Arrest Me

About a week back, we bought some wooden furniture off Trade Me, which is a local equivalent of Ebay.
We travelled to a lock up garage down the road and after meeting the bloke, his partner and his several offspring we headed home with the furniture where it sat in the garage awaiting my attention.

Today was the day I had set aside for staining the scuffed wood so I duly emptied the drawers only to find a whole host of paper info about the seller. Interestingly, all of this info consisted of police reports and court summons for non payment of rent. Whilst leafing through the small rainforest worth of police reports over lunch it became clear that the seller’s main peccadillo of late appeared to be stealing stuff and then selling it on Trade Me. As the stuff didn't feel "hot" I haven't rung 5-0. his favourite trick was the frankly genius move of contacting someone selling a car, finding out when they were available to let him view it and then throwing in some probing questions to discover when they weren’t around. So, he’d arrange to go see it at 6pm, he’d turn up at 3pm while they were at work and make off with the wheels. Unfortunately, the Napoleon of crime failed to show up for the viewing later in the day thereby alerting the suspicions of the seller.

But that wasn’t all, his list of offences include multiple counts of contravention of protection orders (domestic violence), wilful damage, burglary, trespass, dangerous driving, assault, breaching community work, dangerous driving, driving while disqualified, fraud, drunk driving, obtaining money by deception, failure to answer police bail and of course the theft of motor vehicles. There were some questions about overdue library books too.

Now, having the kind of family and friends I do, none of this is shocking but for one bloke it’s quite a CV, even with his multiple aliases (5 according to his rap sheet).

He’s left NZ now for a job in Australia, where I understand they used to deport criminals to back in the day. It’s funny how things go in circles…