After almost three years in custody awaiting trial, Valentino Fries was acquitted by a Sydney jury earlier this month and immediately released after the Crown had brought allegations that Mr Fries was part of a conspiracy to import 1.4 tonnes of cocaine into Australia on sailing vessel the Elakha, the largest such importation in Australian history.
As barrister Michael Ainsworth told the jury, Mr Fries was an incredible sailor. Born in Switzerland in 1961, he was taught to sail by his father and ended up becoming a paragliding champion and house painter. He emigrated to Fiji some 20 years ago and ran charter sailing trips around Fiji where he would sail with just a watch and sextant, keeping meticulous logbooks. He was also in the employ of wealthy yacht owners and had sailed from Hobart to Alaska, all around the Mediterranean and around the Caribbean, covering vast distances.
The trial proceeded before Judge Zahra for over two weeks in the Sydney Downing Centre where Mr Fries raised the defence of duress, saying that co-accused Hamish Thompson, the owner of the Elakha, had threatened him and his family if Fries did not comply with his direction to sail the Elakha to a location in the South Pacific to retrieve the 1.4 tonnes of cocaine from a “mothership” to then bring to Australia. Fries gave evidence and was extensively cross-examined, but he was adamant that he had not conspired with the co-accuseds, he never wanted anything to do with importing cocaine, he had pleaded with Thompson to return to New Zealand and he said to Thompson that it was doomed to fail anyway as the French Navy had previously stopped and boarded the Elakha only months earlier meaning the authorities must have been tracking the vessel.
As was evident throughout the trial, there was a real dearth evidence which suggested Mr Fries was involved in the conspiracy of his co-offenders, despite three-years of extensive police surveillance including thousands of hours of telephone intercepts, listening devices and optical surveillance in which Fries is mentioned just a handful of times. Fries had been fully compliant with police, had given extensive interviews and turned over his iPad password revealing three years of emails and browsing history. In short, had nothing to hide. Mr Fries gave evidence that he had no need to be involved in drugs when he had no debt, was to inherit a large sum of money from his late uncle in Switzerland and in a few years was to receive a Swiss pension the equivalent of $4,000 per month, more than enough to live a comfortable life with his wife in Fiji.
Barrister Michael Ainsworth persuasively made the point to the jury in his closing address that Mr Thompson, along with other co-accuseds, must have had high-level contacts with South American drug cartels to have been able to collect and subsequently import into Australia, $500 million of cocaine on “credit” with no money upfront. This, we submitted, lended tremendous credence to Thompson’s threat and, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of nautical miles from the nearest land, Mr Fries’ actions in complying with Thompson after that threat were reasonable.
Michael Ainsworth is a founding member of Samuel Griffiths Chambers in Sydney. He was instructed at trial by Paul McGirr and Robert Candelori of McGirr Lawyers.