That Guy: Name suppression a sure way to make a splash

Photo / Herald on Sunday.

New Year's Eve fell on a Friday this year and this meant I was unable to get hold of my lawyer in time to apply for any sort of name suppression.

To be honest, I was unable to contact my lawyer "Steve" at all as he has been camping with Chris and Kath Mandu, the well-known swingers, and none of them has phone reception.

Naturally, Steve doesn't want me to mention his whole name in this article as the association with me and the circumstances surrounding his inability to answer his phone may affect his reputation and future business. In effect, Steve is also requesting name suppression in the remainder of this column and I am prepared to grant it.

I can't go into details about what actually occurred on New Year's Eve but I will say that many of the rumours are true and, without naming names, many big names were involved.

However, many of the rumours I have heard about the incident are not true, especially the ones centred on a well-hung Shetland pony. In any case, even if they were true, I would be unable to talk about them as the Shetland pony already has name suppression.

Although I will be applying for full name suppression come Monday, I learned last year that if you don't apply for name suppression you might just learn that you are not quite as famous as you think you are - which, on reflection, can also be a good thing.

I appeared in the courts last year for three separate incidents, all on different charges, and the media never ran with a story.

One incident, early in 2010, involved narcotics. I was unaware that my beagle, who I thought was my best friend for five years, was in fact an undercover drug dog and he had been trying to set me up his whole life. His father was a drug dog and his mother worked in bomb disposal, so I suppose it was inevitable that he would enter the force at some stage.

All the family holidays to the beach together, the long walks ... they were all part of an elaborate plan to frame me.

As a puppy, Benny would frequently come home with all manner of drugs, drug paraphernalia and dead birds and drop them on the doorstep for me. At the time we thought it cute. As I told the judge, I have never really been into drugs - especially if I don't know where they have come from - so normally I would just flush it all down the toilet.

The dead birds and drugs, however, eventually started blocking the toilet so I had no choice but to begin dealing.

I started selling the birds to a guy down the road who was into taxidermy; most of the drugs still went down the toilet - or I would mix them up in sausage meat, make sausages and sell them in a sausage sizzle to fans before Eden Park rugby games.

Benny lived under our roof for more than five years so I felt betrayed when I learned that he was a snitch, but I suppose I had the last laugh when I had him neutered just days before he got his promotion.

The second brush with the law involved trying to bribe this paper's gossip columnist to write fictitious stories about me, and the third involved me and some mates holding up a petrol station with a sawn-off shotgun.

All of these incidents passed through the New Zealand judicial system but not one of them made it into the papers. Had I requested name suppression I am sure they would have.

So should you find yourself considering applying for name suppression this year, think it through carefully. Name suppression will undoubtedly draw more attention to you in the long run, whereas not getting it can serve as name suppression in its own right, as everybody is focusing on trying to work out who the ones are who have it.