Paradise lost in Fiji prison
DRESSED in a shapeless, tan prison smock, with her long blonde hair tied in a ponytail, alleged drug smuggler Yvette Nikolic cuts a lonely figure in Fiji’s Lautoka Prison.
The wife of Melbourne horse trainer John Nikolic, who is fighting for life in Lautoka Hospital, was seen walking out of her cell block and lining up with other prisoners to wash a metal food tray.
But she was not among inmates ordered to sweep prison paths with straw brooms.
Even wearing regulation prison garb, Ms Nikolic, 42, stands out in the Fijian jail with her fair skin and hair.
Waiting to wash her tray, she appeared anxious and seemed to be letting other prisoners take their turn at the communal sink ahead of her.
A guard outside the prison referred to her as “the Australian lady inside”, and knew drugs had been seized from the Nikolics’ yacht by Fiji authorities, and that her husband was seriously ill in hospital.
Recently built Lautoka Prison, which accommodates 24 women on remand and 24 longer-term prisoners, is on the outskirts of town, between hills covered in tropical vegetation and the azure ocean.
Not far away, tourists sit by pools at beachfront hotels sipping rum cocktails from coconuts and boats take Australians on island-hopping day trips or to exclusive resorts.
The guard said conditions were good inside the new jail, with prisoners checked on daily by a doctor and well fed.
Certainly, the prison boasts expansive, manicured lawns. But high walls and coils of barbed wire now block Ms Nikolic’s view of the sea she claimed on social media to love.
From the prison yard, she would be able to look up to the hills but not down to the waters she had sailed on just a week earlier, aboard luxury yacht Shenanigans.
Only three names were on Ms Nikolic’s visitor list this week — her brother-in-law, shamed jockey Danny Nikolic, and her parents-in-law Karen and John Nikolic Sr.
As the trio left Lautoka Hospital, where they presumably spent time at the bedside of John Jr, they declined to be interviewed when asked about John’s condition.
It is understood he was rushed to hospital last Thursday after downing a toxic cocktail of liquid cocaine mixed with methamphetamine during or after the raid on the yacht, and was admitted to the intensive care unit. His current condition is unknown.
Fiji’s Revenue and Customs Service (FRCS) revealed yesterday 13 bars of cocaine worth as much as $20 million, 65 ecstasy tablets and $20,000 of undeclared cash were found when Shenanigans was raided.
Two guns and 97 rounds of ammunition were also discovered on the yacht the pair
ACROSS
2 Being polluted made file
dirtier inside 7 Beginners ran on any dry
place for vehicles 8 Reads without a set of
snooker balls 10 Part of horse’s back fades
away 11 Cannot shorten a salient
angle 12 Chinook raising some tall plant Lie round in alternative for one who attends to machinery 14 Each half with a right to
scorch 16 Ran in to grasp educated one 18 Residue with a quiet
command 20 Gold to lie round in the
window 21 Not condensed without nicks 22 Startling mental impression
on a line 13
DOWN
1 Being of value about one coin originally developed early 2 Girl seen at break of day 3 Leading reporter tried bought last year to sail tropical Pacific islands on the “adventure of a lifetime”.
Maps of the pair’s odyssey show they travelled to Colombia, in South America, to Panama, then across the Pacific.
FRCS CEO Visvanath Das said authorities had put a stop to “a smuggling attempt” in intercepting and raiding the boat.
Shenanigans is moored in the exclusive Denarau marina, largely concealed from public view by multimillion-dollar super yachts.
Mr Das said Fiji Customs had “assisted with intelligence
nothing new 4 Has line-out when breathes in 5 Frightening things don’t
start mistakes 6 A table held the bosses
work endings 9 Cessation of action in stalls
with the money drawer 15 Sign off after a line sets
straight 17 Put cap back in good way
for walking 18 Put sail up after a name
substitution 19 Damp with vapour I started
drying after droning sound information” in finding and seizing the drugs on the yacht.
“Through the profiling and targeting done by Customs’ Drug Enforcement Unit, it was determined that Customs needed to carry out a rummage of the yacht,” he said.
Police Commissioner Brigadier-General Sitiveni Qiliho said after the Shenanigans raid, and the seizure of a large quantity of ammunition on a New Zealand-based yacht in Savusavu, Fiji was quashing any notion that “a small Pacific island nation” could not effectively police its borders.