In a sauna, it’s tough to tell a hardened crook from a famous muso
What happened when a criminal lawyer looking for a heavily-tattooed client ran into Blink-182 Travis Barker in a sauna, and what is ex-Olympian Scott Miller up to behind bars? Read The Snitch.
Police & Courts
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In simpler times tattoos were the domain of hardened crooks and the rest of us didn’t tell our life story via ink under our skin.
In simpler times tattoos were the domain of hardened crooks and the rest of us didn’t tell our life story via ink under our skin.
Life’s more complicated these days.
One criminal lawyer told Snitch they had experienced this modern complexity while interstate recently.
Our lawyer was staying in a luxury hotel and had been instructed to meet a person who was funding the case they were appearing in.
That person was a hardened criminal whose main identifying feature was that he was covered head-to-toe in tattoos.
The lawyer wasn’t told where to meet the criminal, only that he would be arriving at a hotel and would be in contact.
So our lawyer is killing time in the hotel’s sauna when in walks a shirtless bloke covered in tatts. The lawyer assumed it was the hardened criminal.
That was until the inked up man had no idea what the lawyer was talking about and had an American accent.
It turns out the man was Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, currently touring with his uber famous band and globally recognised girlfriend Kourtney Kardashian.
Not that our lawyer twigged.
“I said ‘What do you do? And he said ‘I’m in a band’,” our lawyer told Snitch.
“To be honest he was more interested in what I do — representing killers and gangsters,” he said.
“Eventually I asked ‘What’s the name of your group?’,” he said. “He said Blink-182.”
The penny still didn’t drop.
“I said ‘OK, I’ll check you out. Good luck with your band’.”
Travis and Blink are due to play Sydney Olympic Park on Saturday night in front of roughly 20,000 people.
SWIFT JUSTICE
So it turns out judges and magistrates are real people with real human emotions and interests.
But don’t you love it when those extra curricular activities are embarrassing — or even have a celebrity obsessed-type flavour.
That said, we bring you two examples.
Let’s do the embarrassing one first.
One sitting magistrate is a diehard Taylor Swift fan and has been posting photos to Facebook of their Swift-inspired friendship bracelets on their wrist.
Snitch is reliably informed that Swiftie fans make bracelets — that feature a lyric or the title of one of her songs — to trade with other diehard fans at the show.
Cute, right?
Our magistrate sported two bracelets. One featured the title All Too Well, which is about a very big break-up.
The other was Style, which details Swift’s complicated relationship with Harry Styles.
Perhaps even better is the celebrity-obsessed category.
We’re told there’s a sitting magistrate who has a penchant for poking fun at celebrities on websites and social media.
Snitch hears that at the top of our legal eagle’s list of preferred targets are celebrities and their fashion choices at the Oscars.
SWOT MILLER
Olympic swimmer turned drug smuggler and supplier Scott Miller is making good use of his time in jail.
We’re told Miller has completed a university degree or, at least, is near to finishing the course.
Miller, who at one point was among the most famous people in Sydney around the time he won silver at the 1996 Olympics and became one half of a power couple with Charlotte Dawson, is serving a jail sentence over an ice smuggling ring.
Miller is cluey and has advanced IT skills, which he once put to use developing an Eastern Suburbs-based escort agency before being busted for drugs.
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