how many lives did chan & sumurakan ruin

[dellynt]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3056748/It-Bali-Ten-m-lucky-police-arrested-Sydney-man-hired...

How many people in jail  because of this drug running pair

how many lives have been ruined because of them

how many family have this drug running pair ruined

how many people addicted to drugs because of them

how many people dead from their drugs

these 2 are not heros... they are well known drug runners who have ruined countless lives because of their  greed.

bet they would still be running drugs if they hadnt been caught and destroying countless lives

They are getting what they deserve.....

karma I say

[i-need-a-martini]

I don't expect the corruption to disappear.

My comments are not that we should be objecting to change their laws or their entrenched corruption. That will never change.

But they have a volaltile legal system made even more volatile by their corruption. To say "Serves them right" or "you should expect to die if you do something illegal" ignores that it isn't a simple black and white case.

That any person can be treated differently (and be put to death) because they are poor or less educated is abominable. Or that they can be let off for being rich (ala Michelle Lesley) is equally abominable.

For that to be occurring in a country on our doorstep and one that we go out of our way to support is unspeakable.

[j*oono]

Holding my breath for them now. 

[i-need-a-martini]

Yes I feel the same way.

I want to go to bed with the hope that when I wake up in the morning there would have been some sort of reprieve. But with only a few hours to go, I am afraid it won't come.

[colic2bullsgirlore]

Does anybody remember the false passport links way back in 2005? I note 2005 stories are a little more critical of the

pair and of their position and prior drug dealing history

. I wonder whether the notion of life imprisonment in a poorly maintained, overcrowded corrupt prison system is really a

slow death by proxy sentence?

Excerpts from one of the articles below try to unravel who really were the Mr bigs.. and Mr mediums

http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Bali-nine-kingpin-worked-in-passport-office/2005/04/28/111463565897...

One of the alleged kingpins of the Bali nine once worked in the Sydney passports office but was not involved in the

authorisation of passports.

And his mother, Raji, and brother still work there, according to the Department of Foreighn Affairs and Trade.

Foreign Affairs minister Alexander Downer told ABC Radio: "I can confirm she [Sukumaran's mother] works there and

she would obviously have some access. But hang on - she has not been accused of anything here.

http://www.theage.com.au/good-weekend/tracking-the-bali-nines-mr-big-20150403-1m5xmt.html

Khan Thanh Ly didn't want to be a mule.

Taping vacuum-sealed bags of heroin to his groin and running the gauntlet of Indonesian and Australian customs wasn't his scene.

Nor did Ly, nicknamed "Buddha" by his drug-smuggler mates because of his crew cut and chubby face, want the job as an "eagle", a babysitter and chauffeur for the mules, taping the bags of heroin to their bodies and then making sure they didn't panic or betray their fears before reaching the departure gate.

The 24-year-old university student, who was ironically studying risk management, had higher ambitions in the drug-trafficking gang run by his old school mate from Sydney's Homebush Boys High, Myuran Sukumaran.

Those ambitions were stirred after Sukumaran, who had a middle manager's role in the gang, sent Ly to Bali in 2004 to get a feel for the operation (he chose this over a long-planned holiday with his girlfriend to Fiji).

By late that year, Ly was running shoeboxes of cash up to Queensland, disposing of empty heroin-smuggling bags and eventually overseeing an aborted drug run from Bali in November.

But there were aspects of the job that irked him.

On one occasion, Ly picked up three stressed-out mules from Sydney Airport, who kept whining about how the bags of heroin taped to their bodies were cutting off their circulation.

Without asking, one grabbed a key, slashed at the tape holding the bags and let them tumble to the car floor.

The other mules immediately followed suit.

When they reached the hotel where they were due to offload the drugs and get paid, the trio left Ly with potentially a million dollars' worth of heroin lying in his car, impatient to distance themselves from the operation.

Then, just to torment him, as he drove away the phone rang; it was someone ordering him to get lotion to sooth the itchy skin of the mules.

For Ly, it was too much.

He complained to his superior, another old school pal called Hong Viet Luong. Luong had a reassuring answer: a $5000 payment.

Ly went back to work.

Such was the daily grind of an apprentice Mr Big in the gang.

It was hardly the stuff of a Colombian cocaine cartel, but Ly's role was to turn out to be remarkably significant after the gang's associates were busted in Bali.

In the weeks after the Bali Nine arrests, police in Brisbane and Sydney rounded up a number of those involved in the Australian-based operation, including Ly.

It seems the gang had already been successful in importing heroin on at least one and maybe two occasions, using young, mostly naive, students to mule the drug from Bali for a $10,000 pay day.

Managing the day-to-day operations were Chan and Sukumaran, who answered to Luong.

The gang also boasted a Queensland manager in the form of a Korean student known as Do Hyung Lee, who was also arrested.

But it was Ly who caught the attention of Crown prosecutors. His role as confidant to the bosses led to him being recruited by the Crown to give evidence against his fellow gang members in a series of hearings and trials in the Queensland courts in the late 2000s.

In one of those cases, Ly told the court that Luong had bolted overseas – giving the first hint that the operation had missed the biggest players in the gang. Asked who was above Luong, Ly claimed it was a guy with a mohawk, whom he had met at a rave party at Sydney's Telstra Stadium.

But before Ly could elaborate in court, his evidence was halted at the request of the Crown and the AFP.

The police sought a suppression, citing a public interest immunity (a legal device often used to protect police informants or other sensitive investigations or government information).

What it meant, though, was that information about the gang's hierarchy was never made public, and to this day is contained in a sealed grey envelope in the Queensland Supreme Court archives, gathering dust.

So why the secrecy?

Was this an attempt to cover up the AFP's failure to nab the kingpins or simply because the investigation was ongoing?

When the court hearings finally wrapped up in Australia in 2009, the score for the AFP was the jailing of four mules, one middle manager and the gang's Queensland boss, while the more senior players such as Luong and "Mohawk man" had vanished.

The AFP declined to comment on why Luong was able to escape and whether he is even on an Interpol watch list.

Electoral roll records and company searches, however, reveal a few clues about Luong.

A man of the same age and name was listed as residing at a modest brick home in Marrickville, Sydney, prior to the Bali operation.

Good Weekend rang the telephone number listed for the property and an elderly woman who answered in heavily accented English said that Luong was her son and he was dead.

"He died in China," she said.

The only other clues about Luong were to be found in his eight-month directorship and shareholding of a now defunct private Australian company called Drager, which listed a business – a video and internet shop – in Chapel Street, Bankstown.

Locals remember several young men hanging around the premises, and there was talk of a raid by federal authorities, apparently over pirated videos.

"You know, I saw this big guy [who] used to be in there and then one night I saw on the news, it's this Sukumaran guy in Bali," recalls one local businessman.

"He used to be in there all the time. I thought, 'You idiots.' "

I sought to contact the two former directors of Drager to ask what they knew about Luong, but my efforts were unsuccessful.

Curiously, about four months after the Bali Nine arrests, one of the directors was among five men who featured in the news for allegedly trying to import into Sydney one of the largest amounts of ephedrine ever seized by customs' officials in NSW, an illegal precursor chemical for the drug ice.

The drugs were ingeniously concealed in small statues imported in a shipping container brought through Port Botany.

The sheer size of the precursor chemicals – about 400 kilograms – was one thing, but it was the unique manner in which it was concealed, moulded into the bases of the $15 statues, that startled authorities.

Police estimated the value of the seizure to be about $70 million.

The former Drager director was initially alleged to have been seen shifting boxes from the container, but he was found not guilty of involvement in the ephedrine shipment, while other defendants were convicted.

There is no suggestion that the other Drager director had any connection to the ephedrine shipment.

Since the mid-2000s this man has been involved in a successful property investment business, renovating and flipping million- dollar-plus properties across Sydney.

Thailand

the Australian Federal Police were also keen to explore the wider angles to the investigation, such as catching the courier who brought the heroin to Bali in 2005 and the supplier who provided the drugs.

Indonesian police had publicly stated, and Australian police confirmed, that a Thai prostitute called Cherry Likibamakon was suspected of couriering the heroin from Thailand into Bali, where it was given to one of the Australians.

She had stayed at a hotel on Kuta Beach, checking out the day the nine Australians were arrested.

Strangely, on May 1, 2005, Indonesian police failed to apprehend her in Bali and when she was briefly stopped at the Thai-Cambodian border, where a bizarre Keystone Cops scenario unfolded.

The Indonesian officials who were called in to make the arrest claimed to have not had the right paperwork and let her go.

An innocent bungle or corruption? Neither the Australian Federal Police nor the Indonesian authorities has released further details.

The fresh-faced Likibamakon, whose passport made her look much younger than her 22 years, had family in Bangkok and relatives just over the Cambodian border, making her well-placed to be a courier.

Records obtained by Good Weekend reveal she was travelling extensively in the months before the Bali Nine arrest, regularly hopping flights for two- or three-day stays in Macau, Phuket and Singapore before flying back to Bangkok.

How she got into Indonesia is not recorded.

Police have confirmed an Interpol alert was put out for Likibamakon, but she seems to have melted into the shady and deadly world of Thai prostitution.

In March this year, I went to the home address in Bangkok for Likibamakon listed on her passport documentation.

The location was a neat townhouse development accessed by a private alleyway in the inner-city Phrakanong district.

A thin middle-aged Thai man with glasses reluctantly answered the door and confirmed he was Likibamakon's cousin.

"What do you want? What is the point of all this?" he asked, before revealing that he had been told Likibamakon had died in an Indonesian hospital several years ago.

"Her father was not around when she was raised," he said. "It might be true what they say about her.

I heard she was with some African men. This is not good for the family if you bring it up again. I only knew her as a small child. I never met her when she was older."

He said the reason his address was listed for Likibamakon was because her father had been a flight attendant with no fixed address – so he used this one.

If the cousin's information is to be believed, another low-level player had been chewed up and spat out by the network, leaving those above untouched.

Nearly a month after the Bali bust, the AFP wrote to their counterparts in Nepal seeking information about Ghale and laying out a possible connection that revolved around travel movements and his association with the stepfather of Likibamakon.

"Further we have information to suggest that the dead Man Singh Ghale is associated with the stepfather of the female Thai courier," wrote the AFP's Rangoon liaison officer, Mark Scott, back in 2005.

When I visited Nepal's Narcotics Control Bureau, an officer, who did not want to be named, showed me a thick file containing numerous reports about Ghale and other globally significant Nepalese traffickers, who ran networks connecting the opium-producing regions of the Golden Triangle in Burma and the Golden Crescent to distribution pipelines across south Asia.

The file also contained a host of likely Nepalese suspects other than Ghale who may have supplied heroin to the Bali Nine and who had connections to Likibamakon.

Sensationally, one document, entitled "Information received, Indonesian Police human source Denpasar Bali, May 8, 2005", contained the following statement: "Likibamakon's stepfather (a Nepalese hash distributor) was a close associate of Man Singh Ghale's and they came from the same village in Nepal."

The document also outlined that Likibamakon's mother owned a shop in Bangkok just metres away from another business, the "Golden Hotel", run by a senior Nepalese heroin trafficker called "Mama Mama", who was above both the "stepfather" and Ghale in the network.

Among the documents was a detailed description of how to get to the Golden Hotel. If you visit that address today there is a venue, called the Golden Bangkok Guest House, at the same location.

In March this year, lounging in the Golden Bangkok Guest House's squalid lobby were a group of sharp-looking young Nepalese men and a nervous middle-aged Indian couple who managed a dingy restaurant next to the lobby.

All denied knowledge of anyone called Mama Mama, Ghale or Likibamakon. But, down the street, one local shopkeeper, who did not wish to be named, claimed the hotel was still being run by the same Nepalese family who had operated it for years.

"He [the father, who used to run it] is always travelling to Burma or other places. Now it's the niece," said the shop assistant.

What business the hotelier had been up to Burma, the shop assistant couldn't say – but in 2005, the United Nations estimated the country was the second-largest opium producer in the world, producing some 312 tonnes of opium from 32,000 hectares of poppy cultivation.

If the hoteliers had been involved in the Bali supply, as the leaked police report implied, it's clear the authorities haven't caught up with them.

"The Nepalese man who ran the hotel has moved to Phuket," the restaurant owner in the lobby, said.

While the trail seems to have gone cold at the Golden Hotel, there is no evidence that the Nepali syndicates have given up trafficking heroin from Bangkok to Australia. In 2011, Singapore authorities disrupted a plot to smuggle heroin in the shoes of couriers.

The gang obtained heroin from Bangkok, used a Nepalese cobbler to stitch the powder into pairs of shoes, and then used Nepali and South Korean mules to try to move it to Sydney.

[colic2bullsgirlore]

Nepal

Back in Satyadevi, the Ghale family doesn't knew that Ghale's alleged role as the supplier of the Bali Nine was, eventually, disregarded by the AFP.

And if he was the kingpin the Indonesians allege, reaping possibly millions, there is no evidence of it in the simple clay- and stone-walled farm where he used to live. "I didn't know anything about drugs," says his wife, Sita, whose only evidence of money is a string of pearls around her neck. "I was too busy looking after our daughters to know about the business."

She says she and Ghale married when she was just 15 and he was 20 – following a tradition where distant cousins are married off together in the village, which is five hours' drive from the capital, Kathmandu.

They spoke on the phone only three days before his death. "He said, 'How is the family?' It was a normal conversation. He did not mention there was any trouble with anything."

Like many young Nepalese men, Ghale went to Malaysia looking for work and when he came back the couple moved to Kathmandu and set up a labour-hire business called Gulliver. Sometimes he would travel to Malaysia, other times to India and other parts of Asia, Sita says.

She confirmed the couple bought a large house in Kathmandu but said the money came from using loans associated with Ghale's labour-hire business – a business which took him away from home for long periods. "I understood [the absences]. The boys have to work. They have to provide," she says.

Weeks could go past without a telephone call. "When I asked, he used to say, 'When I find a phone I will ring you. I'm often in places where there is no phone coverage', " she says. In the weeks after his death she and an uncle approached the Nepalese Government asking that his body be returned. "We heard nothing."

In the days after his death, Ghale's then 14-year-old brother, Bijay, was getting ready for school in the family farmhouse when a friend came to the door. "Something has happened to your brother, it says so in the papers," he told Bijay.

The family's supposed lack of knowledge about Ghale's drug links may not appear to be so odd, given most of his activities were undertaken overseas.

Says Hemant Malla, Inspector General of the Nepal Police Central Investigation Bureau, the region around Satyadevi is well known for producing drug traffickers. He notes, however, that many of those who get involved with smuggling drugs are ill-educated country people do not understand what they are doing. Of Ghale, he says:

"We investigated him for years [on suspicion of drug-trafficking]. He had false passports and at one time popped up as travelling through Cuba. Why we don't know."

When I tell Sita and Bijay that Ghale's death occurred indirectly as a result of the Australian tip-off to the Indonesian police, all they ask for is clarification. "We need to know about our man," says Bijay. Echoes Sita:

"The Australians should take the lead and get information to us."

Like other unanswered questions about this incredibly knotty case, Sita and Bijay are likely to be waiting for a long time.

AUSTRALIA CHAIN OF COMMAND

Mohawk Man
A mysterious figure whom Khan Thanh Ly claimed was in the upper level of the gang.

Hong Viet Luong
Known as "John". Gang chief of staff based in Australia; also Khan Thanh Ly's boss. Vanished overseas just before the Australian arrests.

Do Hyung Lee
Korean student. Queensland manager/chief of staff and recruiter. Did jail time in Australia, was then deported to Korea.

Khan Thanh Ly
Known as "Buddha". Aspiring manager: started as chauffeur to mules, rose to supervise a Bali run. Jailed, now released, trying to rebuild his life in NSW.

Myuran Sukumaran
Now 33. Travelled to Bali to oversee attempted importations but was only mid-ranking in the gang's hierarchy.

Andrew Chan
Now 31. Also travelled to Bali. Alleged to have had some direct contact with courier bringing drugs from the Golden Triangle.

[colic2bullsgirlore]

The two executed in Indonesia this morning are not the only 2 Australians to die today because of drugs.

Can anybody tell me the names of the other 4 or does anybody know of pictures of their family grieving, pleading wIth

authorities for respite, as the overdose victims died?

The 4 that died the day before that will do....just their names will be ok..... or the 4 from the day before that....just

names, their aspirations.... anything about them will do.

Is it ok that their lives will not be "celebrated" as showing reform?

I am sure some would have turned the corner... if they had been given a chance...where's the vigils? the candles?

the outpouring of anger for the 4 that died 4 days ago or indeed help for tomorrow's 4 who have been sentenced to

death and will die, probably in comparitive media obscurity?

BTW I do not support the death penalty, I support decriminilisation of all drugs and controlled supply coupled with

harm minimization techniques and counselling.

PROHIBITION CAUSES OVERDOSES

 Take the money out of the black markets hands.

http://www.overdoseday.com/facts-stats/

Nearly four Australians die every day from overdose.

Overdoses out-numbered road fatalities in Australia in 2012.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics overdose deaths totalled 1,427 in 2012, while road deaths, which have been steadily declining, ended the year at 1,338. (Data provided to Penington Institute by Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2014).

[para-slights]

I agree with a lot of what you said there collic but overdoses are unfortunately accidental or gawd forbid intentional, government sanctioned executions, the taking of a life so that political egos are massaged or bruised is incomprehensible to me.  The Australian press was always going to slant towards the Australians being killed (as I;m sure the other foreign press would preference their own convicted country men). Just death  when a few people can have that much power to kill a person with impunity with little to no consequence.

[polksaladallie]

---

@colic2bullsgirlore wrote:

http://www.overdoseday.com/facts-stats/

Nearly four Australians die every day from overdose.

Overdoses out-numbered road fatalities in Australia in 2012.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics overdose deaths totalled 1,427 in 2012, while road deaths, which have been steadily declining, ended the year at 1,338. (Data provided to Penington Institute by Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2014).

---

Remember that most of these overdoses were from prescriptions obtained from doctors.

Some were suicides.

Some of these drugs might have been obtained on the streets, but in the main, they have nothing to do with smuggling, mules, king pins, other countries' laws etc.

They are given no publicity, so we do not care.  Same goes for the 2 women killed this week by their partners.

They also have no candlelight vigils, no handwringing by politicians, no day-to-day headlines.

[colic2bullsgirlore]

The black market trade in opoids originally prescribed by a doctor is rife.

Giving the black markets customers a controlled safer option gives them a valid choice to break the profit chain with

access to counselling and the choice take the drugs under supervision whether at home or in a centre.

Legally varying the drugs to more stable doses while providing the "high" would provide the chance of superior

outcomes and less od's IMO

Although statistics are hard to find (ie the amount of pharmecutical drugs that were procured illictily and then caused an overdose) I would contend that many of the people that overdosed on prescription drugs were not prescribed the drug but rather it was procured either on the black market or stolen from a friend or relative.

http://theconversation.com/three-things-you-need-to-know-about-drug-overdoses-31099

In Victoria, for instance, coroner’s reports show pharmaceutical drugs have become increasingly common in fatal overdose. This year, the Victorian Coroners Prevention Unit noted in a report to the Coroners Court that pharmaceutical drugs played a causal or contributing role in around 80% of Victorian overdose deaths between 2012 and 2013, whereas illegal drugs played a part in around 40%.

[j*oono]

So it's all over.

One good thing that has happened at the 11th hour is that Mary Jane Veloso was spared.  I don't know whether her reprieve also means that she will be released.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/bali-9-mary-jane-veloso-spared-from-execution-as-andrew-chan-and-myuran-...