Disgraced MP Milton Orkopoulos’ letters from jail: What life is like for him behind bars
Life behind bars for former politician and paedophile Milton Orkopoulos has been revealed in a series of intimate letters.
NSW
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A PAINFUL recovery from a jail bashing, whingeing about an inmate’s accent, pronouncements on Malcolm Turnbull’s future and bitching about the endless wait to join a sex-offender rehabilitation program — life behind bars for former politician and paedophile Milton Orkopoulos has been revealed in a series of intimate letters.
They include fond exchanges with a former high-profile inmate which are signed off “Love, Milly”.
Orkopoulos is now 60. Long Bay prison is his home and his next parole review date isn’t listed until January next year. He is almost a decade into a 14-year sentence.
The former Swansea MP, minister for Aboriginal affairs and minister assisting the premier on citizenship was ordered in 2008 to serve at least nine years and three months in jail for more than 30 charges, some relating to paedophilia, drugs and pornography.
His young victims were fed cannabis, sometimes in Orkopoulos’s parliamentary office, and heroin before they were abused.
In Cooma prison — which Orkopoulos nicknamed “Casa Cooma” — he surrounded himself with younger inmates, handing out cigarettes and fatherly advice, much to the distaste of corrective services officers, prison sources say.
In 2015 Orkopoulos found a penpal in one high-profile inmate.
He was also bashed, and found dazed and confused in his cell. The attack prompted his relocation to Kirkconnell prison near Bathurst.
He wrote to his penpal in December 2015, after his bashing: “In the week after it pain management became an issue but now isn’t a problem — thank god.”
Orkopoulos engaged in political banter about the imminent arrival of corrupt Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid — “Obeid-in Orkopoulos-out” — and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. “(The Liberal) party is stuffed — poor old Malcolm will not be given a chance to shine by the small people in the party and he hasn’t the force or personality to tell Abbott and co to get f***ed,” he wrote in December 2016.
Orkopoulos wrote of his role as a tutor to foreign inmates, mostly drug traffickers, including a Macedonian truck driver and a “Chilean dictator”: “And a Hong Konger with such a thick Chinese accent I want to pull what’s left of my hair out!”
His was scathing of Corrective Services: “After Brexit and Trump I have resolved not to be surprised by stupidity any more. No one could have predicted mass stupidity in the USA but it happened and so it did with the department of corrective services.”
However Orkopoulos’s biggest grievance was the amount of time he had waited to start a sex-offender program, CORE, which would vastly improve his prospects of parole. This was contrary to past claims that Orkopoulos refused to take part in the program.
“I applied three years ago to the CORE moderate program and wrote every six months reminding them time was running out,” he wrote.
“Guess what! Time has run out. The parole (board) has approved my address for next year but I have to be ‘treated’ first.”
In January the State Parole Authority denied Orkopoulos’s parole again because he had not finished the sex offenders’ program.