The Last Voyage of the Pong Su · The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

"This f---ing boat"

October 7, 2019·30 min·2 clips

A North Korean ship delivered 150kg of heroin to a Victorian beach — and everything went wrong in the dark.

The operation begins in darkness. Baker opens the Pong Su story with a beach, a van, and a ship pulling police attention toward a 150-kilo heroin import. Someone was already dead. The cold open pieces together calls, denial, a registration number, and the threat of an Australian warship boarding the ship. Then the pace drops. A surfer describes a heavy wave at Lorne in physical, breath-shortening detail, enough to make the shoreline feel dangerous instead of picturesque. He nearly runs out of air. That memory gives the episode a practical way to understand what the men on the beach may have faced while trying to move their load. The investigation shifts to Lorne's Main Street. Donner Venables remembers a Tarago van outside the Smythe Real Estate office and a nervous man urgently asking for a holiday rental. His English was limited. The request for a three- or four-bedroom house, along with missing linen, felt off to her. She was right to notice. Plain-clothed Australian Federal Police were already across the road, filming the men near the agency. A registration number appears. Romeo Yankee Hotel 167 turns a passing vehicle into something police can follow inside a much bigger operation. The episode keeps its nerve. Weather, surf, real estate, surveillance, and remembered unease do the work. By the end, the failed logistics onshore sit right beside the Pong Su offshore.

As heard by us

A grim, carefully observed crime story that lets logistics do the suspense.

The Last Voyage of the Pong Su turns a drug run gone wrong into a tightly observed account of Victoria's shipwrecked coast, with Richard Baker leaning on the weather, the van, the real estate office, the ship, and the men moving in the dark.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a true-crime chase that starts on a wild Victorian beach in atrocious weather.

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