Snowing in Bali (17 page)

–
Denpost,
February 2003

The jail was literally around the corner from the luxurious house Alberto had previously shared with the fat Diaz brothers, Mario and Poca, and dealer Jerome. It was a dizzying dichotomy between his old life of decadence and this life of primitive concrete cages and decomposing cats, but they were insanely close, separated only by whitewashed concrete walls. Knowing his beautiful life was so tantalisingly close was hard and depressing, but he placated himself by ruminating on the fact that he'd actually been lucky.

I was playing with fire for years and years and years and I burned the tip of my finger. A lot of people they just played once and they burned their whole body. I got busted with a very small amount, and I just did a bit of time – a fucking lot of time for me – but still, compared to what I was playing . . .

If you didn't pay the $30,000, how long do you think you would have got?

Probably, eight to ten years.

Is that what the lawyer told you?

Yeah.

– Alberto

*

The sudden blitz by narcotics police was shaking everything up. No one was safe; everyone was a target, from the big dealers like Rafael to the rich expats enjoying a quiet spliff at home in the evenings, to local dealers, users and tourists on holidays. Narcotics teams were working frenetically to set up stings, working with their captives to do the notorious ‘changing heads', paying cash for tip-offs – especially to catch a westerner, their prize target – and then kicking in doors.

It was not just about cleaning up drugs in Bali; far from it. That had been the catalyst, but the crackdown and tougher sentences suddenly created a shiny new business, producing a torrential cash flow making some Balinese richer overnight than in their wildest dreams. Westerners living and partying in Bali had previously understood that, if busted with a user amount, they could buy a ‘get out of jail free card' for between $1000 or $2000. Now, if caught with a joint or a few ecstasy pills at home, the fee to avoid the problem leaving your lounge room had jumped to between $30,000 and $50,000. Police, whose average wage was less than $200 a month, were winning the lottery just by kicking in doors.

There was all the police force running around like crazy, just trying to arrest as many people as possible. Everyone was like, okay, the ‘arrest race' has started, they are going for everyone, they are just arresting people, every single day you would hear stories, ‘Oh, someone else got busted.' So there was a time they started competing; there was a lot of competition between the narcotics teams. The ones that bust the most are the ones that make more money, that is a fact.

– Alberto

Was like very good business – don't have any cost, police just kick some door and go out with $50,000 easy money. Good business. If you don't pay, you stay. Shit.

– Rafael

Most foreigners arrested on drugs charges in Bali avoid serving their sentences by bribing authorities in Indonesia's notoriously corrupt legal system.

–
AAP,
25 July 2002

I tell you, everybody was getting paid. The foreigners were making these guys rich. The judge was driving a brand new white Mercedes. They realised that finally they could make money out of this, because they think all foreigners like us, if we're having a beer on the beach, we're millionaires. And they rounded up a bunch of foreigners all at one time and they started this business. The cops I think are the ones that figured it out – that there was a money machine, a cash cow, in their town.

– Gabriel, American surfer

It wasn't just the police cashing in on the new business; everyone from snitches to prosecutors, lawyers and judges, were all suddenly getting windfalls. Even local journalists were benefiting. Lawyers were approaching them to keep their clients' stories out of the papers, or at least restrict it to a small story off page one, to avoid the spotlight so cops and courts could more easily accept a bribe for a light sentence without scrutiny.

If I'm a western expat busted with 4 grams of cocaine at home, how much do I need to pay to keep it out of your newspaper?

It depends how rich you are. More rich you are, the more expensive the price. If I know you have a yacht, you have your own aeroplane, maybe a different price. Sometimes I wouldn't take money, if it's a big story.

How does it work?

Mostly the modus operandi is via lawyer. ‘I have client, and my client doesn't want you to expose them, would you help me please? I have a fortune, I want to share my fortune with you, okay, am I clear enough?' Something like that.

What are the big cases lawyers often want to keep quiet?

Drug cases with a foreigner suspect.

And do you tell your journalists, ‘Don't cover that court case today'?

Yeah.

And what if the journalist asks why?

That's my own business. ‘You have to choose, you obey my order, take it or you leave from this office.'

– Editor, one of Bali's major newspapers

While expats busted at home could usually manage a sling to avoid the problem leaving their house, it didn't always work. Some didn't have ready access to big cash, or their case had already hit the newspapers and gone too far to avoid the spotlight. At that point lawyers, together with police and judiciary, had to devise tactics to be able to deliver a light sentence for cash, without red-flagging the bribe and alerting Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), an active non-profit organisation initiated in June 1998 as an anti-graft watchdog.

Tricks used were sometimes as simple as obscuring the quantity of drugs found, or having one sentence read out for public scrutiny in court and then quietly changing it on the court paperwork that was sent and held at the jail. Conveniently, the files were not stored on computer.

Englishman Steve Turner slung a $35,000 bribe to covertly reduce his six-year sentence, announced in court, to three years, avoiding questions being raised over why he was doing three years for thousands of ecstasy pills, while penniless locals routinely served four years for possession of one or two.

Money talks for drug criminals. Indonesia is notoriously corrupt, routinely languishing near the bottom of global corruption indexes, and the rot has spread through certain sections of the police and judiciary. One source says some of the wealthier and more savvy foreigners caught with drugs can bribe police officers and avoid court altogether, while others, less lucky, are kept in prison paying bribes until their funds are exhausted, at which point they are promptly deported.

–
The Australian,
13 November 2004

*

Lawyers, dubbed negotiators, kept their slippery tactics under tight veils of secrecy for obvious reasons, but in the case of English chef Gordon Ramsay's brother Ronnie, busted in a public toilet in Kuta with heroin, his lawyer used the media to call on Gordon for cash, making it clear that money talks in Indonesian justice.

Ronnie's solicitor added his own criticism of the celebrity chef. ‘Money can certainly help the lawyers here . . . help the wheels of justice turn a little smoother,' he said. ‘I don't know how his brother can be so cruel. He can help but he chooses not to,' the lawyer told the
Daily Express.

–
Daily Express,
18 July 2007

All westerners were seen as potential cash, but when it was revealed they were super-rich or at least had connections to big money, they became possible gold mines. When the press exposed Ronnie as the brother of multi-millionaire chef Gordon, word spread like wildfire in Kerobokan Prison that the new inmate's brother was chef to the Queen of England – not quite accurate, but close enough. Ronnie might not have had a yacht or an aeroplane, but his brother might, and that was good enough.

With his piercing blue eyes, Ronnie was the image of his famous brother, despite his rake-thin, drug-ravaged body and sickly appearance being the antithesis of marathon-fit Gordon. But for all the potential cash his capture could create for the Balinese judiciary, nobody was getting anything, because Gordon had cut ties with his addict brother. Ronnie had no line to his brother's fortune and almost no cash.

Heroin addict Ronnie, 38, faces ten years in a grim Balinese jail after being found slumped in a public toilet on the island, clutching a syringe and a £10 wrap of the killer drug. The walls of the toilet are smeared with faeces and crude graffiti. A bloodstained bandage lies discarded on the floor. Only a truly desperate man would consider even stepping inside, let alone rolling up a trouser leg to inject his feet with street-bought smack.

–
Sunday Mirror,
11 March 2007

Gordon was refusing to send cash, having reportedly already spent £300,000 to help Ronnie try to kick drugs. So Ronnie and his lawyer started a shame campaign, pleading through the media outside Denpasar court for his brother to send him cash.

‘I told him, “Gordon, please help me. I have no one else to turn to.” It has been made painfully clear to me – with a lawyer I could be out in a few months, but without one I will be left to rot in this hellhole for the full ten years. I could die in here . . .

‘Gordon's kitchen alone cost £500,000 and he drives a Ferrari. For less than a new set of wheels he could get me out of jail. I feel I've been hung out to dry.'

–
Sunday Mirror,
11 March 2007

‘I asked him for help. He knows I need help,' the 39-year-old addict complained of his famous brother, who is said to have a fortune of more than £60 million from an international string of restaurants plus TV shows and books. ‘But he made his decision not to help me. I've heard nothing from my family. It's heartbreaking.'

–
Daily Express,
18 July 2007

Ronnie served just 10 months, with the judge explaining that he was lenient because Ronnie had pleaded guilty and expressed remorse. Without greasing the outstretched palms, it was impossible to get such a short sentence, so somehow he'd secured the cash needed to ‘make the wheels of justice turn a little smoother'.

*

Australian Richard Stephens was in Bali for a holiday when he was busted after buying a few straws filled with heroin from a dealer at the island's notorious heroin mecca, Kampung Flores, in Denpasar. Richard had stood there as the dealer unzipped his adidas bum bag, took out his packet of Peter Jackson Extra Light, tossed out the last cigarettes and inserted six small straws of heroin, weighing a total of 0.3 gram. When the police stopped him on his bike moments later, they went straight to his adidas bag, pulled out the cigarette packet and found the heroin straws.

I wasn't a smuggler or anything, it was personal use, but we were set up by the police and I actually watched the police pay the informant out of my wallet.

– Richard Stephens

It is not uncommon for dealers to inform police if the buyer is a foreigner, sometimes snaring a lucrative payment for the inform­ation.

–
WA Today,
7 October 2011

The police took Richard to a café, gave him a cup of tea, and told him to pay $10,000, explaining in broken English, ‘It will help you, you go home soon.' To communicate more easily, Richard pulled out an Indonesian phrase book, and the cop pointed to
uang lebih,
‘more money'.

‘Oh, do you want more money?' Richard asked.

‘Yeah, yeah.' Their eyes lit up.

He realised I had understood what he said, but stupid me goes, ‘Nah, get fucked, I don't co-operate with the police.' I said, ‘No money, you are not getting no more,' and he laughed. I wondered why he was laughing and didn't really care. And then I realised, when I got to the police station, [and] in the next days, that you can buy your way out – that we had our chance but now it had gone too far, too many people had seen us, and too many people had to be paid. So I had to go to jail. If you keep your mouth shut and pay money straight away, you can basically slip out without anyone knowing.

– Richard

Missing your chance to deal early only guaranteed the cost of the bribe would skyrocket, as more people required payment and camouflaging a deal got trickier. Richard hired a female lawyer, who did the negotiating.

The lawyer came to me and said, ‘They've offered us a deal; they want 275 million rupiah' – we worked it out as A$55,000 – and she goes, ‘If you don't pay that by a certain time, a certain date, if you are one day late, they won't accept the payment.'

Otherwise we would have had to pay $180,000.

To whom?

The police wanted that; it would've got split up between the lawyers, judges, everyone. They're parasites, they are real parasites; everything is money, money, money. It ended up costing my family $55,000 for me to get home. If I didn't pay that, I would have done 15 years . . . they were asking 15 years.

– Richard

Richard ended up doing three months.

*

Cash wasn't always the reward for snitches; spite also played a hand, with some expats' villas raided after a tip-off by a vengeful local. Komang had been working for a Swiss furniture export company, being paid $250 a month plus commissions, a very good salary for a Balinese. But when Frenchman Gerard moved to the island to do marketing for the company, Komang lost his job. Bitter in the belief that Gerard had bad-mouthed him to the boss in Switzerland, he executed a plan of revenge. Using Gerard's Balinese maid to steal a joint from the house, he passed it to a police friend to test. It was marijuana; so two police searched his house, found a small stash and busted him. Without ready access to big cash, Gerard was taken to the concrete police cells, and then moved into Kerobokan Prison. After raising the cash, he cut a deal and got a lenient two years.

Komang didn't get his job back but got great satisfaction seeing the Frenchman fall.

I was a little bit happy he went to jail. I really hated him because I lost my job, I lost everything, my life, and I was very angry.