Fear and Loathing on the love boat

Feet shackled, dishevelled in his yellow prison uniform, Tony Wilkinson gazed around the courtroom, distracted and unfocused. Similarly cuffed and wearing a blue Alameda County Jail prison suit, Kirsty Harris was more direct. She spoke so softly the court transcriber asked her to speak up. "I want to apologise to the court," Harris said. "I have embarrassed my friends and my family - and my country."

Wilkinson, a former Ponsonby bar owner, is 43. He faces four years and two months in a Los Angeles federal jail, before being deported, never to return to the United States.

Harris, his former girlfriend from Te Puke, spent her 26th birthday in prison awaiting a guilty plea and sentencing. She was this week sentenced to three years and one month in jail, before she too is deported.

The two had been arrested aboard a cruise liner docked for 36 hours in San Francisco, after Homeland Security officials found 5.8kg of cocaine in their cabin - Class A drugs they were trying to smuggle from South America to Auckland.

For Wilkinson, it was the grim nadir of a life that had spiralled downwards since he suffered serious injuries in a skydiving accident nine years ago. For Harris, it was a defining tragedy at the start of her adult life.

As she stood in a courtroom on the 19th floor of the looming Philip Burton Federal Building in downtown San Francisco, she was tearful. "I understand ..." Harris trailed off. She steadied herself to continue. "I understand the seriousness and, although I am greatly afraid of the punishment, I am ready to deal with the consequences of my actions."

Those actions, police say, could have inundated the Auckland criminal economy with cocaine. According to US prosecutors, "had the cocaine reached New Zealand, it could have done real harm". Police Detective Senior Sergeant Chris Cahill, of New Zealand's Organised Financial Crime Agency, says 5.8kg is "a significant amount".

Police have revealed increasing numbers of cocaine seizures at New Zealand's ports and airports. Only six weeks ago, Customs officers found 5.5kg in a refrigeration unit on the container ship Cap Manuel at the Port of Napier, though that stash is thought to have been bound for Asia.

Cahill says cocaine busts have been steadily rising in New Zealand since late 2009, as professionals with disposable incomes embrace the drug. "It just goes to show that there is the market for that amount in New Zealand."

Wilkinson was in just the sort of high socio-economic demographic that is being seduced by cocaine.

He grew up the son of Laughton and Judith Wilkinson, prominent business people in the beachfront town of Mangawhai. Laughton "Wilky" Wilkinson owned hotels and was a long-termmember of the local golf club. Wilkinson had a comfortable upbringing.

Fifteen years ago, as the young co-owner of the trendy Garage and Chill bars in Ponsonby, Wilkinson seemed to have the world at his feet. His bars were popular destinations, known for their good food, fancy cocktails and live DJs at the weekends. But restaurants and bars can be transient business, and his descent into drug-trafficking can be traced back to another more sudden and horrific fall.

In 2000, Wilkinson embarked on a new life as a skydiving instructor with Parakai Skydive.
But on January 15, 2003, the experienced tandem jumpmaster misjudged his freefall. He hit the dirt at Parakai, north of Auckland, at upwards of 50km/h, breaking his neck, pelvis and legs.

"It was devastating for us," says Howard Jamison, who was his boss. "I
was the pilot-it was not a nice feeling when you are coming in to land and you see people standing around and then find out it's Tony rolled up in a heap. He never came back to commercial skydiving.

"He was in hospital for two years. It changed the way he looked at life. It meant that he couldn't do what he dreamt of doing."

A Civil Aviation investigation found that the crash was due to Wilkinson's error, misjudging his landing. He has walked with a limp ever since.

He got a new ground-based job with New Zealand Aerosports, but he never fully recovered. Wilkinson fathered a baby with a well-known Auckland designer, but the two had split up by the time the little girl was born. Through her lawyer, the designer said they had been in a relationship for 18 months. Wilkinson had not had any contact with his daughter for more than six years.

In January 2005, his father died of an asthma attack at home in Mangawhai.

Wilkinson had been friends with Craig Matheson, a recovering drug addict who had been mentored by Laughton Wilkinson. Matheson cleaned up and is now a top residential real estate agent with Barfoot & Thompson.

Matheson remained close to the family. He says it was unfortunate that, with Laughton's death, he was not there to support his son through his recovery from the accident. "After the accident something changed,"Matheson says."How can it not?"

Mired in debt, Wilkinson became estranged from his family and lost touch with his former partner and their baby daughter.

He was soon abusing drugs and alcohol and, in Auckland, he began a relationship with Harris, a country girl from the Bay of Plenty who was not long out of Pongakawa High School. The couple travelled around New Zealand in a camper van a few years ago, but were often in financial difficulty.

Matheson says he met Harris about six times. "She was not my cup of tea," he says. "Sometimes you just get a feeling about someone. She seemed really highly strung, really out there."

About four years ago, Wilkinson and Harris took a campervan trip to Ashburton to see Jamison, Wilkinson's former boss.

Jamison had his own problems: he had been convicted of insurance fraud after claiming to have crashed his Cessna into the sea off Canterbury and making headlines with his miracle survival tale. After the plane was found undamaged in a freight container six months later, Jamison was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment and ordered to repay $258,250 to the insurance company.

He and Wilkinson, two skydivers, shared acommonfactor in their downfalls. "You do have to be an adrenalin junkie," Jamison muses. "Once you have a taste of adrenalin, you tend to want more of it."

By last year Wilkinson was heavily in debt and, according to his US lawyer Mary McNamara, he was desperate.

His old family home on Eveline St in Mangawhai, which he is listed as owning jointly with George FM founder Jef Kay, was heavily mortgaged and in need of repairs. He had borrowed money, listing an old blue Isuzu Bighorn4x4 as collateral, plus motorbikes, boats, household furniture, computers, TVs, whiteware, power tools - even clothing, cosmetics and, bizarrely, surveillance equipment.

In May last year, Wilkinson bought a quarter-share in a Colombian bar, Le Balcon De La Salsa in the resort town of Cartagena, on some of the world's most notorious drug trafficking routes. He had promised to staff it with Kiwis. His Colombian business partner, Luis Alberto Rodgers Barrios, says he is disappointed to lose Wilkinson's involvement.

"I wanted to take this project forward," he says, in an email from Colombia."
I thought bringing in a professional bartender would give the club more prestige - he loved the place and I gave him the opportunity to invest something in the club. I needed some money to improve a little plant he became interested in it."

Wilkinson had visited Cartagena alone, Barrios says, and became enamoured with the town. He met a local woman who spent time with him and showed him around the city. "Things were going well," he says.

According to court documents, Wilkinson developed a "hair-brained scheme" with a Colombian bar and nightclub owner, a friend from his bar-owning days. He would book on to a cruise ship and rendezvous at a nearby South American port. He and Harris would take cocaine back to New Zealand and keep a share of the profits.

Barrios says he knows nothing of that plan. "Whether Tony had help here in Colombia, in truth, I cannot say. I never saw anything like that." Whoever that associate was, whatever his involvement, that drug supplier would have been laughing all the way to the money launderer. The deal Wilkinson struck with his Colombian supplier was completely amateurish.

The US prosecutors described Wilkinson and Harris as drug addicts who tried to solve their financial problems by"muling" cocaine to New Zealand. The Colombian contact would rendezvous with the ship at a port of call near Colombia, pass Wilkinson and Harris several kilograms of cocaine and Wilkinson and Harris would "body-carry" the cocaine on to the ship and to New Zealand.

"For their trouble, Wilkinson and Harris would keep some of the profits from the sale of the cocaine and send the rest back to Colombia," a sentencing memorandum says. "From the Colombian contact's perspective, the scheme had the attractive feature of allowing Wilkinson and Harris to assume virtually all of the risk while he sat comfortably in Colombia waiting for his money."

On January 4 this year, Wilkinson and Harris boarded the P&O luxury liner Aurora at Southampton, England.They had bought tickets from Southampton to Auckland, travelling west through the Panama Canal.While it is not known how much they paid, these tickets generally sell for £3719 ($7550) each.

From Southampton, the ship stopped in Madeira, Portugal and St Lucia. On January 16, the ship stopped in Curacao, a small island off Venezuela. There, Wilkinson and Harris admit, they disembarked and met a contact who provided them with nearly 6kg of cocaine. They smuggled it back on to the Aurora stuffed in their clothes, and hid it in a suitcase in their cabin.

Oddly, they were not the only drug smugglers on board. In what the US Attorney describes as a coincidence, fellow tourist Ahmed Rachid, a 27-year old Australian, allegedly picked up to 7.9kg of cocaine in Curacao to take with him to Sydney. And another passenger, 59-year-old Briton Ronald Fletcher, was allegedly carrying an extraordinary 30kg. This string of "coincidences" is made all the more incredible, because authorities say these were the first big drug busts on an international cruise liner in more than 15 years.

Prosecution and defence documents detail a passage heightened with melodrama: a love triangle, a public altercation, and drugged and disorderly behaviour.

Between Curacao and San Francisco, Wilkinson and Harris had a fallingout after indulging heavily in the cocaine that was supposed to be delivered to New Zealand. As the prosecutors said: "A serious drug dealer would never snort his supply before he could get it to market."

Still smarting from her row with her boyfriend, Harris met Rachid, the Australian, who had recently broken up with his long-term girlfriend and had booked a ticket on the Aurora to get away from home. In the words of the prosecutors, Harris "sought his affections", unbeknownst to Wilkinson.

A few days after the romantic encounter between the young Kiwi and Australian, they ran into each other at one of the ship's bars. Both had been drinking and they got into a loud argument, which escalated into a physical fight. Bar staff broke it up. Already, Harris had repeatedly fallen foul of ship staff for "drug and alcohol-addled behaviour".

Really, the three Antipodeans could barely have been any more obvious, young and drunk and loud and high -on a sedate cruise otherwise populated by quiet, English pensioners.

According to defence attorney Mary McNamara: "They stuck out like sore thumbs in the sea of white-haired seniors, whose pastimes tended more towards bird-watching and cribbage." The ship docked at 6.30am on January 25, at Pier 35 on San Francisco's waterfront, a short walk from the new America's Cup village.

Pier 35 looks out on the infamous Alcatraz, the island once home to drug dealers and gangsters like "Scarface" Al Capone and"Machine Gun" Kelly.

But Wilkinson and Harris had no plans to join their fellow tourists boarding the sightseeing ferry to the prison island. As the liner docked and port staff began to ready the orderly procession of cruise passengers through customs, Wilkinson and Harris were in their cabin consuming lines of cocaine. They planned to hole up in their room for the duration of the 36-hour stopover in San Francisco.

Rachid proceeded through passport inspection but his answers tripped the suspicions of Border Patrol Officer Debbie Le. She recommended the search of Rachid's cabin, which authorities say led to the discovery of his cocaine stash.

Aurora security officers were on hand at the time of this find and reported the link between Rachid and Harris to the authorities-prompting a search of the two New Zealanders' cabin. On knocking on the door, Customs officers discovered Wilkinson in his room holding a stone covered with white powder cut into lines.

He tried to block their entry while trying to flush the powder down his sink. In the ensuing sweep of the cabin, the briefcase of cocaine under their bed was discovered.

The US Attorney's office and Rachid's defence counsel Brian Newman insist the two cases are unrelated. Rachid has not entered a guilty plea, and Newman says they are still exploring the options open to them.

But all three alleged drug smugglers were booked and processed by police and remanded in nearby Alameda County jail until this week, when Wilkinson and Harris changed their pleas to guilty and were sentenced to federal jail.

After the busts, the Aurora was a marked ship. US Customs and Border Protection officer Gary Horne told American TV: "It has been several years since we have had any type of seizure on a cruise ship vessel, so this is a little unusual."

San Francisco longshoreman Mike Villeggiante remembers security as being tighter than anything he had previously encountered at the port, where he has worked for years. To his memory, the last drug find was on a South American cargo ship that had cocaine affixed to its hull 15 years ago.

A customer on British cruise review site Cruise Critic noted that Aurora passengers experienced excruciating security delays. Some stops had to be abandoned completely when security facilities were deemed below par.

One elderly couple from Suffolk, England, said passengers had been banned from accessing the internet or telephones on board, as a security measure. "Passengers are not happy at all as they are being cut off with the outside world," their son said.

In Auckland, the NZ Customs Service got out the drug detector dogs, the beagles that usually operate at Auckland International Airport. They checked disembarking passengers and searching selected cabins onboard the liner. They found nothing.
Nonetheless, a few days later in Sydney, a third Aurora passenger was arrested. Ronald Fletcher, 59, was searched while disembarking.

He was allegedly carrying 30kg of cocaine, hidden inside a wetsuit he was wearing underneath his clothes. The cocaine is alleged to have been shipped through Auckland and the Bay of Islands before the cruise ship crossed the Tasman.

Fletcher was in the Sydney Central Local court last month and entered no plea to a drug-smuggling charge.

"That drug bust sure put the cat among the pigeons," said a New South Wales passenger, posting online. "In Sydney the Customs people were everywhere. Our travel companions had their stateroom searched even though they had only just boarded. When we got to Brisbane they were all over the ship and the port, and everyone lined up for the dog to sniff. It took a long time to get off the ship."

But Wilkinson and Harris saw none of this. They had no friends or family in court this week. Wilkinson's mother Judy, at home in Nelson yesterday, declined to comment on her son's conviction and sentence - though family friend Matheson said she would be "devastated".

The pair were called separately for sentencing, the fourth case of five on the docket on Friday morning, New Zealand time.

First Wilkinson, seemingly so distracted that Judge Jeffrey White admonished him. "I think for something with this serious an impact on your future you could pay attention to the court," the judge clucked.

A few minutes later, Harris was called. She was pale and her jail clothes hung loosely. The judge emphasised the reckless stupidity of the crime, but seemed moved by her remorse. "I don't like having to do this to you," he said. "I hope you've learned your lesson. You've got the rest of your life ahead of you."

When they complete their jail sentences, they will be deported and will never be allowed to return to the US. Judge White may have sympathised with Harris' remorse but he was unmoved about the severity of the sentence.

"The punishment is fitting," the judge said, "given the damage that cocaine causes."