THE TRAVELLERS' TRAP

The beaches of Goa are a paradise for travellers: even though the package
tourists have discovered it, the rooms are still cheap - and so is the
marijuana. But for some Britains this dream has been turned into a nightmare
by the narcotics police who allegedly plant the drugs, then demand bribes
not to pursue charges. Those who don't pay end up in Aguada jail - serving
up to 10 years. Andrew Stablow reports.

In the early evening of March 20 last year, Alexia Stewart was reading in
her rented house in the Goan beachside village of Vagator. The air was
thick and heavy, the temperature reaching over 90F. Tired from a day
selling Indonesian clothes at her shop, she and her boyfriend, Gary Carter -
who was in the process of setting up an Internet cafe near a strip of Goa's
luxury hotels - had returned to the house for a rest before their evening
meal. There was a knock at the door. Alexia put down her book and answered
it to find seven men and one woman standing in the porch. They announced
they were from the Anti-Narcotics Cell (ANC) - a special branch of the Goa
police force - and they wanted to search the house for drugs. Alexia
remained calm, knowing that as an asthmatic she couldn't even smoke
cigarettes, let alone marijuana which is heavier on the lungs. She began to
explain that there were no drugs in the house when one of the men, who she
later found out was Sub-Inspector Uday Naik, lodged his foot in the door and
force his way in, closely followed by his superior, Inspector Lavu Mamledar.
As the officers searched the house, a member of the police party took Alexia
to one side, she says, and told her that, for 150,000 rupees (around
UKP2,000), he could guarantee a quick exit. With the profits from her
clothes shop, Alexia was not short of cash. The money she'd earned during
her two-month stay in India lay hidden in a suitcase under her bed. But
unaware of the ramifications, she refused to pay. This was her first
mistake. Awoken from his slumber and in a sleepy haze, Gary stumbled into
the room. The police refused to listen to him and continued to the house
over. Incensed at his own helplessness, Gary lost his temper and a struggle
followed. Meanwhile, another officer walked into the house clutching a black
plastic bag which he said he had discovered in the garden. Inside was 165g
of hashish, cut and wrapped into 48 small slabs. This, the couple were
told, was evidence of both their drug dealing from the house and their own
cannabis addiction. Alexia and Gary were hauled into the back of an ANC jeep
and taken to the police compound in Panaji, the capital of Goa state. There
they were impounded in a shared cell and charged with possession of charas,
as marijuana is called in India. Then, as now, they insisted they had never
seen the drugs before. In their cell they were presented with a charge sheet
to sign. It was because they found the whole thing preposterous, they say,
that they made up two names: 'Larry Sky' and 'Lucy Sky'. Nevertheless, the
police found witnesses who claimed to have always known the British couple
as local drug peddlers Larry and Lucy Sky. The Indian judicial system is
slow and tortuous. It took three months for the police to gather their
evidence and the trial began in July last year. It lasted six months and on
December 30 Gary and Alexia were found guilty under India's 1985 Narcotics
Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. They are now 18 months into a
10-year sentence. It is an all too familiar tale. Two years ago Stuart
Kanauros and Claire Blatchford, two young tourists from south London, found
themselves in a similar position. "Stuart and Claire were, in my opinion,
100 per cent planted," says Douglas Barrett, Second Secretary at the British
High Commission in Bombay. "They were planted with drugs by three officers
who extorted a certain amount of money off them. The officers confiscated
their passports and asked them to come back to the police station and pay
the rest of the money the next day, but instead they made their way up to
Bombay. I issued emergency passports to get them home, and they got out."
As in many other developing countries where civil servants are poorly paid,
corruption is always a temptation, and the Goan police force appears to work
within a framework of unwritten rules built on bribery. Every night ANC
officers visit the traveller hotspots, which are visible from miles off.
Light blue plumes of marijuana-infused smoke fade into the humid night sky
high above the most popular bars. Goa's police earn a salary of just UKP100
a month, and if a traveller is smoking a spliff, a corrupt officer will
demand baksheesh, a bribe. When a traveller isn't smoking, the officer will
often produce a lump of hashish and threaten him or her with "possession".
But in most instances of police corruption, the victims do not end up in
jail, largely because experienced travellers know to pay up. Of the 1.5
million visitors Goa receives annually, about 250,000 are from Western
countries and 100,000 of these are British. The majority form part of the
travelling community who make their way down from the Indian Himalayas as
winter draws in to stay in Goa between the warm months of November and
March. Some bring with them hashish from the fertile marijuana fields of
the Kulu and Parbhati valleys; drugs and parties are high on the agenda.
The irony is that those who don't partake are as likely to be charged as
those who do. A local journalist, who fearing retribution, wishes to remain
anonymous, met me in his home overlooking a paddy field to explain why many
corrupt police rely on the tourist trap. "They have to pay for their job by
bribing politicians and superior cops," he says. "The job is an investment,
costing officers about 200,000 rupees (about UKP2,600) which they need to
recover. If you pay that much, you want to recover it in a hurry. And once
you recover it, why stop? Many ANC police are very slippery and have a very
bad reputation here." Robert Coutinho knew Alexia and Gary well. He owns a
guesthouse and restaurant, Robert's Place, in the village where they were
arrested and his aunt, Pelegrino Coutinho, rented the couple their house.
"A few days ago an ANC officer came to a guy sitting at a table in my
restaurant," he says Robert Coutinho. "He had a CD player with him and the
ANC man took that. There are many people here who are smoking, and the
police come down to my restaurant every night and take foreign currency off
people - UKP100, 200 a time. If you bargain, you only pay UKP50. The
police are very clever. They own nothing; everything goes to their wives,
their aunties, and their uncles. They must be very, very rich." Gerhard, a
30-year-old Austrian paragliding instructor who has lived just outside
Vagator for the past four years, cycles past but stops to join out
conversation. "The police treat this place like a bank," he says. "They go
to each of the dealers, because they know who they are, and take UKP 3,000
or 4,000 off them at the start of the tourist season. And then it's the
little guy they catch. It's the guy who cannot afford the bribe, or the guy
who gets aggressive. If you stay calm and pay them nicely, there's no
problem. This year, so many British came to Goa, and they were so young they
made me feel old. They don't know what trouble they can get into. It's not
Ibiza here." Goa-born lawyer Peter D'Souza deals exclusively with narcotics
cases and most of his clients are European. With his bouffant seems like an
Indian Libarace. He has an incredible record of acquittals. "I never trust
a cop fully," he says. "Why do our cops take bribes? Because they have to
pay their political bosses." D'Souza has fought police corruption on many
occasions. "in my experience, police manipulate evidence," he says. "They
find it outside, they say it was inside. In the early Nineties they were
finding drugs on a person and it was always in the right-hand back pocket.
In one case the pocket was so torn it could never have carried anything.
The police never say they plant, they say they "transplant". But usually,
when travellers are planted, it never gets as far as a trial." Nearly all
travellers pay off the police before it gets that far.

My Goan hotel, the Taj Holiday Village, is on a coastal peninsula which juts
out into the stormy waters of the Arabian Sea. Behind the hotel and half a
mile along a stretch of beach is the dilapidated 17th-century Fort Aguada.
Below the Portuguese fort's ramparts - and the tourists who swarm over it -
is Aguada jail, housing Goa's most dangerous prisoners, including murderers
and rapists, as well as Gary and Alexia. It's a crumbling and impenetrable
prison famed for the oven-like temperatures of the cells which are shielded
from the cooling breezes that gust in from the ocean. When I visit, the
searing heat makes it impossible to take more than a few steps. The severe
conditions worsen over the four-month monsoon period when heavy rains flood
the walls of the cells and roofs collapse with regularity. Leaving my camera
and notepad in the waiting car, I introduce myself at the prison gates and
wait at the entrance while a guard heads up to prison governor Mashelkarr
with my request to visit "family friend Lucy Sky". After an hour the guard
returns and I am led up, through the staff compound, to a large room with
paint peeling from the walls, where I sit with a Goan lady who is waiting to
see her son. I am Alexia's only visitor this month and she enters the
visiting-room accompanied by a female prison guard. She is a ghostly,
emaciated figure, more like an old woman than the 29-year-old Japanese
language graduate that she is. She shuffles towards me and sits down, her
eyes are red raw, her hands shaking. Her teeth are yellow and rotting like
the prison walls around us. She looks gaunt; her skin is wrapped tightly
around her bones and is as translucent as her prison regulation blue sari.
She has painted her finger and toenails with henna, which grows naturally in
a corner of the cell she shares with four other women. "There is a cage in
my cell," Alexia tells me, "where violent prisoners are held. In the other
corner is a hole in the ground - a toilet. I got used to the cockroaches,
maggots and beetles in the rice early on. But I don't want to go into the
half of it here - it would upset my parents too much." Alexia's mother,
Lucille, is a teacher. Her father, Philip, is director of studies for human
sciences at St Anne's College, Oxford. "My mother has been too distraught
and hasn't visited since the beginning. My father has been a rock." She
tells me about the "quick, quiet exit" she and Gary claim they were offered.
Why, I ask, didn't she simply play by the rules and pay the bribe? "The
police wanted just over UKP2000 and I wish that I could go back and just pay
it - I'd pay anything now." The trial had been a complete disaster, Alexia
tells me. "We couldn't persuade any of our witnesses to the stand as they
were all too scared. I'm not certain I'll get out on appeal. I don't know
what I'll do, I just don't know. I rarely see Gary and when I do, I see how
much harder he's become. There are constant fights in the men's wing."

During my investigation the same officers' names would always be quoted:
Inspector Lavu Mamledar, who heads Goa's 22-man ANC, and Naik, his second in
command. In Goa I was warned to tread carefully when dealing with Mamledar.
His was a volatile temperament, I was told. When I finally meet Mamledar at
the ANC, which is housed within Panaji's central police compound, I am led
into his dimly lit office where rusty fans whirr slowly overhead and police
line the walls of the room watching me. Mamledar is a charmless man with a
pockmarked face, and throughout our conversation he burps and picks his
nose. Before Mamledar was promoted to head the ANC in early 1997, he was a
traffic policeman in the small Goan town of Ponda. What qualifications
then, did he think he had for the job of Goa's primary drug-buster? Mamledar
shrugs his shoulders, beckons me close and whispers conspiratorially, "I
have been in this job two years. The first year, I didn't know how to do
the job and I was learning. The second year, having worked in the field, I
could see there are so many foreigners speaking lies - 90 per cent of them
take drugs." Did he know that the ANC had a reputation for planting drugs?
"In the past there have been incidents of police planting drugs," he
replies, "But I would be the last man to do that. And, it's a question of
whether or not you believe me. Do you?" I nod. "Do you?" I nod again. "Do
you?" I've come to India to hear your side of the story, Mr Mamledar.
Mamledar offers me a cup of black tea which Naik delivers to me swiftly. He
insists I finish the cup before I leave his small, dank office, and a I sip
slowly, he shows me a scrapbook containing pictures of all the people he has
arrested over the past two years. "This is Antonio Calino. He was a British
boy. I felt sorry for him." Mamledar leafs through the book as if it were a
treasured family-album. Calino received a six-month sentence for possessing
14g of hashish. "Look, this is Alexia Stewart and Gary Carter." He points a
finger, on which he wears a thick gold ring with a large diamond encrusted
in the centre. "That was not a plant," he insists. The ring is his only
visible sign of wealth. Otherwise, like Naik, he is dressed simply, with
worn sandals.

I travel back to England, pessimistic about Alexia and Gary's future but
eager to talk to Brad and Mike, two young men whose photographs I had seen
in Mamledar's scrapbook. I call the charities Fair Trials Abroad and
Prisoners Abroad which put me in touch with Mike. He and Brad had met when
their cases came to trial simultaneously. Yes, he would give me Brad's
number. Yes, he would talk to me, but anonymously. "Mike", now 31, is
working as a sales rep in East Sussex. Last January, when he was on holiday
in Goa, he was caught rolling a joint by a team led by Inspector Mamledar in
the beachside town of Anjuna. "Mamledar has cold eyes like a crocodile," he
says. "I knew from past stories I was supposed to offer a bribe when I was
stopped, but I didn't" he says, sounding jittery. "I tried to offer a bribe
when they charged me at the police station, but it was too late. They said
I was in possession of 15g of charas but I had no more than three or four.
I thought I was going to be in for one night, but I was in for three months.
It was at the same time Jack Straw's son, William, was cautioned for
possession of cannabis. My parents saw the local MP and someone sent the
Goa Chief Minister a letter asking them to deal with me quickly. I don't
know exactly what happened, but my fine was upped from 150 rupees, about
UKP2, to 15,000 rupees, about UKP200, and I was suddenly released." Although
their cases are different - Mike admits a measure of guilt - like Alexia and
Gary, he wishes he had paid a bribe at the beginning. In court, the ANC
police gave evidence about finding 15g instead of 3g of hashish, ensuring
Mike's imprisonment. Mike insists the officer giving evidence against him
was lying to get the conviction. "The judge asked if what the officer said
was true, and my lawyer, Peter D'Souza, looked at me and - in what was the
hardest thing I have ever had to say in my life - I said it was and I got
six months. If you argue the case and lose, you get a mandatory 10 years.
I could still be in jail now." While in prison Mike met an Israeli inmate
who claimed to have paid USD10,000 to reduce his conviction from cocaine
possession to charas possession. The Israeli, Mike says, received a
six-month sentence instead of 10 years. "Brad", 28, doesn't want the
prestigious Dorset hotel at which he now works to know that he spent time in
custody in Goa. He was DJ-ing in Baga, living near the beach, when Mamledar
and members of his team, wearing plain clothes, knocked on his front door.
Brad argued vociferously with them through a window and when he eventually
allowed the ANC party into his house, one member of the police unit produced
a large lump of charas which he claimed he had discovered in the garden.
"They then told me to go in the jeep and said we would have a chat about
it," says Brad. "I thought I'd pay some baksheesh, but because I had been
aggressive earlier they didn't ask for any money. Half an hour later, I'm
dragged into Panaji police station. I was charged with possessing 14g of
charas. They said it was a small problem. For someone who had done no
time, six months to a year is not a small problem, especially when I was
supposed to have been flying home the next week." Douglas Barrett came down
from Bombay to visit Brad in Panaji. "Mamledar told me I mustn't talk about
police corruption with him," continues Brad. "But I whispered to Douglas
Barrett that I had been set up and he believed my story. He told me I could
either demand my release or "go behind the scenes", which, in the end, is
what I opted for." Brad's parents made fruitless contact with their local MP
and Robin Cook; neither would help as the case was drug-related. In the
end, it was left to Brad's fiancee, "Louise", who furiously introduced
herself to members of Goa's underworld in the hope that she might eventually
reach the judge. "I was panicked," says Louise. "I just cried to everyone
and eventually I was taken to a Goan mafia boss, Anthony, who said he would
speak to an influential politician friend. Brad's parents handed over
UKP2,000 to this man the day before the trial. Brad was the second case up
and the judge said it should be dismissed because the drugs were found in
the garden and not on his person. There was no prime offence. Brad's dad
and I gave the mafia man another UKP2,000 the day after the judge threw out
the case, UKP4,000 in all. In truth, we would have paid anything."

I meet Alexia's father Philip, among the spires of St Anne's College,
Oxford, a sad irony considering the conditions in which his daughter lives.
It is Alexia's 29th birthday and he has sent her a small cake which he hopes
will get past the guards and reach her in the cell. At one stage in our
conversation he becomes tearful but rather than dwelling on his sadness, he
has immersed himself in his daughter's case as if researching an academic
thesis. Out in India, Stewart has interviewed everyone who stood up and
gave judgement against "the children", one of whom even admitted to lying
under oath fearful of the local police. "I know my daughter is coping
extraordinarily well," he says. "She's fixed herself a timetable of
activity: she does two or three hours embroidery, she reads for four or five
hours, she works at her Japanese kanji characters, she gives English lessons
to her fellow prisoners." Philip has just returned to Goa, hoping to speed
up the judicial system and with it his daughter's appeal, which has been
continually delayed. It is his fifth visit to India in the past 18 months.
Before leaving Goa, he called me: "I am going to go on fighting this."