How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling

by Martin Chambers

  That sleepless night had come to me again when Ingrid and Sally and I saw the footage of that asylum boat smashing into the cliffs of Christmas Island.

  ‘How can your country let that happen?’ demanded Ingrid. I had no answer.

  One time I had been standing on the verandah watching the arrival of another bewildered group. Charles and Simms were standing near the chopper directing them towards the canteen. Or rather, Charles was motioning them and Simms was standing there, watching. Palmenter yelled at Simms to do something, that he wasn’t paying him to stand around gawking.

  ‘There are only two types of people in this world, Son,’ Palmenter said as he turned to me. ‘The leaders, those who take charge and decide what is going to happen, where they want to be; and the rest. The followers. It’s the leaders who will get on in this life.’

  He was referring to Simms and Charles, and by implication me, but at that time I couldn’t help thinking about the refugees. Surely of us all they were the ones who had done most to take possession of their own lives? That came back to me in my swag that night, and later when I was driving with Ingrid and Sally, feeling good about having found Lucy’s family a place to stay and given them the chance to find some work.

  ‘You haven’t done a thing,’ Ingrid said. ‘You have left them in a strange city where they don’t speak the language. They can only get low-paid menial work. They will be ripped off by everybody. You have condemned them to a life of poverty and fear.’

  Of course I hadn’t told the whole story, I had said the good bits, the bits that made me look good. I said I had found these refugees wandering aimlessly on our station and instead of handing them in I had taken them to the city. I made myself out to be the hero, but Ingrid ripped into me. They both did.

  ‘You are the same as everyone. You half help. You help people just enough so you can feel good about yourself, but no more than that. Half help,’ she repeated.

  ‘Well, what would you do?’

  ‘For a start, teach them English,’ she said.

  I was going to tell her that I tried, but she would have seen right through me same as she saw through me when I tried to impress her and Sally with my charity.

  ‘Half tried,’ she would say.

  Half help. I could have pointed out that these people were illegal in our country and that I could hardly set up a school for them but I knew I couldn’t win any argument and I risked saying too much if I tried. So it’s funny that later I did just that, set up a school and Ingrid was the teacher but at no point can I say I directly decided to do it. It certainly wasn’t part of some long-term plan.

  In Mumbai after my father died I was definitely in charge and I had gone back to the clinic to confront the doctor who had botched the operation. I wanted answers.

  When Dad died I was angry. At the doctor. At the clinic. At Newman for helping me, at the Australian doctors who didn’t do a thing. At the officials who made it so complicated to bring a body back. There was I bringing live bodies into Australia and I couldn’t even bring in my father. I wanted someone to blame, and when I realised there was no one to blame I got angry at myself and in my anger determined to shut the clinic down so that no one else would have to go through what I went through.

  At the funeral my mother hugged me and told me it wasn’t my fault, that at least I gave him a chance, but I flew back to Mumbai full of anger. During one of the weeks of the MBA workshops – I did the MBA by correspondence but twice a year for a fortnight we had to live in and attend group workshops – we played this game where you push against someone and they can’t help but push back. Well, as I flew into Mumbai full of anger it was as if the world was pushing back at me. Outside the airport, on the crowded roads, sitting in the back of the taxi looking out at slums and poverty, beggars, the crowds outside the hospital. The whole world seemed to consist of struggle and poverty. By the time I got to the hospital I was somewhat less angry and as I sat waiting to see the doctor I saw how difficult things were for them. It was unbelievably busy. The power went off frequently. People arrived all the time, some so weak they could barely walk, others being carried or pushed on trolleys or makeshift wheelchairs. I watched the nurses treat injuries in the corridor opposite where I sat, washing out wounds and then selecting from a pile of clean rags torn into strips for bandages. There were no medicines, no antibiotics. By the time the doctor came to see me I wondered what right I’d had to jump this queue with my father. Even now to demand the doctor take some of his time to see me suddenly seemed unreasonable. Why did I expect that here they could do what the Australian system couldn’t, and perform transplant surgery to heal a dying man?

  The doctor was terrific. He remembered me and that in itself was remarkable. He sat with me in the corridor opposite the nurses who carried on treating patients. There was nowhere else to go, he didn’t have an office and there was no staff room or private consulting room and I remembered the first time we met, when I stood at the entrance with him and we discussed in halting English what might be done for my father. He had said he could find a donor kidney, people were dying too often in his hospital. I had thought he was being meek in the discussion of money, now I realised it was that he was full of weariness and sorrow for the necessity of it. And he grieved for my father, for all his patients, for all the world.

  ‘Why do you think the world is like this?’ he asked me in faltering voice full of tiredness and curiosity, as if he and I were on the outside looking in and that all too soon we would be gone from it all. We were alien visitors and this was our chance to learn the truth.

  It was a question that took me by surprise. He did not defend his surgery or the hospital or make excuses. What had happened had happened. Why was the world like this? I knew then that it was not his fault, he had tried his best and it was not enough and it was for him an all too common occurrence but yet still it hurt him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I wanted to cry. What right did I have to cry?

  We sat together amid the bustle, he leaning back with his eyes closed and me realising that in this place you paid what you could and that got you into the front of the queue, but once there everyone was equal. They all tried their very best.

  Later, back home, Spanner had no hesitation agreeing to send medicines there. I had paid ten thousand for Dad’s surgery and now I wanted to send a loaded boat back up the line, we could carry about a hundred thousand worth of drugs and bandages and equipment and perhaps it was sort of guilt money, but if you think too much about your motivation for doing things you never do anything at all.

  It was Newman who said no.

  ‘A hundred grand can go so much further if you let them spend it. Pay Aussie prices and you get nothing. Give them money. We can make sure it gets to the right people, smuggle it in so it doesn’t get sucked up by all the layers of corrupt officials.’

  He was right, but of course we couldn’t send money all the way to Mumbai in a brown paper bag, so Newman agreed to take it himself. That was the first of many regular deliveries he did and so perhaps it is true to say that was the start of it all. I would get the notes together – exchanging the Aussie notes at the bank in Darwin on one of my visits – and seal them into a plastic bag and wrap them in brown paper lunch bags, so in emails we called them lunch. Later, for different amounts, we had dinner bags and breakfast, morning tea, afternoon tea and snacks. I’d email Newman something like ‘I have morning tea packed for Barry.’ Barry was our code for a clinic in Somalia. Each place had its own name. ‘Dinner for Arnold is ready.’ The prosecutor tried to make it sound bad that we had all these secret messages but of course we couldn’t say in an email what we were doing. That backfired on him because of course my lawyers could then point out that all this money was going to people in need. I was not some ruthless illegal businessman but someone who was giving back.

  I knew Spanner and Newman would agree to fund the clinic because they had been so enthusiastic the first time. That was when I got back from India af
ter the first trip there.

  When I was in Mumbai with Sid and trying to get Dad a new kidney, I bought all twenty-three of the maimed boys in the slave market. Five hundred dollars each. I now owned twenty-three slaves. We shifted them all the way from Mumbai to Indonesia by truck and then into Australia by boat. At the station we trained them in some things we thought might be useful. Funny, because the one with one leg, he became our best bike mechanic. Spanner loved him, said he was a genius. Spanner made him a special bike, balanced so he could ride with one leg. Cookie took on two of the blind ones and they became cooks. Cookie said they had the most amazing sense of smell. We taught them all first aid in our own clinic in the homestead. I had employed a nurse and we used the room that Margaret had set up for inspecting the girls. With so many people coming through there was always someone who needed treatment. If there was a refugee who showed a bit of interest or who had some first aid skill we’d get them to help in the clinic. Some of the refugees were smart but they had never had the opportunity to learn. After we taught them many agreed to return home.

  The boys were the first ones who agreed to go home. We taught all of them English and then the girls taught them how to teach, and they agreed to go back to India where they could now make a living. I have twenty-three slaves living free in India.

  You see, Spanner and I had talked about it with Newman and decided the best long-term way to help was to train the locals. Someone who belonged, not an outsider. Years ago Zahra had said she would be going back after she earned enough and I had briefly wondered at taking people both ways. Now we were doing it. Sure, the boats were full coming in and half full going out, but it was happening. We didn’t charge for the return trip.

  We were charging five thousand for each passenger, so each trip was bringing in over a hundred grand. People could do our lessons, learn English or mechanics or cooking, driving the tour bus or cleaning or housework and maintenance, all sorts of jobs that we could train them for. They could pay off the cost of the course by working for a while, then if they wanted they could head to the city, and when they had saved enough or for whatever reason they could come back and we would take them on the return trip for free.

  In a way it was Palmenter who was doing all this because he was the one who had paid for the station. All I had to do was make sure some of the money went into the bank each month to keep them happy. And the bank was happy, because for all they knew we had turned Palmenter Station into a thriving tourism destination.

  I guess it was about a year after Spanner had moved to the coast that we decided to get rid of all the cattle. We no longer ran musters but every so often one of the former muster crew would visit, tell us the cattle were going wild or that such and such bore was dry. I wondered if it was a security risk to have them coming and going while we ran so many more imports. They hadn’t been a problem in the past, but Palmenter had bribed them with free beer, girls, and the false promise of money. But to sell the cattle would be an admission to ourselves that we were not leaving, that we had taken control of the station and intended to continue running it. I had to discuss it with Spanner.

  Ingrid and I caught a chopper ride to the coast and we sat with Spanner and a group of fishermen who had returned from a day on the water. Two large fish were barbecuing on an open fire and one of the tourists was rolling up dough balls to cook as damper.

  ‘What’s up?’ Spanner said.

  ‘I think we should sell all the cattle. They cost us money to muster each time and a wildlife conservancy shouldn’t have cattle.’

  I thought it was best with Spanner to get right to the point and discussing it in front of others was fine. The fishermen would overhear two businessmen planning their legitimate business.

  ‘Sure,’ Spanner said. ‘You want a beer?’

  I started laughing.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I thought it might be a big deal. You know, what with everything. That you’d want to discuss it.’

  ‘Nah. Dead loss those cattle. And what the fuck with mustering all the time? As if everyone don’t already know.’ He handed me a beer. ‘Tourism, that where it’s at.’

  He waved his hand to include the others in the conversation and they nodded agreement. Spanner was so relaxed, so comfortable, so happy.

  ‘Awesome day out,’ one of them said. The others agreed. Superb fishing. Brilliant guide. Great campsite.

  ‘I thought you’d be against it.’

  ‘Nah. Talk to Charles, he knows someone who can butcher onsite. Better than trucking them to Darwin and flooding the market. Get bugger all for them that way.’

  ‘You’ve already discussed it?’

  ‘Sure. Newman says we could take the meat, cryovac it and send it up to Indo.’

  ‘Newman too?’

  ‘Yeah. Of course.’

  ‘Do they know about...?’

  What else had they discussed? And when? How long ago?

  He looked at me. ‘Of course not.’

  Sometimes you think you are in charge only to discover that you are simply the fool at the top, that all the decisions are already made long before you get to them. But then, that is what good management is, to notice what people on the ground are saying, those doing the work, they are the ones who know what is going on and a good manager listens to them because long before you knew there was a problem they will be discussing it and having all the good ideas too. Your staff are always ahead of you. Someone wrote a book about it. Management by walking around.

  I had flown up to the coast expecting to have a hard time of it and Spanner had reached the conclusion before me. He had talked with Charles and Newman and yet none of them had said anything to me. That was one moment I knew I was in charge. They were waiting for me to make a decision, to set the direction. Palmenter’s words came back to me.

  ‘There are two types of people in this world. Which one are you, Son?’

  For the final muster we brought in the mobile abattoir. They do everything on-site right down to packing and freezing. We shipped the meat out, back up our import lines and it was brilliant, it gave us legitimacy and a reason for all those chopper flights and boats and we took the meat out to the islands and distributed it for free to remote and poor villages. On the books, it looked like we were selling it but that was the people-smuggling money coming in, suddenly I had a legitimate way to account for all that cash. If we had ever been investigated, though, we were selling each of the cattle several times over. I’ve never told anyone that before.

  I would have liked to be able to send some of the meat further, into Africa, but of course the further your send it the more you lose control. Even in Indonesia unscrupulous people were selling it and making a lot of money out of our charity and you can be pretty sure none of it would have made it to the needy in Africa. That, and the problem of keeping it refrigerated.

  What we did manage to send, though, was bicycles. Hundreds of them. All the way back to villages in Africa. We exported all the second-hand bikes Charles gathered on his trips to the city. We repaired them, and then sent them up on our boats. We found local charities we could trust in cities and towns and they distributed the bikes into smaller and more out of the way places. For many semi-rural people there is only one well for drinking water and this is kilometres from the houses. Usually it is even longer to school. A bike is a simple and reliable way to travel and it saves some of these people so much time and energy. I like to think we have helped someone live a better life because they can get around that little bit easier. I know we did, because people started complaining that their bikes broke down and asking us for another one. Newman discovered it was usually a flat tyre or a buckled rim. So from then on we sent each bike with its own pump and repair kit.

  So bicycles was the second thing we did. Newman looked after the overseas part of that. He’s still doing it, although it has been a lot harder recently with no money coming in. In emails we called him the lunchman, and when the prosecutor tried to use tha
t as a criticism of me my lawyer got up and told them all about the hospital clinics in Mumbai and Africa.

  You can make all the plans you like in this world but nothing will ever go as you think, and the more I think about that the more I think you have to be always ready to jump in the direction life is taking you. Spanner, Newman, Charles, even Simms. Cookie. We were all just doing what we thought was right. I don’t consider the people smuggling to be wrong. It is illegal, but that’s all. Killing people, no matter how rotten they are, that is wrong. I pleaded guilty to the murder of Palmenter and they also found me guilty of the people smuggling but the sentences are concurrent. I’m the one in jail so you might think that is justice, but I’m the lucky one.

  The film studio want to make a movie, but of course I can’t sell the story or make any money out of the movie because it’s called proceeds of crime. The lawyers want to fight that in court but I did a deal.

  Here am I, star in my own movie. Murderer, businessman, the Mr Big of People Smuggling, and all I ever wanted to do was get a few dollars so I could rent a place closer to university, graduate and then travel or go surfing on the weekends. The deal is five million dollars for the rights, plus ongoing royalties. Five million isn’t much but the royalties will flow for as long as the movie runs and worldwide that might be for years. I don’t get any of it, it goes to the charity and my mum and Newman will administer it. It will be enough to keep the charity running.

  As well as the clinic in Mumbai there is also a yearly aid flight; the money will pay for the plane and the crew and the fuel. We will fill the plane with food and clothing collected from people, at schools, sporting clubs, through the Red Cross and other charities. Humans are humans and always somewhere they will be being nasty to each other and the weak will be fleeing the oppressors. Or they will be looking for something to eat. Might be natural disaster or because some war lord sets fire to the fields so people starve. Crops fail not because these people who have been living off the land for centuries suddenly forgot how to farm. If it doesn’t rain, the crops won’t grow, and there is no food. It has probably been happening forever, although maybe like they say it is getting worse with global warming. But whatever the reason, if we have excess we should share it with those in need.