Lloyd Williams
Senior Associate Editor

Following is the third and final part of an interview of a drug mule who made six trips to England in a 14-month period, smuggling cocaine in her stomach.

TRIP THREE:

Lucky says that in October another supplier approached her to smuggle cocaine to England. "The argument (they gave) sounded good, so I went for them - to London. They weren't worse than the first set but they draw back the travel money they advanced you and they paid little bit - the same 3,000 pounds (for 90 pellets). This time, I shopped and spent just one week".

TRIP FOUR:

She made another trip in December, this time with her three children. She paid their airfares which amounted to $77,000. Lucky is considerate of her children. "December when I was going away I never took them to where I was swallowing the cocaine, so they never saw what I was doing." Instead, she had them taken to her at the airport. "I went through (London Heathrow Airport) easily with the children; no problems, nothing". She carried 100 pellets, but again they underpaid her, giving her only 2,000 pounds plus.

In London she sought to show her three children a good time, taking them to see the "London Iron" and Big Ben and to other attractions, but the temperature was much too cold for them despite the winter gear she had bought them.

One in particular became ill and she had to rush them home to Jamaica, paying 70 pounds more on each of the plane tickets to secure their seats. "I didn't make anything, as usual. It was just like when the police took away my 1,000 pounds and the men never claimed it back".

Back in Jamaica she bought pretty bedspreads, curtains and other items and decorations for her house for the Christmas season, and toys for her children.

TRIP FIVE:

In February, Lucky decided she would take her final run. "When I went I was in the airport - London Heathrow - sitting down for seven hours!" She got the impression that the authorities there were checking on the person who was to receive her. But she was worried more that the problem might have had to do with the passport with which the cocaine supplier in Jamaica had provided her.

Lucky explained that the supplier provided passports for cocaine-swallowing drug mules like herself as he has people who substitute the photos in passports (the old-type ones not the new machine-readable ones). "You couldn't go to England on the same book (passport) so many times", she said.

The one she had travelled on that trip had been used by other drug mules before her. She had used her own passport on her first trip, but subsequently, she used passports supplied by the people she smuggled cocaine for. Each time she arrived back in Jamaica she returned the passport.

After the seven hours at London Heathrow Airport, she was free to go. It was an hour's drive to the house where she was going and she was "very uncomfortable". After the nine- or 10-hour flight to England and the time she had spent at the airport she was lucky not to have passed out the cocaine pellets in the car as she had not taken the Imodium tablets which her supplier had given her. Imodium is a drug for treating diarrhoea and it is prescribed by a doctor. She delivered the goods "and they gave me 2,000 pounds and little bit again."

She shopped as usual and returned to Jamaica with 1,500 pounds. This time she bought a "deportee", a pre-owned Japanese car, to run it as a "robot" (illegal) taxi. However it came to grief shortly after - in of all places - a cemetery. It gave her so many problems that she had to park it after spending more than $100,000 on it to get it running again.

TRIP SIX:

In April, Lucky decided to make another cocaine run. "Rahtid, it was the worst time of my life. I was in the airport for six hours, but it was not nothing because is like is forget them forget me.

"When I come out (and went to the house of her receiver) is 54 pellets I carried because my chest was getting sick. They gave me 1,000 pounds flat. I was vexed. I sent home 700 pounds."

Lucky reckons that her suppliers/receivers had made millions of dollars from the more than one kilo of cocaine she had taken up each time on her previous trips. She said that when they "cooked" the kilo of cocaine she took to England each time "they sell it by the eighths and the ninths" to the street sellers and made millions from it. "But I am not red-eye (envious) and watch that. I take what they give me and sing low".

(Her Majesty's Customs and Excise estimates that a kilo of cocaine fetches a minimum of 62,000 pounds on the streets of London and that each kilo seized by law enforcement agents prevents 5,000 deals on the streets.)

She told of cases where drug mules were taken to hotels and after they had delivered their cocaine pellets they were left waiting for pay which they never received. And of other cases where drug mules were murdered, their bellies slashed open in disputes with their associates or when they couldn't pass out the pellets fast enough.

"I said to myself I have been lucky six times, I am not going to be lucky again. I made up my mind that I am not going back. If 'sufferation' is even taking me, I am not going back."

Besides, Lucky has other troubles. "I have a stomach problem from long time and it is getting worse. I vomit a lot of thick stuff and even if I drink piped water I feel it run down on my chest. My chest is gone, so I said 'God is showing me a sign that I am not to go back'".

Lucky was even contrite: "What I did was not right maybe in God's eyes, but I was trying to help myself. I am not craven (greedy) but I was trying to better myself because I know a lot of 'sufferation'.

"Right now nothing is going on for me but I am not going back. With all the trips I made I can see what I did with the money but I really don't have any money now. You can't get rich by carrying coke for other people." What is worse, she says, is that people who she used to get money from in her neighbourhood will no longer help her out as they believe that having gone away so many times in the last 14 months, she has money.

She is determined not to go back to England as a cocaine mule, even if she were not to swallow the cocaine but take it in, mixed with hand or body lotion, in her luggage. Properly mixed, when the bottle is squeezed, only the lotion comes out; the cocaine remains at the bottom, she said.

But she regards her last set of associates as being mean (stingy) and inconsiderate, never having given her, their faithful servant, a pair of sneakers or a pound when they dropped her off at the airport in London, in case she had to upgrade her ticket to get back to Jamaica.

In addition, the fear of going to prison in England always tormented her. Specifically, she worried about what would happen to her children and her parents if she were to go to prison for seven years. "To be away from my pickney them for three years or seven years, is stupidness - and is not working I am working?"

Lucky is critical of the double standards which she says the police apply in dealing with drugs in Jamaica. "They hold onto the mules who are carrying the drugs and I am not asking you - a tell me a tell you - they know the people who bring it into the country, they know. No little poor man can just run to Nassau or the Virgin Islands or Colombia to get coke. It's J$340,000 for a ki of coke in Jamaica now and it is hard to get."

Lucky claims that there are some big drug dons here "who own people at the airports". She maintains that some of them still send 10 drug mules on flights daily, despite installation of Ionscan drug- and weapons-detecting machines at the Norman Manley International Airport, east Kingston, and Sangster International Airport, Montego Bay, since June 1, 2002. According to Lucky, they swallow the drug in the nude.

In her opinion, anybody who becomes a drug mule "is either a dunce or a sufferer". She dismissed as foolishness, reports that people were being forced at gunpoint to become drug mules, pointing out that some people found it easy to swallow the packets, others didn't. "Every-body is taking it (swallowing cocaine) because the country is getting harder and harder and wickeder and wickeder and there is no work for you to earn a $2,000".

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