Once a Jolly Hangman (14 page)

The real story of how Bohl was caught - and her neck saved - was partly revealed to me by a former member of the Central Narcotics Bureau. Now retired and with the understanding that I would never reveal his name, he told me that Bohl and McCrea had known each other long before that fatal New Year's Eve party in January 2002. But it was the double murder that led to the sting and her arrest using 'Ben' as an undercover agent or rather an under-the-bedcover seducer! 'It's a dirty job but this is a dirty business', he told me. 'We have to infiltrate the drug rings in this way. Otherwise they are closed to us. It's the only way we can get to know them and their activities and bring them to justice. The thing I always hated was that we had orders to encourage some mules to commit bigger crimes with more drugs than they planned to traffic. This always meant sending them to the
gallows - and many were'. When Bohl eventually appeared in court to face trial, she was all alone and full of smiles. She had agreed to plead guilty to lesser charges which carried a maximum penalty of 20 years in jail and a $20,000 fine and, more importantly, to give evidence for the prosecution. But she received a sentence of only five years, a slap on the wrist by comparison to what happened to the likes of Nguyen and many others. The damning evidence that 'Ben' had gathered from his 'pillow talk' and observations was never produced. His dangerous undercover work was all in vain, but no doubt his work under the sheets was adequate enough satisfaction for him. Even more strangely, court records now show that only one more of the four named in original court records ended up being prosecuted: Mahdi Ibrahim Bamadhaj. He was jailed for 20 years and given 22 lashes of the rattan cane. The chief prosecution witness in his trial was none other than Julia Bohl. Her evidence cited him as the kingpin while she was under his influence all the time!

While I was delving into court records concerning the case against Bamadhaj and his appeal, I came across this extraordinary titbit of information. After detailing the circumstances of Bamadhaj's arrest with Bohl and 'Ben, the High Court document explained: 'Ben is currently on the run. He was last seen by the CNB on the afternoon of 13 March 2002 at the car park at the York Hotel, after telling his friends present at the Goodwood Park service apartments that he felt he was being trailed by the CNB'. Unless there had been a typing error, the fact that this happened only hours after first appearing in the dock with Bohl and the other accomplices and was then 'seen' by CNB officers at Goodwood Park that afternoon rang a very loud bell in my head! A top flight drug trafficker, possibly facing death on the gallows, then goes 'on the run'? How could it be possible he would be allowed to get away only hours after he had appeared in the dock with Bohl - who was being held in custody along with Bamadhaj and, presumably, Sunaiza Hamsah? Then tell his friends that he 'felt he was being trailed' by the CNB while actually being watched by the CNB? It did not make any kind of sense to me. And
it was my further investigations that confirmed my suspicions that 'Ben' in reality was a police officer and had been working undercover all the time. But it should not surprise anyone, my retired CNB officer informant told
me. Such people doing such dangerous work have to be protected at all times. I also tried to discover what happened to Sunaiza Hamsah, the other young woman named in the original charge. There was no trace of her at all. Lawnet.com has nothing on her 'case either. Perhaps she, too, was an undercover agent or informant? Or maybe, because of the intervention by the German government to save Bohl, they let her fade into obscurity so Singapore could not be accused of 'favouritism' and have her reveal more scandal at her trial than Singapore could deal with. Bohl was released in July 2005 having served only three years - just five months before Australian citizen Van Tuong Nguyen was hanged - and went to live in Amsterdam where certain kinds of drugs are a way of life.

During my investigations into the Bohl case, I uncovered yet another carefully-guarded secret between the two countries. The Federal Government promised that two German banks, the State Bank of Hessen and the State Bank of Bavaria would invest heavily in Singapore on condition that a 'diplomatic solution' would be found to save her from the gallows. It was an offer Singapore could not or rather dare not refuse! After all, business is business. Unfortunately, I was never able to discover if these huge investments actually materialised. Such sensitive banking information is impossible to find without breaking the law in Singapore.

When Nguyen was about to be hanged shortly after Bohl returned home, Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a statement that he was sorry for Nguyen's mother that the execution had to go ahead. He pointed out that this was because the amount of drugs he was caught trafficking to Australia via Changi airport would have destroyed thousands of lives. What a contrast to the warm, friendly treatment Bohl received. Exactly how she managed to escape the noose wasn't known when the campaign to save the Australian citizen failed. Then, of course, it was too late. No one was able to point out to Lee that Nguyen was merely using Changi as a hub! The Australians could quite easily have given him a long, punishing prison sentence, instead of hanging him, as is the norm in the majority of countries. If Nguyen was helping to destroy lives in Australia as Lee stated and was so concerned about, then Bohl was helping destroy lives perhaps on a much bigger scale in his own backyard, Singapore. It is not that Bohl should have
hanged, but that Nguyen's life should have been spared, too!

'Julia has shown good behaviour in prison so she was granted a remission of one third of her five-year sentence', prison spokeswoman Lim Soo Eng said of her kindly on her release. Bohl turned 26 while in jail and was immediately deported. She was picked up by her loving parents and consular officials outside the jail and immediately whisked back to the safety of Europe. Bohl was an ideal inmate, according to a prison officer. While serving her sentence, she was allowed to pursue a London School of Economics distance lear ning course in economics and social science. Her privileged life as a teenager had begun in Singapore where her wealthy parents used to live and where she completed studies at the local German School and continued in prison! The outcome of her trial astounded many human rights observers in Singapore. And when I
became involved in the Nguyen Van Tuong case, I searched the Bohl court files. They prompted a timely interview with her lawyer, Subhas Anandan, for the newspaper The Australian with one of their staff reporters, Mike McKenna, who flew to Singapore to help cover the events leading up to the execution. Anandan, with a reputation as a most skilful criminal defence lawyer, was querulous over the Australian government's 'tardiness' in coming forward to save their citizen in the same way the German government did for Bohl. He dared not go into details at that time, but said only that the last minute flurry of activity by the Howard government was akin to 'visiting a dead person in hospital'. Although they served roughly the same time behind bars, Julia was allowed to start her life all over again. Did race play a part in the outcome? Or didn't Howard care enough to fight for Nguyen like the Germans did for their precious citizen?

The Bohl case and many others I have looked into reveal a little- known secret: that Singapore has an Achilles heel when it comes to whom they hang and whom they don't. 'If the economy comes under threat from reprisals it will err on the right to life - and the right to trade - and buckle under from this kind of pressure', another Singapore lawyer told me. Asad Latif, a former senior reporter with The Straits Times, and a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, would deny this of course. He has to toe the People's Action Party ethos. In an articled published in The Australian explaining why Nguyen should be hanged, he wrote: 'It is unfortunate
Nguyen Van Tuong has to die, but the law against drug trafficking must be implemented uniformly No one has the right to expect, let alone demand, that Singapore bend its laws to suit the laws of another country. Sovereignty, then, is a key issue in this case'.

11

The Odd Couple

One of the most bizarre stories I uncovered for this book concerned British financial adviser, Mike McCrea, a reputed millionaire, and German student Julia Bohl who could, in normal circumstances in Singapore, have ended up on the gallows - possibly together. The crimes they committed were not entirely unconnected and had this fateful chain of coincidences played out to its spooky end, Darshan Singh might well have hanged this 'odd couple' side-by-side at the customary time: Friday at dawn. As it turned out, unlike hundreds of other criminals caught in Singapore dragnets and sting operations facing the mandatory death penalty, these lucky souls were spared the noose. Their stories began in early 2001. Bohl, aged 23, and McCrea, 44, were close neighbours in a high end part of Singapore - he in Balmoral Park and she just around the corner in Goodwood Park where many foreign diplomats also reside. They first got to know each other through their mutual interest in the high life - and drugs - at a bar named Pinkk at Boat Quay, now under new management and completely above board. Both were regular drug users who loved wild parties. And both were dealers who had discovered a lucrative sideline to boost their already impressive incomes. Bohl grew up never having to work for her basic needs. She had wealthy parents back home in Germany and her allowance from them alone was more than many medium level executives earned in Singapore. But Bohl wanted more out of life, the excitement of wild parties with thumping music that went on all night energised by the kind of drugs she sold and consumed. She needed much more than her parents gave her to satisfy

her special cravings. McCrea had very similar interests. He was making pots of money persuading wealthy expats and Singapore's home-grown upwardly mobile executives to part with huge sums of cash they didn't want to show to the tax man. He had better places to put their money, mainly offshore shell companies around the world he controlled with two secret partners in Singapore and London.

He was an expert in these tax shelters, he assured them. His company was suitably called April Investments - signalling the end of the financial year and the time to legally, more or less, reduce his clients' liabilities or hide their ill-gotten gains. As a sideline to keeping some of his wealthy clients happy he also discreetly supplied them with party drugs. In turn Bohl, his chief drugs source, also became one of his April investors. It was an ideal arrangement. McCrea advertised his services in glossy magazines and wrote an occasional column - subtitled 'Doing The Obvious Differently' - in The Expat magazine in Singapore giving advice and encouragement to the wealthy to trust him and invest in his money-laundering schemes without anyone knowing, including the police and the taxman. It was during this time that he became a close friend of the then editor of The Expat, Nigel Bruce Simmonds, who was later to be arrested in another sting operation using the very same undercover narcotics agent who helped
nail Bohl in March 2002. McCrea also enjoyed the company of young, glamorous women and the champagne life he had grown accustomed to and which Singapore was only too happy to oblige. He also developed a propensity for all kinds of drugs, especially cocaine, and Bohl was another perfect solution. She always had abundant supplies of the stuff. Most of it was smuggled in from Malaysia by the busy syndicate she had become connected to. Knowing this young worldly German girl meant he had a new gravy train to jump on. He would become a supplier himself. And he had the perfect front.

In the end he was making so much money that he was able to pay his live-in chauffeur $6,000 a month - huge by local standards at the time - and in 2001 he was able to give him a Christmas bonus of $25,000. A few days later he killed him in a drug and booze induced rage. Until then, he told his Melbourne lawyer, Terry Grundy, who was helping him avoid extradition to Singapore to face murder charges, that the chauffeur was Tike a brother' to him. His dream life had all come
crashing down to a tragic, brutal end after the 2002 New Years Eve drug and booze party in McCrea's luxury flat. After he fled to Britain, where his immediate family lived, then Australia, where his wife lived, a warrant for his arrest was issued in Singapore.

The arrest of Bohl was to come a few months later. It did not take police long to link them. Bohl and McCrea often went to each other's homes to take part in wild, pulsating Saturday night-Sunday morning drug parties and often joined each other at parties in bars along the Singapore River. Despite McCrea being on Interpol's 'most wanted' list over the alleged murders, Bohl was unaware the police now had her under surveillance. When McCrea fled to Australia with his 22- year-old girlfriend, Audrey Ong, homicide police and officers of the Central Narcotics Bureau began investigating all his friends and business connections. The bodies of his chauffeur, Kho Nai Guan, 46, and the dead man's girlfriend, Lan Ya Ming, 29, were found hidden his limo. Tests found heavy traces of drugs and alcohol in both their bodies. Court documents later claimed that the fight began when Lan had called Ong a 'slut' in Hokkien. When McCrea demanded to know what it meant in English, a violent fight erupted between the two men. But this was merely a cover story made up by investigators probing the two brutal deaths, I later discovered from a former agent of the CNB. They wanted to keep the real cause of the murders completely secret. In reality the fight was over a dispute McCrea had with Kho whom he suspected of stealing a large amount of cash from his safe and, more importantly, a large amount of high quality drugs he had purchased weeks earlier, as they discovered, from Bohl.