Man tells court $36,000 under pillow belongs to him

‘‘People gifted me the money . . .’’

He can’t say how much money there was, how it got there, or who gave it to him, but Christopher Lawson is adamant that the $36,715 cash seized by police was donated to him by strangers.

The 54-year-old Napier man has opposed an application for forfeiture made by the Commissioner of Police in relation to the bundle of cash found by police beneath a pillow on a woman’s bed in a Napier drug house that was searched in October, 2019.

Before Justice Cheryl Gwyn in the High Court at Napier yesterday, Lawson said the money had been donated to him over a 10-year period by people he did not know. They wanted to help him as he had cancer, he said.

Lawson, a beneficiary, said he didn’t know exactly how much money there was and said he had given it to the woman, a sex worker, so she could count it.

It was also a way impressing her, he said.

He thought there was ‘‘about $50,000’’, he said.

He had receipts given to him by the donors, but they had all been stolen, he told the court.

Under cross-examination by Crown lawyer Megan Mitchell, of

Lawson said he gave the money to the woman a few days before the police raid of her house.

He’d never counted it because ‘‘at that time I was going through my cancer. Money wasn’t a worry to me then’’.

Asked who gave him the money, he said: ‘‘It was quite a few people over a long period of time. I can’t remember everybody . . . One person that comes to mind was a person Michael. He donated a bit of money. I can’t remember his last name,’’ Lawson said.

He did not contact police to claim the money until May, 2020, seven months after it was seized by police.

Lawson reported the receipts stolen on May 5, 2020, the day before he contacted police to say he was the rightful owner of the cash. The receipts had been stolen a few months earlier while he was in prison, he said.

The woman did not tell police who the money belonged to, and did not say it belonged to Lawson.

Mitchell put it to Lawson that he had made up the entire story.

He did not accept that.

‘‘It is more likely than not that this money did not belong to Mr Lawson,’’ Mitchell said.

‘‘The explanation as to how he came by the cash does not, in the commissioner’s position, hang together,’’ she said.

His narrative around giving the cash to the woman was ‘‘highly unusual at best’’, she said.

Lawson said: ‘‘People gifted me the money ... I gave it to someone, and the police come along and took it, and I’m trying to get it back.’’

Justice Gwyn said she would make her decision within a week.