Hotel Kerobokan (6 page)

She checked out, paying for the room in cash, and then checked into another hotel nearby. Her work was almost done. She had a second client in the morning and would then fly home to her daughter. But as Nita stood in the shower shampooing her hair, police were gathering outside her door. Life as she knew it was about to change forever. As she casually stepped out of the shower, police kicked in the door and exploded into the room. Nita flew behind the bathroom door, gasping for breath. Her heart was slamming against her chest and her wet, naked body trembling as she hid behind the door. A male voice yelled: ‘Come out, Ramos.’ She didn’t move. She was terrified. He knew her name. He called again, ‘Come out, Ramos. Come out with your hands up’.

Nita was visibly shaking as she edged out from behind the door, her hands held above her head. A wall of pistols was pointing at her as she moved into the doorway, exposing her dripping wet body, too scared to reach for a towel in case she got shot. More than ten police were surrounding the bed. Nita continued to stand naked with her hands in the air and her wet hair splashing down her back. One of the police officers tore a sheet off the bed and tossed it over to her. Nita quickly wrapped it around herself.

Police started demolishing the room, rifling through her bags and flinging her clothes onto the floor. They ripped the linen off the bed and flipped the mattress. In under five minutes, they discovered the drugs hidden in the bottom of a bamboo cabinet. Nita claimed they weren’t hers, as she watched the police laughing and talking on their mobile phones. It was a good night for them. Usually they found only grams. But tonight they’d discovered two kilograms of hashish and two kilograms of ice. Nita kept lamely protesting her innocence as she stood wrapped in the sheet, hoping the Bali legal system might go soft on her, as she had plenty of cash.

They demanded twelve years for me, but I talked to the prosecutor and the prosecutor asked me if I had money so I could deal with my case. So I paid over one hundred million rupiah [$25,000] through my lawyer and the court gave me punishment of six years
.

– Nita

Nita later discovered how she was caught. She’d been set up by a dealer who owed her cash. He was due to be her next customer, but had called the police instead, with the aim of effectively wiping his debt by putting Nita away. But a loss didn’t stop Nita for long. She was soon back playing inside Hotel K. The trade that stole her life would become the centre of it.

Hotel K was fast becoming the United Nations of traffickers as Bali became a lucrative drug market, turning from a transit point into a destination throughout the late 1990s. Wealthy expatriates and tourists had created a demand, and smugglers from across the globe were flying into Denpasar, posing as tourists, with their surfboard bags, dive tanks, sports bags and even their stomachs and anuses filled with drugs. Over the next few years Hotel K’s guests would come from all over the world, including Holland, Italy, England, Scotland, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, the US and Australia. Drug offences were also attracting harsher penalties, with a dark new era of death for traffickers dawning in Bali. The first person in Bali to face death by firing squad for drug trafficking offences was 27-year-old French cook Michael Blanc in 2000.

A French national is facing the death penalty for allegedly smuggling 3.8 kilograms of hashish hidden in scuba tanks into the Indonesian resort island of Bali. The
Jakarta Post
said state prosecutors at the Denpasar District Court on Friday demanded that Michael Blanc, 27, be handed the death sentence for bringing the hashish into Bali on December 26, 1999
.

–
Agence France-Presse
, 4 November 2000

On Boxing Day 1999 Michael flew into Bali with two diving tanks in one of his bags. They were set to devastate his young life. As he walked across to pick up his dive bag, it was already being closely watched after a routine X-ray scan showed something suspicious in the tanks. Customs officers had sent the bag onto the baggage carousel with all the other holiday luggage to see who would pick it up. The moment Michael wrapped his fingers around its strap, his life as a free man was over.

Michael and the police tell conflicting stories about what happened next. Police say they took the French man and his diving tanks into an airport office and tested the tanks for oxygen while he stood watching. After the test proved the steel tubes were devoid of oxygen, they drilled into them and found almost four kilograms of hashish divided into hundreds of small packages. According to police, Michael confessed in his first interview with them, that he’d flown to Bali via Bangkok, where he’d bought the drugs in transit, and that he was planning to sell them in Bali.

Michael denied confessing or having any knowledge of the hashish. He said the tanks belonged to a friend, Phillip, who lived in Bombay and that he’d used them on several dives during a 15-day trip to India. Unfortunately, he could no longer contact his friend. He also claimed the police broke protocol by opening the tanks when he was not in the room.

Michael was living in Hotel K under the shadow of death by firing squad. His parents flew over from France desperate to help their son, sure of his innocence and outraged by the lack of a chance to prove it. Their pleas to fingerprint the bags containing the hashish were rejected. Michael had confessed and no further investigation was needed.

His only possibility of an effective defence had nothing to do guilt or innocence. Michael’s mother, Helene, was told a payment of between $330,000 and $420,000 could buy a fifteen-year sentence. But she refused to consider a bribe, believing her son was innocent, and threw away the only strategy that had a chance of working. The judge sentenced Michael to life in prison, rejecting the prosecutors’ request for the death sentence. But he would die in jail. Michael sat in court, slumped in a plastic chair, looking shattered. With only darkness stretching interminably ahead, Michael found a perilous way to deal with the crushing pain of losing his life in Hotel K. He became a heroin addict. Hotel K, after all, was the ideal place to score.

Michael was the first to face the prospect of the death penalty, and it wasn’t long before the prosecutors requested the same fate for more drug traffickers in Bali. A 29-year-old Mexican scuba diving instructor named Vincente Garcia flew into Bali several months after Michael’s conviction. He passed through immigration, then walked to the luggage carousel to pick up his boogie board bag and another black bag. He showed no sign of fear, despite the fact that his bag was carrying fifteen kilograms of cocaine. Vincente was travelling with a Mexican former model, Clara Gautrin, 32, who was acting as his girlfriend to help create the impression they were holidaying lovers. They made a sexy couple as they confidently walked through the airport, seemingly without a care in the world. They appeared like all the other couples starting a romantic holiday in paradise. Neither knew they had been set up and were walking straight into a trap.

Vincente had tangled with his former Mexican drug boss by cutting him out of the loop. On previous drug runs, Vincente had been a well-paid mule, but he was ambitious and wanted a bigger cut – after all, he was the one taking all the risks and few drug traffickers were brazen enough to carry fifteen kilograms in one trip. It didn’t take long for one of Bali’s biggest drug bosses, a Chinese man, to snap up Vincente’s services. But it also took little time for his former drug boss in Mexico to find out and exact revenge. He had one of his men follow Vincente to find out his flight details to Bali. Like most smart drug traffickers, Vincente always ensured no one knew his itinerary, only ever giving clients a ballpark arrival date. But his ex-boss’s man was able to find out the details, and passed them onto the Mexican drug lord, who then faxed them through to the Bali police. The moment Vincente checked in his bags, the authorities in Bali were closing in, waiting to pounce as soon as his plane landed at Ngurah Rai Airport.

The suspects, Vincente Manuel Navarro Garcia and Clara Elena Umana Gautrin, were arrested at the airport on Tuesday on the tourist island of Bali following a flight from the Thai capital, Bangkok. Police said they found the drugs hidden in the couple’s suitcases. Indonesian police said the drugs found on the Mexicans had a street value of $470,000 in Bali
.

–
EFE News Service
, 12 April 2001

Vincente and Clara did a deal with the prosecutors and judges that he would be sentenced to fifteen years instead of death and that she would walk free. But the judges reneged on the deal and sentenced Clara to seven years and Vincente to life. Sparing Vincente the firing squad was the best the judges could do without causing suspicion. It would have been awkward to explain why, in the same Bali courtroom, Vincente got fifteen years for fifteen kilograms of cocaine, when Michael got life for less than four kilograms of hashish. Yet, it was clear to anyone watching closely that a deal had been done. Vincente received the same sentence as Michael, despite being charged with trafficking more than four times the amount of drugs.

Another trafficker checking into Hotel K under the shadow of death was 24-year-old Italian jeweller Juri Angione. He was caught at Ngurah Rai Airport with five kilograms of cocaine in his surfboard bag. Juri had been living in Bali on and off for two years when he told his girlfriend he was going to Thailand for a few days’ break. Instead, he flew to Brazil and picked up a surfboard bag pre-packed with five kilograms of cocaine. He zigzagged his way back to Bali, trying to avoid scrutinised routes. He stayed away from Jakarta Airport, as a Brazilian courier, Marco, had been busted there several months earlier with thirteen kilograms of cocaine in a hang-glider frame. Juri was now working for the same wealthy Italian drug boss who had employed Marco. The boss was a man who lived in Bali, indulging in the good life – watching sunsets and sipping cocktails at the most exclusive beach bars and restaurants while his couriers flew the skies. The drug boss had told Juri he needed him for an emergency run to get bribe money to save Marco from a firing squad. Juri flew from Brazil to Amsterdam to Bangkok, where he changed airlines from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines to Thai Airways. It was here he got a stark warning.

A Thai customs officer saw something suspicious in his surfboard bag as it went through the X-ray machine. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, touching the top of the bag. ‘It’s plastic,’ Juri said. The officer moved his hands towards the zip. Juri had to act fast to convince him not to open it. ‘It’s just plastic, it protects my board.’ He stood watching as the officer’s hand smoothed across the top of the bag. His hand stopped at the zip . . . hovering. ‘It’s just plastic,’ Juri urged, trying to sound blasé despite his heart slamming into his chest. ‘Okay,’ the officer said, waving him on and casually shifting his attention to the next passenger’s bag. Juri grabbed the bag and walked away before letting out a huge breath. It had been an unbelievably close call. But his sense of relief was fleeting. He knew that the bag was not well-packed when he left Brazil, but he’d taken it anyway. Now that a routine X-ray scan had picked up something suspicious, his fears were confirmed. And he still had to get through Bali customs.

Throughout the Thai Airways flight to Bali, he debated whether or not he should just leave the bag at the airport. He’d lose the cocaine but keep his life. He’d smuggled drugs at least twenty times, but this was different. He was exposed by the badly packed bag. By the time the plane hit the Bali tarmac, he’d resolved to go through with it. ‘At the end I say, okay, I will try, I will keep playing. I wanted to play.’ Even the ‘Death to drug traffickers’ signs around him as he queued to buy a tourist visa failed to change his mind.

As he walked down the long corridors from the plane’s exit to immigration at Ngurah Rai Airport, customs officials were already circling. After another routine X-ray in Bali had raised suspicions, a sniffer dog confirmed the bag was piled with drugs. Customs then sent it as bait out onto the carousel to see who would pick it up. Like Michael and Vincente before him, Juri was a walking target as he entered the baggage hall and walked across to collect his bags. The surfboard bag was sitting inconspicuously on the floor among dozens of other bags. He scooped it up and walked towards the green line; nothing to declare. But this time he wasn’t so lucky.