re: ***short time again?********* Why fear of flying has new...

re: ***short time again?********* Why fear of flying has new meaning
By Neil McMahon
May 14, 2005

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Baggage handlers in Sydney this week.
Photo: John Reid

Allegations of crooked airport staff mean travellers have new reasons to be worried.

There were two travellers heading in opposite directions - a woman, Schapelle Corby, flying out, and a man, name unknown, flying in. There were two bags, both with drugs in them, making their way through the international terminal at Sydney airport. There was at least one other man there that day, an airport worker, committing a crime. And by day's end, Corby, who says she committed no crime at all beyond failing to lock her bag, would be locked away in a Bali jail.

It was a Friday, otherwise of little moment, but now we know: October 8, 2004, was the day the seed was planted for our new fear of flying. Michael Hurley would not have been at the airport himself that day. As the man whom investigators say was the kingpin in a massive cocaine operation, he had others to do the frontline work for him. Some of them were airport baggage handlers. They were paid handsomely, as well they might be: this particular baggage contained a cargo so valuable on the other side of the Customs gate that it would be a false economy to skimp on ensuring its safe passage.

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AdvertisementThe cocaine arrived on October 8 in a briefcase, carried as hand luggage on a flight from Argentina by a man described in court documents as the "walker", or in popular parlance the drug mule, often the conspirator with the lowest status but the greatest risk and the most important practical task: getting the stuff from a source in South America to a market in Sydney.

It is unclear exactly how the drugs cleared the airport that day. What is known is that the group's drug runs were co-ordinated with precision: they took place according to the rostered shifts of the baggage handlers involved in the syndicate. And law enforcement sources have told The Age that a method known to be favoured by Hurley in the past involved a bin drop.

Suddenly, everyone has been branded a drug trafficker."
Glenn NightingaleThe key for the mule is getting rid of his case of drugs before he reaches the perilous path through Customs. So he would somehow get the case to a baggage handler in the airport, who would then be able to evade security and take it out of the terminal unscrutinised. The handler would then dump it outside in a designated bin, where other members of the syndicate would collect it.

On that October 8 run, there were 9.9 kilograms of cocaine in the briefcase. That batch found its way to syndicate member Shayne Hatfield, who police alleged in court this week, then threw the case into Sydney Harbour at Rushcutters Bay. The baggage handlers were given their cut of $300,000.


A man arrested in Bondi by police investigating the cocaine ring; and cash wrapped in plastic, found at a Sydney house.

Later, police would recruit an informer who would reveal all about this operation. And this week 13 people were arrested after a series of raids in connection with an alleged conspiracy to import millions of dollars' worth of cocaine into Australia.

But on that day, no one knew something was seriously amiss behind the scenes at Sydney Airport. There were thousands of passengers coming and going that day, oblivious.

Among them was Corby, about to fly to Bali. Today, everyone knows about her. The commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Keelty, is asked about her at every turn. The Prime Minister raises her plight in meetings with the Indonesian president; she is the subject of diplomatic conversations involving the foreign ministers of both countries. The Customs Minister, Chris Ellison, this week summoned heavy hitters in the aviation industry to urgent talks on airport security.

John Patrick Ford is a less likely player in this story, but what might have been a walk-on role became a star turn when he came forward in March to claim he had information to support what had, until then, been Corby's desperate but unsubstantiated defence: that somewhere between Brisbane and Bali, her boogie board bag had been interfered with at an airport.

Ford, a remand prisoner in Victoria, said he had either participated in or overheard a series of conversations in prison, starting in February last year, that showed there was a drug smuggling ring operating through Australia's airports and that baggage handlers were involved.

Some of the conversations pre-dated Corby's October 8 journey; two of them came after it, and the details were specific: marijuana had been planted in a bag in Brisbane. Baggage handlers were supposed to remove it in Sydney. In error, they didn't, and the stash carried on to Denpasar. Corby was busted.

The drugs allegedly belonged to a man Ford named as Ronnie Vigenser, who has denied all the allegations. But Ford maintained this was not the first time that criminals interfering with the bags of Australian travellers had messed up. The prisoners who relayed the story were laughing that it had happened again, he told Corby's trial. They "found it quite funny that Ronnie had lost more drugs between Brisbane and Sydney".

Sixteen years ago, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on a remarkable operation at Sydney airport targeting an organised and brazen group of airport workers who were looting luggage on a grand scale.

Porters loading bags on to planes were robbing passengers blind in a highly organised operation that even involved a sophisticated fencing network using pawnbrokers in Sydney and Melbourne.

The key to their success was that they worked in small groups and conducted their raids once the luggage was on board a plane. The problem became so big that Australian Airlines conducted a sting, using hidden cameras on aircraft, to catch them. To a large extent, it worked. But in 2005, there are no cameras inside the luggage hold of planes; privacy laws prevent it.

And one of the sources of that 1989 expose says today that this is again the weakest link: it's when your bag is actually in the luggage hold on the plane that it is at its most vulnerable.

Driven by the Corby case and now the cocaine bust to come forward again, the source says: "That's the way they were doing it then. And that's the way they are doing it now."

Investigators who helped smash the cocaine ring have told The Age that they were forced to move on the drug network sooner than they would have liked because the syndicate realised it was being watched. That meant police had not nailed with enough certainty the airport staff on the group's payroll. And it meant the handlers under suspicion have been allowed to keep working.

It also meant that the actions of a few blackened the names of the many. There are 800 people employed as baggage handlers at Sydney airport, and at worst perhaps a dozen have been involved in criminal activity.

The public uproar has left their colleagues "shell shocked", says Glenn Nightingale, the airport organiser for the Transport Workers Union. His members have been spat on, abused on the street, questioned by their families. First Corby, now this. "Our guys are beside themselves," he says. "Even their mothers are asking: 'What the hell are you guys doing?'. Suddenly everyone has been branded a drug trafficker."

But while an overwhelming majority of Australians might believe Corby is innocent, her defence team wish she had one more on side: Mick Keelty. It is not Keelty's job to offer public succour to a criminal defendant anywhere; but neither, say Corby's lawyers and others, is it his place to rubbish her defence in public. "Would someone please ask Mick Keelty to shut up," said one of several angry letters to newspapers yesterday.

BUT the commissioner is clear: he believes the idea that Corby is the unwitting victim of drug smugglers is flimsy. "There is very little intelligence to suggest that baggage handlers are using innocent people to traffic heroin or other drugs between states," he said this week. "We can only go by the intelligence we've got. If I was to give evidence in a case like Corby's I would have to be honest and I would have to say that's what the intelligence produces."

The Law Council of Australia has attacked him for undermining her chances of acquittal. And on the last hearing day in Corby's case, Judge Linton Sirait this week rejected attempts by Corby's lawyers for the court to consider the Sydney baggage handler claims before handing down a verdict. Steve, a Melbourne man, remains to be convinced. He has no idea whether a baggage handler or someone else messed with his bag back in 1997, but he knows what he found when he got to Bali: a bag of marijuana, the size of a loaf of bread, packed tight. For seven years, this had been a strange but historic relic from his travelling past. And then came Corby. Steve and his wife went public, telling Channel Nine that upon finding the drugs when they got to their Bali hotel, they called the Australian consulate for advice. They were told to flush it down the toilet. "If you get caught with that, mate, you'll be eating nasi goreng for the rest of your life," he says he was told.

Steve, who went public the day Ford made his highly publicised appearance at Corby's trial, says he tried but failed to flush the dope; in the end he sprinkled it around the hotel garden. The Department of Foreign Affairs confirms the travellers did call the vice-consul. Steve is adamant there is only one place the drugs could have been planted: the airport. "The only time my suitcase was out of my sight was when it was on the plane and on the carousel at the airport."