
What to expect, when you're expecting?
That's the question facing the jury as they enter the final day of the trial of Stephen Alan Fenn.
Fenn is on trial in Wollongong District Court facing one count of attempting to possess a marketable quantity of an unlawfully imported drug.
The former soldier has pleaded not guilty.
After a day's worth of evidence, on Thursday October 12, Crown Prosecutor David Jordan told the 12-person jury the case boiled down to whether Fenn knew, or should have known, that the DHL box he received on October 13, 2021 contained cocaine.
Was Fenn expecting the package, and even if he was expecting novelty pyjama pants instead, should he have known when the large, yellow box he accepted from an undercover police officer, with his name on the front and an unknown Paul Fenn in Dublin as the sender on the back, may have been connected to his childhood friend Danny Nikolvski's penchant for the white powder?
It is a question the jury will be asking themselves intently once they have listened to the closing submissions from defence lawyer Patrick Schmidt and directions from Judge Huw Baker, to be delivered on Friday morning.
Fenn chose not to take to the stand on Thursday.
Brandishing that very yellow box contained in a clear plastic evidence bag in front of the jury, Mr Jordan said Fenn was not the unwitting consignee of a delivery gone astray, but that his role was to be the recipient of half a kilo of cocaine disguised in boxes of Cadbury moist chocolate cake mix to then be given to Nikolovski.
"This is a valuable product that a person wants the person who is going to receive it in Australia, they want it to be found, they want it to be removed from the cake mix boxes and sold as an illicit drug," he said.
"They don't want a person to make a cake out of what is in the cake box. The idea that it would arrive and somebody would leave it to chance that somebody could find it is I would suggest to you an irrational proposition.
"It is meant to be found by the right people."
During his closing address, Mr Jordan walked the jury through the evidence presented at trial, including the interception of the package by Australian Border Force agents, the substituting of cocaine for another substance and its delivery by an undercover police officer.
The jury also heard two police interviews with Fenn, as well as intercepted phone calls between Fenn, Nikolovski and another man, Cameron Smith.
It is the "pregnant pauses" in these phone calls, Mr Jordan said, that were the giveaway that Fenn knew that cocaine was in the package.
"They talk about the consignment, but not in actual terms," he said.
"There is no hint of, 'what have you done to me', no hint of a falling apart of a friendship, instead the evidence is they continued to talk over the next couple of weeks."
When talking to Smith, who says to Fenn, "cough once for Nikolovski, two coughs this is not", Fenn says "shut the f--- up Cameron," and hangs up.
Taking together the evidence of the phone calls, the interviews and the shipment, Mr Jordan said the jury could find that Fenn knew the package was connected to Nikolovski and there was a "substantial risk" it contained cocaine.
The trial continues.
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