Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

African striker risked it all for freedom, new life in LV

Former Malawi national soccer team striker Joseph Phiri, who now works security at the Stratosphere , still suffers from nightmares.

His 5-year-old daughter, Shatto, tells him so. Occasionally, she'll crawl into his king-size bed for comfort, only to replay the night's scenes for him in the morning.

"She tells me I was sweating and talking," Phiri said. "Sometimes, when I wake up, I don't believe I'm here. You can make a movie out of it.

"I am the only one to get out alive."

Longevity isn't a characteristic of political prisoners on death row in Malawi.

Phiri, 45, started to retell his odyssey while sitting on a plush couch in the living room of his spacious two-story home near Texas Station.

Four hours later, he was asked whether he ponders returning to the thin strip of a nation in southeastern Africa.

"I would turn the country upside down within hours of landing there," Phiri said. "Nobody knows what happened."

The juju kid

Phiri was born into royalty in the Ngoni Tribe - "Zulu-like," he said - near Blantyre, near the southern tip of Malawi.

Observers said he played soccer with "juju" in his youth. That's supernatural, or magical, power. That thought was reinforced when he scored a hat trick within five minutes of entering his first international game, as a substitute, against Sudan.

He was 16.

A year later, in 1978, he led Malawi to the East and Central Africa Senior Challenge Cup championship, the former British protectorate's first important soccer prize. That competition started in 1926 as the Gossage Cup.

The Flames, the Malawi national team nickname, received a victory trip to London. President Kamuzu Banda gave every player a house to live in .

"Most of us didn't know what to do with it," Phiri said. "I was living in my village, so I sold the house to the Coca-Cola Company."

In the early 1980s, he parlayed his soccer knowledge and English fluency into a broadcasting career, calling Manchester United games for the British Broadcasting Corporation.

"Still my team," Phiri said of the Red Devils. "Will be 'til I die."

Dennis Liwewe, the flamboyant Zambian sports broadcaster, was Phiri's mentor. The BBC contracted him to work World Cup games at Italy in 1990.

By then, however, Phiri had made a fateful decision. "I made a mistake," he said. "I joined politics."

Locks and luck

Hoping to influence the direction of his country, Phiri became the commissioner of prisons in Malawi in the 1980s.

He was able to close one notorious prison and was working on cleaning up others, and he spoke publicly against Banda's dictatorial regime. Soon after returning from Italy, he and 28 others were targeted and sent to central prison in Blantyre.

The "disloyals" were sentenced to death by public hanging.

They waited on death row for three years. Phiri, in chains and leg irons, was prisoner No. 9006.

Human-rights organizations have long had Malawi on their radar. The few communication outlets in Malawi, which first introduced television in 1999, are tightly controlled by the government.

Phiri said his firm grasp of English, however, eventually enabled him to persuade a judge to grant an appeal for the 29 disloyals.

"It was the first time a political case was allowed to be appealed," Phiri said.

He was just as stunned when all 29 cases were commuted to less-severe penalties. As the ringleader, Phiri was given 17 years of hard labor at Chichiri Central Prison.

It was mitigated in that he was deemed a "trustee," which allowed him to leave the military-style barracks at 8 a.m. for work and to return by 6 p.m.

That gave him a 10-hour window to run.

The escape

Instead of bolting for Mozambique, which surrounds the southern half of Malawi, Phiri decided to head to Chitipa, in Zambia, at the northern tip of Malawi.

Six months later, one of his four sisters ignited his plan by withdrawing 5,000 pounds from the local bank. For a grind mill, she said when officials questioned her.

That sister's boyfriend hauled Phiri half of the 450 miles to Chitipa in his car, to the Malawi capital of Lilongwe, and Phiri - with that money secure in a waist wrap - hitched a ride the rest of the way in the cab of a tractor-trailer.

The following morning, he bought a soccer jersey, shorts, socks, sneakers and a ball at a store near the Chitipa border. He changed from his dirty clothes, which had helped him pose as a fisherman.

An hour before the gate would be raised and thorough inspections commence, Phiri bought an orange soda and started dribbling the soccer ball.

He bounced the ball a few feet beyond the gate, and the security guard allowed Phiri to retrieve it. The next time, a kid on the other side threw the ball back.

When the kid left, Phiri "accidentally" booted the ball much farther. The guard smiled and nodded. Phiri dashed after it, turned to find nobody watching him and was gone. He darted between 24-wheelers and other vehicles on his way to freedom.

In Chitipa, officials arranged to have a helicopter fly Phiri to Lusaka, Zambia's capital. He slept soundly during the seven-hour flight. He then traveled anonymously through Zimbabwe, where he obtained a United Nations passport, then took a train to Botswana, where he awaited his fate as a refugee in late 1993.

When asked whether he'd like to emigrate to Australia, Canada, England, Germany or America, he picked the U.S.

After plane trips to Cairo and then Paris, he was on a Concorde bound for JFK International Airport in New York.

He came to Las Vegas in 1997.

Tower watch

Phiri worked at Castaways until it closed in 2004.

He quickly found employment at the Stratosphere. Part of his security duties involves keeping a close eye on those who pass through metal detectors en route to tower elevators.

He watches for those who have had too much to drink or appear to be on drugs. Phiri also watches for despondent people who might be considering suicide by jumping from the 1,149-foot observation tower.

Neil Roberts jumped almost three months ago.

"I felt guilty," Phiri said. "Was I at the entrance? I felt so guilty."

To live and die in LV

Once in a while, Phiri will play weekend soccer with a group of Latinos on a field near home .

The man who grew up catching rabbits in southeast Africa is on track to become a U.S. citizen in fall 2007.

When he got to San Diego, he sent money to his four sisters in Blantyre, but they didn't believe he was alive. Even if they read this, Phiri said, they probably won't believe it.

He said this is the first time he has ever told his story in full detail.

"Most people don't think I'm still alive," Phiri said. "They think I'm dead. But I'll die here. It's wonderful. Here, nobody looks at me or what I'm doing.

"That's my life. I can't believe it."

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