Speaker 1: There was a great shock and scandal in the district
Speaker 1: because the police had come and arrested their neighbor, Nick,
Speaker 1: the guy who called himself Nick the Riverman. Nick kept
Speaker 1: raving onto the place about the medicinal benefits of cannabis,
Speaker 1: how his grandmother back in Romania was a naturopath or
Speaker 1: something like that, and how he is prepared to die
Speaker 1: in jail to defend his belief that cannabis is a
Speaker 1: wonderful thing and everyone should have free access to it.
Speaker 1: I'm Andrew Rule is his life and crimes. Today, we're
Speaker 1: going to go back in time and look at the
Speaker 1: adventures of a Romanian fella who called himself Nick the Riverman.
Speaker 1: Now this spoke's real name is a complicated Romanian name.
Speaker 1: It is Gelu, Nikolai, Pusia or Pouchia. But for our purposes,
Speaker 1: let's call him Nick, because that's what he called himself
Speaker 1: and what everybody else called him once he got to Australia.
Speaker 1: Now Nick bobbed up for our purposes. He bobs up
Speaker 1: in East Gippsland at the district of Breuthon and Bruthen
Speaker 1: Is in the old Shire of Tambo, which no longer exists,
Speaker 1: but the Tambo River runs from its headwaters up past Omeo,
Speaker 1: and in those mountains it runs down a relatively short
Speaker 1: course through the mountains through a winding valley, the Tambo Valley,
Speaker 1: and then it hits a flat country at Breuthen and
Speaker 1: widens out into quite a big river that then empties
Speaker 1: into the gipsand lakes. And the Tambo Valley has been
Speaker 1: settled a long time, and the upper reaches, of course,
Speaker 1: is very wild, rough country. It's state forests, it's state parks,
Speaker 1: and it's bushy and steep and rocks and all the
Speaker 1: rest of it. And there's not much settlement through their
Speaker 1: only different patches along the river. And Breuthen is sort
Speaker 1: of the last of the flat land, and people who
Speaker 1: lived just north of Breuthen are actually living a butting
Speaker 1: the forest. And this is where our man, Nick, the
Speaker 1: Riverman as he called himself, washed up sometime in the
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, and Nick turned up there with quite a backstory.
Speaker 1: Nick had grown up in Romania in the sixties and
Speaker 1: seventies at a time when Romania was run by a
Speaker 1: sort of a doctor evil type dictator called Nikolai Chasescu,
Speaker 1: whose name I can't pronounce. But he and he's we
Speaker 1: could dictate a wife ran the place like a personal estate,
Speaker 1: and it was very strictly controlled. It went to rack
Speaker 1: and ruin economically and ended up they were trying to
Speaker 1: rule a place, you know, with the jack boot and
Speaker 1: the rifle and the gun butt, and inevitably Romania's economy
Speaker 1: fell apart and people started to try and flee it,
Speaker 1: and the dictator's answer to that was to put more
Speaker 1: border guards on and the machine gun nests and patrols
Speaker 1: and people with rifles and dogs and all the rest
Speaker 1: of it to stop Roumanians from escaping into really interesting
Speaker 1: safe havens like the old Yugoslavia, which was not all
Speaker 1: that safe. But the Romanians were so desperate that routinely
Speaker 1: at night dozens of them would try to swim across
Speaker 1: the River Danube in order to get into mostly into
Speaker 1: what was in Yugoslavia. And one of these refugees who
Speaker 1: did that deadly escape was this man Nick Nick Pucia
Speaker 1: or Puussia, and he did that in around probably nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight. Around that time. He gets as the river
Speaker 1: without being shot, although he told people that you know,
Speaker 1: shots were fired. They might have been, and he didn't
Speaker 1: drown obviously, and he gets to the other side and
Speaker 1: he's thrown into prison on the other side, which is
Speaker 1: not a very nice place to be imprisoned. I think
Speaker 1: they put you in there and let you go hungry
Speaker 1: for a fair while. And eventually he was deemed to
Speaker 1: be a genuine refuge and he got to Australia. So
Speaker 1: he hits Australia around in the eighty nine to ninety
Speaker 1: and he's got a wife and little girl, baby girl
Speaker 1: back in Romania and they can't come out to Australia
Speaker 1: for a while. So he goes fruit picking. Hard worker,
Speaker 1: goes fruit picking. Then he gets a job at the
Speaker 1: busy board factory out in Noble Park or somewhere. Factory
Speaker 1: hand learns a bit of English as he goes along,
Speaker 1: might have known a little bit of English already. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: back in Romania, he had trained apart from being in
Speaker 1: the army for two years, which everyone had to do,
Speaker 1: he had trained as a forester. In your about trees
Speaker 1: and a borer culture and horticulture. And anybody that's been
Speaker 1: to Eastern Europe, especially those poorer countries there, knows that
Speaker 1: basically all the locals are very in touch with their
Speaker 1: peasant forebears, and they grow tomatoes, that grow corn.
Speaker 2: They grow potatoes, they grow.
Speaker 1: All the things you can eat, and you know, have
Speaker 1: fruit trees and all the rest of it, because without
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't have survived. They are very good subsistence
Speaker 1: gardeners and farmers from top to bottom. And I can
Speaker 1: remember walking through a Romanian city, a small city, but
Speaker 1: a city, and seeing a law firm that had the
Speaker 1: signs set up outside this particular house in this quite
Speaker 1: a busy street saying you know such and such lawyers
Speaker 1: in the local language. And in the front garden were
Speaker 1: tomato plants and sweet corner and all the rest of it.
Speaker 1: So even at a place where the house was their
Speaker 1: headquarters are a law firm, they were growing vegetables. And
Speaker 1: this gives you an insight into the sort of person
Speaker 1: that this nick guy was. When he got up to
Speaker 1: brew them in the skips land, he got hold of
Speaker 1: a shed on a block of land, and it was
Speaker 1: notionally a shed, but he quickly converted it into living quarters.
Speaker 1: And everyone who knew him then said, this guy was terrific.
Speaker 1: He shed was really organized, really clean, spotless. He made
Speaker 1: furniture out of timber from the bush. He had bees
Speaker 1: for honey. He grew vegetables, a great variety of them,
Speaker 1: and used to preserve them and all the rest of it,
Speaker 1: swap them with other people barter. He would shoot rabbits
Speaker 1: for meat. He would trap fish in the river, and
Speaker 1: he would get carp which are a nuisance of course,
Speaker 1: and a pest. And he would turn the carp into
Speaker 1: liquid fertilizer to put on his vegetables. And he would
Speaker 1: pan for gold. In fact, he built a sluice box
Speaker 1: and respect for gold in the Tambo River which is nearby,
Speaker 1: and in various creeks around the place. And the suice
Speaker 1: box is an arrangement where you run sand from the
Speaker 1: bottom sand and little rocks on the bottom of the
Speaker 1: river through the sluice box and have water running over it,
Speaker 1: and you find little specs of gold. And indeed he
Speaker 1: used to get enough gold that he would sell it,
Speaker 1: this alluvial gold, which is much sought after because it's
Speaker 1: I think it's soft and very easy to work or something,
Speaker 1: and very pure perhaps, And he would sell that to
Speaker 1: buyers in Melbourne, in suburbs like Colfield and and Kilda.
Speaker 1: He would sell his illuvial gold. So he was very
Speaker 1: much a hard working, self sufficient man who was able
Speaker 1: to sort of feed himself with his own efforts. And
Speaker 1: during the late nineties he was reasonably well known around Bruthon.
Speaker 1: He learned to speak a bit of English.
Speaker 2: He was always fairly well dressed.
Speaker 1: People noticed he had a lot of gold chains and
Speaker 1: jewel and stuff like that. Like a lot of people
Speaker 1: who've come from hard places, he liked to carry a
Speaker 1: bit of gold and stuff because you could move and
Speaker 1: take your wealth with you quickly. I think it's probably
Speaker 1: a self preservation thing. With a lot of people, and
Speaker 1: a lot of men found him quite interesting because he
Speaker 1: was good at doing stuff and talked about it and
Speaker 1: was quite willing to share his knowledge. Women weren't so
Speaker 1: keen on him, most of them. I know one of them.
Speaker 1: One of their neighbors is someone I know. And she said, look,
Speaker 1: he was a bit odd. He was sort of a
Speaker 1: bit up himself, and I found him a bit slazy,
Speaker 1: was summary of him. But she said a lot of
Speaker 1: the guys didn't mind him because he was an interesting
Speaker 1: guy to them because of all the things he could do.
Speaker 1: This same woman young women in those days. She at
Speaker 1: one point went canoeing on the Tamba River, and what
Speaker 1: she did was get dropped off right up upstream up
Speaker 1: halfway to a place called Tambo Crossing. I think there's
Speaker 1: a rock they called white Rock that stands out in
Speaker 1: a river bed and you can get into the river
Speaker 1: there with your canoe and you can hop in and
Speaker 1: go downstream. Fairly fast flowing river, and it's got a
Speaker 1: lot of rocks and bends in it. Quite an exciting
Speaker 1: trip at different times of the year, depending on the
Speaker 1: water flow. And on the trip down river, which might
Speaker 1: have been six or eight k's or ten k's, she
Speaker 1: noticed as she whipped past one particular patch of very
Speaker 1: heavy bush. The river wine through heavy bush, particularly on
Speaker 1: the wild side, on the east side, the sort of
Speaker 1: inland side, and she stooked sideways for a split second
Speaker 1: she saw a big black thing snaking into.
Speaker 2: The river and she realized what it was. It was
Speaker 2: a large.
Speaker 1: Bore polythene pipe what they called polypipe in the bush,
Speaker 1: and polly pipe is used universally in the country for irrigating,
Speaker 1: moving water around, irrigation, that sort of stuff, and this
Speaker 1: was quite a big one, you know, because a child's
Speaker 1: arm sort of thing, and it was poked into the river,
Speaker 1: and the other end was vanished into the bush, and
Speaker 1: she thought, that's funny. I wonder what that's doing out
Speaker 1: here in the middle of nowhere. And she didn't really
Speaker 1: think much about it for quite a while until the
Speaker 1: day came when there was a great shock and scandal
Speaker 1: in the district because the police had come and arrested
Speaker 1: their neighbor, Nick, the guy who called himself Nick the Riverman,
Speaker 1: Nick the Romanian, and they arrested him because someone had
Speaker 1: tipped them off that he had grown a large crop
Speaker 1: of cannabis upstream in the bush beside the Tambo, on
Speaker 1: the wild side of the Tamba, in the forest there.
Speaker 1: And indeed it turned out that he'd set himself.
Speaker 2: Up very well.
Speaker 1: He'd gone up a certain track and then down another
Speaker 1: certain smaller track and parked his vehicle. I think he
Speaker 1: had a ute, And then he had a homemade raft.
Speaker 2: That he'd set up so we could use it.
Speaker 1: We have some little drums and a bit of a
Speaker 1: deck or whatever, and he launched the raft and he used.
Speaker 2: The raft to move poly pipe.
Speaker 1: And other materials, a tent and different things. He needed
Speaker 1: tools and things downstream. I trust it was downstream I
Speaker 1: think to a patch of bush that was suitable for
Speaker 1: his purposes, and that is it allowed a certain amount
Speaker 1: of sun in there was a good spot to draw
Speaker 1: water from, and it was very isolated. There was no
Speaker 1: path into it, no track into it. And hence using
Speaker 1: the raft was a great thing because it meant he
Speaker 1: reached an area that no one would be driving or
Speaker 1: using motorbikes or even walking. And he had set up
Speaker 1: this rather complex and sophisticated dope growing plantation and he
Speaker 1: grew precisely two hundred and fifty eight plants. And we
Speaker 1: know this because he kept a diary, and not only
Speaker 1: that during the eight month growing season which preceded his
Speaker 1: arrest by two or three years. Two or three years
Speaker 1: before he was arrested, this good year for growing dope,
Speaker 1: it's an eight month season, and he had filmed himself
Speaker 1: regularly over the eight months and compile a three hour
Speaker 1: video in which he dubs himself Nick the Riverman. He
Speaker 1: doesn't actually film his own face for legal reasons. He
Speaker 1: explains good idea, Nick, but his voice is on the
Speaker 1: audio because he's explaining to an audience. I don't know
Speaker 1: which audience he thought he had, but he was explaining
Speaker 1: to whoever's watching what he's doing and how to grow it,
Speaker 1: why he did it this way and not that way,
Speaker 1: amount of fertilizer he used, etc.
Speaker 2: Etc. Etc.
Speaker 1: And it was a very detailed insight into how an
Speaker 1: illegal cannabis grower could grow cannabis in the Australian bush
Speaker 1: in East Gippsland at that particular time using what was
Speaker 1: to hand. It was such a good example of how.
Speaker 2: To do it.
Speaker 1: Then we'll get back to the real story in a minute,
Speaker 1: but it was such a good example of how to
Speaker 1: do it that the forensic police, the police forensic botanist,
Speaker 1: a female professor I think she is. She took that
Speaker 1: video at a later date after the court case that followed,
Speaker 1: and she took it to an international conference and screened
Speaker 1: parts of it to show her peers in the forensic
Speaker 1: botany business how good this guy was. So that's how
Speaker 1: good he was. Obviously he was caught because he was
Speaker 1: dubbed in. The police were tipped off and when they
Speaker 1: got there they arrested him at his heart already his shed,
Speaker 1: which he turned into quite a comfortable sort of cabin.
Speaker 1: They went back up to the spot on the river.
Speaker 1: They had to bush bash their way in no raft
Speaker 1: for them.
Speaker 2: So they had to park at the closest spot.
Speaker 1: And then work out where tohead and head across country
Speaker 1: through the bush and probably hit the river and walk
Speaker 1: down the river and find the spot. When they got there,
Speaker 1: they found the remains of the plantation. He found where
Speaker 1: he'd put up, you know, steaks, multiple steaks for each plant.
Speaker 2: They were so tall.
Speaker 1: He'd fed them so well with all this fertilizer and
Speaker 1: this stuff he'd made from the carp to fertilize them,
Speaker 1: that they'd grown between you know, more than four meters high,
Speaker 1: so that in the old money that's more than twelve
Speaker 1: foot so they're twelve fourteen to fifteen feet high, some
Speaker 1: of these plants with trunks at the bay as big
Speaker 1: as a man's arm. And the police were quite fascinated
Speaker 1: by what was left there. There was all the little
Speaker 1: bits of polly pipe that he had to trickle water
Speaker 1: into it. He'd actually, by hand, using shovels, dug things
Speaker 1: like rice paddies. He'd leveled out ground and he'd put
Speaker 1: done little banks around them so that he had all
Speaker 1: these regular depressions with little banks around them, just like
Speaker 1: rice paddies. And that's where he grew his dope. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure whether he would plant them on the high
Speaker 1: bit or the low bit, but he could fill the
Speaker 1: low bit with water. And he had a little two
Speaker 1: stroke pump. He used that to pump the water up
Speaker 1: into these depressions, and that would water his plants for
Speaker 1: several days at a time. He'd give them a really
Speaker 1: good drink every now and again. It was a very
Speaker 1: ingenious and carefully set up thing. He had a tent
Speaker 1: to sleep in, he had a tent to keep his
Speaker 1: food and all that sort of stuff in supplies, and
Speaker 1: he had a shed. He knocked up a shed to
Speaker 1: dry the cannabis when he harvested it. Now, after his
Speaker 1: arrest in early two thousand and four, the police were
Speaker 1: tipped off in late two thousand and three. They went
Speaker 1: in there, they found what they found. They dug around,
Speaker 1: they looked around for any sign of buried anything, probably
Speaker 1: looking for buried treasure, you'd imagine, and they found a barrel,
Speaker 1: and in a barrel they found the video, the three
Speaker 1: hour video, which is basically what got this guy convicted
Speaker 1: because when the police played it back there with the evidence,
Speaker 1: they found a diary which actually helped them as well
Speaker 1: because it had dates and places and times and the
Speaker 1: activities he'd been doing. And they found cannabis seeds among
Speaker 1: other things, and probably I think vegetable seeds as well,
Speaker 1: because he used to grow veggies to help support himself.
Speaker 1: So it was a very sophisticated set up, and sadly
Speaker 1: for him, he had left this evidence very neatly in
Speaker 1: the barrel and buried it so carefully that it was
Speaker 1: all preserved very well so that when the police uncovered
Speaker 1: it they could take it all to court and use
Speaker 1: it to get a conviction. And back in mid two
Speaker 1: thousand and four he went to trial in the County
Speaker 1: Court held at Bensdale, and Judge Jeffrey Chettle, well known
Speaker 1: judge around Victoria, now retired, was the judge and a
Speaker 1: pretty experienced and seasoned judge. And when it was put
Speaker 1: to him by Nick, the Riverman's lawyer, who was trying hard,
Speaker 1: it was put to the judge that Nick had actually
Speaker 1: lost interest in the dope crop and had let the
Speaker 1: plants rot because it had a change of heart and
Speaker 1: had decided not to sell he dope on.
Speaker 2: The wholesale market. Judge Chttel I think did not believe that.
Speaker 2: He preferred to believe that these.
Speaker 1: Police evidence and indicators that this was about one and
Speaker 1: a half million dollars worth of cannabis at street prices,
Speaker 1: but that he probably sold at wholesale to people in
Speaker 1: Melbourne for around a half a million dollar mark, which
Speaker 1: is not a bad sum of money for eight months work.
Speaker 1: When you're camping in a shed at Bruthen Back what
Speaker 1: is now more than twenty years ago, it's getting close
Speaker 1: to quarter of a century ago. And half a million
Speaker 1: dollars cash was quite a bit of money. And the
Speaker 1: smart money says that our friend Nick got all or
Speaker 1: most of that money. And so that judge, Judge Chttle
Speaker 1: sentenced him to some four years and ten months, almost
Speaker 1: five years. There were many charges and one of them
Speaker 1: he had a loaded rifle and ammunition and all sorts
Speaker 1: of things. So there was a bit to charge him
Speaker 1: with four years and ten months of which he had
Speaker 1: to serve a minimum of three years. Now he serves
Speaker 1: you three years. While he's inside, he studies up more.
Speaker 1: He's a good student. Clever guy, studies up gets another
Speaker 1: I think caught a culture qualification and an Australian Borah
Speaker 1: culture qualification which means that when he gets out, he
Speaker 1: goes and works, among other places, he works for one
Speaker 1: of the power companies clearing trees from under the power lines.
Speaker 1: He got a job with them and clearing firebreaks and
Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff. So he had quite a
Speaker 1: good job after he got out of jail, as he
Speaker 1: actually had before.
Speaker 2: All this dope growing business. It had a pretty good job.
Speaker 1: Back in the early nineties with the Forests Commission. He'd
Speaker 1: worked at Alexandra with a Forest Commission as a forestar
Speaker 1: despite his relatively poor English, and that come unglued because
Speaker 1: back in the early to mid nineties he decided to
Speaker 1: go out on his own and have a go at
Speaker 1: business and he wanted to take over or start up
Speaker 1: a plant nursery I think maybe up at Alexandra, but
Speaker 1: somewhere anyway. And he'd borrowed money or whatever, and at
Speaker 1: a gone belly up it hadn't worked, and so he'd
Speaker 1: lost money. And that's what took him to brew them
Speaker 1: to a place that was real cheap to buy something
Speaker 1: and where he could use the skills that he had
Speaker 1: to grow dope.
Speaker 2: He clearly saw it as a way to get out of.
Speaker 1: Debt and get himself a stake to get another start
Speaker 1: in his new country. Meanwhile, back in the nineties early nineties,
Speaker 1: his Roumanian wife and little daughter had eventually come out
Speaker 1: to be with him. Sadly, the separation of two or
Speaker 1: three years didn't make their relationship. When he's stronger, and
Speaker 1: after a year, his wife, who I think could not
Speaker 1: speak English, had left him, and she must have stayed
Speaker 1: around Victoria, because I know the daughter grew up in
Speaker 1: Victoria and to this day is in.
Speaker 2: Victoria, and he's quite friendly with her father.
Speaker 1: And we know that because she gave some sort of
Speaker 1: evidence at his most recent trial, which is the second
Speaker 1: part of the story. Because our mate, the Riverman, he
Speaker 1: does his three years back after Judge Chettle sentences him
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four. So around late two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, he's out and about again. He picks up
Speaker 1: work as I just mentioned, for one of the energy
Speaker 1: companies doing the power line clearing, and he's working away.
Speaker 1: His wife of course has left him and he goes
Speaker 1: back at some point to Brewthen. Now whether he got
Speaker 1: back his original property, I'm not sure what happened there,
Speaker 1: but anyway, I know that he went back up there
Speaker 1: because he had went back to Romania a sees folks
Speaker 1: who he hadn't seen for a long time, and he
Speaker 1: went over there and he met up with an old
Speaker 1: childhood friend, a female friend, married her and brought her
Speaker 1: to Australia and he took her up to his converted
Speaker 1: shed at bruden which was where somebody that I know
Speaker 1: met him and her, and they said, the poor woman,
Speaker 1: she couldn't speak.
Speaker 2: A word of English.
Speaker 1: She was really nice and she was a very skilled cook,
Speaker 1: great cook. But she's living in a converted shed on
Speaker 1: the edge of the bush, no friends, no one she
Speaker 1: could really talk to except him. And the day that
Speaker 1: the person I know and her partner had lunch or
Speaker 1: dinner there, they said the food was spectacular, but clearly
Speaker 1: the wife was not all that happy, and they weren't
Speaker 1: when later on that wife went back to Romania to
Speaker 1: look after her sick mother, and she stayed there, and
Speaker 1: of course COVID intervened in twenty nineteen and she didn't
Speaker 1: come back. And so i'll mate Nick the river man.
Speaker 1: Here he is during Covid. He's lost whatever job he had,
Speaker 1: he's got no money, COVID's closed everything down. His wife's
Speaker 1: back in Romania, and he's not feeling too good about things,
Speaker 1: and he decides in twenty twenty two, this is about
Speaker 1: twenty two years after his previous attempt, he decides he'll
Speaker 1: have another go at the dope. So there he is
Speaker 1: up there again. Somebody in authority gets a tip off, perhaps,
Speaker 1: but I don't think he any longer has the land
Speaker 1: with the shed on it. And this time he goes
Speaker 1: back up there because he's familiar with the district and
Speaker 1: he's full time in the bush. He's got a tent,
Speaker 1: he's got a ute, he's got a rifle, he's got
Speaker 1: a telephone, and he's got a little scooter, a little
Speaker 1: on the scooter, and he's living in a tent in
Speaker 1: the bush, just doing the best he can. And the
Speaker 1: relevant state authorities, the people that run the forests, whoever
Speaker 1: long and interesting name, they went up there because they
Speaker 1: must have known he was camping in the bush or
Speaker 1: someone was, and they gave and they find the tent and.
Speaker 2: He's not there.
Speaker 1: Next day the police from Bensdale turn up because while
Speaker 1: the departmental.
Speaker 2: Officers are there, they realize that there's.
Speaker 1: I think one hundred and eighty eight cannabis seedlings in
Speaker 1: tubes down.
Speaker 2: By the river. So he's back at it, they tell
Speaker 2: the police.
Speaker 1: Next morning, the police turn up fairly early, and there's
Speaker 1: Nick the riverman. Oh friend, He's standing outside his tent
Speaker 1: when the police turn up. Han't given any resistance. He's
Speaker 1: too wise for that. There's the cannabis. There's the loaded
Speaker 1: rifle in the ute, which is illegal, not that they
Speaker 1: thought he was terribly dangerous or anything. And there's Nick
Speaker 1: full of piss and wind because when the police get
Speaker 1: him to the police station and interviewing this turned into
Speaker 1: a bit of a marathon, much to the amusement of
Speaker 1: the judge who later ruled on the whole case. They
Speaker 1: filled fifteen hundred pages with the interview, in which, you know,
Speaker 1: several more than a thousand questions were asked because Nick
Speaker 1: kept raving onto the police about the medicinal benefits of cannabis,
Speaker 1: how his grandmother back in Romania was a natural path
Speaker 1: or something like that, and how he is prepared to
Speaker 1: die in jail to defend his belief that cannabis is
Speaker 1: a wonderful thing and everyone should have free access to it.
Speaker 1: The government should be handing out cannabis well to everybody
Speaker 1: who's in pain or in need or anything else, and
Speaker 1: you can do everything with it. It's wonderful. And he
Speaker 1: gave this relatively obsessive and eccentric dire tribe to the
Speaker 1: police until their noses bled. And this was so obvious
Speaker 1: that it came through that the judge realized what had happened.
Speaker 1: And the judge commented on it when he was running
Speaker 1: the second trial of our man, Nick the Riverman, and
Speaker 1: the judge I suspect. He was not quite as flinty
Speaker 1: as Jeff Chettle, who was the judge in his first trial.
Speaker 1: This judge tended to think that our man was a
Speaker 1: bit of a green thumb. He was interested in his
Speaker 1: views on the medical benefits of cannabis and remarked on
Speaker 1: a little riley, perhaps rolling his eyes a bit. But
Speaker 1: in the end he didn't really jump on Nick the
Speaker 1: Riverman the way he could have. He said, now you're
Speaker 1: fifty nine years old. You're a father, a devoted father,
Speaker 1: a devoted grandfather, and we have evidence to that effect.
Speaker 1: You are a resourceful man. You're a very hard working man.
Speaker 1: You're quite a clever man. You appear from our psychological
Speaker 1: reports not to be mad. You don't seem to have
Speaker 1: any mental illness, despite your eccentricities are telling inside that one.
Speaker 1: He's not mad, just a little eccentric, or at least
Speaker 1: can pretend to be. And he said, I will give
Speaker 1: you sixteen months for having one hundred and eighty eight
Speaker 1: cannabis plants, which if you have one hundred plants that's commercial.
Speaker 1: You've got one hundred and eighty eight. I will give
Speaker 1: you four months for having the loaded unregistered rifle and ammunition,
Speaker 1: but I will reduce that to one month cumulative. So
Speaker 1: the total sentence for you, mister Pucia, is seventeen months,
Speaker 1: but that's a head sentence. That's the most you can serve.
Speaker 1: The minimum you can serve with parole would be ten months.
Speaker 1: And you have already been in custody since your arrest
Speaker 1: for three hundred and twenty one days and that covers
Speaker 1: that ten months. So you just to be clear, mister Pussaer,
Speaker 1: just to be clear, you are paroled now you can walk.
Speaker 1: So he walked out of Bensdale Court late last year
Speaker 1: a freeman. And that is the story of Nick the Riverman,
Speaker 1: the Romanian refugee who was caught twice growing dope in
Speaker 1: large commercial qualities in Victoria and has luckily been able
Speaker 1: to go back on the street and with any luck,
Speaker 1: stay out of trouble. And so he's got an opportunity
Speaker 1: to go back to normal gardening, you know, be and
Speaker 1: things like that. There is another thing he might be
Speaker 1: able to do. His neighbors from the old days remember
Speaker 1: something he did very well. They said he made beautiful,
Speaker 1: a grade spirits. He must have had a still set
Speaker 1: up and he could make snaps, brandy and vodka. And
Speaker 1: they said he was very very good at it, ums
Speaker 1: high quality stuff. Perhaps he should become a boutique spirit maker.
Speaker 1: It's all the rage I'd buy his gin. Thanks for listening.
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