How Cocaine Cassie went from farm girl to accused drug mule
THE untold story of Cassie Sainsbury. The intervention to stop her going to Colombia, the deceit and how Daddy’s little girl went from farm girl to accused drug mule.
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STUART Sainsbury is a country bloke and not very big on the internet.
But he needs to know an answer: “Does Colombia have the death penalty?” his tradie fingers fumble on his mobile phone.
Google had good news. A search result spits out “abolished in 1910”. She will live, he thinks, taking in a life saving breath of his own.
It is the first thing the father of the girl next door now known as Cocaine Cassie does when told his daughter was in jail as an accused drug mule.
“I thought, ‘Oh my god, she is going to be shot’,” he told the Herald Sun. “I was expecting to go over and get her in a body bag.”
More: Cocaine Cassie flips story again
Cassie was the 22-year-old small town country girl, with big ambitions and a love for animals.
She didn’t mind picking up the shovel with Dad to earn extra cash when times got tough.
But an appetite for fast money would soon change this. She became Cocaine Cassie. Then weeks later she added Call Girl Cassie to her new list of names.
But sister Khala Sainsbury wants one name to remain unused in this ordeal.
“We are not the Corbys 2.0,” Khala says referring to Bali drug smuggler Schapelle Corby and her family.
DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL
Before Cassie became the nation’s latest water cooler conversation, she was Daddy’s little girl.
The now defunct teen Dolly magazine was Stuart’s bible during testing puberty years with Cassie.
He would have a quick peek to help deal with things of a female nature. The feminine hygiene aisle at the supermarket can get confusing for a single dad.
Stuart and his ex-wife Lisa Sainsbury divorced when Cassie was 11-years-old. She stayed with her dad while older sister Khala moved in with mum.
She grew up with her parents at Minlaton on the Yorke Peninsula, attending Yorketown High School, and moved with her Dad to nearby town Warooka where she would spend much of her teen years.
She tended to her own chooks, their mother hen.
When her chickens had heat stroke she nurse them back.
Stuart remembers taking Cassie camping when she was about 16-years-old. She could deal with ruggedness but he forgot to tell her there wouldn’t be any mobile phone coverage.
“She climbed to the top of one the highest rocks she could find looking for reception with the phone up in the air,” he says.
More: Fiance, family visiting Cassie upsets inmates
Madam’s startling claims about Cassie’s life as sex worker
The ideal spot for a selfie.
In Warooka, she was a volunteer firefighter for the CFS. But one call out got too much for her. When she arrived she realised the life she would be saving was her close friend, who was badly injured in a car accident. Cassie struggled to deal with trauma and ended her service in July 2014.
Her spirits would soon be lifted by finding her dream man and getting engaged.
THE CALL
SCOTT Broadbridge and his father, Peter, drove two hours from their coastal home for a “meet the parents meeting” in a little town called Warooka, west of Adelaide, with a slogan “Gateway to the bottom end”.
The two dads would meet in March — just one month before they would learn Cassie was languishing in a Colombian jail cell. Stuart had cooked up one of his big lunches at his country home.
The meeting would be only the second time he had met the man who planned to marry his “baby girl”.
Tall, lots of hair … aspiring weightlifter. Scott Broadbridge would not have been his pick but if he made Cassie happy, then he would make his peace with it.
Oddly, it was Peter Broadbridge who phoned he and wife Michelle on Easter Sunday. He had tracked the couple down via the local mechanic.
But Stuart wasn’t about to engage on the phone with a bloke he had only just met telling him his youngest daughter was arrested in Colombia on Good Friday.
To police she was their latest drug mule. Hidden among headphones, across 18 boxes, the drugs were spread out and then wrapped in black plastic.
“It’s not my girl — you have the wrong kid,” Stuart says he roared down the phone.
“It just about gave me a heart attack. I just felt numb — how do you swallow something like that.”
Stuart says he smelled a rat the day he met the Broadbridges. Cassie was “very clingy” and “just cried”.
“She was hanging around me like a lapdog. She wanted to tell me something but didn’t know how to. I knew something was up — dads just know these things,” he said.
That “something” Cassie wanted to tell him was that she would soon be travelling to Colombia.
“I spat the chewy,” he said.
Scott’s dad wasn’t impressed either. “Are you crazy?” Stuart questioned his daughter.
“Don’t do it, you are an idiot.”
Relief washed over him two weeks later when Cassie told him she was no longer going. But it appears she was just telling her dad what he wanted to hear.
She sent him a text on April 6 asking him what he was doing for Easter. He didn’t know it then, but she had been texting from Los Angeles Airport — one step closer to that Bogota jail cell.
He was going to hook up the caravan for the weekend.
Stuart is gruff. But behind the coarse voice, tough exterior and beard — trimmed to a goatee since he was first introduced on the TV news — is just a bloke who loves his wife and his girls. It’s far from that drug-dealing bikie some wanted to paint him as.
He is the Mr Fixit of Warooka, a tiny town at the southern end of the Yorke Peninsula.
Stuart enjoys his work as the maintenance guy and is happy to drink straight Wild Turkey or vodka with a dash of lemon soft drink.
He also takes care of the cooking. Roast dinners and cannelloni are his forte.
“Whether she is guilty or not doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me. She is still my baby,” Stuart says.
“I will love her no matter what.”
But he does admit that she deserves a “slap around the ears” for getting herself into such dire situation.
THE LOVE STORY
The other man who loves Cassie is Scott.
A disco kiss started their story. But then came another lip smacker. As the pair were walking home, the party boy was punched in the face.
The street brawl was put down to a misunderstanding. And while it’s not the typical start to a love story, it did turn Cassie’s life in a different direction.
Scott didn’t ask Stuart for his daughter’s hand in marriage — just popped the question during a romantic cruise in the tropical Pacific Ocean paradise of Vanuatu.
But that didn’t matter to Stuart — his daughter was getting married and she had asked him to walk her down the aisle.
“I do most things for my kids — I just want my kids to be happy,” Stuart says, before choking up.
Scott and Cassie lived at his parent’s home in Moana, a coastal suburb south of Adelaide, where cars can be driven onto the beach and parked legally on the white sand.
“She just adores him,” says sister Khala.
Khala didn’t get along with dad once she moved out but she was always there for her younger sister.
Their age gap of seven years was sometimes trying, and even as adults conversations would just stop for no reason.
In fact, the first time Khala saw her sister since February 2016 was in the Bogota jail last month.
Before her prison nightmare would begin, Cassie was in full event preparation mode — bridesmaids picked and as an animal lover, the Adelaide Zoo was to be booked for the big day.
Dress fittings were scheduled for next month.
But Cassie has become her own wedding crasher. The prospect of a wedding anytime soon, however, does seem remote with Cassie locked up in El Buen Pastor prison facing a 20 year sentence after trying to smuggle 5.8kg of cocaine out of Colombia.
“Cass and I are engaged to be married and I intend to marry her. Cass is the delight of my life,” Scott said soon after she was arrested.
Then there is also that dirty secret and if Scott knew about it; her life as a hooker in Sydney.
As for the wedding going ahead, Khala says: “Oh, come on.”
Romantic connections are complicated within the Sainsbury clan.
Khala and mum are dating two brothers.
A family rift was also exploited as rival current affair programs were offering big bucks for the exclusive tell all interview.
Cassie would tell her Mum Lisa Sainsbury “It’s not your story to tell.”
Lisa hadn’t seen her daughter for eight months before visiting her in jail but remained a staunch supporter of her.
“I’ve believed from the first second that I heard about it that she is innocent,” she told Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes program.
Should Cassie and Scott head to splitsville, it won’t be seen as a major loss to the family who did not really like Scott.
They blame the 23-year-old’s controlling ways for taking Cassie away from them.
“Everything stopped,” Khala says. “We always used to see her.”
Cassie was popular with her two nephews and two nieces — just don’t ask her to change their nappies.
“The kids are missing her,” Khala says.
Cassie visited regularly and made sure she was at family functions. Her relationship with her mum wasn’t always great.
“Love, hate, mum and daughter tiffs,” Khala puts it down to.
CASH WOES
CASSIE and Scott would bicker about money. He was a couch potato, Cassie was the breadwinner.
She would complain to her family that she was sick of Scott not working regularly.
When he was working, Scott was a calendar salesman, flogging “sexy firemen calendars” packed with photographs of buff, oiled, firefighters. He’d wear a fireman’s bib and brace to boost his sales.
Cassie was a hard worker to set up her own dream — a gym. She worked split shifts as a cook, two jobs at a kiosk and petrol station and at a bar pouring pints.
Soon she had enough saved to pay cash for all her gym equipment.
“This (Colombia) is so far from who she was,” Khala says.
“She worked her arse off to get that gym open.”
Cassie saw an opening when Yorketown’s only gym packed up and moved towns.
She had been running a private training business from home but it got “too big too quick” so she took over a space once occupied by a hardware store.
Cassie was a one-woman show, working 14 hour days trying to get the gym pumping. She had in her mind a 24-hour operation with swipe cards for members.
But six months in the doors shut. She hadn’t even had enough time to get proper signage — Yorke Fitness is scribbled on to the window like something you’d find on a sandwich board.
Her ambitions were bigger than some of the people she would train. Cash flow slowed as many clients stopped turning up. She was $5000 behind in rent.
Khala says the family helped clear the debt. Claims Cassie became a drug mule to get herself out of financial difficulty are ridiculous, she says.
But Cassie has left a trail of enemies in Yorketown where you are pretty much guaranteed a wave from a fellow driver, a smile and a nod.
Yorketown’s population pushes 700. Everyone knows everyone.
“It’s definitely not the town for a Tinder profile,” one local quips.
Locals are brooding, even showing open hostility when questions are asked about Cassie. This is common in small towns after the media circus sweeps through.
Locals watched radars to see helicopters flying in TV crews to cut the three hour drive from Adelaide.
This time it festers deeper. Some loathe Cassie. Some won’t even talk about her. Others have disowned her from the town.
“Bully” and “liar” are words the town’s folk throw around before clamming up.
“Don’t ask my staff about her — if they get caught gossiping they will be fired,” one trader says.
Another business owner is unimpressed her staff are asked about the woman giving unwanted attention to their town.
“I’m not paying him 45 cents a minute to speak to you,” she screams.
“If you want to write about liars, write about politicians and fill your paper.”
The flat, straight roads throughout the town in southern Yorke Peninsula are almost designed for quick exits.
Those in the town say the rent was overpriced which is why the hardware store relocated. Other shops held by the landlord were also vacant.
With her business shut down, Cassie headed to Adelaide and moved in with Scott and his parents.
Cassie told Scott their financial troubles were solved after she picked up work at Uncle Neil’s cleaning business. Neil Sainsbury is Stuart’s younger brother.
It paid extraordinarily well and required many trips to Sydney. Big cash was coming their way but her fiance never questioned how or why the cleaning business was so prosperous.
Scott had never met Uncle Neil. The last time Cassie had seen him she was eight years old and it was at his twin brother’s funeral.
He was an easy cover for what she was really getting up to.
“19 years old, classy, fun and ready to please,” reads Cassie’s prostitute profile.
But those who worked with her describe her as a fly in, fly out, lonely working girl, who would sit in the corner, cry and eat pizza because she was “tubby” for some men.
Neil Sainsbury is a former military investigator. He was medically discharged in June 2000 and hasn’t worked since. There was no cleaning business.
“I have seen Cassandra twice in my life,” he says using her full name, no patience for pet names.
“Why would she pick my name and throw me under the bus?”
Big lies like this can be unpicked quickly.
But to Cassie it was a game of odds. Surely Scott would never meet Neil and ask him about the cleaning business.
Brothers Stuart and Neil are in regular contact. Cassie forgot to factor that in.
“This is why I don’t understand why she would take this shortcut. She has always worked hard for her money,” Stuart said.
CALL GIRL CASSIE
To Khala, Cassie is her smiley little sister. The pair would bicker as sisters do and family snaps show them playfully fighting at birthday parties.
But those innocent memories would be shattered in Bogota the day Khala and her mum Lisa were going to visit Cassie in jail.
It was 3.30am when they found out Cassie was moonlighting as a sex worker.
“I would have sat on her if I knew,” Khala says.
“I just lay in bed for a while and I didn’t believe it.”
They took Tim Tams, chicken, chocolate, biscuits and endless questions when they saw Cassie inside the women’s prison.
“She told me the cleaning company was a cover-up for working at the brothel,” Khala says. “There is no denying it.”
Cassie dropped another bombshell. She had been forced to carry the 5.8kg of cocaine because the lives of her family — including Khala’s four young children — had been threatened.
Cassie told Khala and Lisa that two men held her at gunpoint outside her Bogota hotel.
Her brief to “carry some documents” had changed. To show they meant business a photo of Scott leaving a gym was shown. And then, shockingly, photos of Khala and her children.
These weren’t photos ripped off Facebook — they were taken after Scott and Khala had been stalked, according to Cassie.
“If you don’t do what I want you to do, they are dead,” Cassie says two men — known only as Tony and Angelo and described as stylish with well-groomed hair — told her. “I’m in here because I was protecting you,” Cassie told Khala.
Khala says she lives in fear something will happen to her four children, aged between two and eleven.
“It’s daunting enough and terrifying enough to go to the extremes we have,” she says, as she points to the hi-tech security cameras that now encase her home and images beamed on the flat screen TV.
“I don’t like stepping out anymore but I have to do it.”
Khala says she believes Cassie’s story of a crime syndicate setting her up and packing her headphones with cocaine.
“She honestly thought it was some money laundering,” Khala says.
Cassie told her all she had to do was transport some documents to London and she would be paid $10,000.
But things started to unwind during the mission. Cassie says once she landed in Hong Kong, the people she was working for called her mobile phone to tell her she would now be travelling to Colombia instead of London.
Cassie texted Khala telling her she had landed in Colombia.
“WTF” was the reply from Khala who did not know she was going.
She was there for work — marketing and endorsement for her new private training business was the line.
But Khala now thinks that message was somewhat of an SOS. If anything was to have happened to her at least someone knew where she was.
“Be safe and don’t go outside,” Khala would text her back.
COLLATERAL DAMAGE
WHEN Cyclone Cassie whipped through her family and town, she dropped one of her heaviest weights, smashing their peace.
Her dad’s business was suffering because of his daughter’s actions.
Stuart’s had the “crap canned out of him”
Airport security shook down uncle Neil and his family as they flew back from Bali after a holiday — his token Bali T-shirts and hat wasn’t going to give him too much grief.
“It’s because of your last name,” authorities told him. Cab drivers are also curious once they see his name.
“Are you related to Cocaine Cassie. They all want a bit of it,” he says.
Stuart’s Sunday roast was “it and a bit” and it was “what dad was known for”.
“The thought of never seeing her again scares the sh.t out of me,” he says.
“I used to look forward to her coming down — now I’ll just have to wait.”
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