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FOREWORD

move drugs through the airports and evade police. Once the dealers started warming up and trusting me in their interviews, it was amazing - they just talked and talked and talked, often coming back the next day to talk some more. Most told me they were speaking of many things for the first time - as I'd promised not to use their names. I learned that even among their close dealer friends, these guys don't swap stories - their lives are infused with deep paranoia, especially when they're using coke. They also know that if another person in the drug game gets busted, often their only leverage is giving someone else up (or cash). So it was that some of these dealers were almost bursting to tell their stories, often with a gleam in their eyes as they recalled some moments. Rafael, in particular, seemed to want to talk as a kind of confessional and joked at one point that it felt like I was his psychiatrist. I offered a non-judgmental ear, and that was the key.

I should mention that for some of those I spoke to, I paid them a financial contribution for their time, which was undoubtedly also an incentive.

A couple of the dealers were also motivated by a heartfelt desire to show young kids who might be thinking of getting involved in the glamorous life of fast bucks, hot women and orgies, that in the end, it's not worth it. Literally, within a second, life goes from heaven to hell.

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I first met some of the dealers during Hotel Kerobokan research when I went to the Super Maximum Security Prison on Nusakambangan Island to interview Juri and Ruggiero, whom I'd got to know in Kerobokan Prison while working with Schapelle. It was during my visits there that I met Brazilian Marco Archer Cardoso Moreira, a very funny and gregarious man, who was on death row for trafficking 13.7 kilos

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