Article from: The Daily Telegraph - October 27, 2008 12:00am
Fake licence: Brian Burgess
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BRIAN Burgess came to Australia under the British Boy's Movement for Australia aged 17 in 1969.
His first job was as a labourer and his second as a bank teller.
He then he got a job with Ansett reservations and was promoted through the ranks.
He was office manager of a new Ansett office in Sydney before becoming Australian sales manager of Continental Airlines.
After this he bought a travel agency, which he sold for $500,000, and went into the property market.
This was short-lived when the recession hit and the bank foreclosed on a loan.
In his early 40s, Burgess became depressed, began drinking, became bulimic and a cocaine user and fell into debt, losing his $1.7 million home.
He saw importing cocaine as a way out, and in 1996 he pleaded guilty to importing 2kg of cocaine with a street value of $656,000 and was sentenced to four years in prison.
An international human rights group threatened to take the Federal Government to the European Court of Human Rights over his deportation to Britain.
The International Federation of Human Rights claimed at the time that the Government did not take into account factors including the hardship that Burgess's wife and three children would suffer if he was deported from Australia.
Mrs Burgess said that her children had been expecting their father would be coming home after he has been released from prison.
Instead he was handcuffed, taken to the airport and deported to the UK.
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