When it comes to the drug habits of the rich and famous, there's a thin line between hilarious and disturbing. Championship race car driver Mariusz Malyszczycki's relationship with ecstasy is something closer to entrepreneurial. The Polish speedster was busted in the middle of a brazen plan to import a boatload of the little colorful pills and was sentenced Thursday to 37 months in prison.
Videos online show the handsome daredevil holding trophies and speeding around dirt tracks in a bright red hatchback.
He apparently had another source of income. According to federal court documents, Mariusz and a partner met with two undercover cops at Don Pan Bakery in Miami in March 2004. There, he "asked agents if they had any connections at the Miami Seaport" in order to "smuggle 50,000 pills of ecstasy." They would be 100 percent pure MDMA from Holland, he told cops. (Gigantic glow stick party much?)
His lawyer Scott Sakin contends Mariusz was "in the wrong place at the wrong time" and that his English wasn't good enough to understand what was happening.
A few days after the meeting, cops bought a sample of the 1,000 pills and from his partner. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement later found 40,000 more tabs, but Mariusz was already back in Poland at the time.
Four years layer, while in Switzerland, he was extradited back to Southern Florida for the case.This past August 25 he plead guilty to possessing ecstasy with intent to distribute. "He's embarrassed by the whole thing," says Attorney Sakin. "He wants to put it behind him."
