Daily Telegraph  (UK) 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 Britons 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 Stalbow 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 90°F. 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 forced 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
£2,000), he could guarantee a quick, quiet 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 to be 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 turn 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 so 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 out into the humid
night sky high above the most popular bars. Goa's police earn a salary of
just £100 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 Kullu 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 £2,600] 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? Western tourists have a lot of money and they are
always in a hurry to get out of jail. 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,' 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 - £100, £200 a
time. If you bargain, you only pay £50. The police are very clever.
They own nothing; everything goes to their wives, their aunties, 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 our
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 they take
$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 grey hair and animated
manner, he seems like an Indian Liberace. 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 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, Lucile, 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 £2,000 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 had been 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 on tourists?
'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 as 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, 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 £2, to 15,000 rupees, about
£200, 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 me 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 $10,000 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 money and get off on 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
has 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 £2,000 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 £2,000 the day after the judge threw the
case out, £4,000 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 judgment 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 for
Goa, he called me: 'I am going to go on fighting this.

Headline: Corrupt police have made paradise hell

Source: The Express - United Kingdom, 21-Sep-1999 1169 words.

FROM her cockroach-infested prison cell in Goa, Alexia Stewart can't see
the Western tourists who flock to Fort Aguada in Goa, one of the coastal
states of India. She insists the drugs were planted by corrupt local police...
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
From yesterdays Guardian:

Headline: Britons jailed over drug find to appeal

Source: The Guardian - United Kingdom, 20-Sep-1999 451 words.

A British couple jailed for 10 years in Goa for drug dealing will appear
before an appeal hearing today to try to have their conviction quashed. The
couple, who are being backed by the British organisation Fair Trials
Abroad, claim that corrupt ...
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
and an unrealated link:

Headline: Spice by the Sea.

Source:LA Times 19 Sep.  By MARSHALL BERDAN. 1778 words
Enjoying the duality of Goa, a former Portuguese colony where East and West
merge in food, faith and fun...
Full text at: http://www.latimes.com/excite/990919/t000083854.html


External WWW links from article:

Police, Trouble and Nudism in Goa - Rough Guide:
http://travel.roughguides.com/content/7266/16379.htm  

Destination Goa - Lonely Planet:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com.au/dest/ind/goa.htm

Goa Basics - Rough Guide:http://travel.roughguides.com/content/7266/basics.htm

Courtesy Daily Telegraph U.K
Forwarded by Eddie Fernandes.  e.fernandes@ucl.ac.uk