monsoon books :: nightmare in bangkok

Nightmare in Bangkok
The incredible true account of survival in a Thai prison

by Andy Botts

Andy Botts began his criminal activities as a young “car banger” in his native Hawaii before graduating to drug-dealing and trafficking. After a number of successful and highly lucrative drug runs to Asia (though not without some chillingly close calls), Botts was betrayed by a close associate. Arrested in Bangkok’s Don Muang International Airport with 114 grams of heroin in his possession, he narrowly escaped execution by firing squad.

But his “reprieve”—a prison sentence of life plus two years in Bangkok’s most notorious prison, dubbed the Bangkok Hilton’—threw him into a nightmare world where the only rules were no rules. Nightmare in Bangkok is Botts’ all-too-true account of how he managed to survive this ordeal and emerge a very changed man at the end of a fearsome journey through hell.

Pub Date: October 2008 | Price: S$23.50 | Paperback (B format) 224pp + 8pp photos
Memoir | ISBN: 978-981-08-1301-7 | Territory: World (all langauges)

Born and raised in Hawaii, Andy Botts began his criminal lifestyle as a teenage professional thief. This led to a headline heist in 1977 as well as his introduction to heroin smuggling and addiction. After over a decade of crime sprees, close calls, escapes, and Hawaiian prisons, he was busted for drug-trafficking in Bangkok and faced execution by firing squad. Fortunately, he escaped this fate and survived for almost five years in one of Asia’s most notorious prisons to tell the harrowing tales recounted here.

“Andy Botts’ powerful Nightmare in Bangkok opens his real-life experiences like a knife opening a cadaver. This book took me right back inside those walls, reminding me why I had to escape.”
–DAVID MCMILLAN, bestselling author of ESCAPE