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  Yoshio sold two of his tickets to a friend’s firm that wanted to use the profits to save tax. The firm gave the tickets to an employee, Megumi Ishikubo; she invited a friend, Hiromi Kato. He also invited Kiichiro Asami, then 59, a former film stuntman.

  None of the travellers knew everyone else in the group, but that wasn’t unusual. Neither was their proposed five-day flying visit of Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne and Sydney.

  The group’s itinerary followed the usual tourist trail: bus tours to the penguins at Phillip Island, gold panning at Sovereign Hill and group visits to Captain Cook’s Cottage, the Shrine of Remembrance and the MCG before going to Sydney for two days.

  For all a prosecutor’s later efforts to portray the visit as a sham, it was what bona fide Japanese tourists on a tight schedule usually do.

  The group members met each other, most for the first time, just before they left Japan for Kuala Lumpur, where they were to have a one-night stopover and meet Yoshio’s contact, Charlie, who was supposedly to go to Australia with them. Charlie met them at the airport in Kuala Lumpur with several other Malaysians, who ushered them to waiting cars – two sedans and a van.

  Yoshio and the two women he knew, Kato and Ishikubo, had less luggage than the others and put it in the boot of one sedan. The other four – Honda, Asami, and the older Katsuno brothers – put their bags in the van.

  Their story from this point was later ridiculed in court and depicted as a fabrication, but it has never wavered in any detail in a decade. They say they were driven to the Sakura Restaurant, where they ate dinner with Charlie. He had planned to fly to Melbourne with them, but said he had been delayed and would follow a day later. After dinner, they found the van had vanished from a nearby street, with the luggage in it. Charlie made a show of yelling at his men.

  The luggage of three of them was in the boot of one of the sedans and was safe. But the other four, who had lost their luggage, were distraught. Because they couldn’t speak Malay, they followed Charlie’s instructions.

  Charlie – oddly, in hindsight – told them he wouldn’t call the police and that he would try to find the stolen luggage his own way. They all went to the Gentling Highlands resort apartments – already booked by Charlie – except Yoshio, who stayed to help search for the luggage.

  Late that night, Charlie and Yoshio arrived at the resort to say they hadn’t caught the thief, but they had found the luggage, which would be returned next day. But when the four came to fetch their gear next morning, instead of their own bags they found four large new suitcases.

  Yoshio said their bags had been slashed open by the thief and were ruined, but that their clothes were unharmed and Charlie’s men had repacked them in new suitcases.

  Ten years later the other two women, Kato and Ishikubo, independently recalled Chika Honda’s dismay in statements seen by The Age. Honda was upset her bag had been slashed because it would have been so easy to open. And she complained that the new suitcase was too heavy.

  Masaharu also disliked the suitcase because it was much harder to handle than the two soft bags he had lost. Significantly, he and Yoshio went shopping for replacement bags that day but he decided they were too expensive and he should look for a better buy in Melbourne.

  In any case, Charlie’s ever-obliging employees carried their luggage from the hotel to the cars and then to the airport check-in counter, so the weight of the suitcases didn’t affect the four travellers too much.

  Until they got to Melbourne, that is. Which they did at 6.35am on June 17, 1992. The first day of the rest of their lives. If the Japanese tourists with four new suitcases knew what was hidden in them, they showed little sign of it, judging from the video recording their arrival and the initial search in the Customs hall.

  All six look equally perplexed and annoyed at the delay – but not yet nervous, despite the fact that their tour leader, Yoshio, was obviously being questioned.

  Even after X-rays revealed false panels in the four suitcases, and an electric drill revealed a narcotic powder, the Japanese seemed more confused than scared, reflecting a habitual trust in authority not yet shaken by events beyond their control.

  There was much they didn’t know then. About the extent to which the mysterious Charlie had orchestrated the trip, and why. And about his involvement with the Triad gangs, notorious heroin traffickers.

  It was only later that the Japanese wondered why so many Federal Police had apparently been waiting when their flight landed before dawn. It transpired that Yoshio’s visa had been cancelled while they were in transit, which led Customs and police to question him and then his travelling companions after he happily volunteered he was carrying their tickets and passports.

  The fuss over Yoshio’s visa seems, in hindsight, a routine way to mask a tip-off.

  It wasn’t as if sniffer dogs detected the suspect suitcases, or that Japanese were routinely targeted as likely heroin traffickers. So, if police were acting on information, as they almost invariably do, then who tipped them off, and why?

  Was it set-up by Triad gangsters to harm a rival? Or was it an equally cold-blooded doublecross, a ‘throw-off’ to divert attention from a bigger drug importation on the same flight?

  Either way, it relied on sacrificing the Japanese ‘mules’, regardless of whether all, any or none of them knew what was hidden in the substitute suitcases. Chika Honda, Asami and the Katsuno brothers have had years to brood about whether they were pawns in someone else’s game. But on that June morning 10 years ago they were dazed and confused, trapped in every traveller’s nightmare, though still confident their innocence would become obvious.

  The evidence was damning, though circumstantial. Their plight was compounded by the language barrier that blocked the most rudimentary attempts to explain they were not necessarily party to a conspiracy, but victims of one.

  Most damaging was the fact – soon leaked to a Melbourne newspaper – that their nominal tour leader had been linked to the Yakuza.

  This prompted ‘mafia’ headlines which was great publicity for the Federal Police, but jeopardised the chances of a fair jury trial for the rest of the group.

  This concern was to be reinforced later, at the magistrates’ court, when a small boy walked up to Masaharu and said: ‘Japanese mafia’. The former policeman’s heart sank because he knew then that a jury trial would be tainted by prejudice they didn’t have the means to counter.

  They could not speak enough English to communicate with their Legal Aid lawyers, let alone give proper evidence in their own defence. Worse, police had found it hard to find interpreters to conduct interviews and the result was a mess: meanings of questions and answers were so mangled in translation that, like a house built on quicksand, any trial relying on those interviews would be hopelessly compromised by its shaky foundations. No matter how conscientious the judge.

  Before cases get to court, deals are done and compromises made for reasons that have little to do with truth or justice, more with winning and losing. The result can seem odd to outsiders. In this case, 10 years later, it still does.

  One puzzle is why eight people were originally detained for conspiracy to smuggle heroin yet only six were charged, when the evidence seemed equally strong – or weak – in relation to all of them.

  Initially detained were the seven Japanese and a Malaysian, Su Fonh Huat, who had been on the same flight, was booked into the same hotel, and who, it was alleged, was riding shotgun on the operation for Triads in Malaysia. Significantly, the airport ‘pinch’ on that Wednesday morning was kept secret until the following Sunday afternoon, when it was leaked in time to make headlines in Monday’s newspapers.

  There was a good reason for this delay: the police knew they didn’t have the main player. In the missing four days, they had set up a ‘controlled delivery’ of the suitcases to a city hotel, hoping to trap whoever came to get the heroin. Teams of police were ‘hidden’ around the hotel, using the eight tourists as bait. Telephone lines were tapped and surveillance ca
meras set up.

  The Japanese were so confident they were helping to catch the real culprits that Masaharu, using his own investigative experience, even suggested moving rooms to make surveillance easier – a suggestion the police adopted. But Charlie did not land in Melbourne the day after the group, as he had promised. When no one else showed to collect the heroin, it was obvious the police operation was a flop. Someone must have warned Kuala Lumpur about the airport arrests.

  This was a disappointment for the police. They had kilograms of heroin, but no charges laid. The irresistible suspicion is that, having failed to land the real trafficker, they made the best of a bad job by concentrating on the case against the Japanese ‘mules’, though not all of them.

  Someone decided that the two women, Kato and Ishikubo, should return to Japan without being charged – presumably because they were lucky enough not to have been actually carrying the ‘loaded’ suitcases. While the other six were effectively under house arrest at the hotel, two policemen found time to take Kato and Ishikubo sightseeing to the zoo and the beach, in between long interrogations. Then they were sent home.

  Interestingly, the two women later never wavered in their support for the innocence of the other Japanese, but they were warned off returning to Australia to give evidence for the defence because (they both stated as recently as last year) an Australian ‘attorney’ threatened they could also be charged if they did. Someone thought they might jeopardise a rickety prosecution.

  Which, of course, underlined the weak case against those unlucky enough to have received the suitcases. If Kato and Ishikubo could be arbitrarily judged not to be part of a conspiracy, then the same could be argued for Chika Honda and, by extension, all the Japanese. If any two could be cleared of knowing there was heroin in the cases, it follows that any – or all – could be similarly ignorant.

  The decision to release the other two women was especially cruel for Honda. She had been a late inclusion to the tour and she didn’t know Yoshio – who had an image problem: with his colourful body tattoos and chequered past, he was a star candidate for the lead role in the absence of the missing Triad mastermind.

  If, after two years, several million words and almost as many dollars, the case against the Japanese tourists rested on one thing, it was this: a jury had to believe they were lying about their luggage being stolen.

  Had the Japanese been able to support their story in any way, they stood to get the benefit of the doubt. It would be reasonable to believe they would accept new suitcases to replace stolen ones.

  But the Japanese were being defended by Legal Aid lawyers, who couldn’t communicate with them easily, let alone afford any independent investigation in Malaysia to substantiate their story.

  The prosecution, however, had no such problems. It arranged for a Malaysian policeman to interview staff at the restaurant. The policeman produced statements from a waiter and a car park attendant which, taken at face value, indicated the Japanese had not been there on the evening of June 15, 1992, and that no vehicle had been stolen from the restaurant car park.

  Those flimsy statements were enough, in the hands of a skilful prosecutor, to help persuade the jury to reject the Japanese’s version of events and find them (and Su) guilty. Su and Yoshio were sentenced to 25 years’ prison, later reduced on appeal to 20 years. Chika Honda and the other three men were sentenced to 15 years.

  The waiter’s statement, taken two months after the Melbourne arrests, does not refer to any table booking records – only to bills. The waiter states ‘none of the bills indicate that a group of Japanese dined at the restaurant on that night’.

  On what basis he makes this assertion is unclear: could he really recall the ethnicity of customers by the food they ordered? And even if there was a formal booking system – which there wasn’t – it would be bizarre to note the race of customers, rather than the number of chairs needed. The suspicion is that the staff gave the answers the policeman wanted to hear.

  Why? The answer, says an Australian lawyer who went to Malaysia last year to investigate, is that the restaurant is controlled by the Triad group that set up the heroin scam, and that the gang has influence in the Malaysian police force.

  These are serious claims. The man who makes them is a serious man, an unlikely saviour for a group of Asians accused of heroin trafficking. Brian Erwin is a humble 63-year-old suburban lawyer in Sydney, semi-retired because of poor health.

  He heard about Honda, Asami and the Katsuno brothers by chance more than two years ago from a Japanese-born lawyer as they waited together outside court. The lawyer had read about the case in a Japanese magazine her father had sent her.

  Erwin was intrigued to find he and most Australians had never heard of a case regarded as a scandalous injustice in Japan, where ‘the Melbourne incident’ receives wide coverage. He decided to help.

  Through Melbourne’s small Japanese community, he found a group of supporters who visited the prisoners and made representations on their behalf to both Australian and Japanese authorities. Some of the supporters were Japanese who attend the Canterbury Presbyterian church.

  They and others have devoted themselves to the case for years, raising money with bazaars and cake stalls.

  The minister then at the church, Stephen Young, is an American citizen born in Japan who speaks Japanese fluently. Young, who has since moved to Perth, has pushed the prisoners’ cause since 1992, and is convinced they are all innocent. He had contacts in Malaysia and, when Erwin offered to go there early last year, gave him some leads.

  Erwin spoke to a reformed Triad member willing to share his inside knowledge. He told Erwin that Charlie had Triad connections, and that the Sakura Restaurant was controlled by a Triad group.

  He also introduced Erwin to a person whose identity cannot be published for fear of reprisals, who worked next to the restaurant and who recalled a loud (staged) disagreement between Charlie and his men in the street over the van being supposedly stolen.

  Erwin ate at the restaurant and found it did not record bookings in any systematic way. He established that the van had been taken from a nearby lane, not from the car park.

  But the most vital evidence he found was that the police officer who had taken the statements had been exiled to a one-man police station in the provinces after being accused of corruption.

  Back in Australia, Erwin combed through the trial transcripts and witness statements, using his legal knowledge to look for inconsistencies. He says he found plenty, as did two private investigators paid to work on the case by the supporter group.

  The police had little to link Yoshio and his unsuspecting Japanese group with the supposed Triad ‘minder’ Su. Key evidence was given at the trial by a telephonist from the Swanston Hotel that the same Asian male voice had, on separate calls, asked for both Su and Yoshio.

  Erwin and Stephen Young believe the ‘voice’ was in fact two voices – one calling Su from Malaysia, the other being the Japanese consul in Melbourne, asking for Yoshio.

  It’s odd, notes Erwin drily, that the telephonist heard background noise on one call, which she recognised as trams rattling past. There are no trams in Kuala Lumpur … but there were in St Kilda Road, outside the Japanese Consulate.

  Everybody claims innocence when they first get to jail, prison wisdom goes, but only the truly innocent or the mentally deluded still claim it at the end of their sentence.

  Even then, few are believed. Which makes the following anecdote all the more surprising.

  When Brian Erwin first visited the male Japanese prisoners at Fulham, near Sale, he was surprised how friendly the prison officer escorting him was when Erwin said he was visiting the Japanese. The officer turned to him and said: ‘They didn’t do it, you know.’

  The jail grapevine works fast. A minute later on, a tough prisoner covered in tattoos saw Erwin walk past and called out: ‘They’re not guilty.’

  THE line between guilty drug trafficker and innocent dupe is dangerously fine. That was
highlighted in the case in which high-profile criminal lawyer Andrew Fraser and two co-conspirators were sentenced to long jail terms for smuggling cocaine into Australia.

  The disgraced solicitor and his fellow conspirators, Werner Roberts and Carl Heinze Urbanec, were imprisoned after a case in which the court accepted that Fraser and Roberts had cynically set up Roberts’ former girlfriend, Carol Brand, to carry cocaine into Australia without her knowledge.

  But had it not been for police listening devices that recorded conversations between Roberts and Brand after they arrived in Sydney in late 1999, she would almost certainly have also been convicted and jailed as a co-conspirator. She had carried African wall plaques through Customs which, unknown to her, were filled with cocaine.

  Police charged Brand, but her defence counsel, Paul Galbally, used transcripts of conversations recorded from listening devices to show she was an innocent dupe – that Roberts had lured her overseas by pretending he wanted to resume their previous relationship.

  ‘Her story is quite chilling,’ Galbally says. ‘What happened to her is traumatic and Kafkaesque. Had there not been listening devices, it’s unlikely anyone would have believed her. She was used in such a manipulative fashion that even at the point of arrest she didn’t realise what had happened.

  ‘Juries are cynical and conservative. The accused are stigmatised by the charge and have to prove they don’t know about the drugs. Here was a woman with a good job whose only mistake was to go overseas with a married man, yet she could have ended up sentenced to 15 years’ jail.’

  The Fraser case has particular relevance to the plight of the Japanese convicted of heroin trafficking in 1994 because it shows that people can be charged even when police have evidence that could clear them.

  ‘Some of the investigators in this case must have known there was a very big question mark over Carol Brand’s involvement,’ Galbally says.