'Mr Asia' trial Chauffeur relates cocaine snorting

Press, 15 May 1981, Page 7

'Mr Asia' trial Chauffeur relates cocaine snorting

NZPA Lancaster The alleged heroin supplier, Alexander Sinclair, would not want his London chauffeur to do “anything like” injecting drugs. Instead Sinclair explained that cocaine was snorted up the nose, the chauffeur told the "Mr Asia” trial yesterday. Sylvester Alphonsus Pidgeon, aged 44, said he was at a London nightclub with Sinclair when the New Zealander offered him “a bit” of cocaine. “I told him I don’t believe in sticking needles into ,my arm,’' Pidgeon said. “He said ‘you silly bastard,, I wouldn’t ask you to do anything like that.’ He said you snort it up your nose.” Pidgeon, a former council security officer, said he took the cocaine into a toilet at the club and sniffed it through a straw. “It made me feel very active,” he said. Sinclair hired Pidgeon as a £3O : ($4B) a day chauffeur after moving to London from Sydney, where the prosecution says he ran a heroin operation that moved millions of dollars worth of the drug into Australia and New Zealand.

Pidgeon told the drugs conspiracy and murder trial that it was not his place to ask why Sinclair used different names. Neither did he ask why Sinclair wanted to borrow his spectacles Oh an occasion when the Crown says the New Zealander had a passport photograph taken.

The chauffeur’s job was to show Sinclair and others the sights of London and to run messages, he said in evidence from the witness box at the start of his defence case. Pidgeon also recalled driving, two other men from Australia, Jimmy McDonald and Roberto Fionna, around London and to the nearby Sand Own racecourse. McDonald was in fact a Sydney heroin dealer, James Shepherd, while Fionna was the manager of a restaurant in Sydney and a co-Conspira-tor, the Court has heard. Pidgeon said that McDonald talked about gambling and once showed him a leaflet of a business in Australia he was just starting. “Did you ever hear any discussion with those people connected with drugs?” Pidgeon’s counsel, Mr Thomas Field-Fisher, asked. “No,” the defendant re-

plied. Pidgeon said Of Sinclair.“It was obvious he Was a very wealthy man. I have never seen so much money., “He said he had a fishing, fleet or fishing boat overseas and also had interests in race horses as well, id Australia?’ The Londoner was given the job after approaching Frederick Russell and then Leila Barclay, fellow accused in the case.

, Mrs Barclay offered him a job as driver to a “rich Australian,” he said. At the time Pidgeon was disqualified from driving and had

also been suspended from his job.

“I decided to take a chance and take the job driving,” he said, adding later that Sinclair did not know he did not have a licence.

On a typical day he would run messages or take Sinclair’s common-law wife, Maria Muhari, and their son, Jarrod, out sight-seeing and shopping.

They saw Madame Tussaud’s wax-works and the Tower of London. “1 think we .went to Windsor Safari Park about nine times,” he said. He also carried associates of Sinclair to and from London airport, including Christopher Martin Johnstone, the Aucklander who became a South-East Aslan drugs buyer before his murder late in 1979. Pidgeon said he once picked up airline tickets for Sinclair, two in the name of Muhari and one in the name of Peter Heyfron, which the New Zealander admits he used on a trip to the United States He was also given transfer papers relating to the Mercedes Benz car which he drove around London owned by Sinclair in the name of Robert Gorrie. "Did you ask why he used that name?” Mr Field-Fisher said referring to both instances. — “No,” Pidgeon said. . “Why not?” - "Because it wasn’t my place to ask.”