Chapter 17

The Fall of Flash Floyd

More than 20 years ago, the suicide of multi-millionaire property developer Floyd Podgornik shocked the nation. Everyone was stunned. Here was a charismatic and respected bloke who seemed to have it all – a thriving property business, a high society Melbourne restaurant, a Porsche and a long-legged blonde beauty at his side. Yet the man known to many as Flash Floyd saw fit to end it all with a bullet to his brain in the bathroom of his ninth-floor penthouse on the prestigious leafy boulevard of Melbourne’s St Kilda Rd. It was a very high profile affair, still often if quietly spoken about among a select few in the horse-racing business. Newspapers around the nation must have wasted half-a-dozen forests to try to satiate the public’s blood lust for the story. With the promise of scandal always seeming to be an unwritten subtext, speculation was rife as to why Floyd chose to suicide. Both friends and police were baffled, by all accounts.

But that wasn’t the case for the Moran crew…as we knew all too well.

Floyd’s long-time girlfriend, Ms Carolyn Palliardi, found him on Saturday 3 March 1990, slumped in the bathroom of the office penthouse with a bullet wound to the head. Near his body was an unregistered nine-millimetre pistol, a Fratelli Tanfoglio, an Italian manufactured gun with a carved wooden handle.

Victoria Police spokesman Inspector Rod Porter told the media there appeared to be no suspicious circumstances. He confirmed police had also found ‘quite a lot’ of recently shredded documents in the offices where Floyd was found, registered to his company, the Podgor Group. Over time of course, speculation over Floyd’s death subsided as it became apparent he faced crushing debts. Within a week of Floyd’s death one of the Podgor Group’s principal bankers, the Commonwealth Bank, had dismissed any theory that he had cash problems or that there were any financial troubles that could have caused him to suffer depression. However, before a coroner made a finding of suicide in October, it was revealed that the Podgor Group borrowing had meant an interest bill of $12 million a year. In the weeks before his death, it was claimed, Floyd had also been given an extra month to complete payment of $29 million on a redevelopment loan.

Yet before the extent of Floyd’s financial mess was made public, there were many months of very sinister speculation. Some foul deed had to have been afoot.

The speculation was not to be unexpected, with Floyd being the dashing man about town, at 47 a handsome self-made multi-millionaire, and owner of the establishment restaurant, Florentino’s. Born to a poor Yugoslav family, Cvetko Florian (Floyd) Podgornik migrated to Australia as a teenage carpenter. As he would tell the story, Floyd arrived in Sydney with a cardboard suitcase and just one pound in his pocket. He worked hard and made the right moves. In the year before he died, Floyd was named by the highly regarded Business Review Weekly magazine as one of Australia’s richest people, with a net worth estimated at $70 million.

While the media dubbed him Flash Floyd, his many friends described him as a quiet man who simply succeeded with hard work. But there was no doubt he loved all the trimmings, the immaculate designer suits, the option of driving his Porsche, his Ferrari or the more traditional Bentley. And having the good sense to nurture a few good mates in militant building unions did not hurt his prospects any either. Public interest in his death was huge.

In the year before he died, Floyd did little to hide from the limelight. He not only spent millions on his horses but also on buildings. Most notable was his purchase of Florentino’s, or ‘the Florentino’ restaurant, as it must be called if you are a pretentious twat. It was one of Melbourne’s first wine bar cafes from 1900, and became Cafe Florentino in 1928 when Rinaldo Massoni took over to introduce Italian fine dining and refit the interior with décor which oozed traditional European opulence and grandeur. The restaurant at 80 Bourke St was, and still is, favoured by many of Australia’s power brokers and politicians. Also those who want to impress others or simply enjoy excellent nosh. And let’s not be coy, perhaps a shady character or two. In 1989, Floyd bought into Florentino’s line of distinguished owners when he splashed $4.2 million on the property, soon followed up with around $3 million worth of renovations.

Floyd was already a well known horse owner and punter, with many well placed connections, so the restaurant also became a favourite for the racing set. Many of the Melbourne’s upper-class conservatives were already aghast at the fact a man of Yugoslav peasant stock dared to presume he could cater to their culinary expectations. Then to introduce a whole new social set replete with commoners, the rustic horse owners and track-toughened trainers with relatively little dining refinement, it was all too much for the posh nurtured in the wealth and sleepy safety of Melbourne’s leafy eastern suburbs. Some of the new diners’ behaviour was seen as an open affront to decency. There were the loud guffaws, the occasional drunken expletive-ridden rants and women who exposed more flesh than could surely be healthy for older gentlemen long accustomed to sensory deprivation. Downright uncouth.

Some scribes have said Floyd bought into the business to try to ingratiate himself with Melbourne’s power brokers and high society. Maybe he was, so what? Influence is power after all. For my money the man was plainly living large as best he knew how. Just imagine what the crusty old conservatives might have said had they known Florentino’s was also being used by Melbourne’s criminal elite as a cash clearance house of sorts. Many envelopes crammed with cash did a waltzing Matilda between pockets as Lewis Moran, Graham Kinniburgh and a colourful character or two I cannot name sat down to dine at Florentino’s.

So with a good $7 million down on the Florentino’s restaurant, Floyd splurged almost the same amount if not more on dozens of horses and his stables in Melbourne, all around the same time. The plush Symbol Lodge stables near the Epsom training track had all the latest gear. Training operations were overseen by the 1989 Melbourne Cup winner, Lee Freedman, while his brother, Richard Freedman, was the stables’ manager and ran day-to-day business on site under Lee’s trainer’s licence.

Eerily published on the same Saturday that Floyd topped himself just hours before Carolyn Palliardi found him, a story in the sport section of the Sydney Morning Herald carried a sense of great optimism for the stables’ future. The author Alan Aitken marvelled at how the designer stables were in an architectural class of their own: ‘Brightly coloured walls, fancy architectural design features and a light, breezy aura set the lodge apart from the run of the mill, dark, drab stables of popular occupation,’ Aitken wrote. ‘Rubberised bitumen so that the horses don’t slip, rubberised bricks around the horse swimming pool, a 12-horse automatic walker, fans in the stable blocks, three-bedroom apartments for the staff, stalls that open into yards…’

As a very interested reader in Floyd’s financial affairs, given great scrutiny by the media for some years after his death, it seemed to me Floyd knew his contract with the devil had a 12-month expiry date. Even for someone who headed a company with an estimated $300 million of projects in its portfolio, Floyd’s personal spend up was the stuff of legends. It was phenomenal. There must have been a money tree with million dollar leaves in his backyard. Either that or Floyd had been remarkably lucky on the punt for a while. Perhaps it was all hard earned, amassed over many years and laying in wait for his massive splurge.

Just as the astute scribe Les Carlyon, also of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote in October 1990, seven months after Floyd’s death, racing is itself an industry where there is no mention of derelicts and desperates and one that merely pretends to order. ‘Sometimes the pretence slips, and we see the truth – which is not order but a beguiling version of chaos,’ he penned. Carlyon pondered the ironies of racing victory in the case of Floyd, whose stable was now famed for success, and on whom a coroner had delivered a finding of suicide just the week before. As Carlyon noted, Floyd had spent $5 million to buy 46 yearlings the year before he died, with a return of only one city winner up to the time of his death. He wrote: ‘The hard-nosed view then was that Floyd had bought himself a barn-full of lemons. Now, seven months later, with Lee Freedman as the new trainer, around 20 of Podgornik’s lemons have won some 38 races.’

When Sydney jockey Ron Quinton spoke at Floyd’s funeral, he asked the question everyone there would have already churned over a thousand times: ‘Why?’ Quinton of course had ridden many winners for Floyd. He was a seven-time champion jockey in Sydney and his respect for Floyd was immense, such that he asked Floyd’s widow, Lorraine, to take over his racing colours. Lorraine was a teenage hairdresser when she married Floyd, and they were together for more than 20 years. She and Floyd were separated a year before he died, which then saw Carolyn Palliardi emerge as his girlfriend, live-in lover and betrothed. Floyd would even introduce Carolyn as ‘my fiancée’ at functions such as the re-opening of Florentino’s restaurant. With his fiancée in arm and laden with wads of his cash, Floyd loved to be at the centre of excitement and flout his wealth in the betting ring at the track. Even his close associates freely told the press how their friend had spent millions on horses, high society and fast living.

Many among the 800 or so at the funeral were mindful that just the day before Floyd was found, his business associate Charles Mantello, 55, was also believed to have suicided. He had by all accounts jumped to his death from the 13th floor of his building, only a block from Floyd’s own penthouse. Police probed the possibility of a ‘debt of honour’ between the two, the possibility that Floyd had promised Mantello a business deal which fell apart, causing a struggling Mantello to suicide and Floyd, festering with guilt, to do the same. The theory was a very noble one indeed but it was a world away from reality as I know it.

Charles Mantello was the brother of Albert Mantello, a former North Melbourne footballer who played 107 games when Aussie rules was dominated by the grittier Victorian Football League. Albert captained a hard North Melbourne team in 1960, known as ‘the shinboners’ because several players were actually butchers at the local Newmarket abattoirs. He went on to become a club director and a successful businessman. In June 1998 his family was noted, alongside former Victorian Justice Department consultant Dan Kolomanski, as principals behind a $25 million apartment project in North Melbourne. Their development, the eight-storey Victoria Heights Apartments, had won a planning appeal that month, and boasted former Prime Minister Bob Hawke as not only an investor but project chairman.

According to media reports, Charles Mantello ran a concreting business and shared investments with Floyd. It was only days before the two deaths were publicly linked. The constant barrage of media commentary on what a good bloke Floyd had been put Lewis a little on edge. And there was something else said in the media soon after, which I recall our camp being very uncomfortable with – someone saying that Floyd’s death was ‘a matter of honour’. This came a little close to the bone, as the phrase is also used by some in our circle as a euphemism for the settlement of debt with a murder: to make an example of a debtor, so that others would be less likely to default. In layman’s terms, they would honour their debts, but the payment options may not always be to their liking. However, the comment was made in the context of Floyd facing a business financial crisis. Perhaps more than anything though, Floyd loved to punt…and punt big. He is often credited with saying: ‘I love a punt. Life is a punt. Taking risks makes me feel alive.’

And as I have already suggested, with the mere mention of the Morans, the death of Floyd had more to do with his punting than his business. He took one risk that made him much less than alive. Floyd blew his brains out because it was the better outcome in a very personal fixed race. It was either the bullet or a gut-wrenching fall of nine floors to his death. Floyd owed a huge punting debt to the Morans and could not pay. And there was a link to Mantello of course, but not along the lines that were apparently investigated. Both Mantello and Floyd owed Lewis Moran big time, sharing a joint plunge that caught them both short. All the company credit and corporate smoke and mirrors in the world couldn’t provide them with the ready on the sort of short-term payment schemes Lewis would demand to be met. Floyd had his fate telegraphed the day before, when Mantello plunged 13 floors to his death. He knew the Morans were on their way to see him and to his thinking he would probably die the same way.

That is the untold truth behind Floyd’s death as I know it, directly from the mouth of Lewis. He told me that he and the boys, Mark and Jason, had in fact killed Mantello. The way Lewis told it though, was like the whole thing was a mistake. His eyes seemed to dance a little as his voice lowered into the monotone he used to discuss sensitive issues. ‘The boys took him out on the balcony for a bit of a fright. You know, it was like swing, swing, then woops – he slipped.’ Lewis then let rip with a loud snort of laughter before raising his beer to our health. There had never been any intention to actually kill Mantello, according to Lewis, but it happened. Lewis said Floyd had shared the same debt and knew that he and the boys were due to visit him on the day of his death. As I recall, Lewis’s humour was short lived as he spoke of Floyd. The thought of his lost money resurfaced. ‘Cocksucker cost me a fortune,’ he grumbled.

From what I have since read in the media, another version of how Mantello exited his balcony on that day has been told. One media report stated Mantello’s wife was with him at the time and saw him lean over the railing of the balcony. Mrs Mantello had shouted at him to stop, the report said, but could not prevent him from launching himself over the railing. All I can say about that is while I never heard any mention of Mrs Mantello from Lewis that doesn’t mean she was not there. While the two stories are obviously different they may not be exclusive to further detail. Lewis did not elaborate on all the finer points of this particular murder; he seldom did on such matters.