Snowing in Bali

by Kathryn Bonella

  I think, ‘Shit, he’s gonna take out a gun.’

  Really, you thought that?

  Yeah, because it was my first time. In those first moments I was also thinking maybe there is someone else hiding in the toilet.

  Rafael was watching, wary, scrutinising the buyer, who was about 40 years old, clean-cut and handsome. He looked like a boss – no tattoos, stylishly dressed in jeans, Polo shirt and leather shoes, with a Rolex on his wrist. Out of his briefcase he took not a gun, but a sharp knife, using it to slice open the plastic bag, then sniff a bit of coke off its shiny blade. His mouth twitched and his eyes glistened. Rafael tried to read him, still feeling anxious.

  My thoughts were going crazy, because I was really looking at the guy, really suspicious. I could see he works out at the gym, a very strong guy, and I was thinking it would be hard to fight with him, because he’s bigger than me, stronger.

  Rafael picked up a tiny rock, gesturing he wanted to use some. ‘You mind?’ he asked. It would help to settle his nerves. ‘No problem,’ the buyer replied. Rafael sniffed a little off his fingertips, instantly feeling better.

  The buyer was now focused on testing the quality of the cocaine.

  He was organised. He had all the equipment in his briefcase, like the lighter and spoon. He put some bicarbonate soda and coke on the spoon, flicked the lighter, fried the shit, and then he agrees: ‘Okay, it’s good. I want to take it all. How much you have?’ I say, ‘I have three more.’ ‘Okay, give me two days to get the money.’

  After spooning the coke onto a digital scale to check it for correct weight, the buyer tipped the powder into three plastic zip lock bags, slid his fingers along the top of each, and placed them one by one in his briefcase. Then he snapped shut the lid and locks, and re-scrambled the combinations. ‘Okay, let’s go to the bedroom,’ he said, breaking the silence.

  Rafael trailed him out of the living room and into the bedroom. The Australian had clearly splashed out on one of the InterContinental’s plush suites, which Rafael would soon discover was often the genteel way of big cocaine transactions. It had stunning ocean views, but Rafael didn’t notice. His eyes flew to the four big piles of crisp $100 notes sitting on the bed – each $10,000. The buyer apologised that the last $8000 would be paid in Indonesian rupiah.

  It was the first time I see bunches, like nice bunches, four together. I was like, ‘Wow!’

  Rafael picked up a bunch and flicked through it, checking for counterfeits or blanks. The Australian buyer sat down in an armchair, crossing his legs, telling him to take his time. But Rafael now felt he was legit and wanted to do more business, and so wouldn’t be ripping him off. ‘Thanks, but I’ll count it at home,’ he said, putting the cash into his plastic bag. They agreed to meet again in a couple of days, and Rafael left.

  Two days later, it was like déjà vu. Rafael watched the Australian do precisely the same adept moves, down to snapping shut the briefcase and scrambling the locks. The one signi­ficant difference was that this time the bed was dressed with 14 bunches of cash.

  *

  Two months after the first rendezvous, the Australian surfer phoned saying he was again ready to deal. Rafael was keen to deliver all the way to Sydney’s northern beaches this time, so he’d make more than $120,000 a kilo, the highest price anywhere on the planet. This was the reward for penetrating Australia’s rigorous borders – and made it the number one global target for all drug traffickers.

  A gram of cocaine in Australia costs between $200 to $500. In the United States, a gram sells for as little as $100.

  – Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 2010

  A ‘generational shift’ has pushed demand for cocaine to unprecedented levels, giving Australia the dubious honour of being the world’s most lucrative market for the illicit drug.

  – Daily Telegraph, 2009

  The day of the Sydney run started early. By 7 am Rafael and his Peruvian partner, Jerome, were sitting on the floor of his bungalow packing 5 kilos of cocaine, first into plastic bags, then stitching it into the lining of the surfboard bag. It was exacting work. The faintest trace of blow on the bag could excite sniffer dogs; a mere sprinkling of dust brushing from their fingertips to the bag could spell disaster. Rafael had also heard that the potent ether smell could leach through plastic after 24 hours, so it was a race to pack and fly the same day. Tonight the flight was at 11 pm. Only after the bag was tightly sealed was the horse allowed anywhere near it.

  He was a 23-year-old Hawaiian guy, ostensibly the perfect horse – well travelled with an American passport and a strong physique that gave him a surfer look, ensuring carrying surfboards wouldn’t look incongruous and create suspicion. A day earlier, Jerome had taken him shopping in Kuta to buy his clothes: Quiksilver T-shirt, jeans and skate shoes. Outfitting a horse was usual practice. They needed to look the part and it also ensured there was no trace of drugs on their clothes, given most horses were also users. When the packing was done, Rafael drove to the guy’s hotel, picked him up and took him to Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport to ensure his precious cargo safely hit the skies.

  This was the Hawaiian’s first big run. As he and Rafael walked from the car park he started feeling spooked. ‘I don’t think I can do it,’ he said, looking at the doors ahead. ‘There’s an X-ray machine.’ Rafael tried to placate him, ‘No problem, my friend, this bag is X-ray-proof. It’s easy.’ But he was now walking very slowly. Suddenly, he dropped the bag. ‘I can’t do it, I’m sorry, I can’t go.’ They were 5 metres from the doors. Rafael took a deep breath. His mind was racing. He was confident the bag would sail through customs, but the Hawaiian’s blatant fear was a classic red flag; he was sweating, almost crying, with fear in his eyes. Rafael stayed calm. He was on the brink of having hundreds of thousands of dollars within his grasp – it was just a six-hour flight away. He’d already invested $50,000. He was exhausted, but the adrenalin was surging. He had a bright idea: ‘No problem, I’ll bring the bag for you.’ Snatching it off the ground, he walked briskly towards the doors, relieved to glimpse the horse trailing him.

  I put the bag on the X-ray, I even went to look at the screen. I say, ‘Come, my friend, look, no problem,’ – and he came, looking at the screen and says, ‘Wow, man.’ . . . ‘I told you, man, this is X-ray-proof. They are not going to catch you. Fuck, just go for it. Just go out of the airport and call me, but don’t be like this again when you arrive in Sydney.’

  As a parting gesture, Rafael ruffled the horse’s excessively gelled hair, trying to make him look more waxhead and less off the set of Grease.

  ‘Man, why did you do that with your hair?’ Rafael gently mocked.

  ‘I wanted to look good,’ the horse said sheepishly.

  ‘Come on, man, you look like John Travolta with this hair. You’ve got to look like a surfer.’

  He went very happy, very easy. I say, ‘See you in Sydney, my friend.’

  Driving home, Rafael’s heart was pumping. He felt happy, excited, sure he was about to win big. He’d fluked a crazy-low price for the coke when two naïve Peruvians flew into Bali with 5 kilos stashed in their bags, aware Bali had a strong market but with no local contacts or any idea of local prices. Someone had put them in touch with Rafael and he’d snapped up the lot for a bargain $50,000. Now he was about to say abracadabra and magically turn it into more than half a million bucks. Not bad for a fledgling career.

  These guys have the best shit I’ve seen in my life. Even my friend from Peru says, ‘Fuck, this is the best in the world. Nobody – Bolivia, Colombia – they don’t have this kind of shiny shit.’ It’s from North Peru, not easy to find, very shiny. The best. Pure, pure. We call it ‘asa de mosca’ or wing of the fly. We have 5 kilos of this shit. And then we make the goal.

  ‘Woo hoo, I made it, so easy man, no sniffer dogs, nothing,’ the Hawaiian sang out as Rafael walked into his room at the Novotel Hotel in Sydney’s Darling Harbour. The horse was buzzing from relief as much as cabin fever. He hadn’t dared t
o leave the hotel room or the bag since arriving the day before.

  As planned, he’d phoned Rafael in Bali as soon as he got through customs, and Rafael had taken the first available seat to Sydney to meet him. ‘I want to do it again, man, I want to do it again,’ he kept repeating. The fear in his eyes had turned to exultant glee. Safely through, it now seemed to him that trafficking drugs was the easiest way in the world to earn $10,000.

  But for Rafael, it wasn’t yet time to celebrate. He’d been given explicit, secret-agent-style delivery instructions; take a taxi from Darling Harbour to Palm Beach – about a 55-minute drive; come alone; stop at the phone booth at the front of a café on the corner; lose the taxi; call from the booth. Arrive at sunset – the surfer will be waiting. Rafael played it to the letter with only a few minor hiccups, like a protracted argument with the taxi driver against strapping the half-million-dollar surfboard bag onto the car roof, the Spanish inquisition for the entire trip, and at the end a battle to get rid of the driver, who was hanging around for a return fare. Finally, Rafael stepped into the phone box and dialled.

  On the first ring, the buyer answered, wasting no time with pleasantries. ‘I’m here already,’ were his first words.

  Rafael looked out into the darkening night. ‘Where?’ Car headlights blinked twice across the street. ‘Fuck,’ Rafael muttered, hanging up. This guy was good.

  They drove to a nearby house, where the deal was quickly done. The guy tested the coke, then took Rafael to a bedroom for the cash. His heart skipped a beat when he saw the money. It was a beautiful payday. A white sheet spread on top of the bed was covered in bunches of $10,000, the brand spanking new Australian notes giving the room an acrid smell. There were more than 60 bunches, a lot more than if it had been in the agreed US currency. Rafael didn’t argue, although he had specifically asked for US dollars because the Aussie dollar was low and there’d be too much cash to carry.

  ‘You want to count it?’ the surfer asked.

  ‘Later, thanks.’ Rafael didn’t even look; he knew where the guy’s house was now if he’d cheated him. He just wanted to leave. So he casually stretched across the bed and grabbed a corner of the sheet, then one by one took the other corners, tying them up together in a parachute-style bag. The buyer stood uneasily watching. It was a hell of a lot of cash and seeing this young guy blithely wrapping it up in a sheet rattled him. If Rafael got into trouble in Sydney and someone discovered his sheet-load of cash, it could expose the surfer too. He advised Rafael to take half tonight, and half tomorrow.

  I say, ‘No no, I can bring it all tonight, no worries.’ ‘But you can’t go like this!’ he says to me. ‘No worries, just call me a cab. I wanna go now, the horse is waiting for me. I have to go. Ciao.’

  As soon as he got back to the Novotel, Rafael raced straight up to see the horse, who was wide awake and waiting for him. Rafael handed him a Big Mac he’d bought en route, and together they sat counting the crisp notes until sunrise. The Peruvian, Jerome, arrived the next day, counted his share and flew home with the happy horse.

  With a huge bundle of cash, the new playboy boss was primed to blow a few bunches in Sydney. He met up with a friend from Rio, who was living at Bondi Beach, and together they spent the next few weeks like rock stars, partying in five-star hotel rooms at night and surfing, sailing and hang-gliding by day. They took a car trip up the coast to Surfers Paradise, leaving in their wake happy hotel staff, thanks to Rafael’s new habit of slinging $100 tips.

  It wasn’t all play, though; Rafael spent days, with the help of his friend from Rio and a new random girlfriend, changing the cash to US dollars and using their bank accounts to transfer chunks of it to Bali. It was time-consuming. Some days, Rafael went into three or four banks, with $30,000 each time, to change it into US notes.

  *

  Standing in the bank queue one afternoon, an icy shiver ran down his spine. He sensed being watched. He discreetly looked around. For the first time, he noticed all the tiny CCTV cameras. Eyes were on him everywhere. But he quickly shook off the feeling; Lady Luck was on his side, for now.

  When I come back to Bali, I become a monster, because I get really rich. Fuck, everyone who comes with coke to Bali, they come to me. There were fucking so many people, man, sometimes I have to make a line. Wait, you know next week, I will sell yours, now I’m busy. Was crazy time, so much coke everywhere . . . everywhere I go, ‘Help me, Rafael, help me, I have 2 kilos.’ I become the man who can fix, sell, you know.

  – Rafael

  CHAPTER THREE

  SNIFF, DRINK, LIVE

  You sniff, you drink, you live.

  – Andre, drug dealer

  The drug business in Bali was frenetic. Alberto, a friend of Rafael’s, was acting as an agent, selling kilos of the cocaine and pills that were swamping the island. He wore disguises – wigs, hats, sunglasses – imagining himself as 007 as he sped along Bali’s potholed roads in his rented Daihatsu Feroza. He’d drive into underground car parks, and leap from one car to another to confuse possible police tails. On a job, he’d work with the world’s biggest traffickers in Bali’s top hotels. Camouflaged among tourists, he would book two or three rooms simultaneously, one to hide the drugs in, another to switch the drugs for cash.

  There was a time I could say, if you snorted coke here in Bali, there was a 50 per cent chance it would have come through my hands.

  Really?

  Yeah, we had that much here, and we had the best quality. A lot of people made millions through my hands.

  – Alberto

  Another dealer, Andre, flew into Bali on false passports, sometimes gluing back his ears to look more like a photo that didn’t much resemble him anyway. He darted around Bali on his motorbike wearing disguises – a Muslim hat or an Indian turban – checking into hotels to collect FedExed drug packages. He was one of South America’s most wanted drug bosses.

  A friend of theirs, Fabio, was fabulously rich, with a beautiful villa close to the beach. His wealth came from trafficking cocaine to Bali and then selling it in bulk to an Australian buyer or to one of the several multi-millionaire Indonesian drug bosses who worked largely with immunity in Bali, with police on their payrolls. He’d been doing it for a while; in fact, the stuff Frank De Castro Dias had been busted with embedded in his surfboards was meant for him. Fabio also ran a hip beachfront bar and restaurant, a couple of doors down from another bar owned by an Indonesian drug boss.

  You would be surprised how many businesses in Bali are built on drug money.

  – Chino, Indonesian drug boss

  Each afternoon Fabio bopped around his trendy restaurant, chatting up babes or selling tiny plastic bags of blow that he kept under the sarong he wore around his waist. It was the only thing he wore, as he flaunted a bare chest and muscled torso. He was notorious for his filthy bare feet, but it didn’t seem to diminish his pick-up prowess. Fluent in several languages, he was rarely behind the bar, usually mingling with sexy foreign girls around the tables instead. He was highly energised, fuelled by the copious quantity of cocaine he sniffed. He kept staff on their toes, often turning around during a tableside chat to shout, ‘Hey you, quick quick,’ showing off that he was the boss.

  Sweeping in with a surge of charisma and a bunch of friends at what he dubbed devil’s hour, 5 pm, was his good friend Rafael, usually wearing board shorts, no shoes and no shirt, nicely exhibiting his six-pack torso too. Together they’d sniff a few lines, and then Rafael would help him sell a bit of coke in Fabio’s pre-packed plastic baggies. He’d walk around with them in his pockets or hidden in his thick curly ponytail – for which Marco had nicknamed him ‘Hair’. Rafael would ask Fabio, ‘Can you see it?’ and Fabio would fix Rafael’s hair to better hide the bags.

  That time it was a fucking game, we were not afraid, we didn’t care.

  Because no one had gone down yet?

  Exactly. But we didn’t sell to anybody we didn’t know. If somebody just comes and says, ‘Oh, I want some coke.’ I say, �
��Fuck you, man! What are you talking about? Get away or you’re gonna get punched.’ We just sell one by one to friends; we say, ‘If you want to buy, you have to come there at sunset time; don’t try to call us at 10 pm, the pharmacy is closed.’

  – Rafael

  Further down the beach was their club.

  The hotel was our drug club. We sell everything there, we take over the place. Sometimes I organised to meet people there . . . ‘I want to have 100 grams’, ‘Okay, meet me in the club, pm.’ And then I meet there, give the coke, take the money, bye-bye. Not big deals, just small deals. Marco was dealing Lemon Juice like candy. No fear.

  – Rafael

  Sprawled on the sand in front of the club were rows of Balinese jakung fishing boats, as well as Lemon Juice boss Marco’s inflatable rubber Zodiac. He zoomed around Bali in it to avoid the choked and potholed roads. Most days he took the guys out to the best surf spots, with their five or six surfboards stacked and tied on the front. Marco, a hang-gliding professional but not a great surfer, often stayed in the boat snapping photos of the guys riding barrels. After a couple of hours, they’d pull up anchor and tear back to the club. There, Marco loved playing host, selling his Lemon Juice, standing at the barbecue with a beer in one hand, tongs in the other, cooking fish and lobsters caught that morning, while puffing on a Lemon Juice joint. All around, Balinese and westerners were smoking Lemon Juice, but it didn’t stop Marco singing out, ‘Come, come to eat,’ to random girls walking past on the beach.

  It was full of beautiful people at the club. Beautiful girls – Russians, Australians, Swedish, always some Brazilian girls – come with small bikinis, lay down, their big ass up. Everyone topless, beautiful.