Snowing in Bali by Kathryn Bonella
Two days later, Rafael flew Thai Airways to Stockholm, stayed overnight with a friend, then took a taxi back to Arlanda Airport. He’d agreed to wear his sun-bleached blond curly hair out, without his usual masking Gucci sunglasses and cap, so the cop could quickly recognise him. Undisguised and exposed to the airport’s CCTV cameras, his life and freedom were on the line on the word of a Hells Angel. Rafael had no idea what this cop even looked like.
It was coming in my mind, ‘What am I doing? What am I fucking doing? If my friends know this, they’re going to think I’m a rat. How do I get involved with this shit? Hard to get out now. I’m already here; I have to get this done.’ Same feeling I had when I go to the police building in Brazil to buy the cocaine. I say to myself, ‘Let’s get this done.’
Standing at the designated spot in the huge, cavernous and sleekly modern Scandinavian airport terminal, he felt acutely vulnerable. This could be it. He was a sitting duck. His heart was pounding. It was far from his usual covert way of operating. A man came up, passed him a plastic bag, said, ‘Sorry, I have to go,’ and vanished as quickly as he’d appeared.
He gives me the bag, a lot of magazines, Playboy, surf magazines and 2 kilos of coke very well packed inside a woman’s leather make-up case. I take a taxi to my friend’s apartment, open the shit, try it, ‘Oh, good.’ Call my contact, sell and then I send part of the money by Western Union to Tota. And I bring cash to Bali. Like Tota said, ‘It’s the best deal you get in your life; we are going to share half and half.’ I was stupid – I could say, ‘Oh, they pay only $30,000 [a kilo]’, but I say the truth – ‘They pay $40,000.’ And then he say, ‘Okay, $40,000 for you, $40,000 for me.’ I say, ‘Fuck, thank you, brother!’
With the help of his wife’s friend, he sent $20,000 to Bali by bank transfer, but carried the rest on the flight.
They pay me in Swedish crowns. I go to the money changer and change it for €500 bills, so it was easy to bring.
In your pocket?
Yeah, in my pocket, a little bit in my wallet, in my shoes, a little bit in my underwear. I never put all the cash together. When I have €70,000–€80,000, I put €10,000 in one foot, €10,000 in other foot, €5000 in my front pocket, €5000 in back, €5000 in my wallet, €5000 in bag, hand luggage, I put everywhere. You know the military pants, full of pockets, I love to travel with these pants. I put it here, here.
How many times have you travelled with thousands of dollars like that?
Many, many times. I hide it very well.
So it’s all carefully done?
Yeah, I do it good. I was very well dressed, too. They never check me in the airports. Some people are afraid to travel with money; I’m afraid to travel without money.
Rafael was travelling more often to Brazil carrying cash to organise runs, to buy the coke and take it to the packers, to try to improve his success rate by being on the ground. His cash was low when he decided to do a high-stakes gamble with Fox, betting all his remaining chips on sending 20 kilos to Amsterdam.
I go to Brazil, I’m going to do, because these pussies there, they don’t know how to do. Then, big shit, big shit, fall fall, fall, lose money, lose money. Fox wanted to be partner too, we want to make big shit.
*
Fox and Rafael had become good friends during the three years they’d been working together, sending coke to Sweden, Europe, Bali, Malaysia and Australia. They hung out in Rio and São Paulo visiting high-class brothels, packing cocaine, organising runs, partying and sniffing blow.
Rafael spent time at Fox’s Bali-style house on a lagoon in Florianópolis, as well as Fox’s mother’s $10 million mansion in São Paulo’s ultra-exclusive Jardins district. Fox had his own wing, where he played his games of guns, girls and cocaine, often storing his loaded booms there.
At the mansion one day, Fox showed Rafael a new gun and silencer. ‘This shit work?’ Rafael asked, screwing on the silencer.
‘Never tried,’ Fox replied. Rafael walked across to the window, opened it, pointed the gun to the sky and fired. The bang exploded in their ears. ‘Fuck, man, this silencer shit doesn’t work,’ Rafael laughed. ‘The police are gonna come.’
Fox’s well-to-do family had no idea what he did. His Brazilian mother and grandmother were very wealthy and his father, divorced from his mother, was a consul from France.
His family was very rich. Amazing. His Brazilian grandmother was fucking rich. I met his mamma, his brother, his driver who did everything for us.
Fox and Rafael were unlikely friends. Fox was plain-faced, tall with a stooped posture, a pear-shaped physique, long arms and dark, razor-cut hair.
He looks like kind of pussy guy, not tough guy, skinny, little bit big bum, shoulders smaller than bum. A shy guy; not a charismatic person. Nobody liked him. From the beginning people say, ‘Why you go with this guy, man?’ I say, ‘I wanna help him.’
The charismatic, gregarious Rafael was also opposite to his friend in his sartorial style. Rafael was often aghast at what he deemed Fox’s bad taste. Despite splashing a fortune on his wardrobe, Fox dressed in clothes that Rafael wouldn’t wear in a casket, like pairing a €5000 Dior leather jacket, which Rafael abhorred, with jeans and white Nike shoes. Fox was obsessed with his collection of Nike’s most expensive sports shoes with the Shox feature – foam springs. He kept a dozen pairs on display on special shelves in his living room.
Totally ugly, these shoes. I don’t use training shoes with jeans, but Fox loves white Nikes. If he got one drop of something on his shoes, he got so mad, he went home to change. He uses them one time, brings them home, and cleans them using a toothbrush. This guy is sick with the shoes. Sick.
Rafael often had hookers asking him if his friend was gay.
Sometimes we go to the best prostitute house in Brazil, São Paulo. I don’t like this shit much, but Fox says, ‘Let’s go, I pay for you.’ ‘Okay, let’s go.’ High-level girls. Sometimes people who work in TV go there. Normally girls cost $100, but if you get one they call the artists, it costs $1000, $2000, the expensive program.
Did you try an artist?
Sometimes we take, cos they do a show with the poles, and we ask ‘How much for this one?’ ‘$2000.’ ‘Okay, bring.’ But we always play with the girls, pay one time and get the phone number, and then we meet outside, so they don’t pay for the place.
But when we sit in the prostitute house and all the girls come out and take you to a room, they always think Fox is gay. ‘Oh, your friend’s gay?’ I say, ‘No, why? Fox, they say you’re gay.’ ‘No, I’m not gay.’ But the way he dress, he spent €5000 on the Dior jacket, totally ugly. I would never buy something like that for myself. With the pocket down the front, like a suit, so ugly this shit. I say, ‘Fox, how can you buy this shit?’
So he had a lot of cash?
Yeah, but that time he started taking money from the business. He says, ‘Oh, I get money from my grandmother for my birthday.’ It was bullshit, he already started taking from me.
On their latest high-stakes gamble, Rafael desperately needed a win. He packed himself with €75,000, flew to São Paulo and delivered it to Fox, then flew out to Amsterdam to wait for the horses. Often runs expected to take days stretched out for weeks, but as time passed and the horses didn’t arrive, Rafael was hearing more and more excuses from Fox.
He say, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Next week’, ‘Tomorrow’, but they never come, they never show. Then he disappeared, don’t answer the phone. The guy bullshit me. He was going behind my back, selling to another friend in Amsterdam while I wait. He robbed me. I didn’t know he’s gonna fuck me and I stayed in €300-a-night hotel, eat in the best restaurants every night, and then suddenly, he disappears, and I’m poof, totally bankrupt.
I came back to Bali with no money, just thinking, ‘I want to kill this fool,’ but I didn’t have the money to follow him. I have a friend who met him in the surf in Brazil. He says, ‘Be careful, Rafael’s going to kill you, man. You fuck his family, you fuck him.’ He says
But Fox was served drug dealer justice. As he stood talking on a public phone in Florianópolis, a car load of men stopped, one man jumped out and pointed a gun in Fox’s face, saying, ‘Hello, playboy.’ Fox dropped the phone in panic, unclasped his Rolex and held it out, begging, ‘Please don’t kill me, please, take my watch.’ The armed bandit snatched it, then ordered Fox to get in his new Toyota and take him to his house.
Once there, the men ransacked the place, taking everything from his PlayStation and plasma TV to his precious Nike shoe collection. Then they beat him up badly, stripped him down to his underpants, and dumped him on the highway 100 kilometres from his house in the freezing cold, driving off in his new $100,000 Toyota.
Two months later, Fox was attacked again at his house on the lagoon in Florianópolis. Fox saw in his security cameras two big black Chevrolet cars, with blacked-out windows, pulling up and five bandits wearing black balaclavas, brandishing submachine guns and pistols, get out.
He was already paranoid; he put in a special security system, full of cameras, and when they come, he saw in the cameras and was pissing his pants. They came calling, ‘Fox, Fox’ and then they shoot, ba-a-a-a-a-a, the door. He ran upstairs, hid in the wardrobe. They go inside, ba-a-a-a-a-a, come to the second floor, shoot everywhere. The bullets go through the wardrobe but don’t touch him. Lucky motherfuck. They didn’t know he was in the wardrobe – if they know, they shoot him.
– Rafael
As a parting gesture, the bandits spray-painted ‘Rafael $$$’ on the front of the house. Then they fled.
Who were these people?
I don’t have a clue. Until today I try to find out. I believe somebody I know, who was pissed off with the situation. I was thinking Claudio, the police friend, but I met him and he thinks it’s me. Everyone thinks it’s me and then Fox calls, ‘Why you do that?’ I say, ‘Man, you think it was me? You really think it was me? You’ve known me a long time . . . If I come to see you, I’m not gonna write my name. You wouldn’t be talking anymore. You know what I’m gonna do with you?’ ‘You threaten me?’ ‘No, I just tell you.’
Rafael’s tactic was to be vaguely civil to Fox on the phone, hoping he might return to Bali so he could avenge himself. But Fox fled, suffering from panic syndrome – fearing someone was trying to kill him – to Teahupoo, Tahiti, on his French passport.
Many people want to kill this guy, he’s not gonna live long, he fuck everybody to get rich.
– Rafael
The next time Rafael was in Brazil, he met with Fox’s lawyer, who by chance was dating one of his friends. She told him the cops had been asking, ‘Who’s this guy Rafael?’ She asked Rafael, ‘Was it you?’
‘I wish,’ he replied. Rafael went to Florianopólis to look at Fox’s house, which was up for sale.
I was planning to burn the house, make some Molotov bottles and throw in the house to burn it. But I give up. I say it’s too hot now. I’m ready to make some money. Fucking Fox, he’s lucky.
*
Although Rafael had lost many of his friends to jail or betrayal, one of his more trusted partners returned. Irrepressible, with a toothy smile on his face and as excited as a kid, Andre flew back to Bali. He’d fast grown tired of wheeling his shopping trolley of books around maximum security and, after 14 months, paid to be transferred to the less secure Complex Penitentiary, the jail where he’d escaped from the containers previously.
The boss from this prison is really funny. He’s a fat guy, his name is Shucka. When he sees me, he says, ‘Why are you coming here again? You try escaping, you want to fuck my job, yeah?’
– Andre
Andre’s escape was thanks to guards who agreed to leave two doors unlocked for $10,000. The night before, they told Andre he had exactly ten minutes between 6 am and 6.10 am to slip out. Andre didn’t sleep that night and in the morning, it went perfectly to plan. He walked out, into a waiting car, and went straight to Laguna Beach. For fifteen days he hid there, waiting for his false passport, then flew out of Brazil to Amsterdam. He planned to lie low for a long while, but it was January – midwinter, freezing and snowing.
I arrive in Amsterdam, it’s snowing, cold, nobody on the streets, I don’t want to stay. I just go inside one travel agent, buy one ticket and fly to Bali.
– Andre
Now, back on the tropical island, life was again beautiful – full of sunsets, afternoon joints, surfing, dining and dealing. But his lust for whimsical jet-setting would soon flip his life again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
SUA CASA CAI – YOUR HOUSE FALLS
Rafael wasn’t in Bali when Andre flew back. He’d had a long streak of bad luck, busts and rip-offs, which had sent him into a financial tailspin, unable to pay basics like his kids’ school fees. So when he’d got a call from his friend Lee, in Amsterdam, asking him to come and ‘play a game’, Rafael had jumped on a plane, desperately hoping for a win. ‘Everybody wanted to do it with me because I know the game.’
Lee was paying all operational costs, but needed someone he could trust to organise the buying, packing and sending. He’d pay Rafael in cocaine, giving him 2 of the 7 kilos being sent. In Amsterdam, he gave Rafael €45,000 to arrange things in Rio. In a few weeks, Rafael had it all set. A Brazilian girl was running with the 7 kilos of coke in Lee’s €3000 suitcase – with a false carbon fibre bottom – which he’d had tailor-made by an elderly Dutch specialist.
She flew to Brussels, avoiding Dutch customs, then was supposed to take a train to Amsterdam. But she failed to show up. She simply vanished and things turned sinister.
‘I’m gonna kill you, motherfucker,’ Lee’s Dutch investor screamed down the phone at Rafael, accusing him of a double-cross. ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with. You can’t hide.’
‘Pff, man, she busted,’ Rafael retorted, unsure if it were true.
‘You think I’m fucking stupid?’ the investor ranted. ‘I know you stole the coke, you did bullshit. I’m gonna kill you, I’m gonna burn your eyes with cigarettes.’
Everybody becomes Al Pacino, Scarface. All the drug dealers, they have this. In the end we think they found it in the X-ray and she bust. It’s a lottery.
– Rafael
Rafael was more desperate now. His wife was hassling him to hurry up, because she needed cash. Rafael was tired and cold in Europe’s freezing winter and wanting to go home to Bali to see his kids, sit on the beach and surf. But when Lee offered him another game, he knew he had to stay and breathe life into his career.
He flew back to Brazil, met another horse, Otto Koester, loaded him with 1 kilo and sent him off. Otto made it, finally breaking Rafael’s spell of bad luck. Rafael got $15,000 commission and reinvested it with Lee in another run. Otto was keen to run again too.
Back in Rio, Rafael loaded a backpack with 4 kilos of coke. As soon as it was ready, Rafael drove Otto to Rio’s Galeão International Airport and risked going inside with him to buy a ticket to fly immediately. The flight was full, so they bought a ticket for the following day.
Everything was too crazy, in a hurry. I don’t care anymore. I pushed to do it quickly, ‘Let’s do, let’s do, fast, fast, let’s go today, let’s go to the airport now.’ I think everything go down because my wife was hurrying me.
– Rafael
The next day, as Otto stood in line waiting to board the plane, there was a sudden commotion. A girl just ahead was pulled aside. They’d found 3.5 kilos of cocaine in her hand luggage. In those first moments of chaos, Otto had a chance to flee. But he decided not to; he felt confident that his bag was well packed and safely checked in. He thought they’d take her and let everyone else board the plane, but police suspected the 17-year-old girl from Cape Verde was a decoy for a larger amount. Suddenly, the window to flee slammed shut – every passenger was a suspect. Cops began checking them one by one, taking their bags off the plane for a rigorous search. They found the coke
A Brazilian, Otto Koester, 26, who also has Swiss nationality, was carrying 4 kg of cocaine in his baggage. Both [he and the 17-year-old girl] were trying to go to Europe on the same flight, although they had no connection with each other.
– Federal Police Association Press Agency, 11 April 2008
Rafael was waiting in his hotel when he got word from Lee that Otto had been busted. Lee had checked the net when Otto didn’t show. Rafael felt exhausted. All he had to show for the past six months of hard work were failed projects, guilt over his jailed horses, and bankruptcy.
I was still in Rio, hiding myself in some hotel. I was already very depressed because I lose a lot of coke, I put three people in jail, everything gone to hell, then my friend calls me and says, ‘You have to get out of the country now, quickly, or they’re gonna catch you.’ I say, ‘Don’t say that! Why?’ ‘Man, you were stupid; you went to buy the ticket with the horse. They have cameras everywhere, big surveillance.’ I was depressed, desperate, waiting, thinking any minute now somebody’s coming to catch me. It was the worst time in my career.
– Rafael
Rafael booked a flight and raced to Rio de Janeiro airport with only hand luggage.
I was on the run. I didn’t bring anything to make it easy. I throw away many things, clothes, even the laptop I leave in my friend’s house because of all the communication, emails and everything.
– Rafael
At the airport things went perfectly. He checked in, sailed through immigration and sat down in his tail-end economy seat, breathing a sigh of relief. Now, to hit the safety of the skies . . . But his instincts for trouble were sharp and something was wrong; his pulse started racing. Passengers were all seated and the plane wasn’t moving. The captain announced, ‘I’m sorry we have a problem . . .’ Rafael tuned out; he didn’t need to hear any more words. Two Federal police officers were walking towards him – a black guy and a blonde woman, wearing suits with shiny Policia Federal badges slashed across their shoulders. They were checking the seat numbers above the passengers’ heads.