Prisoner Is Tourist Attraction in Ecuador Town : Genial English drug smuggler holds court and throws tea parties for curious visitors.

Riobamba is a tired-looking town on a high plateau dividing the eastern and western ranges of the Andes in central Ecuador.

It was once a northern capital of the mighty Inca empire and later an important stronghold of the Spanish conquistadors.

But in 1797, a powerful earthquake sent a mountainside crashing down on Riobamba. A large part of the population, including the entire city council, was buried under heaps of rubble. Not a single church remained standing.

The survivors abandoned what was left of Riobamba and rebuilt from scratch at a new location. It was a valiant effort, but one that couldn’t hope to reproduce the splendor of the old city.

Today, Riobamba doesn’t offer a lot to tourists, aside from the religious art museum, the Saturday afternoon cockfights and a good night’s sleep.

But on the outskirts of town, in a 10-by-12, cement-floored cell at Riobamba prison, awaits one of South America’s unlikeliest--but most memorable--tourist attractions, drug smuggler Jimmy Smurfit.

Since his 1984 arrest on cocaine charges, hundreds of accidental jailhouse tourists have come to know Smurfit, 46, as a jocose and genial host who serves a proper cup of English tea while amusing them with his confessions of a “hippie freak,” which is what he says he was during the ‘60s counterculture movement.

“My visitors say the most ridiculous things, like what a nice guy I am. I’m in here for drug smuggling, for God’s sake,” says Smurfit, pausing for a deep laugh.

Born in South Africa to British parents, Smurfit has finished nearly 8 years and 3 months of a 12-year sentence for trying to spirit 2 kilograms of cocaine past drug agents at Mariscal Sucre Airport in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito.

He spent the first 3 1/2 years in a Quito prison before his fortuitous transfer to the smaller and quieter Riobamba facility, 100 miles south.

The prison is a cheerless huddle of concrete buildings, housing 140 inmates, 29 of them women. In the exercise yard, prisoners queue up at a cold-water tap to bathe themselves from a plastic bucket. The cell blocks are poorly lighted and the air fetid.

But Smurfit has installed himself in a small outpost of British civility. He treats his guests to milk-whitened tea and biscuits, keeps up an English-language book exchange and recites T.S. Eliot from memory.

“Aside from the drug-smuggling thing, I was always a gentleman,” he says.

All of his visitors are complete strangers, but Smurfit welcomes them as if they were old friends.

“Well that’s damned decent of you,” he says to a young couple who have dropped in on a Sunday afternoon in March, bearing gifts of bananas and a Paul Theroux paperback.

“Have a seat and I’ll put the teakettle on.” Smurfit disappears behind a curtain into a smaller room he has turned into a kitchen-bathroom with a toilet and stove.

His guests, British-born Steve Campbell and his Danish wife, Jeanette, sit on a coarse, woolen blanket on Smurfit’s bed.

“We’ve been in Peru and we’re on our way to Banos (an Ecuadorian hot springs resort) and then on to Quito,” explains Jeanette Campbell. “We had read that there was this British guy sitting in prison, so we thought maybe we should go and see him.”

Neither of the Campbells had ever been inside a prison before. From the way their eyes dart about the room, it’s obvious they are keen to size up the home their host has created for himself in these alien surroundings.

The opposite wall is papered with old Newsweek magazine covers. A 12-inch black-and-white television and a radio-cassette player with shortwave bands sit on board-and-brick shelves.

A barred window runs the length of one wall. It affords a glorious view of the highest peak in the Ecuadorian Andes, the 20,577-foot Chimborazo.

A wallet-size photo of Smurfit’s girlfriend is propped against a stack of novels on the nightstand. She is a 38-year-old Ecuadorian nurse who rides her bicycle to the prison on visiting days--Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

The romance enjoys a luxurious amount of freedom, considering its venue. Riobamba is a low-to-medium security prison and its inmates are accorded uncommon privileges. Smurfit can lock his door from the inside, and the prison administration looks the other way at overnight visits.

Smurfit emerges from behind the curtain. He is nattily dressed in a tweed cap and jacket.

“My first visitor was a British woman in ‘85,” he tells the Campbells. “She put up a sign in the Gran Casino hotel (in Quito). Twelve people came in one day and I practically started doing guided tours.”

Since then, Smurfit’s tea parties have become so popular that he is mentioned in two respected tourist books, “The 1992 South American Handbook” and “Ecuador and the Galapagos, a Survival Kit,” published by Lonely Planet. The “Handbook” entry runs as follows: “In Riobamba jail is a British citizen, Jimmy, who welcomes visitors and may even show you around. Tuesdays and Thursdays, morning visits only. You must hand in your passport at the gate and your bags will be searched. Cigarettes and chocolates appreciated.”

“Like most visitors, I was rather taken by him,” says John Charles Chick, a British vice-consul in Quito who checks in with Smurfit every two months. “He’s a very entertaining character. Very amusing, full of stories.”

Smurfit holds forth from a woven stool, smoking a filterless cigarette. He gets a monthly allowance of the equivalent of about $50--more than the basic Ecuadorian wage--from the National Council for the Welfare of Prisoners Abroad in London. It keeps him supplied with tobacco and food to supplement the tiresome prison fare.

He is bald-pated and a little paunchy. From afternoons spent reading in the exercise yard, his nose is peeling and his forearms freckled.

Not indifferent to fashion, Smurfit wears a gold loop in one ear and pulls back his graying, wispy hair in a ponytail.

Despite his unhappy circumstances, Smurfit maintains an air of buoyancy, even cheerfulness.

His stories chronicle the arts, drug and freak scene of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. He ran a mod-clothing boutique in Capetown; designed neon-colored earrings and experimented with black-light photography equipment in Amsterdam, and says he had a string of girlfriends with aristocratic pretensions and names such as Penelope in London.

He read enthusiastically about American drug gurus who eulogized altered states of consciousness, and was not infrequently stoned on marijuana or tripping on LSD himself.

“I don’t regret any of it,” Smurfit muses. “There are so many people in the world who toe the line, ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full, sir.’ That was never me.”

In the early ‘60s, he was a cameraman for a Rhodesian television news show and speaks proudly of the work he did there. There were more prosaic jobs, like that at an employment agency in Amsterdam, where Smurfit worked for several years before his arrest in Ecuador.

The bust was Smurfit’s fourth drug arrest. The two earliest, in South Africa and England, resulted in small fines and probation. The third carried a conspiracy charge and landed him in a British prison for 26 months.

A Quito Superior Court judge took into account Smurfit’s considerable record when he finally pronounced a sentence--23 months after the January arrest.

Under Ecuadorian law, foreigners are not eligible for parole. But counting remission time--time off for good behavior--Smurfit could be free in about a year.

Meanwhile, the tourists come, hardly mindful that their host is a drug trafficker with an arrest record on three continents.

Three years ago arrived a pair of Canadian grandmothers, looking like the kind of women one would meet on an Audubon Society bird count.

Apparently taken by his roguish charms, they memorialized the visit with affectionate snapshots of themselves and their new friend in the prison yard.

One year, startled guards watched as a bus pulled up at the prison gates and out spilled a group of London university students. They were taking time off from an anthropological study to visit their involuntarily exiled compatriot.

Why would tourists choose to visit such bleak surroundings?

Jeanette Campbell says it was a completely natural impulse that drew her to the prison.

“If I was stuck in jail somewhere, I’d certainly like someone to come and visit me. And there’s the cultural thing. I had never seen the inside of a prison before and thought it might be kind of interesting,” she said.

Smurfit is a daily BBC listener and a voracious reader of books and magazines. But being the only English-speaking prisoner in Riobamba--and, in fact, the only Briton serving a prison sentence in Ecuador--the visitors are Smurfit’s only real-life links to his language and culture.

“I really don’t know what I would have done without them,” he says. “The worst of it is not missing your family and friends. It’s the cultural deprivation.”

A good historian as well as a good host, Smurfit began keeping written records of his visits in 1985. His “Smuggler’s Inn” guest book now bears signatures and remembrances from nearly 300 guests.

“The most interesting day I’ve spent in months,” wrote San Franciscan Lee Azus.

Some entries are vintage ‘60s-isms, like “Stay Free” from a Belgian woman or this from an Australian visitor: “May your journey in Ecuador be but a moment in the great journey of life.”

Others come from Hallmark plagiarists, like Andrew Taylor of West Yorkshire, England. “All the best for the coming year.”

This small consolation was offered by a Los Angeles visitor: “Your cell is a lot better than some of the hotels I’ve stayed at.”

Smurfit has never had, nor encouraged, visits from relatives or old friends. Neither does he write letters.

“What am I going to write, ‘Having a great time, love, Jimmy’? My mother would have a heart attack if she knew what went on here.” Smurfit’s 79-year-old mother lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Smurfit spares his guests, too. He doesn’t talk about the time he was stabbed at the hands of a rancorous adversary or his bouts of melancholy.

“The people who come here are on holiday to have a good time. They’d rather hear the funny stories,” he says.

A now-legendary story was born four years ago when the warden let Smurfit out on the town to celebrate his birthday. The guard who accompanied him got drunk and passed out. Smurfit, who by this time had become philosophical about his long confinement, took it upon himself to pour his intemperate escort into a taxi, get the two of them back before curfew and lock himself down for the night.

“I could escape from here 100 different ways if I wanted to, but where would I go? It’s not so easy for a foreigner.”

Although there is sometimes more nostalgia than remorse in Smurfit’s accounts of his own drug history, he says he no longer condones drug use and has given up trafficking for good.

Far from bitter, he feels he got what he deserved.

“When I started this sentence, I thought, I’m going to do it. I’m guilty and I’m going to sit and wait. If you’ve got patience, everything will come. It’s very Zen.”

If you’re traveling through Ecuador, Smurfit says he’d be delighted if you’d look him up. Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten how to find him.

After all, he says, “I’m in the book.”

GUIDEBOOK

Holding Court in Prison

Getting there: The easiest way to get to Riobamba from Quito is by bus. They leave every 15 minutes from the main bus terminal. The trip takes 3 1/2 hours. A pleasant alternative for the trip back to Quito is the autoferro , buslike coaches that run on train tracks. The trip lasts five hours and takes passengers through Ecuador’s breathtaking “Valley of the Volcanoes.” Check schedules at the train depot in Riobamba a day in advance.

The prison: Visiting hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. Passports must be left at the front gate and visitors and their belongings will be searched. The local prison phone number is 961-604.