Now, Erik Aude’s future looks hellishly like that of Billy Hayes, the American hash smuggler whose years in a Turkish prison inspired the 1978 drama “Midnight Express.” Aude is expected to be charged later this month with narcotics trafficking,which carries a maximum sentence of death. Speaking through iron bars at a jail in Rawalpindi, Aude vehemently protests his innocence. “I’m not a drug smuggler,” he told a NEWSWEEK reporter in an exclusive interview. But his pleas to U.S. officials to help secure an immediate release have not been successful.
The United States rarely intervenes in foreign courts on behalf of American citizens, beyond making sure that prisoners are treated humanely. And U.S.-Pakistani relations are at a particularly delicate stage; America, simultaneously pressuring its ally in the war on terror to crack down on Islamic fundamentalism and clean up its human rights act, might be reluctant to add to its list of demands.
Still, the plight of a prisoner in Pakistan is exceptionally chilling. A State Department human-rights report issued this month called prison conditions there for Pakistani nationals “extremely poor and life threatening.” Two mass murderers were sentenced in March 2000 to execution “by having their bodies cut into 100 and 98 pieces…and then having the pieces dissolved in acid,” the report claims. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the State Department’s findings as “factually inaccurate and unwarranted.”
Before last month, Aude seemed like just another fresh-faced hopeful on the cusp of his big break in Hollywood. A product of Lancaster, Calif., where he played football at a Christian high school, he got into acting after graduation, thanks in part to his mother, who runs a small casting agency. Bit parts in soap operas and TV dramas led to minor parts on the big screen: a “prom boy” in the Ben Affleck Gwyneth Paltrow romance “Bounce” and his turn as a muscle-head in the stoner comedy “Dude, Where’s My Car?”
But acting never paid the bills. In the fall of 2000, while working as a desk clerk at a World Gym in Burbank, he was approached by a man who offered Erik a job as a courier transporting fine leather clothing from Turkey and Pakistan, at between $2,000 and $5,000 a trip. His mother, Sherry Aude, was suspicious–arguing with her son’s new employer when she suggested he just use FedEx–but Erik jetted off on several trips without incident. When the importer proposed another trip in the weeks after September 11, Sherry Aude put her foot down with her son. “We had words,” she recalls tearfully. “I couldn’t believe he’d go to [the Muslim world] after 9/11. He said, ‘Mom, I’ll be safe’.”
The trip got delayed until Feb. 9, when Aude flew to Canada and then on to Islamabad. He sent her a brief e-mail wishing her happy Valentine’s Day. The next morning, she got a call from the American Embassy in Pakistan informing her that he had been arrested.
Erik vehemently insists he’s an innocent dupe. Speaking over a cacophony of other prisoners to a NEWSWEEK reporter at the Rawalpindi Central Jail last Saturday, Aude declares he had no idea the suitcase contained anything other than “leather skirts and things.” “I had nothing to gain and everything to lose by being a drug smuggler,” he adds earnestly, wearing light blue-tinted sunglasses and jeans after a brief court appearance. “I’m guilty of being gullible. That’s what I’m going to be known as, ‘a gullible idiot’.” The DEA has launched an investigation into the Aude case, but won’t confirm any specifics.
U.S. embassy officials visit Aude, bringing him mail and ensuring he is being treated and humanely. Aude says he’s the only American in the jail, and fellow prisoners became hostile during the bombing runs during Operation Anaconda, the recent U.S.-led assault on Al Qaeda holdouts in Afghanistan’s Shahikot mountains. “They hate me here,” he says. For that reason (and thanks probably to embassy officials), Aude is confined to solitary. “I’m isolated, completely isolated,” he reports. “It sucks, but it’s for my safety.”
State Department officials also provided the family a list of attorneys, and advised Aude to get a good one, quickly. Aude’s vehement insistence that he didn’t know about the opium may not matter in Pakistan, where the courts make no distinction between the intentional smuggler and the unwitting mule. “Anything can happen in this part of the world,” says Pakistani defense attorney Babar Awan, who once defended former prime minister Benazir Bhutto on corruption charges. Americans who’ve been applauding the swift justice Pakistan meted out in the war on terrorism may see a different side of our ally’s swift justice now.
