The tale of Cassie Sainsbury and how she landed in a Colombian jail for allegedly trying to smuggle 6kg of cocaine
CASSIE Sainsbury, locked up in a Colombian jail, will this week be feeling a long way from home as she contemplates the possibility of being jailed for the next two decades.
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IT’S a long way from Warooka to Bogota. Somewhere around 15,300km, as the crow flies. Cassie Sainsbury, locked up in a Colombian jail, will this week be feeling each and every one of those kilometres as she contemplates the possibility of being marooned far from home, possibly for the next two decades.
But why the 22-year-old fitness trainer — who once ran an unsuccessful gym in Yorketown and was an aspiring model — ended up in Bogota’s El Buen Pastor (The Good Shepherd) prison, is still something of a mystery. As is the woman herself, who was subject to all sorts of claims and counter-claims as the week went on.
No sooner had one assertion been made (she was a Country Fire Service volunteer in Warooka) than it was shot down (that was three years ago).
HOW POLICE GOT CASSIE SAINSBURY
FIANCE: I’LL SUPPORT CASSIE NO MATTER WHAT
So is Sainsbury a patsy or a crook? An unwitting dupe who foolishly, if unknowingly, agreed to transport 5.8kg of cocaine worth almost $2 million, wrapped in 18 plastic bags, back to Australia in her luggage?
Or is she just the most inept drug smuggler since Schapelle Corby stuffed her boogie board with 4kg of high-quality cannabis and attempted to waltz into Bali with it.
As the story of Cassie Sainsbury’s life leaked out in bits and pieces over the course of the week, what emerged was a confusing and often contradictory story.
How did a woman from the bottom end of the Yorke Peninsula end up in such dire circumstances, so far from home?
But perhaps now the biggest unanswered questions relate to what Sainsbury was doing in Colombia in the first place. Why was she there? Why was she by herself? Why had she only planned to be there for nine days if she was on a so-called “working holiday?
Contradiction and confusion
The first most Australians heard of Sainsbury, who would end the week as “Colombia Cassie”, was last weekend, when an online fundraising web page set up by her desperate sister Khala and mother Lisa Evans became public.
“This here is hell on earth,” Khala wrote, explaining how her little sister was being held in a Bogota jail, accused of trying to smuggle almost 6kg of cocaine out of Colombia.
As you would expect, Sainsbury’s family, friends and fiance Scott Broadbridge have been loud and vehement in her defence — but even if their protestations of innocence and claims of set-ups are correct, their stories didn’t mesh.
The idea that Sainsbury was in Colombia on a “working holiday’’ was first raised by Khala. She said the trip was to promote personal training, which made some sense, because at that time it was thought Sainsbury was a fitness trainer. Still, Bogota seemed an odd destination and then there was the fact that Colombia does not offer “working holiday” visas to Australians.
Soon after, her fiance Scott Broadbridge said that explanation was nonsense.
“Although Cassie is a PT, she is not currently personal training and hasn’t been for six months,’’ he wrote on a fundraising page soliciting donations to fund her legal fees.
“I don’t know why that was mentioned at all. She helped manage a commercial cleaning business that had both national and international clients.’’
He also claimed that she had worked three jobs to save $20,000 to work in Bogota.
The traveller
But this statement jarred with Sainsbury’s extensive travel record in the weeks leading up to her ill-fated trip to Colombia. On April 3, she posted a photo to Instagram saying “going from China’s lovely 27C weather to LA’s 7 degree weather is killing me’’. It appears that she caught her connecting flight to Bogota from LA.
The trip to Colombia came after trips to Canada, China and Vanuatu. One story about how she came to the attention of authorities was that her ticket to Bogota from Australia was bought at the last minute by an unknown person in Hong Kong.
On April 8, she posted another photograph while in Colombia. “Can’t complain about an all-expenses paid work trip which is mainly holiday and very little work.’’
Which makes you wonder why she needed that $20,000 for the week in Bogota that Broadbridge mentioned.
It was on April 12 that she was arrested at Bogota’s El Dorado airport with the 5.8kg of cocaine in 18 black plastic bags as she attempted to board a flight on the Colombian national airline, Avianca, to catch her flight to London. Sainsbury was also scheduled to stop in France and Hong Kong before arriving back in Australia on April 15, Easter Saturday.
Sainsbury’s story was that she thought she was buying cheap headphones as gifts to give to the bridal party on the day she married Broadbridge. The wedding was scheduled for February. The cocaine was then placed in the packages, which she thought contained the headphones, without her knowledge by a man she had befriended during her time in Colombia.
Which raises another question — how was the cocaine to be retrieved by the people who used Sainsbury as an unwitting mule when she returned to Australia?
What tipped off the authorities?
There are varying accounts of just what Sainsbury did to draw the attention of the American DEA, who sent an alert to Colombian narcotics police to search her luggage if she tried to leave the country.
This tip-off led to her arrest, but later reports said it was the last-minute purchase of her airline ticket home, paid for by cash by a third party in Hong Kong, that tipped them off.
And yesterday, it emerged that police were on the alert much earlier, with a tip-off about Ms Sainsbury received on April 5, a couple of days after she arrived in Colombia on April 3 and a week before she tried to depart the country on April 12.
Jorge Mendoza, the ports and airports director for Colombia’s anti-narcotic police, told Colombian journalist Carlos Colina the tip-off included Ms Sainsbury’s name, nationality and photo.
Cassie’s lawyer is Orlando Herran, a criminal lawyer with local political aspirations, who took on her case at the request of her Australian legal team, to whom he was introduced through an international network of human rights lawyers.
He says he believes Cassie’s story — but that she should plead guilty anyway, because she has a weak defence and would spend at least two years in El Buen Pastor before she would be able to have her day in court.
“To me, she seems like a good person who made mistakes,” he said.
“She trusted in someone, she accepted the packages without checking them. She’s in a grave situation where she can’t get evidence in her favour.”
Others are far more sceptical.
“99 per cent know what they are doing.’’
Bogota Airport anti-narcotics chief Commander Rodrigo Soler scrolls quickly through screen after screen of photos of drug traffickers on one of the three mobile phones lined up on his wooden desk.
He’s a little surprised we have found his office, about 100m down the road from the bustling El Dorado international terminal on a bank holiday Monday, and even more surprised that we’ve come to ask questions about the arrest of a foreign drug mule three weeks ago.
“We have them all the time,” he says, pointing out photos of some of the characters his heavily armed officers have taken down since Cassie, who is one of 46 arrested this year alone.
“This one, she was a grandmother,” he says, pointing at a 70-year-old Mexican woman staring out from the phone, photographed beside bags of cocaine.
“And this one, you can see he is in a wheelchair and they have packed all of the drugs around his genitals,” he says with a shrug as he shows us a picture of an overweight and ill-looking old man. Another screen shows a close-up of a man who has been shot in the head.
Soler says he believes 99 per cent of the mules arrested at Bogota airport know what they are doing and the risks they are taking. And he puts Cassie into this wide basket.
“We as a unit don’t see these arrests as being great take-downs because really they are just victims of narco-trafficking,” he says.
“They have committed a crime and have to pay for it obviously, but we see them sometimes as victims because they were convinced, or in some moment they weren’t thinking clearly and they were offered money and it’s landed them in these problems.
“Our real objective is to take down the organisations, to arrest the owner of these drugs and to that, the national police is working every day and sometimes we make big strikes both nationally and internationally.”
Commander Soler said Colombia’s national police worked closely with multiple foreign agencies to stem the flow of drugs from his country.
“The DEA helps us, but not only the DEA — we have different countries’ help,” he said.
“Not much from Australia. There’s not a close relationship with the Australian authorities and us, but Spain, Mexico, the US, they all send out alerts saying ‘take care with this person’ and some of them turn out to be true, some of them false.”
The Americans
There is no doubt the DEA is intimately involved in trying to crack the Colombian drug trade.
The US embassy in Bogota is a hulking concrete fortress that takes up almost 10 city blocks. Deep within its secretive confines sits the Drug Enforcement Agency, where as many as 800 agents have been tracking and policing the country’s booming cocaine cartels since the late 1970s.
So tied are Colombia’s anti-narcotics police to the DEA that many see them as a puppet army for their American superiors. So sophisticated is their surveillance, a leak of diplomatic cables recently asserted they are monitoring the entire country’s web traffic, even able to access the microphones and recorders on civilian cellphones.
As the world’s biggest cocaine producer, Colombia has by necessity spawned this law enforcement behemoth. And just over three weeks ago, they set their sights on a young South Australian woman at the end of a nine-day stay in the capital.
“She was so young’’
That the fellow who allegedly set up Cassie — and whose name may be Angelo or Tom, according to her lawyer Orlando Herran — has disappeared is not surprising.
If her story is to be believed, you would expect this character to go into hiding; if she is guilty, well, he’s probably gone into hiding.
Sainsbury’s movements in Bogota also seem odd from the outside. According to the manager of the hotel where she stayed in Bogota, she arrived alone, without a reservation and only paid a couple of days in advance.
Hotel manager Ingrid Hernandez remembers Cassie well from her stay at her family-run hotel in downtown Bogota. Although drug dealers line a seedy nearby pathway to a square, named the Park of the Journalists, Hernandez’s hotel is clean and popular with business travellers, with
painters and carpenters working on some of the 40 rooms when we visit.
Cassie spent eight nights in the tiny room 601, which holds a bed, a small bureau beneath a TV and a closet-sized toilet.
“I try to talk to foreigners when they stay here because of Tripadvisor and everything, and I once shared the lift with her, and I asked her how she was,” Hernandez says.
“I asked her because this room is basic, for Colombians, and foreigners are usually used to a standard that is a little higher. That was the only room we had at the time. She arrived without a reservation.”
The mystery man
Hernandez rode in a lift with the young man who was Cassie’s only known visitor — a young, well-dressed Colombian with a stylish haircut and dark skin.
“He came a few times, the receptionists told me, but we don’t have a record of him because he didn’t stay the night,” she says.
“He was a young guy, but older than her. He looked normal. Normal height, normal build. He could have been in his late 20s, 30s. He had short, brown gelled hair.”
Herran said Cassie told him in detail about how she came to unknowingly pack the drugs into her bag, after being told by Angelo or Tom they were the headphones she bought from him to take home as presents.
“She said this guy was very friendly, he spoke English and Spanish,” he says.
“But we don’t have any more details about him. The only thing she had was a cell phone number — no address, no nothing, no surname, nothing else.”
Cassie — who has formally refused all requests for interviews — has told her family at home that she called the number after she was arrested, and that the man hung up on her and the phone appears to have been destroyed.
“Supposedly she met him around the hotel where she was staying, in the first few days when she arrived here,” Herran says.
“She didn’t speak Spanish so was supported by him, he helped her, accompanied her, they went everywhere together.
“I asked her: how did you trust him so quickly? She said that the first day she didn’t trust him, the second day a little bit more, the third day she trusted him, because he seemed very friendly, he helped with everything, with translation, he showed her around. She thought she had made a good friend.”
Home town
Back in the tiny town of Warooka, near the bottom of the Yorke Peninsula, Stuart Sainsbury was standing by his daughter.
“It’s hard to explain that a father’s love doesn’t change, no matter what they do. I love my kid to pieces and would do anything for her,’’ he said.
Some others weren’t so generous. Sainsbury was well known to locals. She had attended the Yorketown Area School and played futsal in Warooka for a team called Warooka Wii Not Fit.
Rumours soon swirled that she had left Yorketown in a hurry after her business Yorke Fitness, which was registered in March 2015, collapsed, leaving thousands of dollars of debt.
One of the stories was that she had borrowed money from her then boyfriend Luke Tape to establish the business. However, Tape’s father Richie Tape denied this was the case.
“Cassie doesn’t owe Luke any money,” he said. “He didn’t pay for her gym equipment.
“We don’t know about any of her other financial affairs.”
The landlord of the business, Nick Paphitis, also said Sainsbury had settled her debts.
“She paid every cent she owed me and that’s all I’m prepared to say,” he said.
It appears she left the Yorke Peninsula towards the end of 2015. Certainly by November that year, she was celebrating her engagement to Scott Broadbridge, which occurred on a cruise to Vanuatu and New Caledonia, and the couple were living in the southern beachside suburb of Moana with their three huskies Buster, Bella and Rex.
On January 10 this year, she also seemed to intimate on social media that her life was about to change radically.
“50 days until I make the biggest move I’ve yet to do ... 50 days until everything changes,” she wrote, a time-scale that would have taken her until March 1.
The fiance
Yesterday, after dodging the media for several days, Broadbridge spoke of his concern for Sainsbury, whom he has spoken to several times over the course of the week.
Speaking at a press conference, Broadbridge said he had “no doubt that Cassie is innocent of these charges and I will support her no matter how long this takes”.
“Cass and I are engaged to be married and I intend to marry her. I know that there are many unanswered questions in this case and I intent to work with the lawyers to get to the bottom of them.”
But the hard truth is that it could be a long time before they are together again.
The cartels
Colombian organised crime expert Ariel Avila says foreigners are increasingly being targeted by criminal gangs to smuggle drugs from Colombia, which for decades has been the world’s biggest producer of cocaine.
“The cocaine market in Australia is newly prosperous, and they started to recruit young men and women as mules,” he told The Advertiser.
“They pay them $US10-$US12,000 ($13,500-$16,200) to take the drugs there. That’s for a small amount of drugs — in this case, it would be probably be more.
He said Cassie’s story of being unknowingly recruited was certainly possible.
“It could happen,” he says.
“There’s heavy parties that last 24 hours, 48 hours, in the middle of the partying you meet a guy or a girl — in this case a guy — you form a relationship fast, you have a few days being tourists in the capital, and then comes the recruitment.
“However, the majority of the people know what they’re carrying. I’d say 90 per cent know what they’re carrying. Ten per cent might have been set up, but the vast majority know what they’re doing.”
He said another possibility was that Cassie was a decoy, explaining that while cartels such as the Urabeños, Colombia’s biggest, manage the export on a large scale, there’s also a local narco, that maybe manages just one route, or maybe just one city.
“Here, we’re talking about either a small-scale trafficker getting her to take a small amount over — in comparison with the tons that go by container — or it could be a large network with lots of mules,” he said.
“Many times there are 18 or 20 mules on a plane and the narcos set one up so they distract the authorities and the rest pass. That could’ve happened to her. She could be a ‘false positive’.”
Avila said that Cassie’s presence on a DEA alert list meant she had likely come in contact with known traffickers after arriving here on April 3.
“If they had an alert on this person, it means that they knew she was going to move drugs out of the country at some point, or that she had a long-time connection with a drug-trafficker that the DEA was following. And we’re not talking about a few days, we’re talking about something longer.”
Prison life
Whether or not Cassie decides to fight — a fraught process that given she doesn’t even know the surname of the mystery man who she says set her up — she will spend at least the next few months in the grimly overcrowded El Buen Pastor women’s prison.
While the cell she is sharing in Patio Five is in by far the most palatable section of the prison, it is still a far cry from suburban South Australia.
“It’s hard in there,” says Sandra Ardila, who runs a support network for inmates across Bogota’s prisons.
“If you don’t have money and you don’t get a good lawyer, they can get people to accept charges by applying pressure, the Fiscalia (police) doesn’t help.
“The food is terrible. Normally a piece of bread would be 120 grams, with oat meal that’s just water. Bread and water, that’s breakfast. Once a week they give out an egg. It’s just sad.”
Herran says Cassie is ‘very traumatised” inside the jail, where she is sharing a cell with only one other woman, but her overriding emotion at the moment is one of deep regret.
“She just keeps saying: ‘Stupid, I was so stupid’. Psychologically, it is very hard for her.”
And whether or not you believe Cassie is a naive young Aussie tricked by a hustler, or a hard-nosed smuggler who was caught out: it’s hard not to agree with that sentiment.
Either way, it’s going to be a long time before Cassie Sainsbury sees Warooka again.
— Additional reporting Joe Parkin Daniels
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