Bali 9: The Untold Story (2 page)

S
cott Rush and Michael Czugaj had never heard of Renae Lawrence and Martin Stephens. Nor, at 8.30 p.m. on this night, could they have cared who they were. Their focus was elsewhere. They’d just checked out of the Adhi Dharma Hotel and were about to board their second international flight ever; their first had been only nine days earlier, when they boarded the Australian Airlines flight from Sydney to Denpasar. And now they were returning home. The two Brisbane boys, who first met playing sport at school, checked in before climbing the elevator at Ngurah Rai international airport and paying the airport tax with money handed to them less than an hour earlier. Then they stood at the immigration counter, waiting to have their passports stamped. The whole process was new to them—as was the ordeal they had just gone through.

The pair had stood in a room, taking their turns to have chunks of heroin taped to their thighs and waists. They’d had their eyes shut as they balanced on one leg, the other resting on the bed in room 105. It had taken an hour or so, and then they’d been sent packing with some strict instructions: call Andrew Chan on their way to the airport. Call him again the moment they arrived at the airport. And call the number that had been put into Rush’s mobile telephone the instant their Australian Airlines flight landed at Sydney’s international airport. Then they’d get paid for the 3.4 kilograms of heroin that now clung to their bodies. Five thousand dollars in cash. Five thousand dollars each.

At that point in time, however, standing in front of the immigration counter, it’s unlikely either Rush or Czugaj were thinking of any of that. They were just concentrating on moving on, through immigration, and onto their plane.

It’s unclear whether the two mates saw the officer in front of them raise his hand. It wasn’t a dramatic signal—just a movement, really. A subtle wave. But it was the look on the officer’s face that told his colleagues the second lot of targets had arrived at Bali’s international airport. The officer held on to the shiny new passports, delaying the process of stamping them.

Rush and Czugaj waited. Time seemed to stand still. And then—from out of thin air, it seemed—they were surrounded. Customs officers. Police officers. By their side. Talking to them. Telling them to step inside the
office nearby. Rush and Czugaj walked with them, first to the small office, and then back down the escalator and into another office. Renae Lawrence and Martin Stephens were there, hunched over in their seats. The air was thick with panic.

The colour drained from the faces of the two Brisbane boys as the wads of heroin strapped to their bodies were revealed. The game was up, and each of the young people in that room now knew that this was all part of a bigger picture. It wasn’t just two Sydneysiders acting as mules on the order of a co-worker. It wasn’t only two young Brisbane teenagers, one awfully good-looking and the other seeming much younger than his nineteen years. Four young Australians with a total heroin haul of 8.2 kilograms, worth up to $4 million on the streets of Sydney, bound to their bodies; and now caught in Indonesia, where drug smugglers are warned off by a penalty of death administered on a lonely beach, or in a park, or on a golf course sometime down the track.

Senopati couldn’t help thinking that Rush and Czugaj looked like a couple of schoolboys sent to the headmaster’s office for their first caning. He glared at their passports and saw that Rush, the good-looking lad, was only nineteen years of age.
Kasian
, he thought. That’s the word Indonesians use for pity. Sumarka couldn’t think of another word—
kasian
summed it up. With a quarter of a century in the job, and the high-profile arrests of at least seven foreign drug dealers and
couriers to his credit, he had never before felt pity for any of them—he always thought they deserved what they got. But this time it was different. These people were just children, the same age as his own son.

The four young Australians sat in the airless and featureless Customs room, the whirr of Indonesian policing happening around them.

Just outside, someone they all knew was arriving at the same airport, with plans to board the same flight back to Sydney. It was Andrew Chan.

Muhammad Zakaria pulled up his Komotro Taxi No 099 outside the airport. It was just on 8.30 p.m., and Chan looked like any other tourist: baggy blue shorts with yellow floral motifs, a grey T-shirt and his Bali souvenirs—a large wooden fish and a long, bizarre-looking, wooden voodoo stick. He looked almost comical. Having the fish was understandable: they are sold in markets and stalls all over the place. But the voodoo stick, with its hairy top, was not so common. It’s impossible to know what would have attracted him to it.

Nonchalantly, Chan strolled through the airport doors, having done this sort of job before, and if he was harbouring any doubts that his operation had worked, they remained deeply hidden. He checked in for the same flight as Martin Stephens and Renae Lawrence—who also worked with him in Sydney—and the two Brisbane boys introduced to him by Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen. With his airport tax paid and his passport stamped, the clock showed that he still had more than
an hour before boarding. Chan didn’t seem to mind, according to those watching him; the time allowed him to indulge in one of his biggest passions, reading. He sat down and opened a book. But Customs and police arrived quickly, asking for his passport and tickets. He looked at them, warily at first, puzzlement filling his face. They asked him to follow them to an office.

Chan’s body might not have been home to chunks of heroin, but there was plenty of intelligence information to justify detaining this twenty-one-year-old from Sydney.

It was 9 p.m. on Sunday, 17 April. Less than an hour had passed since the first of these five young Australians pulled up in a taxi to catch their flight home to Sydney. Now they were being driven down the road, this time to the main Customs office, where the bigger space allowed for unfinished business. They looked helpless, their future seemed hopeless, and their ordeal was about to make international news that would flood the local and Australian media, call into question the role of the Australian Federal Police and irrevocably change the lives of everyone who knew them.

Michael Czugaj looked like he would burst into tears.

T
he air inside the car was heavy with desperation. Ketut Sumarka, driving the short distance from the airport to the main Customs office just down the road, couldn’t help glancing in the rear-vision mirror. His three passengers appeared to be shell-shocked. Their bodies seemed to have shrunk inside their oversized shirts. There was little sound.

Michael Czugaj began to cry. His face was red; so were his eyes. Tears fell silently. It was a pitiful sight. Touching him gently on the shoulder, Renae Lawrence, eight years his senior, implored him to calm down. Pimples still on his pasty face, he was a picture of dreadful sadness. So too was his mate, Scott Rush, but he was not crying. In the next car, Martin Stephens was wearing a defeated and haunted look. He is a big fellow but he too had shrunk.

The four were taken into the office of the Customs boss, Bernadus, and sat awkwardly on shabby brown lounge chairs. They were the very same brown chairs on which, six months earlier, another Australian had sat. In front of her on the ground had lain a 4.1 kilogram bundle of marijuana found in her luggage. Her name was Schapelle Corby.

Corby’s circumstances, however, had been different. Whilst the drugs had been found in her bag, she had vehemently denied that they were hers and had tried to show there was no proof that she had put them there. At the end of the day, it hadn’t mattered: she had been convicted.

Now, for these four Australians in the office, there was no doubting the evidence—the heroin was strapped to their bodies. They couldn’t argue that they didn’t know it was there.

The four sat on the L-shaped lounge, Lawrence and Stephens next to each other on one side, Rush and Czugaj on the other. Thirty minutes later, Andrew Chan was also driven down to the Customs building, but he was in a different office just next door. He also appeared to be in a different frame of mind to the other four: his face didn’t bear the same haunted look, and he didn’t look like he might burst into tears at any second. He was the antithesis of the other four—his confidence seemed intact, even at this dire and low point in his life. The Customs officers and police thought to themselves that it was probably all a façade, but a good one at that. But as Chan smiled
and joked with his captors, acting almost like the class clown, next door, despair was invading every pore of his four colleagues.

‘Will I die for this?’ one of the four whispered to Gede Senopati; the officer can’t remember who actually asked the question.

Senopati was diplomatic in his reply: ‘We will see at the trial.’ He knew he could not offer any comfort to these four young Australians. They had spectacularly flaunted one of the most unforgiving of Indonesia’s laws—the narcotics legislation—and the ultimate sanction was a lonely death by firing squad. While he felt
kasian
for them, he couldn’t and wouldn’t give them any false hopes. The law was the law and they had done what they had done.

Rush and Czugaj, both the youngest at nineteen, looked like little boys who needed their parents. They hung their heads, trying to shield their faces from the police cameras that were documenting every second of the arrest. Again the officers were struck by their youth as they asked to search the luggage of each person.

There are Customs officers, airport security and police everywhere. Among them, the
bule
—or Western—face of a man called Paul Hunniford stood out. Better known by his nickname, Reg, he wore an Australian Federal Police (AFP) ID tag around his neck. He was the AFP liaison officer based at the Australian Consulate in Bali, and he had intimate knowledge of this operation from the beginning.

Martin Stephens seemed to be about to dissolve in a flood of tears. Next to him, Renae Lawrence tried to control her emotions. All smoked heavily. Senopati gave Stephens a plastic cup full of water, which he gulped down furiously. He asked for another and another until he had drunk about four altogether. Senopati assumed it was because of nerves. The Australians also ran out of cigarettes, and officers obliged by giving them more.

One by one, the four readily answered questions, like the spelling of their names, their ages and professions. The full force of the shock had yet to set in for any of them. Stephens whispered quietly to Rush and Rush shrugged his shoulders; only they know what they were conferring about, and perhaps now they can’t remember.

The door to the nearby room, where the jovial Chan was sitting, was ajar, giving the four a reasonable view of him. Stephens whispered to Sumarka that he wanted to tell him something. ‘He is very dangerous,’ he said, pointing to Chan, before asking Sumarka to close the door.

Lawrence kicked off both the leg strappings and put them on the coffee table in front of her, while Stephens searched in his bag for some paper to fan himself with. It was hot in the office, the temperature elevated by the fear that seemed to have sapped the room of its oxygen. Senior Bali drug squad officer Made Maja, who speaks
English, was there. He leant over, deep in conversation with Lawrence and Stephens. What Lawrence heard was not making her happy. Maja was urging her to ‘talk the truth’ regarding the whole sorry episode, but the look on her face was one of defiance.

Maja and AFP agent Hunniford then moved closer to Stephens, talking furtively with him. It was early on but already the four, and especially Stephens and Lawrence, were considering the consequences of ratting on the leaders of the operation and, unsurprisingly, the police were urging them to do so. Especially since Chan had been caught at the airport with not a gram of heroin on him, while the others were carrying a total of 8.2 kilograms between them. But for Lawrence there were other considerations. Officials’ cameras, filming the events of that night, caught her remonstrating privately with Stephens.

‘You have gotta dob some other cunt in, I’m not killin’ my family,’ she said leaning back, looking almost resigned. Stephens’s face was completely blank, his eyes empty, as he listened. Within a second she sat forward again with renewed vigour, looking at her colleague. The emotion in her voice was unmistakable. ‘And what’s the point anyway, because if we dob them in, right—think about it—if we dob them in, they kill our family and then we are dead anyway? Don’t tell them and they just kill us instead and leave them alone.’ Lawrence let out a breath and then leant back again. Tears were welling in her eyes and she fought desperately to stop them spilling over onto her face,
revealing the true depths of her own personal despair. She bit her lip.

Stephens didn’t reply, looking lost in his own thoughts. Then, almost as if to divert her own emotions and avert an episode of the sobs building inside, Lawrence reached under her shirt. ‘Can I take this off?’ she asked officers, referring to the heroin strapped around her waist. Soon enough the ignominy that would result from that request became apparent. Because Lawrence is a woman, she was taken to a separate room, where female officers conducted the official search and the heroin taped to her waist was removed. It was the same procedure for the other three. There were 890.84 grams of heroin taped around Martin Stephens’s waist under a back-support strap that felt excruciatingly tight, like a corset pulled too taut, and his skin dimpled accordingly. Even before the arrest he was in pain, wincing internally with every step.

Stephens tried to help the officers pull the offensive package off. It was stuck to him like glue though, so eventually a Stanley knife was produced for the final stages. Then the tape was unravelled from both his thighs. Nearby sat a big set of scales with an electronic display. Stephens was ordered to crouch beside it as the three packages taken off him were dumped on the scales together. The display illuminated with the gross weight of 3.3 kilograms. Flashes go off—police are recording the event. So too are lots of others, some snapping away with in-built mobile phone cameras.

Each parcel was then weighed individually. The weight for each was displayed—more flashes went off. Stephens was a shadow of his former self, deflated and helpless. Strangely, underneath it all he felt a sense of relief at having been caught, despite the harsh drug penalties of Indonesia. Plus, he was in shock, so a state of denial might also exist. Martin Stephens wasn’t cut out to be a drug courier and the whole experience had been alien to him. He never truly agreed with what he was doing, but later said he didn’t have a choice—after the threats to his life and the lives of his family members were delivered. And if he got back to Australia safely, he had planned to tell Lawrence, his work colleague—whom he had barely known before this, and whom he didn’t trust, nor she him—exactly what he thought of her. He intended using the F-word and severing their short friendship.

The drugs were also stripped from Rush and Czugaj, their more hollow chests testament to their tender ages. It was the same procedure, too, for weighing the drugs, and they were forced to crouch by the scales for photos.

Field test kits used by officers confirmed the powder was heroin. And by that time some of the officers were sneezing—pepper had been poured on top of the heroin to throw the drug detection dogs off the scent. This tactic had evidently worked, but the four Australians needed more than pepper to save them from what, that evening, looked like an increasingly uncertain fate.

Czugaj hung his head—he didn’t want to pose for the cameras. He looked younger than ever now. Czugaj had said little throughout the evening and had been crying all the while. But it was not so in the next room.

Chan was the image of a man with little to fear. ‘One, two, three,’ someone said before a flash went off; Chan grinned like a Cheshire cat, joking with officers. The atmosphere was far from tense. Chan even readily obliged when one officer asked to borrow his matches to light up a cigarette. Outwardly, at least, he was a cool customer. When Senopati asked if he could check the contents of Chan’s luggage, the twenty-one-year-old was not the least bit perturbed. ‘Yes, please, of course,’ he said. There was not much in there except more than 100 DVDs, including some pornographic material.

However, some witnesses say that Chan was not nearly as brave as he was making out and that it was all an act, a bit of false bravado to get him through the night. He might well have not been so flippant and so ready to please had he known what evidence police had already compiled on him. He would find out soon enough.

It was almost 4 a.m. the next day, 18 April, when the group were shown to their cells and temporary new homes in the jail at Polda, the Denpasar police headquarters. They were officially suspects in an international heroin trafficking operation. If the night had gone as originally planned, by this time they would have been preparing to land at Sydney airport.