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'Last Resort' Laurie Connell

Of all of Australia’s corporate crooks of the opulent ’80s, none was as brazen with other people’s money as the Western Australian banker ‘Last Resort’ Laurie Connell. He made Gordon Gecko look like Mother Teresa. Connell got his nickname because there was nothing he wouldn’t resort to in order to get what he wanted. And at the end he used the ultimate last resort to avoid going back to prison.

Born in 1947, the short, stocky Laurie Connell left school at 15 and worked as an office boy and a part-time boxer in the carnival tents around the Western Australian countryside. By the time he was in his early 20s Connell had gathered enough entrepreneurial skills to put himself into the promotions business, and had gathered a bunch of up-and-coming cronies around him who could help him gather in his new generation of investors. One of those contacts was a journalist named Brian Bourke, who would one day become the Labor premier of Western Australia and wind up in jail for fraud.

By the time Brian Bourke had fought his way up through the Labor Party ranks to become premier in 1983, Laurie Connell had formed his fledgling Rothwells Bank and was looking for investors. And what better customer could he have than the Western Australian government, courtesy of his old mate who had pledged that he was keen to promote local entrepreneurs. Hundreds of millions of dollars of public money poured into the coffers of Rothwells and the chairman of the board couldn’t believe his luck.

Shortly after, as if by magic, Laurie Connell was said to have a personal wealth of around $350 million. No one bothered to ask where his newly acquired fortune had come from. Truth be known, it was his investors’ money that he illegally ‘borrowed’ from his own bank and was spending in a fashion that made Iranian oil sheikhs and Greek shipping magnates look like paupers.

Apart from the huge sums deposited by the government, the mum and dad investors also trusted the little man in the Italian suits and left their money with him – many of them their life savings – on the promise of inflated interest rates that he could never possibly pay in the long term. But Laurie Connell didn’t care whose money it was – just as long as he could get his hands on it and spend it on himself.

Connell built a palace on seven blocks of land on the Swan River, flew everywhere in his private $30 million Lear jet, had a fleet of limousines at his disposal wherever he and his entourage were anywhere in the world, sailed on his luxury yachts and built his own private racetrack for his stable of racehorses, which was said to be the biggest in Australia. His list of associates was the who’s who of politics and business, and he was known to take Prime Minister Bob Hawke deep-sea fishing off north Western Australia.

A keen punter, Connell was said to keep a cash float in his office of around $3 million and outlaid up to as much as $1 million a week with the bookies. But gambling was nothing new. Connell had always been a gambler, and not always an honest one. On 3 September 1975, Connell and his associates hit the Kalgoorlie betting ring with a series of large last-minute bets on an unfancied horse named His Worship in a Melbourne race. His Worship won easily.

The bookies smelled a giant rat and, when stewards investig-ated the matter, they discovered that while the broadcast of the race was supposedly aired live on a Perth radio station, it was actually recorded and broadcast several minutes after the event was over. Lucky to escape without a conviction, Laurie Connell was banned from racecourses anywhere in the world for two years.

But Laurie Connell’s biggest race fix was in the 1987 Perth Cup at Ascot where one of his horses, the stayer Rocket Racer, was heavily backed to win. Rocket Racer headed out from the barrier as if its tail was on fire and kept up the bewildering pace for the whole 3.2km until it crossed the line nine lengths in front. But anyone watching could tell that Rocket Racer wasn’t feeling real flash as he wobbled off the track, aided by an army of attendants who stopped him from dropping dead in his tracks.

It was a time when horses were suspected of being doped with elephant juice, a sedative powerful enough to stop an elephant in its tracks, but if used in small doses it had the opposite effect and caused horses to run flat out until they dropped dead. This was the case with Rocket Racer, who, despite being attended to by vets, died not long after. Mysteriously, the horse was never drug tested. While Rocket Racer lay fighting for its life, Laurie Connell celebrated his Perth Cup win long into the night at an expensive Perth restaurant and shouted for everyone in the place, running up a bill in excess of $50,000.

When the stock market crashed in late 1987, the reality of Laurie Connell’s excesses and theft were revealed. It was estimated that between 1983 and 1987 he had embezzled up to $500 million from Rothwells, none of which could be recovered due to an intricate and complicated business structure he had set up that kept him living like a king, even after he was declared bankrupt.

In 1994 Laurie Connell was found guilty of conspiring to fix the 1983 AHA Cup at rural Bunbury, when he bribed jockey Danny Hobby with $5000 to throw the race by jumping off Connell’s mount Strike Softly to stage a fall. The court found that Connell had conspired to pay Hobby $1 million over the years to stay out of the country, away from police who were investigating the matter. Hobby was jailed for three years and Connell was sent to jail for five years.

In 1996, Connell was brought before the court on fraud charges relating to the collapse of Rothwells Bank and $300 million that had gone missing. He died of a heart attack before a judgement could be reached. He was 49.