We are certainly going to defend this with great vigour. I don’t believe the charges should have been brought, and if you read the judgement I’m sure you can reach the same conclusion.
Alan Bond outside Perth Magistrates’ Court, 3 March 1995
Bond’s celebrations at being discharged from bankruptcy threatened to be short-lived, for he now faced imminent prosecution on two sets of criminal charges that had the capacity to put him behind bars for ten years or more. Four days after his escape from Ramsay’s clutches he was due to face a committal hearing in Perth over the alleged $15 million fraud relating to Manet’s La Promenade. And six weeks before his release he had been hit with a far more serious indictment accusing him of a considerably larger fraud against Bell Resources in 1988–89.
Indeed, the Bell heist was the crime of the century in terms of the amount of money involved. The siphoning off of $1,200 million from Robert Holmes à Court’s old flagship to Bond Corporation had reduced a hugely wealthy enterprise to an empty hulk in the space of nine months, and had caused nigh on total loss to its shareholders. It had also directly benefited Alan Bond, in that at least $55 million had been diverted to his private company Dallhold, enabling him to spray millions of dollars in cash and jewels to Eileen and his children when his business empire was on the brink of collapse.
Bell Resources had been one of the stock market’s stars in the 1980s but had been savaged by the crash of October 1987. And by the time Bond came on the scene all its assets had been sold and turned into cash. This, however, was why it was attractive to Bond, who desperately needed to lay his hands on the odd couple of billion dollars to keep his empire afloat. By mid-1988 interest rates were rocketing, the share market boom was over and cash flow had slowed to a trickle.
Bond Corporation seized control of the company in August 1988 and rapidly milked it of every last cent, concealing this plunder from the National Companies and Securities Commission (NCSC) until it was too late for shareholders to get their money back. The NCSC, under Henry Bosch, did its best, but possessed neither the funds nor the staff to prosecute the case, and persuaded the government to set up a major inquiry. This job was given in March 1990 to a South Australian QC called John Sulan, who spent almost two years collecting 200,000 documents, examining sixty-five witnesses and identifying what the Australian Securities Commission (ASC) described as ‘major breaches of the law’.
In February 1992, the head of the ASC in Western Australia made a confident public statement that it would be only ‘a matter of weeks’ before prosecutions were launched.1 But by the time that charges were finally laid in January 1995, it had taken six years, three investigations, 1.2 million documents, and a special waiver from the Attorney General to get Bond in the dock. Even so, at the end of this marathon pursuit, Bond was still rushed into Perth Magistrates’ Court on a Saturday morning to be formally arraigned. It seemed odd after all this time that the commander of the Bond Task Force, Tim Phillipps, felt they couldn’t wait till Monday.2
Bond arrived jauntily at the East Perth court at around 9.25am in a maroon Land Cruiser driven by his skiing buddy and hotelier friend Geoffrey Ogden, and accompanied by his lawyer Andrew Fraser who had flown in from Melbourne the day before. Wearing a grey suit with a white shirt and dark tie, he stopped briefly to pose for photographers. Holding his head high, he tried hard to smile, but he looked so uncomfortable that the effect was more like a rictus. He’d been told only two days earlier that he would be charged for the Bell fraud and had still not been given the details.
Having dealt with the small crowd of journalists outside, his first port of call was the lockup, where he was stripped of his tie and belt, and made to surrender his shoelaces. Next he was asked to turn out his pockets and hand over his valuables— his watch, his wallet and whatever credit cards he had left— while the arresting officer recorded the items one by one in the property book. As he produced his Ansett Golden Wing frequent flyer card he joked to Tim Phillipps, who had chosen to bring the charges against Bond in person, that he probably wouldn’t be needing it much in the future. It seemed to Phillipps that he was shocked to be charged and shocked to be going through this humiliating process, as if no one had told him it would happen. But he probably thought that he had escaped scot-free, because more than five years had passed since the so-called crimes had been committed.3
Bond was first up before magistrate Wayne Tarr at 10.00am, and stood pale and silent as the long indictment was read out to him. There was a Criminal Code charge of conspiracy to defraud, which carried a seven-year sentence, and three Companies Code charges of failing to act honestly as a director with intent to defraud shareholders. Finally, there were three more of misusing his position as a director to gain an advantage for Bond Corporation. Taken together, if all the charges were proved, he could face a maximum of thirty-seven years in jail.
When he emerged from court a couple of hours later, Bond was tieless, beltless and looking strained, having provided half-a-million dollars bail to avoid being sent straight to jail. He now faced the prospect of reporting every Monday to Fremantle police station but, unlike most people in his position, would be allowed to do it by phone to the Australian Securities Commission if he was travelling interstate.
While Bond was being driven away by Geoffrey Ogden, who had been prevailed upon to pledge an additional $250,000 surety in case Bond did a runner, Andrew Fraser told reporters in aggrieved tones about the new wrongs being heaped upon his innocent client. ‘Once again Mr Bond is being made the scapegoat,’ he said. ‘He is not guilty of these charges. We will defend them to the death.’ It was unfair, said Fraser, that the authorities had brought charges outside the normal five-year time limit, and unfair that Bond had been singled out to take the rap when others, who were equally responsible for losing Bell Resources’s money had fled overseas.4
Peter Mitchell and Tony Oates had been charged in their absence with conspiracy to defraud, and with eight and sixteen charges respectively under the Western Australian Companies Code. But Oates was in Poland, where he was quite possibly beyond the reach of extradition proceedings, and Mitchell was in Colorado, USA, where he had been working for three years—although he would in fact come back voluntarily to face the music.5
Seven weeks after being charged with what was easily the biggest fraud in Australian history, Bond was back in the same court for yet another appearance on the rather less spectacular Manet fraud charges. The day of reckoning on La Promenade was getting closer. Having only been discharged from bankruptcy in Sydney on the last Monday in February, he was required to be back in the dock again in Perth the next Friday to hear Magistrate Ivan Brown commit him for trial. This time, however, he was animated and chirpy outside the court, and keen to tell the press that it was all a big mistake. ‘We are certainly going to defend this with great vigour,’ he told a knot of journalists. ‘I don’t believe the charges should have been brought, and if you read the judgement I’m sure you can reach the same conclusion.’6
This was putting a favourable gloss on the proceedings, to put it mildly, for the magistrate had clearly reached exactly the opposite conclusion in ruling that there was a case for Bond to answer. But with the irrepressible optimism of a born salesman, Alan had latched on to Ivan Brown’s observation that the evidence was circumstantial and that he had admitted nothing, so it might be a tough case for the prosecution to win.
Having faithfully recorded his sales pitch about the charges being in error, a couple of journalists remarked to Bond that he seemed to be far sprightlier than he had been in June 1994, when his lawyers had argued that he was too sick for the Manet committal hearing to proceed. And one even ventured to suggest that it was a bit of a coincidence that he had improved dramatically the instant that the magistrate had ruled him fit to face trial. But Bond was having none of this.
It’s not a little coincidental. If you actually read the medical reports at the time, they say that it is about now that I would start to see a full recovery, and I’m not fully recovered yet, but I’m much, much better.7
Thanks to the backlog in the Western Australian criminal justice system, he would now have at least another twelve months to recuperate before he was forced to face trial. He would also be guaranteed at least twelve months of freedom up to that point, whatever the final verdict. And in the meantime, he had an important appointment with his long-time lover Diana Bliss.
Alan had proposed to Diana several times during their sixteen-year relationship but she had always turned him down. No doubt the fact that he had still been married to Eileen had been a major obstacle, but she might also have wondered about the wisdom of getting hitched to such an inveterate womaniser and workaholic. Since the collapse of his marriage and business empire, however, Alan had been forced to slow down and stay in Australia, and they had spent far more time together in far more normal circumstances. Since mid-1993 they had even lived together for long stretches in Alan’s house in Cottesloe, and by October that year they were sufficiently reunited for Diana to confess to the New Weekly, ‘Obviously I love him, obviously I love and care for him. I always will’.8
At this stage, Diana was still dismissing suggestions of marriage, saying there would only ever be one Mrs Bond, but she was talking wistfully of whether at thirty-nine she might still be young enough to have children. And she clearly wasn’t thinking of anyone except Alan as the father.
In October 1994, Alan proposed to her again in a crowded Japanese restaurant in Melbourne’s St Kilda Road and nearly fell off his stool when she agreed. Till then she had always wanted to hang on to her freedom, so she could be out seven nights a week at the theatre, travel the world and be free to pursue her career as a producer, but it had suddenly hit her that she was tired of being single. She told Jane Cadzow of Good Weekend magazine that the revelation had come to her at five o’clock one morning in a cabaret bar in New York, where she was sitting drinking with Australian actor Carmen Duncan and a bunch of gay men, feeling too tired to get a cab. As daylight approached, it dawned on her that she didn’t want to be doing the same thing ten years down the line. ‘It was the family, it was the family … that I knew I was missing in my life. And that commitment to a partner. Maybe even getting a dog, that sort of thing.’9
She did not want to be single at the age of fifty. She wanted more depth and meaning to her life, she said. And so on Easter Saturday, 15 April 1995, she and Alan tied the knot at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sydney’s Circular Quay.
To avoid the paparazzi, the venue was kept secret from even the eighty-odd guests until an hour beforehand, so that the previous week in Sydney had seen mounting speculation about where this ‘wedding of the year’ would take place. Most of the smart money had been staked on St Mark’s Church in Darling Point or All Saints in Woollahra, but when these drew a blank some journalists staked out the Park Hyatt Hotel and a restaurant called Level 41. This was on the forty-first floor of the building that would have been the Bond Tower had Bond’s empire not collapsed in 1990, and occupied the space that had originally been earmarked as Alan’s penthouse.
Now, as the hour approached, some fifty members of the Australian and international media were sheltering under the palm trees, clutching soggy notebooks or protecting expensive cameras, and toying with phrases like ‘wedded bliss’, ‘life of bondage’ or perhaps ‘rain did not dampen their spirits’. It had been conceived as a romantic sunset ceremony but, sadly, a thick autumn drizzle had put paid to that.
First to arrive was the groom, who stepped out of a long white Mercedes limousine looking ‘tanned and fat’, as the British satirical magazine Private Eye liked to put it. Wearing white tie and tails, white gloves, and an expression that John Huxley of the Sydney Morning Herald described as his ‘trademark startled glance at the media’, Bond didn’t bother to say hello to the journalists or pose for the cameras, but merely grabbed the attention of a security guard and told him to ‘get the fuck out front’ to exercise a bit of crowd control.10
Soon afterwards, when the bride and her entourage arrived in matching black-and-cream vintage Rolls-Royces, the importance of this advice was revealed, because Diana, in an off-the-shoulder magnolia silk dress by Sydney designer Christopher Essex, was immediately engulfed in a huge scrum that dislodged her veil, toppled a number of plants and nearly demolished one of the canopies that formed part of the decorations. Fortunately, friends came to her rescue and she was able to proceed into the museum with dignity restored, accompanied by two bridesmaids and four young attendants, to the strains of Procession from The Sound of Music, played on a baby grand piano.
Behind heavy brass-studded steel doors and shaded windows, the main hall of the MCA had been turned into a chapel, with marble columns, massive Grecian urns, cream roses, candelabra and calico-draped plinths. A simple lectern had been pressed into service as a makeshift altar. Rows of delicate white chairs with gold bows had been set up for the ceremony, while cream couches and cane chairs at the back awaited the reception. Neil Perry of Sydney’s famous Rockpool restaurant had organised the catering, while the entertainment had been choreographed by Christopher Essex and the theatrical Miss Bliss.
The scale of it was scarcely on a par with some of Alan’s more famous bashes or any of his children’s weddings, but the press agreed that it was a pretty spectacular affair and reported solemnly that ‘experts suggested’ it had cost more than $100,000 to stage.
They also reported enviously that Alan and Diana had earned the money back by selling exclusive picture rights to Britain’s Hello! magazine, oft-favoured by celebrities for its gushing admiration of wealth, fame and excess. And as the majority of journalists hunkered down outside in the growing gloom, the PR writer hired by Hello! set about giving the happy couple a glowing write-up.
For once, though, the hyperbole was possibly justified, because according to several of the guests, Diana and Alan were like love-struck teenagers. Alan was just out of bankruptcy, was outwardly confident of beating his fraud charges and had finally got his long-time love to the altar after many years of trying. Diana, for her part, really did look radiant as they danced together and watched a troupe of Shirley-Temple-look-alikes in pink tutus sing My Boy Lollipop.
What had finally made up Alan’s mind, he told Hello!, was his heart operation two years before.
I remember the last person I saw before I went into surgery was Di, and her beautiful smiling face was there when I woke up. We have continued to grow from strength to strength, and in a relationship that has had to stand the test of time, through all the speculation and the hard times, true love has really shined through.11
It was a mark of his new wife’s love for him that she had chosen to come back to Alan in 1992 just as others were leaving, and she now told the same Hello! interviewer it was their troubles that had finally united them.
When you go through a crisis in your life, you tend to re-evaluate everything … your friendships, your values, your future … If anything, this recent period with Alan, with his legal battles and our enforced separation, brought us closer together and made us realise the deep love we had for each other.12
As the guest list showed, few of Alan’s other friends had showed such loyalty, although his best man Murray Quartermaine was a notable exception, as was Dr John Saunders, the surgeon who had been so worried the previous year about the state of his brain. The fickle ones had simply faded away, as publicity over his criminal charges and bankruptcy mounted. And none of his family had come to celebrate the new liaison either. Out of deference to Eileen, perhaps, Alan’s four children had sent a telegram of good wishes but had elected to stay away. Word was that they were horrified by his remarriage. Diana’s family and friends, however, had turned out in force, and her mother Phyllis provided one of the highlights by singing What a Wonderful World with Di’s Aunt Betty and a friend Jo Black. The three women, it was said, were all in their seventies.
In the inevitable search for celebrities, the best the press could come up with was the Sydney model Kate Fischer, who was renowned for her willingness to attend almost any party, but who had yet to shoot to super-stardom by bedding Australia’s most eligible bachelor Jamie Packer. In his stead, the ubiquitous Kate had come on the arm of Alan’s burly minder, Jim Byrnes, who had no doubt squired her to the scene in one of his or, should one say, his family trust’s many Rollers.
Byrnes had been busy all week on Bond’s behalf and had earned his keep by helping to squash a story in New Idea which had threatened to feature the intimate confessions of a fifty-three-year-old ‘masseuse’ who claimed to have been Bond’s lover. The story was to include a series of explicit and embarrassing letters that Bond had written to the woman from his Wooroloo prison cell in July and August 1992.
Like most of the other women in Alan Bond’s life, Cecelie Turner was a blonde, but she was twenty years older than his normal female companions. Quite how she had come to light was not entirely clear, but she had been discovered by a freelance journalist, Jamie Fawcett, who had put her in touch with New Idea and perhaps helped her negotiate her $10,000 fee.
Bizarrely, Fawcett had then tipped off Byrnes about the upcoming article (or so Byrnes said in an affidavit to the New South Wales Supreme Court) and Jim had pulled out all the stops to get the item suppressed. His first move was to ring Cecelie herself and ask her what she had confessed to. Then he rang Alan Bond in Perth to tell him the bad news about what she had said. This prompted Bond to say, according to Byrnes’s affidavit:
This is all lies, I’ve only ever met the woman three or four times in my life and I’ve never given her anything. It looks as though she or the magazine or both are trying to blackmail me.13
One of the three or four meetings that Bond admitted to had clearly been quite recent, for New Idea had managed to snatch a couple of pictures of Cecelie and Alan in Sydney in early 1995 to demonstrate that she was telling the truth, and these showed Bond kissing her as he said goodbye to her outside her unit in Woollahra.
Having denied that there was even a scrap of truth in Cecelie’s story, Bond beseeched Byrnes to stop the article being published, whereupon Jim rang the author, Pam Lesmond, to warn her that the piece was an invasion of privacy, defamatory and untrue. She suggested that Byrnes speak to her editor because the article had already been written and subbed.
Jim then rang Fiona Wingett, the editor of New Idea, whom he knew from 1992, when he had publicly lauded then lamented his marriage to Jackie Love. Wingett no doubt remembered him well, for she had reported being monstered by a ‘very large minder’ at Jim and Jackie’s wedding.14 Byrnes told the court he offered Wingett a deal—a tasteful exclusive for New Idea on the Bond–Bliss wedding, in exchange for them dropping the kiss-and-tell piece about Cecelie and returning Bond’s letters—to which Wingett supposedly responded, ‘We already have a good story which will appeal to our down-market readers. Our readers prefer trash not romance’.
Whether Fiona Wingett said any such thing is open to conjecture, since editors are rarely so frank about their clientele, but there is no dispute that she turned down the offer and referred him to the magazine’s publisher, Susan Duncan, who also told him that they were not prepared to do a deal. Byrnes then warned her that he would see her in court.
The journalists’ version of these genteel negotiations, however, suggested that Byrnes had relied on some old-fashioned methods to back up his arguments. In fact he frightened Pam Lesmond so much by threatening to visit her that she complained to the police and then moved out of her house. He was also ‘very menacing’ to Fiona Wingett, reminding her of his criminal record and telling her that she would have ‘a short career in publications’ unless she fell into line. Finally, he told Susan Duncan that he had ways of applying pressure that would make her see reason, and warned her to ‘be careful’. Lesmond even received a death threat on her answering machine, but from a woman rather than from Jim.15
As for his offer of the ‘tasteful exclusive’, Byrnes omitted to tell the court that he had suggested New Idea pay a fee of $50,000. He had also obviously forgotten that the rights had already been promised to Hello!.
After Byrnes’s persuasion failed to do the trick, Bond and his masseuse, whom he had somehow brought back on side, were forced to break cover, and in early May they rushed into the New South Wales Supreme Court to seek an injunction against New Idea, preventing publication of ‘details of the private and sexual relationship’ that they had allegedly enjoyed. Bond’s argument was that he would be defamed by the story, while Cecelie maintained that New Idea would be in breach of contract because the journalist had promised to let her see the article before publication.
A full report of these grubby proceedings was naturally carried in the Daily Telegraph the following day, along with a big picture of a platinum blonde in a bright white dress, sporting glossy nail varnish, huge earrings and lots of gold. Which, of course, was Cecelie Turner.16
The Telegraph reported eagerly that the masseuse had sworn an affidavit, laying out in explicit and intimate detail exactly what she had told New Idea in the interview. Not surprisingly, however, the newspaper was unable to enlighten readers further, because Bond’s lawyers persuaded the judge to suppress it. Alan’s letters to Cecelie and his own court affidavit, which presumably set out his version of their relationship, were also included in the suppression order.
Alan and Cecelie’s joint summons, however, gave a tantalising insight into what the two plaintiffs feared New Idea would say, without saying how they had come to such lurid conclusions. They suggested, for example, that New Idea might be planning to allege that Cecelie was not a masseuse but ‘a prostitute’; that Alan had written ‘lewd and lascivious letters’ to her from jail; and that he had proposed that they ‘engage in sexual activities of an unusual nature’. It was also suggested that the article would accuse Alan of being ‘a person of loose morals’ who had ‘cheated’ on his wife-to-be.17
An injunction was duly granted by the court to prevent the article or the letters being published on Monday 10 April, which meant that the scandal would at least not hit the newsstands until after the wedding had taken place. And battle was then joined on the substance of the case. But after all these fanfares, the war ended with a whimper, because when a watered-down version of the article was eventually produced in court it turned out to be worthy of Mills and Boon.
According to New Idea, Cecelie and Alan had indeed been lovers for a number of years, enjoying ‘mainly a physical relationship’, but Cecelie’s view of it all had apparently been so romantic that there was not the slightest suggestion of impropriety.18 The magazine’s supposed legion of trash-lovers, who would doubtless have lapped up a few lewd and lascivious letters or some novel sexual manoeuvres, must have been bitterly disappointed.
Jim Byrnes told me afterwards that this whole affair between Bond and Ms Turner had started because Cecelie had written Alan some ‘really erotic’ letters while he was in prison and had followed these up with a photo of her from her younger days. Bond, out of curiosity or kindness, had then written back and eventually agreed to meet her.
But Cecelie told the Australian Federal Police a rather different story after the court case was over. Her signed statement to the AFP in June 1995 alleged that Alan had picked her up in a bar in 1981, in much the same way as he had befriended Diana Bliss around that time, and that their encounter had led to what Cecelie described as a close personal friendship and ‘physical relationship’ over the next fourteen years. Bond, she said, had often visited her in Sydney, and she had occasionally visited him in Perth.19
But more interesting than that, Cecelie informed police that Bond had told her in pillow talk down the years about the money he had stashed overseas. In 1991, for example, she had been with him at his favourite hotel, the Sheraton Wentworth in Sydney, while process servers tried to serve him with a bankruptcy notice. According to her statement, Bond had told her that it didn’t matter if they did make him bankrupt because he had $50 million invested overseas in companies run by Jurg Bollag.
Much more recently, in 1995, after his bankruptcy had been annulled, Bond had supposedly complained to her that his family and Bollag had forked out $5 million in legal fees to keep his pursuers at bay. Cecelie told the police that she had remarked that Mr Bollag must be a very nice man to help Alan out like this, at which point Bond had allegedly scoffed, ‘Well, it’s all my money’.