Fifteen years after he was found guilty of 28 child sexual assault and drug charges, disgraced former Swansea MP Milton Orkopoulos has been found guilty of 26 more, a jury left with no doubt the 65-year-old had abused his power and preyed on four young boys, providing them with drugs and cash so he could sexually abuse them.
Orkopoulos has spent the last five weeks on trial in Sydney's Downing Centre District Court accused of indecently and sexually assaulting four boys at Belmont, Caves Beach and Swansea between the mid-1990s and early 2000s, including two who attended his electorate office to ask him about building a skate park.
He had pleaded not guilty to 28 charges including aggravated indecent assault, committing an act of indecency, supplying a prohibited drug, sexual intercourse with a person aged between 10 and 16 and doing an act with intent to pervert the course of justice.
But on Wednesday, after deliberating for a little over a day, the jury returned and found him guilty of 26 of the 28 charges, including 11 counts of sexual intercourse with a person aged between 10 and 16 and multiple counts of indecent assault and supplying cannabis.
He was acquitted of one count of supplying cannabis to a boy and of perverting the course of justice for allegedly attempting to get the boy to retract his statement.
During the trial each of the victims claimed Orkopoulos had indecently or sexually assaulted them when they were children growing up in Lake Macquarie and each said he had provided them with cannabis, heroin, money or cigarettes.
During her closing address, Crown prosecutor Cate Dodds told the jury the former politician would encounter the boys in Lake Macquarie, including through his role as an MP and before that Lake Macquarie councillor, speak to them about using drugs, take them to an isolated spot where they would use cannabis and then he would sexually assault them.
"It's all part of the accused modus operandi," she told the jury. "You might think it's a pattern of behaviour to provide young boys with drugs, sexually assault them when they are drug affected and keep them coming back for more."
Ms Dodds said each of the boys were "shocked, confused and embarrassed" after they were abused and did not tell anyone because of Mr Orkopoulos position of power and because he gave them money or drugs and told them to keep it a secret or that no one would believe them.
"None of them say anything," Ms Dodds said. "He tells them not to say anything so they don't and he keeps doing it, getting more brazen in the belief that no one is going to challenge respectable, friendly Milton Orkopoulos, councillor of the east ward, MP for Swansea and ultimately minister for aboriginal affairs."
Ms Dodds said one boy, who says he was repeatedly sexually assaulted after speaking to Mr Orkopoulos about funding for a skatepark in Swansea, trusted Mr Orkopoulos because he was an adult and was "meant to be a model citizen".
"Like a wolf in sheep's clothing, affable, easygoing, friendly, approachable," Ms Dodds said. "Milton Orkopoulos, an adult cloaked with the respectability and importance of his position in the community, has preyed on [this boy] who did not see the danger until it was too late and failed to appreciate its seriousness."
Orkopoulos took the stand to repeatedly deny the allegations, as he had in 2008, and did his best to talk his way out of a plethora of damning evidence.
At one point, despite the convictions against him in 2008, the allegations against him in this trial, his admissions to having had a same-sex sexual relationship with a boy who he said was just of age and the discovery of child abuse material under his mattress in 2006, Orkopoulos claimed: "I had no interest in underage boys".
The jury in this trial did not know about his previous convictions and media were barred from referring him to the labels he has worn for the last 15 years; "convicted paedophile" and "disgraced MP".
But nonetheless, the jury took little time to find him guilty on 26 of the 28 counts.
Orkopoulos, who has spent almost all of the last 15 years behind bars since his last trial ended in 2008, is looking at least another decade behind bars.
This trial, and the subsequent jury deliberations and verdicts, were a mirror of the 2008 proceedings.
In that matter, it took a jury just over a day to convict Orkopoulos on 28 charges, including sexually abusing three boys and supplying them with marijuana and heroin between 1995 and 2006.
For those offences, Orkopoulos was jailed for a maximum of 13 years and eight months, with a non-parole period of nine years and three months.
He was released from jail in December 2019 after serving 11-and-a-half years but was returned to jail three months later after breaching his parole conditions by speaking to a child in a phone call with a relative.
His parole was revoked and while in custody, detectives charged Orkopoulos with the child sex and drug supply offences that he was convicted of on Wednesday.
The verdicts are a victory for Lake Macquarie detectives who formed Strike Force Glenwarrie to investigate Orkopoulos, and particularly the dogged police work of Detective Sergeant Kristi Faber, and for the former MP's many victims, some of whom had ended up in jail and addicted to drugs after Orkopoulos abused them and forever changed their lives.
To see more stories and read today's paper download the Newcastle Herald news app here.
