Gizmondo Exec Pleads Guilty To Drunk Driving...
...now all he has to worry about are those pesky fraud and felony grand theft charges in his upcoming trial. Bo Stefan Eriksson, former Swedish gangster and executive of the now-bankrupt Gizmondo company, pleaded no contest to drunk driving charges in an LA courtroom yesterday. This came only days after rejecting an initial plea offer which had him admitting to stealing two other heinously expensive vehicles; it’s all a bit convoluted, but apparently Eriksson defrauded British banks of the money to purchase these cars and would then bring the vehicles over to the USA just before he stopped making payments to the banks.
Eriksson was originally set to face trial for driving his rare Ferrari (estimated at a worth of $1.5 million) into a utility pole on the Santa Monica highway at over 160 mph. The story just gets weirder from there, involving an imaginary friend of Eriksson’s, fake agents from the Department of Homeland Security, and Eriksson stowing a gun in the car of a good Samaritan who happened to stop by.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle,
He agreed to plead no contest to misdemeanor drunken driving because “it’s always better to ‘fess up what you’ve done,” said his attorney, James Parkman.
“We want to fight the battle where the battle is,” Parkman said. “It makes no sense to chase windmills and waste the jury’s time and the court’s time.”
So does that mean he’s eventually going to plead guilty to the more serious charges at a later date?
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to on 20 October 2006
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: british banks, drunken swedish gangster, ferrarri, Gizmondo
There was a really good article about him and all the craziness surrounding him in Wired a month or so ago. http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.10/gizmondo.html