Underbelly 7

‘I only want to take one little girl … I don’t know how to look after two little girls.’

BOB Vernon was 42 and a prominent criminal barrister. Barbara Biggs was 14, a troubled runaway with nowhere to go. He had paid her grandmother to allow her to work for him as a live-in babysitter.

The first day, he picked her up from her grandmother’s Melbourne flat. As they drove to his house, he told her about the job, minding his two small daughters while his wife was a long-term patient in hospital. He turned and looked her up and down.

She soon found out. That night he seduced her, beginning an illicit sexual relationship that was to last nine months. It ended when he ordered her to leave because he feared she might upset his young daughters by attempting suicide.

The lonely, disturbed girl was desperate for this man, more than old enough to be her father, to love her. The realisation that he regarded her as disposable cut deep. So begins a dark tale at the heart of an autobiography that has sent a ripple of embarrassment through Australia’s legal establishment.

In Moral Danger is a survivor’s story of a life salvaged from the wreckage of a dysfunctional family on society’s margins. Part Lolita, part The Getting of Wisdom, part Jerry Springer grotesque, it is a gritty real-life soap opera told with brutal candour and black humour.

There is more to this turbulent life story than the sordid secret relationship between a manipulative middle-aged man and a vulnerable schoolgirl, though that is the scandal likely to catch attention. It exposes the dark side of a gifted man, and suggests that the legal profession, so skilled at rooting out wrongdoers in other fields, is not always sure how to handle its own.

BARBARA Biggs is now in her 40s. She is a fit, healthy, articulate, intelligent woman – but there are hints that she comes from a harder place and does not want to go back there.

Biggs was one of six children with five fathers, four of whom had disappeared, including hers. Her mother and grandmother brought up the fatherless brood in sordid semi-poverty, skating perilously across the thin ice of the permissive age – the 1960s and ’70s – from rented house to rented house, shoplifting, pulling petty frauds and, as the cliché goes, looking for love in all the wrong places.

Biggs’s mother, a cheerful, obese woman who attracted men, many of them predatory and worthless, worked as a telephonist but prostituted herself to make extra money. The children gradually realised their grandmother had probably done the same.

Dino Dibra: Shot dead outside his Krambruk Street, West Sunshine, home in October 14, 2000. Motive: Payback.

Housam ‘Sam’ Zayat: Shot during a late night meeting with a friend in a paddock in Tarneit on September 9, 2003. Motive: Underworld related.

Willie Thompson: Shot dead in his car in Waverley Road, Chadstone, on July 21, 2003. Motive: Unknown, suspected underworld related.

Frank Benvenuto: Shot dead in Beaumaris on May 8, 2000. Motive: Debt-related.

Dimitrios Belias: Found by cleaners in a pool of blood below a St Kilda Road office on September 9, 1999. Motive: Failure to pay gambling debt.

‘Mad Richard’ Mladenich: Shot dead while visiting a friend in a St Kilda motel unit on May 16, 2000. Motive: Drug-related.

Veteran homicide investigator Detective Sen-Sgt Rowland Legg (right) with dead hitman Christopher Dale Flannery. Legg has been assigned several of Melbourne’s gangland killings.

Gerardo Mannella: Shot dead as he left his brother’s North Fitzroy home on October 20, 1999. Motive: Possibly pre-emptive strike because the killers believed he would avenge his brother’s murder.

Vince Mannella: Shot as he returned to his North Fitzroy home on January 9, 1999. Motive: Possibly debt-related or connected with an underworld power struggle.
… survived by third brother Sal Manella.

Mark Mallia: Charred body found dumped in a drain in West Sunshine on August 18, 2003. Motive: Debt related or connected with Radev’s murder.

‘Nik The Bulgarian’ Radev: Shot in Queen Street, Coburg, on April 15, 2003. Motive: Drug-related.

Biggs wrote: ‘The year before I was born, Ma took to street-walking in Queens Road at Christmas time. To buy presents, she told us later: “They don’t grow on trees, you know.” My father was her first client, or so she said.

‘He told her he was married with three children and worked at a garage. He was short, with olive skin and dark eyes, like me. He had an Australian accent but maybe European heritage. One hand was withered and permanently bent at the wrist: a birth defect, Ma thought.

‘Five years later, she met him on the street again and invited him home. “I’ve got something to show you,” she’d told him. She did … a photo of her six kids on the mantelpiece. She asked him to guess which was his. He picked me straight away. Then she took him into my room and showed me to him while I was sleeping.

‘I still imagine him standing there watching me. That’s all I know about my father …’

Missing a father figure and craving attention, the children were vulnerable to the sort of men their mother brought home. One of them was the man Biggs later called ‘the Chief’.

The Chief’s real name was Robert Vernon. He was one of the best criminal barristers in Australia – and a sexual predator.

Barbara Biggs was still at primary school when Vernon came calling. He was an occasional client of her mother’s and would appear sometimes, turning up to whichever shabby rented house they lived in at the time and disappearing into a bedroom with ‘Ma’, as Biggs called her mother.

As far as she could remember later, the first time Biggs met Vernon she was in third grade, in 1965. She remembered clearly that he arrived just as she and her older sister, Linda, had finished a bath and were still naked. Embarrassed, they hid behind a couch, but he asked them to dance for him.

He offered them money – ‘two bob’ each. Barbara wanted to take it, but her sister held her back. They stayed behind the couch until he went into their mother’s bedroom.

Another evening, when Barbara was in fifth grade, they caught Vernon looking through the window before he came to the door. He offered to buy them an ice-cream each – on condition that Barbara go to the shop with him. Their grandmother was looking after them. She urged Barbara to go but, again, her sister Linda grabbed her and whispered: ‘Don’t go, Barb. He’s creepy.’

Vernon conferred with their grandmother, then tried again. ‘I only want to take one little girl,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how to look after two little girls.’

Linda held onto Barbara’s arm. ‘She’s not going unless I go, too,’ she said, staring at their grandmother defiantly. Four years later, when Biggs was living with Vernon, he told her he had paid the old woman to let her go with him that day – and to work for him later.

Another time, he told her if she ever told the police what was happening, they wouldn’t believe her ‘because he was a barrister and I was nothing – the daughter of a prostitute’.

ROBERT Roy Vernon was no sad suburban hack with a guilty secret. Around the Victorian Bar – and bars where lawyers drank – they called him ‘Rolls-Royce’. It was half-admiring but, like the best nicknames, it carried a subtle connotation, an edge beyond the play on his double-barrelled initials.

In the 1970s, Vernon was one of the best-known criminal barristers in Australia but, like English luxury cars of the era, he was expensive to run and didn’t always start on time. ‘Rolls-Royce’ was no name for an honest plodder or a high-minded lawyer who would take silk (become a Queen’s Counsel) and then a place on the bench. Instead, it hinted at the venality of a big spender with bad habits, a man who got so close to his criminal clients that boundaries blurred.

Many of Vernon’s contemporaries regarded him as mysterious, some saw him as sinister and secretive, and few knew him intimately. On the record, most praise his ability. Off it, few are surprised he stands accused of misconduct, sexual or otherwise.

Some also suggest delicately that he was not just an advocate for his criminal clients in court but an adviser outside it. He crossed the ethical line that separates a clear conscience from easy money.

Brian Bourke, a hard-bitten veteran of criminal defence work who shared big cases and great wins with Vernon, admired his ability more than his character.

‘He was fearless of judges … capable and flamboyant,’ Bourke told the authors.

‘Bob was an unbridled larrikin. He had charisma the way a lot of crims have it – always money in their pocket and don’t care if the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow. There were a lot of shades to his life. He knew a lot of crims. All criminal barristers do. You don’t cultivate them – but Bob would have.’

On his good days, Vernon was a brilliant defence advocate, a bruising cross-examiner who could destroy witnesses, then turn to a jury and use a flair for drama, sentiment and humour to coax an acquittal. He rarely took notes in court, relying instead on memory and reflexes to conjure a bravura performance. More diligent lawyers wondered at his cavalier attitude but, mostly, he got away with it.

Justice John Starke (the judge forced to sentence Ronald Ryan to hang) once sent a note to Vernon saying he had made the finest address to a jury he had seen in decades. The praise was genuine. One of the accused in a big armed robbery case, a gunman called Danny Corsetti, also received a message from Starke. ‘Don’t worry about getting a QC – Bob Vernon will do the job just as well’ is the way one of Corsetti’s associates remembers it.

‘And Bob did do a great job,’ adds the source, a convicted murderer and robber. ‘He had a very good name among the underworld. He wasn’t a bloke who would knock you back.’

Law students and budding barristers were told to watch Vernon cross-examine witnesses and address juries. Charismatic and charming, he dressed sharply and cultivated an air of mystery. Part of the mystique was that for several years he lived in the gatehouse of the historic Ripponlea mansion, a National Trust property set in vast grounds in a bayside Melbourne suburb. He wore long leather coats and once affected a pencil-thin moustache and slicked-back hair like the sex symbol film star Errol Flynn’s – and that was not the only similarity to the hard-living actor, who was famously prosecuted for seducing an under-age girl.

Men found Vernon good company and many women fell for him. He married three times, and there were other women in between.

Vernon’s secretive nature means that few people still living know details of his background, and they aren’t talking. He arrived in Melbourne from Sydney in his late 20s and enrolled at the Victorian Bar in 1960. He hadn’t done law at Sydney University, but had been articled to a solicitor and studied in his own time for the NSW Solicitors Admission Board examination, which admitted him in 1957, when he was 27. He had spent several years in the air force, according to one source, although he told Barbara Biggs he’d been an army officer.

Despite his background – or perhaps because of it – Vernon stood out at the Victorian Bar. His buccaneering style was more in keeping with his home town: Sydney’s legal scene was more raffish and knockabout than the southern city’s. Whereas Melbourne barristers tended to treat each other and the bench politely in court, their Sydney counterparts were more earthy and robust.

The bar that Vernon joined after he came to Melbourne was a conservative enclave, where those who were not members of the Establishment by birth and education tended to conform with those who were.

Criminal work still tended to be frowned on. But that didn’t stop criminal barristers – like that other, even older profession – from flourishing. There was too much money to be made. And Vernon was one of those who made it – and spent it.

He was not the only colourful and charismatic defence lawyer in Melbourne’s courts but, for more than 20 years, he was one of the best. Perhaps only the legendary Frank Galbally was a better advocate, able to rattle witnesses and charm juries. Vernon was not necessarily less brilliant than Galbally – but he was unreliable. Like many brilliant men, he was easily distracted because he had a lot of interests. Such as military history and tennis. And sex.

Vernon jokingly described himself as looking like ‘a broken-down pug’, as in a former boxer. The square jaw, broad face, strong cheekbones, bull neck and broad shoulders gave an impression of a hard man, for all the well-cut suits and soft hands. It was an image he fancied.

When Vernon went to Europe with George Hampel – later a judge, now a professor of advocacy – to research a forgery case in the 1970s, he delighted in introducing Hampel as ‘El Cordobes’, the famous bullfighter – and himself as the great man’s bodyguard.

At least, that’s the story Vernon liked to tell later. When the authors contacted Hampel recently he did not tell the El Cordobes story, instead recalling Vernon’s visits to museums to indulge his passion for military history.

His former travelling companion was, concluded Hampel judiciously, ‘a man’s man’. It’s a phrase, one often used in obituaries, that covers a lot of ground.

Other barristers made a living representing career criminals and knew them well enough – but still kept them at a distance. Frank Galbally, for instance, warned his lawyer sons not to drink with their clients. He knew that to cross the line and fraternise with criminals could be dangerous. But Vernon liked to live dangerously – as one younger barrister found out firsthand.

The younger man – now a senior counsel who insists on anonymity – once went with Vernon to a nightclub used by underworld figures. There they met several armed robbers, clients of Vernon, and were drinking with them when two consorting squad detectives arrived.

Two of the criminals were carrying handguns. Vernon knew this and told them to pass the weapons to him under the table. He hid the pistols in the pockets of his leather overcoat and, when the detectives approached, said he was conferring with his clients.

The detectives searched the criminals, saying they had information the men were armed. They found nothing. After the disgruntled detectives left, Vernon handed the pistols back underneath the table.

The young barrister admired Vernon as a dashing figure, but decided not to go drinking with him and armed robbers again. It didn’t stop him taking a case, at Vernon’s suggestion, that older, wiser heads had refused.

It was a racing scandal. A shady racehorse owner – now dead, but then suspected of crime connections – and a former jockey were accused of fixing a race in which all but a couple of jockeys had been promised cash if a certain horse won. It did win and the jockeys were paid. But after the fixers were overheard boasting in a pub, they were charged with fraud.

Vernon represented the horse owner – but not his underling and co-conspirator, the former jockey. Vernon secretly approached several senior barristers to represent the jockey at three times the normal daily fee – a premium that would, it was obvious, be paid by Vernon’s rich and powerful client. But the lucrative brief had a proviso that spooked seasoned barristers … whoever took it was expected to tell Vernon if the former jockey (or any of the others) planned to give evidence against the owner.

The unspoken suggestion was that any witness willing to implicate the race fixer would be intimidated, bashed or even killed.

One barrister who refused the brief told the author: ‘Bob was offering $150 a day at a time when we got $50 a day for murder trials. The deal was we would meet them in motel rooms and that I would have to let them know if my bloke was getting into the witness box. I said “no thank you”. It was highly unethical. Years later I found out that a barrister, now a Supreme Court judge, was also offered that brief and knocked it back. And so was another barrister, now a QC. There was a clear implication the witness would be heavied. Otherwise why would Bob make an issue of it?’

Eventually, the young barrister referred to above agreed to represent the former jockey, though he did not make any deals with Vernon. He was intrigued by the way the prosecution case collapsed. One reason for this, he knew, was that Vernon had managed to obtain parts of the police brief in advance. After the committal hearing, the young barrister privately mentioned his misgivings to the prosecutor, who was shocked at the suggestion Vernon had connived to nobble the case. Naively, the young barrister did not think the prosecutor would report the conversation to anyone else. He was wrong.

Within hours, Vernon accused him of telling the prosecutor too much. Vernon said the outraged prosecutor had contacted a senior officer in the police hierarchy, ‘but luckily he’s one of ours’ – meaning the policeman was friendly with Vernon and had tipped him off.

The nervous young barrister admitted speaking to the prosecutor but denied passing on any damaging information. He claimed that the prosecutor, angry at being beaten in court, must have guessed someone had ‘got at’ the police brief. Vernon didn’t believe him – and warned that the race fixer, a violent man, was angry enough to have the barrister killed.

The barrister called his wife and told her to go to her mother’s house. She told him two men had followed her when she picked up their children from school. Vernon, meanwhile, arranged a meeting with the race fixer at 6.30 the next morning. Vernon told the young barrister he should turn up and ‘probably get a flogging’ – and warned him that if he didn’t turn up his life could be in danger.

The barrister did not fancy the choice. At dawn the next day he and his family flew to London. They didn’t return for 18 months.

He has never forgotten the incident. Neither has the older barrister who refused the job in the first place.

‘A lot of people would think Bob Vernon was a beacon of the criminal bar – a fearless advocate with tons of ability,’ he says. ‘He had no need to be corrupt … but he was black to the core. The most corrupt barrister I’ve ever known.’ None of which comes as any surprise to Barbara Biggs. By the time she was 16, she had survived moving to Sydney, several suicide attempts and three months in a psychiatric hospital.

She had also taken an intelligence test that showed she had an IQ of 142. Teachers convinced her she should go back to school and try for university.

She started studying, but was still torn between self-improvement and self-destruction. She worked hard – but couldn’t stop herself going to Kings Cross on weekends and bingeing on sex and drugs. At 17, she bought a motorcycle and was involved in a bad crash, but still passed her final exams.

Meanwhile, she had gone from heartbroken to suicidal to realising she had been damaged by Vernon’s treatment, but did not yet know how to deal with the knowledge.

‘If he told me once that sex was all that mattered, he told me 100 times,’ she was to say later. ‘He left me with a self-image as a sex toy and I played out that self-image without knowing why. Again and again.’

She was restless and reckless. At 18, she went to Thailand, crossed the Cambodian border and persuaded mercenary pilots to fly her into Phnom Penh, then under siege by the Khmer Rouge. She escaped the city just before it fell. She could easily have died there.

At 19, she went to Japan, hoping to get work teaching English, but could not get a work permit. An Australian girl she met introduced her to a brothel keeper. She became a prostitute, telling herself that it was to pay for university back home. In fact, as she later admitted to herself, she was still playing out the role.

Step by step, she shed her old life and built a new one, though there were hiccups along the way. In 1978 she worked as a tram conductor – and won national notoriety when she refused to join the union, a stand that halted Melbourne’s public transport system.

At 23, she had a baby and, in him, found new hope. She had a series of steadily more respectable jobs. She bought property and renovated houses and prospered.

And all the time she thought about what Vernon had done. But it wasn’t until she was 37 that she did something about it.

In 1993, a friend who knew the truth suggested Biggs go to the police. The sexual offences squad was sympathetic, but there was no chance of prosecution. The next possibility was a civil action – to sue him for damages. But a lawyer checked and found Vernon was a serial bankrupt. Like many of his criminal clients, he’d mostly dealt in cash and didn’t own assets or pay tax. A civil lawsuit was useless.

The only option was Victoria’s Crimes Compensation Tribunal, which was technically not punitive, and did not demand payment from ‘guilty’ parties. If it were proved on the balance of probability that someone had suffered from a criminal act, they were awarded money from a central fund.

The hearing was set for December, 1996. Considering that a well-known former member of the bar was accused of sexually abusing an under-age girl, it was a scandal waiting to break. But it didn’t, despite a few whispers.

Vernon was represented by a former Victorian solictor general, Hartog Berkley, but it did him no good. The magistrate found in favour of Biggs, awarding the maximum compensation of $20,000. Vernon died four months later.

CHAPTER 6

Villain in a horsehair wig