How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  By the end of the wet we were having a pretty good time and it was a shame to send them off, but we had to. I kept back Joseph and Chad, the two I had employed to go with Charles to Darwin. They were happy enough to stay and we needed more hands around the place. Also there was a young mother, Judy, who stayed on with her three-year-old boy. She helped out Cookie and later when there were more kids coming in we called her the governess and put her in charge of the homestead.

  Of course during that wet I spent a lot of time in the office going over the books. I didn’t play the games so much, I preferred to let the others do that so I had a lot of time looking through the accounts and records, searching the entire house and destroying anything incriminating. I couldn’t think of anything else we should be doing.

  We had so much money. I had spent some but not much of my million and I think Spanner had all of his, plus we had over half a million more that had come in since. I paid cash to everyone, to buy vans and food and fuel, and I gave ten grand to Cookie and Charles and five grand to Simms. Still the money kept piling up. I kept no records, but on the last trip alone, Newman had given me a bag with over two hundred thousand in it. I counted the money into envelopes holding fifty grand and some with smaller amounts. I hid these around the office. I didn’t let people come into the office but even so I thought it was best to have the money in different hiding spots.

  Ingrid and I moved in together. We needed all the donga rooms for arrivals and I could not explain to her why Palmenter’s old bedroom was not being used. My excuse was that Palmenter might be coming back anytime, but she argued that it was unfair to leave the biggest room empty and if he did return we could simply move out for a few days. She did not know Palmenter. But then Spanner and I were the only ones who knew the truth. Palmenter was dead under the sand and never coming back.

  Ingrid and I repainted and completely redecorated the room. Sally helped, and she moved into Margaret’s room. We agreed it would be easier for one person to move out for a short time if ever Palmenter did return so we shifted all of his stuff in with Sally. The thought of Palmenter returning and happily accepting Margaret’s room made me smile. Slowly I began to feel more comfortable in the house. Sometimes, with Sally in Margaret’s old room and when there were no refugees, we were almost like a family.

  It all seemed too simple. We waited at the station for Newman to rock up after the wet. He’d give us some people and a bag of cash and say see you next time. We’d put them in vans with a map and say see you later. There had to be more to it but I couldn’t find it, and given that Palmenter had kept records and files of every import, neatly labelled by date, whatever extra there was couldn’t have been run from the station. Perhaps it was that simple. I think that is the thing in business. The best systems are simple and they run themselves and you sit back and count cash and wonder what else is it you are supposed to be doing.

  After that wet Newman turned up with no people. He came straight to me and left Rob at the chopper and I was panicked into thinking he was planning a quick getaway, that perhaps he knew of or had guessed about Palmenter and I was in trouble. I was pretty sure that there was no love lost between Newman and Palmenter but you can never tell. I mentally planned my escape, but I didn’t need to because Newman didn’t ask after Palmenter or when he was due back or anything. He came straight to me like I was the man. He wasted no time in pleasantries other than looking at me hard, as if to say hello and can I trust you.

  ‘I’ve got a biggie. Hundred and fifty on their way.’ He said it as if he had a big problem and I would be helping him out. You know, if you ask things like you are vulnerable, people can’t help themselves. Clever.

  ‘Hundred and fifty!’

  ‘Yep. Women, children, oldies, the whole thing. Full rate. Can you deal with that many?’

  What the hell. Here we go again, I thought. Spanner and I would say yes, then quietly disappear during the night. I laughed at the thought of Charles and Simms, of Cookie, trying to deal with, what would that be, six, seven days continuous chopper flights, a hundred and fifty people and no food and no vans. I would take Ingrid and Sally with me. Spanner could come as far as the roadhouse because there was only my van working. I’d drop him off with his million dollars in his backpack and I pictured him waving goodbye as Ingrid and Sally and I drove off: a thin potbellied man hitching a ride with a backpack full of cash and not much else.

  ‘When?’

  ‘They’re on Sumba. Be here in a week from when I say go. I thought I might land them and leave half someplace hidden up the coast and bring half here. Spread the rush out a bit.’

  I got up and walked to the window and stood looking out to the water tower. Cookie was playing with the three-year-old while Judy looked on laughing. She looked so happy. Cookie was laughing too, and I realised how much he had changed from the first time I saw him. Ingrid and Sally were lounging on the back of Bitsy without a care in the world. Over behind, in the distance, I could see Spanner in his shed tinkering with some machine part. Would he ever be happy not doing that? Probably not. Unless he was fishing. Had I really done him a favour by discovering his fishing camp was not worth buying?

  ‘Give us three weeks,’ I told Newman. ‘Can you fly us up the coast now?’

  17

  Spanner got his fishing camps and left me to run the station. That first import was a bit rough but after that he got things well organised. He set up two outcamps and had a total of sixty-five beds. Eventually each camp had four or five boats, a big centre console and smaller dinghies, so everyone could go fishing at the same time. Between times he took genuine fishing groups and he was doing so well I realised that tourism was the future, a much better cover for the importing than mustering had ever been. It gave us a legitimate reason to fly at anytime between coast and station, also to own boats, have camps at different places in the wilderness. Graffiti-painted vans full of non–English speaking people would be only another set of backpackers visiting our tourist camps.

  We had made the camps at Morgan’s Well and Coffeehouse as temporary places to hide away the imports. I sent Joseph and Chad out to set them up as permanent camps and to build two others at different scenic spots. Eventually we ended up with eight outcamps as well as the three on the coast. On the station they were constructed around the shell of an old bus or campervan. That was our theme. You have to have some sort of theme running through your operation, something that links it all together and gives you a point of difference from the others, because the thing is no matter what business you are in you have competitors.

  With these outcamps we could easily bring in a hundred and fifty at once. Three quarters of a million dollars each time. It was extremely profitable because of course the only better thing than running bigger numbers less often is running bigger numbers just as often. We made nearly ten million that first year.

  It was only later that other operators started to see how well we were doing things and asked for our help. We were full up with our own people and couldn’t take anybody extra and maybe I could have given some advice, or perhaps I should have said yes and got rid of the risky part of the business, let others do the boat trips and leave us to deal with the land side of things. After all, we owned the real estate, we were untouchable in that area. In business, you have to own the real estate or whatever the thing is that makes you solid. I don’t care what they say about intellectual property or virtual systems: when it boils down to it, the physical thing is what sets you apart.

  But at the time I didn’t see the need to cooperate with anybody. It’s not as if you can go to a people smugglers’ convention and share ideas, or buy a magazine and study what others are doing. People Smuggler’s Weekly or something. But there is an underground network, word gets around, you meet people, things are said, comments, ideas pass up and down the chain of command and I guess a lot of the people on the ground in the villages were working for whoever they could. But like I said, at the time I didn’t see the need to cooperat
e and as you know, we never had a boat stopped or caught. In part that was because of the custom-designed carbon fibre boats that don’t show up on radar. Other operators were so afraid of their boats being caught and seized that they used leaky old things that they didn’t mind losing. They would send them off with only enough fuel to get part way. When they ran out they could call for rescue. If there was crew at all it would be a couple of kids because the United Nations says kids can’t be prosecuted. Half the time the boats sank before they even got to the coast. Boat would sink, everybody would drown. But our competitors didn’t care because they already had the money. How silly is that? Drowning your customers is not good for business, although other operators drowning a few was certainly good for my business. Our reputation was good, we were getting a couple of grand more per passenger and still we couldn’t cope with demand and as far as I know all of our imports got to a city and are living there now. That’s another business lesson for you.

  If I had been able to I would have sold franchises. When I did the MBA at Darwin Uni we had a whole unit on franchises and how that was a way to leverage a successful business, but how do you sell a people-smuggling system to people in the Caribbean or on the Med? Once, during the wet, when we closed down and anyway things were going well and I could leave Spanner to run the place, I flew to Tunis and asked around about how things were done. I discovered we were doing it better than any of them. We were unique and in part it was because I had set up a legitimate parallel business that allowed us to operate to and from the coast and to fly whenever we felt like between the camps and the station.

  After Tunis I travelled as a backpacker through Morocco and the Western Sahara, then down through Senegal and Guinea and into Sierra Leone where the civil war had ended years ago. Sierra Leone was sparse but Guinea was beautiful in a way that the Northern Territory is not. Lush jungles, rugged forests and mountains, great backpacker lodges on fantastic beaches. Life was so simple there and I loved it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would ever want to leave. Why do people ever want to leave that which they know, the place they are born?

  One evening I was standing on the beach watching a one-armed fisherman working his nets. As I watched him I thought if ever there was a case to flee your own country there he was. I tried to recall if we had ever had any refugees come through the station with missing limbs. I couldn’t remember any, but anyway, the bloody civil war, where ruthless gangs cut off the arms of their enemies, was before my time. Our clients came mostly from Iran and Afghanistan, and when that was over there would be some other place in the world where people would find a way to ruin paradise and we were assured a never-ending supply of customers.

  The fisherman finished bundling up his net and came over to me, holding a basket of small fish with the stub of his arm. He smiled, and held up his hand with five fingers open.

  ‘Five?’

  He nodded. I gave him five one-thousand-leone notes. He put the basket on the ground and pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and indicated I should hold it. He tipped the fish in, nodded to me, and walked away happy. I took the fish back to my lodge and shared them and some beers with the other travellers, but all evening I was feeling sad.

  By now I was starting to miss the harsh bright openness of the outback, where you can stand on an outcrop and see as far as there is to look, and where every little thing you see is significant. In Africa it was beautiful, lush, overgrown, vibrant, but eventually it got to be oppressive. When you trek to the top of a mountain there is a view and space but mostly to get there you are in jungle and the four green walls are all around you and it is like you are in the exercise yard of a prison cell and the other inmates are chattering monkeys. Perhaps it is that there is no place like home. What you are used to. Perhaps that was why these one-limbed cripples struggled on in their own land because I was sure if they really wanted to they could have found enough money to buy a ticket. But there is no place like home.

  I travelled for six weeks until the wet was over and we could start up again. I had a day in Singapore on the way home and I went for a long walk along the waterfront. I liked looking at the activity, the ferries and the boats coming and going, the tourists. I came to the yacht club and at the bar ended up in conversation with another Australian businessman. He was on his way home from Vietnam where his company made fibreglass boats. They exported them all over the world but the thing he was most excited to tell me about was the racing yachts. Perhaps he thought I was a sailor.

  ‘Carbon fibre, mate. Weigh less than two tonnes and cost me the same to build up there as a standard one in Oz. A glass hull is over four tonnes.’ He pulled out pictures. ‘Do you sail?’

  ‘No,’ I said. And then to justify me being at the bar in the yacht club, I added, ‘I run tour boats.’

  That was how we got the carbon fibre boats. I don’t know if they really didn’t show on radar but that’s what we told people. Certainly we never got caught. But they cost me only what any other boat would cost, and running at high speed unladen back to Indonesia they used far less fuel, and the hull shape was excellent. They were so good that we could sell our trips as ‘pay when you arrive’.

  From Singapore I landed in Darwin and spent a few days sorting out my second-year MBA units. I placed a series of ads in newspapers and magazines for backpackers and grey nomads to visit what I called Palmenter Wildlife Conservancy. Slowly we started to mix our imports with legitimate travellers. Most of the time, you could camp out at one of the waterholes or up on a bluff with a brilliant view, watch the sunset over your camp with no one for miles and miles. People loved that, particularly after the wet when it was green for as far as the eye could see. We even got to have tourists during the wet, because we had set up the camps on high ground and Bitsy was able to get out to them when the roads became impassable. There was no other way to see the land in the wet season. People are interested to see stuff like that.

  One time, two tourists came who had mountain bikes on the roof of their car. Serious-looking bikes. They had been at some desert cycle race in Alice and they camped out at Morgan’s Well for a week, riding all over the place, carving out trails wherever they could find hard dirt or surface rocks. That was when Spanner and I came up with the idea of setting up a bike circuit for the tourists because we remembered how much fun it had been on those old bikes that Charles had brought up. We created single-lane bike paths where the sand and dirt was packed flat, and linked the outcamps with these bike trails. The distance along these trails between the camps was between ten and forty kilometres, so it was perfect for a rider who wanted to take in the whole place on a multi-day tour.

  Eventually we had a fleet of hire bikes too because Charles brought in hundreds more of the wrecked bikes he picked up from streetside rubbish days in Melbourne. Councils rotate the collection times so there was always some locality where Charles could collect old bikes. He would load up the back of the truck, often having to put bikes inside the vans to make enough room to carry them all. Some trips there would be twenty or thirty old bikes that Spanner would fix up. Whatever bikes or bits he couldn’t use he threw onto the gene pool.

  When Spanner was full-time running the camps up at the coast he would often take a week off to come down to spend time with us. He would tinker in the shed rebuilding bikes from many bits. He taught Charles and some of the refugees enough about bike mechanics so they could fix most of them. Funny thing though was that it didn’t help Charles choose better wrecks from the streetside. The pile of irredeemably lost bikes on top of the gene pool grew and grew.

  We sent a bunch of bikes up to the coast to try out for when the fishing wasn’t happening, but the coast was too rough, lots of steep limestone terrain or crocodile-infested mudflats.

  It is important to notice what your customers are doing, what they want or are interested in, and then you build on that. Now we had backpackers doing cultural tours, bush tucker, grey nomads who wanted to sit with the view at Coffeehouse and hardcore cyclis
ts who rode the back trails. And birdwatchers, walkers. All sorts. And imports. Even with all this going on it was only during the import weeks that it was crowded but no one minded. It is a big station. Lots of space.

  We held one last genuine muster and thought we had sold all the cattle, but we kept finding a few at the waterholes and as I’d now started calling the place a Wildlife Conservancy we needed to get rid of them. I remembered that Palmenter had used to take hunters out after the imports and I wondered if we could add that to our activities, so I put a few feelers out to gun clubs in Darwin to gauge the interest. As you’d expect it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Palmenter must have had some private arrangement with his cowboys who I had no desire to meet again, so for now it became Simms’ job.

  Simms would bring back fresh meat and whenever he did there was a free barbecue at the homestead. Cookie was in his element. He had rigged up a bell and would make fresh damper, ring the bell as the damper came hot from the camp oven. Tourists loved it. I bought some guitars and there was always someone who could play.

  About the only thing I didn’t get rid of was his name. Palmenter Wildlife Conservancy. I’d have liked to get rid of that too but supposedly Palmenter was alive calling the shots from somewhere and I was only his manager. You change what you can, forget the rest.

  Newman did not come anymore. He had moved to Indonesia to live and he ran his end from there, and later he took on some other projects as well. We still used Rob and the same chopper to fly between the coast and the station but by then it was doing much more airtime in tours and joy flights that we sold to tourists. It was a ridiculous chopper for mustering anyway and wouldn’t have fooled anyone. For mustering you want a nimble little two-seater and this was a six-seater. Massive great thing. We could fly a group of fishermen into the camps and the families would often come to the station. After the fishermen’s week of man-time, the women and kids would be flown to join them and it worked so well. We set up some walks and stuff, wildlife and interpretive signs, printed guides and signposted the way. That was both on the coast and around the station. You have to give people things to do.