1 My name is Sharon Armstrong. I was locked up in a foreign prison for two years and six months for being a drug mule. I was caught trying to traffic over a million dollars' worth of cocaine out of Argentina. This is my story. Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2017 SPANISH ACCENT: It's gonna be all right. Just trust me. When I got to the airport, I checked in and had no problems. Suddenly, my name was called out. (SPEAKS SPANISH) They took me over to the suitcase and said to me, 'Is this your suitcase?' (SPEAKS SPANISH) I said, 'Yes, here's my tag. This is my suitcase.' They then said, 'We've identified something is in the bottom of the suitcase,' to which I responded and said, 'Yes, I know there is. There's some documents in the bottom.' I remember thinking, 'They're going to feel very sorry for themselves soon, when they lift that bottom up 'and they see that there are documents in there. 'I'll have missed my flight by an hour, so they will need to get me on the next plane to London.' The next thing I remember was seeing them lift up the lining and I thought, 'Hmm. That's not really what I expected to see.' I don't know what that is! (SPEAKS SPANISH) I don't know what that is. Is this the absolute worst nightmare? Is this drugs? Oh, yeah. I mean, I almost, you know, oh, I dunno. It was physical. It was emotional. It was,... uh... (SIGHS) Yeah. Totally overwhelming. Before all of this, I had never been in any trouble. I have had a great career. I spent eight years working within the Department of Corrections. I spent from 2000 working for the Maori Language Commission. By the time I left, I was working in senior management. At that time, my grandson was 8, and I realised that I wanted to be around him over the next 10 years or so. And so it seemed that all the roads were pointing me to a move from New Zealand to Brisbane. I was living with my sister. I was surrounded by my whanau. I was actively looking for work; it wasn't overly forthcoming. She was applying for jobs all over the place and wouldn't even get answers back from them. To come from such a, you know, big working history back in New Zealand to not being able to find a job even in a bakery here was just heartbreaking for her. Mum's cousin thought it would pick Mum up a bit to sign her up for an internet dating site, thought it would be a little bit funny, I guess. Yeah, so she signed her up for that. I wouldn't have set myself up on a dating site. It was something that had never held any interest for me. I think some were just after a bit of dirty talk. If someone actually really started to get down to 'I want to meet you', I thought, 'Hmm, I don't think I want to meet you.' We looked at a couple of the profiles and, you know, thought it was a little bit hilarious. (TYPES ON LAPTOP) I decided to de-register myself but was told that my profile would remain for a further three days. It was in that three days that I was contacted by Frank Linus. He told me he was 42. He was living about 45 minutes away from where I was living in Brisbane. He told me he was a civil engineer. I definitely thought, 'Oh cool. Yay` Yay for her.' I didn't really think much of it, to start with. Nothing wrong with talking to someone online. Initial contact was via email. That quickly progressed to a phone call. We arranged to meet on a Sunday morning, about a week and a half after we'd first started talking. He was going to come to my house; he had the address. Like, they were supposed to meet a few times. And then they` he always came up with an excuse or it fell through. That morning I received a phone call from him to do with his civil engineering work. Uh, they had contacted` contacted him that very morning, and they were requiring him to fly urgently to Sydney for a meeting. OK, yeah. He said that he would be flying down, basically, as we spoke and that that would, of course, mean that we couldn't meet. OK. Next day, he rang me to tell me that he'd been successful. They were offering him the contract. It was going to be, uh, work in London, and they required him to fly out of Sydney immediately. (CELL PHONE CHIMES) Throughout all of this, he had a very loving, caring way about him. (OMINOUS MUSIC) (CELL PHONE CHIMES) It became sexual towards the` maybe after about three months. Um, and when I say that, in terms of the texts that he would send, the things we'd talk about on the phone. (DOOR CLOSES) So, Mum was on her phone all the time and was, yeah, quite secretive about what she was doing on her phone. After four` four and a half months of communicating on a daily basis with this man, I was head over heels in love with him. I guess I had a gut feeling that this wasn't right and something was wrong about him. Um, but, yeah, Mum kept wanting to talk to him. So then in March 2011, Frank started to talk about me travelling to London to meet up with him. It was around the time of my birthday. He told me that he had seen a wedding dress he wished to buy me in a window of a shop in London. I found myself being excited by the fact that this man had declared that he wanted to marry me. And I said, 'You know, there's` This isn't right. I don't think he's real. 'I think you should stop talking to him.' Then he brought up the subject again, or the possibility of me travelling to London via somewhere in South America, potentially ` or Spain ` uh, to pick up his contract for him. All of my travel arrangements were made probably a week before I left. I was introduced via email to a woman called Esperanza Gomez, uh, whom I'd been told was, like, the secretary or the PA to the big boss of this corporation that was offering the contract. Esperanza organised my travel. Mum literally didn't tell us until the night before. She said that she was going over to Argentina. She was eventually going to London, but she had to stop off in Argentina to pick up some documents for Frank. I said to her, 'Mum, it could be anything. It could be drugs, you know. 'How do you know they're even real?' Well, I was angry, and I couldn't believe that she was doing this, but, I'm guessing, there was nothing I could do to stop it, seeing as she was flying out first thing in the morning. On Wednesday the 6th of April 2011, I arrived at Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires. I caught a taxi as I'd been instructed to do. I'd been told to pick up another cell phone. Checked into my room. Thought, 'Well, it's definitely not five-star, but it's OK.' By this stage, I realised I was a bit out of my depth in terms of nobody being able to speak English; not knowing the location that I was actually staying in. I saw, I guess, some sort of shady-looking people. I was probably a bit frightened to venture too far. Hello. Despite being told initially that I was only going to be there for one, maybe two days at the most, the time seemed to be extended. There seemed to be one reason after another as to why the documents weren't ready. I got a few text messages from her in Buenos Aires. Um, I didn't hear anything from her for days and, yeah, was really worried about her. While I was waiting, Esperanza made contact and advised me of some alternative travel plans. I wasn't happy about it at all and in fact phoned Frank and said, you know, 'I'm now being told that I have to go via Switzerland and then on down to Spain.' To which he would respond and say, 'I totally agree with ya, honey. Leave it with me. 'I'll talk to Esperanza. You just get on that plane and you come to me in London. 'I'll take the documents off you. I'll go to Spain on the next flight. 'Return immediately. I've signed it, and be back within 24 hours.' So, on my sixth day, I received a phone call from a person who told me his name was Miegel. He advised me that a woman would come to the hotel to drop off the suitcase and that the documents would be inside that suitcase and that I was to repack all of my clothes into that suitcase and leave the suitcase that I had taken to Argentina behind. The woman did turn up at the hotel. However, she asked me to walk with her for a little bit. We went maybe four or five blocks away. She asked me to just wait. She said, 'I'm just going to go and pick up the suitcase.' She came back with a big metal suitcase. She flagged down the taxi. Taxi driver dropped me off. I carried the suitcase upstairs to my room, and the first thing I did when I got in there was to open it and couldn't see any papers inside. So with that confusion, I did what I'd been doing, and that was to phone Frank. And he goes, 'Oh, that's very strange.' He said, 'Look, ring Esperanza and have a talk with her and ask her where they are.' So I got in touch with Esperanza and she said, 'Oh, they've been hidden in the lining of the suitcase.' She proceeded to tell me that this was a multi-million dollar contract, that there were lots of people that were aspiring to have won this contract. There were bad people in Argentina; it was more for my safety that no one would cotton on to the fact that I was involved with this contract. I remember asking questions like, 'Well, you know, what about when I get to the airport and customs say, '"Oh, we think there's something hidden in your bag."' Esperanza's saying to me, 'Well, tell them, yes, 'there is. Tell them that you've got very important documents concealed in the bottom of your suitcase.' She said, 'If they ask to have a look, tell them they're welcome to pull the bottom up and have a look.' So I starting thinking, 'Well, would they be telling me all of this?' Still a little bit concerned, ran it past Frank again. He said to me, 'Look, honey, if you're really concerned,' he said, 'lift up the lining,' he said, 'and have a look. 'I don't mind if you read the contract.' He said, 'Have a look,' he said, 'to reassure yourself.' I would have had to have either got some scissors or something and cut into the material, or the lining, of the bottom of the suitcase to actually check what was in there. But I kept coming back to the fact that if it wasn't truly documents in there, then why would he be offering to then take them, once I got to London, on to Spain? Mum called me the night she had to leave Buenos Aires. Um, and she didn't sound right. She sounded quite frightened or` just something wasn't right. And I just kept saying... She kept saying to me that she loved me and she had to go` she had to go, and I was crying on the phone saying, 'Please don't leave. Please don't leave. 'There's something wrong. You need to not go.' And she just kept saying that she had to go and that she loved me, and she ended up hanging up. I'll probably drop Libby home after dance. I'll be home a little bit after 10, not too late. Yeah, all good, love. # Na, na, na, na. PHONE CHIMES Hey, the others wanna hang out. Um... GIRLS LAUGH ALL SING: # It's time to cut and run. This time I'm really done. # GIRL SQUEALS Oh my God! SHOUTS: Yeah! TECHNO MUSIC PLAYS, GIRLS CHATTER HORN BLARES, GIRLS SHRIEK, LAUGH (SIGHS) 1 BEL: On April 13, Sharon checked in at Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A security scan revealed cocaine weighing over 5kg concealed in a false bottom of her suitcase. Sharon was arrested. I remember feeling physically sick, thinking that I actually am going to vomit. I remember... crying out. I don't know whether it was screaming. (SPEAKS SPANISH) No! No! I remember going, 'No! No! No! No! No!' They offered to give me some form of sedation ` something that would help to calm me down. I refused because I was thinking at the time, 'I need to know exactly what's going on around me.' I realised then that whatever was going to happen from here on in was pretty serious. BEL: The street value was NZ$1.25 million, and at that time Argentina was seen as a very soft location for drug cartels and anyone arrested could face up to 16 years in prison. At around 3 or 4, we finally pull up outside prison number 28. The stench within the prison was incredibly overwhelming. I remember looking up at the walls around me and seeing cockroaches and thinking, 'Oh my God. You know, 'wh-wh` what's going to happen?' (CELL DOOR SLAMS SHUT) Three, I assumed were, lawyers came in. One of those three, uh, was a young woman called Bel. When I first saw Sharon, I could see that she was not the typical drug mule. Sharon was a middle-aged woman. She was also very well educated, and, yeah, New Zealand was not a very common country to see. I was very open and honest that I had no idea that there was cocaine concealed in that suitcase. After Sharon met with the judge and she had her first interview, I saw her very, very devastated and desperate to call her family in New Zealand and Australia. So I got permission to take her to make the first call. Hello, sis? Oh my God. I did say to Bel, 'Look, I need to phone my sister. I can't phone my daughter, she` My daughter needs 'to be with my sister when she finds out,' so I phone my sister. Um, there were tears. Her response was something along the lines, 'Thank God for that. We had you dead and buried.' Even if it was prison, it was better, you know. At least Mum was still alive. My auntie had even contacted Interpol, and we found out she didn't even make the plane in Argentina. That was my birthday. I spent all day in the cell not knowing whether I was going back to court, whether I was staying in this prison, what was happening. There was a toilet at one end that was essentially just a hole in the ground. I had been scheduled to have a hip replacement, so squatting didn't come easy. So, at some point on the Friday evening of my birthday, I was strip-searched. I was told to bend over. I was feeling so disgusted in myself in terms of having had no shower, same clothes, same underwear that I'd been in for three days. I'm thinking, 'Well, I'm glad I haven't got your job.' There was a woman there who did speak some English. Oh, I don't know yet. The first questions, of course, were what was my name and how old was I, to which I responded, 'Well, actually, I'm 54 today.' And then to add to that whole feeling of everything being so surreal, these women then sang 'Happy Birthday' to me in Spanish. (SINGING IN SPANISH) While there was still a tiny thread of hope that maybe Frank wasn't involved in all of this, and that maybe he was going to come to my rescue and that he had been set-up just as I had been set-up. I` As each day went by, I thought, 'No, because surely he would be able to find me if he wasn't involved.' But I had loved him and trusted him and shared things with him, like I've probably never ever shared with anybody else ever before. That frightened me because I thought, 'If this is a drug cartel, I don't know how far they can reach. 'I don't know whether pressure will be put on my family to shut me up.' So the betrayal, I think, that I felt was not Frank's betrayal of me, but was my betrayal of my whanau. Sharon, she was right to be worried. When she was arrested, I think that she was more in danger than before. Actually, the drug cartels, they want to make sure, um, that drug mules are not declaring against them, and then they can't be, um, caught. At this stage, I'm hearing that the maximum penalty is 16 years. I'm thinking, 'As far as I know, there's no exchange with New Zealand,' so I'm adding it up in my head, and I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, I could be here till I'm 70.' 1 Although I'd only been in prison for less than a month, it felt like it was much longer. I didn't know when I would be going to court. I didn't know what the process was ahead of me. I didn't understand the language. It was all foreign to me. Argentinian prisons are quite different from New Zealand prisons. We see there are some very, very bad and poor conditions. The embassy had been in contact with me; they'd phoned me. My family had deposited some money into their account, so they were able to buy me some necessities, uh, like a blanket. (PHONE RINGS) We had access to a telephone. However, once the media started to take an interest, they started phoning directly into the pavilion, which for me then meant that they were taking calls that, uh, I was hoping to save for my family. The media was saying horrible things, like she was a drug mule, and people were commenting, like, 'They should lock her up forever,' and, you know, there was some horrible headlines. I was surprised at how nasty people could be with their comments about her. You know, people are so quick to judge. They have no idea. We were running around crazy trying to get the funds together to get over to Argentina to see her. So to pay for all the costs, we put some money in ourselves, and a lot of our family helped out, and we had some donations from some strangers and friends and` So that was just amazing. To be greeting each other within a prison in Argentina, uh, was... (SIGHS) something I guess none of us had ever, ever thought would ever happen. However, to actually be able to physically touch them, to hug them, to talk to them ` it was starting to get cold by then, you know; we'd huddle under blankets ` to have that time was just amazing. It was horrible seeing her, but, you know, it was also a bit of a relief to actually see her alive and be able to touch her and know that she was OK as you can be in an Argentinian prison. I knew in the early days that if I stayed strong, my whanau would stay strong and that together we would get through this. We had a patio off our pavilion that wasn't very big. I would walk around that. I started off` Because I had problems with my hip, I started off doing 15 minutes at a time. I built that up probably over a month or so to an hour. So I would walk around and around and around in this yard. Losing the weight became quite a positive focus for me. I was probably the fittest and healthiest I had been for a number of years. Some of the hardest parts when I was locked up were missing out on tangi that were happening back at home. The driver for me to move to Brisbane before all of this happened was to have some quality time with my grandson growing up. But I became very good at not letting myself dwell on that, because I knew that if I started going down that pathway, I would have started to climb into that deep, dark hole, and I had promised that I would avoid that at all costs. The times that I was most scared were when I was away from the prison; when I would be bundled up early in the morning, put on a bus having to go into town to make some sort of court appearance or to meet with the lawyers. The full hearing against, uh, Sharon took place on 15 February 2012 before three judges. My translator, she had been sitting beside me, nudging me, saying, 'You're going home, Sharon. 'You're going home, Sharon. I've never seen anything like this. You're going to go home.' When the judges delivered the verdict later that evening, I think everybody in the courtroom was more surprised than I was. VOICEOVER: 'You, Sharon Mae Armstrong, are condemned to a punishment of four years and 10 months of imprisonment.' My whanau who were there, the Embassy, my lawyers, they immediately stood up, saying, 'Don't worry about this, Sharon. We'll appeal.' I think I knew in my heart that it just wasn't going to happen. To have acquitted me would have opened up a floodgate of other drug traffickers coming through, who would have claimed that they too had been victims of scams, so my rational, logical mind does understand why that's the verdict that they handed down. I had time over the next few hours to think, 'My God. Everything that my whanau and my friends had warned me about had become a reality.' 1 (SPEAKING SPANISH) BEL: The day that Sharon was arrested, the telephone start ringing. I picked up the phone, and this person was Frank Linus. He wanted to check if she, uh, was arrested or not. Of course, it was a big, big loss for the drug cartel. I think it's one hell of a way to get over someone. You know, I think that that happened for me almost immediately when I realised that I had compromised my whanau for the sake of someone whom I thought I was in love with. Romance scams in particular are fascinating because of just` the sheer` the growth in numbers that we're seeing. They're, you know, email harvesting. They're doing all sorts of things. And it's that ability through the social media mechanism to target, uh, people that could, uh, be preyed upon. There's two main ingredients that you need. The first is a vulnerable victim, and the second is the application of sophisticated psychological techniques. Sharon's case is textbook. ARIANA: I could definitely see why Mum was sucked in. She was in such a horrible place. She was vulnerable. She was feeling useless. The emails that Frank wrote were perfect. They were exactly what she needed to hear. PETER: In the early stages of Sharon's involvement, you see that, uh, they are deliberately creating, uh, an other, a romantic other, um, who firstly has no verifiable details. He told me in the first instance that he was an only child and that he didn't know who his father was; that he grew up with his mother; travelled to many places around the world with her. They didn't really settle anywhere, and that as a result of that he had no other family contact as his mother had died eight years earlier. He told me she worked for the UN and specialised in, uh, human rights, uh, which of course pushed a number of buttons for me. CRAIG: That front person is actually quite talented in terms of, uh, the model that they use, which is essentially reflecting back empathy. Um, letting the person identify needs, concerns, and then reflecting back to them that they have the same needs and concerns. He'd given me a landline number, which did appear to be, uh, within the Brisbane area. Then when he went to London and called me and gave me his phone number there, um, of course, I looked up to check and see whether the area code was correct, and it was. Hey. Hi Frank. How are you? In fact, the night before I left, I asked him to tell me what the name of the company was that he was, uh, going` that this contract was related to. He told me the name of it was 'CanCourt'. I then looked that up on Google, and there was such a company, so again it was like, 'Well, you know, this is all legit and above board.' I'm getting so excited now. Not long to go. PETER: The person is providing clues that can be verified in order to engender trust in that person. BEL: This drug cartel, they planned to` to take Sharon, uh, as a drug mule right from the outset. Usually the way it works, they start asking for money from the victims, and then that's the way that end` they end up paying for the whole scam. So all the plane tickets, the accommodation, the expenses ` it's usually something that is paid by the victims. The first time he asked for some financial assistance was maybe around $2000. My first response was, uh, 'Oh my God. This is just a big set-up. This isn't real.' (LAPTOP SLAMS CLOSED) I spent some time writing an email back to him saying, you know, 'I'm absolutely gutted.' Um, you know, 'If you hadn't have asked me for money, you know, everything would have been OK.' To which I got no response. Typically in a romance game, there comes a time when pacing and joining with the person, uh, leads to a` uh, a test in order to see if they can then lead the person to somewhere of criminality. Uh, and in this case, the asking and the request for money is that test. So I waited and I waited and I thought, 'Hmm. What's going on?' So I rang the phone number. When he answered the phone, he appeared to be intoxicated. Told me that he was absolutely gutted by my email, that I didn't trust him. It was almost like the tables were turned, and I felt like I needed to apologise for not believing him. ARIANA: I wasn't aware that she was giving him money. If I had known that Mum was giving him money, I would have been angry. He asked me for money many times. By this stage, I was well and truly hooked in. Sharon has, if not lost objectivity, is` is losing it very fast as this progresses. I guess, yeah, I guess... What this leads to is the relationship going underground, so, uh, Sharon not wanting to be in a position to lose this man in her life, progressively listens less and less to her family, her whanau; when really, objectively, she should have. Maybe two months after I had been talking to Frank, he talked about this woman called Alice. Well, who is this person? She'd, um, told him that she was quite interested in him. Uh, and, you know, was there a chance for the two of them? He reassured me that absolutely not, and that he'd told her how important I was in his life. In Sharon's case, we see the introduction of a love rival, and, of course, this is ratcheting up the emotional pressure on Sharon. Maybe a few weeks after that, I actually received an email from this woman. Frank hadn't called in to follow up on an appointment with her on a Monday, and so she went round to check on him to see if he was OK, to find him collapsed on the floor. She phoned an ambulance, and they took him to the nearest hospital. So her email was to tell me that there was something seriously wrong with him, that he was unconscious. The doctors were looking at things, but I would need to start looking for some money to be able to pay these doctors. There's also the` the issue of racking up the psychological pressure, um, by the demands around the` the need for money and ur` a sense of urgency or, um, a sense that something catastrophic will happen were the money not to be presented. I even spoke to a doctor who confirmed that it was a very acute case of appendicitis that he had, and that if they didn't operate soon, then it would likely burst and potential consequences could have been death. I was totally beside myself with worry for him. I can remember probably three or four days where this dragged on with them saying that money was needed. I felt probably depressed like I haven't for, like, I don't actually even remember ever feeling so down. Yeah, I'll do it, and everything will be fine. So Alice then said that she would try and find some of the money and that we would then owe her this money. I spoke to him probably a week after this saga had begun. He talked about how difficult the past week had been, that he was unconscious for most of it. Um, he cried. I cried on the phone. Yeah. PETER: When Sharon goes to Argentina, this is a completely different phase to this scam, and it's one that goes to the issue of dislocation and confusion. The plans continuously changing ` with my flight path changing, with the way in which they wanted to drop the contracts off to me. Every` It felt like every hour something was changing. By this stage, I was feeling incredibly stressed. I had whanau from home saying, 'Why are you still there? Why haven't you arrived in London?' So there was this huge stress that was starting to build up. The change of culture, the` the language; she's not able to even order a taxi. She is put in a hotel, which she knows is` is not up to standard, in some senses dodgy. Uh, but again she brushes this aside, uh, and this is all part of the strategy. SPANISH ACCENT: I wanna looking after you. Don't worries. Yeah. Yeah, no problem. My rock at the time when I was so stressed in Argentina was Frank. ON PHONE: Trust me. It was almost like it was him and I against this company. Just trust me, yeah? All good. He sets himself out to be the middleman, the negotiator and, in this case, the saviour. Um, these are techniques that are used in, for example, hostage negotiation strategies. Every time I would get myself upset, he was the one that would talk me down or calm me down and say, 'Won't be long. It won't be long.' Sharon has been led to a point where she's now in a position that she can objectively verify or not the contents of the suitcase. She chooses not to, and it is because the scam has been so sophisticated and over such a length of time, it is as if, if she were to open the lining and verify the contents of the suitcase, uh, the card house would come crashing down, and she is psychologically in a space where she's unable to pull that card away. 1 1 I felt it was probably a show of faith on my part, in terms of how much I trusted him, to not arrive in London with the lining all torn to bits. This is a pivotal moment because objectively, I think, people would be saying, 'Why didn't she look in it? Of course, you would look in it.' So for her it's not about drugs. It is about the relationship to Frank. Frank, in this case, calls Sharon's bluff, and it is a risky strategy, but you've got to understand that at any one time, these sophisticated scammers may have tens, if not hundreds, of women worldwide coming to this point. If one of them falls down at this point, they will just cash in and move on to the next person. But this is the point they have to lead the person to because she will now be carrying drugs for them. The appeal argued that... I didn't knowingly attempt to smuggle drugs. If I didn't know they were in my suitcase, then how could I be convicted of knowing they were in my suitcase? God! (SPEAKS SPANISH) This isn't just somebody, you know, that sort of blindly picking up drugs. There's been a whole backstory, which, um, plays and exploits the person to the absolute maximum. ARIANA: I got a phone call from a guy called Bob, who I'd never met before, offering to help us get all the` retrieve all the information off Mum's computer ` so all her emails and everything like that. I thought the reaction of the general public was mean-spirited and incorrect. I like to work with evidence instead of opinions. If she was telling the truth, then, um, all the evidence would be on her computer. So I arranged via my company to acquire her hard drive and did a forensic investigation on it and, um, found all the evidence to support her story. And wrote the report and, um, sent that to the courts in Argentina. The who was saying he was Frank Linus had acquired pictures from mainstream websites and used them as his profile pictures. I found a large volume of communications between Sharon and the scammer. Um, a lot of it was manipulative, um, it involved emotional blackmail. Um, yeah, it was, um, actually quite hard to read. I've seen different language patterns, um, different addresses, they were based out of cyber cafes in London. And it appeared that they had multiple victims at the same time and a system to organise who's talking to who at what time. It was a very nasty scam, yep. I'd never encountered anything like it before. She's entitled to say, 'I've been duped. I-I'm innocent. I did not know, and I would never, ever bring drugs, be a drug courier, drug trafficker.' The tribunal, they found that, uh, Sharon was caught in a fictitious, uh, love relationship. Uh, but at the same time, she was a smart, uh, person. She would have noticed about the drugs that she was carrying in her bag. Sharon's sentence was reduced by 10 months. My lawyers worked with immigration in Argentina and were successful in securing my release some two years, six months after I was first arrested. Although I was deported from Argentina, I had to buy my own ticket home. ARIANA: When she arrived in New Zealand, they lost her bag, so we felt like we'd been waiting there for ages, and when she finally came, it was like, 'Yay! Now let's just get in the car and go home.' PETER: She is a` a normal, robust, intelligent individual, and I think the takeaway point is, to me, is if this can happen to` to Sharon` a person such as Sharon, it really can happen to anyone. I acknowledge that... I was too trusting, that I was naive. I acknowledge that I fell head over heels in love. I acknowledge that I probably didn't listen as I should have to my whanau and friends when they were trying to warn me. But at the end of the day, I am innocent.