Dumb, dumber and their discount prison sentences

Sometimes a crime stands out and cops or lawyers will alert journalists to it. I was told about this one because of certain humorous elements. One fact that did not make it into the printed story was that the planning for the heist occurred at a famous Sydney institution, the Snake Pit at La Perouse.

LAST week Hassan Droubi pleaded guilty to one of the less successful heists in the annals of Sydney crime. On March 26, 2006, he and his cousin Richard Droubi, armed with a small pistol and a rusty shotgun, robbed the Soho Bar and Lounge in the Piccadilly Hotel in Kings Cross.

It was an inside job: at 7.30am, the two bandits were let in the hotel's back door by the manager, Nimrod Nagy. During the robbery they tied up Nagy, no doubt hoping he would wait for a while before giving the alarm. But the manager, possibly carried away by the excitement, broke free and called police just a few minutes later.

The getaway car was Hassan's wife's vehicle, a silver Ford Escape, which they had parked around the corner. The cousins were keen to get away, not just to escape police but because on the way to the job they had dropped off a friend at the Gateway, a gentleman's club in the inner west, and were due to pick him up on the way home.

Some $80,000 was stuffed into a computer bag, and as the Droubis ran down the road, notes and rolls of coins started to fall out. A group of people began to pick up the money. The police who turned up had no trouble finding the bandits' trail.

When Hassan and Richard reached the getaway vehicle they discovered the keys were in the bottom of the bag, underneath the loot. With the police hot on their heels there was no time to dig them out. The cousins split up, abandoning items of clothing as they fled. These included the bright pink rubber gloves Hassan had worn during the robbery. Richard jumped a fence, not realising there was a 15 metre drop on the far side. He broke his ankle and was apprehended soon after, along with $61,000 of the stolen money.

Hassan escaped the police. You have to wonder if at this point he considered the problem posed by the presence of the family Ford Escape near the Piccadilly Hotel. Calls were made to Hassan's residence on a mobile phone Richard had been using the previous night. A minute after the second of these calls, someone at Hassan's house called 000 and announced the vehicle had been stolen. It was found six days later in Bexley by a friend of Hassan. There was no sign of forced entry.

The investigation was headed by Detective Senior Constable Lawrence Milburn, and Hassan was arrested and charged. Until this week he denied involvement in the robbery, despite the fact his DNA was found on the inside of the gloves. He claimed Richard had taken the family vehicle without permission.

Richard Droubi and Nimrod Nagy pleaded guilty some time ago and are now in prison. Before the robbery, Richard had been a drug addict, and gambled heavily on the poker machines in the Soho Bar and Lounge. One night he borrowed $7000 from Nagy to cover his debts. When he could not repay it, Nagy suggested the robbery.

The judge who sentenced Richard noted that the accused had used cocaine and ecstasy almost daily for the previous seven years, and "committed this offence when he was under the influence of ice and had not slept for many days". At Hassan's committal hearing, Richard was asked why he had decided to engage in the robbery.

"At the time, I was - I was in - in - in the wrong - like, at the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.

On the night before he had committed the robbery he had been at his girlfriend's house.

"What's her name?" asked the Crown prosecutor.

"Susie."

"What's her other name?"

"I don't know. I never got to that part, asking her her second name."

Hassan Droubi's admission of guilt came after weeks of tortuous delay, including changes of solicitor and barrister. His trial was due to begin in August but was postponed when Droubi said he was too ill to come to court. Last week there were further delays as his barrister, Tony Barber, made yet more requests for postponements and changes to the charge. These were vigorously contested by Crown prosecutor Sarah Huggett. At one point Barber said his client did not fully understand the charge against him and Judge Robert Hulme, SC, until then demonstrating almost superhuman patience, read out the indictment (a simple document of two or three sentences in plain language) and asked a little tersely just what part of it was unclear after all this time.

Hassan Droubi is likely to ask for a discount off his sentence, possibly between 10 to 15 per cent, for pleading guilty at this late stage. Richard Droubi received a much bigger discount (in the range of 20 to 25 per cent) because he admitted his guilt shortly after his arrest, thereby saving the state the considerable cost of a trial plus all the pre-trial work done by lawyers and police.

The discount system is not widely known to the public, but it is an important part of the criminal justice system. Says Huggett: "The idea is to encourage accused persons to plead guilty as early as possible. One major element is the saving of the expense of a trial. If Hassan Droubi hadn't pleaded guilty this week, we'd now be in a two- to three-week jury trial, with the need to call up to 80 witnesses. In other cases, for example, sexual assault, a plea of guilty can spare the victim the ordeal of giving evidence."

So ends this most curious saga. At Hassan's committal, Richard was asked to explain their biggest blunder, leaving the keys at the bottom of the bag with all the money in it.

"I think I was falling over myself, to be quite honest," he said. "That's how drug intoxicated I was ... It was a bad time for me. I wasn't stable."

-- Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 2008

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