Ray Marsden’s two-year nightmare before being found innocent
A MAN who handed over millions of dollars’ worth of drugs to police thought he was doing the right thing. Instead he was arrested and faced spending the next two decades in prison.
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AUSTRALIA’S most extraordinary international drug bust didn’t involve police smashing down the door of a warehouse and swarming in to uncover a massive stash headed for our streets.
It wasn’t sparked by a luxury yacht off the coast, trying to spirit an illicit shipment past Customs. And there were no phone taps, or video surveillance, bikie gangs or even any Mr Bigs.
No. The most bizarre bust our country has ever seen, one that netted 44kg of pure methamphetamine worth up to a staggering $100 million, took place on a steamy January morning when an ageing Queensland pensioner dressed in shorts and a T-shirt pulled up at Bribie Island police station in an old Ford Falcon station wagon.
Ray Marsden, a gentle bloke with thinning grey hair, thought he was doing the right thing.
A load of imported decorative tiles were in the back of his car and a load of dark questions were weighing on his mind.
At first he had to beg police to open up his cargo to check it was all legit.
By that evening, the now 68-year-old converted Buddhist was an accused drug trafficker: charged, locked up and staring down the barrel of 20 years in jail.
It was day one of a 2½-year ordeal – one that drove him to the absolute brink – trying to prove his only crimes were being honest and catastrophically naive.
“It’s been a hell of a nightmare – the whole thing,’’ Marsden says.
Staring across the blue waters of Moreton Bay, opposite his home, he says that while awaiting trial he often thought about swallowing packets of pills and ending it all.
“I had it all figured out. All I had to do was put something heavy around my legs, take my canoe out on the water and roll over,’’ he says.
“I came that close to it.
“I don’t know how many times.’’
The path to hell began in one of the most beautiful, tranquil parts of the world – with the holiday of a lifetime and a fateful meeting.
Marsden, who had always been interested in Buddhism – travelled to Tibet and Nepal about eight years ago.
A friendly porter at his hotel in Kathmandu, “Pashupati’’ Manish Shrestha, then 28, showed him the sights of the Nepali capital.
Later in the trip, high in western Tibet, Marsden developed altitude sickness, forcing his return to the hotel.
Hearing of his plight, Pashupati then invited Marsden to stay with his family in their humble mud floor house in a small village, close to the Tibetan border, an eight-hour drive away on a rutted road.
“That’s where the friendship started. He was an extremely friendly, very kind person who cared. I wasn’t just a number,’’ Marsden says.
In the ensuing years Marsden visited Nepal several times doing courses in Buddhism as well as visiting Pashupati, whom he came to consider his “adopted son’’ and his wife and daughter, now five.
He felt he could trust Pashupati with his life, even lending him $20,000 to open a clothing shop.
In early January 2016, Marsden had just returned to Queensland from Nepal when his friend, asked him to help him with a new venture.
There was an opportunity to do some freight “like DHL’’ and he asked Marsden to pick up some packages of household decorations from the Port of Brisbane.
Marsden soon began receiving emails from Pashupati’s friend Bikram Lamichhane, who he had met briefly in Nepal but disliked, with instructions about picking up the packages.
“I said, right from the start, I didn’t want any money to do it. I was just doing it to help Pashupati, thinking he might get a couple of hundred dollars out of it,’’ he says.
Alarm bells started ringing when Bikram suggested he’d need a truck for the pick up, and offered to give him $6000 – more than a year’s wages in Nepal.
“I’m thinking $6000. That’s a lot of profit for a few decorative items. I want nothing to do with this’, Marsden would tell Federal police.
But Bikram backtracked, saying he had made a mistake about the $6000 offer.
“I kept asking all these questions and I kept getting answers that were sort of plausible. I didn’t just go blindly into it,’’ Marsden says.
“I’ve watched crime shows on TV. My imagination was running wild. But if I’d honestly thought there were drugs I would not have done it.’’
Then Bikram got him over the line, convincing him to pick the packages up on January 18, 2016, by saying: “If you don’t think it’s right, take the police with you. Let them open the packages.’’
At the Port of Brisbane on January 18, 2016 the plot thickened.
Waiting for the divorced father of two were 10 packages of Chinese decorative tiles weighing a total of 340kg.
He could fit only six in his Falcon station wagon, leaving the rest behind.
“I’d expected nothing bigger than one or two suitcases,’’ Marsden says.
The 10 packages – later found to be packed with ice – were all addressed to a man in Fitzgibbon, Brisbane.
As he was driving home, the worries mounting in his mind, a stranger called Marsden’s phone, claiming his name was Frank and saying he was from the freight company in China that had sent the packages to Australia.
Marsden, who had not let on that he had already collected some of the packages he thought had come from Nepal, was told by Frank he must pick them up.
The sirens in his head were really going off now.
Why would someone from a Chinese freight company have his number or name, when the packages were not addressed to him?
“That’s when it was really ringing alarm bells. That’s when I decided I’ve got to take this to the police and let them have a look at it. They can sort it out,’’ Marsden says.
Later, when he got an email from Bikram telling him the packages would not be picked up from him for a week, he became even more concerned.
“That, coupled with Frank’s call, tipped everything upside down,’’ he says.
Two days later, Marsden was at his local police station, armed with printed emails from Bikram and some plastic-wrapped tiles, pleading to see a drug squad officer.
He eventually spoke to a “rather disinterested’’ policeman, who read the emails and said it all seemed okay. But then Marsden offered to show him one of the red and gold decorative tiles from his car.
At first blush the officer said the cargo looked OK, but Marsden asked the policeman to open one up, and inside there was a plastic bag, containing crystal rocks of methamphetamine.
The six packages he had collected turned out to contain 24 kilos of pure methamphetamines.
“I had to ask him three times to open it up and if it hadn’t been for me pushing him and basically doing his job, the stuff would never have been found,’’ Marsden says.
“Why would I have done all that if I was involved?’’
His first reaction to the discovery? Elation. Vindication.
“I felt great. I thought I’d done the right thing. At no time did I ever feel there was any legal problem, not until the police said ‘You’re under arrest’,’’ he says.
He agreed to answer questions without a lawyer, thinking he had nothing to hide, later telling them: “I do not do drugs. I do not agree with drugs, I’m totally against drugs.’’
“I wasn’t worried. I was absolutely frustrated,’’ he says.
After a 2½ hour interview, Marsden was arrested for importing a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug.
He was taken to the city watch-house around midnight “in absolute shock’’.
Marsden had offered to be involved in any operation to help catch those who were involved in the importation, including those who might pick up the drug packages, saying he was “their best lead’’.
“I even said if you want to, you can stick a microchip under my skin. I said I’ll go to Nepal. I’ll go to China and try to be undercover for you,’’ he says.
Federal police then conducted a controlled operation, after finding out Marsden had been instructed to deliver the six packages to a Brisbane woman, who is believed to have been unaware of the drug importation.
They arranged for the packages, minus the drugs, to be delivered to the woman’s house and then watched as Nepalese man Bhupendra Tamang arrived in a taxi truck to collect them.
He was later arrested at a Bowen Hills rented apartment and in August last year he was convicted of attempting to possess a commercial quantity of border-controlled drugs.
He is serving a 10 year sentence with a non-parole period of five years, six months.
One of the most humiliating times for Marsden was when he spent nine days in the Brisbane Watchhouse, before being moved to Wacol Correctional Centre for a few weeks before getting bail.
“It’s a hovel, an absolute hovel,’’ he says of the watch-house.
“When I came out of there, out onto the street, and saw three friends there, I lost it.
“I felt so embarrassed, filthy, dirty. I was sobbing. My friend Chris grabbed me – I was hitting him away – and gave me a big hug.’’
After he was driven home to the Bribie Island house he shared with others, Marsden did not want to leave his room.
“I felt so betrayed by everything,’’ he says.
But Chris would not let his friend wallow in his despair and took him for a walk on the beach opposite. “He basically saved my life,’’ Marsden says.
The ordeal had pushed Marsden to the edge repeatedly in the long two years until his trial. But thinking about the effect his death would have on his daughter, and the fact that as a Buddhist he believed he would be reincarnated and possibly have to deal with the same or a similar experience in his next life, stopped him taking his life.
Years before becoming a Buddhist, Marsden was married with two children, now in their 40s, and had been self-employed in the automotive industry almost his entire working life.
When he retired a few years ago Marsden gave away most of his possessions to live simply in a house with friends, occasionally exhibiting his paintings.
As a Buddhist, he has taken a vow not to lie, and therefore he freely admits he has not always been squeaky clean.
More than 30 years ago, after his marriage broke up and when his business was going belly-up, he was involved in a car stealing racket and, as the only one caught, spent six months in jail.
“I’m a spiritual person. The universe was telling me it was not what I should be doing. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. It stopped dead everything in its tracks,’’ he says.
“I became a much better person.’’
Now he was being tested in a way he could not have imagined.
The hardest time for Marsden came in May – more than two years after his arrest – when a jury retired to consider their verdict after a three-day trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court.
Marsden was staying in a Brisbane hotel apartment, just down from the court building and on that night, after the jury had gone home without reaching a verdict, he felt extremely low.
“I just couldn’t handle it. Waiting for 12 people to decide my fate for the next 20 years,’’ he says.
“I was stressing big time. I was on the balcony thinking ‘Why couldn’t I have been on the 18th floor’?
“I think if I had been on the 18th floor I would have jumped off. It was so hard. I had no control over it.’’
But once again, as a Buddhist who believes in reincarnation, and who had taken vows not to kill anything, including himself, Marsden knew he could not do it.
When the jury foreman uttered the words “not guilty’’, Marsden put his head in his hands and cried.
He had not given evidence in his trial, as was his legal right, but the jury had seen a DVD of his full interview with Federal police.
“I don’t think I could have given evidence, emotionally or physically. I don’t think I had the strength,’’ he says.
Outside court, after the verdict, Marsden was approached by one of the jurors, who congratulated him for taking all those drugs off the streets and hugged him.
“I felt vindicated getting a not-guilty verdict and for him to come out and confirm it, it was one of the highlights of my life,’’ Marsden says.
Afterwards Marsden, who was supported at court by his sister and some close friends, wanted time alone and walked across the nearby Kurilpa Bridge, “trying to make sense of it all’’.
“I’d felt that the weight of the entire earth was on my shoulders, squishing me into a little hole and suddenly I was released and I imagined leaving it all behind, as I walked over the bridge.’’
Despite his acquittal, Marsden has lost some friends and he is still struggling to put the whole experience behind him.
“I was a victim for 2½ years. You can only be a victim if you allow yourself to be one and I choose not to be a victim anymore,’’ he says.
Three or four days after the verdict he finally spoke to Pashupati, who emotionally told him to come to Nepal “now, now now’’.
Marsden’s bail conditions had previously prevented him from contacting his friend, but that did not stop Pashupati sending him messages saying: “I am very sorry. So many time cry. So many tear fall” and “I am your son, you are my father …”
Marsden is unshaken in his belief that Pashupati, whose family home was reduced to rubble in the 2015 Nepal earthquake, was another innocent victim of those who set up the drug importation.
“He is still my son. There is no way in the world I will believe he knew about it,’’ he says.
In Nepal, arrests were made as a result of information passed on by AFP, but Pashupati was later released.
Marsden, whose life savings have been wiped out after spending $50,000 defending the case, also counts the huge public cost from his arrest, the police investigation, his time in custody, many court appearances and trial.
But on the flip side, he says his role in keeping all that ice off the streets possibly saved some lives and prevented many people becoming victims of ice-fuelled violence and crime.
His solicitor, Ross Malcolmson of Fisher Dore Lawyers, says there are lessons to be learned from Marsden’s experience of being prosecuted after taking the packages to police.
“Irrespective of the co-operation you might be giving police or Federal agents, it always pays to obtain legal advice before doing so, even if you think you are doing nothing wrong,’’ he says.
The Australian Federal Police refused to comment on whether Marsden should have been charged, only saying the force “accepts the decision of the court’’.
Marsden has recently returned to Nepal, where he will spend the next four months living simply, doing Buddhist courses and spending time with Pashupati and his family.
A few days before he left Australia, Marsden said: “I need a couple of months of quiet contemplation, to understand what has happened.”