A Remarkable, Almost Forgotten Story About Drugs Found In A Bag In Bali

The infamous boogie board bag and 4 kilos of cannabis

As Schapelle Corby gets closer to release from jail, here's a recap of one of the most extraordinary stories that emerged during Corby's trial. It was covered briefly by the media, and soon forgotten.

June, 1997.

This is a true story, but we'll call them Lisa and Colin.
Lisa and Colin lived in Melbourne. They’d been working too hard and Melbourne had been too wet and too grey. They decided they needed a holiday.
Like hundreds of thousands of other young Australians each year, Colin and Lisa decided Bali was just the ticket. A short flight there and back, cheap airfares, endless sunshine, tropical heat and all those bars and nightclubs and endless miles of white sandy beaches. They asked each other a simple question. What could be more fun and more relaxing than two weeks in paradise?
Nothing.
Colin and Lisa flew out of Melbourne and into Bali. They grabbed their bags off the luggage carousel at Denpasar Airport, checked through Customs and went straight to their hotel room.
Colin lifted the bags onto the bed so Lisa could start the unpacking while he headed to the toilet.
Lisa zipped open the first bag and looked inside.
She froze.
Tucked snugly between the neatly folded clothes was a fat brick of compressed cannabis, tightly bound in plastic wrap.
The brick was the size of a loaf of bread.
Oh, shit...
Lisa yelled for her husband.
“Colin? Colin!”
When Colin rushed back into the bedroom and saw what Lisa was holding in her hands he thought for a moment he might actually be dreaming.
This simply couldn’t be happening.
Colin wasn’t an idiot, he read newspapers, he watched television, he’d seen the movies about this kind of thing, he knew what the punishment was for being busted in Bali with a big fat brick of cannabis.
Drug traffickers got the death sentence. Signs all over the airport they had just passed through told him that.
It didn’t matter that Colin and Lisa had no idea where the cannabis had come from, all that mattered was that it was in this hotel room with them, it was in their possession.
The death sentence.
And Colin knew what that meant. Death by firing squad. For him and for Lisa.
Panic hit him like ice water in the face.
Colin was smart, or smart enough. He knew he had to make immediate contact with an Australian official in Bali, someone who could tell what the fuck they were supposed to do. He had to tell an Australian official what they had found in their luggage before the Indonesian police found out.
Colin located the number of the Australian Consulate and dialled with trembling fingers.
When he finally got through to someone at the Consulate and explained what had just gone down he was placed on hold, for long minutes.
An Australian consulate staff member eventually came onto the line.
"Do you want the good news or the bad news?"
"Well," Colin said, "give me the good news."
The voice laughed, "There isn't any."
Colin swallowed hard.
"What's the bad news then?"
The voice that was supposed to help fix everything then told Colin something incredible, something impossible to believe.
"You get caught with that mate,” the voice said, “and you'll be eating nasi goreng in jail here for the rest of your life."
Colin was shocked.
Stunned.
What the fuck is going on here?
"Here's what you do," the consulate staff member told him, "flush it down the toilet. Break it up and flush it down the toilet, now. Get it out of your possession and do not, under any circumstances at all, do not make contact with the Indonesian authorities."
So that was it. Colin hung up and told his wife. She was as dumbfounded by the advice given as Colin was.
But he had to do it. And he had to do it now.
Colin grabbed the cannabis loaf and stripped off the plastic wrap as he lurched into the bathroom. The rich smell of the tightly compressed cannabis heads hit his nose and swirled his brain.
The fumes was breathtaking.
With trembling fingers Colin broke up a third of the brick and dropped the fat clumps into the toilet bowl. Not too much at a time, he had to be careful. If he tried to flush it all it might block up the toilet, and when the plumber came and found out what had caused the blockage....
Colin flushed the first lot and looked down.
Oh, shit...
Some of it had been flushed away but the rest was still there, bobbing away, and there was a ring of cannabis detritus and resin around the bowl. He flushed again, and then again, but the water wouldn’t get rid of it all. There was always something left, something obviously suspicious floating there, or glued to the porcelin.
Colin knew he couldn't take the remaining brick of cannabis downstairs, that would an act of sheer lunacy. There could be Indonesian police down in the foyer, right now, tipped off or something, waiting to bust him.
But then another thought hit Colin and the rest of the blood drained from his legs, they nearly buckled beneath him.
Worse, much worse than the cops. Right now, down in the foyer, there might be the people who owned this cannabis, asking about him and Lisa, or lying in wait. The people who missed the pick-up at the airport could have followed them back to this hotel, they could be on their way up right now....
Colin was freaking himself out with such thoughts.
The smell of cannabis resin in the room was cloying.
He dashed for the balcony. He looked around, tried to contain his panic, but there was nowhere to hide all this cannabis. He couldn’t just throw it off the balcony. What was he going to do?
Colin looked closer at the little garden that was the main feature of the balcony. He had a brainwave.
While Lisa watched on and urged him to hurry, Colin tore the fat half brick of cannabis heads into small clumps and spread them across the balcony’s garden. He sprinkled the cannabis amongst the fallen leaves, he buried long fat heads that his sticky, trembling fingers couldn’t break into pieces deep  down into the soil.
“Hurry up!” Lisa cried as she watched the door of the hotel room, thinking at any moment it would be broken down and Indonesian police would come charging in.
Colin hurried.
And then it was done.
Colin and Lisa looked the garden over carefully. Was anything suspicious still visible?
No.
Unless someone looked real close, and dug amongst the garden's dirt, nobody was going to notice there was more than a kilo of cannabis heads buried and scattered.
That rich, pungent smell lingered still but the heat of the day and the cooler evening breeze to come would take care of that.
Colin and Lisa looked at each other, laughed nervously.
They thought they would be safe now. All the evidence that could have seen them both shot through the chest with six bullets each had been destroyed.
They were relieved the minutes of high panic were over, now their holiday could begin. And they had one hell of a travellers tale to tell once they got safely back to Melbourne.
But for years afterwards their minds were still full of questions.
How often did travellers like them find fat bricks of cannabis tucked neatly away in their luggage?
Who, with access to their luggage, would have put it there in the first place?
And why.
So many whys.
Why had the Australian consulate official been so downright casual about what Colin had told him? And why hadn’t the official come to the hotel to help them out?
How often did the Australian consulate get such phone calls from Australian travellers who had suddenly found they had become unwilling drug mules somewhere on the way to Bali?
Nobody from the Australian embassy or the government ever made contact with Lisa and Colin. Nobody ever questioned them about what had happened. There was no Australian Federal Police investigation, no phone call from the Department of Foreign Affairs to find out more.
Years later Lisa and Colin would still, occasionally, talk about their experience and ask each other, “What the hell was that all about?”
And they remained haunted by the lingering questions, the what-ifs.
What if they hadn’t found the cannabis in their luggage when they did?
What if the people who owned the drugs had come to try and get them back?
What if their hotel room had been raided by the Indonesian police?
What if someone at the Customs desk of Denpasar Airport had opened the bag after they picked it up from the luggage carousel and had found that brick of cannabis?
Would they be in a Bali jail still?
Would they now be waiting on death row, still trying to get judges to believe that they really were innocent? That they didn’t know how all that cannabis got into their luggage?
Would anyone believe them?

- This is a chapter from a book draft I wrote in 2006 about the Schapelle Corby saga. I'll be publishing excerpts from it here over the next few weeks.

Smuggle Drugs Into Bali, Get Busted, Become Media Sensation, Sell Your Story For $350,000 And Counting

If Schapelle Corby had actually managed to sell the 4kg of cannabis she was busted trying to smuggle into Bali in late 2004, she may have earned around $40,000.

Now serving 20 years in a Bali jail, Schapelle Corby's incredible legal adventure has spawned autobiography and media rights sales to her story worth more than $350,000. And that's before the movie rights to her life story are sold, and long before she makes another half million, or more, for the inevitable Schapelle Corby : Free At Last memoir, due sometime after 2024.

The autobigraphy, My Story, written by a journalist, Kathryn Bonella, from extensive interviews she conducted with Schappelle inside Bali's Kerobokan Prison, has been the Australian publishing phenomenon of the year.

The 'memoir' has sold more than 100,000 copies, and recently two Australian current affairs shows engaged in a week long war over unproven allegations that Schapelle's sister, Mercedes, and even her own mother, Rosalie, were dope smokers and drug dealers/smugglers.

It's the story that refuses to die, or so the Australian tabloid media hope.

But behind the incredible success of Schapelle's book is a remarkably seedy story of how an Australian publishing company tried to get around laws that prohibits a convicted criminal from profiting from their crimes, by writing books or giving paid interviews or selling their life rights to a movie producer.

Publisher Pan MacMillan has been exposed, through confidential court documents filed in Queensland, as having forked over some $350,000 to members of the Corby family for the rights to Schapelle's story.

But they weren't the only media to drive truckloads of money up to the front door of the Corby's Brisbane home.

The Australian Women's Weekly paid $110,000 to run an extract from My Story.

News Limited handed over $2000 for the rights to run an exclusive photo and book extract.

New Idea Magazine paid Mercedes Corby and journalist Kathryn Bonella some $15,000 to write an exclusive story.

As this story explains, the trial and jailing of Schapelle Corby sparked, literally, a media feeding frenzy, and there's still plenty of blood in the water :

The publishing contract shows that Schapelle's sister, Mercedes Corby, is entitled to 85 per cent of the $350,000 publisher's advance and any future royalties earned from the book...

The documents reveal the protracted and complex negotiations among the Corby sisters, Bonella and Pan Macmillan.

An email from Bonella to publisher Tom Gilliatt reveals that the writer had concerns about losing the money to the Australian Government through the proceeds of crime laws long before the Court of Appeal froze the book's profits.

In the correspondence last October, Gilliatt reassures Bonella she would face no problems.

"My understanding is that you're at no risk since the act is to stop those convicted of a crime profiting from it (and even that's arguable in court)," he says.

Gilliatt indicates it would be best for Mercedes Corby to send an invoice to the publisher so she can be "paid before the book becomes public knowledge".

Bonella also reveals to the publishers she is using an alias while staying in Indonesia and that documents should be addressed to "Lisa".

The Australian Federal Police seized the emails and tracked the movements of Bonella and a number of Pan Macmillan employees through the Immigration Department.

The AFP argues that the amounts should be refunded under the act. However, there are questions concerning how much money is left in Widyartha's Indonesian account.

The publisher wired $76,500 to Widyartha's account at the Bank Negara Indonesia 15 months ago and the balance of $191,250 arrived two months before the court order.

The Corbys have argued the money will be used to fund on-going legal action.

Mercedes Corby, meanwhile, is now suing the 'current affairs' program Today Tonight for defamation in the NSW Supreme Court, after the show aired an interview with a former friend of Mercedes, Jodi Powers, who claimed the Corby family were no strangers to cannabis before Schapelle was busted in Bali.

Jodi Powers was paid more than $75,000 for the interview and was given a lie detector test in a ridiculously staged attempt to add credibility to her questionable claims. Powers failed the first set of lie detector tests.

Mercedes Corby became aware three months before the story aired that Jodi Powers was going to make such allegations and repeatedly tried to contact the producers of the show so she could respond on air.

Today Tonight ignored her phone calls and then waited until she left the country so they could claim they tried to contact Mercedes for an interview but got no response.

If Mercedes Corby's defamation suit is successful, she could be awarded damages of more than $500,000.

Schapelle Corby is the tabloid sensation that simply will not die.

PRIME MINISTER HYPED BIO-TERROR ATTACK THAT DIDN'T EXIST

In late May, 2005, the Australian government was besieged by an outraged nation.

They were furious that a young Australian woman, Schapelle Corby, had been sentenced to 20 years jail in an Indonesian prison, convicted of smuggling four kilos of cannabis into Bali, barely concealed inside a boogie board bag.

During the trial, more than 90% of Australians came to believe Schapelle was innocent. Public opinion claiming that Schapelle Corby was not getting a fair trial in the Indonesian courts was virtually united. For more than two months, the debate about whether Schapelle Corby was innocent or guilty, and whether the Indonesian courts could be trusted to follow the rule of law in putting her on trial dominated the media and public discussion.

For many weeks, it appeared that Schapelle Corby would be executed by firing squad if she was found guilty of smuggling drugs into Bali.

The only evidence that existed to prove Schapelle Corby was guilty of drug smuggling was that the quantity of cannabis was found in one of her bags when she collected her luggage at Bali airport.

And yet, that very same day in Sydney, where her luggage in transit was unloaded from one plane and loaded onto another, known drug smugglers were using corrupt baggage handlers to bring kilos of cocaine into Australia.

Virtually everybody who heard about this curious coincidence smelled a rat. Except the federal government, that is, who backed Indonesia ceaselessly, and quietly blocked the gathering of crucial evidence to support Schapelle Corby's claims of innocence. All the while the prime minister and senior government ministers expressed sympathy for the young woman, and her family.

But the prime minister was resolute. He could not interfere in the justice system of Indonesia. If Schapelle was sentenced to die by firing squad, he could do little more than plead for mercy on her behalf.

On May 27, when Schapelle Corby was told by three judges that she was going to spend two decades in a Balinese prison, literally millions of Australians had stopped work and were glued to live broadcasts of the trial.

When the verdict, and 20 year sentence, was handed down, traumatised Australians gathered in offices, pubs and public spaces exploded into tears, screams of outrage and sobs of grief.

Word spread quickly via text, e-mail and word of mouth that massive protest rallies were going to be held in cities across Australia one week later to demand that Indonesia free Schapelle Corby and return her to Australia.

But the protest rallies never happened.

The pressure on the prime minister and his government was enormous. There seemed no way to calm down the public. Even key talkback radio hosts that the prime minister could usually rely on were backing the public outrage to the hilt.

On June 1, two days before the planned protests were to begin, the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, solemnly announced in federal Parliament that a suspicious package of white powder had been sent to the Indonesian embassy in Canberra.

Downer then said, "The initial analysis of the powder has tested positive as a biological agent..."

After years of publicity surrounding white powder incidents in the United States, which suffered anonymous anthrax-mail attacks shortly after 9/11, most Australians who heard Downer's announcement, repeated on the evening news and throughout the afternoon on news radio, would have assumed anthrax was involved. Or something worse.

Prime Minister John Howard was quick in getting himself in front of the nation's media as well, announcing that same afternoon that whoever had sent the powder to the Indonesian embassy had acted with "murderous criminality".

When a reporter challenged Howard that test results, not yet then completed, might reveal the white powder to be "rather benign". the prime minister reacted with mock outrage.

"No," he snapped. "… the reference biological agent does not mean it's benign."

Another reporter asked the prime minister, "Do you believe that this is a result of the Corby conviction in Indonesia?"

The prime minister replied, "Well, it would be a remarkable coincidence if it were not..."

The key words were "a biological agent". It was a phrase used by both the prime minister and the foreign minister that afternoon and evening.

But neither the state or federal police, nor the government entity responsible for identifying the white powder told Howard or Downer that the white powder was "a biological agent".

The story that Australia had suffered its first bio-terror attack filled the evening and late night news, with further solemn, disturbing warnings from the prime minister and foreign minister, intercut with footage of terrified staff being evacuated from the Indonesian embassy, with 50 staff members being isolated for tests, filling the evening's current affairs programs.

Every daily newspaper in Australia carried the words "bio-terror attack" on their front pages the next morning, and the terrifying news filled that morning's television news cycle and was the sole subject of discussion on talkback radio.

All of this happened, and yet there was no official confirmation that the white powder was anthrax or "a biological agent" or even that it was dangerous.

It was the words alone of the prime minister and foreign minister that sparked Australia's biggest ever bio-terror scare.

But there was no bio-terror attack. It didn't happen.

And John Howard and Alexander Downer knew this by the early evening of June 1, even as they continued to link the 'white powder incident' with the public anger over the conviction of Schapelle Corby.

No newspaper and media outlets were contacted by Howard or Downer's media units that evening to correct the record, and to inform the media that the bio-terror attack had not actually taken place.

Nor did they inform the media that the description "biological agent" was the wrong one, even after they had been advised that this was so.

Howard and Downer chose instead to stay mute on all these facts and let the story run wild.

And the strategy worked.

By the afternoon of June 2, many Australians were convinced that the backers of the young woman convicted for smuggling drugs into Bali were dangerous, crazy people, who had launched a biological terror attack against the Indonesian embassy.

The momentum for the protest marches dissolved almost instantly, and support for the young woman plunged virtually overnight.

The scare was a complete success.

from the smh.com.au :

THE Prime Minister and the Minister for Foreign Affairs sparked Australia's biggest biological terror scare last year when they distorted test results to claim white powder sent to the Indonesian embassy was a "biological agent".

Documents from ACT Pathology and the federal police, obtained under freedom of information laws, show the microbiologist who examined the powder on June 1 last year and the federal police never called it a "biological agent", and described it as a commonly occurring bacteria.

The documents also reveal that some days after testing began, the powder was shown to be flour.

...the Government did not tell the media that no threat had been identified. The following day newspapers and other media gave prominence to the Government's claims, running headlines saying the country had experienced a bio-terror attack.

Before announcing the powder had tested positive as a biological agent, Mr Downer warned Parliament the public attacks on Indonesia would cause "a good deal of anti-Australian sentiment in Indonesia"...

The Government's revelations that a biological agent had threatened the safety of Indonesians at the embassy sent shock waves through Corby's defence team. Her lawyers condemned it for damaging her chances of winning an appeal. After the public outcry over the biological agent, Corby never again enjoyed the public support she had previously received.

Mr Howard, Mr Downer, the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, and Senator Ellison have all failed to answer written questions on who came up with the term biological agent, generally used to describe diseases like anthrax, used in biological weapons to cause mass loss of life.