PING!
Posted on 10/08/2006 7:08:29 PM PDT by GMMAC
Churchill's great-grandson held
on £5m drug trafficking charges
The Times (UK)
October 09, 2006
A GREAT-GRANDSON of Sir Winston Churchill is being held in an Australian prison awaiting trial on charges of trafficking large amounts of Ecstasy.
Nicholas Barton, 33, has been in Parklea prison in Sydney since June when police allegedly seized 55kg (121lb) of Ecstasy tablets with a street value of A$12.5 million (£5 million) from properties in the city, including Mr Barton’s beachside apartment in Coogee.
Mr Barton appeared before a court in Sydney via video link from prison last week to seek his release on bail. His application was refused and his case has been adjourned.
Mr Barton’s mother is Arabella Spencer Churchill, the grand-daughter of Sir Winston and daughter of his son, Randolph. Nicholas was born during his mother’s brief marriage to Jim Barton, a Scottish school teacher, in the early 1970s. Arabella Churchill has since remarried.
Her son, who is believed to have lived in Australia since the early 1990s, has taken out Australian citizenship. He graduated from the University of Launceston in Tasmania in 1999, where he obtained a Bachelor of Applied Science degree. He had been training to be a fish farmer.
Mr Barton was arrested in June after drugs were allegedly found in his apartment in Sydney. Ross Woodgate, 42, from New Zealand, was also arrested.
Both men have been charged with supplying Ecstasy in large, commercial quantities. If convicted, they could face long jail terms. The charges carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The arrests came after a three-month investigation by police officers from the Special Crime Unit, who allegedly seized 55kg of Ecstasy tablets during raids on Mr Barton’s and Mr Woodgate’s homes and other premises in inner Sydney, according to Australia’s Sunday Telegraph.
Police also allegedly seized 18kg of Ecstasy powder, two pill presses used to manufacture Ecstasy tablets and more than A$100,000 (£39,700) in cash.
Police said that the seized tablets carried the logos of various car manufacturers, including Maserati, Mercedes Benz and Volkswagen.
Police allege that the drug was manufactured at the Coogee apartment listed as Mr Barton’s address, according to the newspaper. Neither man has yet entered a plea.
Arabella Churchill founded the Somerset-based Children’s World Charity 21 years ago, and remains its director. The charity aims to increase the confidence and self-esteem of young people with special needs and to teach all children to be kinder to each other.
In 2003 Ms Churchill told Somerset Life magazine: “Some people just don’t click who I am at all. Then, occasionally, people are taken back when they realise and they say, ‘Ohhh, I can’t believe it. Really?’ ” She lives in Glastonbury, Somerset, and helped to run the first Glastonbury festival in 1971.
One of Mr Barton’s given names, Gompo, is thought to have been derived from a legendary Tibetan resistance leader who was strongly supported by Sir Winston in the campaign against China’s invasion of the Himalayan kingdom in 1949.
FAMILY TIES
Winston Churchill (born November 30, 1874) married Clementine 1908
Randolph Churchill their second child, was born on May 28, 1911. He married June Osborne, his second wife, in 1948
Arabella Churchill was born to the couple on October 30, 1949
Jim Barton married Arabella in 1972; Nicholas Jake Gompo Barton born that year
PING!
121 pounds!!!! man, that's alot!
This guy has loser written all over him. Product of a bad marriage - probably not parented well at all. A "fish farmer"?!
OMG that lots of X
Another loser/layabout Limey migrant doing the work Australians will not!
What a waste of good genes. He could be fighting Islamofascism, but then his great-grandfather was branded a drunk, until he rose to the ocassion to confront Neville Chamberlain and the paper hanger of Austria.
Perhaps there is hope yet, that Barton might have an epiphany.(Not holding my breath though.)
I wonder if fish farmers also plant their crops in orderly roes.
ping
,,, do you think Nickerless Barton will fight them on the [Bondi] beaches and never surrender? Not his finest hour.
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