Snowing in Bali

by Kathryn Bonella

  Instantly, Rafael’s radar went off. It was a red alert. Too suspicious. ‘Abort, abort, run run,’ he warned.

  ‘Okay, yeah,’ Psychopath agreed. But then he disappeared. For 10 days, Rafael couldn’t reach him, until he got the bad news. Psychopath had ignored his warning, gone into FedEx, given his name, confirmed the package was his, then snap – he was wearing a bracelet. He got two years. Rafael lost a chunk of cash

  My friend got busted with this. Fabio Psychopath; he’s a young guy, cool, crazy psycho. He loved drugs. He didn’t give a shit. That’s why he got caught.

  – Rafael

  The other 4 kilos were carried by a horse and successfully reached the buyer in Amsterdam, covering the loss.

  *

  Although Rafael was now selling a lot of coke in Europe and Sweden, Marco’s death sentence hadn’t stopped him dealing in Bali. When he arrived back, he had a new project with Fox – the young French guy who’d first worked for Andre – 5 kilos arriving from Peru, transiting in Malaysia, then going on to Bali and Sydney.

  But the project was hexed. Rafael and Fox flew from Bali to Malaysia to meet the horse at the airport, with their flights booked to coincide. But the flight from Bali had been delayed by two hours, and when they finally arrived their horse was missing. This guy was not bright, more a mule, who spoke no English. Strangely, he hadn’t called Rafael’s batphone – a cheap phone he bought for every job, using it exclusively for that job, then tossing it. The horse had simply vanished. Rafael didn’t know if it was a bust, a theft, or stupidity.

  Fuck, I think, where is the guy? Where did the guy go? We don’t have a clue. First I think he got caught, because when I came into the airport he didn’t call, and I say, ‘Fuck, we lose 5 kilo of coke, ah we lose everything.’

  – Rafael

  By uncanny luck, they found their lost horse. Jumping into a taxi, exasperated and mystified, Rafael heard the driver uttering magic words. ‘I picked up a guy with the same bag as you a few hours ago.’

  ‘What, the same bag as this?’ Rafael asked, pointing to his windsurf board bag.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where did you take him?’

  ‘To a hotel,’ the driver said.

  ‘Oh, take us there quick.’

  Then I come to the hotel, knock on his door, he says, ‘Who’s this?’ I say, ‘It’s me,’ and the horse opens the door. He was in a G-string . . . I look at the guy’s underwear, you know the string one, normal men don’t wear this. I say, ‘Man, put something on, why you wearing this shit?’ He goes down on his knee, crying, ‘Whoa, thank you god, thank you god.’ South American people are very religious. I say, ‘What you doing?’ He was afraid; he cannot speak, cannot call, lost my number, already hours in the hotel, he doesn’t know what to do. He was so stupid this guy, he tries to call his family, but he can’t dial, because he can’t work out the code.

  – Rafael

  Relieved, Rafael went to another room to organise the booms, putting one set containing 2.5 kilos in the spare bag to courier to his surfer buyer in Sydney. In the other bag, he put 2.5 kilos for the G-stringed horse to finish his run to Bali. Transiting in Malaysia was a tactic to deflect suspicion and more easily slip the booms past Australian and Bali customs. The horse breezed into Bali, but the Sydney deal bombed.

  Rafael’s longtime Australian buyer went off the grid, unres­ponsive to all calls and messages. It was an expensive mystery. So Rafael sent Sparrow, who was back in Bali, to unravel it. Sparrow was an unlikely detective, with things always going awry around him.

  He’s always got black eyes, broken arms, because he’s always involved in shit. He likes to argue, to fight, but he doesn’t know how to fight and always gets punched. People beat him because he’s skinny.

  – Rafael

  But Sparrow was available after flying in for a surfing holiday, staying in the small room under Rafael’s water tower, sharing with Fox. Rafael offered him $1000 to fly to Sydney to chase up the buyer and spindly legged Sparrow, who’d never been to Australia, gladly took the job. Before leaving, Sparrow and Fox sat huddled together on the internet tracking the Fed­Exed windsurfer booms to see if they’d arrived in Newcastle. They had.

  Sparrow flew out of Bali and straight into trouble. A routine bag swab at Sydney Airport detected traces of cocaine on his suitcase. With his UK passport showing a travel route – Rio-Bali-Sydney – combined with his swarthy looks and edgy, nervy demeanour, Sparrow fitted the trafficker profile. Suddenly, officers were surrounding him, creating a spectacle. People were staring. Sparrow wasn’t happy. He knew he had nothing on him.

  Rafael had rolled up a poster of Ganesh (the elephant-headed Hindu God revered for ‘removing obstacles’), unzipped Sparrow’s suitcase and put it inside, saying, ‘This is for good luck.’ Then he’d zipped it back up. Sparrow felt sure some coke must have leached out of Rafael’s pores and left a faint trace on the zipper. Now, old Ganesh was creating obstacles; customs officers were pulling out his socks, underwear, stuffing their hands in his jeans pockets, rifling through everything. Sparrow was piqued but stayed calm. He was already thinking about how he was going to sue for damage to his ‘image’.

  I look like a criminal, cos police were making like a party with me; two or three policemen were playing with me. It was not good for my image. They check all the stitches in my bag, they check my shoes, all my pants, all my coats, all my shirts, and the bag they put a lot of times in the X-ray. They’re not satisfied, they put it through again, not satisfied, they put it through again. Finally, not satisfied, they took me to hospital for a stomach X-ray.

  – Sparrow

  Sparrow was furious, but it was either a stomach X-ray or being held for 48 hours waiting to defecate. Customs officers were sure they’d nabbed a drug trafficker. They had, but it was his day off.

  Sparrow was released after four hours, indignant and pissed off, but free to fulfil his mission. He took a train to Newcastle, checked into a cheap hotel and phoned Rafael, updating him. Instantly suspicious, Rafael advised him to check his bags for a tracking chip. Paranoid at the best of times, Sparrow chaotic­ally rifled through his clothes, before flinging them onto the floor, then held the suitcase up to the light, twisting and turning it in every direction. Finally he gave up, still unconvinced his suitcase was free of spy devices.

  The next day he confronted the surfer, who explained that trusting his sharply honed instincts, he’d been sure the blow was hot, and rejected the package when FedEx tried to deliver it. Using Rafael’s system, the surfer’s name was written incorrectly, so he could deny ownership if he felt it necessary. Forty-five minutes later he’d seen a suspicious car lurking around the corner. Something was off. He felt convinced the cops were ready to snap on a bracelet the split-second after he accepted the package. So he hadn’t. For extra caution, he’d also cut all contact with Rafael in case calls were being traced. Sparrow understood, but his mission was incomplete until the surfer phoned Rafael. He did that night. Rafael was disappointed. It was a big loss, but better than a bust.

  Now, Sparrow couldn’t wait to leave Sydney. It was cold and unfriendly, not like he’d imagined. But his quick turn­around sparked suspicion again at the airport. He was questioned and his bags taken off for a search. In his conspiratorial mind, he was sure they were removing the tracking chip. He lost it, yelling that he didn’t like the country, and was leaving fast because he was treated like a criminal, humiliated, and it was cold.

  I say a lot of things . . . I don’t know why they don’t put me in prison, because I didn’t respect him. I began to shout loud at him, ‘Friend, I wanna go, I don’t have any drugs, you’re crazy people in Australia. I want to go to Bali. I don’t want to stay here anymore, where is my bag? Why do you do this with me? Three days ago they did the same thing, took me to hospital, they did something to my bag.’ They try to make me calm; he says, ‘No, we did nothing to it, here’s your bag, go.’ I think maybe they took out the chip from the bag when they took it fo
r searching and give back.

  – Sparrow

  When he returned to Bali, he told everyone he planned to demand the British consulate sue Australian customs for hurting his image. It was typical Sparrow. Making it more farcical was the fact that just a couple of months later he was actually doing a drug run. Incredibly, it was only a few months after the triple whammy of Rodrigo’s bust, Juri’s life sentence and Marco’s death penalty. And Sparrow knew Marco well. He’d even helped him to exercise his legs after his glider crash by walking all day with him on crutches around the beaches in Nusa Dua.

  Everybody said this to me, ‘How can you do this with Marco sentenced to death now?’ But in my head, I think I’m just going on the same plane as Narco, but I’m not carrying it. I was afraid for my friend. He was a little bit afraid, because he was friends with Marco too. We were crazy.

  – Sparrow

  This was another project with Fox and Rafael as partners. Their horses Sparrow and his friend Narco, whose father was a Brazilian police chief, flew out of Rio to São Paulo to meet Fox, who collected them from the airport. Fox took them to his mother’s ten million dollar mansion, where he gave them two loaded booms; the bigger one packed with 1.7 kilos, the smaller with 1.3 kilos. To boost their confidence, he dunked the booms in his mother’s swimming pool. If the water didn’t seep in, no smell would seep out.

  Narco was the carrier, Sparrow the back-up. Deciding to try a different route, they flew to Buenos Aires first, then to Bali, where they breezed through. Despite the increasing numbers of high-profile busts – including Australian beauty school student Schapelle Corby, arrested with 4.2 kilos of dope in her boogie board bag, a month prior to their run – most horses were still getting through easily. Chino, who made it his business to know, estimated only 2 per cent of traffickers to Bali were getting caught.

  After taking a taxi to their hotel, Sparrow and Narco picked up a hire car, tied the windsurfer board and booms onto the roof, and phoned Rafael as they drove to his house. Rafael was sitting at the beach café, drinking Coca-Cola and watching the waves. He didn’t want to say anything on the phone, but the place to keep the booms wasn’t ready. ‘Bro, can you stay with the booms until tomorrow? The boy in the bungalows where I want to keep them is busy,’ he asked Sparrow.

  ‘Okay, yeah.’

  That night Sparrow parked his car, with the loaded booms strapped to the roof, in the hotel car park in Legian. The next day he delivered them to Rafael and moved into his small room under the water tower, ready to start his surfing holiday. It was a couple of weeks later that Rafael asked Sparrow to move into the bungalows behind his house, where he still had one boom. Rafael needed Sparrow to babysit it for a while. He agreed. But typically, things went awry.

  Sparrow was leaving on Christmas Day, and a couple of days earlier had asked Rafael for a little present of four or five grams. He wanted to sell it to his friend Beans, in Uluwatu, to make cash to buy sarongs to take back to Rio.

  On Christmas Eve, Rafael and Anna threw their lavish annual Christmas party. It was a sumptuous spread of food from Brazil, Sweden and Bali, with fresh fish, turkey, beer, champagne, soft drinks and cocaine. Twenty-five people turned up. Kids ran around, music blared, people swam in the pool, dived from the balcony – and discreetly did lines of coke upstairs.

  Towards the end of the night, Sparrow asked Rafael for his little Christmas present. Rafael told him, ‘No, you can sniff a bit upstairs, but that’s it.’ Rafael didn’t want to risk Sparrow running around high with a little bag of coke. Things were too hot.

  Sparrow was furious and a bit drunk. ‘You make me sleep one week with this coke, if police get me I’m fucked,’ he shouted, slashing his hand across his throat.

  Rafael was adamant. ‘Sorry, my friend. No. If I give you this, you’re going to get crazy. You’re gonna talk bullshit.’

  ‘Okay, no problem,’ Sparrow snarled sarcastically.

  As the party wound down, his pique rose. Sparrow felt he deserved some blow after sitting on a bomb for a week. Another mutual friend at the party, Julio, an addict – the guy Andre had once got Laskar thugs to threaten by putting a gun in his mouth – was inciting Sparrow. Sparrow had already proved Rafael’s point that he was a risk by mouthing off about the boom to Julio. No one was supposed to know.

  ‘Come on, we can cut it open. Look what he has done to you,’ Julio goaded. ‘You slept one week with this thing. Come on, let’s get some coke from Rafael. You need money, you’re bankrupt, you can’t go to Brazil without money. You ask him, he says no, so let’s go get it,’ Julio urged, dead keen for a white Christmas.

  Julio was putting a lot of pressure on me, and all day he was in Rafael’s house, a friend of Rafael’s – what a friend. If I was alone, I would not do it.

  – Sparrow

  About midnight, Julio raced to his nearby house, grabbed a sharp knife and silver tape, then met Sparrow at the bungalows.

  Sparrow hacked into the boom. It wasn’t easy. Rafael had perfected a technique using a pipe-cutting tool to clamp around each tube and slice it cleanly. It prevented aluminium shavings from mixing in with the coke. Unsurprisingly, Sparrow’s method was slapdash. He sawed like a maniac, cutting his hand, while Julio sat like a panting puppy, holding a curled up restaurant menu, ready to catch the coke. But it didn’t just spill out. It was compacted like concrete. Sparrow scraped out about 10 grams – $1000 worth – into the cardboard menu. Julio took four grams, Sparrow six, tipping it into the plastic wrapper from his cigar­ette packet. Before leaving, Sparrow used the silver tape Julio had brought to try patching up the boom. Then he fled to his friend’s house in Uluwatu, aware Rafael wouldn’t be happy to discover it had snowed on Christmas night.

  Rafael learnt of the theft early the next morning. After trying to call Sparrow, he walked across to the bungalows, unlocked the room with his spare key, checked the bag and saw the traces of snow and the destroyed boom. His temper blew.

  I get crazy . . . I want to catch him and punch him very hard. But he escapes.

  – Rafael

  What made this worse was that the boom was set to fly to Singapore. Now it would be a huge job to get the coke out and repack it in a new boom, minus the stolen grams and the stuff mixed with aluminium shavings. Rafael picked Narco up from his hotel and spent Christmas Day tearing around Bali, hunting for Sparrow. He didn’t find him. Sparrow had gone to the airport hours before his flight to hide out.

  Rafael was chasing me like a cat catching a mouse, ‘Where’s Sparrow, fuck him,’ fed up with me. All that day he was looking for me; he ran looking for me in a lot of places, couldn’t find me, then took Narco to the airport. Narco told me on the aeroplane, ‘Rafael’s very fed up with you.’ I was fed up with Rafael, too. If I saw him, maybe I want to fight him – want to punch him. He was angry but he had a lot of money in his pocket. I was angry and no money. I was bankrupt. I knew it was going to make trouble for Rafael, but fuck him.

  When I arrive in Brazil he says all the time on the internet, ‘You better watch out, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you,’ all the time, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I say, ‘Ah, you’re going to kill me . . . Remember you have family here, your father, your mother . . . I like them, but don’t talk too much because even if I can’t get you, I’m going to get your family.’ Nobody’s good all the time. I’m not perfect. If I have to kill someone, then I would do it. I was fucking crazy.

  There is not too strong friends in this business, in drugs. We think we are, but any trouble we have, all the friendship’s gone. We become enemies.

  – Sparrow

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  OPERATION PLAYBOY

  It hadn’t been a very good Christmas for Andre either. It was the high season in South Brazil, which he usually spent at one of his glamorous restaurants. Not this year.

  The Brazilian cops had been watching the zigzagging jet-set lifestyles of the Bali crew.

  Andre had known he was hot ever since Rabbit had pho
ned from jail in Paris, telling him about the DEA asking questions. He was paying more attention now, noticing the zips on his bags always in a different spot after a flight. He was sure cops were waiting for him to do something stupid, catch him red-handed. But he was too smart; they needed a snitch. With his girlfriend Gisele, he’d spent most of the year in Bali and Hawaii. He was now wary of returning to Brazil, but he was the best man at his best friend’s wedding in his beautiful restaurant in Santa Catarina.

  He and Gisele flew in and went straight to the restaurant. They stayed at the wedding for two hours, then drove to Andre’s house. Nobody but those at the restaurant knew he was back, but his home phone rang. He looked at it, debating, then snatched it up. ‘Hello.’

  It was the mother of a horse who’d been busted weeks earlier, but not on a run for Andre. ‘Hey, you need to send money to my son, he needs your help.’ Andre’s pulse was racing. This was not a conversation for a landline.

  ‘Sorry, you have the wrong number. I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied.

  She hit back. ‘I know who you are, Andre.’ He hung up. It was a trap: she’d used his name to link him in. The cops were closing in and he had to get out fast. Within moments he vanished. After telling Gisele to go to her mum’s house, he grabbed his bag, switched on the lights as a decoy, then raced out through the garden, and across 3 kilometres of mountain and jungle to a friend’s house. His friend drove him to the airport and he flew straight back to Hawaii.

  For 25 days he stayed in a friend’s luxury ocean-front condominium set on a golf course. But even such a glamorous abode lost its lustre when he wasn’t there by choice. The high season was kicking off in South Brazil and his restaurants would be buzzing. Gisele kept calling asking him to return for Christmas.

  He acquiesced. The cops didn’t have anything on him; he was a reputable businessman. He flew into São Paulo, where his bags were delayed. When they turned up, the zips had moved. Unpacking at home, he saw his neatly folded clothes were dis­arrayed. It was indisputable – he was in their sights. He had to be supremely careful.