Hotel Kerobokan (33 page)

– Scott

Sometimes there was only crushing darkness for Scott; periods when he rarely left his cell, preferring to blow up hippos with aliens on his PlayStation. But other times he tried to live in the moment and make the most of the day. During these times, he would often play tennis all day, stopping only when the sun got too hot around midday. He would take a break in his cell, watch DVDs or cable TV and read self-help books.

For most of the Australians, the day was often broken up by a visit in the blue room. Scott’s devoted parents came to Bali whenever they could, friends visited regularly and a Balinese friend came once a month to deliver him cash sent from his family.

Scott had checked into Hotel K when he was a teenager. He was nineteen, the second-youngest of the Bali Nine. Life as he knew it finished the Sunday night that he took a taxi to Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport, trying to look like any other tourist set to board a flight to Australia. Under a bright floral shirt and baggy pants, he had just over one kilogram of heroin taped to his legs. Three other Australians, posing as tourists on their way home in almost identical outfits, were also carrying heroin. But they didn’t make it to the plane. They were all busted after checking in.

A fifth person, Andrew, then twenty years old, was already sitting comfortably on the plane when police grabbed him. He didn’t have any drugs on him but was one of two ringleaders.

Another four, all in their teens and early twenties, were arrested in a hotel room in Kuta. Police found three hundred and fifty grams of heroin in a suitcase, as well as scales, tape, backpacks and mobile phones. None of them had stood a chance. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) had waited for them to leave Australia, then tipped off the Indonesian police, passing on their names, passport details, mobile phone numbers and even black-and-white photos of them, knowingly exposing them to death by firing squad.

An AFP officer had quietly watched 19-year-old Scott check in at Sydney Airport and fly out, despite knowing a crime was going to take place, and despite Scott’s father, Lee, having asked the police to help stop his troubled son from leaving the country.

Lee had received a phone call from Flight Centre the day before Scott flew out, asking him to ensure his son called their office as he hadn’t yet picked up his ticket from Sydney to Bali. An alarm bell sounded; Lee knew that Scott didn’t have any cash and that he was using drugs. He flew into a panic and called a friend, Bob, who was a barrister. ‘Look, they’re going to use him as a mule,’ Bob told Lee, who hadn’t yet even heard of the term ‘drug mule’.

Lee desperately wanted his son to be prevented from leaving Australia. Bob rang an AFP contact, asking if Scott could be intercepted at Sydney Airport and stopped from boarding the plane. Lee was assured it would happen. That phone call took place at 1.30 am. At 10 am, Lee got a distressed call from Bob, saying, ‘Mate, sorry, he couldn’t be stopped, he’s on his way’. An AFP officer had watched Scott checking in and boarding the flight, but decided not to approach him. Instead, on that same day, after the Nine had left, AFP agent in Bali, Paul Hunniford, passed a letter to the Indonesian police, alerting them to the Bali Nine’s trafficking plan.

They had waited until they had all left Australia. The letter gave specific details of a crime not yet committed: who the players were, where they would stay, when they would try to leave, even how they would strap the drugs to their bodies. The AFP had had the group under surveillance in Australia for weeks. Scott had seen a suspicious man watching him buy his ticket at Flight Centre in Sydney – he is now convinced it was an AFP officer. They knew they weren’t trafficking drugs into Bali, but were planning to bring them into Australia.

They will be carrying body packs (with white powder) back to Australia with packs on both legs and also with back supports. They have already been given the back supports. The packs will be strapped to their bodies. They will be given money to exchange for local currency to purchase oversized loose shirts and sandals.

–
AFP Letter

Scott Rush now says the AFP knew far more than he did at that stage about the trafficking plan.

The letter also named the alleged leader as 20-year-old Andrew, and told them: ‘If you suspect Chan and/or the couriers are carrying drugs at the time of their departure, please take whatever action you deem necessary.’

It also instructed the Indonesian police to arrest those at the Melasti Hotel as soon as the airport bust was done. Despite the AFP, when later defending its actions, claiming it wanted to expose the network, find the source and the ‘Mr Bigs’, the Indonesian police somehow missed the point of sale when the eight kilograms of heroin, worth four million dollars, was handed to the Australians.

The AFP did throw us to the wolves and there’s a lot of pressure on them for it, and I don’t think they can make up [for] their mistakes. I suppose there’s nothing they can do to rewind the past.

– Scott

In a Bali courtroom, all nine Australians were convicted. Initially, seven of them got life, and the two ringleaders, Andrew and Myuran, got the death penalty. They all appealed, and their sentences then varied erratically between life, death and twenty years. The three at the Melasti Hotel had their sentences reduced to twenty years, but when the prosecutors appealed this leniency, they were increased to death. After a final appeal, they were reduced back to life. Andrew and Myuran remained on the death penalty. Scott was the only courier suddenly and inexplicably to be handed a death sentence after appealing. Although the other three couriers carried more drugs, Scott got death, while Renae Lawrence got twenty years and the other two got life.

Don’t ask me why. Just sort of happened like that. It’s crazy. They haven’t even given me reasons why. We all had over five hundred grams, and the law is, if you go over five hundred grams you’re eligible for the death penalty. But they kind of just gave it to me.

– Scott

Scott’s Nigerian cellmate, Emmanuel, had a similar court experience. He was the first person ever to get the death sentence for drugs in Bali, despite having carried only four hundred grams. Initially, Emmanuel was given a life sentence, but it was upped to death when he appealed.

Emmanuel went nuts. He felt like a victim of everything that was wrong with the justice system and Hotel K. He knew that while he had carried a smaller amount than everyone around him who’d been caught at the airport, they had had cash to buy a lighter sentence. Now he was facing death for drugs, while his captors were blatantly using and selling drugs in front of him.

The hypocrisy of the system turned him into a madman. At nights, he woke angry and crying out like a wounded animal. Some nights he smashed the door, the bars, the bed, everything in sight, with a hammer.

Sometimes I woke at night-time, I feel like I don’t want to stay alive. I feel like my body is hot, I feel so stressed. If I had something, like anything to drink, to kill myself, I would
.

They put me here because of drugs, but I see they are selling drugs like coffee. They give me death sentence for my drugs, then they bring that same drug and sell in front of me. I watch this and it makes me stressed. I watch the guards sit down and use together with prisoners. They are selling drugs everywhere, no secret, just everywhere drugs here. When it is so corrupt in here, when they are selling drugs everywhere, nobody would be happy here
.

Are they all corrupt?

Yes. Many guards have been arrested. Even last year, the chief of security was arrested. Some guards are good, but eighty per cent of them are shit
.

– Emmanuel

It was proven that it wasn’t just the underling guards who were lured into the Hotel K drug business, when the head of security, the number two boss, Muhammad Sudrajat, was charged with and convicted for drug offences, and sentenced to four years in jail.

Last Saturday the Bali police arrested Muhammad Sudrajat, the Security Head at Kerobokan Prison, after receiving information from ex-prisoners he had been their drug dealer. Sudrajat was set up and busted with 2.45 gram of low-grade heroin in his pocket. As security head, Sudrajat could easily smuggle narcotics into the penitentiary – nobody was suspicious of him
.

–
Jakarta Post
, September 2007

Police allege Kerobokan’s Head of Security, Muhammad Sudrajat, has been running drugs in and out of the prison since starting work there 14 months ago
.

–
NZ Press Association
, 14 September 2007

Mr Sudrajat’s lawyer, Muhammad Rifan, said his client was ‘surrounded by dealers’ and had an amount of ‘involvement in the trade’, but said he was more a user than a dealer. ‘My client admitted he got carried away after getting too close to inmates who were drug addicts,’ Mr Rifan told Reuters. ‘He became an addict, and became more and more involved.’

–
Today, Singapore
, September 2007

Emmanuel had been in his early twenties when he flew to Bali from Pakistan, with just under four hundred grams of heroin inserted in his anus and in his stomach. He had just cleared Bali immigration when customs officers grabbed him. He was taken straight to a nearby medical centre, given two enemas and fed doses of laxatives until he finally excreted 31 capsules of heroin.

Emmanuel felt sure his Pakistani boss had tipped off the Indonesians. His boss had been angry that he could not carry one kilogram.

They use a machine and push into my anus. I try but I cannot put more … it’s too big
.

– Emmanuel

With only four hundred grams, the Pakistani boss sent him anyway, as his false Sierra Leone passport and plane ticket were already paid for. So, for the lure of a $2000 cash fee, the young Nigerian flew to Bali and threw away his life.

I hope they are not going to kill me, it shouldn’t happen. I’m the first person they give death for drugs here in Bali. But my stuff is the smallest. Many people here … the guy from Mexico had fifteen kilograms, Michael had four kilograms, get life sentence. Juri five kilograms plus, fifteen years; the Bali Nine, some of them already on life or twenty years. Me? I only had four hundred grams. They give me death sentence because of my colour. And because I have no family, no friends and no money
.

I’m angry because nobody cares here. But, I believe, one day I am going free. That’s what I believe. If I had money in the first place, my case would not be like this. And they hate all foreigners, but they hate black people more
.

– Emmanuel

After living on death row for two years, Emmanuel calmed down a bit and started looking after himself. He cut his dread-locks off. ‘If I put water on my head, one litre stuck in my hair. So, make me more stress, so I cut it.’ He started working out with weights for an hour a day, spraying himself with Rexona afterwards, and dressing smartly. It helped that he was sharing a cell with Scott, and now also had Scott’s lawyer helping him. He didn’t feel so isolated and his rage was not so fierce.

Scott bitterly regretted his teenage mistake, and was losing his life day by day. Once, in a fit of anger at himself, he’d scratched his arms with a sharp piece of metal. He’d also shot up heroin a couple of times, chain-smoked, had seen a psychiatrist and taken antidepressants. But the death sentence was always lurking. One of his earlier cellmates had told him he sometimes called out, ‘Mum, Mum,’ in his sleep. He often dreamed of someone harming his family. Sometimes, he heard the ringing gunshots of his own execution.

The first thing his mother, Christine, had given him after his arrest was their family Bible, and Scott had turned to God for strength. Many nights, he got down on his hands and knees in his cell and asked for forgiveness. He started seeing a Catholic priest at Hotel K’s chapel but stopped when the people running it started telling him, ‘If you die, you will be going home [to God]’. He didn’t like it. They weren’t the ones facing death by firing squad. Dying was not going home. ‘Who were they to tell me that?’

Scott’s parents initially spent five months in Bali, looking after him and trying to find someone they could trust to take money to him from an account they had set up. His parents spent about $340 a month to keep Scott in relative comfort in Hotel K. This was cheap by Hotel K standards. Another Australian was spending $1000 a month on food and payments to guards.

On Scott’s twenty-first birthday Lee and Christine flew to Bali with their other two sons, Dean and Cameron, and threw a two-hour party for him in one of the small offices. It was only three months since his sentence had been upped to death, when his mum had walked out of the jail telling waiting reporters that her son was ‘scared, absolutely petrified’ about his fate.

But they were all making the most of his birthday, with about twelve people celebrating and a chocolate cake. As he took a deep breath to blow out the twenty-one candles, someone joked, ‘We know what the wish is, Scott, so just blow’.

When he was handed a framed portrait of his late grandfather, he kissed the image. If he were ever to know how important family was, it was now. And, somehow, for those hours he simply enjoyed being with his loved ones.

‘Actually, I feel pretty good. It’s good to have my family and friends here. It’s amazing to be able to celebrate it and I just feel great today,’ Scott told reporters.

Snatching moments of happiness was vital, as the daily grind was so difficult. But if Scott and Emmanuel ever needed reminding that things could get worse, they only had to look out their death tower door. Their cell was luxurious in comparison with cell
tikus
, across the grassy path.

So far since I’ve been here, two guys have died in solitary cell
tikus
from tuberculosis and AIDS. One guy got put in there because he tried to escape from hospital where he was held, that wasn’t that long ago, and [the] guy before that just kept getting skinnier and skinnier … some days he didn’t know who he was, and I think they knew he was going to die sooner or later. That’s a terrible way to die, I reckon, being put in a little cell like that
.