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.' "