No More Tomorrows

by Corby, Schapelle

  And there was an even bigger shock to come. The Australian Federal Police (AFP), Qantas and Sydney airport knew almost from day one that they had strong, compelling information that might help to back up my story. But they also realised that this piece of information was far more sinister and frightening than the issue of lax security. So they kept it quiet while feeding the media the line that they were doing all they could to help me. They knew they were sitting on dynamite. They knew that on the very same day I travelled, within minutes of my flight, airport staff had been involved in evading security in order to help move a large amount of cocaine through Sydney airport. The authorities knew that some of those airport workers we trust with our bags – and our lives – were criminals.

  It didn’t prove my innocence but it backed up my story, because it offered a highly plausible alternative scenario. But it took Qantas, the AFP and the airport months to even admit there was any problem with crime among airport workers, and only then because it came out in a Sydney court during a bail hearing. It would have been so much easier for them if I’d gone down quietly as just another guilty drug smuggler who got lucky by getting her drugs through their security. That was a lot less difficult for the public to swallow.

  Every courier, whether they are coming into Australia or whether they are going into Vietnam, going into Thailand, will say the drugs are not mine. It’s the universal excuse . . . If Schapelle Corby wasn’t a very attractive lady, the reaction might have been quite different.

  Mick Keelty, Federal Police Commissioner,

  Sydney Morning Herald, 12 May 2005

  Well, thanks for the compliment, Mr Keelty!

  From early on, Commissioner Keelty threw regular comments to the press about my case. Usually his comments were damaging, often wrong, and never helpful.

  I was a fly in the ointment. Apart from scaring people with my story, I was putting Australia’s busiest international airport in the firing line. Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport had managed to keep its serious level of crime quiet until my boogie-board story hit the news, as there had never been much interest in it before. But suddenly it was dinner-party conversation – or so thousands of people who’ve written and visited me have said. It’s been a while since I was at a dinner party myself.

  I know that plenty of news about crime at Sydney airport has come out since – people send me clippings all the time. One showed just how bad the situation had become: a New South Wales Government report was written in early 2003 by a high-ranking NSW policeman, but it was kept secret for two years. It found its way into the press a month after my case had been heard.

  The underlying theme of this paper is reflected in my knowledge that our airport in Sydney has been infiltrated by organised criminals, is susceptible to terrorist activity and is a haven for criminals, criminal networks and global organised crime. I know this because every police agency directly involved in airport policing I have visited over the past four years accepts it as fact.

  This document will demonstrate that we have closed our eyes and crossed our fingers. To date we have either been lucky or don’t even know what is going on.

  Detective Chief Inspector Jason Breton,

  report to the NSW Premier’s Department, 2003

  There were bigger agendas than mine at stake from the start.

  My luck was running no better in Bali. They’d caught a drug smuggler red-handed, and the Balinese police were not interested in any further investigation. The drugs were in my bag: case closed. They would connive to get the second piece of evidence they required to convict me, but it wouldn’t involve any investigation.

  There was no lab testing for fingerprints. No testing for the origin of the marijuana or its THC level, which, I found out, is how you tell its strength and therefore how valuable it is. There’d been no checking of the other bags in my name for evidence, and there was no questioning of Merc and Wayan – who were supposedly going to sell the marijuana for me. There was no search of their house or car, no search of my house in Australia either. They had obviously never watched CSI.

  There was no investigation into the fact that the plastic bag had been cleanly sliced open by the time it reached the customs counter with me (which is why I could smell the stuff soon after opening my boogie-board bag). In fact, the marijuana was in two bags, one containing the other, each with blue zips at one end. It was packed so that the zips were at opposite ends, and so for the marijuana to be exposed at one end of the double covering, the zip of the outer bag was open and the inside bag had to have been cut.

  Lily and Vasu didn’t tell me about there being a second bag until sometime in December. ‘Well, let’s fingerprint that!’ was my shocked response. They realised there were two bags after they’d been to Australia to search for space bags with two vacuum plugs but could only find them with one.

  Why hadn’t I been told this earlier? Why hadn’t anyone pushed for fingerprints? Any chance of having the first bag fingerprinted had vanished that Friday night when everyone had frantically touched it. Now there was a second chance, as it was highly likely that none of the prying hands had actually touched the outside surface of this inner bag. We pushed and pushed for them to fingerprint, but the police refused.

  It was up to me to formally request that the Indonesian Police test the marijuana for its origin and THC content and, although I was a bit worried about whether they would be done properly and accurately, I confirmed to the Australian Consulate on 3 December 2004 that I would like the tests done. I had been told that the AFP couldn’t get involved in the testing without a formal request coming through the Indonesian authorities. I had no idea what the tests would discover, but I was innocent and so I had to try everything. I signed a piece of paper to give my permission, but it didn’t happen, because the Bali police refused to do it.

  Vasu was so outraged that he illegally acquired a sample of the marijuana to try to get it independently tested. I was a bit pissed off when I found out, as being accused of stealing evidence was the last thing I needed, and any test results would not have been accepted in court anyway. Of course, he didn’t find anyone of any authority in Australia prepared to carry out tests on a stolen sample, even though he’d been prepared to risk flying into Australia with it – or so he told a couple of journalists.

  Despite Lily’s requests, we were never shown any CCTV vision from cameras directly above the customs counter at Denpasar airport, which could have proven that I willingly opened my bag.

  Mum received a phone call at home from the AFP, asking her about the mobile phone I’d given to the Bali police on that first night. It was registered in the name of Rosleigh Rose. They must have thought they’d cottoned on to something – maybe she was my drug supplier?

  ‘Rosleigh Rose?’ they asked Mum when she picked up the phone.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you give Schapelle Corby a phone?’

  ‘Well, because I’m her mum. I’m allowed to give her a bloody phone!’

  After a surprisingly long wait, I’d had blood and urine tests – which came out clear, of course – and I got a certificate from the Australian Police stating that I did not have a criminal record.

  So, with no positive test results, no signed confession and no known association with drugs, the Bali police did not have any quick hit of secondary evidence on me. And as they had no interest in putting any effort into a real investigation, they had another shot at setting me up instead.

  In early November, almost four weeks after I was arrested, a friend, her two little kids, Mum, Merc and Lily were visiting me in the upstairs office at Polda. When three of them left the room to talk to the head of police, leaving my friend and the kids with me, something sinister happened that gave me nightmares for weeks.

  ‘Mummy, what’s this?’ The little boy was holding up a small plastic bag filled with white powder and some pills.

  My friend leapt up, furiously hitting it out of the boy’s hands and flinging it underneath a table. It w
as scary and very weird.

  We sat there for a moment in shock, not knowing what the hell to do. I thought, Oh no, they’re trying to set us up for something else.

  As the bag sat on the floor where it had been flung, I noticed the policeman sitting at his computer across from us quietly taking it all in, occasionally smirking and giving us sly looks.

  We were trembling in fright, shocked and unsure what to do. It suddenly struck me that Mum had been sitting on the chair where the bag had been found, so they could have been trying to set her up, to make it look like she was bringing her drug-addict daughter some supplies.

  When Merc walked back in, we probably looked like ghosts. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked us both.

  In frantic whispers, we told her what had just happened, and she went back out to get Lily. Soon, they were both on their hands and knees searching for the packet of drugs as the room started to fill up with policemen. Bingo, Lily found it. She stood up. Then, holding up the incriminating little bag, she let them have it, yelling furiously in Indonesian, though the words of her tirade were lost on the rest of us.

  The room erupted. The police were arguing among themselves, pointing at the bag, pointing at each other.

  After a minute or two, the policeman who had been sitting behind his computer arrogantly pushed his chair back and stood up slowly, saying, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah!’ He took the bag from Lily, mumbling that it had fallen from ‘the evidence cupboard’, which was on the other side of the room from where it was found. He then simply popped it up into the cupboard and sat back down – none of the police bothered asking us any questions. Their little stunt hadn’t worked, but it had scared the hell out of us.

  We all became a little bit paranoid after that, as it showed that these people really did want to send me to jail and would clearly do whatever it took. Merc and Wayan were even warned by a policeman who was a friend of Wayan’s family to be careful of drugs being planted in their car. They lived in fear of it for months, parking their vehicle well away from their house and rarely using it, but always searching it first when they did.

  Merc and Wayan lived with hurtful rumours from day one – that they were drug dealers who were going to sell the marijuana through Wayan’s surf shop. To find drugs on them would have been perfect secondary evidence for the police. Merc, Wayan and his two younger sisters were the only people I knew in Bali, so I guess that’s why the rumours started. But Bali is a small island, and the police knew who dealt drugs and who didn’t; and they definitely knew my sister and her sweet-natured, quiet husband were not drug dealers. Neither of them was ever questioned, not once. Wayan didn’t even have a surf shop, and they had not lived in Bali for six years. To anyone who knows my sister and her husband, the idea of them being drug dealers would be laughable if it wasn’t so disgusting and hurtful.

  Absolutely nothing was going my way. And Merc and I started having doubts about Lily and Vasu, too. They were fighting hard for evidence, but we’d realised by now that Lily wasn’t on the consulate list of recommended lawyers, she’d never fought a drug case in court or been lead counsel in court. As for Vasu, he wasn’t actually a lawyer at all. He and Lily had been very good friends for years, even wearing matching rings, but he had never worked on a legal case with her before this. But we’d already paid them an advance of US$6,000, which we’d scrambled to pull together from everyone’s spending money, so we couldn’t afford to switch to a new legal team.

  Apart from being disappointed that her credentials were hopeless, I was upset to find out that Lily had stalled the police on doing my blood and urine tests. Thinking it should have been done on or close to the day of my arrest, I asked her in the car when we were finally en route to Polda’s police hospital: ‘Why have they taken so long to do this, Lily?’

  ‘I waited to be sure your blood is clean.’

  ‘What are you talking about? Of course it is!’ I was furious with her. Of course I was clean, but even my own lawyer was doubting me.

  Lily also started crying regularly, which worried me. She was meant to be my tough lawyer. The first time was about a week after I signed her up, when I sadly joked that I’d been picked up by the wrong airport bus. She also told me that she cried whenever she was out having a cup of coffee in a café, watching foreigners on holiday – young women my age out shopping, carefree, with friends, doing normal things. She’d imagine where I was and what was happening, and start to cry, thinking Schapelle should’ve been out in the mall just like them. She’d tell me this with a tear in her eye and I’d reply, ‘Well, you’d better work hard so I can!’ She cried so often that I regularly ended up comforting her and giving her a hug, but at the same time thinking to myself, Just do your goddamn job.

  Vasu, on the other hand, was becoming increasingly rude and belligerent, often yelling at Merc and me. Many times when I hesitated to make a decision about something, or questioned him, he would say, ‘I’ll wash my hands of you, Schapelle, I’ll wash my hands.’ I promised myself that the next time he said this, I would hand him a bar of soap.

  Vasu repeatedly asked Merc for dollars to organise someone to help test the marijuana for the Bali police. The day after she gave him the money, the decision not to test it was made by the police, but despite her requests the money was never returned to her.

  Merc and I felt alone and frightened, not sure who to trust or turn to. I needed to get out of here and go home to my life. I needed my luck to change. I needed evidence. Without evidence to fight my case, my lawyers only had doubt to fire at the court. It was strong doubt, admittedly, because if you just scratched the surface, it was perfectly and logically obvious I did not do this.

  First, I’d assumed that security at our airports was watertight, all bags were scanned, cameras kept an eye out twenty-four/seven, and brilliant, sophisticated technology lurked everywhere. So why would I even think of trying my luck at moving 4.2 kilograms of drugs past such security? Apart from the fact that I respect the law, I would never risk it. Who the hell would?

  And if I had been stupid enough to risk it, surely I would have at least flown directly from Brisbane to Bali to minimise that risk?

  Not only that, but I’d hardly have put the dope in see-through plastic bags sitting blatantly on top of my boogie board, with my name and address written clearly on the outside, without at least bothering to put a lock on the whole package. If I had taken this crazy, stupid risk, why wouldn’t I have put it deep inside my suitcase among my clothes, in an attempt to hide it? It would easily have fitted, as the bag would have been significantly smaller before the vacuum seal had been broken. It would have been a perfect fit in any bag.

  Also, I would have known that the death penalty lurked at the other end of the flight. And all this risk for what? What the hell was my motive?

  I don’t know the true value of the dope here or in Australia. No one does, as the THC was never tested. Some say it’s worth more in Bali, while others argue the opposite. But even if it was worth more in Bali, it would have been a marginal profit. So why would I risk death or life in jail? Why?

  And where and how was I going to sell it? The only people I knew well on the island were certainly no drug dealers – the cops would’ve been banging on their door immediately if they were.

  My lawyers and my mum were trying every avenue and beating down all doors in search of evidence. This evidence could indisputably prove my guilt or my innocence. I knew which one it would be. Why else did I fight so hard to find it? If I was guilty, the discovery of that evidence would have meant I was signing my own death warrant or kissing years of my life goodbye. Yet there I was, wanting to find that evidence more than anything else in the whole world.

  The Bali police did not find anything to supplement the dope being found in my bag – not that they really looked. But no one could have found evidence to prove the marijuana in the bag was mine . . . because that evidence simply doesn’t exist. I have never had anything to do with drugs. I had clean blood tests, clean ur
ine tests and a clean criminal record. The most trouble I’d ever been in was getting a ticket for going eight kilometres over the speed limit.

  I lived in hope that my luck would change, that something stronger than doubt would be found. Maybe someone who knew the truth and just couldn’t sleep in bed at night would finally speak out.

  ‘I do not fear the future. I am an optimist. Whatever happens will be for the best.’ I read this quote in a magazine interview with Imran Khan while I sat in my cell at Polda. It resonated with me and I wrote it down because I had to believe it, too. There was no other way.

  9

  Hotel Kerobokan

  CHECKING IN TO KEROBOKAN PRISON WAS LIKE CHECKING in to a very bad hotel – a hotel where the doorman might be a killer, the smiling hosts heroin addicts and the guests anything from illegal card players to bloodthirsty, mass-murdering terrorists.

  But tragically, I was looking forward to it. That’s how low my life had sunk. Merc had even been pushing for it. My aching limbs were screaming to be stretched, and I badly needed fresh air and sunlight to revive my spirit. Thirty-six days cramped in Polda had tortured my body and soul to breaking point. Hotel Kerobokan had grass, palm trees and even a tennis court: that part would read OK in a cheap holiday brochure!

  First impressions weren’t too bad. There was a shabby courtyard just inside the front door, with a few trees, bits of scruffy grass and a murky pond. Its backdrop was an ugly but colourfully painted cement wall. Beyond that, the grounds looked huge. It was no luxury resort but definitely a star up from a concrete box.