Thinking of rasPutin…
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is unveiling his fourth budget tonight, and it's all about the "cost of living."
When Bennet Schwartz slept, it was with his arms crossed over his chest. It made him feel safe, the 34-year-old told his partner early in 2021.
The mining consultant and Sydney Grammar graduate from the city’s moneyed east had reason to want to protect himself.
An extraordinary trajectory had taken him from one of the most prestigious schools to prison, wrenched off a flight by police in front of his horrified fiancee two weeks before his wedding.
His 2018 conviction for importing cocaine resulted in him spending four hard years in jail – something he had dodged in 2013 when he was convicted of pseudoephedrine importation.
Despite developing post-traumatic stress disorder after being set upon with a sandwich press and stabbed in jail, police say Schwartz hadn’t learned his lesson: by August 2020, while still on parole, he was back to his old tricks.
Operation Birdlip
Engaged to be married and working for Rio Tinto while studying mining engineering at the University of NSW, Schwartz spent 2015 blissfully unaware that his phone was being tapped and his movements tracked by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. By this time, he had also accumulated a vast property portfolio in Brisbane’s wealthy inner-city suburb of New Farm.
As he obsessively checked logistics company DHL’s website – at various locations including from his house, on the UNSW Wi-Fi on a computer named Bennet’s laptop, at his future in-laws’ home, and from Mongolia, Manila, France and Hong Kong – police were watching.
When a package claiming to bear glass sculptures arrived in Sydney from California’s North Hollywood in August 2015, Operation Birdlip investigators seized it.
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