Bali Nine drug baron Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen told me his SECRET dying wish – after he became grief-stricken at the miserable fate of the hapless Aussie mules he recruited, reveals STEVE JACKSON, who illicitly grilled him in his fetid Bali jail cell
EXCLUSIVE
Wasting away in a Javanese prison cell, Bali Nine drug runner Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen spent his final years wracked with grief for his family, and the young Aussie mules he recruited.
Resigned to dying behind bars, the convicted heroin trafficker was crushed by guilt over roping in naïve school mates Scott Rush and Michael Czugaj for the botched $4million drug plot.
Although they were all sentenced to life in prison in Indonesia, he desperately hoped Rush and Czugaj would one day be allowed to walk free and see Australia once again.
I know this because Nguyen told me during our many long and candid phone conversations over an illicit mobile he had paid to have smuggled into his wretched jailhouse home.
We discussed at length their secret plan to traffick eight kilos of heroin from Bali to Australia in April 2005, the part he played in it, and his dying wish for the other members of the foiled, ill-fated cartel.
‘Am I guilty? Yes,’ Nguyen told me via encrypted messaging service WhatsApp ahead of his death.
‘Am I sorry? More than anyone will ever know.
‘Not because of what has happened to me but because of what I have done to other people – the pain that I have caused to my family and to Scott and Michael and their families.
One of the ‘selfies’ Bali Nine members Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen and Martin Stephens sent from their jail cell in East Java via a mobile phone smuggled into the prison to prove their identities
Nguyen was just 21 when he was arrested over his role ‘supervising’ the botched attempt to smuggle eight kilograms of heroin from Bali back into Australia in April 2005
Nguyen had enlisted 19-year-old drug mule Scott Rush to traffick the heroin on his body
Nguyen also recruited Rush’s 18-year-old schoolmate Michael Czugaj as a drug courier
‘I live with that regret every single morning when I wake and every night in my noisy, bare jail cell as I try to sleep.’
Bearing witness as Rush disintegrated into a world of drug addiction behind bars was particularly devastating, Nyugen said, with his pleas to Bali’s prison yard dealers to stop supplying him with narcotics wilfully ignored.
‘It has been terrible watching him destroy himself,’ Nguyen said.
‘I tell you now, there isn’t any code of honour among drug dealers. In the end, (drugs) will destroy you and everyone around you.
‘Scott and Michael deserve better than what has happened to them – and I will never forgive myself for that.’
It was March 2015 when Nguyen first got in touch with me, just weeks before Bali Nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were put to death by firing squad on Nusakambangan Island on April 29, 2015.
Nguyen had been transferred from Kerobokan to a penitentiary in Malang, East Java, along with fellow Bali Nine member Martin Stephens the previous year and was nervously watching Chan and Sukumaran’s executions play out from a far.
Bali Nine ringleader Myruan Sukumaran was put to death in 2015 for his part in the foiled plan
Fellow ‘mastermind’ Andrew Chan was also executed over his role in the smuggling operation
He had never spoken publicly – nor given any sort of interview – about his involvement in the infamous drug operation but wanted to clear his conscience and do what he could to help the other members of the group.
At first, I was apprehensive he was indeed who he was claiming to be.
But after days of sending me detailed text messages and selfies alongside cellmate and fellow convicted trafficker Stephens it became clear he was telling the truth.
He was taking a grave risk in speaking with me.
Although it was an open secret in Indonesia that most prison inmates had ready access to covert cell phones and used them to keep in contact with loved ones and the outside world, overtly advertising this fact by giving an interview was bound to be met with swift retribution.
Nguyen knew this but wanted to push ahead anyway.
Besides, there was little hope for him, he explained.
Lifers like Nguyen were not eligible for the annual sentence reductions other prisoners received and, given the strong message being sent by Chan and Sukumaran’s executions, he feared any attempt by the Bali Nine’s surviving members to seek clemency or appeal the severity of their sentences would backfire disastrously.
‘Sitting in my jail cell and watching the way the Indonesian government is handling their execution, I’m terrified,’ he told me at the time.
A youthful Nguyen refused to speak publicly about his role in the drug smuggling plot for 10 years for fear of further shaming his family before breaking his silence in a rare 2015 interview
He was resigned to dying behind bars in Indonesia after Chan and Sukumaran were executed
Nguyen shared a cell with fellow convicted Bali Nine member Martin Stephens
‘I’m terrified for their situation, distraught for their loved ones and agonisingly certain I will be next [to die].
‘Given what’s happened to Andrew and Myuran, I fear the rest of us will never be able to have a fair trial – the risk is huge.’
Still, he said, languishing in prison in Indonesia was just another sort of death sentence.
‘It’s death by another means. Death by another method,’ he said.
‘No one prefers death. Death is an easy way out. I deserve the suffering I’m going through.
‘I have brought shame on my family. That time when my mother, aunty and sister came that first time to visit me in prison. That’s the memory that has stayed in my mind.
‘My mother trying to just touch my face between the bars. The pain in her eyes and face. (It) was the most heartbreaking experience ever.
‘I just want them to know I am sorry for everything – I hope they will one day forgive me, even though I don’t expect that.
‘As for the others, I hope and I pray every single day that they will be able to find a way home.’
Rush has now spent more than half of his life in prison after being arrested at just 19
Michael Czugaj, seen with his parents in 2005, has also spent more time inside jail than out
Nguyen’s prediction he would die in prison would ultimately prove correct – though it would not be before a firing squad.
Not long after we first started speaking, he was diagnosed with renal cancer and eventually succumbed to the disease in May 2018.
He did not live long enough to see one member of the Bali Nine realise his dream.
Six month’s after Nguyen’s death, in November 2018, the group’s only female conspirator, Renae Lawrence, was released after serving almost 13 years locked up and deported to Australia.
Six years on, the five members who remain in prison, Rush, Cazgaj Stephen, Si Yi Chen and Matthew Norman, could finally now also be sent back home.
Indonesia’s authorities have privately agreed to a request from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to allow them to complete their incarceration in Australia in a move that would see them return as early as next month – although no official announcement has yet been made.
By then, the two mules Nguyen personally recruited, Rush and Czugaj, will have spent more than half of their lives behind bars.
The only female member of the Bali Nine, Ranae Lawrence, was sentenced to 20 years in jail
Lawrence walks free as she returns to Newcastle after serving 13 years of her sentence
The Brisbane schoolmates we just 19 and 18 when they were arrested with more than one kilogram of heroin strapped to each of their bodies at Ngurah Rai International Airport in Denpasar, Bali on April 17, 2005.
They are both serving life sentences.
Nguyen, who had been 21 at the time of the smuggling run, had recruited the friends after meeting them in a pub in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley and seducing them with the promise of an all-expenses-paid holiday on the tropical resort island.
He had been part of a failed attempt, along with Chan, Lawrence and Norman, to traffick heroin into Australia from Bali the previous December, only for the operation to fall apart when their supplier was arrested.
The son of hard-working Vietnamese refugee parents, Nguyen hadn’t planned on taking part again, but his drug baron ‘friend’ – whom he refused to name right up to his death – convinced him to take on ‘a supervising role’.
‘My friend was stressing and couldn’t find anyone to carry the drugs. So I started calling people and found two people, [Rush and Czugaj],’ he told me.
‘Another person who was meant to go couldn’t because he had exams. So my friend, having no one else, asked me if I could go and just be “an eagle”.
‘I said yes, because he was my best friend and I would do anything for him.
Nguyen, Chan, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen were barely adults when they are arrested
‘At the time, I don’t think any of us really had any clue of the extent of what we were all doing.
‘It just seemed like a bunch of friends, going on holidays together, having fun.
‘We got drunk every night, girls were easy and everything was exciting and new.
‘We partied in Bali that last night and got so wasted.’
Still, he said at times he had the feeling of impending doom.
‘After we landed I told someone twice that we were being watched, but he told me I was being paranoid,’ he said.
‘I tried to put it out of my mind. But I still had this feeling. We were being watched.’
Nguyen’s co-conspirators should have listened.
The baby-faced members of the Bali Nine after their arrest, top from left, Myuran Sukumaran, Scott Rush, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Renae Lawrence, and bottom from left, Si Yi Chen, Matthew Norman, Michael Czugaj, Martin Stephen and Andrew Chan
The group’s every step was being closely monitored by Indonesian police after being tipped off about the operation by the Australian Federal Police.
Nguyen never made it back to Denpasar Airport.
He was arrested the same day as Rush and Czugaj at the Melasti Bungalows resort with Sukumaran, Norman and Chen in possession of 334g of heroin, plastic wrapping and a set of scales.
Nguyen was also sentenced to life imprisonment and spent his initial years locked away in Bali’s notorious Kerobokan prison before being transferred to Java.
He was moved again, to a prison in Jakarta in 2017, at his family’s request so he could better access cancer treatment before dying in a hospital in Indonesia’s capital on May 19 the following year.
He was just 34, and had spent more than a third of his life in jail.
