Party Spirit Set Chef On The Path To Ruin
THE SUNDAY AGE
Sunday March 17, 1996
A $30 bottle of Scotch and a New Years Eve party hundreds of kilometres away drove apprentice chef Simon David Hogan to try to steal prime movers worth almost half a million dollars.
Hogan, 20, downed the liquor while attempting to get a ride to the party in Portland via Geelong. Somehow he ended up in Colac, seriously drunk.
Hogan told `The Sunday Age' he had not known he was in Colac until the next morning when he woke in the police cells. By that time he had crashed a stolen prime mover on the Princes Highway, causing $8220 damage, given a breath alcohol test reading of 0.131. He could not remember stealing the vehicle but told police: ``If you reckon I did it, I did it."
The Melbourne Magistrates Court heard last week that at about 9pm on 31 December, Hogan broke into Neale's Transport depot, in Wilson Street, Colac, and tried to steal five prime movers before successfully removing a sixth.
Senior Constable Sandy Skilton, for the prosecution, said Hogan backed the vehicle into another and then crashed through the gates of the yard and into Wilson Street.
Senior Constable Skilton told the court that Hogan soon ran the prime mover off the Princes Highway just west of Deans Creek Road, through a fence and into a paddock.
Police who attended the scene found the Kenworth prime mover and then Hogan, who was unsteady on his feet, slurring his speech and smelling of liquor, she said. A breath test revealed he had a blood alcohol content of 0.131.
He told police he could not remember stealing the vehicle, but that he could recall driving it.
Hogan, formerly of Archers Road, Hamilton, pleaded guilty to exceeding the prescribed concentration of alcohol, driving while disqualified, theft of a $55,000 prime mover and four counts of attempting to steal prime movers worth a total of $415,000.
Defence lawyer Mr Steve Ballek said ``this bizarre, quite extraordinary" incident resulted from Hogan's drunkeness ``and the fact that he would go to the length of trying to travel to Portland by stealing such a huge truck".
Hogan was fined a total of $400 and had his licence cancelled for 26 months.
© 1996 THE SUNDAY AGE