By Erin Pearson
AFL great Mark "Bomber" Thompson has escaped a string of drug trafficking charges after a magistrate ruled he didn’t intend to sell the ice and 480 ecstasy pills found in his home.
Magistrate Duncan Reynolds did, though, find drug possession charges against Thompson were proven.
Mark "Bomber" Thompson (right) arrives at court on Thursday.Credit: AAP
“The remaining charges of trafficking are dismissed,” Mr Reynolds said.
Thompson appeared before the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday in his signature blue suit, supported by more than half a dozen family members including his daughter and parents.
His lawyer Mick Milardovic asked for Thompson’s offending to be dealt with by way of a fine and an adjourned undertaking.
He said his client had suffered considerably with the Essendon doping scandal, which followed a “lengthy and illustrious” career in the AFL.
The prosecution, though, argued the sheer quantity of drugs found warranted a criminal conviction.
“You’ve heard the events of where he found himself ... in self-imposed exile,” Mr Milardovic said.
“My client comes to the court as ... a cleanskin, a first-time offender.”
Mr Milardovic told the court Thompson had since embarked on a number of new business ventures, including making furniture from recycled materials, importing mechanised e-bicycles and the new industry of “hydrogen inhalers”.
“It’s a burgeoning field, your honour,” he said.
The four charges of possession that were found proven related to methamphetamine, MDA, LSD and unprescribed Xanax found in Thompson’s Rouse Street home during police raids in January 2018.
Thompson pleaded not guilty to all seven drug-related charges earlier this year.
The magistrates' reasonings will be handed down this afternoon, alongside what’s anticipated to be Thompson’s sentence.
The court has previously heard that police discovered illicit drugs and paraphernalia stashed alongside Cats memorabilia inside a coded room off Thompson’s bedroom.
They included a bottle of 481 ecstasy tablets, weighing in at 134.6 grams of MDA, four ice pipes, digital scales and a show box filled with clear resealable bags.
A further search of shared areas of the home uncovered a hand-written lease agreement between Thompson and his heavily tattooed housemate Thomas Windsor, and hand-written notes relating to large sums of money.
Amounts of up to $115,000 were scrawled alongside the names "Bomb" and "Tatts", which police said were the nicknames of Thompson and Windsor.
In an upstairs mezzanine level and inside a magnetic box, police then found 33.1 grams of ice, 5.6 grams of Ephedrine, an LSD tab, four Xanax tablets and three white capsules, all of which Thompson has been charged with.
Thomas Windsor was Thompson's housemate.Credit: Bendigo Advertiser
He contested seven charges of drug use and trafficking, but pleaded guilty to breaching his bail conditions. His legal team later argued the drugs were not his and he did not need to deal drugs to make money, as one of his NAB bank accounts contained $3 million.
But during his time in the witness box last month, Thompson told the court he had developed an ice habit more than a year before the January 2018 police raids, after abandoning a football career he said he ended up hating.
The 53-year-old told Melbourne Magistrates Court that as he struggled with leaving the football world he locked himself in his Port Melbourne home, trading in cryptocurrency 12 hours a day while smoking the drug ice.
Thompson, who coached at Geelong and Essendon, revealed he still struggles to deal with an Essendon supplements scandal he didn’t agree with, and that left him in a ‘‘bad way’’.