The Married at First Sight Australia bombshells just keep coming . This time, groom Timothy Smith has revealed he was jailed for his part in a million-dollar drug smuggling operation in 2006.
The 52-year-old got busted back in 2006 for moving loads - and we mean LOADS - of marijuana between the US and Canada after learning to pilot a helicopter.
Tim felt so ashamed he kept it hush-hush from MAFS AU producers throughout his casting for the show.
Now he's sharing the wildest and most "terrifying" lessons he learned from his time behind bars with some of the worst offenders in the US, in hopes it'll stop others from making similarly bad decisions.
"I'm sorry for what I did. I'm sorry to everyone I hurt. But I don't want anyone to do what I did," Smith told A Current Affair in a tell-all interview.
Revealing how it all began, Tim said he was approached in a Canadian nightclub by a group looking for a helicopter pilot, which he quickly became.
"It was $100,000 a trip for a couple of hours of work," he said of his smuggling.
"I would take off from a little unmanned airport. I had the helicopter sorted and I'd fly up a valley and into a creek," he recalled. "I'd meet a 4WD and land behind it and within a minute the helicopter would be loaded with marijuana and I'd fly south into the US."
It’s reported he did over 20 trips (that would have earned him $2 million!) before getting caught in late 2006. He was nabbed by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement after returning to LA from Australia, where he was visiting his mother who had cancer.
"My world changed. I was shipped off to a federal facility. No guards, four walls, 180 guys, good or bad," Tim said.
He was sentenced to a year in a maximum security prison after he owned up to his crimes.
An insider close to Timothy told So Dramatic! that Timothy’s “time in prison was terrifying”, he was in prison alongside “the worst offenders in the country”.
“He once told me the story of how he was chained to a serial killer in the Mojave Desert while he was waiting for his first Con-Air [inmate transport] ride,” they recalled.
Another source told the outlet that “Timothy really paid the price for what he did”.
According to the insider, Tim was allegedly homeless returning to Australia after his stint in prison.
“When he returned to Australia, he had nothing. He was deported from a country he had built his entire life in and can never go back to,” they said. “He had to start his entire life over again from scratch.”
Reflecting on his past, Timothy told A Current Affair: "If I could go back and change it, I would… that decision in 2006 keeps affecting me. Unfortunately - or fortunately - it shapes who I am today."
