Pubdate: Sun, 21 May 2000
Source: Age, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2000 David Syme & Co Ltd
Contact:  250 Spencer Street, Melbourne, 3000, Australia
Website: http://www.theage.com.au/
Author: Sue Quinn

MAIN'S CO-ACCUSED CONFESSES

Australian Simon Main is facing an uncertain future as his co-accused in
trafficking one of the world's biggest ecstasy hauls has now confessed and
is helping police with their investigations.

Mr Main, who faces up to 20 years in prison for his part in Europe's largest
ecstasy haul, continues to protest his innocence this weekend.

The 30-year-old stepson of entertainer Barry Crocker is awaiting his fate in
prison in the northern Italian city of Trieste while the country's finance
police and anti-Mafia investigators prepare their case against him.

Mr Main and 26-year-old Briton Alex Bruell have been charged with a range of
offences, including drug trafficking after the seizure of 80 kilograms of
ecstasy tablets in a raid near Trieste, a resort on the Adriatic coast, at
the end of last month.

It is the largest seizure of the amphetamine in Europe and, possibly, the
world.

After initially refusing to cooperate with investigators, Mr Bruell - who is
the stepson of a disgraced British aristocrat, the Duke of Manchester - is
now helping police with their inquiries in the hope that his sentence might
be reduced.

Police say the handsome playboy broke down in tears shortly after his arrest
and was persuaded to outline details of the ambitious drug-smuggling
operation. According to reports in Italy, Mr Bruell now accepts his evidence
will be crucial in convicting Mr Main.

However, Mr Main insists he had no involvement in the drug operation - that
he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was simply visiting Italy as
a tourist. Police say he has hired prominent Los Angeles celebrity lawyer
Robert Shapiro - who represented O.J.Simpson in his murder trial - as well
as taking on a tough-talking Italian lawyer, Giuliano Carretti.

Officials from the Australian embassy in Rome are keeping in constant touch
with Mr Main. His mother, former model Jenny Main, is known to have visited
him after flying to Italy from Sydney.

When police seized the 333,000 ecstasy pills in two Nike sportsbags from the
boot of a sports car parked outside a beachside pizzeria on Easter Monday it
was the culmination of a two-month investigation.

Mr Bruell was born in Britain but raised in Hollywood by his psychologist
father, while his mother, a London socialite, recently married the 12th Duke
of Manchester, who was recently released from a Florida prison where he had
been serving a three-year sentence for fraud.

So far it is unclear how Mr Bruell first became involved in drug dealing,
but Italian investigators assembled a 30-member team to monitor his
activities when an underworld source tipped them off that he was at the
centre of a major drug-smuggling operation in Italy.

According to investigators, Mr Bruell had taken delivery of 453,000 ecstasy
tablets in Amsterdam two months before on behalf of an American
drug-smuggling syndicate.

Mr Bruell, who is registered as a security consultant in California, where
he and Mr Main are based, first surfaced in Italy at the beachside resort of
Lignano at the home of his Italian girlfriend. Then followed one of Italy's
biggest undercover surveillance operations.

He was placed under 24-hour watch with investigators keeping one step behind
his every move.

"We created an invisible cage around him," said Federico Frezza, the
anti-Mafia prosecutor who coordinated the investigation.

But it was the around-the-clock monitoring of his mobile telephone calls
that first alerted police to the man they claim was Mr Main, whom they
allege was responsible for collecting Mr Bruell's cache of drugs and
exporting it to the US.

The street price for one ecstasy pill in the United States is about $US50 -
almost double that in Europe - and the haul of pills would have been worth
almost $US17 million if it had reached its destination.

Police say Mr Main travelled from California to Rome in the weeks before his
arrest and stayed at five-star hotels in Milan and the ancient Tuscan town
of Lucca. When arrested, police found more than $20,000 in cash in his
possession.

The net began to close in on Mr Main and Mr Bruell when police say they
began to argue over their mobile telephones about where to meet to hand over
the drugs.

Finally on April 24, the two agreed to meet in a car park outside a pizzeria
in Lignano. According to witnesses, if they hoped to meld into the
background, the pair failed spectacularly, as their tall, athletic good
looks attracted the attention of many onlookers who were eating at the
pizzeria on that busy Easter Monday night.

"When we asked people in the pizzeria whether they had noticed Main's
presence all the women said, `yes - he was fantastic'," a police spokesman
said.

Police decided to swoop. In the boot of Mr Bruell's car were the two sports
bags stuffed with more ecstasy tablets than they had ever seen before.

No date has yet been set for Mr Main and Mr Bruell to appear before
Trieste's Tribunale where a judge will decide if they have a case to answer.

Meanwhile, the pair are being held in separate cells in the Caraneo,
Trieste's 100-year-old prison next door to the Tribunale.

When contacted yesterday Mr Main's lawyer, Mr Carretti, refused to comment.
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