Paul Malone turned down the adventure of a lifetime -- but his decision probably saved his life. The 30-year-old Australian is alive and well in Tokyo. Instead, he could so easily have been named in recent news reports as missing in the South Pacific along with former NBA basketball star Bison Dele and his girlfriend and the skipper of a yacht at the center of an international murder-mystery whose chief suspect is Dele's late brother.

Malone recalled this week that after Dele -- born Brian Williams -- invited him to join the voyage that almost certainly led him to his death, he "considered it seriously for about a minute.

"I would have loved to have taken off and just gone on a journey and seen where it ended up," he said. "Then I read about his death, and thought, 'If I'd chewed the offer over a little longer and gone -- who knows what could have happened.' "

A popular Perth-based DJ before coming to Japan five months ago, Malone first met Dele at the ritzy His Majesty's Hotel in Fremantle, capital of the state of Western Australia, on Jan. 1, 2000 -- less than a year after Dele had walked away from more than $30 million left on his contract with the Detroit Pistons.

"We were sitting out on the front lawn in the morning after a big show a friend and I had just put on, and he was there, too, this big guy. I said, 'How are you doing?' and we had a chat. He said he was staying upstairs."

In fact Dele, 33, had rented the biggest room in the hotel, where Malone was also living. "I bumped into him a week or two later and started making the connection. I said, 'Man, I know your face.' He just said he played a bit of basketball, and I said, 'The Chicago Bulls. The '97 finals.'

"Over a few months, he used to drop by and ask if I had any new tunes. I lent him a few CDs that I never got back."

Gradually, Malone introduced Dele to his circle of friends -- to one of whom the millionaire gave a motorbike to persuade him to join a camping trip across the rugged continent to Sydney. "I was a bit bummed out when I heard that -- I would have gone," Malone said.

After that trip, Dele returned to Fremantle -- host city of the 1987 America's Cup -- in January 2001 and rented a luxury warehouse apartment where the 211-cm giant worked up his fateful plan to purchase the $500,000 catamaran found abandoned off Tahiti last month.

Malone recalls inviting Dele to several music events around that time, after which Dele proposed that Malone join him on the adventure as they sat in the DJ's room listening to music. "He said, 'I'm thinking about buying a boat and going for a sail. Want to come?' "

Though no expert yachtsman, several years before Malone had often sailed small catamarans when he was working in the northwest Australian port town of Broome. Dele, on the other hand, knew nothing about sailing -- which was why Malone passed up his offer.

"The fantasy of it was great; it would be cool to just take off over the horizon. The reality was that I thought, 'Nuh, bad feeling,' " Malone said. "I just think that having been in the NBA feeling you can do whatever you like, he thought sailing was a great idea. He never thought about the risks involved."

Even so, Malone, who instead set his own course for Tokyo and a job as an English teacher, admits that if Dele had offered him a lure -- like the $50,000 he later sent girlfriend Serena Karlan -- he, like her, may have been persuaded to embark with Dele. Describing Dele as calm and free-spirited, he said, "He was really kind-natured. It was funny talking to him, sometimes you would have these big silences, and you maybe felt uncomfortable to start off with . . . but it was sort of like you were just chilling."

So it was that Dele steered the Hakuna Matata (Swahili for "no problems") on the dangerous 5,000-km journey eastward around Australia's southern coast and across the Great Australian Bight. On that trip with him were four others Malone never knew -- Perth-based skipper Mark Beal, Megan Moody, a 26-year-old Perth theater arts student, a woman called Emily and another person whose identity is unknown.

According to Moody, quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer last month, Beal had to outrun a fierce storm in the Roaring Forties before, after two months at sea, finally docking in Melbourne. There, in a decision that likely saved her life, Moody turned down an offer from Dele to continue on to New Zealand. She was heartbroken and disappointed over a romantic relationship between Dele and Emily.

Nonetheless, by May this year Dele was in Auckland, New Zealand, with the people closest to him -- all about to embark on the voyage believed to have cost them their lives. Among those people was 30-year-old Karlan, who he'd contacted the previous September, and who joined him there in February. In Auckland, too, was Dele's brother Miles Dabord. Also known as Kevin Williams, Dabord had arrived shortly before the catamaran left New Zealand for Tahiti on May 2, with new skipper Bertrand Saldo, 32, at the wheel.

No one has heard from Dele, Karlan or Saldo since July 7, when they were preparing to leave Tahiti for Honolulu. However, Dabord steered the boat -- repainted and renamed -- back into Tahiti alone July 18. He flew from there to Los Angeles on July 20.

Six weeks later, on Sept. 5, he was arrested and released without charge in Phoenix, Arizona after allegedly trying to buy $150,000 in gold using his brother's passport. Soon after, Dele's disappearance became known, triggering an FBI manhunt for his brother. Dabord was found comatose in Tijuana, Mexico, on Sept. 14 and died that weekend.

With Dabord's death, the only clue to what really happened in Tahiti during those 11 days comes from a former girlfriend of Dabord's, who claims to have flown into Tahiti on July 8 and left July 15. She has told investigators that Dabord claimed to have killed his brother in self-defense after an argument between them on the boat led to the accidental death of Karlan, following which Dele killed Saldo to stop him notifying the authorities. U.S. authorities this week said that the argument between the brothers started after Dele threatened to stop giving Dabord money.

"It sends a shiver down your spine," said Malone, musing last week on the fickle finger of fate that fortunately pointed him to Tokyo . . . and not to Tahiti.