Original subtitles

He said, I've just been to Nepal to smuggle some gold.

And it was dead easy.

You should do it.

Carrying four stone of gold is a lot easier when you're charged with

We were rushing, we were buzzing from the excitement of, you know, being in

presence of some serious gangsters with guns.

Looking back now, I think they knew full well what they were going to do to us.

They were going to sacrifice us.

I was a city boy.

I had my Hermes.

So I had my brogue, my pinstripe suit.

And, you know, I enjoyed having a bit of money in my pocket and pretending that

I was really quite important.

And quite a little city gent.

But because of the general business environment, there was a lot of stress.

I was working long hours, not much time off, not really enjoying it that much.

That led to me becoming ill.

I literally lied on my mum's sofa for a year, experiencing the most bleak

clinical depression.

The depression was brought on by having not enough thyroid in my system.

I couldn't speak a whole sentence.

I couldn't walk.

It was certainly the lowest point of my life.

When it was warmer in England, I felt better.

Thyroid is used to create body heat, and when you're in a warm climate, your

deficiency is much less obvious.

So I thought, well, if I go to an even warmer climate, maybe I'll feel even

better.

I decided to go travelling.

Ended up going to Singapore, Malaysia, and then ended up in Thailand.

And sure enough, it was a big tonic as soon as I landed in a warmer, freer...

I felt an awful lot better and, you know, it proved to be a good move.

I could really live like that for the rest of my life. The idyllic existence

it as well was staying in a wooden hut on the beach, frolicking around in the

surf during the day and eating lots of lovely food and then starting drinking

fairly early on and trying to get off with any number of gorgeous female

tourists. It was a three -month existence of...

Pure hedonism and fun.

Sometimes going home alone, sometimes not.

But living to frolic another day.

Help me.

Help me.

Help me. It had all the elements of a sort of dreamlike existence for a young

man who wants to just get stuck into a few adventures.

And that's exactly what I ended up doing.

Hong Kong was a cultural shock because just literally the amount of people in

the buildings. I was used to space and beauty, and suddenly it's just this

and bustle.

There was this bloke in my hostel called Oz who arrived after I'd been there for

about a week, and I just kind of took him under my wing.

He seemed a bit naive in terms of drinking and going out and having fun,

just showed him how to do it.

I was no expert, but we went out drinking, and he picked it up, actually.

Very good feuding.

And we soon became very firm friends.

We both had dwindling reserves of cash.

I had frittered away on booze, pretty much.

I clearly needed to work if I was going to stay away from England, and I

certainly wasn't ready to go home.

Oh! There he is, Jeffy boy. How you doing, son?

Marsha, do me a favor. Let me get a bottle of beer. Rhett moved into the

He gave guided tours to German tourists because he spoke German but was

American. He was tiny. He was like a midget. You should have seen his wife,

She looked like she was in the NBA, man. She was like 6 '6", 6 '7". She was

huge. He wasn't a particularly likable character from the start. He was quite a

loud mouth. Bottoms up, buddy.

Literally loud.

Yes, that is what I'm talking about. And he's sort of boastful and whatever.

Take that, keep the change, all right? No, not really my kind of guy.

But slowly we got talking, and slowly it emerged that being a

tour guide wasn't his only source of income.

So, you boys want to make some money?

Really? If you want to make good money, boys, you've got to get into gold.

Gold.

Let's get into it.

He revealed that he had been taking some gold over to Nepal, and this sounded

like extraordinary.

What on earth are you doing? All you've got to do is take the gold on a plane,

spend the weekend in Kathmandu, take a look at the mountains, fly back Monday.

Kathmandu. And that he was going to do it again, and that there were spaces for

other people to go with him if I wanted. You know, the guys at the airports, the

custom officials, that sort of thing.

They're all in on it.

Every single one of them. It just sounded frightening, scary, involving

didn't know in countries I didn't know, and that it could go horribly wrong, and

I, you know, I wasn't in that desperate a situation.

Listen, fellas, take it or leave it?

Leave it, thank you. What about yours?

Well, mate, I'll think about it, and, uh, no. It's all good, boys. I'm not

to twist your arms.

He disappeared for a weekend, didn't tell us where he was going, and came

with a wadge of dollars.

A big, fat, green wadge of dollars.

You know, we were just transfixed. I think Oz and I just were sitting

him, and we just thought, well, you know, that's a lot of money.

It was actually $2 ,000.

It wasn't a great deal of money, but to people who were travelling...

and running out of cash, it was a lifeline.

It seemed so tempting.

Just a weekend away, not that difficult.

Money in your hand.

Dead easy.

And we were pretty much doomed from then on.

Oz and I approached Rhett and said, we're on for the next run.

He was pleased, and he said the next phase was we had to go with him

one evening to Chungking Mansions, which was a notorious tower block where all

sorts of nefarious activities went on.

So one evening, Oz, Rhett and myself went downtown and met the fourth

member of the team.

Guys, this is Eric. He's French. A guy called Eric who was a maitre d' at a

restaurant in Hong Kong.

He's a nice guy.

We got on well with him.

In many ways, it was a bit odd. It was a bit like a joke because, I mean, there

was me, the Englishman, there was the American who was Rhett, there was Oz,

Australian, and there was this Frenchman who just turned up called Eric.

And we were all going into this very dodgy -looking tower block to meet up

two even dodgier...

Nepalese gangsters.

It was rather exciting because I'd heard about this place but never been there

and it had quite a reputation for being a centre for prostitution and smuggling

and, you know, you could hire a room by the hour and this was one of those

places where dodgy deals could be done and no questions would be asked.

Then we went up the lift to some floor near the top to

meet up with two Nepalese men who

had been waiting for us.

The first thing that hit me was that one of them was wearing a shoulder holster

and the end of his gun was sticking out from under his arm.

And I must say, your stomach sort of sinks a bit.

There was a gradual dawning realisation that suddenly we were

involved in a very serious world and we were to be on best behaviour.

They had one multi -pocketed denim waistcoat which had $400 ,000 worth of

in it. And he wanted to see whether we were physically strong enough to pick up

this vest and put it on.

It weighed over four stone.

Obviously you go from being 11 stone to 15 stone suddenly.

It was just very heavy and you could feel your feet, you know. You were a bit

like Robocop when you were walking with that on because suddenly you were four

stone heavier.

We all wanted to prove ourselves to each other that we could handle it.

But you know we were all physically strong enough. We all managed to do it

we satisfied them that we would be good mules My only question

was what happens if we get cool

No

problem nothing man sent home deported one night in prison, that's it

So it seemed there wasn't any real downside in this.

One night in prison, I mean, we can all deal with that, can't we?

We had a good drink that night because we were rushing, we were buzzing from

adrenaline of agreeing to do this.

And, you know, being in the presence of some serious gangsters with guns, it is

all good stuff as far as we can tell.

It's frightening as well.

But without that fear you don't have the excitement. So it's all part and parcel

of this Progressively crazy adventure

There was a week between trying on the jacket and doing the gold run during

week There were times when I would ask myself what the hell I thought I was

doing I've still got time to pull out and why don't I just be sensible?

It came round to be a definite yes

Not so much because of the money, but more because the more I considered it,

more I believed it to be a huge adventure, and it became me wanting to

that I could do something as dangerous and as stupid as that.

I'd been ill and restricted for a long time. This became an expression of my

being better and my freedom.

This was proof.

that i was back and not only was i back i was back with balls

The plan was to arrive at the airport, check in, go through to the departure

lounge, and there, somebody would meet us and hand the gold

over to us in the toilet.

There was a lot of nerves at this point. There was tension.

We're sitting around waiting, thinking, you know...

Where is this guy? The first group of people on our plane have got on a coach

and have driven across the tarmac to the plane, and still this guy isn't here.

It's like, what's happening?

And you think, are we being watched?

Do people keep an eye out for people who look nervous?

And eventually he turned up at the very last minute.

Eric followed him into the toilet first and then we all went in one by one after

that.

I was almost forcing myself to do something which was against my nature. I

you know, just a...

A middle -class kid backpacking around, suddenly doing something totally

illegal, which was probably the first major illegal thing I'd done in my life.

The guy was standing outside a cubicle, and on the floor of the cubicle

was the denim waistcoat containing the gold.

We had to wear jackets and shirts in order to provide two layers to conceal

we were carrying beneath.

And he looked me up and down and said, yes, that looks good. I looked in the

mirror and... And there was this kind of ashen -faced, rather sort of

sweaty, wide -eyed individual staring back at me, saying, do you really think

this is a good idea?

That was the dawning realization that there was no turning back now and it was

going ahead It was just an intense

Fear primarily

Fear of the unknown and what one was letting with

oneself in for

We didn't want to stand out like a sore thumb, but there we were, the last

people getting on, delaying everyone else, delaying even the take -off of the

plane, probably.

Carrying four stone of gold is a lot easier when you're charged with

and you're therefore a lot stronger than you normally are.

I have some vague recollection of Rhett saying that he felt that he was carrying

even more than usual.

And that was really the only indication that perhaps we were carrying right up

to the maximum of what could possibly be taken by someone.

It seemed that the deal with gold smuggling was that you can fly it over

Nepal where they have no metal detectors at the airport and the customs

people in Nepal were paid off to allow you to go through without any trouble.

Then it's taken across land to India where they do have metal detectors at

airport and it's sold in India for a vastly inflated price.

What you haven't done is paid the tax for bringing it into either Nepal or

India. So that's where the arbitrage is. That's where, you know, people make

money from gold smuggling.

We get off the plane and it's hot.

It's right in the middle of the day and you're hit by this wall of heat and

obviously... We're not really appropriately dressed.

So we're kind of sweating.

When you add to the fact that we're obviously quite nervous as well, we're

sweating quite a lot.

But anyway, we go through, we queue up, and the passports are fine, we hand over

the money, and then we go through these big double doors into the customs hall.

And it is bustling and noisy and...

There are four gates, which consist of a table and somebody searching people's

luggage. And suddenly Rhett stopped and looked puzzled, and I thought, what, you

know, what's the problem here?

OK,

he's not there. The problem was he'd been told to go through gate four, but

usual guy...

who manned Gatefall wasn't there. It was a woman in a purple sari.

There

was

literally an awful, I don't know, three or four minutes. It dragged on forever,

whereby we were just sort of trying to look cool, but...

Not moving and level attracting more attention to ourselves whilst trying to

have these conversation. Well, what are we gonna do then? We can't just turn

here And eventually We

looked over to the woman in the purple sari and she could see that we were

struggling and she just sort of

I know one guy. I told you you've got a better idea.

Of course I've got a fucking better idea. It's not my idea. You don't have a

better idea than one of them. Shut the fuck up.

Rhett was first. He put his bag down.

Thank you very much.

Oswald next.

I was last.

I'd rather not have been last, but everything seemed to be going fine.

Until suddenly, on the other side of the customs hall... Stop!

There wasn't really a thought in

my head at this point.

I just sort of couldn't really take on board what was happening, but...

There was this little guy with a moustache. He grabbed Eric.

My worst fears are kind of being realised.

He gets out a metal detector.

And it goes off with a noise like a car alarm.

I had to walk towards him.

But, you know, I thought, well, what can I do?

He just pushed us both in the direction of this room to the side of the customs

hall and just, like, ashen -faced, in total shock, we

went into this room and there was just bedlam from there.

Whilst Eric and I are sitting in this room, Oz and Rhett have walked through

are on the other side, waiting for us to come through.

Better check out the monkey temple while you're here, mate. Yeah, right there.

Do they have help at the store?

No. They're not in the city, mate.

Get the fuck off me!

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Stop!

But instead of us coming out, it was...

Four or five armed policemen coming out.

As they started opening it, you know, I was feeling pretty awful at the time.

And then suddenly I thought, well, hang on.

I hope that it's just gold I've got in my vest, you know, that there isn't a

couple of packets of heroin as well.

You know, I just thought, well, how stupid have I been?

Quite remarkably stupid in retrospect.

Thankfully, though, there was no sudden appearance of any packets of white

powder.

We had never seen the gold before, obviously. We'd only felt how heavy

it was.

And we'd just seen sort of denim pockets and known that the gold was in it. So

to actually see what we were eventually smuggling was quite a revelation.

And it was quite a revelation to the customs officials who were gathering

around.

We later discovered it was the largest seizure of gold ever in the history of

gold smuggling in Nepal.

So they were naturally rather amazed at the amount that we had had the audacity

to try and smuggle into their country.

Forms were produced which were written in Nepalese which they wanted signatures

to.

We didn't know what they said.

We didn't have any legal representation.

We didn't have anything.

But, you know, with people shouting angrily in your face

and thrusting a pen at you, you...

Don't want to cause unnecessary trouble, but you don't want to sign your life

away.

In the end, we signed them, because we didn't want to be seen to be causing

trouble.

Then what happened, and this was the only time I must have come close to...

I suppose emotionally, this was a difficult, very difficult moment.

I've never been in handcuffs before.

And they were big, rusty, very third -world handcuffs.

That was just a powerful, symbolic act of putting on handcuffs.

That's when you truly lose your freedom.

Four of us were put into a jeep, and I think there were four armed guards with

us.

We didn't know whether we were being sort of kidnapped or anything like that.

And we were just driven up into the night.

It was dark, and we couldn't see the country that we'd landed in.

We eventually pulled up outside this sort of wall.

We were pushed through this hole in the wall, all four of us, and we

were in prison.

We realised we were in prison and it was sort

of dark and there were just rows of men sleeping all over the place.

We thought that...

We were being put in a sort of holding place prior to being thrown out of the

country the next day.

That's what we clung on to.

Strangely, I slept incredibly well.

It was an exhausting experience the whole day, and by the time we got there,

shut my eyes, and I did manage to sleep and woke up the next day.

You know, surrounded by this hubbub of being in the middle of a prison.

I just could not believe I was there.

I sort of woke up and thought, well, what's going on here?

Oh, right, yeah, I was arrested last night for gold smuggling.

I've been flung in prison.

Here I am.

There was a call from the front gate and...

We had to get back into a jeep with some more soldiers in, and we were driven

back to the airport.

And we thought, excellent.

Right.

It was an interesting little stay in prison.

They seized the gold. They're happy with that. We're obviously going to be

putting the first flight out of here.

Get out of here, you idiots.

First flight home.

But when we got to the airport, We were taken to a building on the airport

grounds which had a sign outside saying Customs Court.

And it quickly transpired that anyone caught smuggling at the Nepalese

airport was tried at the Customs Court.

But then it turned out that the Customs Court was simply an office.

a rather shabby, small office with a bit of paperwork in it, and that the judge

was actually the chief of customs, who was the bloke who'd arrested us the

previous evening.

And we thought, well, this is just crazy here. You know, I was expecting, if we

were going to have to go to a court, I was expecting something that resembled a

court, somebody that resembled a judge.

We just didn't know what to do. We were just, like, alone on the other side of

the world.

being shouted at by the bloke who arrested you, who's also your judge,

like, this is not a planet or a legal system that I'm familiar with.

From where you brought it?

From where you brought it, this gold?

There were some questions about, do we know whose gold it was?

I don't know.

We just take the gold, pick it up in Hong Kong, take it to Kathmandu, and we

find out when we get here, we give it to him.

I think, satisfied that we didn't really know anything about anything, he pretty

quickly said we'd all been sentenced to four years.

Four years?

Yes. In jail in Nepal?

Yes.

Not deported?

Unless we could pay the value of the gold seized in a fine.

Since we didn't have $1 .6 million gold on us, that was looking rather unlikely,

so stunned.

Shocked and still in a state of sort of disbelief, we were taken back to the

prison to begin our sentence.

You know, just unable to really comprehend

what had happened to us in the previous 48 hours.

wondered what had gone wrong.

Why didn't this operation go smoothly like all the other ones had done?

Who was the guy who first of all apprehended Eric and then myself?

Why did that happen if everyone was paid off?

We were later to find out that, you know, there were other things afoot.

But at that time we had not a clue.

Life in prison in Kathmandu was very frightening. We didn't know whether

would be violence, whether there would be sexual violence.

It was a prison that just had everything from murderers and child molesters and

rapists, thieves, drug addicts. The whole range of criminality was there.

On the first or second day, I was introduced to the only other white guy

prison.

He looked...

simply quite extraordinary.

He looked like some sort of wizard from another century.

And he talked in riddles. He talked in total gibberish, basically.

I discovered that he had been a gold smuggler, had been in for nearly four

years, and had gone mad.

This was particularly frightening, because my greatest fear now was...

I don't know, for depression or being cut off from your friends and family.

know, you don't know where that's going to take you mentally. And it seemed to

me that here was potentially the future of me.

Just bonkers.

I composed a very difficult letter to my mother saying,

don't worry.

I've ended up in prison. It's in Nepal. I didn't tell you I was going to Nepal,

but I'm here.

And, you know, I felt stupid, selfish,

pretty wretched, really, you know.

All of the sort of bravado had drained away like dirty bathwater and was

left with a slightly scared young man.

wishing he could go back in time and reverse some decisions that had proved

be less than sensible.

After three or four days in prison, we received an American visitor who asked

speak to Rhett.

And his name was Ian, and he was somebody that Rhett had met on previous

How's it going, man?

How's it going? I'm in Nepalese prison. Pretty fucking shit.

He worked for the Nepalese gangsters, and he

brought with him food and bedding, and basically his message was, anything's

possible in Nepal, we know who to speak to,

pay a couple of people off here or there, and, you know, money talks, and

we'll get you out.

There was an enormous sense of relief and excitement and hope that, you know,

hadn't been forgotten about.

We received regular visits from Ian every week to ten days,

with more money, with more food, whatever, you know. We were constantly

promised that our release was just around the corner.

We just carried on waiting and hoping, and eventually the weeks turned into

months.

Then one day after about three months, the planned day of the visit turned up

and no one visited us.

And that was it. No one visited us after that.

One of our friends in the prison, a Nepalese guy, he was actually a silver

smuggler, he explained to us the Nepalese system.

Are you in the jail?

Are you in the jail?

Yeah. Do you want? Uh -huh. Come.

If we stay for three more months, we can't appeal. So we've got three more

months to appeal after doing three months.

If you didn't lodge an appeal against your sentence within the first three

months, then you could no longer lodge your appeal.

And three months had gone by and we'd been told by the

Nepalese gangsters to keep quiet.

And as soon as that three months was up, they dropped us.

And so we were left with no chance now of getting out.

It became very clear that we'd just been strung along from the beginning.

And we had to think of other ways how we were going to get out without spending

four years there.

Uncle Tony actually wasn't an uncle. He was something like a second cousin, but

he was always an uncle to me.

I also knew that, you know, Uncle Tony had been in the RAF and had quite a

distinguished career there, and I knew that he'd afterwards had some sort of

more shadowy role, which made him a kind of James Bond in my eyes.

He was a kind of, you know, a bit of a hero figure for me.

I received a call from the front gate and there waiting was Tony in a

big green barber, the same one he used to wear on his farm.

And it was quite an emotional moment because suddenly there was one of my

here to try and help get me and my friends out.

Tony had done his research and we knew that once a year on the king's birthday,

the king, in all his mercifulness, agrees to let out certain people on a

Tony got us writing paper and we composed a nice letter

to his highness saying, could you let us out on your birthday, please, your

highness?

We were guilty.

but we're sorry and we'd like to go home.

Tony's role was really to act as our representative on the outside.

You know, we just wanted Tony to meet as many people as possible.

We didn't know how any one contact might be able to help us, but we understood

that if you were going to get out

Writing to the king, you had to have political support on the inside.

And so Tony met up with an interesting guy called Lucas.

Lucas, it transpired, was an American who worked with the Nepalese gangsters.

In fact, he was closely involved in organising the

greasing of palms of the customs officials at the airports in Kathmandu.

But he wasn't in the country at the time when we were arrested He had been

called away by the Nepalese gangsters to Hong Kong

So whilst we were heading for Nepal

Lucas who would normally be overseeing the bribing of the customs officials is

arriving in Hong Kong Lucas pretty soon realized that we had been

set up.

They invited him over to Hong Kong so that he didn't meddle in our arrest.

Our arrest was planned from the start by the two guys that we had met

in Chungking Mansions.

They packed us to the gills with as much gold as possible and told the chief of

customs that we were going to be arriving.

And the deal was, if you inform on any gold smugglers in Nepal, you get a

quarter of the value of the gold seized.

So the more you put on your gold smugglers and the more money you get, we

up spending four years and they end up extremely wealthy men.

It felt pretty bad when we realised we were the victim of a set -up.

But it felt pretty good as well because suddenly our chances of getting out

increased, increased quite significantly.

Lucas had contacts, or so he claimed, at pretty much every level of government

right up to the Prime Minister and then beyond.

He told Tony on that first meeting that he was very interested in helping us get

out and he would do everything in his power power to get us out despite the

guys who got us in it was december the

17th and i remember the cry of english from the front gate

there was the english vice consul from the embassy she said uh

i don't know how or why but i've come here to tell you that we've been

this morning that you're going to be released on the King's birthday on

the 29th.

And... I don't know, I mean, it's just an extraordinary...

extraordinary feeling.

I then had the rather pleasant task of going back inside the prison, gathering

Oz, Eric and Rhett around and telling them that we were getting

out.

We'd been very stupid in getting in and we've been very lucky in getting out,

but we were incredibly relieved But it looked like our ordeal was coming to an

end

I went in search of adventure.

But the plan for proving oneself had gone about as dramatically wrong as it

could have gone.

I still dream.

I have regular dreams where I've tried to smuggle again and I've failed again

and I'm back in prison and I'm counting the days again.

And it's never a particularly nice dream.

I wouldn't want to experience the thrill of smuggling or attempting to smuggle

ever again.

And the series concludes next week here on 5 at the same time, 9 o 'clock.