Letter From Indonesia: Behind high-profile murder case, not your usual caddies - washingtonpost.com

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A culture of permissiveness on and off the links

By Andrew Higgins
Monday, November 2, 2009

TANGERANG, INDONESIA -- Modern Golf Club boasts an 18-hole course scented by tropical flowers, four tennis courts, a squash center and a big swimming pool. It's also the only club where, after a day on the links earlier this year, a golfer was shot twice in the head as he drove from the clubhouse in his BMW.

The chief suspect: a rival middle-aged golfer who, while running Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission, received off-the-green services from the victim's 22-year-old wife. They'd met on the golf course when she was working as his caddie.

In a mostly Muslim country where much of the political elite, including the president, plays golf, the saga has caused a sensation -- and also raised some delicate questions about why so many of Indonesia's caddies are beautiful young women.

At Modern, nearly 200 of the club's 250 caddies are women, mostly in their 20s. "You cannot have an ugly face or a smelly person in the front line," explained Bonnie Umboh, the club's sales and marketing manager. Moreover, she said, female caddies are much better at calming golfers, nearly all men, when they flub a putt or drive into the rough. When women carry golfers' clubs, "they hold their temper."

But, according to some female caddies, that is not all they hold. "They like to pretend they are teaching me how to hit a golf ball, you know, hugging me from behind and touching my thighs," said one Modern caddie. She asked that her name not be used. Groping golfers, she said, "usually give big tips, so I don't mind."

She sometimes meets golfers off duty and charges 500,000 rupiah, about $54, for a night in a hotel "but there are other caddies, top caddies, who get almost 1,000,000 per night."

Modern said it has a strict policy against golfers getting overly intimate with caddies, at least on the course, and encourages the reporting of unwelcome advances. "So far there are no complaints," said Umboh, the sales manager. Before joining Modern's caddie roster, new recruits get training in the rudiments of golf and learn how to drive a golf cart, and to smile a lot.

Golf in Indonesia, like in most of the world, is governed by rules set in Scotland by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, which dates back to 1754. Its rulebook covers how much time a golfer can search for a lost ball (five minutes), the length of club shafts and other arcane details. But the Royal and Ancient has no view on the sex or age of caddies, nor on what players and caddies do together beyond hitting golf balls.

"That is not in our jurisdiction," said Kevin Barker of the Scottish club's Rules Department, "What happens off the course is neither here nor there."

Female caddies are hardly a uniquely Indonesian phenomenon. A British company called Eye Candy Caddies markets itself with the slogan "golf made gorgeous." It charges nearly $400 for a round of golf and an hour of post-game chat in the clubhouse. Its caddies "are not encouraged to fraternize with clients after an assignment has ended," according to a code of conduct. (At least one British club has banned its services.)

But female caddies are far more widespread in Indonesia and often wear more revealing outfits, despite a campaign by Muslim activists to purge "immoral" conduct. In Tangerang, the town west of Jakarta where Modern golf club is located, a local Islamic bylaw prohibits lewd behavior.

Dispute now in court

Exactly what happened at Modern and in a room at the Grand Mahakam Hotel is now under review by a Jakarta court, which recently began the murder trial of Indonesia's busted corruption-buster, Antasari Azhar. Prosecutors allege he had the husband of his former caddie killed to escape blackmail. Azhar has denied any involvement. His lawyers accused prosecutors of presenting "porn material" instead of evidence. Local television carried the proceedings live.

With golf under the spotlight, the Indonesia Golf Association has "asked clubs to strengthen the rules for caddies," said England Rachman, the association's executive secretary. But, said Rachman, golfers and caddies "can do what they want outside of working hours. As long as people are happy this is their personal business."

Rachman said he prefers to have a man carry his clubs when he wants to play a serious game but likes a woman to do it when "I just want to relax." Male caddies, he said, tend to be older and know more about the game, and this means they can spot mistakes and offer advice: "Sometimes I don't like that. Women just follow and smile."

Not all Indonesian golfers are men. The trade minister, Mari Pangestu, a respected American-educated economist, likes to play and uses a male caddie, as do many of Indonesia's more traditional-minded golfers. The president, former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, goes to a military sports club that has only male caddies.

At the Jakarta Golf Club, where Indonesia's late dictator, Suharto, used to play, male caddies still far outnumber female ones, and they're determined to hold the line against what they see as an escalating threat to golf, and their own livelihood. "I'm more experienced and stronger. But players like to pick young pretty ones," grumbled 47-year-old Taufik Hidayat.

Modern Golf Club, meanwhile, has just held a big tournament and gala dinner to celebrate its 14th anniversary. When the golf, sex and murder saga first made headlines, said the sales manager, Umboh, some golfers stayed away from Modern under pressure from their wives. But all the bad publicity, she said, had since become "free promotion. The plus is that people now know where Modern is. They want to come here to play golf."

Politicians' Scandals Elevate the Profile of a Spiritual Haven on C Street SE

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 26, 2009

No sign explains the prim and proper red brick house on C Street SE.

Nothing hints at its secrets.

It blends into the streetscape, tucked behind the Library of Congress, a few steps from the Cannon House Office Building, a few more steps to the Capitol. This is just the way its residents want it to be. Almost invisible.

But through one week's events, this stately old pad -- a pile of sturdy brick that once housed a convent -- has become the very nexus of American scandal, a curious marker in the gallery of capital shame. Mark Sanford, South Carolina's disgraced Republican governor and a former congressman, looked here for answers -- for support, for the word of God -- as his marriage crumbled over his affair with an Argentine woman. John Ensign, the senator from Nevada who just seven days earlier also was forced to admit a career-shattering affair, lives there.

"C Street," Sanford said Wednesday during his diffuse, cryptic, utterly arresting confessional news conference, is where congressmen faced "hard questions."

On any given day, the rowhouse at 133 C St. SE -- well appointed, with American flag flying, white-and-green-trimmed windows and a pleasant garden -- fills with talk of power and the Lord. At least five congressmen live there, quietly renting upstairs rooms from an organization affiliated with "the Fellowship," the obsessively secretive Arlington spiritual group that organizes the National Day of Prayer breakfast, an event routinely attended by legions of top government officials. Other politicians come to the house for group spirituality sessions, prayer meetings or to simply share their troubles.

The house pulsed with backstage intrigue, in the days and months before the Sanford and Ensign scandals -- dubbed "two lightning strikes" by a high-ranking congressional source. First, at least one resident learned of both the Sanford and Ensign affairs and tried to talk each politician into ending his philandering, a source close to the congressman said. Then the house drama escalated. It was then that Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign's mistress, endured an emotional meeting with Sen. Tom Coburn, who lives there, according to the source. The topic was forgiveness.

"He was trying to be a peacemaker," the source said of Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.

Although Sanford visited the house, there is no indication that he was ever a resident; when he was in Congress from 1995 to 2000, the parsimonious lawmaker was famous for forgoing his housing allowance and bunking in his Capitol Hill office. But it is not uncommon for residents to invite fellow congressmen to the home for spiritual bonding. There, Sanford enjoyed a kind of alumnus status. Richard Carver, president of the Fellowship Foundation, said, "I don't think it's intended to have someone from South Carolina get counseling there." But he posited that Sanford turned to C Street "because he built a relationship with people who live in the house."

People familiar with the house say the downstairs is generally used for meals and prayer meetings. Volunteers help facilitate prayer meetings, they said. Residents include Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Ensign and Coburn. None of the congressmen agreed to be interviewed for this article. But associates of some of Ensign's housemates privately worried that the other residents would be tarred by the scandals.

"That two fell doesn't prove that the house -- which has seen many members of Congress pass through and engage in Bible studies -- doesn't mean that the house has failed," said conservative columnist Cal Thomas, who once spoke to a group of interns at the house. "If that was the standard, the whole Congress would be corrupt."

The house's residents mostly adhere to a code of silence about the place, seldom discussing it publicly, lending an aura of mystery to what happens inside and a hint of conspiratorial speculation. In a town where everyone talks about everything, the residents have managed largely to keep such a refuge to themselves and their friends. On a street mostly occupied by Hill staffers and professionals in their 20s and early 30s, some of the Democratic staffers nicknamed it "the Prayer House." On summer evenings, the congressmen would sometimes sit out front smoking cigars and chatting, but what went on inside stayed inside.

The house, which is assessed at $1.84 million, is registered to a little-known organization called Youth With a Mission of Washington DC. Carver, who said his Fellowship group is affiliated with the house, said that he has never heard of Youth With a Mission of Washington DC and that he did not have a phone number for it. Later, he said, he spoke with someone who "at one time was involved with the house" and had "heard secondhand" that the organization that runs the house is "subscribing to the no-comment."

"They've done a very good job of creating an atmosphere as separated as it can possibly be from the tensions of the city . . . a spiritual retreat from the cacophony and distraction of Capitol Hill," said the Rev. Rob Schenck, who has attended prayer meetings at the house. "But I've questioned in the past the highly secretive nature of it. The secretive nature of it has come off as a bit too clever. It places them at risk of suspicion about their motives. It hasn't served them well."

All of which made Sanford's nationally televised mention of "what we called C Street" the more enticing.

"It was a, believe it or not, a Christian Bible study," he said, departing from the tight-lipped ways of the house's denizens.

Schenck's group, Faith and Action, operates a less-shrouded Capitol Hill home used for Bible study -- but not as a residence for congressmen -- a haven he says was inspired by the house on C Street. He wonders whether the C Street house might have been too "accommodating" about the foibles, the sins, of its residents and friends. All in the name of attracting the famous and the powerful to its ministries.

"We're tempted," Schenck said, "to make room for their weaknesses."

Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.