A Bunbury grandfather and businessman has been found guilty of smuggling heroin into Australia after a trial in Sydney heard how he was promised over $18 million to transport a camp bed into the country that was stuffed full of drugs.
Barry James Calverley, 70, told a Sydney jury last week that he had no idea that he was smuggling drugs through customs when he agreed to transport the package on a flight from Laos in south-east Asia in January 2024.
Calverley, a mining consultant, father of three and grandfather, often travelled for work and told the jury he had previously been scammed out of $250,000 that led him to become depressed and caused problems in his marriage.
When he received an email “out of the blue” promising him millions in exchange for signing some documents in Laos, he thought it may have been some sort of compensation from the scammers.
Calverley had been forced to sell his Bunbury home after the scam and was struggling to get a new consultancy business off the ground.
He had been emailed by a Rene Lopez Jnr weeks earlier and told he was entitled to millions of dollars – originally $18 million but then decreased to $12.5 million. She messaged him over Whatsapp and asked him to sign documents saying an investor would pay for his flights and hotel, even sending him money.
When he arrived he was asked to bring a “little gift” back to the “paymaster” in Australia. He told the jury that he insisted to the contact he would not do anything illegal but was happy to carry cigarettes or alcohol. When he was asked to carry a camping stretcher he claimed he opened its storage bag and looked inside briefly but did not closely examine its contents.
Inside was five kilograms of heroin with a street value of $2.25 million.
Calverley’s lawyers argued that he was the innocent, gullible victim of an organised crime syndicate.
On Wednesday, a jury announced that they thought otherwise, finding him guilty of importing a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug, namely, heroin.
“I want you to catch the mongrels, because they’ve set me up,” he told Border Force officers after his arrest.
Calverley will be sentenced at a later date. The maximum penalty for the crime is life imprisonment.
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