When you’re offered the chance to go to Brazil just to pick up a package, or decide to smuggle drugs in a plaster cast, you know there’s a risk that your holiday won’t end well.
Locked Up Abroad (Wondery/iTunes) is a podcast version of National Geographic’s TV strand, in which people find themselves incarcerated in foreign lands. It opens with an excellent hook: the story behind Midnight Express, which Billy Hayes (who escaped from a Turkish prison where he was serving time for drug smuggling) can only now tell in full. Contrary to his movie character, Hayes doesn’t claim to be innocent and paints a picture of himself as a cocky youngster who thought he was invincible. “I knew people could get arrested, I knew that sentences were severe in places, but it wasn’t going to happen to me,” he says. “I knew I was way too smart and good-looking to ever get arrested, and I really believed that.”
What follows is a journey so immersive that you feel like you’re with him, from sweating it out at customs to trying to escape from prison. It’s more heartfelt than the 1978 film and Hayes’s voice cracks when he talks about writing home to tell his mum he had been arrested: “That’s when I knew what sorrow was.”
There’s something irresistible about these cautionary stories, which could easily be well-written fiction. But they’re real. Brendan Cosso details how he went from “running with the in-crowd” at the VIP room of one of Hollywood’s hottest clubs to languishing in prison after being offered $50,000 to pick up a mysterious package from Brazil. It sounds naive, but he didn’t even need the money – his temptation was the idea of a holiday where he would meet “the hottest girls in the world”. By the time he opened the package, which was “like a never-ending waterfall of drugs”, he knew he was in too deep to turn back.
All the episodes unravel addictively, the podcast equivalent of a thriller you pick up at the airport and devour the whole holiday. They’re harrowing, tense and have a knack for making you root for the protagonists even though they have done wrong.
If you like this, try this … Ear Hustle
