Bali 9: The Untold Story (14 page)

A
ndrew Chan might have thought he was being clever. One thing was for sure, though: in the stickiest situation of his life, he was squirming. And he was about to start squirming even more.

Since his arrest, Chan had been less than forthcoming with investigators about anything to do with the drugs found on the four mules. Had he known that in nearby rooms his underlings were singing like birds and pointing the finger directly at him, he might have been more honest. Or perhaps he did know and decided to point the finger right back. Certainly, over the next few weeks he would shift the blame—away from himself and towards other people. He had no compunction in doing so. Everything that was done had been done by other people, not him, he said. In fact, all he had been doing was following orders. At least, that was his claim.

Painting a picture of innocence, Chan was shocked when police told him that they thought he was the ‘Godfather’ of a drug-smuggling operation. It couldn’t be, he protested—he had come to Bali for a holiday.

It was 21 April, four days after his arrest, and Chan was in a police interrogation room under heavy fire. Sure, he knew some of the people who had been arrested. He worked with some, had gone to school with others and met some of them in a Kuta bar. No big deal. Yeah, sure, on the day he was due to leave for Sydney he had gone to see Lawrence and Stephens in their hotel room, but he didn’t remember where that was. He took Sukumaran along for the ride. When he got there he did nothing more interesting than lie down on the bed and watch a ‘silly’ program on television. Stephens and Lawrence were in a hurry to go to the airport and didn’t want to wait for him to take a shower, so they left.

What about that other matter of Chan booking into Yan’s Bungalow in Kuta under a false name and leaving some suitcases there? Chan had the answer ready—evidently he had been thinking about this issue ever since police had discovered that he had checked in there under the name of David Yu and left two suitcases there. Those cases contained traces of heroin, which would later be linked forensically to the heroin strapped to the mules.

Chan was no dummy—he knew he needed a reasonable explanation for why he had been seen and identified checking into the low-budget hotel. And he
knew that the explanation must be clever enough to implicate someone else and exculpate himself—he was a novice when it came to police interviews but he was intelligent and canny. He couldn’t remember the name of the hotel, he told officers, but it was Renae Lawrence who told him to check in there, and gave him 1 million rupiah to pay for it.

He was warming up now: ‘Renae Lawrence asked me to use another name, namely David, and false passport number,” he said, the words rolling off his tongue. He hadn’t actually stayed there, and the officers wanted to know why not. ‘Because Renae Lawrence asked me to bring a suitcase into the room, then because I was anxious to find out the contents of the suitcase because it sounded like a bomb, I opened it. Unfortunately it was empty. After that I went to the hotel where Renae Lawrence stayed and asked her, “Why did you ask me to bring an empty and broken suitcase?” She replied, “Later I will explain when we arrive in Sydney”. That’s the reason why I did not stay in the hotel.’ But he was admitting to nothing else—he had, he said, never asked anyone to deliver any drugs to Australia. He was doing enough to throw investigators off his trail and just a bit to point police in another direction—that of his work colleague, Renae Lawrence.

Meanwhile, Lawrence herself was being more than helpful during her sessions in the interrogation room. She was a font of knowledge and she wasn’t holding back. She was in no doubt just how much trouble she
was in, and something had happened since the night she was caught on tape at the airport tearfully exhorting Martin Stephens not to dob anyone in. The sobering thought of the fate that might await her—a firing squad—had something to do with it.

Lawrence had been to Bali twice before for the same kind of venture and both times Chan had also been in it up to his neck. She told police that he had been threatening her the entire time and that she feared for herself and her family. In October 2004 she had been in Bali with Chan and Sukumaran, and both she and Chan had taken drugs back to Australia; Sukumaran had strapped them on. That trip had lasted six days. On that occasion Chan had also used the Hard Rock Hotel as his base and the modus operandi had been the same as the April 2005 run, except Chan had used his own hotel room to have the drugs attached. Lawrence told police that when she got to Chan’s room on that earlier run, Sukumaran was there, and she was instructed to change into tight shorts. She told police that Sukumaran strapped packages to her body but she did not know, and was not told, what the contents were. With packages strapped on her left thigh, then the right thigh and her waist, she said she went to the airport for her flight to Australia with Chan and his girlfriend, Grace. At the airport in Sydney she was picked up by a friend of Chan’s and in the car told to remove the packages with scissors, and warned not to split the plastic. Lawrence had named other people who were there too and gone on to explain how, after
getting back to Australia, Chan had called her to his house and handed her an envelope stuffed with $10 000 in cash. Lawrence said she gave it back to Chan, telling police she hadn’t known what it was for. Chan told her it was money to keep her mouth shut, that she was not to put it in the bank and not to tell anybody. Lawrence took the money home.

There was more, though, and Lawrence was proving to be a Pandora’s box. She said she had also come to Bali several months later, in December 2004. With her were Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Matthew Norman and several others known by aliases. Chan had paid for the trip. But while awaiting instructions, Lawrence was told by one of the group that because of financial problems the mission was to be aborted.

Things were moving along but, frustrated by the inability to crack some members of the group and the fear that the four mules had of the ringleaders, police decided to start using some psychological pressure. Chan and Sukumaran were shifted to jails in other police stations on their own. Chan was in jail at the Sanur station, where he at least had the company of some local prisoners, including one mobile phone thief who helped him avert the media. In contrast, Sukumaran was completely on his own at the Benoa Harbour water police station. Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen was moved too—into a cell with an undercover police operative posing as a drug dealer. He tried to get Nguyen talking, offering up the details of his own
arrest, but he didn’t get far. Nguyen was not talking, even to a supposed kindred spirit in the drug game.

The four mules were left together in the Polda cells. They had been extraordinarily cooperative with the police, and what they were telling officers was yielding results. The officers just had to crack Chan. His persistent denials were beginning to grate.

Enter Gories Mere, a charismatic Indonesian detective, crack interrogator and the man famed for hunting down and arresting the smiling terrorist Amrozi in the crucial first breakthrough of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombing investigation. Mere had a feared reputation. The Bali Nine bust was momentous and the National Narcotics Bureau (known as the BNN) was involved in trying to track down the big end of the story to find out where the drugs came from and who else in Indonesia was involved.

With other BNN members, Mere flew down to Bali for a chat with the Godfather. Speaking perfect English, Mere was more than capable of interacting with Chan, offering him cigarettes and drinks. The question was, did Chan, the twenty-one-year-old school dropout, have the intellect to outwit him? One thing Mere did have was police intelligence—the surveillance report and the phone records of the Nine. And he had smarts. Chan was about to squirm.

It was 7 May, sixteen days after Chan had told police that he knew nothing about the heroin, and that it was Lawrence who had told him to check in to a hotel using
a false name, that miraculously Chan’s memory seemed to be improving. Confronted by the imposing Mere, he started remembering more and more. In fact, it wasn’t Lawrence alone who had instructed him to book into Yan’s Bungalows—the instructions had come via Myuran Sukumaran.

Chan also remembered that, after he checked in there, a hotel officer had come to the room to get a copy of his passport. Knowing he had used a false name, Chan decided to bypass requests to drop down to the office with his passport when he got a chance. Chan said he abandoned the empty suitcases at the hotel, locked the door and slid the key under it before grabbing breakfast at a nearby McDonald’s. After this he caught a taxi to the Adhi Dharma Hotel, where he met Sukumaran in the room of Matthew Norman. By this time it was about 10.30 a.m. on 17 April. Confronted with the mobile phone records which showed who had called who and how many times, Chan’s memory about this began to improve as well.

At the Adhi Dharma he spent a couple of hours lying on the bed and watching DVDs with Sukumaran, before the pair adjourned to the Hard Rock Hotel for a spot of lunch—at least, that’s what he said. After lunch they came back to the Adhi Dharma and watched some more DVDs, this time with Norman, Chen and Nguyen. He admitted later going to the room of Lawrence and Stephens, but this was where Chan’s version deviated from that given by the mules themselves.

In the room, Sukumaran had instructed him to stand guard at the door and monitor anything suspicious. Why, he was asked, was he told to monitor anything suspicious? ‘Because Myuran Sukumaran would like to stripe [strap] something wrapped in brown plastic tape,’ Chan said, adding that he had seen these goods earlier in a silver suitcase at the Hard Rock Hotel when he was together with Sukumaran and Nguyen. But as to how the strapping was done, he didn’t know because he didn’t see. All he remembered was hearing Lawrence and Stephens laughing while the strapping was occurring. Sukumaran, Chan said, had asked him to help out with strapping something to the bodies of Lawrence and Stephens but he had declined.

Chan said they then went to the room of Rush and Czugaj, but he didn’t see much of what went on in that room because he was in the bathroom taking a shower. Nguyen had been there too. He hadn’t joined in with any of this business of strapping stuff to people’s bodies.

There was one other thing investigators wanted to know: where did that silver suitcase which he had seen at the Hard Rock Hotel, and which contained the packages, come from? Chan was obliging. While having dinner with Sukumaran and Nguyen on 8 April, Sukumaran had asked Chan for a favour—could he possibly duck over to the Kuta Seaview Cottage later that night and see a woman called Packet in room 114?

‘At that time Myuran Sukumaran told me, “Just say ‘package’ and she will understand what you want”,’ Chan said.

Chan insisted that there had been no other conversation with the mystery woman except to ask her to call him a taxi. When he got back to the Hard Rock Hotel he took the suitcase to his room and called Sukumaran. For some reason that night Sukumaran couldn’t open it, but by the next day he had figured out how. Chan said he saw only brown packages but he was clueless as to their contents. Chan then drew a rough sketch of what the mystery woman in room 114 had looked like.

Finally investigators were getting somewhere. Chan’s story differed from what the others were saying but at least he was giving a version. But it wasn’t to last: by 23 May, when he was again questioned, Chan was in no mood for talking. To every question he answered that he did not know or he did not remember. He was reminded that on 7 May he had told police that he collected the suitcase from Packet.
When did you do that?
‘I don’t know.’
Was she in her room, what was her room number and who was with her at the time?
‘I don’t know.’
When you booked Yan’s Bungalow on 17 April under the name of David Yu and brought with you two suitcases, where did they come from?
‘I did not know who is the owner of the suitcases and I am not sure where I got the suitcases.’
If you didn’t know about the suitcases, who brought them to your room at the Hard Rock Hotel?
‘I don’t remember.’
If you did not remember about the suitcases, where did you get them? Why did you leave the suitcases in such a way at Yan’s Beach Bungalow in Kuta and put the key under
the door?
‘I don’t know.’
Have you ever gone to Kuta Seaview Cottages to collect something from Packet?
‘I don’t know.’
Is the statement just given to the investigator true?
‘Yes, it is.’

Police were getting nowhere. Chan was quite obviously in no mood to cooperate this time and had no intention of confirming or elaborating on what he had said two weeks earlier. They had reached an impasse. It was the same story with those arrested in the Melasti bust—Chen, Norman and Nguyen—who quite simply refused to admit much at all—even the obvious, like knowing some of the other nine, even those who had worked with them.

T
he man at the front wearing the guard’s uniform says it costs 5000 rupiah to get in. No one asks why. That’s just the way it is at Kerobokan Jail, and the way it’s always been. And it doesn’t end there—hire a mat to sit on during your visit in preference to the ground, that’s another 10 000 rupiah or so, and more if you want to sit in the preferred visiting places. Then there’s the enterprising prisoner offering cold drinks: red or orange Fanta, iced tea, Coca-Cola. There would be table service if there were tables; there aren’t. Sitting on the ground is the only option, although there are one or two plastic umbrellas.

A couple canoodles in a secluded corner. No one takes any notice as the passion hots up and hands slide under clothes. The rules posted at the front door say that visits must last only fifteen minutes each, but
no one takes any notice of that either. Stay for hours if you want. Visiting your loved one separated by bars or glass partitions like you see on television, armed guards patrolling nearby with eagle eyes? Forget it. These are full-contact visits, and while the guards are there, they are pretty relaxed—within limits, of course.

A kind of ad hoc rules system has evolved. Those inside know and understand it, and appreciate the limits. It doesn’t help to put anyone offside by trying to overstep the mark or be a little bit too clever. It’s far easier to operate within the boundaries of the established system, however unorthodox or intriguing it may appear from the outside.

The
warung
or small café outside the main gate—which has since closed, after the proprietors became drunk on
arak
—sold what could be rated one of the tastiest serves of
mie goreng
(fried noodles) on the island. The chefs were both prisoners, small-time druggies who were trusted to spend most of their days outside the walls, giving them unfettered human interaction. Better than sitting in their cell all day. Business had soared exponentially for them since a whole bunch of Australians started residing inside the jail, because with them has come a press corps that spends hours sitting outside, waiting for visitors to come and go. The
warung
boys had a captive market. When business started booming they even spruced up the area, putting a poster on the wall, a rickety plastic ceiling fan on a beam and a cloth on the lone table. The
fan did nothing, really, to ward off the humidity, but it was the thought that counted.

A recent security and drugs crackdown ended the freedom of another man who would spend a lot of time going in and out of the wooden doors at will, looking for all intents and purposes like a free man. He is serving thirteen years for drugs and hand-grenade possession, but the guards paid no heed to his comings and goings before the crackdown. Another man, supposedly serving time, was found in a nightclub. Most people thought he was inside and he was—except when he was allowed out. Welcome to Lembaga Permasyarajatan Kerobokan, or LP Kerobokan for short. Translated it means—aptly or oddly—‘socialisation institution’, but most people just call it LP, and it is Bali’s main and most well-known penitentiary.

Kerobokan is actually the name of the suburb where the jail is located, nestled next to the super-trendy district of Seminyak and not all that far from Kuta. In recent years some of Seminyak’s spunk has rubbed off on the village of Kerobokan, which now boasts its own chic cafés and shops, and a series of sleek furniture shops. The jail is almost shabby in comparison, its whitewashed walls looking as though they could do with a good coat of paint.

There is little to distinguish the jail as one drives past on Jalan Tangekuban Prahu. Until recently, and around the time of the Bali Nine’s arrival there, one could almost pass by without any idea that it was even a jail. There are no armed guards outside; no tall guard
towers with officers, rifles at the ready to deter would-be escapees; and no surveillance cameras recording everything and everyone that moves on the perimeter. It’s an ordinary, nondescript building in the middle of what is turning into a tourist shopping district. What is gleaming new is the razor wire and new security entrance which went up around the top walls of the complex—the main sign that this is, in fact, a high-security prison.

Until October 2005, LP Kerobokan was home to the three Bali bombers, on death row for their roles in the murderous 2002 nightclub attacks. So-called smiling assassin Amrozi, his older brother Mukhlas and Imam Samudra had been there since their arrests and convictions, and were destined to remain there until the executioner came calling, except that security was an issue and they were bundled off to the Alcatraz of Indonesia—an island jail off Java called Nusa Kambangan—on the eve of a protest rally calling for their immediate executions. They had been Kerobokan’s most infamous inmates.

For security reasons, mainly, and for their own safety, they were kept in their own cell block and never allowed to socialise with the other prisoners, save for religious festivals, when they were allowed out to pray with the rest of the Islamic prisoners. But in recent times they had banned themselves from even that brief respite, declaring that the prayer area was spiritually dirty because it had also been used by Christians for their religious services.

The three men were housed in a circular series of cells with a fence around the outside, known as the tower block. Their only contact with the rest of the prison population was through a barred window. It was from here that Imam Samudra, on the days the media were allowed inside the jail, took the opportunity to shout a homily to the waiting cameras. More than twenty other people, convicted of more minor roles in the Bali bombing, are also serving their terms at Kerobokan, mixing with the rest of the population.

As jails go, and when compared with the overcrowded penitentiaries in neighbouring Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines or Thailand, Kerobokan is not so bad. That doesn’t mean it’s good, but it could be a lot worse. Compared with the number of prisoners it was originally built to house, Kerobokan is hopelessly overcrowded, with almost 800 prisoners in 2005; but the cells bear no resemblance to jails in the Philippines, where places built for 80 prisoners have more than 500 inmates, up to 50 crammed into one cell, and the cells regularly flood in the rainy season.

At various times during her stay in Kerobokan, Gold Coast woman Schapelle Corby, jailed for twenty years for trying to bring 4.1 kilograms of marijuana to Bali, has shared her cell with eight or nine other women. When Adelaide model Michelle Leslie first arrived following her arrest for possession of two ecstasy tablets, she was sharing with only a handful of women, including a Mexican woman also serving time
for drug offences. The women’s cells are less than 10 metres in length and within them the inmates work out their own pecking order—those there for the longest tend to get the best sleeping position, determined through a kind of natural attrition. As one person leaves, the next in the hierarchy moves into her spot.

Each cell has its own bathroom, known as
kamar kecil
. Literally translated, it means ‘small room’, and they are certainly that. The
kamar kecil
has an Asian-style squat toilet and a
mandi
—an Indonesian-style bath which really is a big, square-shaped tub filled with cold water which you ladle over yourself. Inmates also wash their clothes here. It sounds pretty awful to those used to Western facilities, and hot and cold running water, but most homes in Indonesia, especially those of the lower and poorer classes, are no different. In those classes whole families sleep in one room of a house and mattresses are rolled up each day to allow a thoroughfare.

When Westerners recently complained about ants in their cell, authorities treated the complaint with more than mild amusement, and then sarcasm: ‘Ants, I have ants in my house. What’s the problem? This is a jail, not a hotel.’ The letter of complaint was promptly filed in the rubbish bin. It doesn’t help, in a place like Kerobokan, to complain too much, especially to people who live the same way in the their own homes as the prisoners do in their cells.

Inmates at Kerobokan learn quickly not to whinge too often or too loudly, and that many advantages
come one’s way if one keeps one’s own counsel and learns how to work the system, not to buck it.

Kerobokan mirrors the rest of Indonesia’s jails in that about half its prison population is doing time for drug offences. And, as in many jails, drugs are not hard to come by inside. Some people believe that drugs are easier to get inside the dull walls than outside. Authorities do regular drug sweeps of prisoners’ cells, and the odd guard has been caught acting as the dealer.

Often the jail’s drug dealers think that if you’re inside for drugs you must be an addict. The Bali Nine members learnt that very quickly when, not long after their arrival, some were offered a range of narcotics. Some of the prisoners thought that this bunch, caught with so much of the gear strapped to them, must surely be users and hanging out for a hit.

Everyone knows the drugs are a problem in Kerobokan but it seems there are not too many solutions for fixing it. Prison psychiatrists are confronted with it every day and joke that people who go in for minor larceny offences often emerge drug addicts. Then there’s alcohol, which is also available to those in the know and those who can pay. Because that’s the thing about Kerobokan and jails like it—if you’ve got the money and the know-how, anything is possible and life can be much more comfortable. Ready cash can buy many privileges in a country where corruption has historically flourished and where people like jail guards earn a small salary, but can make up for it by taking
some cash on the side to make a prisoner’s life more comfortable, for things like turning a blind eye to alcohol and drugs, or charging a ‘fine’ to those caught with illegal mobile phones in order to ensure that the phone is returned and not confiscated. One well-known lawyer with a number of clients in Kerobokan says that some people run their businesses entirely from behind bars, a practice facilitated by the advent of mobile phones with email and internet capability.

In short, the more money you have, the more comfortable life inside can be. In the men’s section of the jail, money buys quite a lot, like wood to make proper wooden beds to sleep on rather than a dingy mattress on the floor; Michael Czugaj got a bed made not long after moving there. And it’s said that, for the right amount of money, inmates can even purchase the right to have a blind eye turned to conjugal visits in a special room.

LP Kerobokan is not the most attractive place; inside it has a dullness that makes it look like it has no personality. The visiting area is a concrete courtyard, with the odd shade tree but not much else going for it. A pond in the middle was, for a time, full of stagnating green water in which some inmates even washed their clothes. Fortunately someone decided it was better empty, and now prisoners and their visitors sit in the area. Given the calibre of prisoners inside—murderers, drug dealers on death row and the Bali bombers—the front doors are almost disappointing:
two thin, brown wooden affairs, with a little peephole in one.

Official visiting hours are Mondays to Fridays from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., with weekend visits allowed between 9 a.m. and 12.30 p.m. Inmates and their visitors can sit in a visiting room—although this is not always recommended, given that it is often used by passionate couples who have spread mats on the floor—or they can choose the area around the pond.

Once inside the wooden doors, Kerobokan looks more like a prison, with a locked and caged area. To get past here one must surrender 5000 rupiah (less than A$1) and ID. Then it’s around the corner to be searched and have all bags searched as well, before finally being allowed in to visit. Someone will then go and tell the prisoner that they have a visitor. The saving grace for many prisoners, especially Westerners, is that their visitors can bring any kind of food they want—pizzas, sandwiches, sushi (one of Schapelle Corby’s favourites), whatever they like.

In the jail’s common area is a grassed rectangular space, adjacent to the Bali bombers’ tower block, which is used for ceremonies on special days and so those who aren’t in their cells can wander around.

The women’s and men’s blocks are segregated—jail authorities are very sensitive to the issue of pregnancies between inmates, which can be difficult to explain to those in higher authority. The women are kept in their block, a row of cells, and allowed out only to receive
visitors in the common visiting area or if they pay a special sum to be allowed to go to the visiting area. This means that the only interaction between Renae Lawrence and the other members of the Bali Nine occurs when they are receiving a common visitor. Members of the public are banned from going into or anywhere near prisoner cells.

The cuisine on offer at LP Kerobokan is not gourmet. For a Westerner it’s well below standard, but for those who don’t have friends or family members on the outside, there is no other option. Jail rations come around on a kind of cart; there are big pots or drums of rice and whatever is on the menu to accompany it that day. Some say the food is almost inedible, that the rice is full of dirt, sticks and stones, and the pots are encrusted with dried food from the days and weeks before.

Many prisoners opt to cook for themselves on small gas stoves, like camp stoves, inside their cells. For a fee the guards will even duck to the fruit and vegetable market down the road and pick up some fresh supplies. It pays to keep the guards onside, especially if you want to make life easier for yourself.

For special celebrations like birthdays, no one stops a little party; several of the Nine have had one, and they all joined in a Christmas bash. But it is health and nutrition that suffer most for inmates—especially those in for the long term—unless a family member or someone close is living nearby to bring the things the inmates need to survive but just wouldn’t receive otherwise.

For many, twenty-four hours in LP Kerobokan seems like so much longer. Boredom sets in; the hours take for ever to pass and all you are left with sometimes is your own thoughts about the future. Some, like the male inmate from Sierra Leone, don’t even have that: he was sentenced to life for drug trafficking and on appeal his sentence was increased to death. A future is something he can only dream about as he waits and wonders how long he has before the execution.