss his forthcoming novel 'Last Call of Caracas', which he's been writing for eight years and life imitated art a bit early in this case because by sheer coincidence, the novel ruptures to a scene of the US attacking Venezuela 

Throughout it all, Jeff reflects on a country he clearly loves but can no longer safely visit—and holds onto hope that one day, when the regime falls and the diaspora returns, he might get to write something positive about Venezuela for a change.

Timestamps

00:00 Jeff Farrell & The Story
03:00 The Risks of Reporting from Venezuela
06:13 The Challenges of Foreign Correspondence
09:03 Life Under a Regime of Fear
11:59 The Complexities of Venezuelan Society
14:57 The Impact of Corruption and Socialism
18:12 The Beauty and Paradox of Venezuela
21:06 The Geography and Demographics of Venezuela
24:04 The Journey of a Foreign Correspondent
27:07 The Serendipitous Encounter with Paul Keeney
44:27 A Journey into the Venezuelan Prison System
51:47 Serendipity and the Book Deal
54:07 Paul Keeney's Life and Struggles
01:00:22 The Harsh Realities of Venezuelan Prisons
01:08:14 Escape from Venezuela
01:13:54 The Aftermath of the Book and Future Plans
01:18:04 Reflections on Journalism and Human Experience

SPEAKER_00

When Irish journalist Jeff Farrell arrived in Venezuela during the Chavez years as a Latin American correspondent, he couldn't have chanced a more serendipitous encounter that led to one of the most harrowing stories he'd ever tell. That encounter was with the Irish drug mule Paul Keaney, and his story that followed became the best-selling book, The Cocaine Diaries, which pulls back the curtain on the nightmarish reality of Venezuela's prison system, particularly in this case Los Teques, and all the corruption, the violence, the abuse, and the absurdity that came along with it. As Paul told Jeff, if I was put in prison as punishment for trafficking cocaine, the justice system put me in a prison where there was more cocaine than I'd ever seen in my entire life. But the book almost never happened. Jeff left Venezuela, burnt out from freelance journalism that wouldn't pay the bills. And as he's disembarking his flight to Dublin, he hears a familiar voice. At the baggage carousel in Dublin Airport, he spotted a figure collecting a backpack. Paul Keaney, freshly escaped from Venezuela. Jeff approached him and said, The chances of me and you meeting like this, it has to be fate. Me and you are going to write a book. In this podcast, Jeff takes us deep into that story, but as well, far beyond it. Jeff takes us inside Venezuela today, a country so locked down that his local contacts won't even take phone calls from abroad. They stop people on the street and say, Show me your phone. And if they see a phone call from abroad, questions will be asked and you could be disappeared. Jeff goes on to discuss the extraordinary risks facing foreign correspondents trying to report from Venezuela today, where journalists are turned back at the airport and armed civilian militias called collectivos patrol the streets on motorbikes itching to exploit. We discuss his forthcoming novel, The Last Call of Caracas, which he has been writing for eight years, and life imitated art a bit early in this case, because by sheer coincidence, the novel ruptures to a scene of the US attacking Venezuela. Throughout it all, Jeff reflects on a country he clearly loves but can no longer visit, and holds on to the hope that one day, when the regime falls and the diaspora return, he might get to write something positive about Venezuela for a change. Consider leaving this podcast to review on Spotify and Apple. And with no further ado, here he is, Jeff Farrell. Mr. Pharrell, thank you so much for joining me.

SPEAKER_01

Pleasure to be here. I have to correct you in how you pronounce my surname. Maybe in Australia, I'm a Pharrell, but I'm a Pharrell in Ireland. But the Pharrell is beautiful, man. I love it. I sound very important.

SPEAKER_00

So we're going to get into Cocaine Diaries, uh, which is this remarkable profile that she made of an a comrade of yours, an Irishman who had found himself as a drug mule in Venezuela. Looking into your work, there's so many different angles to go from. But I just wanted to start with this that it seems to be a good time to be publishing a novel set in Venezuela if you want some sort of Hollywood deal.

SPEAKER_01

Well, look, I'll tell you what, anybody who looks at that book on Amazon, Last Call and Caracas is the name of the novel. They probably think, well, man, this guy, he writes really fast. He saw Donald Trump come into power and he sat there and went, ooh. But no, I started the book about eight years ago. It's been through several drafts, and uh all I can say is in the last year I rewrote the conspiracy of the novel. To be a bit more up-to-date, uh, connected to the headlines, includes Trend de Agua, the supposed cartel that's taken over America if you believe Donald Trump. So it's it's the backdrop, the knockout conspiracy in the novel, is ripped out of the headlines. But things in the book, um kind of a funny angle which I'm going to use in the publicity. And I haven't published the book yet. It's coming out in April. But I had to write very quick at the end because part of the ending, this is not a spoiler, includes uh a scene where the US attacks Venezuela. Now, this was purely fiction. I thought this could never happen. Nonsense. People think I'm crazy. But I wrote it anyway. Then all of a sudden, the US attacked Venezuela. I took Maduro out of uh out of Caracas in the middle of the night. And then I thought, I can't believe this. I'll have to get this book finished faster. Now I was in the editing stage of the book, not the writing, but so I was almost there. When I saw the news that Maduro was snatched up there, no, Donald Trump, wait, wait, give me two more months. I'm nearly there. Stop. Stop. Call back the special forces. But no, everything is fine. Venezuela will be in the news for a long time to come. So as far as a media hook is concerned.

SPEAKER_00

Are you tempted to go back in and rewrite the ending for something that matches more what happened in reality?

SPEAKER_01

I'm desperate to go back. I tried to go back November 2024. I had my tickets booked. You know, I paid for them. And uh people talked me out of it. People said, don't go, you get snatched on the streets. The worst thing what the worst thing that would probably happen, and likely, is that I can contacted a media fixer. I wanted to go over and do journalism before Donald Trump kicked in and Venezuela's big in the news. But I also wanted to get on the ground and research certain aspects of the book that I couldn't do from afar. Now, yeah, I've been in Venezuela, okay, a couple of years, but back in the Hugo Chavez years, the country has changed. It's worse. So I wanted to get there and see it with my own eyes. So I booked the tickets, uh, media fixer and friends on the ground, the crackers, you won't get past the airport. The biggest fear that I had was that, uh, I mean, no, they don't let any journalists in in general, but the biggest fear for me was that I reported in Ukraine several, six, seven times over the past three, four years. And I saw a story that uh two uh Colombian foreign fighters went to uh they fought in Ukraine on the way back from Ukraine, back to Colombia, they did a stop with Venezuela, but disappeared two weeks, vanished off the face of the earth. Families didn't know where they were. All of a sudden they popped up back in the news in the courtroom in Moscow. So obviously what happened was the the regime in Venezuela uh picked them up, got a request from the uh Russian Intel. These two guys fought in Ukraine, picked them up, they're mercenaries. They weren't mercenars, they were paid fighters. So, because of the Ukraine stuff on my passport, I said I don't want to get uh deported. It's bad enough getting locked up in a prison in Venezuela, but I don't want to uh to get deported to Moscow. Another thing is that uh I mean the book that I wrote about Venezuela, it's hardly flattering. I mean, a drug meal gets caught in the airport uh with cocaine and he gets raped. I'm not giving much away about the book, that that's well documented. So I said to myself, if they caught me at the airport, and they found out that I wrote that book, they said this guy's the biggest idiot on the face of the air. He knows what the prisons are like. How could he be so stupid to kill me? People would laugh at me. So I was talked out of it rightly. I was gonna go back again next week because of what's happening. Again, I was talked out of it again. So, no, I'd love to go back, love to report, but I can't take the chance getting locked up in prison in Venezuela. I can't do it.

SPEAKER_00

Isn't there an angle where you could let the Irish authorities know that this is who you are, this is what you're intending to do, this is a likely outcome when I get there, and that could support provide some type of buffer for you?

SPEAKER_01

That's not a bad idea. I don't think there's anything they can do. They did have somebody on the ground in the park. They had a consular at least. There's no embassy. So get no embassy support if I get get locked up when I get there. No embassy support. The nearest Irish embassy is in Mexico. The consular, they took the consular a decade ago. So there's not much I can do, you know? I mean, yeah, there'll be a bit of noise, but they could still put me in prison for two or three days even. I don't know if I can handle it.

SPEAKER_00

What aspects of the book did you want to go back to explore?

SPEAKER_01

Well, the I mean the novel, it the the the prison book is obviously done in Dossa, but the novel I wanted to just get on the ground. What does the place look like again? What's it smell like? Pick up the sounds. All the things you want to capture to make a book good. You can do a lot these days on YouTube and you can look at videos, I can I can call people on video calls, and it is fantastic. But nothing beats being on the ground for obvious reasons. That's why news organizations want journalists to go into Venezuela. Yeah, you can report from afar. You can send a report to CUCAT, which is I had hundreds of porters they send it on CUCATA. It's a border town with Venezuela, where all the international press went the day after Maduro was snatched in the middle of the night. They tried to cross the border. And then most of them ended up uh uh being detained, not uh not for very long, for several hours, and then let go and thought, look, we know you're a journalist, just get out. Get out and don't come by. So everybody wants to be in Venezuela as a reporter at the moment, but it's difficult times.

SPEAKER_00

Is that how dire it is there? It's like the similar level of press access that Gaza might get or something.

SPEAKER_01

I can't I haven't been on the ground in Gaza, but yeah, they don't want Venezuela doesn't want foreign journalists on the ground. They want to shut down the news. There's poverty, there's there's hunger, there's misery, there's people going through bins on the streets all around the city. There's bullets flying and the barrios. It's uh it's basically a lawless territory that's overrun. Or run, maybe you could say. It's run by what these armed groups called collectivos. They're basically armed civilians. They're loyal to the regime. The regime knows that it can't have eyes and ears everywhere at the same time. They have a military, they have the police, but they can't be in the slums all across the country. So they get civilians who are loyal to the regime, they put on a red shirt, they get on motorbikes, they carry guns. So if a protest pops up around the city, the collectives go rock up at motorbikes, shotguns, rifles, revolvers, they threaten off the protests and they they take pop shots. So they can kind of they can take a level of violence that uh the government itself can't do at times. So they're basically everywhere. And uh just to bring it right up to date, so I have a friend who's riding the he's in a patio in Caracas, in the west of the city. So when the uh when the US abducted Maduro in the early hours, you know, I had a guy on the ground I could get quotes off, which was great. So I rang him up at about it was about 7 a.m. in Caracas and I said, How's things? He said, Oh yeah, it's it's a little bit hairy. Uh just uh uh hang on, I'm driving across the city. And he said, uh hang on, I'll have to call you back. There's a guy coming up to the car with a machine gun. Oh my god. I said, I'll have to hang up. So I said, Oh no, what am I gonna do if this guy gets you know locked up or shot up? But I called them back a couple of hours later. I got through to him and he said, Look, everything's okay, but they were they were collectivos. They stopped everybody across the city. The collectivos basically took to the streets the day after the morning after the the US uh took Maduro out of the city. They basically showed him their presence. They're saying we're loyal to the regime. If you take to the street, if you celebrate Trump abductive Maduro, we're coming for you. We're taking you out of your house. And we're going to bring you to bring it to the police, bring it to the authorities. So that's what they've done. So there's nobody running around the streets of Venezuela saying Trump, Trump, Trump. Not unless you want to go to prison.

SPEAKER_00

And your mates down there who you're calling to get the sense and feel for what Venezuela is like. How are they talking about what their regular life actually looks like now beyond what you just described?

SPEAKER_01

Their regular life, they have a salary from abroad, they live comfortable. I'm talking about an expat. I mean, I talk to Venezuelans as well. Actually, you know what? I can't talk to Venezuelans. I talk to Venezuelans who live abroad. Uh, the Venezuelans, I can't, my Venezuelan friends who have all fled Venezuela, live here in Spain, they live around the world. I wanted I say to them, look, can you put me in touch with people on the ground in Corai? They said, no. Everybody's terrified to talk. I said, look, I have a podcast. I speak to them anonymously. And I said, no, we can't do it. I said, listen, nobody listens to my podcast. I can guarantee the Venezuelan intelligence won't pick it up. And they said, no. Wow. What happens is the uh the authorities, including the collective, but they stop people on the street, they say, show me your phone. So they look through people's phones, they break into their houses, stop them on the street, show me your phone. If they see a phone a phone call abroad, questions will be asked. And you could be disappeared, you could be taken off to a detention center, tortured, uh, your family might not see you for years. Maybe a year later, you know, they'll find out you're in prison and they'll spend a long time trying to get you back out. So that's what happens. Actually, my contact in Caracas he said, simply to have simply to write a message on your phone to say you support Trump and you're anti-Maduro. If the authorities see that text message, you can go to prison for 30 years. So did that if that gives you a good sense why people are afraid to talk, why foreign journalists can't get into the country. It's the fear of information getting out from Venezuela about the lie, the difficult, the horrible lives that people live.

SPEAKER_00

It's much more of a regime of terror than I was expecting to hear. Because I feel like I've watched lots of travel YouTube guys that go throughout Caracas and maybe other parts of Venezuela. I don't know how dated it is, to be fair. Um, but they're obviously not painting a picture of prosperity, but not one as not one that is as brutal against any type of deterrence to the regime as you would expect in the good old days of Iraq or I've seen those videos and uh yeah, I've looked at them for my own research because I can't really get into the country.

SPEAKER_01

What I'll say is there was Venezuela before Maduro has told the elections, and there's Venezuela after Maduro stole the elections. So when I tried to get back into Venezuela in November 2024, the inauguration of Maduro was set for mid-January 2025. So when the whole story broke in the international media and the Western leaders all uh came out and denounced the results, I said that Edmundo Gonzalez won the elections. The Venezuelan authorities stopped letting foreign journalists into the country. Not stopped it completely, but they made it very difficult. So the time I was trying to get back in November 2024 was when the authorities really cracked down on foreign journalists or anybody coming into the country to document what's happening on the ground. They were very nervous, very sensitive. And uh one guy, you know, for example, he's uh he's a coffee farmer, he's a European guy. He's been there 30 years. He came back into Venezuela from a trip home to Europe and he was detained for up to eight hours. Where the intelligence services questioned him, wanted to know why he was coming back to Venezuela. So they were very good, he said, from a uh level of intelligence and police work. They found everybody he knew in Venezuela, including his wife, and they wanted to check up his claims that he lived in Venezuela, that he had a business there. So, there you go, that's the inside. He said he's never had that experience in the past. And I know from traveling to Venezuela in the past, you flash your passport, you get into the country, no great difficulties. But since Maduro stole the elections, as we all know, everything's changed.

SPEAKER_00

Now Maduro's in New York, what's gonna happen to the country?

SPEAKER_01

Well, as here's a here's a good quote from my uh European friend. He said, nothing changed, as he said. He says the mustachio leader went to New York on his holidays. Nothing's changed. Nothing. So your guess is as good as mine. Today, since Maduro was snatched and taken out of Venezuela, the regime is still there. The same regime continues to reign over the country. The only big change I could see coming would be uh if if elections then actually there will be elections in three or four years, but I suspect the US will force elections within a year or so, uh under the guidance or suggestion or advice by Maria Corina Machado, who is uh an occup opposition activist. So for the change Yeah, yeah, yeah. So day-to-day life in Venezuela hasn't changed, and I can't see it changing until at least there's elections.

SPEAKER_00

So you decided to set your novel in Venezuela. Uh the book you wrote on Paul Keeney, which we'll get to, is obviously a Venezuelan story. What's your relationship with this country? When does it start and why does it hold such a firm grip over you?

SPEAKER_01

Um the the book that I wrote, Paul Keney's story in the cocaine die about his time getting locked up with Venezuela. It was fascinating to be involved in it. It was a horrowing experience. I mean, we can talk about that later, but uh it was his story. It wasn't my story. So I always wanted to write my story said in Venezuela. Now it's a novel, it's fiction. It features a reporter protagonist. He's nothing like me. I have a projection. I have to say that he's nothing like me, or my mother might be in trouble. She might get in trouble with me if uh if she reads it, you know. But um, I was always uh the country never left me. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. I mean, a country with all this oil, some of the big, the biggest known oil reserves in the world. Yet there's people hungry. When I was in Venezuela, there wasn't much hunger. There was a lot of money knocking around the economy. But there was things that I couldn't get my head around. You walk into a supermarket, there's no food, there's no rice, there's no flour, there's no chicken, there's no milk. And before I went to Venezuela, I knew nothing about socialism. I had a vague idea that, you know, it didn't work because of what happened in the Soviet Union. But when I got to that as well, I saw with my own eyes, it doesn't work. You know, I meet these lefties in Ireland and around the world. Oh, but it's a it's a socialist paradise. Everybody has free access to healthcare, free food, subsidized food. Everybody lives so well. I say, no, they don't. You go into the supermarkets, you queue for three hours to buy a packet of rice. This is not a socialist paradise. It doesn't work. But then, you know, you walk out of the supermarket where you queue for three hours to buy rice, you get into a big old American car, vintage American car, a Mustang from the 70s. You rock up to the gasoline station, you fill up the car for one dollar. I think this is crazy. They had to work for a week to buy a bag of rice. And they filled up a Mustang for the price of a cup of coffee in uh in a in a in a fancy cafe in Caracas. The whole spectrum of the country, the socialists and the thing, or the failed socialist aspect, that stuck with me. And um another funny angle about the socialism is that the corruption that went on in it, uh, there was a supermarket, maybe still exists, that subsidised food for the people, which sounds great, wonderful. Cheap food, cheap price. But then I'd cross, I do think I regularly cross back and forth into Colombia. Uh there was I used to go to towns called Cucuta, which was a crossing between Western Venezuela, Tachet Estate, and I used to cross in the northwest up in Maracaibo into La Guayra. And I go into the local markets as you do, cross over, get a bit of food, coffee, water, and I'd find I'd find all this Venezuelan food from the supermarkets in Venezuela. You'd look at you'd look at the back of the packet of rice, Hugo Chavez, say thanks to Hugo Chavez. So obviously, what was happening was the people around the supermarkets in Venezuela said, look, we can sell the food and not make any money, or very little, or we can ship the food over the border in the Colombia and make good money. So that's socialism doesn't work. Human nature is greed and profit, and so it does it didn't work.

SPEAKER_00

So it was interesting from some type of socio-political perspective. You'd never seen a place like this. The great paradox is that you can see a dollar for a full tank of petrol, yet three hours to queue up to get a bag of rice. But even more than that. What was it about just how rich your experience was when you were originally there? Maybe it was formational, maybe meeting Paul Kini. Uh, like, why does this country still live with you and you love it?

SPEAKER_01

It's a good question. I don't know if I love it. I mean, I had this chat with a foreign correspondent friend who lived there for a good ten years. He said he loves it and he hates it. I probably loved it and I hated it. Um I mean, the the people stuck with me probably more than anything. And uh the hospital. Hospitality was wonderful. You know, I'd go to some I used to crisscross the country in 20-hour bus trips on stories, stop in small towns. People I would meet would bring me into their homes and feed me. And if I was sick, people would say, Oh yeah, I have asthma. So people would say, Oh yeah, I know the local doctor, the local health uh, the local pharmacy, hang on, I'll get you some medicine. You know, somebody'd hop up hop on a motorbike, come back 20 minutes later with a ventilant inhaler. I think, what kind of a country is that's amazing. These strangers uh went off to get me medicine when I'm sick. And they they really work together among themselves. I was sick and uh I got amoeba from uh probably from ice in a drink or something some night. But anyway, I was very sick and you go to the pharmacy, it doesn't I couldn't the the hospital gave me great service that I paid for, but then you go to the pharmacy and there's no medicine. And I thought, oh man, this is just ridiculous. This country with all this oil and all this wealth is not distributed and they can't get medicine. But anyway, I'd walk away from the pharmacy. Couldn't what could I do? Nothing. But then I'd walk the streets, I'd be walking, this is a city called Merida in the Andes. I'd see, I'd bump into the pharmacist the next day. Is everything okay? How are you feeling? I'll do my best to get you that medicine. So the people probably stuck with me. The people and the landscape. It has everything across the country. I lived up in the Andes in Merida, mountain snow. I used to go down to the Lojiana, it's a desert area. I used to get down to the south of Venezuela, whereima, it's a big mountain range on the border with Brazil. I'd go north again to Angel Falls. I'd go to the islands, the diversity. I had everything. Beautiful country. And I would say I traveled for heavily for three years in South America as a correspondent. It was easily the most beautiful country that I've been to. And I have to say, with the most beautiful women. I have to like my girlfriend mightn't like me saying that. She's from Brazil, but Brazil, they're beautiful as well. But so the country, it never left me. So that's a good point. Yeah, why the head of the country? Why am I still why am I still writing about Venezuela?

SPEAKER_00

Why is it still living in mind?

SPEAKER_01

And that's a good question. I don't know if I if I can fully answer, but it's still there.

SPEAKER_00

Could you offer us a little geographic introduction to the country? Kind of Tim Marshall or Peter Zion style. How big is it? Where's the population centers? What's the population of the whole country? But if you can offer that comprehensive geographical introduction to Venezuela, I'll do my best.

SPEAKER_01

As a country, I think when the US uh recently abducted Maduro, somebody said they could never occupy it properly because it's twice the size of Iraq. So it's an enormous country on the in the northeast kind of if you see South America and the north and the northwest of Colombia at that tip before it breaks up into a small branch and you go into Central America. So it occupies a huge uh swathe territory. There's about 30 milli 27 to 30 million is is is the population figure that was going around. But this has been decimated since 2014. They've lost a third of their population through emigration since 2004. 8 million people have left the country. Almost a third. 7, 8 million people fled across the continent. Many to the United States, many to Colombia, many around to Argentina, Chile, Peru, seeking a better life. Particularly since 2014, the price of a barrel of oil collapsed. And it sparked massive immigration from the country. So that economic crash destroyed the population. But back to the geography of the country. So you have Caracas. So the northern part of the country is the Caribbean coast. Caracas is the capital city. It's about an hour from the coast. You fly into an airport called Simon Bolivar Macatia. Macatia, Simon Bolivar International Airport, which everybody says is Caracas, but it's just outside Caracas. It's about an hour outside. It's right on the coast. Caracas slightly inland. So Caracas has a population of over a million. It's hemmed in by a mountain range called El Ávila, which stretches across the a mountain range across the north of Venezuela. So there's Caracas. It's a bowl. It's like a valley. It is a valley. It's like a bowl where all the people live. So people are crammed into the city. There's not enough space for people to live. So you have the wealthy people in the probably the north, northern suburbs of the city, live very well. Swimming pools, servants, staff to cut the grass. And you move and it's there's big banks, there's embassies, there's oil companies. But then you get in your car half hour, an hour away, and there's people living in dire poverty in the slums. They're basically little houses that people built over time. One small house on top of another small house, top of another small house. So these little houses crawl across the hills around the valley. They were illegally built. They're basically people who came to Venezuela in the the oil boom years, 60s and 70s, people from rural Venezuela wanted a better life, wanted the job, came to the city for a new life. So there wasn't enough space, built houses where they could. So that's what Caracas looks like. So across from Caracas, then different diversity areas you would say would be uh right to the west on the border with Colombia, it's Maracaibo, which is like a world in itself. It's it's it's mostly a desert area. It's the oil center of Venezuela, not completely. There's Orinoco as well, and it's uh it's kind of Maracaibo, it's the old area, the old region, red sand, huge wide uh flatlands that disappear as far as the eye can see. And terms of diversity of climate, uh Caracas, very good, mild, beautiful weather year round. Maracaibo steaming heat, steaming tropical heat. So then south from Maracaiba you have Merida, which is up in the Andes. It's the Andes mountain range, snow capped mountains, adventurous forts, cheaper living, mostly safer than Caracas. Further south you would have uh Los Llanos, which is the flatlands basically. Basically, it's sand, cowboy country, farmers. Further again, south end towards uh Brazil, you uh well further south uh you have the Amazon region. So uh Venezuela shares the Amazon region with Colombia, Brazil, Peru has a stretch in there as well. Ecuador, possibly, I think. I'll have to look it back at that. So it has the Amazon region, it has the Andes, then you go further uh west or east from the the Amazon area, you have Roraima area, which borders Brazil, so the north of Brazil, where the north of Brazil and uh Venezuela meet. Wet east of Venezuela, uh you have the British Guyana and so on. North from uh you go north, you you head towards Angel Falls, famous waterfalls in Venezuela. Uh you go back on a bus as I've done, as I did, another 20 years, you head north of the main cities. Big port cities are Valencia, Valencia and another big port city I can't remember quite now. Uh the islands, of course, it encompasses islands. Famous islands would probably be Isla Margarita, which was a huge uh tourist draw in the 70s, 80s, up until up into 2010, until crime got out of hand. Yeah, so they're the island region of Los Rocky is a famous island as well. Big tour restaurant in the past, beautiful, beautiful sand, great, you know, caribbean, tropical weather, fancy resort hotels. Again, I haven't been to Los Rockies, but I can't imagine they're doing too well at the moment. I know Isla Magherit is deserted of tourism, it's destroyed.

SPEAKER_00

And so how old were you when you first went there? Because you mentioned it in the cocaine diaries, but you were an aspiring uh journalist, essentially. And you were no, you described yourself as a backpacking journalist, and you had discovered this story of the Irish fellow in the prison, Paul Keaney. Um, and we'll get to the incredibly serendipitous moment where you discover him, I think a year later or something in the Colombian airport. But how old were you when you came into Venezuela and then uh take us from there what you were doing?

SPEAKER_01

I was just turning 30 when I went into Venezuela. If uh I met the years are coming fast these days. Yeah, I was just turned 30 and uh pushing 30, I was pushing 30, I went into Venezuela. So I had a very comfortable staff job in Ireland as a journalist, but I didn't get into journalism to sit at a desk. So when this company I was in in Ireland, they they touted a redundancy scheme. I don't know what the word in Australia would be, but they offered a lot of money to tell everybody to fuck off. It's basically what they said, and I put my hand up and say, yeah, I'll take that. Uh I'll get out of here, thank you very much. Uh looked at the map, and um yeah, so I I kind of I wanted to start on a career of foreign journalism, foreign correspondence. So I looked at the map, I said, okay, where will I go? I looked at the Middle East, lots of wars going on. I don't speak any of the language. Uh extremely difficult to be as a freelancer, I suspect. Uh then as well, I I was interested in as well. It wasn't big in the news in Europe, but it was it got a lot of coverage, at least in the US. And I said, that's somewhere I could go. I could start there. There won't be huge competition with other journalists. Iraq and so on, the Middle East. For sure it's already crawling with staff journalists from wire agencies and staff newspapers and so on. So when I got to Venezuela, I I realized that I was right. There wasn't a huge number of journalists on the ground. So I picked a good spot. Uh but I didn't do, I did my research well to get to Venezuela, pick a good country to start. But I didn't uh I I didn't realize how difficult it was to speak a foreign language. How difficult it was to learn it. I said, ah yeah, Spanish, those are the bases. I picked that up easy, three months. No, I'll hit the ground running. But yeah, it was extremely difficult. And uh when you get there and you realize there's 32 ways to conjugate a verb, you go, oh, this is not gonna be easy. But anyway, I did a crash course in Spanish and um hit the ground running, did my best with after six months. I could I could fold down an interview. I wasn't very I wasn't very good, but I could hold down an interview and record it and bring it back to somebody who spoke better Spanish than I didn't say, what did he say? So that was that, and uh I I got five got your question, but um, so why did I pick Venezuela or uh no?

SPEAKER_00

The question was more um you and you definitely answered the first part of it, but it was mostly how would and then what were you doing? But I think you've you've kind of described that. So uh there was something that came up there which I thought was interesting. Um, because you were 30 when you went, and there were these wars in the Middle East. Were there any foreign correspondents you were modeling yourself on, journalists you admired who you wanted to sort of emulate what they were doing, just in your own style and flavor in your own place?

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah, I would say yeah. I mean, there's Robert Fisk who covered the Middle East. He's a British journalist who lived in Ireland, worked for the isn't he infamous? Yeah, yeah, he he yes and no. Yes or no. He was a well-established correspondent for The Independent in London. Uh I liked his work, his coverage of the Middle East. Um I would say I was probably more driven by not highbrow correspondents, but in general, I was I was attracted to the lifestyle, if not any particular journalist, of flying into a country, hitting the ground, parachute journalists, get in, telling a good story. Hoover it up, be there, be on the front line of history, rather than any particular journalist. But yeah, I mean, journalists like you know, Hunter S. Thompson, he wasn't necessarily a correspondent, but the lifestyle that he lived, went to South America, travelled around, drank, went to parties, had fun, but did his work seriously as well.

SPEAKER_00

And had his own style.

SPEAKER_01

Had his own style. That that's what I was attracted to as well. Particularly, yeah. As well as just going to somewhere somewhere different and um being a foreign correspondent, and maybe what I wanted most was to tell people back home what's happening in another place. I know now these days with technology, it's not such a big deal, but at least when I went to Venezuela, I was telling people what was happening on the ground in Ireland and America. So the biggest markets that for me as a journalist there was the United States. They were obviously the big Latin American population. So that was probably the biggest market that I hit. I was the I was a correspondent for the Miami Herald newspaper quite quickly, and when I picked up stories fast. I think they well, I'd say when they got uh my email from Venezuela, they went, yes, we found the journalist stupid enough to go to Venezuela. Wonderful! Let's use this guy. Nobody else wants to go.

SPEAKER_00

That same romanticization for um consuming the work of a foreign correspondent on the ground. Uh, is there a part of you that sort of laments or is um sentimental about that appetite, which has since been lost? And there just doesn't seem to be the same amount of appetite, and you can see it in the economics of the mastheads who would have beforehand employed multiple people doing that type of work, the Robert Fiske's, you know, or the New Yorker having John Lee Andersons in all these different types of countries. Now there's only one John Lee Anderson left, for example.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. The the business model, the economic model of the media is destroyed. It's gone. The days of uh newspapers hiring journalists that travel the world and you know you're at your desk in London and somebody taps you on the shoulder, oh hey, jump on a plane and uh go to Gaza. It's becoming fewer and far between. So so yeah, that that's pretty tragic, yeah. They the money's just not there anymore. On the other side, you could argue that it's given freelancers a bigger opportunity to get their name out there, get their get their stories into the traditional media. Uh what I would say to freelancers these days, though, is that okay, you get your name in the New York Times, okay, wonderful. They pay you $120, $150. How are you gonna pay your bills with that?

SPEAKER_00

No, you can't.

SPEAKER_01

So you can. So I when I I traveled across Ukraine, we can talk about this again later if you like, but I went with a photographer, and when we filed at the press, and we got the uh we got the payments that we were getting, they weren't huge. We both realized that you know what, in the future, or even now it's probably started already, the future of foreign journalism is in the hands of this is his club, and I agree with it. It's in the hands of trust fund kids. Trust fund kids in the US. Mommy, daddy's got a lot of money in the bank. Oh, I want to be a journalist, go off to Ukraine, there's a war. They can finance themselves to travel these countries and send stories back. Will they be good at what they do? I don't know. But they can get there on the ground and do something that other journalists can't.

SPEAKER_00

Fuck Jeff, that's a depressing outlook.

SPEAKER_01

I didn't paint it very well. On the other side, a lot of the trustful and kind of style kids, they will work for traditional media. Uh, they want their name and lights. But there's another economic model opening up, which I would have done in Venezuela. I actually lament the fact that the technology wasn't there when I was on the ground in Venezuela. That YouTube wasn't what it is. Podcasting didn't exist. I relied on paychecks from traditional media to live. And ultimately I couldn't live. So I went after three years I went on, did some great stories, really proud of them, did some great adventures, but I had to pack my bags and go on. I could not live on what the press paid me. It wasn't possible. I see now guys in Ukraine, for example, who got into the war early, went onto YouTube, built up a following on Instagram, YouTube, the podcast, uh, they go on to Patreon and they get people to support their work and buy them a coffee and these kind of websites. So a new model has opened up. But again, you have to you still need a pile of money to get on the ground and get started. And most young journalists don't have most aspiring forward correspondents probably don't have that financial base to get going. But there is a new market opening up where you can bypass traditional media.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. The appetite seems still there, but just the style of the content is changing. Because you can look at there's a guy called Baldwin Bankrupt, who I'm sure you've seen on YouTube, um, who would make an enormous living for himself, but it's obviously not the reason why he's doing it, and it's a very, very personal style of essentially walking through a city with some bloke. Um, or then there's Andrew Callahan of Channel 5 News, which is an American documentarian who's now swanning around the world with a Shane Smith, the old fella from Vice. Um, they're going to be going to all the hot spots of American foreign policy interest. I think uh Cuba and Turkmenistan and Greenland and all the rest. So there's obviously still an economic opportunity for it, but at least I would share your lament for the masthead being the financier of it, and therefore all the checks and balances and editorial discipline that you would get from the outcome of having that masthead there. At the end of the day, the quality of the work is just significantly more rich to consume.

SPEAKER_01

I I fully agree. And what I've what I found in Ukraine is that journalists who go out there who build up these following on YouTube and Instagram and so on, they blur the lines between journalism and activism. They start off as journalists, then all of a sudden, you Ukraine is the best, Ukraine is the same, Ukraine can do nothing wrong. I don't follow them anymore. It's not it's not journalism anymore.

SPEAKER_00

Whereas a masthead would have kept it in check, more likely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

At least an editor, an editor would have said, look, tone that down. You know, you send your copy back to a news desk in London or Sydney or New York, and they read all this, you know, Ukraine is perfect copy. They go, sorry, buddy, you need to balance that out. That's not partial. It needs to be impartial, impartial journalism. You'd be told by an editor to rewrite to get different quotes for your story, or get other quotes for your story to make it balanced. So that that's missing in that kind of um what would you call a citizen journalism? No, backpack journalism. I don't know what you want to call it, but podcast journalism.

SPEAKER_00

Alright, well, look, Jeff, we're 40 minutes in. Paul Keaney hasn't gotten much of a mention. So you're about six months to a year into your first backpacking journalistic foires into Venezuela, and you go into this prison, Los Teques, and you're trying to get a story back for I think it was an Irish newspaper or at least Irish media at the time, and you interviewed this fella who was kind of mealy-mouthed, he didn't want to say much. And you thought you had a good story here, you sent it back home, it got a little bit of radio coverage, but then the story sort of died, even though you knew in your heart there was something much more here. And the story continues. About a year later, there's the most unbelievably serendipitous encounter in another country in an airport, and then that's from where the Kokan Diaries comes.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, went into the prison of Venezuela, and um I can give you a little bit of colour about the prison if you like. Colour it all in. Went into the prison, queued up uh I tried to get in for six months through the official channels uh as a journalist. So I wrote into the Ministerio de Justicia, uh, requested uh press access and uh didn't get any response. Went down to the Ministerio de Justicia, knocked on the door, got nowhere. So I can't I there was an Irish priest I knew. I knew of everywhere in the world is an Irish priest. Everywhere I've travelled in developing countries, and uh they're those guys are my best stories, man. They're not the story of them, but to the best contacts. The doors I but anyway, exactly, can open doors. So I uh I rang up uh this particular Irish priest, uh his uh his housemate, yeah, priest housemate. Housemates. His housemaid answered the phone. She said, He's not here. He went to visit two Irish guys in Los Tequis. And I thought, wow, that's it right there. This guy, this priest is my access to this story. Fantastic. So I figured out he was visiting these two priests in the prison. Oh, sorry, he's visiting these two uh Irish guys in the prison. So I got a hold of him again. I said, Look, I've been trying to get in here for six months. What what do I do? He said, forget about uh emailing as a journalist to the uh to the press office of the minister, the justice ministry, forget about it. Just go up as a member of the public on a I think it was a Sunday morning, I can't remember. So I went up, uh, brought a couple of bags of food, went to his prison of the SK, but an hour as a caracas. The heat was burning into my head, midday heat, spent two hours in a queue with all you know, hundreds of Venezuelans queuing up to visit their loved ones inside. I was carrying a couple of bags of food, got in. I was the last. What was interesting about that, well, fate happened not just when I met Paul Kini later on, but the minute I walked into the prison, I was the last person to walk into the prison and the public uh access. The guards, the army closed the gate behind me. They said, that's enough for today. So there might have been a hundred people outside. By chance, I was the last to get through the gates. Brought in, uh, I was patted down. Semi-strip search. Uh the the army looked through the food that I had, uh, everything's okay. I mean, I saw the military outside the prison, makes perfect sense. The Guardian Naciona, armed the teeth, uh, assault rifles, towers, guys of uh heavy-duty assault rifles. Yeah, normal. It's a prison. I expect that. Went into the prison, knocked on the door, went into a cell block called Maxima. And the guy who opened the uh it was a kind of a corrugated iron door. The guy who opened the door, he was holding a pistol in his hand, a revolver. I thought, okay, that's fine. Normal, it's a prison. Another guy came up to me again with it with a gun, civilian clothes. He wasn't dressed like the prison officers outside. The prison office were armed with buttons. And we did the cell block, the officers were armed with guns. Uh a few minutes later I saw this guy dancing with uh beside a dancing salsa with his partner beside a Christmas trainer with a gun, a big lot uh rifle swinging off his belt. But then when I realized they're not prison officers. They are they're they're prisoners. Unprisoners. So I eventually got uh somebody called for Paul Keeney, and I sat there just shaking my head. Didn't speak to Paul for very long. To give it a bit of context, I was robbed at gunpoint a few days earlier. I was held up, gun right in my head. And it was still it was still had had me rattle, so I didn't speak to Paul very long. He couldn't stay for very long anyway, for the visit. And I was I wanted to get at.

SPEAKER_00

So how many years into his sentence was it when you first met him?

SPEAKER_01

He was very soon into a sentence. I mean, uh weeks. At the most two months, I'd say maximum. Because he was still wearing he was wearing a pair of black dress shoes that you might wear to a do a job interview. This guy's in a prisoner then as well, uh, wearing these uh black dress shoes.

SPEAKER_00

That's what he wore when he got yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That's what he wore when he was arrested in the airport in Caracas, so he still wore the same shoes. Anyway, as you say, I didn't get much of an interview, I didn't stay very long. He had to escort me out of the prison. He said I have to look like a like a prisoner as well. If I look like a journalist or, you know, diplomat or somebody, he said I'll get kidnapped. There's a chance I'll get kidnapped. And the prisoners will use me as a pawn to get better conditions in the prison from the authorities. Anyway, got out of the prison, as you say, uh did a brief story for sure enough story for the the radio in Ireland. I had I did it, uh I used his name, I had no quotes, I didn't have any recording device. So that was it. Uh left Venezuela very soon after, uh after getting held up at gunpoint and had experience in the prison with all the guns. I had enough. After a year and a half, I had enough. Went off, reported around South America interesting stories for three years. After three years, uh stated earlier, uh the pay was so bad from the press in Britain and Ireland and uh in the US, at least after 2008, after the economic crash. I couldn't make a pay anymore, the journalism. So I said, okay, in 2010, I think, I'd have to look back at the dates. I said, I'm out of here. I I I booked a flight from Bogota back to Dublin. Uh there was a stop in um there's a stop at Frankfurt on the way back, and I heard uh uh somebody speak kind of an Irish, English mix in his accent, but it didn't it didn't strike me. It it threw me in and I said that sounds vaguely familiar. But I didn't I didn't pursue who it might be. Got on the plane from uh Frankfurt back to Dublin, landed in Dublin Airport, went to the immigration, uh I was queuing up on one side, and there was another queue on the other side, and there were two people being interrogated by the immigration officers, and they were saying, But what are you doing with this emergency passport? So I looked over and the two Irish guys had these little paper passports, which I'm sure the Australian embassies might issue them as well. If your passports get stolen, you get an emergency passport to travel at short notice. So I heard this guy again given the reason why he had an emergency passport. He said, Oh, I was robbed in Colombia, they stole my passport. That's when I looked over and I said, That's the guy I interviewed in the prison in Venezuela. That's us to me. Now, what drew what threw me off the scent, you might say, was that he was like that, he was thick thin. But when I interviewed him in the prison, he was he was kind of heavy, but he was thick thin when I saw him at the airport. So he was in the other queue in the airport. He got through the immigration eventually, himself and another Irish guy who I didn't get to meet in the prison on that day I was there. So I had a bit of a delay in my immigration queue. When I got through the queue, I ran through the airport and I ran up to the baggage belt and I caught the guy. The guy I thought was Paul Keaney, and he took his his backpack off the conveyor belt. And I stopped him and I said, I know you. He looked at me and said, Oh yeah, you're the guy who came into the prison in Venezuela. I said to him, you know what? The chances of me and you meeting like this, we were on the same flight back from Bogota to Frankfurt, Frankfurt at the double. The chances of me me and you meeting like this, it has to be fair, I said. So I shook his hand and I said, Me and you're gonna write a book. So we shook hands and we said, let's do it. So gave me his phone number, got in touch with him, got a deal, very got it, got the bones of a story, uh, a couple of interviews, pitched it to a couple of publishers. Two publishers wanted the book, and on Monday I pitched the book, two publishers wanted it, and they wanted the response by Wednesday. So it wasn't it was an easy book to pitch a it was it was an easy story to sell. So that that's how it came about.

SPEAKER_00

It's such an insane moment of serendipity. What what is that moment of recognition when you have left Latin America after these three years, and it's because you haven't been paid enough doing journalism? So you're probably thinking in your mind all these other different things that I'm gonna have to be doing now. And you see this guy who you know is a gold mind of a story. But not even that, just you recognize a guy who was in a prison in Venezuela for as being for drip for being a drug meal. Uh is there any way to sort of just recreate the complete surprise of that?

SPEAKER_01

I I couldn't. Paul Keaney said to me, he said, if if you're a gambling man and you put money on the people think you were mad. People think you're out of your mind.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, you'd be out of your mind.

SPEAKER_01

Just it's not logical. It's not logical. For me, you can be woo-woo about it and and believe in the universe, and it w it was meant to happen. It was destiny that I was to meet this guy and write a story. And I kind of learned from the experience as well is that I was desperate to get a book when I first met him, get a book out of a story, but it was too difficult to get back into the prison. He was too early in his sentence. Uh I couldn't get back in and out of prison regularly to write a book. The logistics tool wasn't practical. So I kept on the case and I kept thinking when I travelled across South America, covered different stories, I kept saying I want to get back to that story, but I just have to let it go. So I learned that what I learned from my experience was that chase something, have a go, but then let it go. And if it's meant to be, it'll come back to you. So that's what I learned from that experience. I had the goal, I had the the dream, the vision to write this book about this guy's story, but then I just let it go and I said, There's nothing I can do.

SPEAKER_00

But you meet him again, you shake hands, you get the deal from the publisher. So obviously, for anyone listening to this that is interested in the story, we'll tell we'll talk a little bit about it now. But it really is the horrific detail of life inside Los Teques, uh, which is why you would want to sort of read it in full. But are you comfortable telling a bit of the story, a bit of Paul Keaney's life?

SPEAKER_01

Um I can, yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. I I was invested in his life for a couple of years, so I I know what's certainly his time in Venezuela now very well.

SPEAKER_00

So he was a he had a plumbing business, the GFC kind of ruined him, and he got into a little bit of a recreational cocaine habit in Dublin, and then um got approached by a guy who said, Well, you can make some easy money if you just go to this country and fly back to Dublin, put something in your bag, no questions asked. How just how how common is that experience for Europeans, especially at this time?

SPEAKER_01

Well, if you judge, if you judge it by the uh the drug villains who are in the prison in Venezuela, I did I met a few of them. And obviously from Paul Keaney's story, uh there was dozens. There was five, ten, then twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, up to a hundred at one point. Wow. As the global financial craft deepened. So it was a common, it was common at the time. Educated guys, Paul would tell me about some guy from Israel, educated guy, went to got into money problems. Polish guy, same thing, got into money problems, guy tapped them on the shoulder in the bar in the community, fancy making 10 grand. Holiday to Venezuela, easy money until it isn't. So, yeah, according to Paul and uh the stories that he told me from the guys in the prison, as well as a second Irish guy, all had similar stories. Uh, not all of them lost money through business or lost a job. Some of them got into drug debts. So there were heavy users in their own country. Got into debt, couldn't pay those debts. And uh a narco guy would say, Look, you want to clear your debt? You go to Venezuela. Guy meets you over there, you beat the mule, we'll give you 10 grand. Now, what I couldn't understand, and I still don't understand to this day, why the narco gangs gave these guys so little money as an incentive. 10 grand, 10,000 euros to risk your life in prison. I mean, Paul Keeney had six kilos of cocaine in his suitcase on the street in Ireland, that six kilos of cocaine was hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of at least six. These days I think a kilo of cocaine's about 80,000 euros. I bad at math, but it's almost 500,000 euros, isn't it? So you get this drug gang who's gonna make 500,000 euros and it only costs them 10 grand. If I was the drug, I would look at the maths and go, hang on a minute, at least give me 50 grand. Give me 10%.

SPEAKER_00

So isn't that the whole point, though? They're totally without leverage, they're desperate. If he had said five grand, they might have done it, you know.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I mean, ten grand. For a guy from Poland, okay, there's a there's a there's a cheaper economy, but a guy from from Ireland, ten grand, even in the recession time. A couple weeks rent, it doesn't go very far. So I don't understand how you'd send the book. These guys they're desperate, they're under stress. If they have a debt with a gang back in Ireland, Australia, there's a couple of Australians in the prison. I don't know if you if you saw on the book. You know, a lot of these guys, they were uh it was two guys from Australia who were in the prison with them. But uh, same thing, uh, got into debt back uh at home with with drug gangs, and they didn't have much of a choice. The 10 grand was a bonus to them. Yeah, they didn't have a choice. We told you go, this clears your debt, and we'll give you 10 grand as well. If you don't, we shoot you.

SPEAKER_00

Have you tried uh doing research into uncovering that story within Ireland? Who who are these middlemen, these series of middlemen who were taking advantage of rather desperate Irishmen?

SPEAKER_01

No, I wouldn't go near them, and Paul cleverly rightly pushed me away from going down that road. He said, Look, forget about it, look, we're gonna write a book. I'm already under uh a feeling in in danger. He already felt in danger by doing the book. So I'm I he he put the word out when it when it became common knowledge that he was doing a book with me. He made sure he put the word out to to people who had hired and that they weren't gonna appear in the book. There's nothing to worry about. So no, I didn't I didn't get out on that route. I didn't touch them. I took Paul's advice.

SPEAKER_00

Is there a part of you now, years later, Paul's gone that it's a worthwhile story to rekindle?

SPEAKER_01

Uh no. No, it's not something I'm uh I I'm going to look into. I I know who it is. I know the gang who it is. I don't need to know the individuals exactly who was involved. There's a couple of major drug gangs who operate in Dublin. It's not difficult to know which gang was involved, given that I know where Paul was from, what part of Dublin he's from. He's from a very working class part of Dublin called Kuluk. It's in the north uh north area of Dublin. Where drug gangs would be well entrenched in the area. Uh I know the pub where Paul was uh propositioned, if you like. So some heavy narco guys, uh heavy gangsters go to that pub. It's actually been, I think it's gone actually. But these are guys who would uh, you know, they think nothing about targeting prison uh police officers. So i if if if prison officers and police officers are worried about these people, I'm I'm not gonna take them on. I don't need I don't see any benefits in me or society by me going down that road. They end up in court eventually anyway. Some some yeah, they they they get that they get what's coming to them. And they end up in the court, we all find the who the who they are in the end anyway.

SPEAKER_00

So Paul is caught even before he leaves the airport, tragically, you know, he didn't make it very far. And that's when, you know, his horrific story really begins. And as I was, I listened to the audiobook, by the way, and as I was listening to it, and the opening night of when he was in that sort of holding cell before he went to the actual prison itself, he's brutally gang raped by multiple guards. And I thought this is just too much. Like to be so brazen to do this on the first night. Was there ever a part of you that was questioning Paul's honesty about how he was treated in certain ways along the story?

SPEAKER_01

I would say the that he was gang raped by the uh anti-drug police in Venezuela. Yeah, of course. I mean, there'd be something wrong with me as a journalist if I didn't question that. Uh and I I but I I thought to myself, how could you? No sensible person would make up that story. There's no benefit to it. Most men would be horribly ashamed for to be publicly known that they were raped. So for me to be rape fight and gang raped. And he also told me about um surgery that he went through on that part of his body. Uh so no, but I find it hard to believe anybody would make that up. And there was other parts of the story I thought might have been a bit outlandish. But I I couldn't cooperate them at the time I wrote the book. But I met two two guys were in the prison with with Paul Keaney, and they they stood over them. All the accounts of the prison in the book. Says, yeah, it all happened. Now they obviously couldn't cooperate, but Paul Keeney was raped because he was on his own. But all the other things in the prison, yeah, it all happened. Nightclubs on the prison roof, prostitutes doing the rounds, crack cocaine, cocaine everywhere. The prison officers would come in, take all the guns from the gangs. The next day all the guns come back into the hands of the gangs. Obviously, what was happening, the army, the army took the guns off the gangs, and the army sell the guns back to the gangs.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

So that that that was fun.

SPEAKER_00

The fella accidentally blowing himself up with a hand grenade.

SPEAKER_01

I told people these stories, I even told Venezuelans that that story. Or the story that uh that the prisoners were armed inside the prison, and they didn't believe me. So it was a hard sell to convince people outside of Venezuela that prisoners were walking around with guns. Even in even across Latin America, Venice, no matter how bad the conditions might be, there is no part of South America, Latin America where prisoners are armed with guns and control the prisons. It doesn't exist. There might be riots and, you know, guys get their heads cut off, all kinds of horror. And maybe the inmates will storm the prison officers and take the guns in the middle of a riot. But Venezuela is the only country where the prisoners are armed and controlled the prison. The prisoners decide who gets in and out of the prison.

SPEAKER_00

And they take rental worlds.

SPEAKER_01

Rent. Force the prisoners to pay a cowsow. Kind of an extortion to stay safe. And tell the tell the military when and when they can't come in. Oh, you can come in on Tuesday at one o'clock. Yeah, and you can come back in again on Friday at three o'clock. It's just madness.

SPEAKER_00

Was it a power dynamic that was uh enforced because of the power they could exert outside of the prison, or was it all just simply explicable via corruption and the money that could be greased into people's palms?

SPEAKER_01

It it revolved around money. A lot of these heavy heavy heavyweight narcos who ran these narco gangs, there was a name for them in Spanish. Ooh, yeah, a prani, a prani. So these guys were like Tren de Riagua, for example, is it's a well-known transnational Venezuelan criminal gang that made the news last year in the US when Donald Trump tried to say that they were, you know, this massive cartel. They're not a cartel in the sense that they move any sums of cocaine. They're not involved in the cocaine business, but they're involved in extortion. But they started, mostly started it, they had the roots in a prison in Venezuela. The prani of that gang, the leader, he didn't want to leave prison. These guys have more power when they're inside prison. What keeps them in prison as well, some of them stay beyond their sentence. They're safe. They can run their criminal network across Venezuela and across South America and in the US. Extortion, human trafficking, marijuana. They do it from the prison with a phone, uh a laptop. So that that goes to show you the the the high level of criminal uh criminality in the prisons in Venezuela. There were high level narcos.

SPEAKER_00

It really reminds me of Pablo Escobar's La La Catedral.

SPEAKER_01

La Catedral, yeah. Uh nightclubs, uh the prison Paul Kini was in, there was a regular On the roof, that they'd hire DJs from Caracas and around the world to perform on the roof. Prostitutes did the rounds. And as Paul said in the book, if I was put in prison and punishment for trafficking cocaine, this the justice system put me in a prison where there was more cocaine that I've seen in my life. So this great irony in the whole system. I had the the authorities themselves, they they have a stake in the crime as well. Like when Paul got arrested with six kilos of cocaine. By the time he got to his final uh his court case, it was down to about two kilos. So where did the four kilos of cocaine? Where did they disappear? Obviously.

SPEAKER_00

Every everybody along the way, every cop along the way, and every step along the way, every step along the way, there is an attempt to extort him by someone who's saying, Call Weston, call your family, tell them to why this Western Union account, and you know, we'll take care of you. And thankfully it looks like he had his wits about him on a lot of them. Otherwise, he would have just been fleeced in his position no better off. Exactly. But it's just corruption all the way down.

SPEAKER_01

What can I say? Yeah, it's corruption all the way down. It's corruption all the way down. I was fortunate not to get locked up in some scam myself. You get stopped in the streets in Caracas, a couple of cops has happened to me. Got pushed against the wall. Guy searched for another guy who went through my satchel. And I was terrified. There's a scam that the cops will do. They'll throw a little bag of cocaine into your bike, and the cop will take it out and go, Ah, look, look what we found. But if you give me $1,000, we bring it to the ATM, everything disappears. No worries at all. It didn't happen to me, but it happens.

SPEAKER_00

We've tracked Paul through being caught, early days in the prison. Uh I think you've added a lot of colour to what life in the prison experience was like. But he self-truncated an eight-year sentence into what was, I think, in the end, three. So could you run us through actually the characters he met and how he managed to escape?

SPEAKER_01

He managed to escape. Basically, the prison system gives parole after about two years. It doesn't anymore. But at the time, for high-level crimes, including narco trafficking, pedophiles, everybody got a shut up parole after two years. So he gets out on parole, and um the characters that he met, he gets out. I got through the parole thing a little bit just to show you more corruption that went on. He was able to buy to get on parole, you had to pass a Spanish exam to show you how the competency to work outside the prison and pay your own bills and not be uh a burden on the state. So he his Spanish was pretty bad. Uh my Spanish wasn't great when I first met him. It's it's good now, but his Spanish wasn't good. So uh he he had to he had to to pay off somebody to make sure he passed the Spanish exam. There was a psychological test as well. Uh people in the prison, yeah, kind of other inmates have been through, would uh hold classes and say to the all the expat inmates, say, look, foreign inmates, if you want to get out of on parole, one, pass the Spanish exam. Don't worry, pay your way through it. Two, a psychological exam to show you're not crazy. So one major question they'd ask the prisoners was uh the prison would say, um, you know, what's the first thing? Uh why do you want to get out of the prison? Don't say you want to go back to your family. Don't. Just say you want to spend time in Venezuela and, you know, think about the crime that you committed and, you know, make sure you don't go down that road again. So he pass paid his way through the psychological, uh he bluffed his way through the psychological exam. He paid his way through the Spanish part of things and he got a uh he got parole, he stayed with uh this as Irish priests, it features in the book. So he'd a place to stay, well, supposedly he had to spend another six years in Venezuela, which for him was a was was another prison sentence. Okay, he was a free man, quote unquote. But he was still in this country, thousands of miles from home. But he didn't have his family. He had a daughter to get home to. She wasn't ten, five, she wasn't a kid, but he still had a daughter he wanted to get back to. So he went to one of the parole hearings uh with another Irish guy. And he came out of the parole hearing. There was an Aussie guy with him as well, if I remember right. And he, after the parole sentence, a parole hearing, he said that the Australian guy and the other Irish guy said, We're free. And the Australian guy said, Yeah, I know we're free. We're outside the prison. He said, No, no, but we're we're gonna be really free soon. What do you mean? So I'm getting out of Venezuela and going to escape. I'm not staying here anymore. So that was the that put him into the position where, okay, he's in Venezuela. He's free in the sense he's not inside a jail cell. How's he gonna get out of Venezuela? It's an enormous country as I laid out earlier. So to get out of Venezuela, he cleverly or shrewdly uh made contact with a narco gang, through an Australian, uh actually, who was doing some work with him, and he said to the narco gang, look, uh, if you get me out of Venezuela, I'll do a drug mule run for you back to Europe. So this Colombian narco gang went, yeah, fantastic. We'll get this guy out of Venezuela, bring him to Colombia, keep a hold of him, he wins and we win. So that's basically it was pretty much that simple. He met the Colombian gang, he did his deal, said, Yeah, get me across the country, get me at Colombia, I'll get on the plane to Europe and I'll carry your drugs. So that's what he did. It was a nerve-wracking trip. Nearly got caught at the border. The officials looked at his passport, he was terrified he'd get caught. But he got through, he gets into Colombia, gets into Cucuta, which is a border town with uh Táchira in Venezuela. So he stayed in this himself and the Irish guy, and the one guy from the Colombian knockout gang stayed in a hotel at night. So to get out, Paul Keaney knew that if he stayed with this knockout guy, if he did agree to take drugs back to Europe, you know, they followed him right to the um to the plane properly. Maybe they'd even get on the plane with them. He knew he'd probably get caught with the drugs and face prison back again then back back in Europe. So he basically said to the uh, he didn't share his plans with the Irish guy. In the middle of the night, he woke him up in the hotel and he said, Look, we're gonna get out of here. We're gonna run. If we stay with this guy, we're gonna be stuck in stuck with the stuck with this narco gang. Oh, we could end up in prison back in Ireland. So they they they fled in the middle of the night, made their own way to Bogota. From there he got the emergency passports and headed home. And met me on the way back. Not only did he get the free, not only did he get to Flea Venezuela, he got a book deal on the way home.

SPEAKER_00

And years after publishing that book, which I saw on Amazon, it has over a thousand reviews. So presumably it's sold really, really well, and it also has a Spanish translation. How much did publishing that book change the trajectory of your sort of writing career and journalistic career?

SPEAKER_01

It didn't. I thought I'd kind of launched this writing career after it. Uh Paul did as well. I got the first royalty check and went, oh no. Oh no, it can't it can't be real. It can't be that bad. No. But we were Paul said to me, You wouldn't get a hotel room for the night.

SPEAKER_00

No, it can't be that bad.

SPEAKER_01

It was so bad, man. It was so bad. Is that just the way Amazon is? It's the way the uh well, we had a big publisher. We had one of the biggest publishers in the world. Penguin Random House. Uh it's we we got signed with an imprint with them. Uh basically, how the publishing industry works, the profits are so small to the writers that that's the publishing industry structures the contract that they make all the money. They make 90 to 95% of the income. And they give you an advance, it's it's very small. It's enough to keep you going for a few months to write a book. And they want the advance back.

SPEAKER_00

It's devastating to you.

SPEAKER_01

Obvious, obvious reasons. So when I got that first royalty check, boom. No way I'm gonna make money out of this. No way I'm gonna make money as a writer. Impossible. I only got back into writing. I was so embittered by the experience that people say, oh, write another book, you wrote a best-seller book. I said, No, I don't want anything to do with the publishing industry again. And that's why I'm self-publishing this novel. I had to finish it with the publishing world.

SPEAKER_02

How those things are.

SPEAKER_01

To give you an example, I mean, when I got the royalty check, the first royalty check, it was still a heavy recession in Ireland. So I had to uh leave Ireland after I wrote the book. I moved to London, get some okay paid work as a journalist for the papers in London. One day I was flying back and forth as I did from time to time from between Dublin and London. I went through Dublin Airport and there was a major bookshop, W. H. Smith, I think it was. They had a whole shelf dedicated to the cocaine diaries.

SPEAKER_00

Oh, that must have felt good.

SPEAKER_01

And I walked by and I said to myself, I'm gone over to London to make 120 pounds a day as a journalist. And my book is a best seller, and I'm sitting on that bookstand and that bookshelf, this is not right. Uh I hired a lawyer in London, uh a guy who specialized in publishing. I gave him the contract, and I said, There must be a hole in that car, there must be a way out of it. Because we have to make money out of this, but he looked at it, I pent him a lot of money, paid him a substantial amount of money to look through the contract for some kind of loophole. Nothing. Nothing.

SPEAKER_00

Is it just standard? That's how it rolls.

SPEAKER_01

That standard, he said to me, look, I've seen worse. So if we got shot, if we got, we didn't necessarily get shaft, it it's it's how the publishing industry treats authors. That's why most people never make a living out of it. So yeah, I'd love to say, I wanted to, I have a novel coming out soon. Cocaine Diamonds came out in 2012. That's a long time ago. But it took me that long to get, I needed a decade away from uh the publishing industry. I I couldn't stomach it again. So only the last few years I said, I'm gonna do it again, I'm gonna write another book, but this time I'm going to own it. So that's what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_00

What are the plans for distribution if you're self-publishing? Can you still get it into bookshops?

SPEAKER_01

You can do, yeah, there's there's models to do that. Yeah, I haven't investigated that in in too much depth. But yeah, there are kind of hybrid publishers that you can say, okay, you put this in shops and uh you get a percentage and I get a percentage. So it can still get into shops.

SPEAKER_00

Alright, so years later now, over a decade since the book was published, which details of both telling the story alongside Paul, but as well from Paul's experience, just live with you most?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, somebody telling you they were raped, uh, gang rapes, a man telling he was gang raped uh in Venezuela, I was the first person he told that to. He told his family after. And for somebody to share that with you is just a kind of tragedy. I'm not going to forget that moment. So, you know, journalism in a way were also, this is not discussed much really, but we're kind of counselors as well. Like when I cross Ukraine and I I've I go to people's houses and destroyed and missile strikes and drone attacks, and they're the first person that I'm the first person they speak to about that tragedy. So you're you're you're partially a counselor in in ways as well. So in in respect to Paul specifically, the thought he was raped in the prison obviously stuck with me. How can I forget somebody uh sharing that intimacy with me? Showing their vulnerability to another person like that was was quite astounding. And I appreciate him for for telling me, I appreciate it that he could uh reveal that to me. So that's that that's the main thing that uh that came out of that experience for me from the interviews.

SPEAKER_00

You could sense there was a little bit of vulnerability in your voice there, especially when you're saying being a counselor to some of these people that you had met in Ukraine. And as as I was going through your website, I noticed there were lots of stories from Ukraine, uh, particularly of Irish people who had either died or were fighting over there.

SPEAKER_01

They're a small number, even smaller now because several of them are dead, but yeah, they're over there, they're fighting alongside Australians, Kiwis, British, Americans. There's a huge international community of uh foreign fighters or less now. Less now since the war has advanced. People get tired of fighting. It's not the best paid job in the world, but I spoke to a foreign fighter, for an ex-foreign fighter yesterday. British guy fought there for two years. And I said he was talking about British guys who were over there in that in the International Legion. I said to him, four years during that war, guys from the from Western countries who get paid 3,000 euros a month to be on the front line. I said, I don't understand why would you want to be there? He said, it sounds odd, but for them, it's an easy life. It's kind of irony, sir. It's an easy life, but they don't have to think they don't have to think about mortgage payments, car insurance, uh paying bills. They just sit in a safe house a lot of the time. Go out and fight on occasion, and it's like he says it's you're institutionalized. So that was that was his uh his experience.

SPEAKER_00

Did you meet people who you got the sense were not even there for some honor some noble defense of the Ukrainian sovereignty? It's simply just because it was a paycheck and an opportunity to do what they were trained to do and love to do.

SPEAKER_01

Initially, no, they're there, they're definitely there because they believe in Ukraine. That's what brought them there in the first place. But over time, they get sucked into their lifestyle. Well, can't me and you and anybody saying wouldn't want to be on the front line in Ukraine. But they become conditioned to it. But yeah, court, they're still there, they still believe in Ukraine. They weren't attract no Western person is attracted to a paycheck in Ukraine. 3,000 euros a month. I mean, you could get that working in a simple job back in Ireland. You don't need to go to war. So they went there uh because they believed in Ukraine. That's the reason I brought them, that's the reason why they're still there. But the reason why they can't leave is that they're institutionalized. War is all that they know after four years.

SPEAKER_00

Is there an International Legion fighting for Russia as well?

SPEAKER_01

It's probably not branded the International Legion like it is in Ukraine. But yeah, there are foreign fighters on the ground in uh in Russia. The BBC did a piece recently. I didn't look at it, but they tracked down foreigners who were fighting for Russia. The numbers wouldn't be as high as Ukraine, be small. Dozens maybe. Certainly not up to the hundreds or thousands, up to twenty thousand that fought in for Ukraine, at least in the beginning of the war.

SPEAKER_00

Jeff, before we wrap this up, I just wanted to ask whether there was anything in particular that comes to mind, which we should have spoken about but didn't, or a detail from Venezuela or your life in Venezuela that you think is worth mentioning we didn't cover.

SPEAKER_01

Nothing jumps to mind. What I say is I kind of feel bad about writing negatively about Venezuela. Uh I hope one day to write something positive. Uh the book obviously shows that the the the worst thing that can happen to a human being to be raped by by uh anti-drugs police officers and to be thrown into a hellhole prison. And now Venezuela is thrown into further chaos after the US abducted Maduro. The regime is still in power, nothing's changed for now. Now what? I look forward to the day I got back to Venezuela, probably when the next elections come and the this lunatic regime has voted out. I want to go back to Venezuela and report positively about the country, not negative, not just write bad stories again, horror stories. I want to hear people saying, Maybe not things are not perfect, of course, but people saying we're looking forward to the future.

SPEAKER_00

Is there any optimism in is there any optimism in your heart about that future you can look forward to? Where do where do you fall on US and US intervention or not? Will they make it a better place? Will they just spiral into further chaos?

SPEAKER_01

I can't say. Well, I I mean I speak to regularly speak to Venezuelans who live around the world, people I know. A Venezuelan woman who lives in Spain, uh, I'm regularly in contact with her. She's very helpful. She says that of the seven, eight million people that left the country, many want to come home. They're educated, they're doctors, lawyers, dentists, uh construction workers, they want to go back to their home country and rebuild that country from from from basically the scratch from from from the runes that it is into something powerful. That that's what she hopes. Uh as a journalist for two decades, I'm too cynical to see the world that way. All I can say is I hope I hope that that's what happens. I hope that's what happens.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, Venezuela must have, over the last two decades, experienced the most, among the most, if not the most, in intense brain drains of any country around the world. And this the diaspora is so well represented, especially in Europe. My old colleague was Venezuelan, had some old mates or colleagues as well in Amsterdam who were Venezuelan. And I don't know if they're necessarily pining to go back, but it seems like anyone who could left did leave. Therefore, the population figure we gave earlier of 27 million, I was assuming it'd be closer to 50. So obviously it's a struggling place. Um I typically there's two questions I try to ask every guest. The first is about serendipity, but given the story of serendipitously ranging in running into Paul Keeney, it's incomprehensible that we're going to get a better response than that. So rather I'll just jump straight to the last one, which is a country which you, Jeff, are particularly bullish on, looking forward into the future.

SPEAKER_01

Uh they have to finish the war. Yeah, they have to to win it as best as they can. Not win it. Uh you I say that quote unquote. But as soon as there's a ceasefire and a peace deal, Ukraine has a great future. It's going to become part of the European Union family, maybe even part of the NATO security alliance. That's guaranteed. It's guaranteed NATO isn't guaranteed. Security guarantees are guaranteed. But as soon as the war stops, there's already frameworks in place for Ukraine to join the EU. They have a very bright future compared to where they came from. Peaceful and prosperous.

SPEAKER_00

Alright, Mr. Pharrell. In the description, we'll put a link to a waiting list for the novel that's going to be coming out. As well, there will be a link to Cocaine Diaries, the audio edition. Um, is there anything else that you want to draw the audience's audience's attention towards?

SPEAKER_01

Nothing. That's great. You you put those links in. Very welcome. If people want to follow my uh my reporting from Venezuela from afar, I have a podcast called A Country in Crisis. And I'm currently interviewing Venezuelans both abroad and in Venezuela itself.

SPEAKER_00

Amazing. That'll be there too. It was a pleasure talking to you, mate. There have not been enough Irishmen that have brandished this podcast, so I'm extremely thrilled that we got one here.

SPEAKER_01

I appreciate it. Nice one, thank you very much.

SPEAKER_00

All right, mate, all the best.