Crime does pay

CONFIDENTIAL documents filed in a Queensland court lift the lid on the secretive world of celebrity book negotiations, revealing that Pan Macmillan paid $350,000 for the rights to drug-smuggler Schapelle Corby’s story.

The Australian Women’s Weekly paid a further $110,000 to publish an extract from My Story, the memoir Corby co-wrote with Kathryn Bonella. The publishing contract shows that Schapelle’s sister, Mercedes Corby, is entitled to 85 per cent of the $350,000 publisher’s advance and any future royalties earned from the book, which has sold more than 100,000 copies.

That should buy a lot of marijuana for the ‘Corby Drug Collective’.