Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Lawrence suspect: Pay £90k or face another year in jail
Jamie Acourt trousered £500k in drug plot
A STEPHEN Lawrence murder suspect has been ordered to pay £90,000 or face another year in jail after a making £500,000 in a £2.1million drug plot.
Jamie Acourt, 44, fled to Spain hidden in the back of a car with an encrypted phone while he was wanted over the plot, a court heard.
Acourt, one of five suspects named over the 1993 racist murder of 18-year-old Stephen in Eltham, South East London, spent over two years on the run in Barcelona after his escape.
He told the proceeds of crime hearing he had stayed with friends at first and worked as a barman, personal trainer and odd job man.
He then moved in with two others in a £3,000-a-month flat which he got under a false name after buying a fake passport for around £1,000.
He told the hearing: “It was ID, obviously I was on the run, so it was for if I got stopped.”
While on the run he was helped by his drug-dealer cousin Jason Stuart, a judge has found.
Convicted money launderer Stuart was arrested in the UK 10 months after his escape in possession of €58,800 that had just been converted from sterling.
Judge Peter Lodder ruled that Stuart had planned to send the money to his fugitive cousin.
Stuart, previously convicted of drug dealing, had an encrypted phone with a Spanish SIM card, the court heard.
Details of a similar encrypted phone were found by police on packaging for a Blackberry during a raid on Acourt’s home in 2016. Acourt, who was arrested in 2018 and is currently serving a nine-year prison sentence after admitting plotting to traffic cannabis, said he had escaped through UK customs in the back of a car. He told Kingston crown court in South West London: “I was concealed.”
He claimed he was only involved in the drug gang for a few weeks after a hernia operation meant he could no longer work as a tiler.
But prosecutor Sarah Przybylska said he was lying, and was in fact a leading player in the gang. She said police found a notebook in his Spanish flat listing a number of valuable watches including Rolexes that he may have been investing in instead of banking his cash.
Judge Lodder ruled that Acourt personally pocketed £500,000 from the drug plot, telling him: “I find hidden assets of £90,000 in respect of which I make an order with a default of 12 months in prison.”
Brother Neil Acourt, also a suspect
in the Stephen Lawrence murder, was jailed for drug dealing as part of the same conspiracy.
Gary Dobson and David Norris were convicted of the murder in 2012 and given life terms.
Another former suspect, Luke Knight, is still living near Eltham.
The Metropolitan Police said last year that it had no further lines of inquiry over Stephen’s killing.