Deborah Richardson

What plane are they on?

And we received a phone call

And we were told that the lady from the legitimate organisation who had set up the original respite for the children had actually left that organisation and she'd stolen all of our records.

And then she was associated, I understand, with the Russian mafia.

We were told they were Russian businessmen at the time.

And we received basically a phone call, an extortionist phone call, demanding that...

that we needed to give them a plane load of medical supplies and US$250,000, or they were not going to send the children home to Ukraine.

What did you do?

Well, I'd actually received about day two or three of having Yuri for some reason.

I mean, I was in the white pages, but Darren Hinch had got hold of my phone number and rang and said, do you want to do a story?

And I was comfortable in doing that, but I said, I need to talk to the organisers.

And at that stage, they'd said, oh, no, no, no media, which I thought was quite strange.

And I guess on the back of having had that call, I thought, actually, there's a story in this.

And so I rang the local media and said, you wanted a story, have I got a story for you?

And we did have a media storm around us for the subsequent months that it took for us to get the children home.

And

And it was eventually we were doing a public meeting out at Dandenong to share the story.

Here were all these children.

They wanted to go home.

They were between the ages of 10 and 16, so tiny little things with us.