Hugo Chetcuti relative gives angry, emotional account of Bojan Cmelik’s employment

The frayed nerves and raw emotion of murdered entrepreneur Hugo Chetcuti’s extended family were evident yesterday morning as his brother-in-law took the stand to tell the jury trying Bojan Cmelik for Chetcuti’s killing about Cmelik’s employment with the victim’s business empire.

Noel Falzon, Chetcuti’s brother-in-law and a manager at Bacco, gave an emotional account of the psychological trauma he had suffered as a result of the murder, but also of how he had engaged Cmelik to work there twice, after having fired him first for not speaking English at work and on a second occasion over his attitude.

“I know his brother Adam Mitic. He was one of my best bartenders at Bacco. He asked to bring his brother on board and to teach him to be a bartender. Adam told me to help him out because he’d just been stopped from (Hugo’s) Terrace.

“My brother used to teach us to forgive. Someone does something wrong; you give him another chance. Stupidly. Fool me! I was an idiot!” Falzon said as he broke down sobbing on the stand.

“I brought him up there to teach him how to be a bartender,” he said after recovering. “I had my best bartender, his brother, but he couldn’t talk English. I got this one (indicating the accused) to kill two birds with one stone.”

Mitic had been dismissed first, “I gave him a lot of chances. Hugo told us to be kind. This is what this one took away from us,” he said bitterly.

A visibly emotional and highly agitated Falzon informed the judge and the jury that the last time he had testified, before the compilation of evidence against Cmelik, the accused had laughed at him from the dock. “Last time I came here, he was laughing at me. Because this is something to laugh about…”

Asked why Cmelik had been fired, Falzon replied that he had 19 employees at Bacco. “He knows full well that I had Serbians, Italians, French, Japanese and Thai workers who all talk English. I need to have a team… so I made a rule that everybody speaks English.”

“He took him away from me! Why! Why! Why! Why did this man, after all the things I did with him... He knows how I treated him. I will go to Serbia to see Adam and his mother.”

Falzon said that he had been told that Bojan was acting funny. “I was a fool, an idiot. I want to explain myself, so you are not fooled like I was,” he told the jurors.

“There was an incident where he said, ‘boss, I’m not happy’ because I changed around the lockers. I said take the one you had if it makes you happy. This is the only issue I had with Bojan.”

He had stopped his brother from working with the company because of his excessive drinking. “I was close to the brothers because they were good workers,” said Falzon. “He,” referring to Cmelik,” he …not bad.”

“But I stopped him not because he was speaking Serbian. He fully knows that I didn’t fire him because he was speaking Serbian. I stopped him from working because…he told me, ‘if I want to speak Serbian, I f *****g will.’ I didn’t like the attitude… Mr Nobody!” shouted the witness.