Snowing in Bali Read online

  ‘Here’s a small present,’ he said back at the table. ‘I’ll bring more to the villa tonight.’

  About an hour later, he made excuses to his friends, who hated missing a party. He rode home on his Honda 750 Africa twin to grab 10 grams of coke, then met Bras at a spot they’d chosen when he discreetly told him about the party, and they sped off to the models’ villa in up-market Seminyak.

  The high concrete walls outside concealed the stark beauty inside. Stepping through the large wooden doors was like entering another world. Moonlight sparkled on the large pool, the gardens were soaked in soft ambient lights, and loud rhythmic music was pumping. This was one of Bali’s rapidly spawning super-high-end luxury villas.

  Rafael’s eyes shot to some vigorous splashing at the end of the swimming pool, where two people were fucking. After absorbing that for a moment, he glanced up and saw a stunning array of beautiful, semi-naked girls, coming towards him, slinking in and out of the shadows. It was as if he’d walked onto a glamorous porn movie set.

  The blonde from the restaurant materialised in front of him, in a string bikini. She stretched up to place a Hawaiian-style lei around his neck, rubbing her breasts against him and running her fingers along the lei to pull him close. She kissed him hard on the mouth, then whispered, ‘Hello, baby.’ He didn’t resist. Another beautiful girl started tearing open his Armani shirt and stroking his torso, crooning, ‘Sexy body. I love your tattoos.’ Rafael glanced across to his friend Bras, who was getting the same pampering.

  I was like, shit . . . how good is this.

  The two girls with Rafael were becoming more horny and aggressive, thrusting themselves against him to the beat of the music, kissing his stomach, stroking his groin and undoing his jeans. ‘Come on, baby, let’s take your pants off,’ one breathed in his ear as the other pulled down his jeans. ‘Come on.’

  The Don Juan was now out of his comfort zone. ‘No, please, I don’t have underwear.’

  I was not feeling comfortable with the situation. I was feeling, fuck . . . you know, out of control. It became crazy . . . I have two girls kissing me, they take off their bikinis, the music was high, they jump into the pool, pull me in and they attack me a little bit. It was a very crazy situation.

  Rafael wasn’t enjoying himself; rather being naked in the pool, with two sets of breasts, hands, lips and tongues rubbing against him was strangely emasculating.

  Another model came to the edge of the pool and tried to push a blue ecstasy pill – popular in Bali for being super strong – into his mouth. ‘No wait, wait, I can’t take a full one,’ he insisted.

  ‘Come on, your friend’s already taken one. Just relax, let’s party.’

  I took the ecstasy, bit it in half and put half in her mouth, but she was already high . . . sweating. Then I started to feel a bit dizzy in the pool. I say, ‘Please wait.’ The two girls were too much, they were all over me, sucking my neck, pulling my dick, hugging me, like raping me. I was a bit uncomfortable, freaked. I cannot even get hard.

  So I say, ‘Wait, wait, stop, stop.’ I escape from the girls, jump out of the pool, and I see my friend was already lying down on the sun chair by the pool with three beautiful girls on top of him; one was kissing him on the mouth, another one was giving him a blow job . . . When I see that, I think, ‘Damn, what am I doing? I’m too slow. I should relax and enjoy. I should not refuse.’

  I go to the table, drink some water and take a line and then, boom, I feel the ecstasy effect. I was like, ‘Whoa,’ I start getting hard, horny, excited and then I jump back in the pool and start playing with the girls. And then we all jump out and I start to kiss one, sucking her pussy, and then they suck me. Was good, you know. I was with two girls, having sex, they were kissing each other too, and then the other three girls with Bras all came onto the deck, all changing positions like a big orgy.

  In the humid Balinese night air, fuelled with coke and ecstasy, combined with sexual exertion, they were all overheating, feeling hot and clammy, prompting one of the girls to stand up and suggest moving into an air-conditioned bedroom. On their way, the girls grabbed cold drinks from the fridge.

  Rafael fished the coke out of his jeans and spooned generous lines on the bedside table. He loved to share his coke with hot girls, magnanimously declaring, ‘This is on me tonight.’

  The models quickly enmeshed into a tangle of beautiful bodies, kissing each other, kissing Rafael, every so often breaking away to snort a line of cocaine off the bedside table, then rejoining the writhing orgy. The room was filled with moans of sexual pleasure, sporadically changing to orgasmic screams. The mix of blow and pills was the perfect prescription for hot, uninhibited sex.

  Cocaine makes people real horny, if it’s good coke. For men it’s like an aphrodisiac; men get a hard-on and don’t come, can fuck for hours. For me, the best combination was coke and ecstasy; you get sensitivity on the skin and horny and you can fuck for hours; but it’s very addictive.

  – Alberto, Bali drug dealer

  Rafael hadn’t stopped for two hours and was now with one girl against the wall, while the other two girls were entwined on the other side of the bed. Suddenly, he needed a break.

  I was, ‘Whooof . . . I gotta go in the pool.’ I am sweating, high from the ecstasy, and haven’t stopped. I jump in the pool and feel better. Bras is still outside talking to one girl. I say, ‘Hey, Bras, come inside, man, let’s do some lines.’ He comes in, we make some more lines while the two girls are still sucking one another on the bed, ignoring us.

  Two of the models were wrapped in towels, sitting on the edge of the bed taking turns to do lines. Bras politely waited for his turn, then leant over to snort a generous line – a move that would soon dramatically end the night.

  I say, ‘Fuck, my friend is not well, he is starting to OD.’ I see his lips are the same colour as his skin. I say, ‘Bras, let’s drink a beer man, beer is good.’ And then he says, ‘Please, Rafael, let’s go from here. I don’t feel good. Take me to get some fresh air on the bike, man.’

  I say, ‘Come on, man, I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, have a good time. Are you crazy? Take beer, take water, breathe. Come on, man.’

  Then he starts to throw up and I say, ‘Fuck, let’s go to the toilet,’ and the girls were afraid, I was afraid, and then I say, ‘Guys, I go. I’m going to take him out to get fresh air on the back of the bike. I’m sorry. Ciao, ciao, bye-bye.’ . . . Escape.

  After several minutes on the bike, with the night air rushing into his face, Bras started improving, but Rafael wasn’t thrilled about leaving the night unfinished.

  ‘Fuck, you bencong, you pussy. Why are you like this, man? Why did you take too much?’

  ‘Oh sorry, sorry, but please take me home.’

  Rafael had no choice. As they sped along Kuta beachfront, the sun was starting to rise across the water. There was a stillness on the streets, the witching moments of shift change between the ghosts of the night – hookers and clubbers – going to sleep and others waking up. By the time Rafael reached Bras’s room at Bali Village Resort, it was daybreak.

  Weariness was now starting to hit Rafael too. He slumped onto Bras’s lounge and fell asleep, confident there’d be plenty more orgies with random sexy girls to fuck.

  When you’re really fucked up on drugs, really high, you lose all inhibitions. You just feel really horny, you meet someone at a club, have chemistry, you can fuck in front of other people, you don’t care. And that’s what happened a lot. There were a lot of orgies in Bali.

  – Alberto, Bali drug dealer

  CHAPTER TWO

  COMING TO PARADISE

  Surfing, sex and cocaine were Rafael’s passions, but the sport of Hawaiian kings had come first. As a child he had natural flair on a board, riding Rio’s waves with grace and agility. The rush of hurtling down a breaking wave, and sense of freedom quickly had him hooked – the same potent emotions that drug trafficking later induced. But surfing was his first love and the young boy drea
mt about one day going to a faraway tropical island called Bali.

  When his chance came, typically it involved a girl. Flying home from a surf comp in South Brazil, he flirted with the flight attendant and before hitting the tarmac, he had her number. Soon they were dating and the girl put her hot new boyfriend’s name down to share the airline’s free flights for staff-plus-one to anywhere in the world.

  Before long they hit the skies to Bali. Rafael fell in love, but more so with the island than the girl. After a month’s holiday, she flew home alone. The sunshine, palm-fringed beaches and the perfect waves spoke to his heart. This was the faraway island he so often dreamt of as a boy.

  I was like, ‘Wow, my god, beautiful place and good waves, very good waves.’ I thought, I love this place, I want to stay here.

  – Rafael

  He quickly met other like-minded westerners, who offered him a golden key to stay in Bali and pay for his dream life. Being a drug runner would be far more lucrative than his first run with a bag of sarongs. He’d taken the colourful fabrics to Rio to sell and flown back to Bali with cash, but quickly ditched the rag runs for coke runs.

  It started on the beach. A bunch of surfers and expats from across the globe hung out, played music, danced, and smoked marijuana at a hotel fronting Kuta beach, dubbed ‘the club’. Every afternoon, music blared from speakers, while guys played frescoball on the sand and girls sunbaked topless. Marco, a dark-haired hang-gliding champion from Rio, barbecued fresh fish and sold top-quality grass he trafficked from Holland, euphemistically trademarked ‘Lemon Juice’. A rich Balinese man, a member of one of Bali’s royal families gave the crew carte blanche to use his beach hotel, joining them daily for a smoke.

  This guy smoked marijuana every day – the whole day. This is crazy, because drugs get the death sentence, but the Balinese guy can smoke in front of everyone. He doesn’t care about tourists, doesn’t care about staff, nobody can touch him.

  – Andre, drug dealer

  Unless you were a hot girl, or had a connection, it took time to become a club member. Rafael spent several days coming out of the surf and walking past with his board tucked under his arm before being welcomed to join the club’s cool crew. Soon afterwards, he was offered a drug run.

  They were a very close gang. It’s hard to go in, to even say hello, because I think they are so cool, these guys. I want to be friends, you know. They didn’t open the door. They were always rude. And then I met them on the beach one time and we smoke together.

  – Rafael

  Marco, the charismatic wisecracking Lemon Juice dealer, sold Rafael a small bag of grass for $100, and knew he’d be a perfect mule, or horse as they started calling runners when the word ‘mule’ got too hot. Rafael possessed all the traits to slip invisibly through customs. He was smart, well-travelled, white, western, good looking and a surfer – meaning no cover story needed for frequent trips in and out of Bali with surfboards. Marco, always on the lookout for a new horse, made his pitch on the beach one afternoon.

  ‘Hey man, what you doing here in Bali to make money?’

  ‘Not much, selling sarongs,’ Rafael replied.

  ‘You want to make some real money?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Easy, you fly to Amsterdam, bring marijuana back, and I’ll pay you $5000.’

  Growing up in the cocaine gateway of South America, where drug busts were daily news, meant Rafael knew what the job was, and felt insulted. ‘Come on, man, you think I’m a mule? I just want to buy a bit, and that’s it,’ Rafael snapped.

  Marco persisted: ‘Man, you look like a movie star, the cops are never gonna stop you. It’s easy; you can hide the grass inside the surfboard bag. Easy money, little risk – come on, brother.’

  His slick talk didn’t work. Rafael turned him down flat and walked back to his nearby bungalow angry. But it had ignited a spark and for weeks he watched Marco’s horses blithely coming with kilos and leaving with cash. He started selling Lemon Juice, freelancing as one of Marco’s many sales people – paying Marco $500 an ounce, and making $100. They became good friends, and Rafael saw the intricacies of the game up close. Before long, he decided to give it a shot.

  ‘Okay, man, let’s go,’ he told Marco on the beach, ‘but I want to invest some cash, be a partner too.’ For Marco that was no problem. It was often how deals were done, with several investors in one run, and at this point it was blue-chip. So, in the sun, on the sand, they struck a deal. A few days later, Rafael flew out of Bali to the marijuana capital, Amsterdam.

  I was very confident. I say I can do this, no problem, they’re not going to touch me because twice I’ve flown into Bali and they never even looked at me.

  – Rafael

  This was the mid-1990s, when Bali customs was lax, and before a rash of big airport busts and draconian life and death sentences were imposed. But there was one sobering, stand-out case that most surfers across the globe knew about – the notorious case of Frank De Castro Dias. Frank was doing a coke run to Bali but foolishly slipped up. As well as 4.3 kilos of cocaine embedded in his two surfboards, he was carrying a saw to cut the boards open. It created suspicion and got him busted. After paying a bribe of $100,000, he was sentenced to nine months in Bali’s Kerobokan Prison, instead of the prosecutors’ requested ten years.

  Indonesian customs officials on the resort island of Bali have arrested a Brazilian accused of smuggling 4.3 kilograms of cocaine hidden in his surfboard, a customs official said on Saturday.

  – Reuters, 15 January 1994

  Frank’s bust exposed and ruined for a while the method of using surfboards to carry drugs to Bali, as boards suddenly got more attention. But drug traffickers constantly worked cre­atively to stay that one critical step ahead of authorities, by devising new tricks. On this first run, Rafael was using the so far undetected method of stitching the grass into the lining of a surfboard bag. His insouciant confidence only slipped when his bag came through Bali’s airport with a large cross slashed across it in chalk. It gave him a scare, but didn’t stop him.

  I freaked out a bit, but when they say, ‘Open the bag,’ I was acting very calm, smiling. They asked, ‘How many boards inside?’ I say, ‘Three.’ ‘Okay, you can go.’ Oh shit yes! Close. ‘Ciao.’

  – Rafael

  Winning his first hand of Russian roulette was always going to ensnare him in the game. In days his cash balance had rocketed from zero to $5000, giving him precious freedom to live his dream life, spending several months cruising the islands of Lombok, Sumbawa and Sumatra, surfing from dawn until dusk. At nights though, he contemplated his next move, especially as the cash started running out.

  Rafael was never going to be just a horse. He was smart and savvy, with a fierce confidence and strong ego. In Amsterdam, he’d closely watched as the master drug packers stitched the dope into the lining of the surfboard cover, using exactly the same holes they’d unpicked so that the alterations would be invisible. Like many horses before and after him, Rafael was ambitious and believed he could play this game on his own. But like most complicated things that looked easy, it wasn’t, and the assumption that it was easy was why many mules got busted.

  I start thinking, ‘Mmm, fuck, I can do this myself. I don’t want to ever carry anymore. Fuck off.’ Then I meet these Peruvian guys in Bali, and then they say, ‘Forget ganja, man, play with coke, it’s much more money.’

  – Rafael

  Life was about to get beautiful.

  *

  Sitting on the tiled floor of his Bali bungalow, Rafael slashed open the lining of the Billabong surfboard bag and extracted the plastic bags of shimmering cocaine. He opened up one and put a little on his fingertips. He sniffed. His eyes shone. It was 100 per cent pure. Amazing. He’d flown to Peru to meet the supplier, buy it, pack it and then give it to a horse to carry back to Bali, where the deal was to take place. Carrying it himself was a job too risky and lowly paid for Rafael, when he could now be a boss.

  Later that afternoon he w
as going to make his first bulk sale to an Australian surfer. The guy was buying a kilo for $48,000 – 48 times what Rafael had paid for it. He spooned the cocaine, bit by bit, onto a small digital Casio scale, then put it into a plastic Bintang supermarket bag. After measuring 1 kilo, he tightly folded the plastic bag and wound tape around it. It was crude. It was early days and he would become more sophisticated. But today he just slipped this first bag inside a second plastic bag and threw a handful of dirty clothes on top. If anyone stopped him, he’d say he was going to the laundry.

  He jumped into his rented Suzuki Jimny, picked up his contact, who’d set up the deal, and sped to the five-star InterContinental Hotel on the beachfront. Dark thoughts started to creep across his mind. He snuck a look at the Indonesian next to him, eyeing him suspiciously. He could be working a sting with the buyer, or the buyer could be an undercover cop. He felt intensely nervous. This game was new to him, but Rafael knew he was breaking the rules – trusting an Indonesian guy he barely knew and switching drugs for cash directly with a stranger.

  But he had to trust his instincts. It had felt okay when the Indonesian insisted he came to meet the Australian buyer. He was potentially a goldmine, interested in future direct deliveries to Sydney – where the price per kilo could shoot to more than $120,000. The stakes were high, but this was a risk worth taking. The winnings could be a bottomless piggy-bank.

  They drove into the hotel, valet-parked the red Jimny, and then walked alongside happy, suntanned tourists into the capaciously grand lobby, carrying the flimsy plastic supermarket bag of blow.

  I go with my Bintang shopping bag, in jeans, T-shirt and flip-flops, to the room and shake hands with Australian guy. He says, ‘Did you bring the coke?’ I say, ‘Yes.’ He says, ‘Where?’ I say, ‘In the bag.’ Then he laughs. ‘Are you crazy, man, why don’t you put in better bag, a backpack or something?’ I say, ‘Ah, man, this nobody is gonna check – dirty clothes.’

  – Rafael

  Rafael was keen to get in and out fast. He quickly rifled in the bag, pulling out underpants, board shorts and T-shirts, dumping them all on the polished table, then took out the precious bundle, worth more than its weight in gold, and placed it on the table. Rafael’s heart was thumping. He was still on red alert to detect a trap. He was edgy. He watched the Australian, in one slick move, unscramble the combination locks on the front of his briefcase, loudly snap them open and flip up the lid. Rafael was ready to run.