Find led to forgery

Press, 7 August 1976, Page 5

Find led to forgery

An unemployed Hungarian pay clerk pleaded guilty to 35 charges of forgery and false pretence involving $1232 in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday before Mr H. J. Evans, S.M. Gvorgy Illes, aged 38, was convicted and remanded on bail to August 18 for sentence on 16 charges of forgery, one of theft, and 18 of false pretence. The offences occurred at Wellington and Christchurch branches of the Post Office

Savings Bank during July. Sergeant J. C. Rowe said that the defendant had found an Inland Revenue cheque made out to Christopher M. Sutton for $627.30 lying in Abel Smith Street, Wellington.

The defendant had kept the cheque and had opened a P. 0.5.8. account in that name, depositing the cheque in the account

The defendant had then gone to a number of savings bank branches in Wellington and then in Christchurch, and had forged withdrawal receipts and had withdrawn sums of money. The balance in the pass book had been altered by the defendant to show that there was more money in the account. BURGLARY Owen Leslie Pugh, aged 53, unemployed, was convicted on charges of burgling a motel, theft of a coat, and failing to comply with the conditions of probation. He was remanded in custody, on pleas of guilty to each charge, to August 16 for a probation report and sentence. Sergeant Rowe said that Pugh forced a quarter-light window of a car on July 8 and took a coat worth $4O. When questioned by the police on July 29 he said he had been given the coat by the Salvation Army a year earlier. On July 28, Pugh took a blanket off the washing line of a motel in Ferry Road and used it to punch a hole in a motel unit window. He then took a colour television set, radio, electric blanket and other goods worth a total of $1029, said Sergeant Rowe. On July 29 he approached a person in a hotel, offering to sell the television set. He was apprehended by the police after selling the set. (Before Mr B. A. Palmer, S.M.) FORGED PRESCRIPTION A 19-year-old typist, whose name was suppressed, was fined $lOO on a charge of forging a prescription for palfium.

The girl was charged with forging two prescriptions and with causing two chemists to act upon the prescriptions as if they were genuine. When ordering final suppression of name, the Magistrate said that there was a suggestion of a drug problem in the case and there would always be people willing to supply drugs to those who they thought were weak. Counsel (Mr D. H. Stri-

nger) said that the offence of forgery, which was obviously drug oriented, was of an experimental nature and that the forgery itself was very bad, as even the chemist could not understand the prescription. The prescriptions, which were written on forms obtained from a doctor’s surgery by a friend of the defendant had been taken to

two city pharmacies, but in each case the chemist had been suspicious and the police had been contacted. PROBATION Michael Charles Graham, aged 27, a driver (Mr C. K. Osborne) was sentenced to 18 months probation and ordered to pay restitution when he appeared for sentence on two charges of theft of goods worth a total of $325. Graham had previously admitted taking the goods from houses he rented at Pines Beach in June. The thefts were discovered by a relative of the owners of the house.