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SNOWING IN BALI

His slick talk didn’t work. Rafael turned him down flat and walked back to his nearby bungalow angry. But it had ignited a spark and for weeks he watched Marco’s horses blithely coming with kilos and leaving with cash. He started selling Lemon Juice, freelancing as one of Marco’s many sales people – paying Marco $500 an ounce, and making $100. They became good friends, and Rafael saw the intricacies of the game up close. Before long, he decided to give it a shot.

‘Okay, man, let’s go,’ he told Marco on the beach, ‘but I want to invest some cash, be a partner too.’ For Marco that was no problem. It was often how deals were done, with several investors in one run, and at this point it was blue-chip. So, in the sun, on the sand, they struck a deal. A few days later, Rafael flew out of Bali to the marijuana capital, Amsterdam.

I was very confident. I say I can do this, no problem, they’re not going to touch me because twice I’ve flown into Bali and they never even looked at me.

– Rafael

This was the mid-1990s, when Bali customs was lax, and before a rash of big airport busts and draconian life and death sentences were imposed. But there was one sobering, stand-out case that most surfers across the globe knew about – the notorious case of Frank De Castro Dias. Frank was doing a coke run to Bali but foolishly slipped up. As well as 4.3 kilos of cocaine embedded in his two surfboards, he was carrying a saw to cut the boards open. It created suspicion and got him busted. After paying a bribe of $100,000, he was sentenced to nine months in Bali’s Kerobokan Prison, instead of the prosecutors’ requested ten years.

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