Death in the jungle
Even in a world not lacking in barbarity, last night’s execution of eight alleged heroin traffickers on an “island of death” in Indonesia was especially grotesque.
Dressing these men in white gowns for the after life, tethering them in a jungle clearing then fixing black crosses over their hearts so the firing squad knew where to aim, was intended to send a deterrent message to would-be smugglers.
But it won’t. However globally-covered this legalised killing spree was, drug gangs will continue to sucker in mules from amongst the poor, the weak and the foolish. As a multi-million pound cocaine importer once told me: “...we’re still in big profit if only one in five gets through.”
Derrick Gregory was a Brit who didn’t. I co-produced a Channel 4 investigation into the pathetic life and times of this drifter who’d never been out of the UK until lured into becoming a courier.
Not surprisingly, he got lifted on his first mission. Malaysian police arrested him en route to Los Angeles with heroin in his boots and clothing. He was sentenced to death but his story was taken up by Andrew Drummond, a savvy ex-Fleet Street reporter freelancing in Asia.
Gregory’s only hope of a reprieve turned on proving mental incapacity. I knew Dr Colin Brewer, a London psychiatrist who sat on a committee helping medically mistreated Soviet dissidents. He agreed to fly to Malaysia to assess Gregory professionally.
Drummond managed to spirit the condemned man - and some guards - out of prison to a hospital where we filmed him undergoing a CT scan. Sure enough, images clearly showed physical brain damage dating from infancy - enough to impair judgement and explain failures in later life.
This irrefutable evidence, Dr Brewer’s expert opinion and Gregory’s confession naming everyone he knew in the drugs syndicate, would have mitigated his position in any country with a humane penal system.
But other games were being played. Derrick Gregory was as expendable to the Malaysian authorities as he had been to the criminals who promised him big bucks. I doubt he was ever competent to realise this. But having interviewed him and seen the fear in his eyes, he was all too aware of being a dead man walking.
Given the deaths and misery heroin addiction causes, I suspect social media message boards will display little sympathy for convicted smugglers being executed. But rarely, if ever, do big players get caught - only their cheaply hired hands.
In Malaysia, there were rumours of well-heeled people getting off drug charges carrying capital punishment. In Indonesia, it’s already been claimed that had corrupt officials been offered larger bribes, some of those now lying in white wooden coffins might still be alive.
Derrick Gregory was hanged in Pudu Prison, Kuala Lumpur in July 1989, clutching a photograph of Tara, the seven year old daughter he’d not seen since she was a baby.
Drug mules have since continued to criss-cross the globe, completely undeterred. And they will, regardless of how often a firing squad captain shouts “Execute! Execute!” at the stroke of midnight on some God-forsaken prison island off the coast of Java.