Bali 9: The Untold Story (21 page)

All four mules had told, from the day of their arrest, a pretty similar story of having no idea of the true
reason for being in Bali until it was too late; of thinking it was a holiday and finding out, in the Adhi Dharma Hotel, that they were to carry something on their bodies back to Australia; and, significantly, they told similar tales of being threatened with death. For the mules, this evidence from their fellow mules was potentially helpful, a corroboration of their own story. And they were willing witnesses.

Not so the ringleaders, like Chan and Sukumaran. Both men—along with Matthew Norman, Si Yi Chen and Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen—shared the same legal counsel. Their strategy from day one had been denial—denial of any knowledge of the drugs, denial of any involvement. They saw no evil, heard no evil and had nothing to do with anything—in the wrong place at the wrong time, apparently, victims of the malevolence of the mules. It was stonewalling on any interpretation of the word. And there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t be the same come the trials and their turn to testify against the others.

That’s how it played out: the other three mules were willing witnesses at other trials and readily agreed to tell their stories, which didn’t vary much at all really—the offers of a free holiday for some, their protests of not having a clue, of being innocent victims, and details of the menacing threats that forced them into this predicament.

Scott Rush was in the witness box for ninety minutes at Michael Czugaj’s trial, during which time the judges gave a good indication that they were not completely
buying this story of innocent mules and threats. Female judge Made Sudani wanted to know why, after the heroin was strapped to him, Rush didn’t try to report it to the police. ‘I don’t know why, we were scared at the time,’ he said. She was not going to be thrown off the track, though: did he ask Nguyen, when he offered Rush a free holiday to Bali, what the reason was? ‘I asked, he said, “Don’t worry about it, I’m doing you a favour”.’
But didn’t you suspect?
‘Yes.’
So what did you suspect?
‘My suspicion was, why is he paying for a trip for us.’
So you didn’t ask Nguyen why?
‘Yes and basically we got the response that he didn’t have anyone to go to Bali with…he also had friends to meet in Bali.’

Didn’t Rush discuss the issue with Czugaj? And was he ready for any risk? No, Rush replied. In that case then, if he wasn’t ready to take a risk, why did he agree to go to Bali? ‘Because he [Nguyen] promised me it was just a good trip, there was nothing.’ By the end of the interrogation Judge Sudani looked less than convinced.

When the other five—apart from the mules—were called to testify, they all had the same answer ready for the judges: they did not wish to give evidence because they were also suspects in the same crime. No amount of urging from the clearly annoyed judges could make them change their minds, even when the judges reminded them that if they agreed to give evidence and were cooperative, it would help them later when the question of leniency came to be considered. It didn’t matter.

Sukumaran and Chan were slated to give evidence at Czugaj’s trial on the same day, but unhappily Chan
couldn’t come—apparently he was sick. Sukumaran was there, though, and he wasted no time in telling the judges, ‘I don’t want to make a statement because I am the same suspect.’ One judge reminded him that he made a statement to police during his interrogation. ‘But I don’t want to make a statement today,’ he shot back to the translator, whose job it was to then translate the English into Indonesian for the judges. (All of the trials were conducted in Indonesian, meaning that each of the Nine needed a translator to tell them what was going on, and to translate the questions and answers from one language to another. Unfortunately for the defendants, some translators were better than others, and some of the Nine, it has to be said, were not served too well at all in that regard.)

His patience tested, the judge told the translator to tell a defiant Sukumaran this piece of sobering news: ‘If you are cooperative and later you are proven to be guilty, the judge will consider leniency.’ Sukumaran repeated his earlier mantra that he didn’t want to give evidence because he was a suspect in the same case. The judges wanted to know if anyone had told him to say that but Sukumaran assured them that no one had.

In cases where witnesses refuse to testify, their original police statement—taken during the interrogation phase—is then read to the court in lieu of the spoken evidence and is considered as part of the case. It was a frustrating process for all involved as the judges pointed out that Sukumaran’s police statement, in which he had
been much more forthcoming than he was being in the court, was signed by him.

He was then told to give the judges an example of his signature to ensure that he had, in fact, signed the statement. Up he strode to the bench where, keeping up his obstructive attitude, Sukumaran scribbled a signature that bore little resemblance to the one on his statement. He was ordered to do it again and again and again. It took four tries before he signed his name in the same way he had on the police document. It was not a good start to his interaction with the court, and his insolence threatened to dog him through to his own verdict.

Sukumaran’s statement was a series of denials of what Czugaj had said about him—he said he didn’t know Czugaj, never gave Czugaj $500, never met him in Kuta, never invited him for a drink at the Hard Rock Hotel bar, never strapped heroin to his body and never threatened to kill Czugaj and his family. Throughout his recitation Czugaj was stony-faced, uttering to the translator ‘not true’. At the end of the statement, Czugaj was asked to respond. He was angry and it showed: ‘I want to swear that this guy threatened me and my family and strapped the heroin to my body.’ Sukumaran looked like he couldn’t have cared less and that was that.

There was a similar situation when Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen was called—he too didn’t want to testify for the same reason given by Sukumaran.

With the prosecution’s case closed, Czugaj’s team called one character witness—Czugaj’s old boss at a Brisbane glass and aluminium firm. Trevor Thomas Hennessy told how Czugaj had first come to his firm as a fresh-faced fourteen-year-old to do school work experience. It was the same place where his father, Stephan, had worked for twenty-odd years, and three of Czugaj’s brothers and a sister worked there too.

Mr Hennessy’s reference was glowing. ‘When Michael went through work experience with my company he was very small, he was very well mannered, he did very good work, so much so that my factory foreman—who has been with me for twenty-five years—said he was one of the best young boys that had gone through our factory for work experience,’ he told the court. (One of the judges was slightly confused—in Australia, were people allowed to work at fourteen years of age? It was one of the problems associated with the need to translate everything—sometimes not all parties were on the same wavelength.)

In November 2004, having said goodbye to school, Czugaj was back at the firm, this time as a full-time employee. By this time he had started to develop physically but he was still a ‘timid sort of person and did not like confrontation’, said Hennessy, but was ‘well disciplined, very obedient and very diligent’.

Then it was time for Czugaj himself to take the stand. Clearly nervous about what was to come, and no doubt knowing just how important this moment was, he asked for a toilet break. When he returned,
his evidence differed little from Rush’s, with judges reminding him sternly at the beginning that he had to tell the truth, and that if his evidence was complicated or convoluted ‘it will cause difficulty for yourself’.

At first it was gentle questions. Czugaj told how, before coming to Bali, he’d spent several nights in Sydney at a hotel with Rush and Nguyen, and that Sukumaran had paid for this but there’d been no discussion about the real reason he was going to Bali—he still thought it was a free, no-strings-attached holiday. He also said when there were meetings in Bali with others, like Sukumaran and Chan, there’d been no talk of illegality or drugs, just general stuff like how the holiday was going and what they were doing.

Eventually it got down to the important stuff, like Chan intimating to Czugaj and Rush that he had a gun and telling them that if they refused to take the packages to Australia, ‘I’ll kill you and your family, I know where they live’. Czugaj said that when he tried to ask what was in the white packages strapped to his body, he was told, ‘You don’t need to know’. And the questioning continued:

Q. Didn’t you ask to Myuran [Sukumaran] or Tan [Nguyen] or Andrew [Chan] why the packages were not put in my suitcase? Why is [it] on my body?

A. No, at that time I was frightened…at that time there was a threat made to myself and my family.

Q. Did you have any instinct that the package strapped to your body must be a dangerous package?

A. At the time nothing like that crossed my mind because, as I said, there was a threat delivered.

Q. Didn’t you feel any suspicion, didn’t you suspect the things strapped to your body were dangerous things, that’s why it was strapped not put in the luggage?

A. It could have been anything—like I said, it wasn’t on my mind at the time. I had asked what the package was and I was told I didn’t need to know, and my mind was thinking about other things apart from what was in that package.

…

Q. Didn’t you suspect or feel something strange about the package strapped to your body?

A. Yeah, it felt very strange. There wasn’t much I could do about it after there had been a threat to my family. I was intimidated.

Q. Did you suspect something illegal was strapped to your body?

A. It didn’t really cross my mind at the time.

Q. Did you feel afraid the authorities will find out?

A. Yeah, at the time and there’s also concern for my family.

It seems hard to reconcile Czugaj’s last two answers. On one hand he said it hadn’t crossed his mind that something illegal was strapped to his body, but he
admitted to feeling fear that the authorities would find out. What had he to fear from the authorities, especially if he didn’t even suspect he was doing anything wrong? The question was never asked.

With the witness questioning over, the serious end of the trial was quickly approaching—that is, just what sentence prosecutors would seek for Czugaj, and how they assessed his and others’ evidence. Was he truly the innocent victim and did they believe the evidence of threats to the point of no return? By the time the prosecutor’s sentence request for Czugaj was delivered, he had already heard prosecutors ask that his mate Rush be sent to jail for life, and he was expecting the same treatment. He was right: they asked for his life.

R
enae Lawrence was bemused. So much fuss about a little dab of make-up—Natural Glow, to be exact. She couldn’t understand why anyone would care less that she was wearing make-up. She was, after all, a woman, and women wear the stuff. She didn’t think it was a big deal. In fact, she thought it funny that, after all she had been through and was going through, on this particular day, the only thing anyone cared about was her make-up. Never mind the gravely serious charges she was facing or the detail of the solemn court proceedings that would seal her fate—the important thing was the make-up.

Actually, not so much the make-up itself but the person who applied it. When someone on the defence
team let slip that a fellow Kerobokan Jail inmate called Schapelle Corby had lent her beautician services to Lawrence that morning, the media was whipped into a frenzy. Corby, a former beauty school student, was well known for her immaculate grooming and make-up at her own trial, and she had been more than happy to help Lawrence with some of the finer points of cosmetics. The image of Corby dabbing and preening the usually rugged Lawrence was too juicy to ignore. Within hours the story had taken on monolithic proportions—Corby, so the story went, had given Lawrence a complete ‘makeover’. Radio couldn’t get enough of it.

Back in her cell, Lawrence just shook her head. There was nothing to do but laugh at why anyone cared less. It was almost a brief respite from the stressful court appearances. The truth was that Lawrence, suffering the painful effects of a gum infection after having a tooth removed in jail, was pale and Corby had offered her some ‘Natural Glow’ bronzer to give her face some colour. It could hardly have been called a makeover in the true sense of the word, but it provided a diversion for a while.

It wouldn’t take long before the famed Corby makeover paled into insignificance. There was an even more juicy image for the cameras to savour and it came in the form of a waif-thin, poised and immaculately attired model wearing an elegant white Muslim headscarf. Enter Michelle Leslie, the Adelaide-born model arrested in Bali with two ecstasy pills in her
handbag. By some quirk of fate, Leslie’s first appearance in court happened to fall on the same day as Lawrence’s third court appearance. It meant the pair might well arrive handcuffed together in the same prison truck, and the media had their cameras poised. Not since the days of Corby’s trial had such a big media contingent converged on the courthouse all at once.

There had been a big crush of cameras for the first week of the Bali Nine trials, but day one of Leslie’s case was going to eclipse that. As the prison truck backed into the narrow gate through which the prisoners walk, cameramen jostled for position and locals crowded around. They all wanted to see the model for themselves. They’d seen plenty of her in the local newspapers which ran spreads of the twenty-four year old on the catwalk in underwear, body paint and exotic creations, but this was the real thing. She had morphed into a celebrity.

Lawrence was the first to step from the truck; not far behind her was Leslie. Both wore crisp white blouses and black pants. And they were sharing the same set of handcuffs.
Magic
. It was like a photographer’s dream and a PR agent’s nightmare. And to the disdain of photographers and news cameramen, Leslie’s Australian minders were onto that, doing their best to ensure that images of the two women together were kept to a bare minimum.

Pushing, shoving and shouting ensued as Leslie’s minders tried to clear a path and block the cameras. Leslie was dragged in one direction by her people while
Lawrence was dragged the opposite way by the guard. The object was to keep the two women, from vastly different worlds, as far apart as possible. The problem was that they were handcuffed together and Lawrence was feeling pain radiating through her wrist. She was understandably furious: none of this had been her doing; she had just been born into the wrong world to end up sharing a camera frame with someone like Leslie. She had been caught with heroin, and a lot of it; Leslie just had a couple of ecstasy pills. As soon as the two women got into the court holding cell and the handcuffs were removed, the pair split, retreating posthaste to opposite ends of the cell. No words passed between them.

They were the only two prisoners there that day and the air separating them was almost thick. Leslie hid her face with her headscarf, and kept her back to the cameras and her legs elegantly crossed. An angry Lawrence massaged her wrist. It had been a debacle, a joke, Lawrence said later. But what could she do? Nothing. She knew that and shrugged her shoulders.

Earlier Leslie’s media and legal minders had been at the jail, arguing with authorities that their client should be spared the ignominy of having to wear handcuffs to the court. It was to no avail—prisoners wear handcuffs, end of story. On this day, Leslie might have been wearing a vastly more expensive white blouse than Lawrence, but they were both wearing the same set of worn handcuffs. Leslie just wore them for less time: sentenced to just three months in prison, she was
long gone from Kerobokan Jail months before Lawrence’s trial was even winding up.

If the day of the Leslie–Lawrence show was a low point for Renae Lawrence, so too was the first day of her trial. Bustled into court, she had an almost haunted look as she hunched over, covering her face with her hands, head almost on her lap. Cameras got painfully close and she just couldn’t bear to sit there like some kind of zoo exhibit.

In the front row of the public gallery sat her father, Bob, and stepmother, Jenny. His face looked almost blank as he watched his beloved child in one of her many dark hours. Another day, as the cameras zoomed close to her face, she’d had enough and told them to back off.

When she had been arrested Lawrence was wearing an earring through her left eyebrow. That was now gone.

Lawrence’s trial was generally held on the Friday of each week—the slowest court day. Several times she was the only prisoner there that day, and she had the court holding cell to herself. Sometimes she looked like the loneliest woman in the world. Other days she would be with her new confidant, Martin Stephens. The pair shared food and jokes in the cell, the bond between them evident.

Inside the court there were fewer jokes. This was serious, life-or-death stuff for Lawrence. Most of the lighter moments came during her easy-going banter
with the translator. Dr Wayan Ana is a tiny man whose loud, officious voice is almost a surprise. He is one of those people who almost runs everywhere, a picture of efficiency as he scurries about. He is sought after by police and the court to translate English to Indonesian and vice versa every time a foreigner finds themselves on the wrong side of the law. He was well known to the Bali Nine—he had been there with them from almost the day after their arrests, acting in his capacity as translator during police interrogations. And now he was with them in the court. He would turn up at court each day clutching a diary. He was expressive in translation, articulating and stressing words at the appropriate time.

Dr Ana had quite a rapport with the four mules, for whom he also had a great deal of affection. His months spent with them had provided him with an unexpected bonus—he had learnt enough Aussie slang to fill a dictionary. Like the word ‘dunny’, which he’d never heard before he met Lawrence. One day during police interrogations Lawrence had interrupted, telling Dr Ana, ‘Hey, Wayan, I need to go to the dunny.’ He had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Dunny, what is dunny?’ he asked her innocently. ‘Toilet, you know,’ she replied.

They taught him slang and he taught them some Indonesian. People say that Dr Ana is one of those people who doesn’t have a bad bone in their body and who is never quick to judge. He seemed to be especially fond of Lawrence; in court she would often answer
questions in basic Indonesian rather than English, like ‘
tidak tahu
’ for ‘don’t know’ and ‘
tidak
’ for ‘no’. She also knew the word for lies—
bohong
—and more lies—
bohong lagi
—phrases she used to describe the evidence of Chan and the others.

One day after a long session, Lawrence complained to Dr Ana about how hot it was in the court. The slow-moving fan wasn’t doing much to help the situation. Lawrence said it was ‘
panas
’, the Indonesian word for hot. Dr Ana begged to differ—it was ‘
dingin
’, cold, and the fan was giving him a headache. As they joked around, Dr Ana said that next time he had to translate for Lawrence he was going to bring a cap to wear so his head didn’t get so cold from the fan—Indonesians, acclimatised to the heat, are not always fond of fans or air conditioners.

As at all the trials, the four mules testified about the threats of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, who, in turn, refused to testify on the grounds that they were involved in the same case. So too did Lawrence’s young workmate, Matthew Norman.

For reasons never explained and never really questioned at any length, during both her own trial and during her evidence at Andrew Chan’s trial, Lawrence withdrew her earlier police statements in which she had said that she came to Bali in October 2004 with Chan and that Myuran Sukumaran had strapped up the pair with heroin which they then took back to Australia in similar circumstances to this 2005 bust. She had told
police that, after the 2004 drug run, Chan had given her $10 000 cash in an envelope, telling her it was ‘shut up’ money, and instructing her not to bank the cash or tell a soul.

She had also told police of another aborted drug run in December 2004 when, at the instruction of Chan, she had come to Bali with Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Matthew Norman and four others, but because of ‘financial problems’, the run had been cancelled. She told police that from the beginning of her Bali trips, back in the previous October, she did not have the nerve to disobey Chan because from day one he had been threatening her and her family.

During her own trial, Lawrence’s withdrawal of the statements was not really questioned by the judges or the prosecutor. She said it was not true that she had come to Bali three times to carry narcotics and she withdrew the statement that she had received the $10 000. But one day earlier, when she testified as a prosecution witness at Chan’s trial and withdrew the damaging statements, Judge Arif Supratman was nowhere near as accommodating.

It began with Lawrence telling the court that she did not come to Bali in October 2004 with Andrew Chan.

Q. Once again…have you ever carried packages before?

A. No.

Q. Never?

A. No.

Q. Is that true?

A. Yes.

Q. Have you been interrogated in the police station?

A. Yes.

Lawrence was ordered to come forward to the judge’s bench, to look at the copy of her signed statement in which she had said the opposite to what she was now saying in the court.

Q. When Andrew Chan is strapping the packages to your body, did you know the contents of the package?

A. No.

Q. So if the package is legal why was it strapped to your body?

A.
Tidak tahu
[don’t know].

…

Q. When you came to Bali in October 2004, was that paid for by Andrew Chan as well?

A. No.

Lawrence told the court that in October 2004 she had come to Bali by herself, and she now denied meeting the people she’d named to police as having been there as well. The air thickened and things became strained as Lawrence looked around for her lawyer, Anggia Browne, who sat in the body of the court, desperately meeting her eyes and pleading for help with the sticky situation she was quickly becoming mired in.
Lawrence had undeniably told the police of the previous and aborted drug runs and now she was, in fact, denying this. There was not much Ms Browne could do, as she was not appearing for Lawrence in Chan’s trial.

Judge Supratman, known to be stern, saw the exchanged looks and was clearly annoyed. He angrily instructed the translator to tell Lawrence to be polite, to stop looking back and to face forward. It was at this point that Lawrence asked for a toilet break. It was clear to all that she needed to gather her thoughts.

When she came back Judge Supratman again told the interpreter to tell Lawrence not to look back, warning that her punishment could be more severe in the long run. There followed a confusing series of questions and answers about whether Lawrence wanted to affirm her police statements or withdraw them. In the end she withdrew them. No one quite understood the reason for this sudden change of heart. Tactics, perhaps?

Lawrence proceeded to testify that she was scared of Chan and didn’t dare disobey him. Once, at his home, she said that Chan had shown her photographs on his computer of him holding guns. This had made her even more frightened. She insisted that she had not known that the packages strapped to her body contained heroin—again, this was at odds with her earlier police statement that she had been involved in a 2004 drug run.

She was asked why, on 17 April 2005, she had not gone to the police. ‘Because Andrew said that he had people following us and people that worked for him in
both countries,’ she told the court. She couldn’t take the risk of her family being harmed in any way. ‘He said if we didn’t do what he wants he’d kill our family and me and send us to the farm.’ In the criminal lexicon, ‘sending someone to the farm’ means getting rid of them—killing them. Lawrence told the judges that she had been stupid, but she’d had no choice.