Christmas behind bars: Aussies locked up abroad
Christmas cheer will be hard to find for the Australians spending this festive season in some of the world’s worst prisons. See arrests that made headlines in 2023.
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There will be sparse Christmas cheer for the many Australians spending this festive season banged up abroad.
Among those behind bars — in some of the world’s worst prisons — are newly-accused fraudsters, drug lords and money launderers, whose arrests in 2023 made huge headlines.
The Mataks
Accused fraudsters Adriana and Luca Matak will spend Christmas in prison after a Croatian court rejected their bid for early release.
The Municipal Criminal Court in Zagreb recently dismissed Ms Matak push to be let out on the grounds she is almost five months’ pregnant, meaning the pair will remain in Remetinec Prison, awaiting trial.
The couple, who hail from Sydney and once led a glamorous life, are accused of swindling investors of nearly $600,000.
A total 12 investors from four countries are seeking a combined $1.8 million from the alleged fraudsters.
It is understood a second investigation will open against the pair examining each alleged victim’s case to show if serious criminal intent was committed — a crime which carries a 10 year jail sentence.
The pair, who are in their 30s, are yet to be charged, deny the accusations and have told Croatian police there was no intention to cheat investors with any loss due to the risk of investment.
Damien Carew
Australian real estate agent Damien Carew is being held at a detention centre in Nice, France, accused of trying to kill his wife, Russian born Anna Polianskaya Carew, at their villa in April.
He is also at the centre of a global money laundering investigation, sparked after he was picked up drunk on a Paris street with almost €200,000 ($A335,000) in cash.
The former student at exclusive Melbourne private boys’ school St Kevin’s College, faces up to 10 years in jail if he is convicted of the money laundering charge.
Ms Polianskaya-Carew, who grew up in Monaco, was originally put in a coma by doctors following the alleged attack but has since been discharged from hospital.
Mr Carew’s mother previously expressed her disappointment at the slow pace of the French investigation.
Lisa-Marie Cunningham
Adelaide mother Lisa Cunningham is on death row alongside her husband in the US, charged with killing her seven-year-old stepdaughter Sanaa in Arizona.
Sanaa had more than 60 scars, 100 cuts and bruises, and several ulcers and abscesses when she died at Phoenix Children’s Hospital in 2017.
She suffered from acute schizophrenia and died from sepsis infection caused by her living condition.
If the former prison guard, 47, is convicted, she could be the first Australian to be executed in the US. Her trial is slated for September 2024.
Hakan Ayik
Suspected Australian drug trafficker Hakan Ayik’s decade at large came to an end in November when he was arrested in Istanbul along with 36 others in a sting against an “armed, organised crime ring”,
The musclebound ex-Comanchero bikie leader is in custody in a Turkish prison awaiting trial for supplying large commercial quantities of drugs, charges that would see him imprisoned for 20 years if convicted.
The Sydney crime figure renounced his Australian citizenship, meaning police cannot bring him back to New South Wales to face the charges.
Dubbed “the Facebook gangster,” he was famously tricked by the FBI in 2021 into spruiking and distributing its encrypted phone messaging app to associated, which led to the much-publicised AN0M raids.
Hakan Arif
Fugitive Australian Hakan Arif was arrested in the same dawn raids in Istanbul as Ayik in November.
And like Ayik, the former Comanchero bikie, known as “Mr Billionaire” and “Little Hux”, is accused of being a ringleader of an offshore syndicate overseeing the movement of drugs from South America to Australia, the Netherlands and Hong Kong.
He was refused bail after the arrest and currently sits in a Turkish prison.
John Nikolic
Former Melbourne and Gold Coast racehorse trainer John Nikolic has served five years of his 23-year drug smuggling sentence in a Fijian prison.
Nikolic and wife Yvette’s holiday of a lifetime, sailing through the Pacific on their catamaran Shenanigans, came to an abrupt halt when it was raided at Denarau Marina by Fiji Customs in June 2018.
Thirteen bars of cocaine, drug tablets, guns and $15,000 in US $100 bills were found stashed on board.
His wife maintained she did not know anything about the drugs, guns and money and was acquitted in February 2019.
Peter Gerard Scully
Until his arrest in 2015, Melbourne father Peter Scully touted videos of himself torturing and sexually abusing girls and children as young as 18 months on his dark web site “No Limits Fun.”
Scully is serving a life sentence plus 129 years for assaulting dozens of children in the Philippines after relocating there in 2011 to escape a $2.6 million fraud scheme.
The “world’s worst paedophile” told destitute families in Manilla he would feed and educate their children, but instead tortured and sexually abused them before selling the footage to clients for $10,000 per view.
Prosecutors had asked that the Philippines reinstate the death penalty just for him.
Scott Anthony Rush
Labourer Scott Rush 35, is in the Bangli Narcotics in Bali serving a life sentence for his role in the notorious Bali 9 heroin-smuggling plot.
Unless he can win a reprieve from Indonesia’s president, will never be freed.
In 2019 — after spending 14 years behind bars for his role in the thwarted 2005 8.3kg heroin smuggling mission — he sent an emotional letter to the authorities, pleading for a sentence reduction on the grounds he would become an anti-drugs campaigner.
At one point, early on in his case, a High Court appeal saw the Queenslander’s sentence changed to the death penalty, before a life term was eventually reinstated.
Si Yi Chen
Si Yi Chen, 36, is another of the Bali 9, serving a life sentence in Indonesia.
Chen, from Doonside, Sydney, has been a model prisoner and runs a silversmith training rehabilitation program at the notorious Kerobokan jail.
Kerobokan jail governor once described Chen as a model prisoner who deserved to have his sentence cut.
Matthew James Norman
Fellow Bali 9 member Matthew Norman is also at Bali’s Kerobokan prison and considered a model inmate.
Indeed, Bali’s Correctional Board recommend he have his sentence downgraded from life to a fixed term.
He was just 18 at the time of his arrest.
Martin Stephens
Former bartender Martin Stephens, now 45, is serving a life sentence for his role in the Bali 9 drug plot at Malang prison in East Java.
He was transferred from Kerobokan, where married his Javanese wife, Christine Winarni Puspayanti, in 2011.
Stephens’ appeal to have his sentence reduced to 10 years was thrown out by the Indonesian Supreme Court in January 2011.
Michael Czugaj
Brisbane glazier Michael Czugaj turned Bali 9 drug runner also faces a Christmas behind bars.
His sentence was reduced to 20 years in 2006 but this was overturned and the original life sentence reinstated later that year.
He was transferred from Kerobokan to a jail in East Java in 2016, after the prison claimed he had been found with less than a gram of ‘sabu sabu’ or ice.
Czugaj was studying business management before the move.
Brendon Luke Johnsson
Brendon Luke Johnsson was handed a five-year sentence for using and trafficking cocaine in Bali in 2019.
The former kickboxer, from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, was sent to prison, alongside his Indonesian girlfriend Remi Purwanto.
The pair had initially faced a death sentence if convicted on more serious charges.
Robert Andrew Fiddes Ellis
Vile paedophile Robert Andrew Fiddes Ellis was sentenced in Bali to 15 years’ jail after he was found guilty of persuading children to commit an indecent act.
The 77-year-old Victorian argued in court he did not deserve to be imprisoned because his crime was “not a serious thing” and he paid the girls he abused “generously”.
Ellis sexually abused 11 girls aged under 18 between 2014 and 2015.
Michael Sacatides
Former Sydney man Michael Sacatides initially faced a death sentence for smuggling $390,000 worth of ice into Bali from Thailand in 2010.
The former kickboxing trainer from Wentworthville, NSW, had stuffed the drugs in a compartment in his suitcase and was intercepted when he arrived on a flight from Bangkok.
He escaped the firing squad and was sentenced in 2011 to 18 years in the unforgiving Kerobokan jail.
Sacatides is now in the Bangli Narcotics jail with Rush and regularly holds exercise classes for other prisoners.
He has married a local woman.
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