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DARK PARADISE

I have a fortune, I want to share my fortune with you, okay, am I clear enough?’ Something like that.

What are the big cases lawyers often want to keep quiet?

Drug cases with a foreigner suspect.

And do you tell your journalists, ‘Don’t cover that court case today?’

Yeah.

And what if the journalist asks why?

That’s my own business. ‘You have to choose, you obey my order, take it or you leave from this office.’

– Editor, one of Bali’s major newspapers

While expats busted at home could usually manage a sling to avoid the problem leaving their house, it didn’t always work. Some didn’t have ready access to big cash, or their case had already hit the newspapers and gone too far to avoid the spotlight. At that point lawyers, together with police and judiciary, had to devise tactics to be able to deliver a light sentence for cash, without red-flagging the bribe and alerting Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), an active non-profit organisation initiated in June 1998 as an anti-graft watchdog.

Tricks used were sometimes as simple as obscuring the quantity of drugs found, or having one sentence read out for public scrutiny in court and then quietly changing it on the court paperwork that was sent and held at the jail. Conveniently, the files were not stored on computer.

Englishman Steve Turner slung a $35,000 bribe to covertly reduce his six-year sentence, announced in court, to three years,