On the day she was sentenced, Michaella McCollum arrived at the courtroom, in Lima’s Sarita Colonia jail, clutching a self-help book called Secrets About Life Every Woman Should Know: Ten principles for spiritual and emotional fulfilment.
The book, by US author Barbara De Angelis, claims that ‘by embracing ten simple principles, you can transform any situation or event — no matter how difficult or challenging — into something that can enrich you’.
By now, we’ve all seen the 23-year old Dungannon woman’s stunning physical transformation following her release to parole from her Peru jail stretch in April.
And now it seems other big changes — all for the better — may be in the convicted drug smuggler’s future. Industry experts have revealed how Michaella is in a prime position to ‘easily’ earn a six-figure sum from publishing her fascinating story, and bookies currently have odds on her carving out a career in reality TV, or even scooping her own show.
The wannabe Ibiza dancer/hostess, whose Facebook page was replete with pictures of her in Miss Whiplash poses and various risqué attire, has been replaced by a sophisticated young woman, with ambitions to match her improved appearance. A degree in psychology is on her new to-do list.
And now, on her return to Ireland this week where it’s believed she will see out the terms of her parole, it’s emerged that another transformation may have taken place — a spiritual one.
Since her release from jail, Michaella has been carrying out voluntary work under the leadership of Fr Seán Walsh of the Columban Fathers Mission in Peru. Following her departure from the country, it’s been suggested that McCollum may continue her voluntary work with the Columban Fathers Mission here, which has headquarters in Navan, Co. Meath.
The soft-spoken Tyrone woman, who claims to have been spiritually transformed by her jail experience, has insisted in the past that while she made a mistake, she wished to make amends. And it seems, she has made inroads to do just that to do that by living with a priest and doing charity work in Peru.
Through seeing the errors of her ways, it seems she has also developed a deeper interest in religion.
Before leaving Peru, McCollum said her goodbyes to the friends she made there, bidding a special farewell to flatmate and best friend Jackie who served time in the notorious Ancon Dos prison with Michaella for similar drug charges.
After accompanying Michaella to the airport, Jackie posted a farewell collage of pictures taken during their time together, and wrote: ‘I will miss u baby gurl. The secret and the magic was God. Amen.
Everything was possible to Him wen u believe in him.’ While living with 73-year-old Fr Seán Walsh in his modest, threebedroom apartment in Miraflores, Lima, Michaella carried out administrative and clerical duties. She also worked on the church’s magazine, New Hope, a recent edition of which features an article about how marijuana use can affect teenage intelligence.
‘I’m not sure she was a staunch Catholic before I met her, but I really think she did come to the Lord (in prison), at least in her conversations with me, she indicated that,’ said Fr Walsh, who visited Michaella in prison three times a week as part of his pastoral services.
‘Michaella did her time with dignity, took her lumps and now she’s ready to start life fresh. She’s an intelligent and gifted young lady. She just did something dumb, now she can get on with the rest of her life,’ he said at the time of her release to parole.
Fr Walsh’s positive words echoed Michaella’s own rhetoric during her televised interview in April.’ ye ne ‘I was naive, young and insecure,’ McCollum said. ‘In life everybody makes mistakes, people that make mistakes — it doesn’t make them a bad person. I’m not the same person that I was when I committed the crime. I’ve matured a lot. I’ve learnt a lot of things that ten years in university I probably couldn’t learn.’ And it’s fair to say that Michaella stands to be considerably enriched in other ways by her experience — just as De Angelis, the self-help author, had promised.
According to Irish celebrity agent, Sonia Harris, McCollum could gain more than €100,000 from a book deal.’It depends where she sells the story, whether it’s in Britain or Ireland, but you’re easily looking at a six-figure sum for a book deal and all the fall-out afterwards in terms of interviews,’ Ms Harris said.
Vanessa Fox, managing director and book scout for Dublin’s The Inkwell Group, also believes McCollum’s story will have publishers bidding for the rights.
‘It certainly appears to have all the elements that will keep a reader hooked to the end of the book. With help from a good ghostwriter, this could be an exciting prospect.’ However, with McCollum’s proven talent for creative fiction, she shouldn’t require a ghostwriter to tell the often unbelievable tale of her life, loss and resurrection in Lima.
Reality TV may also be in the pipe-line, if current odds at the bookies are anything to go by. Boyle Sports has priced her at 6/4 to become a housemate in the next series of Celebrity Big Brother, with an appearance on Ireland’s newest dance show Dancing With The Stars priced at 11/2. And although it’s likely that Michaella will be in hot demand to appear on chat shows (whether she can, or agrees to do so is anyone’s guess), the odds are high when it comes to getting her own chat show, at 7/1. So who is the real Michaella McCollum: the 20-year-old filmed laughing and eating doughnuts hours after her arrest at Lima airport on August 7 2013, or the 23-year-old beneficiary of a marketing team’s makeover, who now claims to have found God and to be on a spiritual quest to prove her reformation?
On August 7, 2013, McCollum and Melissa Reid were caught trying to board an Air Europa flight to Majorca, via Madrid, with 11kg of cocaine secreted in 34 separate food packages, such as crisp packets, in their bags. The Tyrone woman and her Scottish friend concocted a bizarre tale of coercion, featuring a mysterious, unidentified cockney man, and gun-toting Colombian gang members who supposedly kidnapped both of them in Ibiza, and forced them to travel to Peru to collect €1.9million worth of drugs. With a ‘cool and aloof ‘ performance, McCollum told detectives working with Dinandro, Peru’s elite anti-drug unit, that she was held at gunpoint, and that the lives of members of her family were threatened, unless she travelled to Peru and returned the cocaine to Europe as instructed.
One of the lead detectives in Dinandro, who asked not to be named, told Irish journalists in Peru in April: ‘The “chicas” stated that they were bringing the food packages that were found in their suitcases back for someone who had helped with the trip and that they had no idea of the contents.
‘At first, we believed them. They put on a convincing show; they were calm, but as time went on holes started showing in their accounts.
‘Next thing we had this account of the kidnap, which of course we knew to be false.’ The Colombian drug lords and the cockney gangster were, of course, fantasy; fictitious characters in a web of fabrication designed to escape the 15-year sentence both faced if convicted. Yet, it didn’t stop a groundswell of support for the pair, with a 2013 Facebook campaign page to Free Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid, attracting more than 4,400 likes.
McCollum and Reid kept up their lies for four months. Before sentencing, both changed their stories and admitted they smuggled the drugs for money. McCollum admitted in her RTÉ interview: ‘I was partying for days… I wasn’t sober leaving on that plane… I wasn’t sober leaving the apartment.’ A plea bargain was reached, with the pair pleading guilty in return for sentences each of six years and eight months. The plea bargain was heard in a closed court, with no media present, so it’s unclear what, if any, information the women gave to the authorities about the gang for whom they had agreed to work.
Detectives in Peru believe the pair were to be paid €20,000, in addition to their free holiday in Lima, for smuggling the drugs. McCollum went on to claim in her RTÉ interview that she had fled Belfast, where she was working variously as a dancer and nightclub hostess, under threat of sectarian violence, going to Ibiza overnight, without telling her family.
‘I was living in an area that caused me a little bit of problems. I was told to leave the area as soon as possible or something would happen. I didn’t have the money to pay a deposit for a new house … to rent a new house. I was a little bit too proud to go back to my family’s home. I literally had that moment that I would go to Ibiza,’ she said.
‘It was an overnight decision. My family were highly against it,’ she said. In fact, she didn’t travel to Ibiza until June 2013, and her family had known she was intending to go since early 2013. They had spent months trying to stop her travelling there. McCollum’s mother spoke about this battle to keep Michaella from Ibiza’s drug and party culture in a 2014 RTÉ documentary about McCollum, made by the same company which made the documentary that aired in April.
The youngest child of Norah and Robert, had previously been in a fractious relationship with a violent man, who was subsequently jailed on drugs charges.
Her family wanted her to avoid Ibiza’s drug culture, and stay at home. It was only while in Ibiza that she stopped contacting her parents and older sister, Samantha, and disappeared.
In fact, at the point when she was arrested, her family knew nothing of her whereabouts and had launched a Facebook campaign to find her. The Belfast Telegraph followed up the Facebook search, and discovered she was in Lima, and had been arrested as a drug mule for Peruvian dealers.
The number of tourists involved in drug smuggling from Peru to Europe has reached epidemic levels, according to former Peruvian drugs czar Ricardo Soberón.
‘It is harder to send Peruvians and South Americans to Europe. We don’t have as many tourists going there. It is easier to offer young [European] people a free holiday and in some cases, €20,000, maybe more, to move the goods.’ Peru, a developing country where more than one quarter of its 15million citizens live in poverty, recently overtook Colombia as the world’s top producer of cocaine, crack and other coca-derived illegal substances.
Peru’s national prisons institute says that 90% of the 1,648 foreigners in the country’s prisons are either sentenced or awaiting trial for smuggling narcotics across international borders, sometimes hiding them in their bodies. Ironically, it was this increase in foreign, female drug dealers that lead to McCollum’s early release from prison, having served just two years of an almost sevenyear sentence.
The Peruvian authorities, under pressure to deal with massive overcrowding in its prisons, passed a law last year, allowing foreign drug dealers to be released on parole, or be extradited to serve their sentences abroad, at their home country’s expense.
Michaella’s partner in crime, Melissa Reid, returned to her hometown on Glasglow in June.
Now fluent in Spanish, Peru’s mostused language, Tyrone woman McCollum also plans to do a degree in psychology. ‘I’ve forgotten the things that everybody takes for granted in life,’ she told RTÉ.
‘Seeing the sun, seeing the darkness, seeing the moon and the stars, things I haven’t seen in almost three years.’ Even this seems a stretch of the imagination, considering how Fr Walsh has spoken of how the Peru prisoners were released into a large open park area every morning, and allowed to spend time in the sun.
‘I’m thankful for the experience [of prison]. I plan to study psychology. I believe I deserve that second chance,’ McCollum said.
Whether or not Michaella McCollum truly has seen the light remains to be seen. But, it seems, she may certainly have that second chance.
By Brian Carroll
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