Lara Worthington‘s brother, 34-year-old tradie, Joshua Bingle, has pleaded guilty to drug possession charges, following an incident at a Darlinghurst cocktail bar last month when a police sniffer dog caught him with a quantity of cocaine.
Bingle appeared before Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday of this week, where the judge heard that he was at the Darlo Country Club when he “walked right into” the path of the sniffer dog, which happened to be patrolling the venue with an officer.
Per reports in the Daily Mail, the dog “made an indication” that Bingle may have been carrying drugs as he walked past, and police say that he appeared “nervous and fidgety”, before a search uncovered a 0.6 gram bag of cocaine in his pocket.
He was placed under arrest and made a confession in a subsequent police interview, before pleading guilty in court this week.
The maximum penalty for possession in NSW is two years’ imprisonment, although it is unclear what kind of sentence he will face.
This is not Joshua Bingle’s first run-in with the law. In 2012, he was fined $800 and placed on an eighteen-month good behaviour bond, stemming from a 2009 incident when he punched a man at Randwick Racecourse.
That incident occurred on Melbourne Cup Day, when Bingle, who had been drinking throughout the event, asked the man girlfriend for a cigarette.
He was heard to make “derogatory remarks” towards the man, and the two were separated after a fight, but Bingle then approached him again and punched him from “the blind side.”
The magistrate at the time found that both men had acted with “minimal” provocation and used physical violence, so both were fined and placed on good behaviour bonds.
