Former Ipswich mayor Paul Pisasale sentenced to one year in jail for extortion

The former Ipswich mayor has been jailed over the plot to extort money from a call girl’s ex-lover.

Yutian Li (left) Paul Pisasale (centre) and Cameron James McKenzie (right) were all found guilty of an extortion plot.

Disgraced Ipswich mayor Paul Pisasale fell “from a great height” when he instigated a bizarre extortion plot involving a Chinese callgirl, her former lover and the suburban lawyer who abused his position as an officer of the court, a judge said yesterday.

Sentencing Pisasale to a year’s jail, judge Brad Farr of the Brisbane District Court told the 67-year-old that his record of community service and poor health had saved him from spending more time behind bars.

Once celebrated as Queensland’s most popular politician, Pisa­sale was a shadow of his former ebullient self as he stood ashen-faced and silent in the dock between escort Yutian Li, 39, and solicitor Cameron James McKenzie, 37.

All three had been convicted of extortion over a bid by Pisasale, posing variously as a telemarketer and private investigator, to force Li’s former boyfriend to pay her up to $10,000 over their break-up.

“Because of your high political profile, this case has generated much media publicity,” Judge Farr said, sentencing Pisasale to two years’ jail, suspended after 12 months.

“Hence your fall from grace has been from a great height and very public. That public shame is a matter of some limited relevance in the determination of an appropriate sentence.”

Li, who followed the proceedings through a Mandarin-speaking court interpreter and interrupted the judge to say she had not meant to extort money, got 15 months’ jail time, suspended after seven months, while McKenzie will serve half of an 18-month prison sentence.

But for the unlucky coincidence for the trio that Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission had been tapping Pisasale’s phone, Judge Farr said the extortion might never have come to light.

It started when Pisasale had sex with Li after they were introduced by a barrister friend of his and she complained about her treatment at the hands of her ex-lover, Sydney taxi driver Xin Li. Aggrieved that she had travelled to Australia from Singapore for him only to discover he was married, Yutian Li wanted the man “punished”.

Judge Farr said Yutian Li failed to tell Pisasale that she, too, was married when she poured her heart out to him. The then-mayor “almost incomprehensibly” phoned Mr Li in January 2017 pretending that he was conducting a health survey to confirm some details she had provided.

Later, he called back posing as a private investigator to threaten Mr Li with a $200,000 lawsuit or exposure of the affair to his wife unless he paid $10,000.

Judge Farr said Pisasale persisted even though he knew Yutian Li had no entitlement to the money — she had flown to Australia on her own volition after Mr Li ended their relationship.

In an “act of breathtaking hypocrisy”, Pisasale even accused the man of blackmailing her.

He then “ramped up the pressure” by enlisting McKenzie to send a letter of demand to Xin Li for $8400. “It seems to me you simply acted as requested to enable Pisasale’s demand to take on an air of legitimacy,” Judge Farr said, in jailing the solicitor. “I suspect you paid precious little thought to what you were doing and you certainly paid precious little attention to the documents you received from Pisasale.”

The judge said he did not accept that Pisasale had been motivated by a “misguided sense of justice” to help the callgirl.

Were it not for his “exemplary record” of community service and health challenges, Pisasale would have gone to jail for 2½ years, the judge said.