WASS: ROCKER DOHERTY’S CRACK-SMOKING PAL SPARED JAIL

A friend of junkie rocker Pete Doherty who was filmed smoking crack with the singer by Goldsmith heiress Robyn Whitehead hours before she died of an overdose was let off by a judge today.

Musician Alan Wass, 30, was convicted after jurors watched a video of him smoking the class A drug from an adapted brandy bottle with Doherty, 32, and friend Peter ‘Wolfman’ Wolfe.

The film was made by Wass’s ex-girlfriend Ms Whitehead, 27, as part of a documentary about the Babyshambles singer and former boyfriend of supermodel Kate Moss.

Hours later, she was found dead from a suspected heroin overdose, Snaresbrook Crown Court heard.

Doherty and Wolfe, 42, were both handed jail sentences earlier this year after pleading guilty to drugs offences relating to the incident.

Wass denied possessing crack cocaine after claiming he had ‘naively’ agreed to pretend to smoke the drug in the hope it would boost his career.

But the jury unanimously convicted him after watching the footage.

Judge William Kennedy said: ‘I think the film that I and the jury saw should be compulsory viewing for anyone aged 14, 15 or 16, or indeed indeed anyone for whom drugs appear to have some kind of glamour.

‘What they actually saw was something sordid and pathetic.’

Wass had made an ‘extraordinary’ decision to try to boost his own profile through appearing in a film endorsing class A drugs, he said.

‘What the jury did not know was that night, that young woman who was in that film died of an overdose,’ he said.

‘Publicity, for her, was not all good.’

Alison Morgan, prosecuting, said police seized films made by Miss Whitehead after attending the flat at Landmark Heights, Hackney on 24 January last year.

‘She had filmed the footage in the few days before it was seized by police,’ she said.

‘Robyn Whitehead was at that time making a documentary about the musician Pete Doherty.

‘He is shown on the footage you will see, along with another man, Peter Wolfe, the defendant Alan Wass and Robyn Whitehead.

‘The prosecution case is footage taken on 23 January shows the defendant consuming crack cocaine, smoking it from a small adapted bottle, to be used as what is commonly known as a crack pipe.’

Wass was later arrested after agreeing to attend at appointment at a police station in March, and made no comment in interview.

The musician, who fronts a band called the Lipstick Melodies and has played with the Libertines, said he had agreed to appear in the film in the hope it would help his career.

‘I told her I was going to take part, but I was not going to be smoking crack cocaine,’ he said.

‘I was smoking tobacco rolled in a small piece of Rizla and then put in the pipe to imitate crack cocaine.’

The judge told Wass that as someone who might might be viewed as a role model for others he had ‘let down’ countless people.

‘What that film showed spoke volumes about you,’ the judge told Wass.

‘Whatever emotions you feel now, I hope one is shame.’

The judge handed Wass a three year conditional discharge but warned if he appeared before the courts again in that time, it was likely to be treated as a suspended prison sentence.

Wass, of Bramley Road, north Kensington, was also ordered to pay full prosecution costs of £3,500 within a year, despite telling the court he was on income support of £85 a week.

Doherty, of Durley, Wiltshire, was jailed for six months in May this year, after pleading guilty to one count of possession of cocaine.

Wolfe, of Heath Road, Maidstone, was handed a year’s prison sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of cocaine possession and one count of supplying the drug.

Miss Whitehead, the granddaughter of the late Teddy Goldsmith, is thought to have died as a result of ‘heroin poisoning’.

She had spent the last ten days of her life making a documentary about Doherty.

An inquest into her death is yet to take place.

The judge ordered that any of the drug-related items seized by police should be destroyed unless they are required for the inquest.
ends