I actually know a few staff members on the Sydney Morning Herald. Eamon Duff has a good reputation for checking and counter-checking his facts. This story was printed last year.
Schapelle's wild ride before the crash
Date November 12, 2011
[I]Corby drew attention to herself even before her Bali flight landed, writes Eamonn Duff.
Rosleigh Rose has always been her family's unofficial photographer. Wherever she went her little camera went with her and no family event was too boring to document. So, it wasn't unusual that Ros took a happy snap of Schapelle and her three travelling companions at Brisbane Airport before they boarded QF501 for Sydney. These days, looking at that photo can easily bring Ros to tears. She had unconsciously captured her daughter's last moment of freedom in Australia.
In the photograph, friends Katrina Richards and Ally McComb, a glamorous and confident-looking Schapelle and half-brother James are bunched together outside the domestic terminal just minutes before they boarded their flight. On the back of the photograph, Ros wrote: ''8th Oct. All happy go to Bali.'' The photograph was later handed to the media as proof Schapelle and the others were relaxed as they set off on their tropical holiday.
You'd be caught before you sold your first bag.
James was scheduled to take a different flight but, after some last-minute pleading at the airport by Ros, he scored a seat on the same flight as Schapelle and the girls.
Last moment of freedom ... Katrina Richards, Schapelle Corby, Ally McComb and James Corby at the airport.
Ally's memory is that James carried the boogie board to the check-in counter at Brisbane Airport: ''Me and Schapelle and Katrina all checked in at the same time. James went to a different counter and put the boogie board up there to go through first and they're like, oh no, that goes in a different section - that goes over to oversize baggage.''
Advertisement But apparently James didn't carry the boogie board across to the oversize baggage counter - Schapelle did. During her trial in Bali in 2005, Schapelle said: ''We all walked together from the check-in counter to the conveyor, the oversize conveyor. I put it in - everyone saw me put it in.''
Katrina also remembers Schapelle checking in the boogie board: ''Schapelle actually put her bag through the oversize counter - it just looked like a normal boogie board bag. How it would normally - no marijuana in it.''
Indonesian police inspect the boogie board.
Not long after 6am the group was finally in the air. Once in Sydney, they found their way to the international terminal, where they had a couple of hours to kill. Schapelle had a few beers in the airport bar with her good friend Jodie Power, who was booked on a later flight to Bali. Jodie later claimed that Schapelle kept pointing at the security cameras saying, ''There's one, and there's one over there'' and that the ill-fated traveller's last words to her in the bar were, ''We'll see you round the pool.'' But it didn't quite happen the way the had planned.
Australian Airlines flight AO7829, scheduled for departure from Sydney at 10.30am, was full with the usual Bali crowd: mostly tourists with business people, surfers and a few expats heading back to their low-cost, exotic lifestyles. Schapelle and Ally helped themselves to more drinks on the flight. While most people were having a morning coffee, it seems Schapelle drank solidly all the way to Bali. She later wrote in her book, My Story: ''Feeling tipsy, I think we spent most of the flight laughing at nothing … I was well into the holiday spirit.'' A photo taken by Katrina on the flight shows the girls laughing and holding up their cans of beer.
The group may have thought they were discreetly having fun, but Schapelle's heavy drinking didn't go unnoticed. After Schapelle's arrest, a person claiming to be a flight attendant on flight AO7829 posted this blog on the internet:
''Those crocodile tears. Seen 'em from Schapelle before. She was a total bitch on the flight to Denpasar - even jumping up on descent and demanding another beer - her ninth for the trip: 'If I wanted f---ing water you would give it to me! Why not another beer?' Then the tears. She almost had to be physically taken back to her seat. We [the cabin crew] cheered about 3 hours after hearing about the arrest. And, yes … I have considered all along she could be really guilty. Just got caught this time after having paid off officials in the past.''
Gail Burgess was senior cabin purser that day, overseeing the flight attendants who served Schapelle's group on the flight. While Schapelle insists she couldn't have been more relaxed on the plane, Burgess recalls a different story. In an interview for Sins of the Father, she said the blog was ''completely genuine'' and confirmed Schapelle had been at the centre of a ''major drama''.
''As the cabin manager in charge that day,'' she recalls, ''I was mainly working towards the front of the plane, so didn't really know what was going down until the passengers had all stepped off and all the crew were talking about it. I was briefed about a woman that was heavily intoxicated and creating a scene around her area. Consequently, the attendants were forced to cut off her alcohol.''
Schapelle was annoying people. ''The exact words used by staff were 'angry', 'tense' and 'agitated', to the point where surrounding passengers kept on complaining that she was being too aggressive and loud.''
Burgess said she was notified of the incident within minutes of the last passenger exiting, but she was nevertheless ''upset'' her staff had not alerted her at the time. ''I remember saying after we had got off, 'You know the process … You should have let me know what was going on down the back.'
''The protocol is that the captain is also supposed to be informed - and he was angry that he hadn't been advised of the situation also. If someone gets violent, there are containment procedures. The handcuffs come out and then surrounding passengers also have to be moved. She hadn't reached that point, but if you have your alcohol cut off, then you are displaying behaviour that suggests this is a possibility.''
The following day, ''We returned to the aircraft to prepare for a shuttle run to Singapore and straight back [to Bali]. It was then that I was informed a girl from our flight the day before had been reprimanded due to an illegality with her luggage - and that it was drugs. It then emerged it was the same girl who had been acting so strangely on the plane.
''They [the cabin crew] were saying, 'Now it all makes sense.' The captain and I had a chat and we were like "Jesus!" It kind of reinforced our earlier point that we should have been made aware of the situation as it was happening.''
Burgess said that, to this day, nobody acting in any official capacity had ever thought to interview either her or her staff about the flight: ''You have to say it was a bit of an oversight. Had they [the authorities] known what had occurred, it might have proved to be an important part of the jigsaw. She certainly wasn't your typical carefree, relaxed traveller heading off on a family holiday like she claimed. She was the opposite.''
By the time Schapelle and her travelling buddies entered the terminal at Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport, it was 14 hours since they had packed their bags in Ros's garage - everyone was feeling exhausted and Schapelle was almost certainly starting to feel the strain from her heavy drinking.
Ordinary tourists wait in long queues to get their entry visas and passports stamped before entering the nightmare of long lines and crowding in the customs area. With corruption rife in Indonesia, however, there is an alternative for the well-heeled travellers staying at five-star hotels - a VIP service fee that ensures easy passage through all the processes and surrounding mayhem. Those travellers usually receive a ''meet and greet'' service. Rarely, if ever, are their bags checked by customs officers.
When Mercedes Corby, Schapelle's sister, was interviewed by the journalist Sian Powell, she said no one in their right mind would dare smuggle cannabis into Bali.
''Usually stuff gets found inside surfboards with the glass resin over it,'' she told Powell.
''You wouldn't even be able to sell the stuff; you'd be caught before you sold your first bag.''
During Schapelle's trial, however, it was common for television camera crews to arrange payments for fixers to ensure equipment would sail through customs without any checks. Pretty girls can get away with a lot at airports and on this particular day, Schapelle was dressed to impress.
Perhaps the plan had never been to use a fixer but instead to use the happy travelling group as her ''protection''. They certainly blended in.
There were no problems when the group queued at the immigration counters to pay the arrival tax and get their holiday visas, nor when they lined up to have their passports stamped. Next they passed through the hand-luggage X-ray checkpoint and walked through to the main baggage collection area. It had been quite a while since their plane landed and the queues were starting to thin out as passengers gradually left the airport.
At this point, Schapelle was very close, but there was just one final hurdle remaining - the customs inspection desk. All that was left to do was to grab her boogie board, let the customs officers check her huge black suitcase and, if necessary, flash a flirtatious smile if she was asked to open the boogie board bag. But two years after the terrible 2002 Bali bombings, security measures had increased considerably at Bali's international airport. Now Schapelle Corby was playing Russian roulette with her life.[/I]
