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Former hockey star faces jail for drug smuggling racket

Kathy Marks
Tuesday 27 August 2002 00:00 BST
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A former England hockey international and disgraced lawyer nicknamed "Champagne Jimmy" faces a life sentence in Australia after being convicted of smuggling £5m of ecstasy tablets into Sydney hidden in bottles of French red wine.

James Neale, 56, from Colchester, Essex, masterminded an attempt to import 270,000 tablets in a consignment of wine two years ago. The drug seizure was Australia's biggest ecstasy haul. Neale's partner in the venture, an Australian barman, Bruce Ridgway, was jailed for 12 years at Sydney District Court.

Neale, who played hockey for England 42 times in the 70s and 80s and used to be married to a former beauty queen, was told by Judge Penny Hock that he would probably be jailed for life under Australia's tough new anti-drug laws. She deferred sentence for him to find a new lawyer after he sacked his legal team.

Neale, who earned his nickname for turning up at hockey matches with a case of Moet and Chandon in the boot of his sports car, was at the centre of England's biggest law firm collapse.

He was jailed for three years at the Old Bailey in 1986 and banned from practising as a solicitor after stealing more than £1m from client accounts to fund a fraud involving scores of luxury cars.

His Colchester law practice crashed with debts of £1.3m and the Law Society was forced to bail out his clients. His second wife, Rosemary, a former Miss Great Britain finalist and millionaire's daughter, stood by him but the marriage broke up after he was jailed again in 1995 for credit card fraud. He was also accused of handling stolen paintings worth £2m.

Neale moved to Hong Kong. Mrs Neale, a former model, was battered to death in 1999 by their 21-year-old son, Jonathan, while she was visiting him at a hostel in Colchester. He had a history of schizophrenia.

He was detained indefinitely under the Mental Health Act. Neale did not return to England for his former wife's funeral.

While in Hong Kong, he planned the operation to smuggle ecstasy into Australia in 940 bottles of claret. Customs officers detected the drugs, which were from the Netherlands, by using X-ray and particle analysis at the Sydney container terminal. Australian Federal Police replaced the tablets with fakes and arrested Neale after 11 days of surveillance.

Neale had flown from Hong Kong to France to organise the shipment. He had travelled with Ridgway, who was supposed to distribute the drug in Australia.

The court was told Neale and his fiancée, Claire Graham, 33, checked into a Sydney hotel, posing as Hong Kong wine merchants and had the wine delivered to a storage facility. With his hotel room bugged and a bug hidden near a hotel payphone, he was overheard making telephone calls in relation to the ecstasy.

Neale collected two wooden crates containing the dummy tablets and was videotaped in his hotel room removing the tablets from wine bottles and stuffing them into a briefcase. He then gave the briefcase to Ridgway, who was arrested while leaving the hotel.

Neale, who played hockey for England in two World Cup campaigns, claimed he was forced to import the drug by unnamed Asian crime figures to whom he owed money.

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