Bali 9: The Untold Story (19 page)

From here, the drug will fan out over the next
twenty-four hours, with orders filled across the nation. Between 3 and 8 tonnes of heroin will be used annually, making up between 18 and 78 million street-level heroin sales each year. The secrecy and illegality of the transactions mask any more specific estimates. But as sure as night will follow day, Cabramatta will usually serve as the central distribution point, with organised drug lords and freelance distributors lining up to pay for their share.

Most of the white will remain in Sydney, being sent back towards the CBD, to Kings Cross on the city’s eastern fringe and Redfern on the southern fringe. Lesser amounts will travel by road to Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane, with roadside deals often done in lonely outback stretches between Sydney and those cities. Minor amounts will be sent across to Western Australia, where the street price will be almost double what it is on the east coast. Indeed, it’s always cheaper near the source, and dealers in Sydney’s southwest will offer better prices than their counterparts in other parts of the city.

Give or take a few bucks, a gram will cost $300 in New South Wales, up about $80 on what it was before the 2001 drought. Demand will dictate that the price won’t vary much in Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory, but users can expect to pay inflated prices elsewhere—$380 a gram in Queensland, rising to $500 in Western Australia. The price of a cap—the amount usually needed for a single injection—will rise and fall on availability, but teeter around $50. Caps are often
bought in small pieces of foil, taken from inside a cigarette packet before being fastened inside small water balloons.

Apart from the market forces at play, the different price levels in different states is driven partly by the onion effect in distribution: the more layers in the chain, the greater the price. Everyone has to be paid. Cabramatta’s strong freelance market means that middle managers are often not part of any big network or organised gang—there are just addicts desperate to feed their own habits; young men and women drawn to supplying so that they can keep using.

As the heroin changes hands, in some areas its purity will fall as dealers attempt to stretch its quantity and its value. It’s not common now, but what’s added to it, and how much is added, all depends on who you deal with. There’s not much trust in this business, and everyone wants to know they are getting what they are paying for.

Payment is not always in cash, either, although it’s never in kind. Electrical equipment is part of the currency now, with laptop computers, iPods and portable DVD players, along with jewellery, all considered as valuable as cash. And that, in turn, adds to a vicious crime cycle that impacts on neighbours and communities across the country. The average heroin user can earn $1175 a week on crime. Someone’s got to pay for that, and the effect of that chain ripples through our towns and cities. Burglary owes its impetus too often to addiction; so too does armed robbery.

The dealer has to be paid, just as the addict has to have his next fix. And so while assaults and bashings, stand-over tactics and blackmail are all part of the illegal drug operation, property crime stands out. Homes and businesses—and the people in them—fall victim to the heroin scourge dozens of times a day; young men and women so desperate for money to pay for the next fix that they will steal anything and hock it, or hurt anyone who tries to stop them. They will turn on their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, stealing from those closest to them, as well as others they have never met. There are no loyalties, just the here and now of finding money for the next hit.

The cost to the community of drug abuse—in crime, especially property crime, but also in health and policing, welfare and absenteeism, as well as the loss of life—adds up to billions of dollars each year.
Billions
. And everyone ends up paying. Not just the addicts—often with their lives—but their families, whose love and trust of those they saw develop an addiction is sorely tested, often destroyed. Just as they are reaching out with one hand, the addict is likely to steal from the other.

Law-abiding citizens in towns and cities across Australia pay dearly too. Their freedoms are stolen when their houses are robbed. Valuables go too, to be hocked for little. Businesses suffer, as do taxpayers, whose contributions to the nation’s crime-fighting effort and health system grow and grow. It’s a vicious
cycle of crime that restarts every time a chunk of heroin arrives on our shores.

None of that, though, was front of mind in April when four young drug mules walked into Indonesia’s Ngurah Rai airport with heroin valued at between $2.4 and $4 million on the streets of Australia strapped to their bodies.

K
evin O’Rourke picked up the newspaper over breakfast on Monday, 13 October 1997. The story tore at his heart: two young children, aged just five and seven, had been virtually orphaned after their father died of a suspected drug overdose. The man’s name was Ian McKenzie and his children had found him on the bathroom floor on Saturday morning. Unable to wake him, and no doubt with the innocence that only comes with being a child, they ducked off to play with a neighbour. O’Rourke didn’t have to wonder what had happened to the children’s mother—that was explained too. Jane McKenzie, along with Deborah Spinner and Lyle Doniger, was serving a fifty-year jail term in Thailand after pleading guilty to attempting to smuggle 115 grams of heroin from Bangkok to Sydney. That small amount of heroin equalled fifty years in jail, and a
couple of young children were forced to grow up without parents.

It didn’t make a lot of sense to O’Rourke. He looked up from the newspaper and across the breakfast table to where his son, Ryan, sat. He smiled at the morning antics of a child fresh from a big sleep. Ryan was loud and alive with laughter that filled the dining room, just like kids across Sydney. But not Jane McKenzie’s. O’Rourke’s son was young, as were Jane McKenzie’s kids, but he seemed so much more fortunate. Jane McKenzie’s children, just across Sydney in the suburb of West Ryde, had lost their father to a drug overdose and their mother to a Bangkok prison. O’Rourke left for work, unable to shut that out of his mind.

A year later, O’Rourke was visiting McKenzie, Spinner and Doniger in jail, desperate to secure a prisoner exchange treaty between Thailand and Australia which would allow McKenzie and Spinner to serve out the rest of their time in their homeland. That would mean they could be near their children, while still being punished for their crime. O’Rourke was the NSW Council for Civil Liberties president and that treaty had become his campaign, one he waged until 2002, when it was ratified by Australia and Thailand. It was Australia’s first such scheme and it allowed prisoners to apply to serve out their term in Australia, after the completion of four years in Bangkok. Two years later, in 2004, McKenzie and Spinner flew into Australia to be united with their children for the first time since their arrests.

By 2005 O’Rourke was the chief executive officer of PricewaterhouseCoopers Legal, and this time he turned on the television to catch the nightly news. His children were a few years older, but so too were the ones that filled his television screen. He stood transfixed as close-up images of Schapelle Corby and some of the Bali Nine appeared. The cameras panned across their faces, recording every raw emotion. The lens seemed to be within centimetres of the youths as they looked out, lost, from their jail cells, pressed hard up against the windows of the vans transporting them from one centre to another. O’Rourke found it distressing to watch, and he wondered about the young Australians at the centre of it all. Did they understand what was happening to them? Did their parents understand the full ramifications of their arrests?

The next morning, still with those questions in mind, O’Rourke decided to do something about it. Arriving early at work, he sent out an email to colleagues at PricewaterhouseCoopers Legal, asking if anyone else wanted to donate their time and offer assistance to the families of the nine young people facing the possibility of execution. Any help, everyone was told, was unrelated to their current workplace and needed to be conducted in their own time.

One hour passed…and O’Rourke was overwhelmed by the response. More than thirty colleagues, almost all lawyers, had popped into his office, picked up the
telephone or sent him an email volunteering their time and their expertise. A legal lobby was formed, and behind closed doors—without any media fanfare—work began to ‘save’ the lives of the nine youths in Bali.

No members of the public knew about the group. It wasn’t that the group was hiding its activities, they just considered that their best chance of making a difference was to close the door and get on with it; find out what needed to be done, and do it.

A letter was hand-delivered to each of the Bali Nine, explaining the role of the top-notch team. It was made very clear that the group would not provide legal assistance for their court cases—that was the responsibility of their individual lawyers. But the Sydney-based legal eagles would be there as back-up, as a behind-the-scenes maintenance crew to ensure that the road ahead was as smooth as possible for both the Nine and their families. Not that anyone thought it would be too smooth—it was going to be an uphill battle no matter how anyone looked at it: for the lawyers working behind the scenes; for the families thrown into the public eye through their children’s involvement; and for the Nine themselves, most of them with no knowledge of what the months ahead would bring.

Some of the Bali Nine, once handed the letter, tossed it away, probably not understanding it. They’d become minor celebrities of sorts, with everyone wanting to interview them, people passing them notes and seeking their views. To some of them, this might have been just another request. But others passed it—along with
other notes they had received from strangers—to their parents the next time they visited.

For Matthew Norman’s mother, Robyn Davis, it was the helping hand she so desperately needed. Her boy was in trouble, and she had to both understand his predicament and raise the funds to travel to Bali to see him. And by herself she couldn’t do either. She was the first to put in a call.

Renae Lawrence’s father, Bob, and his wife, Jenny, asked for help too. Wallsend is a world away from Bali, and Bob felt frustrated that he had no involvement in his daughter’s future. He couldn’t turn back the clock and change things, but he didn’t know how he could help her either.

Then one of the Brisbane families put in a call, wanting guidance over whether a petition might help their son’s predicament. Another of the families from New South Wales was interested in the likelihood of a treaty being set up between the two countries.

Other families stayed clear of the couple of dozen lawyers giving up their free time, worried it had to be a trick. Why would they volunteer to fund flights to Bali when talkback radio was filled with the ire of other Australians? Why would they try to force the Australian Government to adopt a prisoner exchange program when they didn’t personally know their son or any of the others mixed up in the whole ordeal? Did they really side with the families over the role played by the AFP?

A couple of families felt they had been tricked into talking to the media once their children had been
charged, one removing a reporter from his home at 1.40 a.m. and another furious that their young son was interviewed and quoted without permission. They had learnt to be wary and to trust no one. But some—Robyn Davis and Bob Lawrence, in particular—couldn’t afford to think like that right now.

Kevin O’Rourke’s operation ran along two lines: specific help for the youths and their families, and big legal issues on the home front that needed investigation. The latter element involved setting up two teams, the first looking at the controversial involvement in the case of the Australian Federal Police. Like many of the parents, O’Rourke wondered why the AFP might tip off a country to a possible crime, knowing it could end in the execution of a group of young Australians. O’Rourke needed an answer to that question and so did many of the lawyers working for him. They started asking questions, seeking the guidelines under which the AFP acted in such cases, lodging freedom of information requests in their search.

That was O’Rourke’s first band of lawyers. A second team would explore a prisoner exchange program, drawing on the treaty between Australia and Thailand in the hope that the Australian Government would adopt it. O’Rourke’s loud lobby for the Thai treaty had proved fruitful and he saw no reason why a similar program could not exist between Australia and Indonesia.

A third team was entrusted with less legal and more human endeavours; its job was to liaise with those
families who had sought help, find out what assistance they needed and provide it. Did any of the Bali Nine have medical conditions, for example, that required treatment? Was proper bedding needed for the young asthmatic among the nine? Did their families—most of whom had thought their children were off on holidays around Australia—need either emotional or financial support to cope with what would happen next? These were the more important issues for the families, rather than the behind-the-scenes legal manoeuvrings that did not change the here and now. What they wanted was a regular—in one case, daily—phone call to explain the latest twists and turns in the drama. Phonecards helped too, with the one presented by O’Rourke’s volunteers to Bob and Jenny Lawrence proving of great benefit. Before that, the Lawrences had relied on the odd weekly facsimile that would only sometimes arrive. The phonecard allowed them to check up on their daughter and offer her, through her lawyer, important words of encouragement on the eve of her court appearances.

The charity didn’t stop there, either. Families who sought financial help were also offered trips and accommodation in Bali so that they could visit their children. Volunteers kicked in to fund the trips, and all bureaucratic liaisons—an onerous task for the families involved—were handled by the lawyers based in Sydney. For two of the families, that support seemed crucial for their own survival.

Behind the scenes, O’Rourke’s team was knee deep in legalese. His team involved a cross-section of young
professionals, almost all lawyers, chewing up their spare time in the hope of making a difference. O’Rourke had also picked up the phone and called his mates at his old stomping ground, the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. The Council had been planning to mount a similar operation, so they joined forces, reconvening a council subcommittee to look at Australian prisoners abroad.

The lobby of lawyers received the AFP guidelines for acting in death penalty cases after submitting a freedom of information request, and they were shocked by what they considered to be the inadequacies of the guidelines. The rules allowed wide latitude for the AFP to provide information in cases that could end in the death penalty. The lawyers understood the value of intelligence swapping, even citing the example of terrorist organisation Jemaah Islamiah as an example of why Indonesia and Australia need to share information. But they wanted to lobby for a brake on the exchange; they wanted transparent checks and balances factored into any intelligence-sharing agreement.

The team charged with looking at the AFP’s role soon went back to O’Rourke recommending that our law enforcement agencies be able to provide the information to other countries, on the proviso that their actions did not indirectly result in the death penalty. This would stop the willy-nilly trade in which other countries are provided with masses of raw intelligence without reference to the possible effect.

O’Rourke thought that the recommendation was a good idea, and decided to lobby our politicians to force the AFP to adopt it. To him, it’s simply a matter of Indonesia respecting the Australian culture, in which both political parties abhor capital punishment, just as Australians are sometimes asked to be tolerant of the Indonesian way.

The treaty team’s task would also lead to a request to the government. Its optimism climbed in October 2005 after talks between the Australian and Indonesian governments. It didn’t take long to filter back to the team that the go-ahead for two crucial matters had been given. First, any treaty between the two countries could proceed despite an accord between Indonesia and France still being worked out. To the lawyers donating their time and energy to the issue, this was good news—it was like jumping the queue, promising the chance that a treaty was a real possibility—in the short term. Second, it seemed that any agreement reached would not have to be ratified by every Indonesian politician on the block; if it was suitable to the Indonesian authorities, it could be signed off quickly.

With a new spring in its step, O’Rourke’s treaty team decided on a minimalist approach—there was no need to reinvent the wheel. The aim was to provide a legal framework under which both countries could exchange prisoners, and the Bali Nine, along with Schapelle Corby and any other Australians, could be brought home to serve the remainder of any sentences. So the letter drafted to the Australian Government was
simple, with three requests. One, that the prisoner exchange treaty provide for the death penalty to be taken off the table when it involved an Australian citizen—this would essentially mean commuting such a penalty to life in jail. Two, the lawyers wanted special consideration to be provided to minors. It didn’t matter in the Bali Nine case, because none of those charged was under eighteen years of age, but it did matter in some other cases. When a treaty is enacted, regular stipulations mean that the prisoner must serve a set time in the foreign jail before being eligible to return, a requirement, the Australian Government was told, that should be waived for minors. The letter’s final point encouraged the government to enter into treaties with other countries to reduce the chance of being back-footed next time round. O’Rourke believes it is a priority the government needs to consider.

‘A lot more effort and resources need to go into working out what we do with 150 other countries and how we prioritise those countries—who should be the top ten—and commence negotiations,’ he says. And the Bali Nine offered the immediate impetus to launch such a debate.

Under the volunteer lawyers’ exchange plan, prisoners already in jail would be eligible for transfer under the treaty. Prisoners would be required to serve a minimum amount of time in the country in which they were convicted—between two and four years—before being transported to their homeland. Once home, they would be eligible for earlier releases if that
fitted under the original terms and conditions handed down by the foreign court. They would also be eligible for other sentence reductions, taking into account a range of issues like whether the prisoner had an aggravated medical condition or whether a disparity existed in the sentences between the two countries.