Former NSW government minister guilty of child sex charges
Adelaide Now
AMY COOPES, SYDNEY
March 14, 2008 11:45am
FORMER New South Wales MP and Labor frontbencher Milton Orkopoulos, today convicted of 28 child sex and drugs charges, led a sordid double life.
Orkopoulos appeared stunned, closed his eyes and lowered his head as the foreman delivered the verdicts today.
The jury of six men and five women took just over a day to convict the former Aboriginal affairs minister of the 28 counts.
In public he was a family man, a loyal Labor figure and conscientious NSW MP, but Orkopoulos had many shameful secrets.
He smoked cannabis, used amphetamines and taught a teenage boy how to inject heroin. He also exchanged drugs and cash for sex with boys as young as 15.
Orkopoulos would rendezvous with the teenagers at parks, in bushland and, most often, at his Swansea electorate office late at night, and would offer them drugs.
Once they were stoned, the 50-year-old performed oral and anal sex on two of the boys and indecently assaulted the third - buying their silence with cash, some of it electoral funds, as well as gifts and drugs.
Orkopoulos employed "sordid genius" to identify and exploit their vulnerability, crown prosecutor Helen Wilson told the Newcastle District Court.
"There was a secret part of his life, a hidden part of his life that involved the use of drugs ... and the use of drugs as a lure, effectively, for sex with boys under the age of 18," Ms Wilson said.
In public he was a legislator, the NSW minister for Aboriginal Affairs, but privately, he broke the very laws he helped to pass.
It was a secret he was desperate to keep from his wife, his Labor party colleagues and the police, Ms Wilson said.
In February, Orkopoulos pleaded guilty to smoking cannabis with a 17-year-old boy during a student leadership summit at NSW Parliament House in 2005.
While serving as a government frontbencher, he also admitted to having kept a copy of a pornographic story that detailed sex acts between two boys, aged 12 and 16, and an adult male.
He entered not guilty pleas to a further 34 charges, arising from the allegations of three men who claimed Orkopoulos gave them drugs and sexually assaulted them when they were boys.
Spread over a decade and spanning his career as both a Labor staffer and MP, the allegations against Orkopoulos bore striking similarities.
The first and third victims both told the court they met the MP at an ALP function.
One came from a strident Labor family, the other was an aspiring politician.
Viewed 15/03/08 at 07:30
