Danny Awad and John Tambakakis ask High Court to rule $10m Mexican cocaine case a “miscarriage of justice”

The High Court of Australia has granted special leave to Danny Awad, giving a glimmer of hope he could be cleared over a massive 2017 bust.

Lawyers for Mick Gatto’s jailed son-in-law will argue he was the victim of a “substantial miscarriage of justice” following the discovery of $10 million of cocaine found hidden inside five Xerox printers.

The High Court of Australia last month granted special leave to Danny Awad, 43, and his friend, John Tambakakis, 38, effectively giving the duo a glimmer of hope they could eventually be cleared over the massive 2017 bust.

Australian Border Force officers detected a shipment of cocaine inside five Xerox printers that arrived in Melbourne from Mexico. Picture: AFP/County Court of Victoria.

Danny Awad and John Tambakakis are both serving 15 year jail sentences for attempting to possess a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug. Picture: AFP/County Court of Victoria.

Awad — who is married to Mr Gatto’s daughter Sarah — and Tambakakis, were in 2019 found guilty of attempting to possess a commercial quantity of a border controlled drug, cocaine, after Australian Border Force officials found 22.4kg of the drug hidden inside a shipment of printers that arrived in Australia from Mexico.

Police replaced the cocaine with an inert white powder, placed a listening device inside the printers and orchestrated a “controlled delivery” under the close watch of surveillance experts.

Both men are just over two years into 15 year jail sentences, with 10 year non-parole periods.

According to documents filed in the High Court, Awad and Tambakakis will argue they were the victims of a “substantial miscarriage of justice” because of directions County Court Judge Mark Dean gave to jurors before they began deliberating.

Sarah Gatto (centre), wife of Danny Awad departs the County Court of Victoria in 2019 after her husband, Danny Awad, was sentenced to 15 years jail.

Tambakakis gave evidence he accepted the shipments on behalf of his personal trainer “Mark Edwards”, and that he thought it contained steroid tablets, which are not a border controlled drug.

He said he “wouldn’t have been involved” with accepting the shipment if he knew there was cocaine hidden inside the printers.

Awad’s case is that he never got into Tambakakis’s Kia van as it was driven from King St to Halsey Road, in Airport West, and therefore never “possessed” the drugs.

Judge Dean said of evidence Tambakakis gave at trial: “a guilty person might decide to tough out cross examination in the hope or belief that he will be more likely to be believed and his defence accepted if he takes the risk of giving evidence”.

Danny Awad and his wife Sarah Gatto, in happier times.

Three Victorian Court of Appeal judges found the direction should not have been given, but only one judge found it amounted to a “substantial miscarriage of justice”, meaning the duo’s appeal in that court failed.

Awad and Tambakakis’s legal teams will argue the Court of Appeal was wrong when it found, by 2-1 majority decision, that Judge Dean’s direction to the jury was wrong, but that there was no “substantial miscarriage of justice”.

The men have asked the High Court to quash their convictions and grant a retrial.

The case is set to be heard in mid September.