In recent days we have shown the emails which proved that the owner said he regretted I had left Kelapa Gading and the casual teachers saying they were shocked we had left, all from just a day or two after the event. We have shown Lipi’s testimonial which confirms independently that we resigned. I have also shown the emails giving my attention to leave one week before the final decision. This also flies in the face of lies from Preece and France that we were fired. I had heard on the grapevine that this is what they were saying, so it was necessary to prove this as yet another example of Preece’s pathological lying (richly documented by his own leaked emails).

We have also shown that there was a long history of the owners faking financial reports and then trying to blame staff for it. My trust in the franchise owners, it has also been established, had been long eroded by their series of empty and broken promises. That I was trying to pressure them to ‘go legit’ in terms of royalties and taxes is also supported by the leaked emails. In truth, Cam and I were pushing TBI to reform for years before we left. We just had no idea just how filthy a corporate culture we were really dealing with. It was always a lost cause.

Apart from the owner’s increasingly dodgy behavior, there was one more reason why we left TBI and that was fear of Luke Preece. I had been warned by multiple people that he was ruthless and without a conscience and I was best off out of there. This was the ultimate reason Cam, Lipi and I all left: we had seen enough of TBI’s sleaze and so it was a hopeless case.

By January 2012 I had series doubts about Luke Preece’s sanity. This is not hyperbole or exaggeration. I had heard from Mariezka that he had a long line of victims in Bandung and that he had a long record of fraud and forgery to get his way. I had also been told that Mariam protected him whatever he did. I had then seen this sickening display first hand when Mariam had refused to even answer any questions at all about why Luke had lied Cam was going to be deported. I had seen first hand how little integrity TBI has and how much Mariam closed ranks to protect Luke, even after multiple people swore he had lied about the Tante Vera incident.

I had an old family friend who I have known more than 20 years who is a highly respected and successful clinical psychologist. I studied one year of Psych myself as part of my Bachelor of Arts before moving into a Literature major, and she had gone to the same University as me. I had rang her in Sydney and asked her for an informal opinion about what I should do and had told her what I knew about Luke’s lies to Cameron about Tante Vera’s deportation threats, his history of making a false criminal accusation against the school manager of Malang, the strange confession one night towards the end about fantasizing about snapping Mariam’s neck in his bare hands, how he had rigged the Scott Martin appointment and more.

She said that while she couldn’t make a definite assessment without having seen him, she said she thought it was highly likely that Luke Preece was either a sociopath or possibly even a psychopath. She suggested some books and websites I could read, which I did and some of which I have quoted excerpts from on our blog. She said that he displayed all the signs of ruthless cunning and lack of conscience which goes with a major pathology. She said that considering there were many teaching jobs that paid as well, she thought I should get out of TBI. She strongly recommended it. She said that part of the pathology is that they hate with a passion and they never give up hunting their perceived enemies until they are gone. I had already been warned that Firlana was out the front of the school talking to someone in Head Office in English (he always spoke in Indonesian to the owners) and the owners confirmed that Head Office had been hounding them to fire us and replace us ever since Cam had moved across. Luke had it in for Cameron after he reported him to Mariam and Ning. 

I was also frightened by something else my friend said. She said that sociopaths will make fake charges and use fake witnesses and so on; they will stop at nothing to get their way and they can sometimes land people in very serious trouble, even with the police. I thought about what Luke had done to the SM Malang, making fake allegations he was a robber mastermind and thought of the way he had used Matthew France and Nia to make fake complaints. In the end, I decided that TBI was not worth the risk of working with a couple of tax-cheat owners and a possible sociopath with a vendetta against Cameron and I. I compiled what Mariezka, sources in Malang, Cam, the psychologist friend and others had told me and decided that TBI was worse than I had ever imagined and that Luke was a true danger to be around. Especially since hearing that he tried to do the same sick back-stabbing antics again in Malang in December 2012, I have felt more certain than ever that Luke Preece, like Binsar Simorangkir, was a sociopathic personality and I know we did the right thing getting out.