Michelle Leslie sham (or is that scam?)
The whole Michelle Leslie case just gets shonkier and shonkier every time new information comes out. According to this story, she tried to bribe her way out of trouble at the outset - offering 200 million rupiah ($A27k), her missing friend Mia is actually Siti Namira Asman, daughter of a prominent Indonesian, that her companions in the car on the night she was arrested were very well connected and some mysterious witnesses who were unable for various reasons to give evidence.
This is not to mention the odd and inconsistent demonstrations of her Islamic faith, changes in excuses why she used ecstacy.
According to a member of Leslie’s defence team, Siti Namira Asman (Mia) planted the tablets, part of a much larger stash allegedly belonging to an Indonesian judge’s son, in Leslie’s bag so that she, the ecstasy’s owner and a prominent politician’s son could walk away. Leslie and the group’s two remaining members were taken to Bali police headquarters, where the other couple, an Italian and an unidentified Asian, possibly Singaporean, were quickly able to pay their way out. That pair have since melted into thin air.
According to the Leslie source, at about midnight just over three months ago, Balinese property developer I Bayu Ada, son of South Jakarta District Court chief judge I Made Karna, had a bulging bag of ecstasy pills in his pocket when the rented silver Toyota he was driving was pulled over by police outside the huge Garuda Wisnu Kencana park. With him were Leslie, Namira and the two other unnamed tourists, as well as Anindra Ardiansyah Bakrie, the youngest son of Indonesia’s wealthy Co-ordinating Minister for the Economy, Aburizal Bakrie. Namira, a modelling friend of Leslie’s from Singapore, was not so generous. She visited the frightened young woman in her cell at Bali police headquarters shortly after her arrest and warned she would be killed if she ever revealed who was in the car, the source said. Leslie claimed during her trial that Namira told her “whatever you do, don’t say anything, don’t tell them anything and if anything happens, we’ll fix it”. This is all along the lines I speculated on in an earlier post. On top of the strange goings on with the case, now we have the media circus with the chequebooks out to get her story …. some large numbers are being bandied around for rights, up to $200k. I always find it obscene that people can cash in like this on their five minutes of fame (or infamy as the case may be). I would have thought in Leslie’s case, the best advice would be to lie low, say little and get on with her normal life.
