The tale of Nick the Riverman

I'm Andrew Rule is his life and crimes. Today, we're going to go back in time and look at the adventures of a Romanian fella who called himself Nick the Riverman. Now this spoke's real name is a complicated Romanian name. It is Gelu, Nikolai, Pusia or Pouchia. But for our purposes, let's call him Nick, because that's what he called himself and what everybody else called him once he got to Australia.

Now Nick bobbed up for our purposes. He bobs up in East Gippsland at the district of Breuthon and Bruthen Is in the old Shire of Tambo, which no longer exists, but the Tambo River runs from its headwaters up past Omeo, and in those mountains it runs down a relatively short course through the mountains through a winding valley, the Tambo Valley, and then it hits a flat country at Breuthen and widens out into quite a big river that then empties

into the gipsand lakes. And the Tambo Valley has been settled a long time, and the upper reaches, of course, is very wild, rough country. It's state forests, it's state parks, and it's bushy and steep and rocks and all the rest of it. And there's not much settlement through their only different patches along the river. And Breuthen is sort of the last of the flat land, and people who lived just north of Breuthen are actually living a butting

the forest. And this is where our man, Nick, the Riverman as he called himself, washed up sometime in the nineteen nineties, and Nick turned up there with quite a backstory. Nick had grown up in Romania in the sixties and seventies at a time when Romania was run by a sort of a doctor evil type dictator called Nikolai Chasescu, whose name I can't pronounce. But he and he's we could dictate a wife ran the place like a personal estate,

and it was very strictly controlled. It went to rack and ruin economically and ended up they were trying to rule a place, you know, with the jack boot and the rifle and the gun butt, and inevitably Romania's economy fell apart and people started to try and flee it, and the dictator's answer to that was to put more border guards on and the machine gun nests and patrols and people with rifles and dogs and all the rest of it to stop Roumanians from escaping into really interesting

safe havens like the old Yugoslavia, which was not all that safe. But the Romanians were so desperate that routinely at night dozens of them would try to swim across the River Danube in order to get into mostly into what was in Yugoslavia. And one of these refugees who did that deadly escape was this man Nick Nick Pucia or Puussia, and he did that in around probably nineteen eighty eight. Around that time. He gets as the river without being shot, although he told people that you know,

shots were fired. They might have been, and he didn't drown obviously, and he gets to the other side and he's thrown into prison on the other side, which is not a very nice place to be imprisoned. I think they put you in there and let you go hungry for a fair while. And eventually he was deemed to be a genuine refuge and he got to Australia. So he hits Australia around in the eighty nine to ninety and he's got a wife and little girl, baby girl back in Romania and they can't come out to Australia

for a while. So he goes fruit picking. Hard worker, goes fruit picking. Then he gets a job at the busy board factory out in Noble Park or somewhere. Factory hand learns a bit of English as he goes along, might have known a little bit of English already. Interestingly, back in Romania, he had trained apart from being in the army for two years, which everyone had to do, he had trained as a forester. In your about trees

and a borer culture and horticulture. And anybody that's been to Eastern Europe, especially those poorer countries there, knows that basically all the locals are very in touch with their peasant forebears, and they grow tomatoes, that grow corn.

in the local language. And in the front garden were tomato plants and sweet corner and all the rest of it. So even at a place where the house was their headquarters are a law firm, they were growing vegetables. And this gives you an insight into the sort of person that this nick guy was. When he got up to brew them in the skips land, he got hold of a shed on a block of land, and it was notionally a shed, but he quickly converted it into living quarters.

And everyone who knew him then said, this guy was terrific. He shed was really organized, really clean, spotless. He made furniture out of timber from the bush. He had bees for honey. He grew vegetables, a great variety of them, and used to preserve them and all the rest of it, swap them with other people barter. He would shoot rabbits for meat. He would trap fish in the river, and he would get carp which are a nuisance of course, and a pest. And he would turn the carp into

liquid fertilizer to put on his vegetables. And he would pan for gold. In fact, he built a sluice box and respect for gold in the Tambo River which is nearby, and in various creeks around the place. And the suice box is an arrangement where you run sand from the bottom sand and little rocks on the bottom of the river through the sluice box and have water running over it,

and you find little specs of gold. And indeed he used to get enough gold that he would sell it, this alluvial gold, which is much sought after because it's I think it's soft and very easy to work or something, and very pure perhaps, And he would sell that to buyers in Melbourne, in suburbs like Colfield and and Kilda. He would sell his illuvial gold. So he was very much a hard working, self sufficient man who was able

to sort of feed himself with his own efforts. And during the late nineties he was reasonably well known around Bruthon. He learned to speak a bit of English.

keen on him, most of them. I know one of them. One of their neighbors is someone I know. And she said, look, he was a bit odd. He was sort of a bit up himself, and I found him a bit slazy, was summary of him. But she said a lot of the guys didn't mind him because he was an interesting guy to them because of all the things he could do. This same woman young women in those days. She at one point went canoeing on the Tamba River, and what she did was get dropped off right up upstream up

halfway to a place called Tambo Crossing. I think there's a rock they called white Rock that stands out in a river bed and you can get into the river there with your canoe and you can hop in and go downstream. Fairly fast flowing river, and it's got a lot of rocks and bends in it. Quite an exciting trip at different times of the year, depending on the

water flow. And on the trip down river, which might have been six or eight k's or ten k's, she noticed as she whipped past one particular patch of very heavy bush. The river wine through heavy bush, particularly on the wild side, on the east side, the sort of inland side, and she stooked sideways for a split second she saw a big black thing snaking into.

here in the middle of nowhere. And she didn't really think much about it for quite a while until the day came when there was a great shock and scandal in the district because the police had come and arrested their neighbor, Nick, the guy who called himself Nick the Riverman, Nick the Romanian, and they arrested him because someone had tipped them off that he had grown a large crop of cannabis upstream in the bush beside the Tambo, on the wild side of the Tamba, in the forest there.

And indeed it turned out that he'd set himself.

using motorbikes or even walking. And he had set up this rather complex and sophisticated dope growing plantation and he grew precisely two hundred and fifty eight plants. And we know this because he kept a diary, and not only that during the eight month growing season which preceded his

arrest by two or three years. Two or three years before he was arrested, this good year for growing dope, it's an eight month season, and he had filmed himself regularly over the eight months and compile a three hour video in which he dubs himself Nick the Riverman. He doesn't actually film his own face for legal reasons. He explains good idea, Nick, but his voice is on the

audio because he's explaining to an audience. I don't know which audience he thought he had, but he was explaining to whoever's watching what he's doing and how to grow it, why he did it this way and not that way, amount of fertilizer he used, etc.

dubbed in. The police were tipped off and when they got there they arrested him at his heart already his shed, which he turned into quite a comfortable sort of cabin. They went back up to the spot on the river. They had to bush bash their way in no raft for them.

into it. He'd actually, by hand, using shovels, dug things like rice paddies. He'd leveled out ground and he'd put done little banks around them so that he had all these regular depressions with little banks around them, just like rice paddies. And that's where he grew his dope. I'm not sure whether he would plant them on the high bit or the low bit, but he could fill the low bit with water. And he had a little two

stroke pump. He used that to pump the water up into these depressions, and that would water his plants for several days at a time. He'd give them a really good drink every now and again. It was a very ingenious and carefully set up thing. He had a tent to sleep in, he had a tent to keep his food and all that sort of stuff in supplies, and he had a shed. He knocked up a shed to dry the cannabis when he harvested it. Now, after his arrest in early two thousand and four, the police were

tipped off in late two thousand and three. They went

in there, they found what they found. They dug around, they looked around for any sign of buried anything, probably looking for buried treasure, you'd imagine, and they found a barrel, and in a barrel they found the video, the three hour video, which is basically what got this guy convicted because when the police played it back there with the evidence, they found a diary which actually helped them as well because it had dates and places and times and the

activities he'd been doing. And they found cannabis seeds among other things, and probably I think vegetable seeds as well, because he used to grow veggies to help support himself. So it was a very sophisticated set up, and sadly for him, he had left this evidence very neatly in the barrel and buried it so carefully that it was all preserved very well so that when the police uncovered it they could take it all to court and use

it to get a conviction. And back in mid two thousand and four he went to trial in the County Court held at Bensdale, and Judge Jeffrey Chettle, well known judge around Victoria, now retired, was the judge and a

pretty experienced and seasoned judge. And when it was put to him by Nick, the Riverman's lawyer, who was trying hard, it was put to the judge that Nick had actually lost interest in the dope crop and had let the plants rot because it had a change of heart and had decided not to sell he dope on.

dollars cash was quite a bit of money. And the smart money says that our friend Nick got all or most of that money. And so that judge, Judge Chttle sentenced him to some four years and ten months, almost five years. There were many charges and one of them he had a loaded rifle and ammunition and all sorts of things. So there was a bit to charge him with four years and ten months of which he had to serve a minimum of three years. Now he serves

you three years. While he's inside, he studies up more. He's a good student. Clever guy, studies up gets another I think caught a culture qualification and an Australian Borah culture qualification which means that when he gets out, he goes and works, among other places, he works for one of the power companies clearing trees from under the power lines. He got a job with them and clearing firebreaks and

all that sort of stuff. So he had quite a good job after he got out of jail, as he actually had before.

lost money. And that's what took him to brew them to a place that was real cheap to buy something and where he could use the skills that he had to grow dope.

back at some point to Brewthen. Now whether he got back his original property, I'm not sure what happened there, but anyway, I know that he went back up there because he had went back to Romania a sees folks who he hadn't seen for a long time, and he went over there and he met up with an old childhood friend, a female friend, married her and brought her to Australia and he took her up to his converted shed at bruden which was where somebody that I know

met him and her, and they said, the poor woman, she couldn't speak.

could really talk to except him. And the day that the person I know and her partner had lunch or dinner there, they said the food was spectacular, but clearly the wife was not all that happy, and they weren't when later on that wife went back to Romania to look after her sick mother, and she stayed there, and of course COVID intervened in twenty nineteen and she didn't come back. And so i'll mate Nick the river man. Here he is during Covid. He's lost whatever job he had,

he's got no money, COVID's closed everything down. His wife's back in Romania, and he's not feeling too good about things, and he decides in twenty twenty two, this is about twenty two years after his previous attempt, he decides he'll have another go at the dope. So there he is up there again. Somebody in authority gets a tip off, perhaps, but I don't think he any longer has the land with the shed on it. And this time he goes back up there because he's familiar with the district and

he's full time in the bush. He's got a tent, he's got a ute, he's got a rifle, he's got a telephone, and he's got a little scooter, a little on the scooter, and he's living in a tent in the bush, just doing the best he can. And the relevant state authorities, the people that run the forests, whoever long and interesting name, they went up there because they must have known he was camping in the bush or someone was, and they gave and they find the tent and.

thought he was terribly dangerous or anything. And there's Nick full of piss and wind because when the police get him to the police station and interviewing this turned into a bit of a marathon, much to the amusement of

the judge who later ruled on the whole case. They filled fifteen hundred pages with the interview, in which, you know, several more than a thousand questions were asked because Nick kept raving onto the police about the medicinal benefits of cannabis, how his grandmother back in Romania was a natural path or something like that, and how he is prepared to die in jail to defend his belief that cannabis is a wonderful thing and everyone should have free access to it.

The government should be handing out cannabis well to everybody who's in pain or in need or anything else, and you can do everything with it. It's wonderful. And he gave this relatively obsessive and eccentric dire tribe to the police until their noses bled. And this was so obvious that it came through that the judge realized what had happened. And the judge commented on it when he was running the second trial of our man, Nick the Riverman, and

the judge I suspect. He was not quite as flinty as Jeff Chettle, who was the judge in his first trial. This judge tended to think that our man was a bit of a green thumb. He was interested in his views on the medical benefits of cannabis and remarked on a little riley, perhaps rolling his eyes a bit. But in the end he didn't really jump on Nick the Riverman the way he could have. He said, now you're

fifty nine years old. You're a father, a devoted father, a devoted grandfather, and we have evidence to that effect. You are a resourceful man. You're a very hard working man. You're quite a clever man. You appear from our psychological reports not to be mad. You don't seem to have any mental illness, despite your eccentricities are telling inside that one. He's not mad, just a little eccentric, or at least

can pretend to be. And he said, I will give you sixteen months for having one hundred and eighty eight cannabis plants, which if you have one hundred plants that's commercial. You've got one hundred and eighty eight. I will give you four months for having the loaded unregistered rifle and ammunition, but I will reduce that to one month cumulative. So the total sentence for you, mister Pucia, is seventeen months, but that's a head sentence. That's the most you can serve.

The minimum you can serve with parole would be ten months. And you have already been in custody since your arrest for three hundred and twenty one days and that covers that ten months. So you just to be clear, mister Pussaer, just to be clear, you are paroled now you can walk. So he walked out of Bensdale Court late last year

a freeman. And that is the story of Nick the Riverman, the Romanian refugee who was caught twice growing dope in large commercial qualities in Victoria and has luckily been able to go back on the street and with any luck, stay out of trouble. And so he's got an opportunity to go back to normal gardening, you know, be and things like that. There is another thing he might be able to do. His neighbors from the old days remember something he did very well. They said he made beautiful,

a grade spirits. He must have had a still set up and he could make snaps, brandy and vodka. And they said he was very very good at it, ums high quality stuff. Perhaps he should become a boutique spirit maker. It's all the rage I'd buy his gin. Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to harold'sun dot com dot au forward slash Andrew rule one word.