Teenage ‘Bali Nine’ heroin mule faces prison sentence on drugs, gun crimes
A former heroin mule jailed in the Hong Kong drug plot directly linked to the Bali Nine is now facing another prison sentence over drugs and gun charges.
EXCLUSIVE
A Sydney man, who as a teenager was jailed in the Hong Kong drug plot directly linked to the Bali Nine, is facing up to 20 years in jail over drugs and gun charges.
Almost 16 years after CV was jailed in Hong Kong for his role around the Bali Nine plot, he faces another prison term after being caught in Sydney with a cache of weapons and supplying drugs.
In early 2018, the Strike Force Raptor anti-drug squad swooped on members of a drug and arms ring across Sydney.
Police charged two men with a fleet of charges, but continued investigating CV and other alleged drug syndicate members.
In mid-2019, detectives stopped CV in a vehicle near his home in southwestern Sydney.
When they executed a warrant on his Elizabeth Hills home, they found a cache of weapons, money and drugs.
Detectives charged CV with illegally possessing Glock, Beretta, and Desert Eagle pistols, a Smith & Wesson revolver, $242,830 in cash and supplying more than half a kilo each of heroin and methamphetamine and just under half a kilo of cocaine.
was refused bail on 21 charges, and has been incarcerated in a NSW prison for the past 19 months.
He pleaded guilty in Campbelltown Local Court late last year to supplying large commercial quantity of prohibited drugs, two counts of supply commercial quantity of drugs, possess unregistered firearms and recklessly deal with proceeds of crime.
The NSW Crime Commission has launched a proceeds of crime recovery claim against which is still ongoing.
PLOTS WERE A SPECTACULAR FAILURE
CV had only just turned 15 in 2005 when he agreed to smuggle heroin for the massive Crescent Moon Asian drug syndicate which had launched three concurrent drug operations.
The most infamous was the Bali Nine plot, which saw Australian “godfather” Andrew Chan and his enforcer Myuran Sukumaran both executed by firing squad on Indonesia’s Death Island in 2015.
All three – Hong Kong, Bali Nine and a third operation out of Brisbane – involved recruiting young Australians as heroin mules. And all three would spectacularly fail.
Australian Federal Police would tip off police in Kowloon and Bali, 17 young Australians would be arrested, 11 of them would be incarcerated in foreign jails and two put to death.
From his Kerobokan prison cell, Andrew Chan kept tabs on CV as he served his time in a Hong Kong prison.
RELATED: Bali Nine kingpin threatened teenage mule during prison hell
It was April 12, 2005 – a Tuesday – when Hong Kong police swooped on CV and Diaz in a seedy Kowloon hotel room.
CV and Diaz were preparing to swallow up to 114 packets of heroin in 5cm-long tied condoms and glove fingers.
The pair were due to board a flight back to Sydney from Hong Kong later that evening, but
Diaz was baulking at the idea of swallowing the drugs and flying back with them in her stomach.
Their arrests, with Australian middleman Hutchinson Tran, made world headlines, highlighted by the fact of CV’s and Diaz’s young ages and potential 20-year prison sentences.
(Both CV and Diaz were released to return home before the end of their maximum sentences.)
Then, five days later, on the evening of April 17, Indonesian police arrested four Australians preparing to board flights with heroin strapped to their bodies at Denpasar’s Ngurah Rai Airport.
BALI NINE DISCOVERED
Scott Rush, 19, Martin Stephens, 29, Renae Lawrence, 27, and Michael Czugaj, 19 were carrying the bulk of what would be the Bali Nine’s 8.3kg heroin smuggling attempt.
Ringleader Andrew Chan, 21, was removed from his plane seat on a Sydney-bound flight as it was about to depart the same evening. He was carrying nothing but mobile phones.
His deputy Myuran Sukamaran, 24, was arrested back at a Kuta Beach hotel, with Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, 27, Matthew Norman, 18, and Si Yi Chen, 20.
A Balinese court would convict all of the Bali Nine and find that Chan and Sukumaran had provided money, plane tickets and hotels to the seven mules.
Chan was one of Crescent Moon’s three Australian organisers of the three separate drug plots and a key wingman at the Sydney end of the smuggling and distribution network.
Working for a catering company at Homebush sports facilities, he tried to lure several young workers to the doomed operation with the promise of “easy” money, the lucky ones declining.
Four people aged 24, 22, 18, and 19, were arrested in Brisbane on May 6, 2005 and charged with conspiring with Chan and Sukumaran to import heroin to Australia.
Sales consultant and Bankstown TAFE student Khanh Thanh Ly, 24, was arrested in Sydney for the failed Brisbane plot.
It later emerged the Ly and his old school friend Myuran Sukumaran had flown to Bali together to smuggle heroin seven months before the Bali Nine operation.
As CV and Rachel Diaz waited in their own individual prison hells in Hong Kong for the case to be heard in court, Chan sent Diaz messages from Bali to “keep your mouth shut”.
Although Hong Kong had abolished the death penalty 12 years earlier, CV, Diaz and Tran faced heavy sentences in the territory’s notoriously brutal prison system.
CV was a naive McDonald’s worker who turned 15 just six weeks before he left Australia, tempted by the offer of making $6000-$7000 for acting as drug couriers.
The pair were strangers before they boarded the flight to Hong Kong after being individually recruited by Sydney men, Sung Won Kim and Bao Le “Tony” Zhang, both 21.
Waiting at the other end was Hutchinson Tran, 21, a Vietnamese-Australian who was working off the debts of his slot machine addiction.
Diaz has since told news.com.au she tried to change her mind before boarding the plane leaving Sydney, but Kim and Zhang threatened her if she tried to withdraw.
“I didn’t want to go, but they threatened me. I didn’t want to [swallow the drugs] but they said I had to,” she said.
The drug syndicate in which Andrew Chan was regarded as a low-level “controller” worked on the ground in Hong Kong with local heroin traffickers the De Quy brothers, who conspired with Tran to import the heroin via Diaz and CV.
As Hong Kong police, alerted by Australian investigators, kicked in the hotel room door of CV and Diaz, back in Sydney, Sung Won Kim and Tony Zhang were preparing to visit Sydney Airport the next day to meet the teens with laxatives, but then news of the arrests emerged.
Two days later, NSW detectives arrested the two men at a Sydney service station and charged them with conspiracy to import the heroin, for which they were convicted and imprisoned.
HONG KONG HELL
At a court hearing in Hong Kong, CV’s barrister John McNamara described his client’s plight as “a situation where a young, impressionable, silly boy, has been used by older, cynical, careless criminals”.
Mr McNamara said CV had never been before the courts but aged 13 or 14 had lost interest in school and met people who “got him into the horrendous trouble he is in now”.
Diaz’s barrister Peter Callaghan told the court she came from a supportive family but had been indecently assaulted at the age of five and sexually assaulted aged 12.
The two had been caught with 701.8g of heroin, worth just $55,000 in Hong Kong, but had a resale value in Sydney of $1 million.
Diaz was sent to Tai Lam Women’s correctional centre, a vast facility in Hong Kong’s mountainous New Territories, where the guards beat her with pistols and women inmates took their own lives.
CV was locked up in a juvenile facility, possibly Pik Uk Correctional Institution which houses young male prisoners and has a disturbing reputation for brutality.
A report on the jail said inmates were beaten on the soles of their feet, forced to lick up their own urine, and made to squat for hours at a time.
Hutchinson Tran’s defence lawyer Michael Vidler described the state of mind of the three after their arrests.
“They are in custody in Hong Kong, in a foreign jurisdiction, and you haven’t got details of any of the evidence against you. That’s how they feel,” he said.
Rachel Diaz’s father and Hutchinson Tran’s mother travelled to Hong Kong for their children’s court appearances, but CV had no-one there to support him.
Tran was sentenced to 13 years and four months and Diaz to 10 years and eight months.
She returned to Australia after her father Ferdinand Diaz paid $10,000 to have her transferred to Long Bay prison.
She served a total of six years and eight months before finally being released from prison to her family in Sydney.
CV also left Hong Kong’s prison system under an international transfer.
No such reprieve would be available for the Bali Nine.
RELATED: Left behind to rot: Bali ‘Five’ to die in jail
BALI EXECUTIONS
Chan and Sukumaran, along with Scott Rush, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Matthew Norman and Si Yi Chen were sentenced to death.
Only Chan, 31 and Sukumaran, 34, were executed, 10 years after their arrest, in April 2015 on Nuskambangan island off the southern coast of Java along with six other foreign drug dealers.
Renae Lawrence returned to Australia in 2018, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen died from cancer in jail in the same year and Rush, Norman, Stephens, Czugaj and Chen are still in Indonesian jails.
One of the other April 2005 organisers, Khanh Thanh Ly, was later jailed in Australia for murdering his girlfriend.
BACK IN PRISON
During the search of CV’s home in 2018, police located a Glock pistol, a Beretta pistol, a Desert Eagle pistol, a Smith & Wesson revolver, gun magazines and ammunition.
They also located 65.4g of cannabis, 643.38g of methamphetamine, 491.88g of cocaine and 719.61g of heroin, $242,830 in cash and two nunchucks (Asian martial arts weapons).
According to court documents seen by news.com.au, inside CV’s Elizabeth Hills house were amounts of benzococaine, which is not illegal and sold as topical pain reliever for mouth ulcers.
Some of the cocaine found was in rock form and the methamphetamine in crystal form.
At Friday’s sentencing hearing in the NSW District Court before Judge Andrew Colefax, CV said he received $2000 to $3000 a week as a trusted member of a criminal syndicate.
Under cross-examination by Crown Prosecutor M Valerio, he said he had not sought alternative employment other than working briefly at a sawmill and in his mother’s cafe in 2012.
Asked if he had preferred drug dealing over, say, being a courier or taxi driver, because it was “easy money and not very hard work”, CV responded,: “I wouldn’t say that.
“Those jobs … a lot of them require background checks”.
In court, CV was described as a drug addict but his barrister Peter Lange said he was “remorseful (and) his prospects of rehabilitation are good”.
CV’s mother gave evidence at his sentencing hearing, saying she supported her son financially between his early 20s and his 2019 arrest.
His girlfriend told the court she was unaware of any of the illegal items in his house and regarding the safe in his wardrobe he would “just tell me not to worry about it”.
Asked by Crown Prosecutor Mr Valerio whether CV could against engage in criminal activity while living with her after his future release, the girlfriend disagreed.
“I told him if I was to wait for him, I wouldn’t go through this again,” she said.
“If he loves me enough and doesn’t want to put me through this again, he would … do right.”
Judge Colefax will pass sentence on CV next month.
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