A business owner busted trying to retrieve a huge shipment of cocaine from an excavator was "of the belief that if he did not ask any questions about it, he was not breaking the law".
That is what the NSW District Court heard on Thursday, when Timothy John Engstrom, 38, faced a sentence hearing over what a judge described as "stupid" offending.
Engstrom, who co-owned Bungendore Landscape Supplies, stood trial late last year after pleading not guilty to a charge of attempting to possess a commercial quantity of an unlawfully imported drug.
He had been arrested in July 2019, when heavily armed police busted him using an angle grinder to cut a hole in an excavator that contained about 276kg of pure cocaine upon its importation from South Africa.
Engstrom was doing this at the request of his best friend and business partner, Adam Phillip Hunter, who had arranged to bring the drug-filled digger to Australia for a mysterious criminal dubbed "coffee man".
While Hunter, 37, pleaded guilty and received a jail sentence of 12 years and nine months, Engstrom denied criminal responsibility.
Engstrom claimed he did not know what was hidden inside the excavator, saying his job was simply to cut open the machine for Hunter and have a cup of tea while the latter removed something from within.
For Engstrom to be found guilty, the jury in his trial only had to be satisfied he had been reckless about the fact the machine contained illegally imported drugs.
After less than three hours of deliberations in December 2022, jurors returned a guilty verdict.
Engstrom's bail was revoked and, as a result, he was in custody when he returned to court on Thursday.
His barrister conceded Judge Gina O'Rourke SC would not be able to find Engstrom was remorseful, having regard to conflicting statements the 38-year-old had recently made.
The court heard Engstrom had acknowledged his offending when he met with a psychologist while behind bars in March, expressing "shame and remorse" for his part in the cocaine retrieval mission.
But Judge O'Rourke said he had changed his tune during a subsequent interview with a sentencing assessment report author, offering that person "a complete denial of responsibility".
"It's very peculiar," the judge said.
Prosecutor Adam McGrath also referred to the psychologist's report, which said Engstrom had deliberately decided not to ask Hunter questions about the excavator's contents.
The psychologist also said Engstrom had believed his actions were not hurting anybody.
Mr McGrath agreed with Engstrom's barrister that the 38-year-old had played a "radically different" role than Hunter, whose involvement in the nefarious plot had also begun much earlier.
But the lawyers differed in terms of what had motivated Engstrom to involve himself in the offending.
Engstrom's counsel claimed his client had helped Hunter in order to protect the pair's business interests, given the drug-filled digger had been delivered to their company's landscaping yard in Bungendore.
"Once he was aware of it, he just wanted it out of there," defence counsel told the court.
But Mr McGrath argued Judge O'Rourke should not accept this supposed motivation.
"If the offender wanted to be rid of the drugs, he could've told the police," the prosecutor said.
Mr McGrath suggested Engstrom could have also simply refused to cut into the excavator's arm for Hunter, or demanded that his co-offender move the machine away from the landscaping supplies yard.
Judge O'Rourke told Engstrom she planned to sentence him on May 12.
