Underbelly 1

DANE Sweetman was a smalltime criminal and fulltime loser when he embraced the ultra-right, racist world of the neo-Nazis while serving a two-year term for armed robbery.

His love or violence was already ingrained. The skinhead bower boy who had left school in year eight had been found guilty of attempted murder by the time he was 16 years old.

While in jail in the late 1980s Sweetman found a violent cause to match his vicious nature. In his eyes, he was no longer just another violent head case, but a political freedom fighter.

He covered himself in tattoos which included swastikas and the words ‘Nazi Skinheads’, ‘KKK’ and ‘Native White Protestants Supreme’. From inside jail, Sweetman wrote to colleagues, urging them to violence and providing plans on how to build bombs.

In one letter, Sweetman told a Nazi sympathiser how a group of right-wing fanatics formed a secret organisation called ‘The Guard’ in Pentridge Prison in 1987. ‘Give the dogs what they deserve, full on racial warfare. There is no stopping us when we’ve started,’ he warned.

The most feared man behind bars

Inside the evil mind of a mass murderer

Born bad

Mind games

‘He was the complete Jekyll and Hyde character’

LATE in the afternoon of 29 June 1991, Margaret Hobbs was turning her car into Springvale Road from Burwood Highway in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs when she heard the radio news: a little girl had been abducted at Rosebud.

She felt sick. ‘I thought, ‘It’s Robert Lowe’,’ she recalls. ‘I knew he had a unit at Rosebud. And I knew he’d been building up to it.’

Three-and-a-half years on, the shock of that moment still registered on her face as she talked about a crime that wrecked so many lives.

By the time Hobbs heard the news that day, Sheree Beasley, the six-year-old girl, was dead, her tiny body defiled and hidden in a concrete pipe. But Sheree Beasley, the case, was just beginning.

That case ended, legally, at the Supreme Court, when Robert Arthur Selby Lowe was sentenced to life in prison for kidnapping and murdering Sheree.

Margaret Hobbs had known killers, rapists and compulsive offenders of all sorts in the previous 25 years, first as a parole officer, later as a psychotherapist in private practice. But none affected her the same way as the mild-mannered, middle-aged, middle-class salesman who revealed himself to her as a secret monster.

The first time she saw Robert Lowe was in 1984, when he was 47. He had been referred by his lawyers, who wanted a report to present to Springvale Magistrate’s Court. He had been charged with exposing himself to schoolgirls at Glen Waverley shopping centre.

At first, Lowe appeared to be just another client undergoing therapy for compulsive behaviour — in his case, exhibitionism.

He was placed on a good-behaviour bond for a year on the obscene exposure charge. A condition was that he go to Margaret Hobbs for therapy for that period. He did. It became another habit he found hard to break.

Lowe was always punctual, always polite. But, as Hobbs sensed, never genuine. She realised she was dealing with more than just another ‘flasher’.

Lowe was, and is, a neat and well-spoken man. Tall, thin, with curling fair to grey hair (and, later, a beard), he wore fine-rimmed glasses that lent a prim, bookish look in keeping with his standing as a church elder and Sunday school teacher.

This mild exterior concealed a calculating, intelligent deviate who told Hobbs he often exposed himself to young girls, sometimes first placing pornography (invariably stolen) where they were likely to see it.

As she spoke, Hobbs sat uneasily in a blue easy chair in the pleasant room where she has heard so many unpleasant things.

‘He was the complete Jekyll and Hyde character,’ she begins. ‘I knew the bad one, the Mr Hyde bit, that was hidden from his wife, family and friends.

‘He would sit here very attentively and take copious notes but he wouldn’t enter into any sort of meaningful therapy. He pretended to be in therapy but he wasn’t trying. I told him it wasn’t any good, that he had to be completely honest or I couldn’t help him give up obsessive behaviours … but he enjoyed it too much to give it up.’

At first, Lowe admitted only one previous conviction for obscene exposure but later acknowledged being in trouble often. In fact, he had a record of sex offences spanning three decades but had dodged many convictions through his deceit. Hobbs describes him as a skilled and habitual liar who thought he could ‘run rings around police’. Which he often did — until he came up against the homicide squad.

‘He is clever and enjoys the excitement of jousting with police,’ she said. ‘He is a sophist — that is, he is a skilful arguer who will mount a clever but fallacious argument to rationalise his behaviour.

And he is a specific liar. If you ask him if he has a blue car he will say, “Certainly not”. If you change the question slightly and ask him if he drives a blue car, he will say, “Yes”, but point out that he doesn’t own it.’

Lowe saw Hobbs intermittently after his bond expired in 1985, and often called her. He was still offending, and appeared in court for wilful and obscene exposure, offensive behaviour and theft.

It was a disturbing pattern, although not yet sinister. According to Hobbs, that changed in April, 1990, when Lowe complained to her that police had spoken to his then employer after questioning him about approaching a girl in Yarraville. Although nothing came of the incident, it rang warning bells for Hobbs because it meant he was willing to accost a child rather than just expose himself.

‘When he told me he’d been spoken to by the police about the incident with the young girl at Yarraville, I got very worried,’ she was to recall. ‘It was an escalation. He was getting bolder and the targets were getting younger.’

Soon afterwards, he approached some girls on Flinders Street station. ‘They were holding some balloons. He said something like one of the balloons looked like ‘a big dick’ and made a sexual suggestion.

‘The girls were frightened and ran out and spoke to a traffic policeman, who tackled him. He got charged and pleaded not guilty.’

By this time, Lowe had upset Hobbs’ professional detachment. ‘He came and told me all this very blandly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I told him to leave my rooms. I opened my door and ordered him out. I refused to support a not-guilty plea.

‘He said, “You can’t do this to me.” But he went. I was worried about this escalation.’

Lowe brought his wife Lorraine with him to see Hobbs soon after the Flinders Street incident. Lorraine Lowe was distraught and at one point demanded of her husband, ‘Why don’t you just stop it?’ To which he had replied coolly, ‘Because it gives me too much pleasure.’

At that moment, Hobbs judged, he unmasked himself. ‘Lorraine went pale. She realised her husband had built a cardboard cutout life for her.’

Lowe’s solicitor asked Hobbs to write a court report to verify that he had been seeking therapy. She felt the first pangs of a looming crisis. Trapped between professional obligations to a client and personal feelings about his actions, she feared what he might do.

She wrote a court report which, she says, was a warning. ‘I said this man had to be shown he couldn’t do this sort of thing without being punished. I meant that he should be locked up.’

But the court judged otherwise. ‘He was only fined $750,’ Hobbs said bleakly. ‘Six months later, Sheree Beasley disappears.’

On 25 July, 26 days after Sheree’s abduction, Lowe came to Hobbs’s office in Fitzroy. He was, ostensibly, querying an account but was agitated and refused to leave for hours. Hobbs said: ‘At 5 pm I walked downstairs to my (barrister) son-in-law’s office and said, “I reckon Robert Lowe took Sheree Beasley. I wonder what sort of car he’s driving.” There’d been publicity about the suspect driving a blue hatchback.

‘I asked the office girls if they’d noticed his car. None of them had. But next day one of them told me she’d seen him drive past later … in a blue hatchback.’

Meanwhile, the police had reached the same conclusion. The same week, Detective Senior Constable Andrew Gustke, of the Zenith taskforce set up to investigate the abduction, identified Lowe as the driver of a blue Corolla similar to the car at the crime scene. He made a routine call to Lowe — and was immediately suspicious because Lowe conjured up an instant alibi and vehemently denied being near Rosebud on 29 June.

The hunt was on. The police brought Lowe in for questioning on 13 August, and did their homework, discovering his long history of sex offences.

On 26 September, Sheree’s remains were found in a pipe near the Mornington-Flinders Road at Red Hill. Soon afterwards, the homicide squad secretly approached Hobbs and placed intercepts in her rooms without her knowledge to tape Lowe’s conversations with her.

It was then that a homicide sergeant, Alex Bartsch, struck up a rapport with Hobbs vital to the ultimate success of the case.

In the following months, she was to have more than 100 contacts with Lowe, in person or on the telephone. Each word was taped and transcribed into thousands of pages of what became known as the ‘Fitzroy tapes’.

It was a cruel experience for the psychotherapist. A mother and grandmother herself, she had to make the crucial decision that her commitment to the community was more important than confidentiality to a client.

Lowe, by this time rejected by his wife and two sons, used his interviews with her to start a bizarre ritual of dropping clues that he was the killer. It was an extension, she said, of his exhibitionism.

‘He would come in here and say, “Margaret, would you tell my wife that I didn’t put this girl in the car for sexual purposes”. He was an arch-teaser. A shocker. He has absolutely no remorse, no sense of culpability. It was like Silence of the Lambs.’ The reference to the film is not fanciful. Hobbs shuddered as she relived a scene she could never blot from her mind.

‘One day, after the body was found, he brought in a rucksack and a plastic bag and put them down each side of his chair. He looked at me and said, “Margaret, do you really think I could bury a child in a drain to be eaten by maggots?”

‘His face was chilling. He was enjoying every minute of it. As he was speaking, I noticed something white on the back of his chair. I thought it was a piece of cotton. Then I saw it was crawling. I thought it was a caterpillar. I took a piece of paper and walked over It was a maggot. There were hundreds of them, crawling over the chair, across the floor, up the wall.

‘I screamed at him, told him to get out, and to take his filthy bag with him. He took the rucksack but left the plastic bag, and that’s where the maggots were coming from. I wrapped it up and ran downstairs and threw it in the bin. I didn’t want to know what was in it.’

Other scenes from those nightmare months were branded into her memory. Once she steeled herself to drive around Red Hill (where Sheree’s body was found) with Lowe on the pretext it would help him build a case for manslaughter rather than murder.

‘As we drove, he’s telling me this dreadful story of putting her in the drain face up … I had to turn my face away so he couldn’t see the tears on my cheeks.’

Then, in early May, 1992, Lowe handed Hobbs a written ‘confession’ admitting Sheree had died after he had abducted her, but claiming that she had accidentally choked. Shaken, she managed to copy the document and hand it to police a few days later — the same day Lowe was picked up shoplifting with the original confession in his bag.

He was finally arrested in March 1993, when police decided they had overwhelming evidence.

Afterwards, Margaret Hobbs stripped her consulting rooms to exorcise every trace of Robert Arthur Selby Lowe. She threw out the desk, couch and easy chairs, the carpet, even the pictures on the walls.

Everything but the clock. But could never rid herself of the memories. She took them to her grave. She died in a car accident in January 1996. POLICE interest in Lowe didn’t finish with his conviction. An unsolved murder, which had played on detectives’ minds since 1984, had many disturbing similarities with the Beasley case.

Kylie Maybury was six when she was abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered on Melbourne Cup day, 1984. Like Sheree, Kylie was grabbed on her way to a shop. Her body was dumped in a drain in Preston.

Old murder cases are never closed, although the reality is that they are rarely solved. The Maybury case was destined to remain a tragic mystery. But during the investigation into Lowe over the Beasley case, police were able to track him back to Preston in 1984.

Shortly before Kylie Maybury was murdered, Lowe was interviewed by police over offensive behaviour involving three young girls in Preston, only one kilometre from where Kylie would later be kidnapped. He was a travelling salesman whose work often took him to the area.

He had made sexual suggestions to the girls, and a neighbour took the registration number of his car. Police did not prosecute him because of lack of corroboration. His name was not passed on to detectives working on the Maybury case.

Significantly, perhaps, Lowe first went to Margaret Hobbs weeks after the Maybury murder. Privately, she always suspected he could have been the killer of the young Preston girl. After some years he drifted away — but returned to therapy two weeks after the Beasley killing.

There were many similarities between the cases. The girls were the same age and were abducted while on errands for their mothers on a day when Lowe was not working.

Hobbs said Lowe was fascinated by pink. Kylie carried a pink strawberry shortcake bag and Sheree was dressed in pink. The bag was later recovered near Ferntree Gully Road. Lowe lived off the same main road.

More in hope than expectation, one of the original investigators, Glenn Woolfe, now a detective inspector, ordered that Kylie’s clothes, which had been kept as a possible court exhibit since the murder, be tested to see if modern DNA technology could help identify the killer.

The answer came back. It could be done.

The Victorian Government had passed legislation to demand blood samples for a DNA bank from convicted sex criminals and murderers where the crime had a sexual motive. Lowe was an ideal example of the need for such legislation. This would prove, one way or the other, whether the former church elder was a double killer.

Lowe decided to fight the order. The man who said he would take a lie detector test to prove he was not a murderer became surprisingly coy about the DNA test. The Office of Public Prosecutions found a possible loophole in the law through which Lowe could wriggle. Lawyers withdrew the case.

So determined were the authorities to test Lowe’s blood that the Government reworded the Act in late 1997, putting a retrospective clause in the legislation in the hope of getting the convicted killer to provide a sample.

Biding his time

Never trust a caged dingo

THE best welder in Pentridge’s J-Division blotted his copybook in 1992. After six years of faultless behavior, Raymond ‘Mr Stinky’ Edmunds — rapist, murderer and model prisoner — made a break for it.

And the quiet man with the loud nickname came within a sniff of getting away. The official line was that he was foiled only by the keen nose of a prison dog which led officers to find him hidden in a metal cabinet on a truck moving goods from the prison industries yard where he voluntarily worked seven days a week. There were persistent rumours, however, that the authorities had information and knew exactly when and where to have a dog when Edmunds made his move.

After his attempted jailbreak Edmunds, then 48, was moved to maximum security to spend his days with a neo-Nazi, a mass killer and serial murderer. He fitted in well.

Unlike many notorious inmates, Edmunds was prepared to bide his time and wait, until his carefully-planned bid for freedom. But his aborted escape has added more headlines to one of Australia’s most notorious and long-running crime stories, one that has inspired extraordinary public fascination, a best-selling book and film negotiations. For all his infamy, Edmunds is a nobody: an introspective, hard working man whose very ‘ordinariness’ let him get away with murder and serial rape for nearly twenty years. Profoundly average — although far from normal — the adopted farmer’s son who became a peeping torn, child molester, killer and rapist is in himself of little more interest than the dingo in the Azaria Chamberlain saga.

But as with the dingo, Edmunds’ acts of random violence have had a seismic effect: ruining many lives, affecting scores of others. To those people belongs the real story.

That story begins in February, 1966: the week decimal currency was introduced, Sir Robert Menzies announced his retirement from Parliament and a young batsman called Doug Walters was picked to play Test cricket.

Australia, already shocked by the Beaumont children’s disappearance in Adelaide a few weeks before, was confronted by another chilling crime.

On Thursday, 10 February, two teenagers disappeared from a pop concert at Shepparton’s new Civic Centre: Garry Heywood, 18, a gangly apprentice panel beater with a touch of the lair about him, and Abina Madill, 16, extroverted and only a few weeks out of school.

At first the police assumed the pair had run away, but when Garry’s immaculate, dark green, FJ Holden was found in Shepparton’s main street next morning, his family and friends feared the worst. They knew what the detectives didn’t, that young Heywood would never willingly abandon his car. Later, police accounted for every fingerprint found on the vehicle except one found on the driver’s door, a fact they kept secret for 16 years.

The Homicide Squad was called in, and the town turned out to search, but nothing was found until 16 days later, when two youths stumbled on the missing girl’s half-naked body in a paddock at Murchison East, 37 kilometres south of Shepparton. Heywood’s body was nearby, a bullet hole through his skull.

In the months that followed, Shepparton became a town of stares, whispers and ugly rumor. Hub of a giant orchard area, the district population swelled each summer with the annual invasion of itinerant fruit pickers.

Young, and free with their money and their fists, they flocked into town at night; looking for a good time, often finding trouble. Trouble, after the bodies were found, meant being questioned about the murders. But there were too many potential suspects, and so the investigation narrowed to a few — to Abina’s former boyfriend, a young mechanic called Ian Urquhart, and his friends. Urquhart’s movements on the night of the murder didn’t really tally with his being the killer, but he was the only person with a motive, that of jealousy.

The investigation wrecked Urquhart’s life. Bashed and hounded by a couple of rogue police, he left Shepparton and, eventually, Australia, only to be killed in a speeding sports car in Singapore on the sixth anniversary of the murders, a haunting postscript to the murder story.

Urquhart’s best friend, Peter Hazelman, also left town, eventually moving to Darwin to escape gossip and unhappy memories.

Abina’s friend Jan Frost and her boyfriend (later husband) Max Hart were questioned repeatedly and roughly because they had been among the last to see Abina and Garry alive. They, too, left Australia for several years and even now choose not to live in their hometown.

Inevitably, given the profusion of potential leads, police made other mistakes. Forensic experts quickly determined that a relatively rare Mossberg .22 rifle was the murder weapon. But despite a nationwide ‘search’, detectives failed to check all available gunshop records, which was why they did not find that a Myrtleford sports store had sold a Mossberg years before to a farmer called Edmunds, Raymond Edmunds’ adoptive father.

A few months after the murder a policeman came to the Gawne family’s dairy farm at Ardmona, near Shepparton. He asked to speak to a ‘Raymond Edmunds’. Edmunds, who had been on the farm for two years had moved a few weeks earlier to Finley, near NSW. The policeman said he would follow it up.

He didn’t. If he had, it would have saved a lot more suffering.

Meanwhile, the two faint prints from Garry Heywood’s car were to sit in a drawer of the fingerprint bureau in Melbourne for 16 years.

For nearly a decade in the 1970s and early 1980s, Melbourne’s eastern suburbs were terrorised by a callous attacker known to police as ‘the Donvale rapist’. The man — pudgy but strong, with sandy hair, a pot belly and soft hands — preyed on shiftworkers’ wives at home alone with small children. He often raped women with their children present. The most chilling thing about the rapist was that it was obvious he watched families for weeks before striking, once even hiding under the floor of a house so that he could hear their conversations.

He carried a knife, was usually barefoot and, according to a handful of his many victims, had a peculiar body odor, a fact which lead a Sunday Press sub-editor to dub him ‘Mr Stinky’.

As in the Heywood-Madill case of the 1960s, police investigating the rapes got nowhere. The only clues were prints from some of the rape scenes, but these did not seem to match anything held on record … until the day in June, 1982, that a young fingerprint expert called Andy Wall recognised that the rapist’s prints resembled the mystery print taken from Garry Heywood’s car 16 years before.

It was a marvellous feat of forensic work. Police now knew that the Melbourne rapist was almost certainly the Shepparton killer of 1966, but they still had no idea who he was.

A taskforce was set up. Two years of painstaking detective work followed. Thousands of hours and millions of dollars later, hundreds of men had been eliminated from suspicion, but little else was achieved.

Eventually, in early 1985, the taskforce was wound up. Only then, after 19 years of evading detection, did the wanted man blunder into police hands. He was picked up for indecently exposing himself in Albury on 16 March, 1985.

Because of tougher fingerprint laws in NSW, Edmunds was routinely fingerprinted. From that moment it was only a matter of time.

When the fingerprint reached the central bureau in Sydney five days later it was instantly matched with the ‘Mr Stinky’ print at the top of the wanted list of unidentified prints. The case was all over bar a small formality: the arrest.

Shepparton detectives did that next day, 22 March, at the factory where Edmunds worked in the Melbourne suburb of Highett.

Edmunds was subsequently convicted of the Madill-Heywood-murders and five sex attacks, but because of limits to questioning under the since-abandoned six-hour rule he was not interviewed about dozens more rapes. Tracing Edmunds’s life, detectives uncovered the story of an outwardly ordinary working man who was a secret monster — a violent sexual deviant who had beaten and raped his first wife, molested his daughters, and once beat a cow with a shovel for minutes on end.

Some police still want to talk to Edmunds about unsolved crimes, but cannot while he is in jail unless he invites them to. At least, they believe, he owes it to his victims to confirm exactly which rapes he is responsible for.

It is true that Edmunds pleaded guilty to the crimes for which he was convicted. But the belief that he ever truly repented seems hollow after his escape attempt six year later.

Has the last chapter of the ‘Mr Stinky’ story been written?

Who knows? Edmunds has half a lifetime left to wait and watch for his next chance. Some day, when the events of 1992 are just a hazy memory and he returns to the mainstream prison on a lower security rating, he will make another move.

Never trust a caged dingo.

It’s a living

Even in jail, Lew manipulated the system to suit himself

NOBODY who knew Reuben Lew was surprised that when he went to jail he spent the bare minimum term there. Nor that Lew —jailed for his commanding role in the Estate Mortgage scandal — somehow inveigled his way into leaving Morwell River Prison several times in 1994 to visit relatives, a privilege that led to a prison governor being suspended.

The governor probably suffered more over the incident than Lew, which would be par for the course. For most of his 62 years, Reuben Albert Lew has left behind a trail of people who suffered because they trusted him. The list includes, by some accounts, family and friends.

Even in jail, Lew manipulated the system to suit himself, despite an incident when another prisoner hit him with an electric kettle, reputedly because Lew tried to borrow it without permission. But according to prison sources, he also put his fund-raising skills to work for a charity run by inmates for disadvantaged children.

One pleasure he missed while behind bars was seeing the Melbourne performance of Jackie Mason, the New York comedian whose appearance at the Arts Centre in 1994 pulled a capacity crowd.

The audience loved Mason’s line of humour. Especially the joke where he insists that the Israeli Prime Minister really wants to give back the West Bank to the Palestinians, then shrugs and explains ‘but right now he can’t — it’s in his wife’s name.’

Had he been there that night, Reuben Lew might well have laughed long and loudly. But more than 50,000 investors — mostly retirees of modest means — who lost their money and their peace of mind in the Estate Mortgage disaster of 1990 might not see the joke.

And if they could see Reuben Lew now, they might be even less amused. Because while they got left with the mortgages, Reuben seems to have got the estate.

In his wife’s name, of course. And a few others.

THE six Estate Mortgage trusts were said to have assets in 1990 worth $1 billion and its 52,400 investors, many of them elderly and using their retirement packages had deposited $640 million in the group.

Bricks and mortar has always been considered a sensible and conservative investment strategy and the Lew-controlled Estate Mortgage seemed to be the top of the pack during a booming property market.

But as the boom started to run out of steam, the repeated assurance from Estate Mortgages that was all was well began to sound a little shallow.

Over the next seven years, a story of greed, corruption and mismanagement emerged as wounded investors and angry regulators took their grievances to the courts. Reuben Lew and his son Richard were jailed in late 1993 and Burns Philp was forced to offer investors $116 million in settlement for what one legal counsel claimed was like sentries falling ‘asleep while trust funds … were spent on speculative, hazardous and imprudent property investments.’ Lew was later to admit doing deals with developers that would net him a percentage of their projected profit in return for providing finance. It was discovered that a cash-strapped developer had received loans from one Estate Mortgage company to repay loans to other parts of the group.

Seven years after the funds were frozen, investors are still out of pocket and almost 1000 have died. Managers have recouped about $340 million for investors through property sales and damages claims but have had to pay $30 million in legal costs. Of the initial $640 million frozen in 1990, $300 million plus interest is still unrecovered.

A CYNIC might say Estate Mortgage’s walking wounded are lucky compared with some victims of the 1980s financial orgy. At least they don’t have to go to Majorca to see where the entrepreneur they trusted with their money washed up.

Reuben and Sandra Lew moved out of their luxury apartment in Maple Grove, Toorak (later occupied by Robert Sangster’s son Adam), soon after the Estate Mortgage balloon went up in 1990.

After an eight-week trial in 1993, Reuben Lew and his son, Richard, were found guilty of using their positions as company officers to gain financial advantage.

After two years at Morwell River and Pentridge, Lew saw no need to do a Skase, and seek refuge overseas. He rejoined his wife at the country retreat bought partly in her name in 1989.

The Lew estate is secluded — but little more than an hour’s drive from Toorak. To get there, a group of disgruntled investors, for instance, could pool their pensions, hire a coach, and head east from Melbourne.

They would pass through a succession of semi-suburban hamlets — Seville, Launching Place, Wesburn — and, finally, reach Warburton, sleepy-hollow home of the old Weetbix factory and Seventh Day Adventists.

There, just east of town at Big Pat’s Creek, in a valley overshadowed by Mount Donna Buang, the small holdings give way to a neat boundary fence lined with hundreds of young oak trees.

An avenue of 80 mature oaks stands guard over a broad, well-gravelled lane running down to a tree-lined creek. On each side are picture-postcard paddocks fenced with post and rail, against a backdrop of hills snuggled against a blue mountain range.

Hereford cattle graze in one paddock, a couple of thoroughbred weanlings in the other. It could be, bar the gum trees along the creek, a scene from a millionaire’s stud farm anywhere from Kentucky to Kent. Or, to be technical, a stud farm occupied by someone who still seems to live like a millionaire.

The view across the Lew estate is stunning. The place looks a million dollars, and no wonder: it’s cost that and more, so far. On a clear day you might imagine you can sue forever.

But anybody who did sue shouldn’t count on winning. When Reuben Lew declared himself bankrupt in 1994, he listed his worldly assets as a watch and cufflinks worth $150. Jackie Mason would love that.

Fortunately, Lew married well. Just as Alan Bond’s family has come into money just in time to succour him in troubled times, Lew has been blessed with a spouse and business associates who keep him in something like the style he became accustomed to as a high-flying financier.

Such as where he lives.

The house that Sandra Lew built can’t be seen from the main road. Nor from the tree-lined drive, even if a curious traveller follows it all the way to the creek, where ‘Private, keep out’ signs are posted on an electric fence.

The house can only be reached from a double-gated entrance opening off a dead-end road that most people would mistake as a private driveway. Intentionally or not, as hideaways go, it’s as shrewdly sited as any European hunting lodge for the seriously rich and famous, wary of the long lens and the possibility of assassination attempts.

But there’s more to the Lew house than the difficulty of seeing it. There are, according to locals, four generous bedrooms, the main with an en suite bathroom and walk-in wardrobes. It is solid brick, probably 50 squares in size, has expensive timber floors and open fireplaces and is reputed by local tradesmen to have cost more than $1 million to build.

But the most interesting thing about the house is when it was built. Wreckers demolished the perfectly-sound homestead that was on the site in 1990, and a small army of tradesmen started work on the new one immediately … just as the Estate Mortgage empire crashed, burning more than 50,000 investors and most of a billion dollars.

A title search reveals Sandra Lew’s name on only one small 18-hectare lot, which is one of the front paddocks. Another 98 hectares is registered in the name of Pindanon Pty Ltd. But it is well known in the district that there are several other titles that add up to more than twice that amount of land.

One well-placed source says the titles to the property are ‘like a doughnut’, with Sandra Lew’s small central holding surrounded by others, most of which are — or were — nominally owned by a Hong Kong-based accountant.

To this end, farm ‘reports’ have been regularly drafted by Lew’s staff to send to Hong Kong, and cheques for work done have at times been routed from Hong Kong.

Once, when he was flying high, Lew impressed people as charismatic, clever, charming, confident and cool. But that was $600 million and almost a decade ago. These days he is uncharacteristically shy.

He seems to have tried hard to vanish from view. Not only is his telephone number unlisted, but his address is not listed on the electoral roll.

The Lews drive a standard Ford sedan and a four-wheel-drive that show little sign of conspicuous consumption while they are in public. Once off the estate, they keep a very low profile, indeed.

At his trial, Reuben Lew’s lawyer told the court his client was deeply remorseful for his conduct. The son of a grocer, he had risen from being a dairy farmer to the heights of big business without the privileges of white-collar offenders who normally appeared before the court.

John Walker, QC, told the judge that Lew’s only remaining asset then was a mortgaged dairy farm and he and his wife were ‘virtually destitute’.

Four years later, behind the tall iron gates and stone fence surrounding their estate, life goes on, and in some style.

Last week, balloons were tied to the gatepost after a family party. This is one sign that a handful of friends and relatives are regular visitors. Some are known to share the Lews’s enthusiasm for breeding and racing thoroughbred horses, and several have been regular faces at yearling and broodmare sales.

But the inner circle is small, these days. Not everyone who knew the Lews still associates with them.

One former business associate says Estate Mortgage hurt more than the small unit-holders who invested with it. Reuben Lew persuaded several people who considered themselves to be his friends to invest heavily in his companies. More than one family lost millions, and they have not forgiven him. Apart from personal losses they are also angry that he has brought disrepute to the overwhelmingly law-abiding Jewish business community.

Another associate describes Lew as ‘the most charismatic person I ever met. I watched him dealing with (a bank) and it was mesmerising. He was a beautiful con man.’

These days, says the former associate bitterly, Lew’s closest friends are probably his guard dogs, a pair of savage german shepherds he calls Topaz and Brahms. ‘He calls them his children.’

CHAPTER 19

The stink, the fink and the missing link …

Nazi madness

‘I’ve got a hammer in my head, you bastard’