Michael calmly sat there and said, ‘We want the money back’, and I said ‘What money?’. He proceeded to open his briefcase and said, ‘This is what we do to get our money back’, and showed me this handgun sitting inside the bag.
Luke Atkins and Michael Two Thumbs 19941
Neil Cunningham was a fit-looking Scot in his early thirties who had come out to Sydney from Edinburgh at the beginning of the 1980s and made himself a fortune. He had started off selling five-dollar ties in stalls around the CBD, then graduated to a bigger stall at Paddy’s Market, and soon afterwards was operating two-dollar bargain stores that clearly generated large amounts of cash. But his big break, which made him more money than he had ever seen in his life, was a property deal in the CBD in 1992. So when he first met Bond in 1993, he was, in his own words, ‘ripe for the plucking’.
Cunningham had always admired Alan Bond and regarded him as a role model, because he showed what a poor immigrant might make of himself. And he was worldly enough not to care that the famous entrepreneur had fallen from grace and served time behind bars. So when the two men were introduced to each other by a mutual friend, it was relatively simple for Alan to persuade Neil to jump aboard the St Bees Island deal.
Sadly for Cunningham, however, he did a lot more than come along for the ride, because his new best friend persuaded him to set up a shelf company to own the St Bees project and to fork out enough cash to pay for all the architects’ fees, fancy brochures, lawyers, phone bills, helicopters and other myriad expenses that this new company ran up.2 Bond assured him, he says, that all the finance and development approvals were in place, and mountains of paperwork showed that it was all going to happen. But the promises never came true.
Cunningham claims he was told by Bond that Tri Kal and Gerry Sklar would provide the millions of dollars in finance needed to build the resort, but says that as soon as he set eyes on the Canadian, he knew he had lost his stake. Perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, he says that Sklar was not what one expected of the head of a major international development company. Or it may well be that Cunningham’s bullshit detector worked better than Bond’s. In any case, when the project collapsed in early 1995 leaving a string of unpaid bills, Cunningham found himself cursing the celebrated bankrupt entrepreneur and nursing a $1 million loss.
In the meantime, he became entangled in some of the crazier schemes that Bond was pursuing at the time, including at least one involving the D’Jamirze brothers, and he met Alan’s long-time lover Diana Bliss.
Diana Bliss frequently told friends and interviewers that she knew nothing about Alan’s business deals and stayed right out of them.3 But in May 1994, when Bond was busy facing interrogation in the Federal Court about his offshore fortune, she was pressed into service as a courier.
On the morning of 10 May, as Alan took his place in the witness box for the second day of the Dallhold examination, Diana walked into Luke Atkins’s office at Asia Pacific, just across the harbour in North Sydney. A slight, short blonde-haired woman in her mid-thirties, she was carrying a hatbox with a floral design on it. Introducing herself as Diana Bliss, she closed the door, placed the box on the desk and lifted the lid. Inside, wrapped in newspaper, was a large number of bundles of 100-, fifty-, twenty-and ten-dollar notes. Without hanging around to collect a receipt, she left.
Atkins had been told by Alan Bond to expect a delivery of $130,000, and Diana herself had phoned an hour or so earlier to say that she was at the Sheraton Wentworth Hotel with Neil Cunningham and was planning to bring the money round. But Atkins was still taken aback by it, for even if Asia Pacific’s banking pedigree was a bit thin, he was not in the business of handling big boxes of money. So after counting out the cash and finding it $50 short, he hurried nervously to the St George Bank just around the corner, and deposited it in Asia Pacific’s account, whence it was transferred on his instructions to Barclays Bank in Singapore.4
According to Atkins’s sworn statement to police in 1995, the money was to be collected in Singapore and paid as an up-front fee on a loan of US$8.5 million, designed to fund one of Bond’s attempted deals. But four weeks later, after countless phone calls, it became clear that something had gone drastically wrong. The loan had not materialised, even though the $130,000 had been paid.
Things then began to get extremely uncomfortable for Luke, because Bond and Neil Cunningham now arrived unannounced at his office and demanded the $130,000 back, with Bond in particular becoming ‘quite agitated’. Atkins told the two men that he could do nothing to help, because he had already transferred the money to Singapore. Soon afterwards, he told his visitors that he wanted nothing more to do with them. And at this point, Bond became even more agitated.
The phone calls to Atkins now began in earnest, from Alan Bond, Alan’s son John, and Neil Cunningham, who rang him ‘three times a day for two weeks’. As time went by the flood of calls got heavier. Finally, Luke found himself talking on the telephone to a well-known Sydney debt collector and enforcer, Tim Bristow. And soon after that, he found himself being visited by a standover man called Michael Two Thumbs, who apparently had no thumbs, and was obviously looking for a part in an Australian version of Pulp Fiction.
Michael came here in his polyester suit and sat in my office with his long, straggly hair and looked menacingly at people. So much so that the poor young secretary that was sitting at the front desk went to lunch and never came back. And Michael calmly sat there and said, ‘We want the money back’, and I said, ‘What money?’. He proceeded to open his briefcase and said, ‘This is what we do to get our money back’, and showed me this handgun sitting inside the bag. About ten minutes later Tim Bristow was back on the phone. All I simply did was say, ‘Thank you gentlemen, goodbye’, slammed the door behind me, walked straight up to North Sydney police and said, ‘I’ve just been threatened’. At three o’clock the next morning my front door was kicked in.5
Tim Bristow confirmed to me in 1999 that Michael Two Thumbs was a close associate of his at the time and was doing a lot of work for him. His diaries also confirm that Bristow did a job relating to Bond in mid-1994.6
Luke Atkins emerged shaken from his dealings with these hired enforcers, yet otherwise none the worse for wear. But the menacing phone calls and the visit from Michael were not the end of his troubles, for some two months later, on 27 September 1994, he was woken by a loud knocking at the door of his Rose Bay apartment. He donned his pyjamas and opened up to find five members of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in his hallway, armed with a shotgun and a sledgehammer, and brandishing a search warrant alleging that he had conspired with Alan, Craig, John and Eileen Bond, Diana Bliss, Jim Byrnes and Whaka Kele to defeat the Bankruptcy Act 1966 by concealing assets from Bond’s creditors.
They asked me who I was and then stood upon the landing, read the document to me and said, ‘We’re coming in’. And of course this is the time when everyone is going to work, so people are coming up and down the stairway of the flats and I’ve got five policemen standing there going, you know, ‘And by order of the Federal Court’. It was just crazy.7
The police went through his flat and removed almost everything that wasn’t nailed down, including a plastic garbage bag that contained apple cores, muesli, other bits of stale food, and bits of shredded paper. They also took away a video of the Kingdom of Tonga, produced by Austrade.
They took all my business cards, all my financial records, manila folders with information about all kinds of unrelated clients. And they actually took all my diaries, my phone records, everything, so I had to go through and try to reconstruct all my clients’ details and try to remember who they were, where they lived and try painstakingly to put that together again.8
But Luke Atkins was not the only one to be rudely awoken that Tuesday morning, because the police had obtained warrants to search fourteen premises around the country, including Parker & Parker’s offices in Perth, and had been given permission by the magistrate to use reasonable force to gain entry or get what they wanted, including breaking open doors and filing cabinets.
At various times that day, the AFP descended on Alan’s home in Cottesloe, John and Craig’s houses in Peppermint Grove and Whaka Kele’s house in Epping. Diana Bliss’s unit in Sydney was also turned over, along with offices belonging to the Bond family companies, Jim Byrnes, Neil Cunningham and Whitsunday Island Developments. After a couple of hours at Alan’s beachside house the police drove off with some ten tea chests full of documents, while at Parker & Parker’s offices in St George’s Terrace they grabbed no less than 144 cases of papers that they must have needed a small furniture van to cart away.
The warrants entitled them to seize wills, cash books, cheque books, address books, faxes, telexes, diaries, notes, working papers, computer disks, manuals, software and encryption devices, as long as they belonged or referred to any of thirty-five named individuals or eighty named companies. All members of Alan Bond’s family except his younger daughter Jody were on the list, as were Jurg Bollag, John Hatton-Edge, Harry Lodge, Graham Ferguson Lacey and others. The usual raft of exotic companies run by Bollag also featured prominently, as did the Allied Irish Banks, the Zuger Kantonal Bank and a couple of newer names such as the Parliament Bank & Trust Company of Panama, the Ueberseebank of Switzerland and the International Trust Company of Liberia.9
The warrants alleged seven offences, of which the two most serious were that Bond had committed perjury during his bankruptcy examination and had conspired to defeat the bankruptcy laws. So it seemed that Bond might not yet have got off scot-free after all. The two major offences carried maximum penalties of five years under the Crimes Act, while the others under the Bankruptcy Act 1966 carried a maximum penalty of one year. These comprised four counts of failing to disclose information, assets, record books or material particulars, and one of concealing or removing property to the value of $20 or more.
Who had given police the tip-off for the raids or set them on the trail was not revealed, but it was clear that the AFP’s criminal investigation was independent of any action Ramsay was taking in his search for Bond’s money. And as it would turn out, they had started pursuing Bond long before his Oscar-winning performance in the Federal Court in May 1994.
But whatever the genesis of their action, the possibility of criminal charges was a new threat, and within forty-eight hours Bond’s lawyers were in court seeking to have the AFP’s seizures declared illegal. This, however, merely stalled the investigation, and before long the AFP were poring over a mass of memos about gold, oil, violins and osmium-187, and trying to make sense of documents that recorded million-dollar deposits in Switzerland and movement of money in and out of Liechtenstein.
Quite possibly, other important evidence had slipped through the police dragnet, for Bond had made great efforts to grab back files that he thought might fall into the wrong hands. For example, the day after his argument over the $130,000 with Luke Atkins, he had turned up at Asia Pacific’s North Sydney offices at 8.30am, before Atkins got into work, and told staff he had come to collect all his papers. He had then rifled through the filing system and taken away several manila folders relating to the deals that Atkins and Asia Pacific had been trying to conduct for him. Bollag had called Atkins soon afterwards by phone from Switzerland to ensure that all Tri Kal’s documents had been returned.
Over in Perth at around the same time, Greg Barnes’s files on Bond and SIDRO Anstalt had also gone missing. Someone had broken into his offices one night and cleaned out everything relating to Bond and the Austrian gold deal, yet apparently had taken nothing else. Stupidly, they had not destroyed copies of letters and proposals that were stored on the hard disk of Barnes’s computer.
Tim Bristow, meanwhile, had also been pressed into action again, though not necessarily by Bond himself. A week before the AFP raids he had been asked to retrieve some documents from an office in central Sydney used by Bond’s buddy Whaka Kele. He had broken into the office, only to be arrested by the AFP who had been keeping it under surveillance.
But whether it would have helped the AFP to have any further documents is another matter, because the deals were often described in the most Delphic terms and set up so that it was almost impossible for an outsider to understand them. Even Luke Atkins, who had worked on most of them, was not always sure what had been going on, because Bond and his partners had been so secretive.
They’d only tell a certain amount of information to a certain number of people. It was almost like assembling the atomic bomb. You know how to do this little bit and you know how to do this little bit, but if anyone tried to piece the story together they’d get the wrong story because they didn’t know all the bits.10
Atkins’s diary contained a meticulous record of phone calls from Bond, Bollag, Bryer and Gerry Sklar during 1993 and 1994, along with details of meetings and tasks he had carried out, plus phone numbers, bank details and the like. But even this was not going to be much help to the police unless they had a guide, and Atkins was in no mood to help. He had tried to talk to someone in the AFP a month or so earlier about Bond and Tri Kal, and now they wanted to wire him up for meetings with Bond, and were suggesting in a heavy-handed way that he ought to cooperate or the taxman might come chasing him.11 But he chose to leave town instead and go to ground.
Nowadays, Luke Atkins is a hard man to track down. He is not on the electoral roll or in the phone book, and does business via his mobile phone. Unlike Bond’s friends, however, who also favour the gypsy life, he rarely answers when you ring, and feeds his phone with pre-paid SIM cards to avoid being given a billing address. Whether that is paranoia or prudence is a matter of opinion.