Mother ‘hurt’ by wrongful conviction
A young woman has been acquitted after her boss wrongly accused her of theft – but she had already served a seven-month sentence. Maria Slade reports.
A mother- of- three spent seven months on home detention after her former employer at upmarket bathroomware chain Spazio Casa wrongly accused her of theft.
Rachel Wilkinson was acquitted at a retrial last month when exfranchisees of the company came forward to counter the claims of Spazio Casa director Paolo Cozzolino.
Cozzolino had accused Wilkinson of taking $ 40,000 worth of bathroom products and selling them on Trade Me.
But 32- year- old Wilkinson, of Auckland, has always maintained that Cozzolino told her to do it, to get rid of unwanted stock.
The allegations came as Spazio Casa was investigated by the Commerce Commission for promoting its products as Italian, when in fact most were made in China.
‘‘I have a lot of anger and hurt towards them,’’ Wilkinson said. ‘‘More hurt because of what I put my family through during that time.’’
Cozzolino, a suave Italian immigrant with a penchant for luxury cars, founded Spazio Casa with his brother Maurizio. The businessmen brothers are married to Iraqi sisters.
Wilkinson left her customer services role in July 2010, and was surprised when police contacted her six months later as part of a theft investigation.
She told them Cozzolino had directed her to get rid of the bathroomware and ‘‘get some money for you’’.
Her boss’s request had confused her, she said, but he was insistent.
She put the sales through the company’s normal processes but receiving the money into her own bank account.
He told her to keep it, something she wishes she hadn’t done now.
A year later she was shocked to find herself facing three charges of theft.
Judge Gus Andree Wiltens said Cozzolino was a strong witness: ‘‘I was impressed. I considered him to be an honest man.’’
A devastated Wilkinson was convicted and sentenced to nine months’ home detention and ordered to repay the $40,000.
She then contacted former Christchurch Spazio Casa franchisees Gary Adam and Angela Pile – and that was when her luck started to change. The couple’s business had been hit by the Canterbury earthquakes, and they had ended up in a dispute with the Cozzolino brothers over the termination of their franchise.
The husband and wife team read the transcript of the original trial, and, Adam claimed, ‘‘you could literally drive a bus through Paolo’s testimony’’.
An employee called Michael, said to have found discrepancies in the accounts, hadn’t been employed until a year later.
There was also evidence from a software expert who said that it was unlikely Wilkinson had been able to manipulate the Spazio Casa order system.
In November 2014 the High Court ordered a retrial, before a jury.
As someone who’d never had anything to do with the criminal justice system, Wilkinson found home detention a nightmare.
‘‘As soon as the home detention officials got here and they were going through what you have to do, what you can’t do, I just started bawling my eyes out.
‘‘ I thought about everything I was going to miss. That was my daughter’s first year of netball, so not being able to see her play.’’
The young family had to pull their son out of rugby because they couldn’t get both their older children to weekend sport.
She is deeply grateful to Adam and Pile.
Cozzolino has now sold his share of the business to his brother and is living overseas.
He is shocked by the outcome of the retrial, he says, which he blames on a campaign against him.
‘‘They historically hate me. They just probably would have said anything to hurt me in one way or another.’’ He maintains his claims against Wilkinson. ‘‘If I want to get rid of some product, I just make a sale,’’ he said.
‘‘ Why should I give it, with all due respect, to a girl? She’s not Miss World that somebody fell in love and does crazy things.’’