Lisa Marie Smith is escorted by a police officer after her arrest in 1996.
THE one good thing about being named after Elvis Presley’s daughter
and having the surname Smith is that it makes you harder to find if you
also happen to be the “world’s most wanted woman”.
That’s how Interpol extravagantly described Lisa Marie Smith after
she checked out of the “Bangkok Hilton” in 1996 and vanished for the
next 18 years.
There have been a few rumoured sightings since
then, including one yarn that she was married and living in suburban
Perth in 2001, but nothing as solid as the story that is unfolding here
in Ireland.
The Perth story, from a shifty Australian who did time
in Thai jails and claims Smith wrote to him, is now all the more
intriguing because he claimed her married name was McGuigan, which has a
distinctly Irish ring.
It’s intriguing because it is now emerging
that the wanted woman may be hiding in plain sight in Dublin, running a
trendy cafe in the capital of the easygoing country where another
Australian fugitive, “Aussie Bob” Trimbole, hid in the mid-1980s.
Lisa Marie Smith after her arrest at Bangkok International Airport in February 1996.
The Irish have little interest in extraditing accused persons
to a jurisdiction like Thailand on 18-year-old charges that would
attract little jail time in any Western country but could mean a life
sentence — or a death sentence — in much of Asia.
It is inevitable
the poor little rich kid will turn up one day. The wonder is that it
hasn’t happened yet. She was barely out of her teens when she was
arrested in Thailand with a middling amount of (probably) someone else’s
drugs in early 1996. She’s now 38.
We’re talking about Lisa Marie
Smith the accused drug mule, not another Lisa Marie Smith who happened
to be born the same day in 1975 and who British police hauled in for
fingerprinting a long while after her namesake went on the lam.
Not
only was that Lisa Marie born the same day but she is also the same
height (164cm) and weight (then around 60kg, which might have altered a
little).
No wonder the police were confused. There are roughly 100
other Lisa Marie Smiths in the UK alone, all born in the era when Elvis
was still king. But only one of them is wanted by Interpol.
Lisa Marie Smith leaves Bangkok criminal court after being granted bail.
The “world’s most wanted woman” was in fact raised an only
child in Melbourne and Tasmania before moving to England as a teenager
with her mother Robyn and British-born father Terry Smith, a rising
insurance executive who chased promotions around the world.
For young Lisa Marie, it was a nomadic life that led to her having dual citizenship and dual passports.
In
England she became, some say, just another spoiled teenager, doing a
hospitality course, partying hard and waitressing in a dodgy Hong Kong
bar after Terry Smith took a big job in the former colony in 1994,
running National Mutual Life’s Asian business. While her father broke
records in the insurance business, Lisa Marie broke the rules at Banana
Joe’s bar and was sacked for smoking marijuana.
Terry Smith, the
corporate gunslinger turned the insurance company around, made
multi-millions for it and was handsomely paid. All those skills came in
useful in February 1996 after Lisa Marie was grabbed at Bangkok Airport
as she was about to board a flight to Japan with four kilograms of
“opium resin” and 565 amphetamine tablets in a false-bottomed bag.
The
frightened 20-year-old told Thai police (who had been tipped off) that
she’d been conned into taking the bag as a favour for “Hassan”, a smooth
Pakistani scammer who preyed on naive Western girls like her,
holidaying in Bangkok’s freewheeling backpacker district.
Lisa
Marie the trembling victim became Lisa Marie the cool fugitive after
Terry Smith turned his formidable talents to the task of getting bail
for her.
Despite the fact accused drug dealers in Thai jails
usually don’t get bail, the rich man’s daughter did after less than five
months in Bangkok’s notorious women’s prison.
One thing that made
bail even conceivable was that the charges were reportedly (and
mysteriously) downgraded from possessing opium resin to hashish.
Then
an understanding magistrate set bail at $74,000, which Terry Smith
promptly paid, and Lisa Marie apparently left Thailand on her Australian
passport while Thai police were left holding her British one. Easy if
you know how — or who.
By the time Thailand got around to alerting
Interpol three months later, the bail jumper had been to Greece and
taken the risk of picking up a new British passport at the embassy in
Athens by filling in forms swearing the old one had been lost or stolen.
After a holiday on the Greek island of Santorini, reportedly to celebrate her 21st birthday, she disappeared.
That
is, maybe, until now - as it has emerged she could have been tracked
down to a fashionable cafe she reputedly runs with a boyfriend.
The
smart money says that having got hold of a British passport, Lisa Marie
would have been able to move around the European Union with little
risk.
Whether she was able to obtain another legal passport when
the 10-year time limit elapsed eight years ago is hard to know, but she
doesn’t seem to have been troubled by officialdom.
Sources say her driver’s licence has both her correct name and date of birth.
The old crime saying goes “Money talks and bull---- walks”.
In
this case it appears money talked and Lisa Marie Smith walked. And she
didn’t even have to break into a sweat. That might have changed these
last few days.
heraldsun.com.au 7 July 2014
Another illustration of how corrupt the authorities really are.
It's all about bribery and how much one can afford.
It's not really that different from Australia.
