Seeking a New Ending

Stephen Roye lives in a dank prison cell on the outskirts of Bangkok, a convicted heroin smuggler whose bed is a thin mat on a concrete floor.

To Thai authorities, Roye is just Hanother foreigner who got caught in the act. But Roye is different in one respect: He is a journalist, imprisoned for the very crime he claims he set out to expose.

Roye’s odyssey began 18 months ago on the streets of Hollywood, where he joined an Asian drug syndicate and flew to Thailand as a courier. In Bangkok, Roye was arrested with three kilograms of heroin sewn into the lining of his suitcase as he attempted to board a flight for Amsterdam.

Roye, 49, admits his involvement in the smuggling ring, but says Thai authorities have ignored the other half of his story--namely, that he came to Thailand as an undercover reporter to blow the lid off the Asian heroin trade.

The veteran news producer, winner of two Emmys and five Golden Mikes, says he planned to back out of the smuggling operation at the last minute and return to the United States with his explosive story, but that an Asian counterpart threatened to harm his mother and son if he quit.

“I came to Thailand to shed light on a terrible problem,” Roye, a graduate of Fairfax High and UCLA, wrote to a friend earlier this month. “My plan backfired.”

Roye’s lifeline now is a small group of friends and relatives, including his aunt and uncle in Westwood, who are waging a campaign to free him.

They have hired lawyers in Washington and Bangkok to work on the case. And they are appealing to Thailand’s king, who is expected to pardon thousands of prisoners in June as part of a celebration marking the 50th anniversary of his coronation. Roye was sentenced to life in prison last October, a year after his arrest.

Supporters remain convinced of Roye’s innocence, saying he made a poor decision in pursuing the story to Thailand.

“Steve admits it was absolutely bad judgment,” said his aunt, Miriam Moorman. “But should he get a life sentence for that?”

Colleagues described Roye as an aggressive journalist who pursued his work relentlessly. During a 27-year career, Roye worked at television stations in Los Angeles, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York. In the early 1980s, he was a producer at the former KHJ Channel 9 in Los Angeles, where he earned his Golden Mikes and one of his Emmys.

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“Steve was one of those people who would push the danger factor,” said Cindy Rakowitz, a former co-worker at WWOR-TV in Secaucus, N.J. “It’s what won him awards and made him work so hard on projects.”

Rakowitz and others also recalled Roye as a staunch critic of drugs, saying his views often were reflected in the shows he produced, including a 1985 documentary, “Taking the High Out of High School.”

According to friends and relatives, Roye began pursuing a series of stories in the summer of 1994 about drugs and prostitution in Hollywood. There, Roye met a smuggler associated with a Southeast Asian heroin ring and was offered $10,000 to work as a courier, according to written testimony Roye presented to a Thai court.

“I had no interest in the money and no interest in becoming a drug criminal,” Roye told the Thai court. “I only said yes so I could investigate this drug operation for the stories I was writing.”

Before he left for Thailand, Roye contacted a New York literary agency and Playboy magazine in Los Angeles, asking if they would be interested in what he called a blockbuster story about drugs and Hollywood.

Roye also left a handwritten note at the federal passport office in Westwood, stating that he was traveling to Thailand to investigate the drug trade.

But Roye, who was between jobs at the time and admittedly trying to jump-start a slumping career, kept the details of his Thai trip a secret from everyone but his son, Adam.

“He felt this could break open a successful freelance writing career,” said Adam Roye, 20, a college student in Santa Cruz. “A story like that could have opened the door to bigger and better possibilities.”

Thai authorities rejected Roye’s explanation. Last October, a Bangkok court sentenced him to death, but commuted the sentence to life in prison after he agreed to plead guilty to possessing and attempting to transport heroin out of the country.

Roye has appealed the sentence, and a hearing on the matter is expected in the coming months.

Yet whether Roye ever will be released remains a question because of a United States policy known as the “one-kilo clause.” The policy bars American smugglers who are caught with more than one kilogram of heroin from transferring home to serve out their sentences; Roye was arrested with three kilograms.

“Unless the ‘one-kilo clause’ is changed in the United States, Stephen Roye would be stuck in the Thai jail forever, [or] until he is [pardoned] by Thailand,” said Richard Atkins of the International Legal Defense Counsel in Philadelphia.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok say there is little they can do for Roye or the other 60 Americans now serving time in Thai prisons, mostly for drug-related offenses.

“This is an independent country with its own independent judicial system,” said an embassy official. “There are definite limitations of what can be done by an outside government. This is not a unique situation.”

Embassy officials said they visit Roye about once a month, bringing him correspondence from home and news of the outside world.

Meanwhile, Roye’s family in Los Angeles sends him packages periodically that include vitamins, sneakers and other items. Family members also forward money through Baptist missionaries who visit the prison, so that Roye can buy extra food.

Those who have visited the prison express concern about the conditions.

Roye shares a prison cell with 19 other inmates, a room that he described in a letter as a “morgue without drawers and a squat toilet in the corner.”

Roye told his aunt that he turned down dental care for a broken crown in another facility after he visited the prison dentist and discovered that the same needle was used on all of the patients, a dangerous prospect in a country where AIDS is rampant.

“As long as I’m here, I’m virtually helpless,” he wrote in a recent letter. “I realize there is no magic solution that will suddenly return me to life as I once knew it.”