Concluding a banner year for unsuccessful Australian criminals imitating film and television plot lines and not getting away with it (see: that time a Queensland man cooked meth in an RV and a terminally ill grandfather started growing weed to provide for his family), a former Qantas flight attendant not named Jackie Brown has been found guilty of smuggling $200,000 worth of meth into the country.
Samuel Kaufman, 50, smuggled the Class A drug that knocks and completely ruins lives in packages hidden in his pants and declared them as chocolates before being arrested by police in the car park of his South Yarra apartment in Melbourne.
Kaufman, a veteran long-haul Qantas flight attendant who worked business class flights to America, was last month found guilty of one charge of importing a marketable quantity of methamphetamine into the country and also pleaded guilty to possessing eight grams of the drug found in his car.
Kaufman, in testimony strongly suggesting he or his legal counsel had just watched the Quentin Tarantino film Jackie Brown, the story of a Mexican airlines flight attendant who smuggles money into America while unwittingly transporting cocaine, maintained in court that he believed the package he was carrying for a friend contained $US20,000 in cash and not a shit tonne of ice as was actually the case.
The SMH reports: “Prosecutor Francesca Holmes said it was ”unclear” whether Kaufman was a courier, principal or combination of both, while Judge Christopher Ryan remarked he had made an ”appalling error of judgment”.
The judge said there were ”two Mr Kaufmans” – the ”kind, giving, gentle friend”, and the drug-user in the gay scene friends were unaware of.
Kaufman’s barrister, David Grace, QC, said that after his client’s life became ”disorganised and chaotic” a year ago, he used Xanax to cope with ice withdrawal while travelling. He urged the judge to be ”merciful” in sentencing on Wednesday.”
2013: the year of unsuccessfully blaming your mates for things.
