Bali 9: The Untold Story (3 page)

K
nock, knock, knock.

Police stood outside room 136 of the Melasti Beach Bungalows, waiting for the door to open. It was getting late, and five young Australians were already undergoing questioning less than 5 kilometres away. But the plain-clothes officers assigned to this job were not yet finished. Just two minutes before, the rest of their targets in this operation had pulled up outside the Melasti in a taxi. Now, as the officers stormed into the reception area, they found that their targets had gone.

The officers headed straight for the check-in counter, demanding to know about the ‘black man’ who had just checked in. For the police who had filled their days following him, Myuran Sukumaran didn’t even have a name. He wasn’t in the intelligence reports given to them by the Australian Federal Police, and
they didn’t otherwise know who he was. But he was important—they were sure of that. And they were on orders now: it was time to act.

Ten minutes later, another four police arrived. For 45-year-old Rai Sidan, the chief of security at the hotel for the last five years, it was the most dramatic thing to have happened there so far. He listened to the police and their demands—they wanted to be taken to the room which had just been let to Sukumaran and his friends. These people were drug suspects, he was told. Sidan didn’t hesitate, taking the police straight to room 136.

Knock, knock, knock.

Someone opened the door. Sukumaran and his friends were sitting around, smoking. Nothing special.

‘We are the police,’ one officer said, showing his badge. ‘Sit down. We have information you bring heroin.’ The word ‘police’ caught the attention of the young men. The expressions on their faces changed. Slowly at first—and then completely. Everyone was quiet. Silent, in fact. Sidan looked at them: Myuran Sukumaran, the black man whom police still could not identify by name; Matthew Norman, who was on the original list sent over by the Australian Federal Police, as was Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen; and Si Yi Chen, the lad from Doonside in Sydney. But there was no doubt where the terror struck first: Matthew Norman, the eighteen-year-old, was backed into a corner like a frightened child, cringeing. A little boy trying to play the role of a man.

April 17, 2005 was Myuran Sukumaran’s twenty-fourth birthday. Until a few moments before he was preparing to celebrate another year. The four in the room had been planning to head out on the town a little later on to celebrate. At least, that’s what they would claim later. But they didn’t get that far, so no one really knows.

The quartet had moved out of the Adhi Dharma Hotel soon after the rest of their contingent had headed for Bali’s international airport. And some time after 10 p.m.—close to 10.40 p.m., perhaps—they’d checked into a room here, at the Melasti Beach Bungalows in the beating heart of bustling Kuta. They didn’t have a booking. They just arrived in a taxi and asked whether a room was available. There was nothing unusual about that; tourists wanting to savour a few more days of their Indonesian holiday did it all the time. And the Melasti’s not a bad place to stay—it’s close to everything, just a stone’s throw from Kuta square and the shops, and right on the main road. Its prices are fairly reasonable too—not that Sukumaran and his friends seemed too worried about that. For US$50 a night they could share a comfortable, air-conditioned room with a television. There was a swimming pool nearby, the ambience of the area obviously Balinese. A small Hindu temple, where staff members routinely place their offerings to the gods, was just outside room 136. What the young men didn’t know was that every movement they made had been watched.

Ida Bagus Dalem didn’t know that, though he had been working on the front desk when the Australians arrived. He’d noticed nothing out of place, odd or suspicious about the young men opting to rent room 136 on the ground floor, adjacent to the temple. They had arrived in two taxis—three men in one taxi and one in the other. The only unusual aspect—although Dalem barely thought about it at the time—was that they said that not all of them intended sleeping there; they just wanted to keep their bags inside. But tourists had all sorts of requests and this one didn’t strike Dalem as being as strange as some he had received.

Sukumaran told Dalem that he would check out again at 6 a.m. the next day. The room was booked in Si Yi Chen’s name. Because there were only two beds, they requested a third fold-up bed. Five minutes later, they were registered. They seemed calm, accepting the traditional welcome drink offered at all Balinese hotels upon check-in. They must have felt confident too: despite the incriminating contents of their suitcase, they agreed to the bellboy carrying some of their luggage to their room.

Police were interested in the contents of the group’s suitcases and bags, which were still unopened as they had just arrived in the room. And when police opened them on the Australians’ behalf, they felt they had struck gold.

How would four young men explain away this paraphernalia? Inside the blue and black rucksack,
wrapped in newspaper, were two plastic bags containing 334.26 grams of heroin and another plastic bag of conventional pepper powder. Its smell was strong; Sidan started sneezing. Black and pink rubber gloves, light brown-coloured Leukoplast adhesive tape, a waist support belt, screwdrivers, seven rolls of yellow adhesive tape, five of white plus three rolls of light brown-coloured cloth adhesive tape, along with seven brown-coloured rolls and one white roll. It was all there. Right in front of them.

Sukumaran quickly denied ownership of the bag. In fact, no one wanted to claim it. ‘It’s not mine’—the mantra was repeated over and over. And over. Police insisted to Sukumaran that it must be his. He insisted back that he knew nothing about it. Angry and argumentative, Sukumaran sat in a chair, his pose arrogant. He complained about police taking his picture and documenting everything on film. One of the officers felt like punching him, wanting to knock some of the hot air out of him.

Nguyen, Chen and Norman had sweat pouring from their brows. Nguyen and Chen were sitting on a bed; Norman had his legs drawn up to his chest, hoping for comfort. Hours passed. The clock ticked towards 3 a.m. Police searched and re-searched. Checked and re-checked. And then, the four who had arrived in a taxi, wearing façades of holiday-makers about to hit the town for a good time, left in handcuffs. The destination: Polda police jail, where they would soon be joined by five Australians they thought would
now be back in Sydney. Nine young Australians, aged eighteen to twenty-nine, suspected of involvement in an international drug-smuggling racket.

It had been a fruitful week’s work for the Indonesian National Police.

A
ndrew Chan always walked with the same swagger. It was half boastful, half blustering, but that was enough to scare off some of the students he shared a classroom with at Homebush Boys High School. He was a mischief-maker who could rule his small clique of Asian friends like a mini gang, bullying those less confident than himself and trying to lure into his group others whom he believed might fit the bill. He thought he was a leader, and those who followed him soon treated him that way. And he could stare down anyone.

Like the time someone saw him steal a mobile phone on a boat cruise. Chan was asked, along with all the other youths on board, whether he was responsible for
the theft. Others on the cruise were pointing at him, some even gesturing towards his pocket. But Chan turned the tables on everyone. He got angry. ‘Go on, check me,’ he challenged, the defiance in his eyes matching his stiff body language. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. I don’t have it.’ The boy sitting near him, along with many others, had seen the class troublemaker put it in his pocket, but no one was going to check him. Chan walked off the boat with a new mobile phone; the boy watching him wondered whether he would ever be caught out.

When the same lad was told by a friend of Chan’s arrest in Bali, he immediately searched for all the details he could find on the internet. He battled with a mix of shock and delight.

‘To be honest, I was quite relieved,’ he admits. ‘I know it’s really bad for me to say that, but he did give me a lot of trouble.’

Once, in junior high school, Chan had tried to flog the boy a sports jumper he told him he had stolen from a local store. Other times when Chan was short on cash, he would come up, his friends sometimes looking on, and demand money.

‘He’d say, “Give me some fucking money”, and I couldn’t do anything about it,’ he says. But he drew the line when Chan’s group of try-hards went on a recruitment drive, imploring other local teenagers to join their group.

‘I didn’t want to join the gang,’ he says. ‘I just kept saying “no” and he kept bullying me. One incident—I
was at the train station and he came around with his mates and said, “Why the fuck won’t you join my gang”, and [was] yelling at me. He grabbed my ears and pulled me. I wasn’t scared of him; I was more scared of his mates because there were a whole group of them.’

That group of mates, some of whom still wander around the same areas of Sydney, frequenting the shopping areas of Strathfield and the railway platforms of western Sydney, is the reason this former classmate is keen to stay anonymous.

However, that group—despite these stories and others, like Chan’s penchant for biting off his fingernails and spitting them at people—has remained steadfastly loyal to Chan. They look at their former friend—none has had contact with him since his arrest—sitting in a jail cell in Bali with an uneasy awe. They tell a different story about Chan, and that’s the interesting point about the fourth child and youngest son of Helen and Ken Chan, born in Sydney on 12 January 1984. Andrew Chan could be as loyal as he was loathed. He could be your best mate, or your worst enemy; it all depended on whether he saw you as being on his side. Some colleagues tell of the love and respect he showed to his parents and his sister, and the friendship he shared with one of his brothers. The same people talk of a teenager trying to find his way in life, going to two different high schools before leaving in 2000, and working at a string of places serving food and washing cars before taking on a casual job at a
catering company that serviced the Sydney Cricket Ground. Chan called himself a logistics helper, but the job description was akin to being a food runner.

Chan, if you take it on the say-so of many of those who know him, can be a chameleon. He is either a menace or a clown; a good friend or a dangerous foe. People either like him or loathe him—there aren’t many emotions in between. But certainly he was a teenager who seemed to struggle to find his place in the big melting pot of western Sydney. Most of his self-confidence was bluff, but he wielded it effectively, and sometimes with intimidation.

The role Chan seemed to drift towards constantly was that of a small-time brute. He was loud. He could be a bully. And he demanded respect. Indeed, the most important thing to him seemed to be the accolades of others. His friends were almost all Asian, and he wanted them to look up to him. He wanted to be their leader.

‘Back in those days it was kind of hard for us,’ explains one of his friends who has considered travelling to Bali to see him. The streets of western Sydney were bubbling away with all sorts of gang activity, and Asian boys found themselves easy prey for other groups looking for a quick fight or to mark out their own territory. ‘It’s just that if we [were] in a group and then another group comes by or something, there was likely to be trouble. He [Chan] wasn’t a bad guy at all. To his friends, he was very loyal. He had respect for a lot of us and we had a lot of respect for him too. He
might just look like a bad person but the real Andrew that no one really knows, he’s not like that.’

The friend talks about low-level gang activity—like knocking off someone’s wallet or handbag, vandalism and the odd fight—as just part of the make-up of the day on some western Sydney streets. And he laughs at the description of Chan as a small-time gangster, the term given to him by some people.

‘It was just boys being boys really. He would intimidate a few people here and there. But it wasn’t just him. The whole school would tease…you know how it is, in every school there’s always a guy who will get teased no matter what. It’s not just Andrew doing it. It’s really everyone doing it, but because Andrew is the type of person to joke around more, to other people’s eyes it might seem a bit serious, but everyone knew he was just joking around, having a laugh.’

The word ‘gang’ keeps coming up when Chan’s background is discussed, but it’s used fairly loosely. To the public, ‘gang’ usually denotes small and often ethnic groups of male teenagers, prowling western Sydney creating waves of crime with violence and standover tactics. And these groups exist, but gangs of young youths drawn together by boredom just as much as ethnicity also form part of the subculture of many Sydney suburbs.

Of the Lebanese and Middle Eastern gangs in Bankstown and Canterbury or the Asian groups in
Cabramatta, some are dangerous and territorial, luring in adolescent boys and spitting out hardened criminals. The gang people talk about when describing Andrew Chan’s teenage years was not like that. It was more like a loose group of Asian boys, linked by friendship and background, brought up in similar families in the city’s suburban melting pots. There are hundreds of them across Sydney—teenagers who would meet before and after school, hanging out in shopping malls and public places, going to the movies, sitting in parks, and spending money in loud, dark game parlours. Crimes are committed, but they are hardly ever violent. Bag-snatches, petty theft, the odd brawl with another group of boys—that’s the type of gang both Chan’s friends and foes describe when talking about the young man Indonesian intelligence officers marked early as a ringleader.

Chan’s friend says that the way Chan has been painted, as using his teenage years to build a reputation as a big-time drug warlord or godfather, is preposterous. The fights that Chan usually found himself in were not even started by him or his friends.

‘He wasn’t the one to go out and start trouble,’ says the friend. In fact, more often than not, he was misconstrued as being a big bully when he was just having a bit of a laugh at someone else’s expense. ‘He was the class clown. He made a lot of people laugh. He mucked around. He was witty. He had all these jokes.’ It’s just if you weren’t on his side, you didn’t often find them very funny.

After swapping schools, Chan seemed to knuckle down a bit more—for a little while, at least—and would even acknowledge his old adversaries when he spotted them. He’d nod, and they’d nod too, but neither side seemed keen to stop for a chat. Time had moved on, and the past stayed where it belonged.

It was usually in the Strathfield area, where hordes of youths would sit on seats and just while the world away, that you might run into Chan and his mates. They’d meet before or after work, or even during work hours for those without a job or on casual employment. They’d just hang out, having a laugh and carrying on, much like other youths scattered across the big Sydney area. Chan and his friends would buy food from one of the takeaway joints nearby, wander the shopping centre aimlessly and catch a movie on some days.

Some of those Chan would hang out with were old friends like Myuran Sukumaran and Si Yi Chen, who, Chan told police, had been his mates since school. Sukumaran, who sometimes used the name Mark, was born a few years earlier than Chan, in April 1981, to parents Sam and Rajini in London. He was the eldest of three children, with a younger sister and brother. He didn’t have the same profile as Chan in the local area. Sukumaran spent most of his days working, after graduating from Homebush Boys High School. First up he worked for ten months in the passport office in
Sydney, before going to a bank and then a finance company during 2003, up until November 2004. He boasted a monthly salary of $2500.

Sukumaran was physically bigger and more imposing than Chan, had a penchant for shaving his head, and had a big scar down the back of his neck. He could appear threatening, scary even, and always looked older than he was. But he kept his own counsel, comfortably sitting in the background, allowing others to do the talking. He’d been like that for years, but it was that personality trait which evaded intelligence detection for a while both in Australia and overseas. Australian officers had never heard his name, despite knowing of and having dossiers on many of his colleagues, and Indonesian surveillance teams invariably called him ‘the black-skinned man’, ‘the negro’ and ‘the dark man’. No one knew his name for a long time. And that’s how Myuran Sukumaran seemed to like it.

Si Yi Chen was a year younger than Chan, born on 19 March 1985 in Guangzhou, China, to parents Edward Chen and Jian Yun Gao, who then settled in Doonside in Sydney. He was an only child; solid, almost pudgy, with a fat, round face. Apart from that, not a lot stood out about the twenty-year-old who always seemed happier to let the conversation swirl around him. He was there, but never the ringleader; in the background, rarely giving his opinion.

Chen had a regular job, in a mobile phone shop, and was earning about $2000 each month. He spent his
spare time hanging out with his friends. One of them worked with Andrew Chan at the catering company at the Sydney Cricket Ground. He was a young man from Quakers Hill called Matthew Norman.

Matthew Norman and Andrew Chan, along with Martin Stephens and Renae Lawrence, were employed casually and worked on and off at one of Eurest’s Sydney sites—the Sydney Cricket Ground and Aussie Stadium. Eurest is a big food service company which supplies, prepares and serves food at functions. It has a big workforce across the nation—up to 5000 casual employees in various states, many of them young and fit. Chan, Norman, Lawrence and Stephens were like many others who would be called up to help out at functions.

Jobs for Eurest’s big casual workforce are both seasonal and dependent on the size of the functions being staged. Some months are always busier than others, especially when sport is involved. Chan, Norman, Lawrence and Stephens would be called to work in the lead-up to and during events like a cricket game or rugby league match. Sometimes they’d be required to work an eight-hour shift, sometimes even a five-hour shift. On rare occasions they might only be needed for three hours, but it was never less than that. And the boss had a rap on all of them: they were good employees—reliable and punctual, with a strong work ethic. Stephens had not been there long, but even in that short time he had shown that he was like the
others. And so they were called back often to work on all the big functions.

By any assessment, the job was pretty mundane, and they all carried the title of food runners. At some events there could be up to 100 food outlets and it was important that stock never ran out. Norman, Chan, Stephens and Lawrence, along with all Eurest’s other casually employed food runners, would have to make sure that the food was delivered to the right outlet prior to the game. Get that wrong and the complaints would flow in. On some occasions, outlets would vary their deliveries on the day before the match. Other outlets might stipulate that they needed it one hour before kickoff. And then during the event—as any sports-lover can attest—it’s important that food does not run out, and the job of the stadium’s food runners was to ensure that it was replaced as quickly as it was purchased. It wasn’t brain surgery, but it required robust and reliable young workers, and they all fitted that bill.

At first, none of the four young workers knew each other. They hadn’t been to school together, they came from different suburbs, and they were all different ages.

Matthew Norman, whose father and sisters lived in Quakers Hill and whose mother lived at Port Macquarie, was the first to get employment at Eurest. A good worker, he had been employed for more than four years, starting with the company in February 2001. He started as a vendor, before moving into retail,
and then finally working as a food runner. His employers knew he had another job as a forklift driver, but as far as Eurest was concerned, it was not possible to fault the nineteen-year-old’s work.

Chan, too, had a good work ethic, and it was quickly apparent that he didn’t mind carrying heavy loads. He was always punctual, a stickler for starting work on time. Indeed, no one can remember him ever being late to work since beginning his job with Eurest in November 2002 as a kitchen assistant, and then as a food runner.

Lawrence, whose family lived up in Wallsend in Newcastle, started in September 2003. A no-nonsense worker like her colleagues, she could average $2300 a month.

Stephens was the last to gain employment there, beginning only a few months earlier as a cellar person. The young man who had come from Adelaide, but who had grown up in the Illawarra area south of Sydney, was only just getting into the swing of things; the seasonal rush when he would be rostered regularly was still some time away. But he’d had enough shifts to enable him to meet co-workers Lawrence, Chan and Norman.