Bali 9: The Untold Story (22 page)

Lawrence’s mother, Bev Waterman, backed up the fact that before her arrest her daughter had appeared to be frightened of her work colleague Chan. Lawrence had returned to live with her mother, stepfather and little brother the previous November. Testifying as a defence character witness, Mrs Waterman told of an occasion when she had heard Lawrence speaking on the phone to Chan. She didn’t know what the conversation was about but Lawrence had seemed nervous.

‘I asked her who it was that rang and she said it was Andrew. She just didn’t seem herself. I did ask her what Andrew wanted and she just sort of said nothing but she just didn’t look like she was comfortable telling me that.’

The family’s home had been attacked after the arrests—in the middle of the night someone had used grey paint to write the words ‘Nine dead cunts’ on the front brick wall of the suburban house. Menacingly, a hammer and baseball bat had been left in the garden underneath the writing. The family was understandably frightened.

Parents everywhere must have empathised with Mrs Waterman when, in tears, she pleaded with the judges
that her daughter was only young and was a good kid. Any parent who has tried to teach their child about right and wrong knew what she meant when she told the court, ‘We spend most of our time trying to put an old head on young shoulders but we can’t do it. Renae is very sorry, I know, for what she has done. She has told me many times that. I did ask her why she had done it, and I asked her why she didn’t come to me about it, and she asked me a question. She asked me what would I do if I was in her position and my family was threatened. And I have to be honest, I couldn’t answer her, because I think I would probably do the same thing to protect them. I am her mother and I love her and I think that she deserves another chance.’ What mother wouldn’t? The burden of being the Bali Nine’s parents was painfully illustrated by one woman’s words.

After all the months in jail, the depression and the loneliness of being Renae Lawrence was later articulated when she delivered her personal plea for mercy to the judges. She was facing life in a foreign prison away from the family and friends she respected and adored. She had tried so hard to protect her family from Chan’s threats but she now felt it was to no avail. ‘I have in fact failed to protect them, as the emotional trauma I am putting them through is probably almost too much for them to bear.’ And the financial burden she had imposed upon them and the anguish of knowing they could only visit her a couple of times a year was ‘almost too much for me to bear’.

By the time prosecutors came to make their sentence request or demand in Lawrence’s case, they had already sought life sentences for the other three mules. Everybody expected that it would be no different for Lawrence. They were wrong. As prosecutor Putu Indriati said the words ‘Twenty years’, a gasp went around the courtroom. No one could believe it. Lawrence could barely believe it herself—she had said earlier that she was fully expecting that the authorities would want her locked up for life.

She sat, looking almost stunned, emotionless. Ms Indriati said that Lawrence had been extraordinarily cooperative with police and that the information she provided during interrogations had helped reveal to police the other members of this insidious drug syndicate. However, she said, Lawrence’s claims of the Chan death threats should be ignored completely—they were untrustworthy and were not backed up or supported by evidence. The judges should not consider them.

It seemed strange: Lawrence was being rewarded handsomely for her cooperation, but then, she was more involved in the whole thing, having been to Bali twice before, and would necessarily have more information to impart than some of the others. The lighter sentence request didn’t seem entirely fair and was quickly picked up on by other defence lawyers, who made this point to the court. It was no secret that the prosecution demands for all the Nine were given the once-over by the Attorney General’s office in Jakarta and that these cases were potentially politically sensitive, especially given the furore
of the Corby case and the hanging of an Australian man, Tuong Van Nguyen, in neighbouring Singapore.

It seems that an order came down from on high that Lawrence was to be treated more leniently to provide an example of just what it means to be helpful. The same thing had happened in the 2002 Bali bombing trials—rather than death, the two repentant roll-overs got life.

As Lawrence sat in stunned silenced that day, translator Dr Ana showed enough emotion for them both. ‘Thanks God, thanks God, thanks God,’ he said. It was not an act: he truly was thankful.

S
ome of the words scribbled onto the wall are witty. Some are funny or crude. Most are a fascinating insight into the minds of prisoners. These are the musings prisoners write on the walls of jail cells they live in or where they wait to find out their fate.

Like the holding cell at the Denpasar District Court. Here the graffiti is without any doubt the most interesting thing about the drab, dirty and stuffy place where members of the Bali Nine waited each day for their court hearings. Some days there were lots of people, twenty or thirty, all lined up together on the benches. On other days there were less, and sometimes the only prisoners were Australians.

All the prisoners due to front court that day are locked in, men and women together. The sole toilet is awful and has grime caked around it. One day during Schapelle Corby’s trial, before proceedings began, her disgusted mother, Rosleigh Rose, turned up early, donned a set of rubber gloves and got to it with the disinfectant. Cursing about the state of the place, she wanted to spare her daughter having to use a room in such a state.

Then there’s the smell, which on any given day is bad, but when twenty to thirty prisoners have spent the day there it’s nothing short of putrid. When they head back to the jail they leave behind food scraps and rubbish, cigarette butts and papers. Sometimes cats scurry around, hoping to find a feed amongst the scraps before the cleaner comes in. People with their freedom would rather stay away from places like this.

Given the number of Australians who have spent hours inside this holding cell, you’d think a couple of them might have been unable to resist the urge to sign their autograph on the wall for posterity, or to write some witty comment—but around the time that the Bali Nine trials were taking place, there was no sign of any.

The only mention of the nine Aussies was this inscription: ‘Martin E. Stevens’ with an arrow pointing down to the word
benchong
, which means ‘gay’. It wasn’t written by Stephens, because he spells his surname differently, but there was no doubt that it referred to him. Whether a fellow prisoner was having a bit of fun with him, or he had an enemy in the jail
who had decided to have a go at him, is a mystery. It could have been one or the other, really, although Stephens is not gay.

Some of the cell graffiti makes for amusing reading. It’s mostly in Indonesian, with the occasional phrase in English, and much of it refers to the historic and widespread corruption in the justice system and the concept of justice being for sale to the highest bidder—a perception and practice that the Indonesian Government has strived to wipe out for ever. Translated, the messages say things like ‘If you have money you can be free’, ‘the judge wants money’, ‘the prosecutor is a bastard’ or ‘the prosecutor wants money’. The most poignant says, ‘I will never be here again’.

Martin Stephens and the other eight certainly wished they had never been there in the first place. During his time spent in the holding cell, Stephens was generous to a T. His mum, Michele, who had moved to Bali to live for the period of the trials, would regularly make him containers full of sandwiches—tuna, cheese and tomato cut into little triangles—which he would offer round to all the prisoners there. The Stephens were of modest means, and making up so many sandwiches so Martin could share them around was very generous under any circumstances.

In the outside world, kindness to fellow human beings is an admired trait, but when you have to live behind high walls with razor wire, sometimes what goes around comes around. The Balinese call it karma.
Offering a sandwich to a hungry prisoner can sometimes be repaid tenfold back in the jail when you need an ally or someone to help out.

It was while he was walking away from the steps of this holding cell, after talking to Martin Stephens, that lawyer Wirawan Adnan revealed the blunt message he had conveyed to his scared client: either they kill you or the court kills you. Mr Adnan, a senior Jakarta lawyer who is known for representing the 2002 Bali bombers—including the smiling Amrozi—was laying out the alternatives to Stephens: stay silent, don’t give evidence against the others and face the very real prospect of a death sentence; or give evidence despite the threats and take your chances. It was a pretty scary proposition, but Mr Adnan wanted Stephens to be in no doubt that if he was not completely cooperative in court, there was a very real possibility that he would be facing the firing squad.

Stephens had already told police what he knew and who had threatened him. He now had to repeat that in court, in the presence of those whom he claimed had threatened and menaced him, and of whom he was frightened.

To the press Mr Adnan used a snappy analogy about his client: Martin Stephens was a human suitcase. He was not an organiser, an enforcer or even a financier. He was an expendable minion, just the means to transport the drugs home to Australia. Would the court believe it?

Like the other mules—Renae Lawrence, Michael Czugaj and Scott Rush—Stephens claimed that, prior to his arrest, he had no idea of the real reason for his trip. Only his imagination could run wild, he told the court. ‘When I came over to Bali I honestly did not know what I was here for.’ He delivered a similar line at all the trials at which he testified: if he tried to find out what was going on, he was ordered by Chan not to ask questions.

Stephens pulled no punches in his own trial when he was asked his opinion of his colleague at Eurest. Chan, he said, was an evil person with no heart. Strong, fighting words, but Stephens was passionate in his views of the man he saw as being responsible for landing him behind bars in a foreign country.

Mr Adnan’s spiel about the court killing Stephens or the gang killing him appeared to have fired up his client, and Stephens was not holding back. On the other side of the coin, he was effusive in describing his affection for his fellow mule Renae Lawrence. They had initially hated each other but now she was like his sister and best friend—theirs was a bond which would never break.

Perhaps the most amusing moment of Stephens’s trial came when the well-dressed and well-to-do Mr Adnan rolled around the courtroom floor, pretending to be a drug mule having heroin strapped to his body. Always a good sport, he didn’t show a moment’s hesitation in taking on the role-play himself when the judges had wanted a demonstration of exactly how the drugs were
strapped on and of who did what. Initially there was some discussion backwards and forwards, with Stephens pointing out that this very thing had been done during a re-enactment in the police station and had been filmed by police. Why couldn’t they just get the video and play that? It would show who did what.

In the end the video wasn’t produced, and there was nothing to do except get a couple of actors for the job. Mr Adnan played Stephens while Stephens played Chan. Resplendent in his black robes, a jovial Mr Adnan happily put one leg then the other on the chair while Stephens carried out a rudimentary display. Then it was down on the floor to show how the gear was strapped to his back and waist.

For this exercise there were no props. But during the trials the heroin, in the plastic bags, was often on display either on the judges’ or prosecutors’ benches, much to the displeasure of some judges who found the smell overbearing, asking to have it moved. One day a witness in one of the trials went into a coughing fit at the smell and had to go outside for a break. It seemed odd that heroin worth hundreds of thousands of dollars was just left idly to sit on a bench, often spilling out and depositing dust particles. It was, however, a solemn reminder of why these people were here. The drug was usually carried to court each day by a prosecutor, bundled up in old A4 paper boxes. As the weeks dragged on, the boxes got tattier and tattier as mules were asked to identify the heroin and the strappings, and bosses were asked if they owned it. The
mules identified it; the bosses said they had never seen it before in their lives.

When Stephens was interrogated by police on 21 April—four days after his arrest—he told officers he had come to Bali for a holiday. In question number fourteen he was asked what he had done during his time on the holiday isle. ‘My activities while I was in Bali are swimming, playing jet-ski, snorkelling, riding banana boat, shopping in Kuta and going to Mbargo nightclub on Jalan Legian Kuta,’ he said. In another interrogation, on 30 April, he said he and Lawrence had been jet-skiing, banana-boat riding, snorkelling and watching DVDs, and they went once to the Mbargo Bar.

Then, when he testified months later at Chan’s trial, he was asked what he had done during the five days spent at the Adhi Dharma Hotel. His response: ‘Just swum in the pool and stay in the room and didn’t go anywhere unless we were told to. We swam in the pool and that’s the only place—the pool, the room—that’s it unless we were instructed otherwise.’

He went on to say that he had even celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday, on 13 April, in the hotel room because he and Lawerence were forbidden from going anywhere. ‘So if I was here for a holiday, don’t you think I would go out and party? But I didn’t, we weren’t allowed.’

Nobody asked about the discrepancy between the police statement and the courtroom evidence, or whether he was hardening up and honing the evidence to
convince the judges about the issue of threats and of not really knowing what he was doing in Bali. Although it must be said that in the police statement he was asked simply what his activities in Bali had been, while in court the question related to what he had done at the Adhi Dharma. Stephens and Lawrence had spent the first seven days at the Kuta Lagoon Hotel and on 13 April had moved to the Adhi Dharma, where, on 17 April, the heroin was strapped to their bodies.

Stephens said at his own trial that about two weeks before coming to Bali he had been threatened at Chan’s Sydney home, and it was for this reason that he was too afraid to disobey Chan’s orders that he travel to Bali. Chan had threatened to kill him and his family, said Stephens; from this night on the threats were constant. ‘Every day I went to work he told me what I did that night, who I was with, which made me believe that he had someone watching me.’

Stephens said he had met Chan each day at the sign-in book at work. He was asked if he tried to overcome the threats in Australia, and replied, ‘Well, I tried but everything I did he was on top of it. I never gave up.’ Stephens said he had been offered no reward for his role and ‘wasn’t even promised that my family will be okay once we get back to Australia. I didn’t even know what was going to happen.’

Asked what had been his purpose in coming to Bali, Stephens replied simply, ‘Just do what I was told.’

Six days earlier, when Stephens had been called to testify against Chan, the tone of his evidence had been even harder. At the meeting at Chan’s house, he said, Chan had told him ‘not to ask questions and do what you are told and everything will be all right.’ He also said that, in threatening him, Chan had shown him photographs of his dad, mum and girlfriend ‘doing everyday things, leaving the house, coming home, going for a swim’. Stephens said that in the weeks before leaving for Bali he had even seen people following him. ‘That’s why I couldn’t go to the police or trust anyone, I was constantly being watched two weeks prior to leaving.’

No one in court asked for more detail of the incidents when Stephens believed he had been followed, like the locations or when they took place, or what happened. In court terms it was left relatively untested.

At Chan’s trial Stephens said he didn’t know the contents of the packages strapped to him until they were tested at the police station after his arrest. ‘They said it was heroin, to my surprise.’ And the other question which was not really asked was a request for more details of the meeting at Chan’s house two weeks before the arrest. Exactly what had transpired there? Stephens had said he was threatened, but what did he think the threats were over? He’d said he was too afraid not to go to Bali—but he didn’t know what he was going there for. No one tackled the point. If Stephens and the others were to be believed, Chan was
a very clever master of mental torture; people dared not disobey him.

After Stephens finished his evidence at Chan’s trial, Chan rejected it all. ‘All your statements are rejected by Andrew, do you want to stay with your statement?’ Judge Arif Supratman asked the witness.

Stephens was unequivocal. ‘I have stayed with my statement from day one and intend to stay with it now.’

Judge Supratman’s next question was a good one: ‘So, if you stay with your statement, are you afraid for your family?’

‘The only reason I am talking is because the AFP has assured us that my family is under police protection and from day one we never talked until the AFP told us in Polda that our police [were] watching our family and everything is safe, so we did. If they didn’t do that I would be like them, not talking at all.’

Judge Supratman seemed satisfied and impressed, telling Stephens he was welcome to visit Bali any time, but please, don’t do drug transactions. He said the same thing to other witnesses as well.

Martin Stephens enjoys a close and loving relationship with his mother, who supported him every day of his trial. Their bond, and the fact that each time he saw her at the court holding cell they exchanged kisses through the bars, and in court embraced and kissed, prompted some local photographers to good-naturedly call out ‘Martin, your mummy’s here’ each day when she approached the cell, sandwiches in hand.

Michele Stephens gave evidence as a defence witness in her son’s trial, telling the judges that when she first heard that her younger son had been arrested in Bali, she thought there must have been some kind of awful mistake. She thought he had gone to Darwin with Matthew Norman to make a furniture delivery, and besides, he didn’t even have a passport. But the Stephens were soon to learn that there was no mistake and that their lives were being turned upside down.

The first thing Martin Stephens said to Michele and his father, Bill, when they saw him at the police station was, ‘Thank God you are safe’. They had already heard from the Australian Consulate that Stephens was upset and scared for the safety of his family because he had been threatened. Mrs Stephens said that, after this, the family was put on a police instant response program with their local police station, which meant that if the police received a call from the family’s phone number they would respond immediately.