Pandora bracelets used as currency in ice deals

Fashionable charm bracelets were used to buy the drug ice in a deal brokered by a Logan father of three, who has walked free from court.

Eric John Tongia Oberleuter outside Brisbane Supreme Court on Tuesday. Picture: Steve Pohlner

Fashionable Pandora charms were used to buy the drug ice in a deal brokered by a Logan father of three, who has walked free from court.

Eric John Tongia Oberleuter, 32, from Logan Central, was in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Tuesday before Justice Melanie Hindman where he pleaded guilty to four charges including possession of 3.3g of the drug ice – for personal use – supplying ice and possession of a box of 60 Pandora bracelet charms, reasonably suspected of being proceeds of drug sales.

Crown prosecutor Aden Tranent told the court that Oberleuter was found with the jewellery on March 24, 2020 at Marsden, in the City of Logan, during a traffic stop by police.

Oberleuter admitted to police that he had exchanged less than “a point” (0.1g) of ice for the box of bracelet charms.

Two weeks earlier Oberleuter had been busted with 3.3g of ice in two clipseal bags during another police stop, in Woodridge in the City of Logan, which the court accepted was for personal use.

A Pandora bracelet

He was also in possession of three mobile phones, and he pleaded guilty to a charge possession of tainted property in relation to these.

“You admitted to police to exchanging less than a point of methamphetamine to a friend a week earlier in exchange for the box of bracelet charms,” Justice Hindman said in sentencing Oberleuter to 14 months’ prison with immediate parole.

Oberleuter’s barrister Kate Fuller submitted that her client deserved leniency in sentencing for the supplying ice charge because without his admission to police it would have been unlikely that prosecutors would have been able to prove his guilt.

Justice Hindman ordered that the 144 days Oberleuter spent in pre-sentence custody between September last year and January 27, be counted as “time served”.