UNDERCOVER STING SNARED EX-LAWYER

LAWYER And Hockey Star Turned Drugs Smuggler Jimmy Neale Was Caught In A
Classic Customs Sting.

IT was a trap - and Jimmy Neale walked right into it.

As he unloaded his illegal cargo of ecstasy tablets he was unaware police
and customs officials were already surrounding him.

Neale had smuggled the 271,000 tablets - the largest seizure of the drug in
its pure form in Australian history - into the country in a shipment of
wine. Of the 940 cases imported, 20 contained ecstasy tablets.

Customs officers used sophisticated analysis methods to target a sea
container sailing from France to Australia.

Before the £5 million haul had even arrived, the net was closing in around
Neale.

Once the shipment arrived, Australian Federal Police discovered stashed into
20 cases of the wine were 105.5kg of tablets of 50% pure ecstasy from the
Netherlands, worth an estimated $14.8 million Australian dollars on the
streets of Sydney.

Customs detected the drug using x-ray and particle analysis after it arrived
at a Sydney container terminal, shipped from Marseilles, France.

Before it was officially unloaded, the police replaced the tablets with
dummies, and mounted an 11-day surveillance operation which cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars.

Officers finally swooped on December 8, 2000, as Neale delivered the 'fake'
drugs to Australian bartender Bruce Ridgway.

In July 2000, Neale and Ridgway had flown from Hong Kong to France to
personally organise the consignment, visiting St-Emilion, a pretty French
village on the northern slopes of the Dordogne valley outside Bordeaux.

After discovering the drugs, federal agents learned that Neale, 56, and his
fiancee Claire Graham, 33, had checked into Sydney's Marriott Hotel on
November 21, as representatives of JLC Fine Wines Ltd of Happy Valley, Hong
Kong.

On December 6, they switched to the plush Regent for two nights. Two days
later, Neale had 90 cases of wine delivered to Millers Wine Storage in
Sydney's suburb of Alexandria.

But for someone who called himself a wine importer, Neale actually knew
little about quality.

Inhabitants of Saint-Emilion do know their grapes after more than 1,000
years of wine-making.

Certainly, St-Emilion purveyors did not much rate the 'quaffers' Neale chose
to mask what remains Australia's largest pure ecstasy haul.

His selection of 940 cases of Grands Vins de Bordeaux, the vineyard experts
told the Australian Federal Police, were more vin ordinaire than top export
drops.

In fact, federal agents would later learn that the wine imported to Sydney
in late November 2000 was not even appropriately labelled for Australia. The
cost of meeting local labelling standards would have made the cheap wine
importation unviable.

However Neale knew that the contents of the crates could make him more money
than any wine importation.

On December 8, Neale returned to Millers Wine Storage and collected two
wooden crates containing dummy tablets.

With his hotel room bugged and an audio tape secreted near a payphone at the
Regent, Neale was overheard making arrangements with Ridgway and talking
about the drugs during phonecalls to Hong Kong and Malaysia.

After collecting the cases, he was heard on another call saying "everything
is all right."

That evening he met Ridgway in the Regent's bar.

Australian Federal Police agents videotaped him in his room stooped over the
bed removing the wine bottles from the crates and taking out the substituted
ecstasy packets.

He then replaced the wine bottles, using a towel to wipe down the packets
and wine bottles he'd touched, returned the boxes to a cupboard and stuffed
the tablets into a briefcase.

The briefcase was later handed on to Ridgway, who was arrested by Australian
Federal Police officers after leaving the Regent.

Agents swooped on Neale and Ms Graham when they returned to their hotel
room.

Ms Graham denied all knowledge of the drugs and flew back to Hong Kong the
next day.

Judge Penny Hock said earlier this month she believed Ridgway, 54, was to
have acted as distributor for the $1.08 million worth of the drugs he had
been handed.

He was sentenced to the maximum of 12 years in prison after admitting
possessing a commercial quantity of ecstasy and being knowingly concerned in
importing the amount.

Neale claimed he was forced to import the drugs by criminal figures in Asia
to whom he owed money.

He pleaded not guilty but was convicted after a three-week trial at Sydney
District Court in December 2001.

He had moved to Hong Kong in the late 1990s.

On his arrest in Sydney, Neale declined to assist authorities further.

But an Australian Federal Police spokesman said the operation had led on to
breakthroughs overseas.

He said: "Working with others in Hong Kong, Singapore, London and The Hague,
we have been able to target further operations.

"It has helped identify patterns and organisations which have already
yielded arrests and will continue to do so."