Amazingly, I didn’t do too badly in my Higher School Certificate. For this I thank James, who cajoled and, when he had to, threatened me into studying for the exam. When I left St Mary’s at the end of 1982, aged seventeen, I signed on to do a Bachelor of Education degree at Sydney’s University of Technology. For on-thejob training as a teacher, they sent me to a school out in the Western Suburbs. My first day in the classroom a bunch of boys at the back of the room started chanting ‘Underdaks! Underdaks!’ It was far from the first time I’d been called that. This time, however, I wasn’t going to cop it from a bunch of smartarse students. These kids didn’t realise that I wrote the book on being a smartarse in class. I gave them the old ’Loo steely glare and they went very quiet. I hated teaching and quit my course.
James got me a job at St Vincent’s Hospital in the cleaning department. Sweeping hospital wards, I soon concluded, was not what I wanted to do either. I told James I wanted to resign to do something I liked, like boxing full time, and he pleaded with me to reconsider. ‘We need the money at home,’ he said. ‘You can’t just walk out.’ I left anyway.
I scuffed around aimlessly for a couple of years. I hung out with a tough bunch and I got involved in some petty crime. I drank too much, and when I was drunk I tended to get into strife. I worked for the council sweeping streets a couple of hours a week for pocket money; Bruce Collins from the PCYC was a manager in the Sydney City Council and got me the job.
Then when James started out in the real estate business with our friend John McGrath, he gave me some work helping out at house openings and doing other menial tasks. James is a wonderful manager, and he paid me more than he should have. None of that was the problem. I had to leave. I wasn’t meant to be a real estate agent. I couldn’t stand there and let customers treat me like a servant, a third-class citizen selling snake oil, and rudely fire questions at me. I wanted to put one on their nose. James and John were more professional and put up with the crap to make their business grow.
Also, I had come to believe that as much as I loved and respected my big brother, I had to step out from behind his shadow. He had always set the standards for me, in life, sport and now business, and it was time for me to do something for myself that I could take pride in. It was hard to tell James ‘ Thanks, but no thanks’ again, especially when I so looked up to him.
Then I had the good fortune to meet Denis Cleary. Denis, the brother of Michael, who represented Australia as a winger in both rugby league and rugby union and went on to be a minister in the State Labor Government, was, and is, a stalwart at the City of Sydney PCYC. A big, formidable man, he was an administrator there and took boxing and fitness classes. Away from the club he was the managing director of the then State Building Society.
Denis and I found ourselves hitting the punching bag at the club one day in mid 1986, and he suggested we go for a run. I was twenty-one and he would have been in his forties. We ran together in the Domain, and hit it off beautifully. He opened up and told me about his life, and some personal problems he was having. Then I told him my story. Much as John Ireland had reached out to James at St Vincent’s Hospital, Denis said he wanted to help me get a start in life and he organised a job for me as a trainee manager with the building society. I learned the ropes of the home loan game at branches at Carlton, in Martin Place in the city, and at Maroubra.
I’m ashamed to say I ended up letting Denis down, even if I didn’t mean to. He was standing for a senior position at the PCYC and it was between him and another bloke, a boxing coach there. I voted for the other guy, but not because I thought he was the better man. Normally I would have backed Denis every day of the week, but I thought he had too much on his plate with his work and personal responsibilities, and I figured I was doing him a favour by lightening his load. I didn’t realise how much that role at the club meant to him. Denis didn’t win the poll. He found out I hadn’t supported him and he thought I had betrayed him. For a while our connection weakened, and that made me very sad. It was a blessing when we reconciled a little later and we have remained mates ever since.
Another bonus about working at the building society was that when James and I bought a small house in Dangar Street, Randwick, in 1986, I was able to get a loan at 6 per cent, far less than the going rate then of 18.5 per cent.
One morning my mate, the champion boxer Spike Cheney, and I turned up at the Bayswater Brasserie in Bayswater Road, Kings Cross, for brunch and to meet a lawyer named Chris Murphy. Spike and I had been tossing up turning professional and Chris, who was a fight fan, had organised $1000 worth of sponsorship for the PCYC and also offered to give us some advice on the pitfalls of signing contracts.
Like I had with Denis Cleary, I took an immediate shine to the flamboyant and outspoken Chris, and he liked me. Right there at the Bayswater Brasserie, he invited me to become a part-time junior clerk in his law office, getting a grounding doing legwork for him, meanwhile studying law part-time as a mature-age student at Sydney University. Oh, and I’d still be able to hold down my job at the building society to earn money to live on, and continue training hard for boxing. ‘If you want to do anything badly enough, you’ll find a way to do it,’ said Chris. Then, if I realised the potential he saw in me, he said, he’d help me every step of the way to become a top lawyer like him. This was all beyond the wildest dream I had ever had, and Chris, as anyone who knows him realises, is very persuasive. Still, I hedged. Was this really what I wanted to do with my life?
Cottoning on to my misgivings, Chris invited me to his office and gave me a grilling. He asked me about myself and encouraged me to ask him about his business. I was almost convinced, but I wanted an hour or two away from him to decide. He said to have a think and give him my answer over lunch at Diethnes Greek restaurant in the city. I always think best when I’m eating so to better mull things over I hared it down to a favourite restaurant, Bill & Tony’s in Stanley Street, Darlinghurst. There, in the dining room–sitting alone at one of the tables covered with the trademark red-and-white-checked tablecloth, gulping down an enormous pasta meal with green cordial –I weighed up the pros and cons. My answer to Chris Murphy would be yes.
Sweating like a hog from my huge early lunch and the uphill run from East Sydney into the city, I rendezvoused with Chris at Diethnes at 1 pm. He was dining with some equally high-flying colleagues.
Chris’s first question to me was what did I want to eat and because my stomach was still bursting from my brunch at Bill & Tony’s, I told him I wasn’t hungry. (When I saw the delicious Greek food they ordered I could have cried!) ‘Well,’ Chris continued, ‘good to see you’re watching your diet for training. Anyway, the part-time job with me – are you in or out?’
I told him, ‘I’m in.’
He said, ‘When can you start?’ I told him eight tomorrow morning. He said to go and sign with the Solicitors Admission Board first. Next morning I did that, then I appeared at Chris’s doorstep on the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets ready to work.
I had not considered a career in the law any more than I’d considered a career as an astronaut. Yet it made sense. After all, I knew loads of blokes who’d been in court. Also, I was a stroppy little bastard and could imagine myself shaping up well before a judge. The money, once I was admitted to the bar after I graduated from Law School, would be excellent. And it would give me a chance to live a full life and still have some left over to help out people in trouble and doing it tough. Along with my love of having fun and partying and playing sport, there was a part of me, down deep inside and not often seen perhaps, that wanted to help people like those I’d grown up with in Camperdown and Woolloomooloo, people like my own family. For this more generous side of me, I thank my mother. I inherited it from her.
I reckon I could have had no better mentor than Chris Murphy. In many ways, he made me the man I am today. He was so kind to me. I loved him, and he was one of my father figures. Chris has a big heart and a code of fairness, and many people experiencing hard times have benefited from his generosity. Along with his kindness, he is charming and charismatic and unbelievably well read. He is also – and I don’t think he’d disagree – hot-tempered and strong-willed. He gravitates to controversial cases and I’m not alone in saying that, except for the QC Chester ‘Walks On Water’ Porter, on his day Chris is the best courtroom performer in the country. To watch him at work defending someone is a master class. If I was on trial for murder, and at risk of being locked away for life, Chris Murphy is the man I’d want defending me.
In the office, too, as I observed him juggling his cases, and performing in court, as often as not getting his clients off, I received an at-the-coalface grounding in what would become my career. People from all walks of life came to Chris. Career criminals, celebrities, politicians, sportsmen, lots of people in the public eye – thirty-one Bandido bikies after the Milperra massacre, the Rolling Stones, Matthew Newton, Darren Beadman, Joe Cocker among them. Their alleged crimes and misdemeanours ranged from defamation to drug possession, assault, murder, robbery, fraud and affray. Many of the cases he takes on are the tough ones that other lawyers run a mile from.
I started working for Chris and that’s when the adventures began. We had some wonderful times and he treated me like a brother. Chris was extra hard on me, and he was extra soft. He is a fine judge of people and he knew when to ramp me up so much that the hairs on the back of my neck would bristle, and how to quieten me down so I’d change my mind about belting him. He has said to me that he was never sure how I’d react when he gave me a bollocking. ‘I half expected you to knock me on my arse.’ But, basically, we got on well. He is a complex man … I don’t try to work people out, people are who they are. He has always had enemies and some of them may have had a case. Chris Murphy is one of a kind.
I gave the responsibilities that Chris assigned me my best shot. For a while, because of my erratic hours being Chris’s legman, I managed to juggle my job with him with my role at the building society. It was too good to last. After a few months, when I’d worked my way to a more responsible position at the building society, I found it more and more difficult to disappear from my desk at all times of the day to do a job for Chris, or train at the club, or go to evening classes from six to nine at uni, and then go out drinking and gambling. Not surprisingly, everything – my legal work and studies and my boxing – began to suffer. I went to Chris and said, ‘Sunshine, this is all too much. It’s killing me.’
He simply repeated what he’d told me from the outset. ‘Steve, let me tell you something. I know more about you than you know about yourself. If you don’t get through this, it’s for no other reason than you didn’t want it bad enough. That’s all. You’ve got the ability to be my clerk here and if you want to do it, you’ll do it.’
I did want to be a lawyer and I wanted to be an Australian amateur boxing champion. The building society work was the odd one out. I resigned. But I still needed to earn money. Without my regular wage from the building society, what I was earning with Chris was not enough to pay my way and help James keep a roof over our head and food in the fridge.
‘What should I do?’ I asked Chris.
He accused me of being soft and said I should toughen myself up. ‘Why don’t you bugger off and sweep the streets for a living?’
I was angry at him because I thought he was having a go at me. As usual, whether he meant to or not, he had given me some good advice. What could be better than getting up before dawn and walking the streets of the city, doing an honest job of physical work, then finishing in time to do all the other things that filled my day and night? Bruce Collins from the PCYC and the boss of the Cleansing Unit at Sydney City Council had helped me land a part-time sweeping job before. Now he signed the papers to give me a regular sweeping gig, every morning from five until nine. Then it was to Chris’s office, then to boxing, then to the Law School, and then out on the town boozing. What a life. I knew I was alive.
Working and hanging out with Chris, I learned plenty about fairness. If Chris sees something that he believes is wrong he has to put it right, no matter what it costs him, or what it costs the person he designates to take care of the business at hand. At this period in our relationship, that person was usually me. One night soon after I started working for Chris, he and I were walking together in Oxford Street when we saw two guys picking on a bloke. Chris said to me, ‘ That’s not right. Go and sort it out, Steve.’
I strode over to where the pair were shoving and hitting their victim and I told them, ‘Leave him alone.’
One screamed at me, ‘Fuck off, or you’ll cop it, too,’ while his mate began stealthily circling around behind me.
I said, ‘Mate, let him go.’
The thug with the big mouth shaped up to me, and I returned the compliment. He was obviously unsettled by my calm refusal to be intimidated, so he turned to Plan B, which was to start raving about how he was a kick-boxing champ. That’s when I knew I had nothing to worry about. Real kick-boxing champs who get into street fights don’t advertise the fact. A true fighter doesn’t pass up the advantage of surprise. I told him he was a poser. He shut up. I stared him down. He dropped his fists and grabbed his friend and the pair of them sauntered away. When they reached the corner they summoned enough courage to shout some abuse at me, but when I advanced on them they hoofed it, vanquished and humiliated. Chris is not a fighter, not with his fists anyway, but he knows how to get things done.
We became good friends. As the old cliché goes, we worked hard and we played hard. I’d gambled and drunk since I was a teenager. That was nothing. Moving in these new exalted circles, meeting high rollers of sport and the media as well as some, as they say, fairly colourful characters, I got carried away and I took my boozing and betting to a higher, more destructive, level. I was suddenly a very popular guy. Everybody, it seems, wants to hang out with a boxer.
Chris was a gambler, brave and ballsy. One Saturday afternoon in 1990 we went out to the races at Canterbury and he backed every winner. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and when it was time for the final race I was desperate to recoup my losses so I asked him for some advice. ‘What do you like in the last?’
‘There’s a thing called Snow Plough,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s the best of a real bad lot, and the odds are terrific.’
Snow Plough it was. I put what little money I had left in my wallet on that horse and hoped for the best. Anyway, nearing the end of the race, Snow Plough hit the lead, but soon began to falter. Chris yelled, ‘Look, the tail’s wagging, it’s giving up!’ But I didn’t hear, I was hollering myself hoarse, exhorting Snow Plough home. Somehow the nag hung on, and won. I was screaming and jumping and punching the air. Chris’s tip had won me $9000.
Buoyed by my gambling successes, I gambled plenty, and when I was drinking, my defences would drop and I gambled even more.
Somehow, though often hung-over and broke, I dragged myself into the office each day, and into the boxing gym to prepare for title fights, and then perhaps after a bit of work for the council, to uni every night. Looking back, I wonder how I did it. The fact was that I had a massive amount of energy, and even at my fuzziest I knew that as well as for myself, I was doing all this for Mum and for James.
In 1994 I graduated from Law School with Honours. The night I graduated I got drunk and was arrested. A mate, he’s dead now, God bless him, said to me, ‘Stevie, you’ve earned it, go to the pub and tell the publican, who’s a great mate of mine, that I sent you and he’ll give you drinks on the house all night.’ Trouble was, I had rewarded myself for graduating by downing many drinks on the way to that particular pub. By the time I arrived and slurringly demanded my free booze I had forgotten my benefactor’s name. Understandably, the publican got nasty. I got nastier. Bouncers came running from everywhere. Punches were thrown. The police were called. I was thrown into jail until I sobered up and was charged with being drunk and violent. They reckoned when I was off the air I had trashed the police station. I was given a good behaviour bond.
In 1995 I was admitted to the bar.
That day, a reporter and camera crew from television’s Today Tonight filmed a story about me: the boxing, street-sweeping lawyer. To celebrate, I went out and got hammered.
I received a letter from Cliff Haynes, the general manager of Sydney City Council. Addressed to ‘Stephen Dack, Cleansing Unit,’ it read, ‘I was privileged to see the Today Tonight report … and the story of your life so far. May I congratulate you on your admission to the bar and your personal achievements. You are an inspiration to all those who are aware of your story and a role model for young people. You are a great example of what an individual can achieve if they set their mind to it and you reinforce to everyone that there is no substitute for hard work.’
I wonder whether Cliff would have written that letter praising me as a role model had he known what I was getting up to.
Every Friday night a bunch of us lawyers met at the Criterion, Crown or Castlereagh hotels in the city and got smashed. We’d go there under the pretext of discussing the law, but our meetings always kicked off with four schooners of beer and then we graduated to spirits. I’d be sitting there with the other legal eagles like kings among those gilt mirrors and little table gas lamps that pubs had in those days, knocking back the Jack Daniel’s, and in the morning I’d wake with a throbbing head and if I hadn’t lost my briefcase the night before I’d open it and my legal papers would be covered in drink stains.
People might be surprised to know how heavily the legal fraternity drinks. Perhaps it’s because of the tightly wound characters who become lawyers, or the dog-eat-dog aggression and ruthless questioning in the courtroom that you have to be able to cop and give. Maybe it’s because there is so much at stake, a client’s freedom as often as not, so the stakes are high. You have a win, you celebrate; you lose, you drown your sorrows. The same number of brain cells are destroyed, the hangover next day is just as deadly.
It was around this time, when alcohol activated the X factor, the addiction gene that I have inherited from my father, that I became dependent on drinking. I didn’t drink every day, or at least I didn’t get drunk every day. But two or three times a week, sometimes four, I would binge-drink myself into oblivion.
Chris Murphy and I had first met because of our shared love of boxing. A highlight of my time with Chris was when in May, 1996, we went to the United States to see the Lennox Lewis vs Ray Mercer world heavyweight title fight at Madison Square Garden, New York. Another world heavyweight champ, Evander Holyfield, whose ear would be famously chomped by Mike Tyson in a title fight the following year, was also on the card. Lewis won on points in the twelfth round, so we got our money’s worth. Another thrill was when I turned my head and sitting in the seat next to me was Eddie Futch, the legendary boxing trainer who trained Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick, all of whom beat the mighty Muhammad Ali. Eddie was eighty-five then, and had just a few years left to him.
Chris stayed at some $600-a-night hotel, I stayed at the YMCA. Once a Woolloomooloo boy, always a Woolloomooloo boy. I got up early each morning in the week we were there, and walked all over that fabulous city. My favourite part was the East Village area where there are lots of small coffee houses, like the one I went to, the Lucky Strike; nothing flash but with loads of authentic character and colour, like Latteria and the Tropicana and some of my other favourite haunts in East Sydney.
The following anecdote about Chris is typical of his style. We were talking about the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. I knew all about it because Bruce Farthing had given me chapter and verse down at the PCYC gym. Chris was intrigued and I told him that the author Norman Mailer had written a terrific book about it called The Fight. Chris went out and found that book in a bookstore, read it from cover to cover overnight and next morning at breakfast he was telling me all about the fabled stoush.
Practising the law, I was finding, did suit my combative instincts. It’s by nature an adversarial existence, just like boxing. My go in court and around the legal traps was pretty much similar to how I was on the street. I minded my own business, kept to myself, but if I was crossed I did not back down. Chris described me in an article he wrote about me in his weekly column in the Sun-Herald as an ‘in-your-face legal clerk’.
One day when I was working on a case with Chris I was standing in the food queue at the Downing Centre criminal court complex in Liverpool Street in the city, waiting to buy my fruit salad lunch, looking immaculate in my dark blue suit. A man I knew to be a crook took one look at me and decided I was a soft touch. He marched right up and, snarling ‘Scram, mate, I’m next in line,’ he shoved in front of me.
I smiled and said, ‘You’re fine, mate, go right ahead. No worries.’ I didn’t want trouble at my workplace.
Sensing he had the upper hand, the hoodlum’s bullying instinct kicked in and he escalated the animosity to another level, loudly heckling me to impress his girlfriend who had pushed in with him. Mindless stuff like, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, in your pin-striped suit?’
‘I’m nobody, mate. Listen, I don’t want any trouble in here.’
‘Oh, you don’t want trouble, eh? You don’t want me to give you trouble. Who the fuck are you to tell me what to fuckin’ do?’
Obviously, turning the other cheek was not going to work with this dope. Now this was my kind of situation. I was in my element, back in a Woolloomooloo face-off. I glared at him and said very softly, so only he and his girlfriend could hear, ‘Let’s go outside. You and me. Right now.’ The bloke turned white and apologised, standing aside so I could reclaim my rightful position in the queue. Like many bullies, he powdered when someone called his bluff.
Sometimes in the years since, I’ve wondered what became of that fellow. If you’re reading this, mate, I hope you’re okay and you’re not pushing guys in suits around anymore. Sometimes appearances can deceive. Where did you come from? What made you so aggressive to a total stranger when at heart you were a coward?
Usually the cases I worked on involved a defendant charged with public drunkenness, drug possession or dealing, getting into a street fight or theft. The most common question people ask me today about the law is, would I ever defend someone I knew was guilty? I answer that I would not. So I ask only if my client is innocent and if they tell me yes, then I ask them for their version of events – I don’t want to hear their life story or irrelevant information – and my sole criterion for deciding strategy is the information I am supplied with. I then learn what facts the prosecution is resting its case upon, and try to dismantle them. It is not my job to determine guilt, it’s the jury’s. Just as it is the prosecution’s role to get a defendant convicted, it is my brief to defend him and, by dismantling the prosecution case or sowing a seed of doubt in the jury’s collective mind, help them reach the conclusion that he must walk free or receive a lesser punishment. Sometimes creating a seed of doubt about a single aspect of the charge is sufficient. Everybody is entitled to be defended in court. That’s the system. I believe that it is better to see ten guilty defendants released than to convict a single innocent person. I have got clients off charges and later learned that they were guilty. So long as I can look at myself in the mirror and know that at the time I believed in their innocence, I can live with that.
In the most heartbreaking case I ever handled, the defendant was a young man who lived four doors down the street from me in my Woolloomooloo days. I left the neighbourhood, he didn’t, and his circumstances trapped him and brought him down. His case was typical of what can happen in Woolloomooloo. My friend was a young single father who, after a big drinking session at the pub, went home to put his young son to bed. The boy drifted off, only to be woken soon after by drunken shouting in the street below his bedroom window. A group of homeless men who couldn’t get a bed at the Matthew Talbot Hostel were drinking and carousing. The lad’s father, his anger fuelled by his drinking, went down to tell the men to shut up. A fight broke out. A homeless man was stabbed and died. My neighbour was arrested and charged with murder. I managed to have the charge reduced to manslaughter. Nevertheless he served a prison term. Life for him will never be the same.
When I was first out on my own I was asked to give a lecture to federal police recruits on a defence lawyer’s point of view. These guys were suspicious of criminal defence lawyers like me, taking the position that they work hard to catch a crook and I set him free on some trumped-up technicality. They sat there in the room, arms folded, their body language antagonistic. I wondered how I was going to get through to them. In time, I said, with an edge to my voice, ‘Okay, everyone, hands on the table. No more crossed arms. I want this to be a co-operative exercise.’ Dismantling their aggressive body language opened the way to a fruitful discussion. I think they saw where I was coming from and that I was an important part of the legal process. I gave them the sport analogy: I don’t hate you, I am simply your opponent, just doing what I have to do to win for my client, and doing it within the rules. It’s nothing personal. It’s the system.
In early 2007 I defended the Hells Angel bikie Christopher Hudson on a car-stealing charge. He was a big, strong, good-looking kid who not long before had been shot at point blank range in a Finks vs Hells Angels battle at a kick-boxing match at the Royal Pines resort on the Gold Coast. We hit it off and I believed his version of events over the car theft matter. I got him off on a technicality, and he was even awarded costs of $12,000. He then went to Melbourne and on 18 June that same year, while under the effects of ice (crystal methamphetamine), alcohol and steroids, Chris shot dead a man who was trying to stop him assaulting a woman on the corner of William Street and Flinders Lane, and he wounded another as well as the woman, who was his girlfriend. He was arrested.
I visited Huddo in jail a few times. I had to have a full body search each time. He wrote me a letter asking me to appear for him, but I turned him down. For murder and wounding he was sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. If I had not got Hudson off the car-stealing charge, the chances are that with his record he would have been in prison on 18 June and that that good samaritan, a 43-year-old lawyer and devoted father and husband, would still be alive. I am sad at what happened, but I couldn’t have known what Hudson would do in the future when I did my best for him on the car theft matter. My job was to get him off that charge based on the information at my disposal and that’s what I did.
Still, he wrote a beautiful letter thanking me for all I’d done and assuring me he was my friend. I may be the only person on earth to think this, but I believe Christopher Hudson has the potential to be rehabilitated. There’s a quality somewhere there.
I can only take each case on its merits and be true to myself, the law and my client. If I do all that, I sleep easy.
I’ve helped a lot of innocent men and women walk free from the courtroom. It’s a fact that many people who are charged with a crime should never have been. Often they find themselves facing a fine or jail because they have been wrongly implicated or accused. The majority of police are straight, but there are some who have no problem in bending the rules or the evidence to see someone convicted. I’ve never made much money from the law. This is because most of the people I defend are broke. I have represented a number of these pro bono, for free. Like when I slip a homeless person a $50 note, this is my way of giving back to the more helpless members of our community.
All that said, many defence lawyers have a bad reputation, and some of them have earned it. Nor is the prosecution always blameless. In trying to win a conviction, a prosecutor might resort to dirty tactics: a defendant might be verballed, false evidence might be planted, and an innocent person might be put in jail. For a defence lawyer who is up against these shenanigans, it’s a bit like going into the boxing ring with an opponent who has a horseshoe hidden in his glove.
An Englishman came to me with what seemed a most unlikely story. He had been arrested and charged with importing a large quantity of ecstasy in a surf ski. He told me he had been in a Sydney pub and another drinker mentioned that it was his wife’s anniversary soon but he and she would be off travelling around Australia on the big day. The drinker had bought a surf ski overseas as an anniversary present for his wife and he was wondering if the Englishman could pick it up when it arrived at the airport and hang on to it until he returned from holidays and could present it to his lucky wife. The Englishman told me that without thinking twice he said he’d be happy to. Of course when he went to collect the surfboard, which the authorities had come to learn was stuffed with drugs, he was arrested.
The Englishman’s story, at first, sounded unlikely. For instance, he had no contact details for his drinking mate, and in this day and age it is rare for someone to go to such trouble for someone they’ve just met. And, hello! A surf ski to be picked up at an airport. Alarm bells should have rung. Would have rung, for most people. Not so my client. I agreed to defend him. The truth was, I believed him. There was something about the way he told me his sorry tale that made me think he couldn’t be making it up.
My job, as his solicitor, was to hire a barrister to defend him in court. The barrister, it turned out after some weeks incurring costs representing his client, did not believe the Englishman and tried to convince him to plead guilty to a lesser charge. ‘You’ll get a couple of years, whereas if you defend this you could be in for ten or twelve.’
The Englishman bridled at the suggestion. ‘ The reason I told Mr Dack that I’m innocent is because I am. I’m not serving any time at all because I’ve done nothing wrong. You’ll run my case and you’ll run it hard. If I smell that you’re running dead on me, I won’t pay you a cent and I’ll hire another barrister.’
This barrister, I suspect, was ‘rubber-hosing’, which means running up a big bill over weeks and months making your client believe you are doing everything to help him, but really doing little. The barrister tried to convince the client to cop to a lesser charge and horse-trade a shorter sentence. The Englishman said he wanted no part of this, and good on him.
I felt responsible, so I encouraged him to do what he threatened. I found him another barrister, and this man, who is a fine professional, got the Englishman off, and rightly so.
I acted for a kid from the ’Loo named Luke, a good boy who got mixed up with the wrong crowd. When he was implicated in an armed robbery and charged with conspiracy to murder (he was carrying a toy gun), his mother, a lovely lady, told James, and James asked me to help. Luke was looking down the barrel at sixteen years in jail. I got him a much lighter sentence, and he deserved it.
Another time I represented one of four teenagers who were charged with attacking a man in the street, purportedly not knowing he was carrying a baby in a pouch on his stomach. They were out looking for a bloke who had stolen a girlfriend’s phone at a pub in Pagewood. They were in a car with the girl trawling for the culprit. They saw a man walking on the footpath. They asked her, ‘Is that him?’ She said it was not. They said, ‘Fuck it, let’s get him anyway,’ and they stopped the car and set upon the innocent man, raining punches and kicks on him. The baby he was carrying received a fractured skull. My client was there but played no part in the attack. I got him off. The other three received custodial sentences. The Crown appealed, and I cross-appealed. The original verdict stood. Today that young man is leading an exemplary life.
People ask me how I can bring myself to defend outlaw motorcycle gang members. ‘Easy,’ I say, ‘they’re human beings and every human being is entitled to be defended.’
To me a Hells Angel bikie is no different to any other person walking down the street. They do bad things – but tell me who doesn’t from time to time. Often alcohol is a factor, and I can relate to that. And sometimes they are accused of doing things they haven’t done. That’s where I come in. I’m not trying to talk it up or talk it down – that’s what it is. Just as the actions of a small number of rugby league players have tarnished the entire code in some people’s eyes, so, too, the actions of a small number of bikies have given the entire tribe a bad name.
One of my more memorable cases was when I represented Jeff Harding, the champion boxer who had given me such a pasting in my second amateur fight and who went on to become world champ. He had been charged after he drove through a red light and he’d had a little more to drink than he should have and then roughed up the police who pulled him over. I didn’t act for him initially but I handled his appeal over the severity of the sentence he had received. The judge said to me in court, ‘Are you giving this man the path of direction?’ which was his way of hinting to me that he regarded Jeff’s offence so dimly that if Jeff continued with his appeal and lost, the judge would very likely exercise his power to increase the sentence. I told Jeff that this was how I was interpreting the judge’s words and Jeff said, ‘I couldn’t give a stuff. The appeal goes ahead. Just get up there and do your best for me.’ I did. I argued as hard as I could for Jeff and at the end the judge didn’t increase the sentence. He didn’t decrease it either. He left it exactly as it stood.
Jeff Harding was another portent of what I would become. He let alcohol rule him. Jeff had trouble coming to terms with life after retiring from a sport at which he had excelled. Nothing he ever did after his retirement gave him the fame or the satisfaction that boxing did when he was winning world titles and having momentous battles with the English champion Dennis Andries.
I ran into Jeff around the traps, and represented him when he got into trouble. He was a nice man. It was the booze, always the booze, that derailed him. There was a time when he’d walk into bars around Sydney and proclaim to everybody who he was and start telling the story of some famous bout. He’d tell the tale so well that his audience hung on every word. But at the end of every round he’d refuse to continue with his saga until someone bought him another beer. He’d get twelve free beers for recounting blow-by-blow descriptions of the whole twelve-round fight, then he’d make his apologies and move on to another pub and another audience, another twelve rounds and another twelve free beers.
After he’d been involved in a series of alcohol-fuelled assaults, I fronted Jeff and said, ‘Sunshine, if you get into alcohol-related trouble again I won’t be able to act for you. I can’t stand by and help you kill yourself, which is exactly what I’m doing by keeping you out of prison. I’m telling you this as a friend and as a lawyer.’
I was expecting him to give me a hug and say, ‘I’m sorry, Stevie. I’ll change my ways.’ But he didn’t.
Instead he said – no, he yelled, ‘You prick! Who are you to give me advice? You’re facing charges yourself!’ And Jeff, I’m ashamed to say, had a point. By this time, the late 1990s, I was well and truly off the rails myself. Recently I’d got drunk and fought with a bouncer or three at the Clovelly Hotel and been charged with assault. More about that in a later chapter.
After a few minutes when it looked like an unsanctioned fight was going to erupt between us, Jeff calmed down and we shook hands and parted friends. ‘You’re dead right, Stevie. I’m going to stay out of trouble and not give all the bums out there a chance to laugh at me.’
I said, ‘Jeff, I hope you’re right.’
The Hitman stayed off the alcohol and out of strife for eight months, then my phone rang. ‘Stevie, how are you?’
‘Sunshine, good to hear your voice. How have you been, mate? Everything good? Want to go for a cup of tea?’
‘Can’t, mate, something’s happened.’ The booze had claimed Jeff again … Of course, I defended him.
Today, after nearly twenty years – the first seven as Chris Murphy’s legal clerk and the balance, after 1996, as a solicitor and barrister with my own firm, Stephen Dack & Associates, in Elizabeth Street, Sydney – I am getting tired of practising law. The constant cases of man’s inhumanity to man are beginning to seriously depress me. Some days I wake up longing to hear some good news in the day ahead and I know I’m going to be disappointed. Also, my naïve sense of fair play and my refusal to do the dirty on anyone I have represented in my legal career have cost me money and clients. I’ve had clients beg me to help them and then when I’ve successfully defended them they’ve gone missing when it came time to pay my bill. Also, lawyers I considered to be my friends have stolen my clients. You know who you are. Maybe it’s time to try something new. Right now, in March, 2009, I’m thinking hard about what the future holds for me.
But, can I tell you, I’m lucky to be alive to have that decision to make. In 1997 I was well and truly in the grip of alcohol and stumbling down the same path as the homeless alcoholics I’d befriended on my street-sweeping run. Drinking was seriously affecting my health and my career. My whole life. I had girlfriends, and when sober I was a charming fellow who was good fun to be around, but inevitably when I binge-drank – which was three or four times a week by then – I showed another, uglier side, and became a man who was angry, abusive, violent and hopelessly irresponsible. Just like my old man. If a girl had any sense she ran a mile. Most of them were smart girls indeed. Some were not, or they just loved me too much to see the danger signs, and they paid the price.