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That left Currado to take the stand in an unusual trial where the focus is not on what happened — that is not in dispute — but why.

Currado, 49, pleaded not guilty to charges of obstructing justice, breach of trust and conspiracy to commit an indictable offence.

He’s charged with giving out confidential police information 34 times from November 2016 to September 2017, and trying to influence the release of someone in custody in July 2017.

Most of the facts are not in dispute, his lawyer Gary Clewley told the court.

“The issue here is why he did it,” Clewley said.

Clewley said he’ll be arguing a defence based on mens rea, the legal concept that someone must possess a guilty state of mind to commit a crime.

He led his client through the eight times he provided confidential information to the fake Greenspan.

Currado testified he thought he was doing the right thing, exposing a huge ring of corruption, without having a clear idea how to do that.

“I believed I could trust her. I trusted her,” he said.

He got nothing for providing the information, Currado testified.

Currado said he made contact with the fake Greenspan through a man named Aaron Barak, whom he’d met in the summer of 2015 while trying to sell his car.

Aaron Barak, according to an agreed statement of facts in the case, turned out to be Darko Jovanovich, a fraud artist still on probation after a 2014 sentence for defrauding people in Windsor by pretending to be a doctor.

Currado didn’t know his real name until much later, he testified.