Bali 9: The Untold Story (10 page)

A
ustralian Federal Police officers were trawling through the life of Andrew Chan, attempting to build a profile of the young Sydney lad who lived with his parents in Enfield. He was twenty-one years old and had held four different jobs since leaving school in 2000. He’d gone to Bali a couple of times, and knew the three other young Australians whom officers were working equally hard to profile. Renae Lawrence had been put on the profiling list too, and she was a bit older than Chan. Her parents lived up near Newcastle, but she worked in Sydney. Martin Stephens and Matthew Norman were also on the officers’ to-do list.

Did these four young Sydneysiders know each other? Who else did they mix with? Telephone records were invaluable as officers painstakingly and meticulously
started to assemble a criminal portrait of the four young Sydney targets in their operation.

The profiling had begun a few months earlier, after a telephone call from an informant in Brisbane to the AFP. The report was brief: a group of young Australians was planning to travel to Bali to pick up some heroin and transport it back here. There were no names given to police and no details on when the group would leave Australia. But it didn’t seem like a piece of idle gossip—the informant was known to police and the information was soon backed up by another police agency. Still, as far as intelligence went, it was pretty raw.

The AFP were used to getting hundreds and hundreds of tips of potential wrongdoing each year: someone planning this, someone else planning that. This was just another one, without a lot to go on, but it warranted a follow-up, and officers began a regular intelligence investigation. Soon a couple of suspects came to the fore. One stood out. And then, by looking at who he mixed with, another one emerged.

Police didn’t know they were really on the track of an international drug-smuggling ring, but kept working away, building profiles and piecing together friendships, meetings and travel plans over the past six months. One person had travelled overseas and bought the ticket with another person. That person then joined the profilers’ target list.

Reams of paper soon built up into folders of information. A big wall chart was started, and that was
often a helpful tool in connecting one young life to another. It continued to grow each day as one name led to another which led to another. That didn’t mean everyone put on the chart was involved in illegal activity, just that they could be linked through associations. At least, that was the case at the start.

Investigations into drug running are the bread and butter of the AFP’s work in Australia, especially since the big heroin drought a few years back and due to an increased focus on border protection. During the ‘drought’ some of the smugglers became even more sneaky, diversifying what they ferried into the country and how it was carried. The big, risky ventures by international drug cartels slowed, replaced quickly by a strategy of attempting to slip in smaller amounts more regularly. Officers would often come across drugs sandwiched between sheets of wonton pastry, or funnelled into the buttons of women’s dresses, soaked into pairs of designer denim jeans, inside fish fillets or candlesticks or even car parts.

The big crackdown on drug importation also meant that sometimes drug lords would attempt to sneak their cargo into the country via sea, usually in cargo, and occasionally by air. And sometimes they’d mix it up to spread the risk.

The drug lords were trying a bit of everything now in order to keep up the supply, and drug mules were an important part of that mix. Young, single and white: that was the target recruit. Backpackers were invaluable, as
shown by the drug recruitment styles of the West African organised criminals trying to import cocaine into Australia in recent years. They would actively search for backpackers, with the most appealing coming from Australia, Canada and Britain. Law enforcement officers around the world would know why: young, white and single travellers would pass through Customs without a hitch nine times out of ten.

Cartels would always look for the type of people who would never attract attention through either their looks or their behaviour. It was important that they looked the part of a tourist or business traveller, and if they knew another mule on the flight, it was crucial that they didn’t acknowledge each other. Airport security staff were trained to look out for suspicious activity, and the fewer risks, the better.

Drug mules were also invaluable in spreading out the risk. If ten mules were employed to carry in chunks of heroin and one was pinged, nine-tenths of the heroin would still find its way through; if three were pinged, seven-tenths would make it through. It was a gamble, any way you looked at it, but drug lords knew the market in Australia and how lucrative a haul of good heroin could be.

Australian Federal Police officers knew how it all worked; they’d seen it time and time again. And, as they advanced this operation, a sharper picture began to emerge. They had a group of young Australians, slowly growing in number, who appeared to be part of a planned
drug importation. Nightclubs seemed to be a crucial part of the recruitment process, with youthful-looking Australians offered free holidays and wads of cash to take the risk and keep their mouths shut. In the melting pot Australia had become, the requirement of some overseas networks for mules to all be white wasn’t that important, and in a tried and true illustration of six degrees of separation, recruitment efforts in Brisbane and Sydney nightclubs fanned out to net a group of young people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, cultures and demographics. As March 2005 marched into April, the list being drawn up by federal police agents covered people from the eastern suburbs of Sydney to the western suburbs of Brisbane and beyond.

Scott Rush’s parents were worried. By the time Lee Rush arrived home from work at 7.30 p.m. on 7 April, his family had received several calls from a Flight Centre travel agent in Sydney. Their other son had taken one call, and messages had also been left at 2.30 p.m. and 3 p.m. and again at 6 p.m. The person making the call said they were a consultant for Flight Centre and needed Scott to pick up his ticket. To Bali. Lee was stunned. He told the consultant that his son, whom he hadn’t seen for several days, would not have had a passport or the money for such a trip.

Lee sat down in the family’s Chelmer home and felt desperate. Fearful. The consultant had said the flight left the next morning. Lee worried about what to do—he thought his son might be up to no good. So he
picked up the phone and dialled his friend, Brisbane barrister Robert Myers.

Bob Myers is a good listener, and he paid attention to what his friend was saying. Lee Rush was worried that his son might be travelling to Bali to be involved in illegal activity. Could he be stopped? It was a father’s appeal, driven out of love rather than punishment, for someone to step in and help. Myers knew an Australian Federal Police officer, he told Lee, and he would put in a call and see what could be done. Scott was due to fly out within hours, just after 10 a.m. the next day, so there was no time to waste.

Myers called his contact—a Queensland police officer on secondment to the AFP. It was Thursday night, 7 April 2005. It wasn’t the officer’s area of expertise, so he consulted other officers. Myers was told that the AFP might not be able to stop Scott Rush, but that a passport alert would be activated. Myers asked for Scott to be warned, if he could not be stopped, that his every move would be watched in Bali. The phone call left the lawyer with the strong impression that Scott Rush would be pulled aside and warned in no uncertain terms that someone would be watching him the whole time he was away; and he hoped that an in-your-face warning not to look sideways by some burly law enforcement officer would act as the red light to any dodgy plans the young man might have.

Myers conveyed the content of the phone call to Scott’s parents, Lee and Christine, and they all believed
that if Scott boarded the Australian Airlines flight he was booked on the next morning, it would be after a tough talk with a police officer at Sydney’s international airport.

Friday morning, 8 April, dawned, and true to his word, Myers’s AFP friend called him to confirm that the pass alarm had been activated. Myers passed on the news to Scott’s parents, all of them believing that Scott would have been issued a no-nonsense police warning on departure. No one really believed that Lee and Christine’s nineteen-year-old son would do anything silly—let alone risk bringing wads of heroin into the country, strapped to his body with cheap packing tape.

As each day in April progressed, the AFP began to—as one officer puts it—trap more rabbits down the one hole. Up to fifteen mules could be employed by this drug syndicate, some officers thought. Previous attempts to carry heroin into the country by some of the same targets had been made over the past eight months and it appeared that one or two of the trips had even been successful. Checking previous travel bookings proved worthwhile: three of the young people now under investigation had travelled to Bali in October 2004; another trip in December seemed to have been aborted, and a trip was also made in August 2004, although that introduced different people onto the list of names the AFP was building.

Officers working on the case started to draw arrows from one person to the next. Names kept popping up,
and that would open a new line of inquiry. One step at a time and another piece of the puzzle was found. Investigators knew that well-oiled drug syndicates—and this looked like one of those—needed money, people and planning. When chunks of heroin arrive at Sydney airport, the drug lords rely on a sophisticated network of suppliers at different levels to deliver the heroin to Sydney’s west and beyond. But it works the other way too: the drug bosses also need to know how to source heroin coming from Burma and elsewhere. In the slimy underbelly of Australia’s drug trade, they had to know who they could trust and where to put their hands on the financial backing to make it all worthwhile. And they were the same questions officers set about trying to answer.

By the time Rush, Czugaj, Nguyen and Sukumaran boarded their Australian Airlines flight to Bali on Friday morning, 8 April, investigators were flush with intelligence. They had a list of names. They knew these people had planned an earlier operation but had not had the money to fund it. They also had enough detailed information to know that the young mules had been ordered not to smoke for two weeks before departure, because they might look nervous not being allowed to light up a cigarette on the way home. The body packs of heroin would be attached to their legs and backs, hidden under oversized clothing, and sandals that would avoid metal detection. Pre-paid mobile phones would be used to keep in touch with each other, and Customs searches
would be avoided by focusing attention on the big wooden objects they would carry in their luggage back to Australia.

The AFP’s investigations pointed to Andrew Chan being the organiser, his travel itinerary even leading officers to the hotel he had booked for accommodation.

The AFP sat down and penned a letter to their Indonesian counterparts. And they weren’t shy about asking for help. Australian Federal Police officers sought an information swap, asking the Indonesian National Police (INP) to take secret snaps of any meetings between the targets, furnish any phone records that might help, and gather as much evidence as possible to identify both the ringleaders in Australia and the source of the narcotics in Indonesia.

Four days later, the AFP sent another letter, again listing dates of birth and passport numbers, and also likely return dates. They kept working away in Australia, building links between the groups of young Brisbanites and Sydneysiders being kept apart by their bosses. Within a couple of weeks—by 28 April—they would boast a wall chart that looked like an enormous pyramid: dozens of names all linked by arrows. The names of eight of the Bali Nine had been put down over time, as had the names of others. And the last one, on information given back to them by the INP, would soon join the others, right up at the top of the chart: Myuran Sukumaran. The AFP officers working on the case had never heard of him.

Y
ou never forget the smell: a mix of incense and greenery—hard to describe and even harder to forget. It’s the smell of Bali, wafting around the atmosphere as soon as you get off the plane on the Indonesian holiday isle.

It is the Balinese way to pay homage to their Hindu gods and ward off evil spirits. They place offering baskets everywhere, from the sidewalk to tiny shrines in offices, public places, homes and big temples. Little baskets made of woven banana trunk with anything from biscuits to eggs to lollies inside, along with burning sticks of fragrant incense. Walking down the gangway after a flight from anywhere, the aroma acts like a beacon—welcome to Bali, Island of the Gods.

Now another welcome beacon has become just as prominent, near the X-ray machine that scans hand luggage after passengers have come through Customs. Right next to the machine is a gleaming sign that states, ‘Welcome to Bali, death for drug traffickers’. Andrew Chan must have seen it—he couldn’t have missed it, really. The message, in English, is blunt and clear: get caught with drugs here and you could well find yourself lined up before a squad of armed men who will aim their rifles at your heart and pull the trigger. On 3 April Chan walked within metres or even centimetres of this frightening warning. Did he even look at it? Did it mean anything to him?

Only Chan knows for sure, but it’s a pretty fair bet that he would have seen the sign. Especially since at that time it was only six weeks before the Schapelle Corby verdict. The story had been big news since the young Queensland woman’s trial had started, and by the time Chan arrived in Bali there weren’t too many people who hadn’t heard that the Gold Coast beauty student faced a potential death penalty for attempting to smuggle marijuana into Bali. But the words on the sign couldn’t have meant too much to Chan—perhaps he thought they would never apply to him. After all, he’d gambled with these authorities once before and won. Sign or no sign, law or no law, he knew he could smuggle drugs through Bali airport, and through Sydney airport as well.

This was Andrew Chan’s third trip to Bali in six months. In October 2004, he, Renae Lawrence and
others had taken a shipment of heroin back to pollute the streets of Australia, without a hitch. And members of the syndicate tried it again in December, thwarted only by a lack of money or heroin, or both. It was going to work this time.

Chan headed back to his old stomping ground, the Hard Rock Hotel, right on the beachfront in Kuta. Why he chose the Hard Rock on this and the previous occasion is a mystery. Perhaps the very reason why some tourists shy away from spending their Bali holiday in such a commercialised Western establishment was what drew Chan there. Many of the other hotels are smaller, more quaint and brimming with Balinese tradition. The staff, in traditional Balinese sarongs and
kebaya
tops, tend to know their guests’ names, say good morning and good evening, and generally hang around for a chat with holiday-makers. This would not have worked for a man in the midst of organising a drug shipment. He needed a place where he could be much more anonymous, draw little attention to himself and become lost in the sea of Asian-looking faces similar to his own.

The middle to higher echelons of Indonesian society like it at the Hard Rock. It’s not unlike Hard Rock hotels anywhere around the world—guitars of musical icons past and present lining the walls, gold records and loud music everywhere, including piped through the hallways of the guest areas. The staff in the accommodation section wear overalls, and there is a big bar area, along with a separate nightclub section.

Chan needed to come and go without drawing too much attention to himself, so the bustle of the hotel suited him. Moreover, it was close to the shops and nightlife, and to some of the hotels in which his recruits would be staying. He knew that because he had been involved in arranging their hotels as well, ensuring that the two groups of mules were kept well away from each other. Chan also didn’t want anyone to know where
he
was. He told front desk staff at the Hard Rock not to tell a single person that he was there. Not something most tourists would care much about, because who would be asking anyway?

Three days to go before the first group of recruits would arrive and five days before their cargo would be here. Trying to portray a picture of innocence, Chan later told police that while he was in Bali he did what many true tourists do—he went jet-skiing in Nusa Dua but had to cancel the parasailing because the weather was no good. Instead, he said, he went banana-boat riding and snorkelling, but that that only lasted twenty minutes because of the weather. And, of course, he indulged in the staples of any Bali holiday—shopping and drinking. Except that this wasn’t just any Bali holiday, and the leisure and recreation activities were a cover for something far more sinister: most of his time was spent planning and detailing what was to come once the recruits turned up.

Five days after Andrew Chan arrived in Bali, the letter from the Australian Federal Police was waiting in the
office of the Australian Consulate in Renon, the business district of Denpasar, Bali’s capital. It seems that the letter was not collected by Indonesian police until 12 April, and the first meeting between a team of surveillance officers from Polda, the police headquarters in Denpasar, who had been assigned to watch and document every move of the group, took place the next day.

By this time the first group of Chan’s lieutenants in his illicit business were already in Bali. Renae Lawrence and Martin Stephens had gone straight from the airport to their hotel. The Kuta Lagoon Resort in the heart of Kuta, just a stone’s throw from the bustling main street of Jalan Legian, would be their home, free of charge, for the next eight days. The accommodation had been arranged and paid for by Chan, the man who would later be painted as a supreme organiser.

He could have chosen worse places for his mules to stay. The Kuta Lagoon falls into the category of one of those quaint hotels where Balinese tradition abounds. Far enough off Jalan Legian, down a laneway, it is peaceful, unaffected by the noise of the traffic and beeping horns that characterise Kuta’s main thoroughfare. But it is close enough to enable guests to walk to everything—the bars, the shops, the markets and even the beach. And, importantly, close enough for the mules to get to the meetings arranged for them by Chan.

The gardens and swimming pool are framed by frangipani trees. Dubbed the Cool Blue Lagoon, the pool could be described as the hotel’s crowning glory, weaving the entire length of the accommodation area.
Guests on the ground floor need only walk out on their balcony, down their steps and dive in. The rooms are older and a bit tired looking compared with the classy new resort and villa complexes that have spawned in recent years, but when you’re not paying personally there is no need to be choosy. And the green floral curtains are adequate to keep out any prying eyes.

The hotel is not that far from the site of one of Kuta’s most well-known spots—the two nightclubs in Jalan Legian where murderous terrorist bombs in October 2002 killed 200 innocent people, including 88 Australians. Almost 70 per cent of the Kuta Lagoon’s guests are Australians—or were, before 1 October 2005, when three suicide bombers chose Bali restaurants in which to end their lives and the lives of so many others. After that the numbers dropped off dramatically, as wary Australians retreated from Bali in fear.

Guests at the Kuta Lagoon are treated to a Saturday night performance of the famed Balinese
Barong
dance, and Friday nights are happy hour at the hotel’s Lagoon Café—buy three large Bintangs (the cheap local beer) and get one small Bintang for free.

Lawrence and Stephens kept to the schedule dictated by Chan. According to Lawrence, Chan had told the pair to meet him at the Centre Stage bar at the Hard Rock the same day they arrived in Bali. The instructions had been doled out back in Australia and there was no option but to stick to them. So at 6 p.m. the duo headed for the
Hard Rock. So too did Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen, who had been on the same flight as them earlier in the day. But they were staying in a more salubrious establishment—the White Rose Hotel, just behind the Sari Club bombing memorial in Kuta, where a prayer mounted in gold lettering on a large board at the hotel’s entrance bears testimony to the night that will haunt the island for ever.

Rooms at the White Rose begin at US$95 per night, not that this pair was paying either. With an opulent marble foyer area, glass chandeliers and big vases of fresh flowers, the hotel is definitely more upmarket than some of the establishments used by other members of the group.

That evening as they all gathered, Lawrence would later tell police, they talked about the flight and had dinner. Chan gave directions on what assignments would be completed in Bali. Next morning there was no sleep-in for Lawrence, who says she had been ordered by Chan to meet him every day during her stay. So at 9 a.m. she saw him but says now that it was ‘normal’ and that there was no special talk.

It was now 8 April 2005. Another bunch of the conspirators was due to fly in. They were the Brisbane connection, along with a ‘dark-skinned man’. Scott Rush, Michael Czugaj, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen and Myuran Sukumaran—whose identity, almost until the time of his arrest, would remain unknown to the police and who was known variously to the police as the
‘negro’ and ‘dark-skinned man’—arrived to the smell of incense at around 2.30 p.m.

Rush and Czugaj headed to the Aneka Beach Hotel in Kuta, just a couple of doors down from the Hard Rock on Kuta’s beachfront. It seemed there was a pecking order almost, in terms of the hotels chosen for the different members of the group. Those in charge appeared to want to keep a watchful eye on the Brisbane rookies, making sure they were within easy reach. The two boys were young, still teenagers, and this was the first time they had ventured away from home. So Rush and Czugaj were kept very close to Chan, Sukumaran and Nguyen.

Meanwhile, the Sydney mules, Lawrence and Stephens, were kept further away. Not so far as the crow flies, but far enough given the maze of Bali’s one-way streets, often jam-packed with cars crawling at little faster than walking speed. Sometimes you might only want to go across the block, but it could take half an hour to get there by car because the main street running along Kuta’s beachfront is one way, so getting to your destination involves going all the way around.

Part of the plan was to ensure that the Sydney and Brisbane mules did not meet up—they were not to know each other. While this was Stephens’s first trip, Lawrence had done it before and could be relied upon to keep Stephens on track. And the White Rose where Chen and Norman were staying was not all that far from the Hard Rock. Again, Norman had done this before and could be on hand to guide Chen. A
hierarchy, based on the rookies and the old hands, and on the Brisbane and Sydney connections, had clearly been established.

Rush and Czugaj’s lodgings for the next eight days would be room 404 at the Aneka, booked from Australia as part of their flight and accommodation package. The 5- by 4-metre bedroom with two single beds sporting white bed coverings and maroon cushions, and a bedside table in the middle, was more than adequate for these two teenagers who had never been outside of Australia before. A carved and colourful wooden Balinese wedding couple drew the eye to the wall above the television. Luscious green palm trees framed the balcony of the second-floor room, and the bathroom, while dated, had everything Rush and Czugaj needed. They seemed to be happy there, making good use of the Aneka’s 20-metre swimming pool and sunken bar.

Room 404 is a standard room, with a published rate of US$60 per night; however, their room rate was less given that it had been booked from Australia as part of a package. Sukumaran, who would later be elevated from being the unknown ‘dark man’ to one of the kingpins of this enterprise, along with Nguyen, was also ensconced at the Hard Rock, headquarters of the big bosses.

In keeping with their orders, the latest arrivals—Rush, Czugaj and Nguyen—headed to their meeting with Chan. It was 6 p.m. and the designated meeting place
was far more downmarket than that for the group who had arrived two days earlier: the international drug conspirators convened at the KFC outlet in nearby Kuta Square. Sukumaran was also there.

KFC was as good a place as any—no one would have taken any notice of this group there. Tourists wanting a cheap meal duck in there for some Indonesian-style KFC (served traditionally with rice like most dishes in this part of the world), mingling with locals who have also developed a taste for the Western fried chicken. Outside, motorbike and car drivers hang around hoping to snare someone who needs a lift. ‘Transport, transport, you want transport?’ they chime, miming the holding of a steering wheel.

Chan had one more important job to fulfil on 8 April—the most important of his trip. He had to make his way a couple of blocks down the beachfront road, Jalan Pantai Kuta—which, translated, means Kuta Beach Street—from the Hard Rock to Kuta Seaview Cottage. The promotional brochure describes it as ‘a place for leisure’ and it looks it—some rooms boast ocean views from the balconies. But one of the guests was not there for leisure. Cherry Likit Bannakorn, alias Pina or Paket, was there on business. The twenty-two-year-old had flown from Thailand to meet with Chan and hand him a specially constructed silver suitcase—built so it would slip easily through Customs without its valuable contents being detected. They hadn’t been, and neither had her presence in Bali. No one was even looking for Cherry Likit Bannakorn. At that stage the AFP’s letter to
their Indonesian counterparts was still being written and sent to Bali police, but her name wouldn’t appear on it. Chan’s name was on it, but when he made the journey to the Seaview Cottage, no one was watching him. He collected the suitcase, which contained up to 5 kilograms of heroin, without a hitch. And Likit Bannakorn went home.