The Cross was Chris Murphy’s patch because so many of his clients did business there.
THESE days Chris Murphy is in the news again because he’s reportedly dropped more than $100 million into the financial black hole at the centre of the Opes Prime crash. Win or lose, Murphy does things in a big way. His way.
Although he has been a millionaire stockmarket player, a huge punter who rubbed shoulders with the likes of Kerry Packer and John Singleton in betting rings and casinos, he made his name and his first fortune as a tough criminal lawyer.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Cross was Chris Murphy’s patch because so many of his clients did business there. One of them, a power lifter, bouncer, prizefighter and bodyguard known as ‘The White Rhino’ killed a drug addict there one night with one punch. Murphy got the big man off the murder charge because he’s good at it and that’s what they pay him for. But he didn’t have any illusions: his client might have beaten the rap but that didn’t mean he was innocent. Not much at the Cross is.
Once, in the mid-1980s, Murphy took a respectable brother-in-law to the Venus Room in the Cross, on a reconnaissance mission to show the in-law how the other half lived.
‘On stage a naked girl’s spraying a sailor with cream and licking it off,’ he recalls. ‘My brother-in-law said, “This is Sodom and Gomorrah – when does the fire start?”’ One club, he says, was closed down after a man was kicked to death there. Another had bouncers wearing tee shirts with the slogan We don’t call the police. In that place and time, the cops were just another gang, ‘the big blue gang’, taking their whack of the wages of sin. Or maybe more than their whack.
Murphy knows how the Cross chewed people up. But like a lot of Sydneysiders, he has affection for the strip. When the Wood Royal Commission was on in the mid-1990s, he used to have coffee most mornings at the legendary Bar Coluzzi in Victoria Street, Darlinghurst, alias Goldenhurst, and once known as Razorhurst in the days when razor gangs roamed East Sydney between the wars. In recent times Murphy switched allegiances to another nearby café, but the scenery is the same: people on the make in a city on the take.
At the height of the Cross’s reputation as Sin City central, Murphy was Sydney’s crime lawyer of choice: the playboy, punter, scourge of crooked cops, friend of people in high and low places, incorrigible performer, self-publicist and patron saint of (almost) lost causes, and champion of the downtrodden.
He still has the shingle and works the odd case. When actor Matthew Newton (subsequently Underbelly II star) struck trouble over allegations that he struck his then soapie-starlet girlfriend Murphy agreed to handle it.
His office has a frosted glass door that says ‘Christopher Murphy Lawyers Inc’ that looks to be straight from a Raymond Chandler novel. When the author came knocking, Australia’s most colourful legal identity was talking tactics.
The gravel voice sounds like the prize fighter he once wanted to be, but the tongue’s as silver as his hair.
The slightly predatory good looks – part-Romeo, part-rogue – once made him a fixture on most-eligible-bachelor lists in women’s magazines. They are no longer as chiselled as they once were. But for a long time the silver hair, dark eyebrows and piercing grey eyes made him a natural to play the part of, say, the handsome lawyer hero in a television show.
Which, in a way, he is: star of his own real-life serial, and writer and director as well. When the author came calling while the police corruption Royal Commission was sitting, Murphy was coaching a thin teenage girl for her supporting role in this week’s episode of Murphy’s Law.
Behind her sunglasses, her eyes were hollow and redrimmed, as if she’d been crying or sleepless, or both. Her face was drawn, lip trembling.
Across the street at the Downing Centre local court, news cameras were waiting. Murphy said how shocking it was that the media can hound people like this. He didn’t look shocked. He borrowed a jacket from the girl’s brother to hide her face, warns her to keep it covered.
It’s 9.40am: show time. Murphy flanks one side. The girl’s Vietnam veteran uncle takes the other. In the lift, Murphy applies the finishing touches. ‘I’m not sure the sunglasses are a good look in court,’ he says smoothly. ‘Maybe a bit sinister.’ She obediently whips them off.
Downstairs, he checks the jacket is rigged over his client’s head, takes her arm and steers her expertly across the street and through the media scrum. A photographer brushes briefly with the clerk.
Cut to crowded lift, then a crowded courtroom. Murphy goes through the mob like a kelpie through sheep, herding the girl to a chair. He prowls back and forth, like a pro boxer set to step into the ring. He’s not nervous, but she is. A muscle flutters in her jaw.
When the magistrate appears, Murphy sits and studies his papers, polishing his lines for the performance ahead. It’s just after 10am. After disposing of some minor matters, the magistrate gives his cue. ‘Now, Mr Murphy,’ he says, with a meaningful glance at the crowded press seats.
There’s an expectant hush. The sort that other Sydney larrikin, Paul Keating, commanded when standing to speak in Parliament.
The pair share more than black Irish looks and growing up near each other in poor Catholic families in Sydney’s west. They have a devastating ability to use Australian vernacular the way streetfighters use knuckledusters. Watching them is almost a blood sport.
Murphy rises, managing to be somehow dignified and indignant at the same time. ‘The defendant is an 18-year-old person,’ he says quietly. ‘Outside the court this morning news cameramen were less than a metre from her, sticking cameras in her face.’
He throws the switch to outrage. ‘A few minutes ago my young clerk had a rabid, frothing photographer scream at him, “Get out of the way, you f … idiot!” This is a tragic case involving the death of a young girl but the defendant had nothing to do with that death. She is just outside the jurisdiction of the children’s court. She is sitting the Higher School Certificate. She has been terrorised in the press … terrorised by a newspaper rattling tins asking pensioners to hand over their coins to ‘fight drugs’.
‘Meanwhile, there are kids up and down the coast comatose from alcohol abuse and the alcohol is supplied to them by someone. But in this case we have rabid, redneck terrorism.
‘The incident this morning was within the court confines.
‘You must, Your Worship, be getting close to examining this contempt of court.’
Angry Murphy pauses, switches into character as concerned Murphy.
Shooting a worried glance at the girl, he confides to the magistrate and the entire press corps, scribbling furiously: ‘She’s under the care of a psychiatrist for stress, and is unable to stay at her own home.’
Then the question. ‘I am asking Your Worship to adjourn the matter.’
Bingo. Not only does the magistrate adjourn until February, he criticises media coverage of the case in general, and of the girl in particular.
‘Clearly, she is distraught,’ he says. ‘The lines of sadness are etched across her face. It would not serve the public interest for the media to hound and harass her or we may have two tragedies on our hands. This is not a hunting ground. It is a place for justice.’
Murphy couldn’t have scripted it better himself. His client still has a long way to go, but in ten minutes he has done what he’s best at: changing perceptions, twisting opinion.
The headline in next morning’s Sydney Morning Herald reads: ‘Ecstasy Case: Magistrate Warns Media’. It’s the first step in a classic Murphy defence. Another chapter of Murphy’s lore.
The first case Chris Murphy did, in 1971, made the newspapers, too. But it was the ‘Milperra Massacre’ of 1984 that made his name outside the closed world of prostitutes, thieves and drug dealers.
A CRIME reporter, Lindsay Simpson, who co-wrote a bestselling book on the bikie gang war that ended with seven dead in a shoot-out at a hotel car park in Sydney’s wild west, quickly noticed that Murphy was no ordinary lawyer.
In a long and tedious case, Murphy ‘always kept everyone in court awake’, Simpson recalls. It prompted her to write a profile on him early in the marathon trial. She tipped well: Murphy eventually beat murder charges against the 31 Bandido gang members he defended.
Says Simpson: ‘He’s a genius at telling the story behind the story, at presenting the human face of crime. He bridges the gap between the law and ordinary people.’
John Slee, a legal correspondent (and qualified lawyer) who has watched courts for 30 years, says Melbourne’s Frank Galbally in his heyday in the 1960s is the best comparison with Murphy ‘in his aggressive approach to the law and success in the law’. But Murphy, he says, is ‘quintessentially Sydney’.
There are other ruthless courtroom tacticians, shameless grandstanders, punishing cross-examiners. But none apart from the late Galbally were loved, hated or feted like Murphy, whose reputation outstrips what he does for a living, and how well he does it.
The highlights of a brilliant career in crime are carefully preserved in scrap-books in his office. How he represented the rugby star Johnny Raper, charged with receiving stolen goods. And Virginia Perger, the prostitute at the centre of the ‘Love Boat’ sex scandal. When Perger didn’t appear at court one day, Murphy told the judge: ‘She’s been up all night working, Your Honor!’
Another time, representing a Melbourne man with many Victorian convictions but few in New South Wales, he told the magistrate: ‘Your Worship, he’s a state-of-origin thief.’
When ten South Sydney players were charged with drug offences in 1990, Murphy took the brief. When then Australian heavyweight boxing champion Dean Waters and his father were charged with murder in 1989, Murphy beat the rap.
When Rod Stewart allegedly assaulted a Sydney photographer, Murphy got him out of it for a song. When Jeff Fenech broke a greengrocer’s nose, Murphy talked it down to a $300 fine.
He beat the cannabis charges against soap-opera lead Dieter Brummer. He’s worked for the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker.
The New South Wales police don’t like Murphy, and he doesn’t like them. But it’s true to say they understand each other perfectly.
One of his personal bests was extracting a massive settlement for a youth called Darren Brennan, shot in the face in a bungled police raid. The settlement can’t be divulged, but is believed to be at least $500,000. Murphy denounced the Tactical Response Group, which did the raid, as having ‘a fire station mentality’.
The group was later disbanded.
POLICE and Murphy go back a way. Never one to bother with fancy cars, for years he drove a red Honda Civic with the number plates VERBAL, an audacious swipe at the once-common police practice of getting convictions by swearing falsely that an accused had verbally confessed to a crime but wouldn’t sign a written statement.
The car was often vandalised outside courts and police stations, a good reason not to drive a Ferrari to ‘work’, even if he could be bothered with conspicuous success symbols.
He had death threats from corrupt police. They were just getting back at him, really.
As a teenager and young lawyer, Murphy bred and raced greyhounds. He named one dog ‘Constable Plod’ and another ‘Oink Oink’ – a story he tells, ironically, walking from his office to the Royal Commission on police corruption. He laughs gleefully at the memory of punters in the betting ring ‘all calling out “Oink Oink!” ’
Minutes later, in the huge Royal Commission hearing room, Murphy gets bored and slips outside for coffee. His client, private detective Michael Oliver, won’t be on until later in the week, and the evidence is dull.
It wasn’t dull last January when Murphy was hauled before the Commission and grilled over his sources for a sensational front-page story he wrote for the Sun-Herald newspaper, for which he has written a racy ‘law’ column since 1990, mainly poking fun at the police and judiciary.
Murphy’s exclusive revealed that the notorious criminal and star informant ‘Neddy’ Smith had been secretly taped, in his protection cell in Long Bay, boasting to another prisoner that he’d committed six unsolved gangland murders.
Ordered to reveal his sources for the tape transcripts, Murphy played his inquisitors like a matador taunting a bull, prompting the journalist Evan Whitton to reach for the dictionary to define ‘bravura’. The words he found were: ‘a florid passage or piece requiring great skill and spirit; a display of daring; a brilliant performance’.
Not your average family solicitor.
SO who is Chris Murphy? And what makes him run? Trying to answer that is like trying to trap a bubble of quicksilver: touch it, and it shoots away. The truth is he’s not too sure himself.
During a lunch break at the Royal Commission, he sat at his usual corner table in his then favourite restaurant, Tre Scalini, eating his usual snapper with mineral water and pondering the question. Meanwhile, he talks about a dozen other things.
Back then, the fashionable setting fitted Murphy’s reputation as one of the Sydney social A-list, a heavy-duty party boy on the prowl with a succession of models and actresses twenty years his junior. Since a heart scare a few years before, he rarely drank, and tried to get more than three hours sleep a night, but he was still a workaholic who played hard. Since then, he has married and had small children.
Some days he used to sit at this table with the then top jockey Shane Dye, whose brashness and success mirrored Murphy’s own, and irritated some people the same way. Other days, it might be James Packer, then heir to Australia’s greatest fortune he would inherit on the death of his father Kerry. Or ocker advertising guru John Singleton, a mate Murphy once defended on an assault charge. Or television executives negotiating for him to host the pilot of a new show – something he says Clive James told him he should try.
Murphy appeared on one of Geoffrey Robertson’s hypotheticals, on drug use. And he defended the villain of the piece, naturally, when 60 Minutes put the domestic cat ‘on trial’.
Like one of Runyon’s Broadway wise guys, Murphy knows nearly everybody worth knowing, and many who aren’t, in a city where colourful racing identities have rubbed shoulders with colourful advertising, police, media, business, union and political identities ever since the Rum Corps.
His boon companion in the 1980s was David Waterhouse, brother of Robbie, the bookmaker once warned off every racecourse in the world over the Fine Cotton ring-in.
Another friend, who once shared Murphy’s bachelor apartment in the fashionable Connaught Building, was a professional punter who accompanied Murphy on legendary betting expeditions.
Murphy dubbed the pair ‘the odds couple’.
Neighbours at the Connaught have included missing hit man Christopher Dale Flannery, media star Richard Wilkins and the late singer Michael Hutchence. It’s that sort of place.
Murphy admits being a ‘mad punter’ since childhood. He won’t comment on rumours he used to go high-rolling in Las Vegas with Kerry Packer, but reckons he used to be second only to Packer punting on horses during a purple patch in the 1980s. In one month in 1987 he spun $400 into $3 million at the track – including a win of $365,000 on one horse. He reputedly gave away $300,000 to friends and lost the rest, plus a beach house and other property, on Elders-IXL shares.
That would worry some people. Murphy laughs about it. Boom and bust has been his life cycle, and still is.
His grandfather, Samuel Murphy, was born in the Rocks under the Harbour Bridge, blinded at Gallipoli, and returned to rear eight children. Six of Samuel’s sons fought in the next world war.
One, Vincent Birdwood Murphy, brought home a pregnant Welsh bride of gypsy blood, Christine Evans, to a life almost as poverty-stricken as she had left behind in the valleys. Christine, cursed with brains, was determined to give her children the education she had missed.
Chris was the second of six children raised in a two-bedroom war service house in Lakemba, shared with his grandparents. So a total eleven people were thrust together by poverty and fierce family loyalty into a two-bedroom house.
How the knockabout kid from the wrong side of town came to be a sometime millionaire, consort of beautiful women and playmate of the rich and powerful, is a very Australian story.
It’s the story of a poor policeman’s son who became a cop-baiting lawyer who boasted he ‘never did deals’ with police.
Murphy doesn’t criticise his father, but is ambivalent about him compared with his admiration for his mother. He describes her slaving heroically in factory jobs to keep the family together and educate her kids.
The lawyer in him sees a mile off the inference that he’s spent his life getting back at police because of some grudge against his late father. He shrugs it off.
‘People look for some Freudian thing,’ he says. ‘Dad had that violent Irish temper when he was drunk, but so did a lot of other people.’ End of subject.
One old friend says she suspects the teenage Murphy once took up boxing so he could ‘stand up to’ his father. Another tells the story differently. Sure, Chris wanted to be a fighter when he left school, but his furious mother had told him, ‘I haven’t worked in a factory all this time so you can be a boxer.’ Then she burnt his boxing gear.
This seems in character with the feisty woman Murphy describes so fondly years after her death. If there’s one reason he didn’t end up either behind bars like some of his mates or merely the smartest truck driver in the street, it was his mother’s belief in her children.
He worked his way through law at university, digging ditches, driving trucks, doing anything he could to ‘make a quid’.
This taught him things law lectures didn’t. Then he worked for a veteran criminal lawyer, Mark Murray, who taught him some tricks.
He learned his trade around the courts. The Milperra case won him contacts and a profile and a street reputation as a guy who got results, and the rest is history.
So much for the public Murphy. Privately, he’s complex: the tough guy who’s a soft touch, a good hater but impulsively generous, the workaholic hooked on adrenalin and deadline pressure, hungering for the applause that comes from making it look easy when everyone knows it’s not.
‘If there’s one thing that motivates me,’ he said, ‘it’s injustice.’ He still gets angry when he talks about how, 30 years ago, a sadistic teacher used to hurt boys who wouldn’t fight back until the day Murphy, then 16, jacked up.
Then there’s loyalty. ‘One of my earliest memories is when I was four, coming home on the bus with my sister, who was five. A big girl, about 15, hit her. We went home crying.
Next day Mum got on the bus with us and knocked the big girl out of her seat.’
It’s 5.15pm. Murphy watches Channel 10 news to see how his client has been treated. He yells to his secretary to call the station’s chief of staff, and grabs the telephone. ‘Listen,’ he barks, ‘about …’
Five minutes later, he’s still talking.
CHRIS MURPHY’S idea of justice is illustrated by an incident involving his youngest sister, Anne. Born with Down’s syndrome, she was in her late 30s and travelling daily on a school bus to a workshop for the handicapped when she started to get upset about using the bus.
Murphy found out an 18-year-old schoolboy had been taunting her. He armed himself with a camera, got on the bus, sat next to the culprit and began taking photographs of him.
The youth demanded to know what he was up to.
‘Welcome to the worst day of your life,’ Murphy said, then told him who he was. ‘I’m going to school with you all day, to see what sort of a system turns out people like you.’
In the schoolyard Murphy gave the boy a choice: he would follow him into class or they could go straight to the principal. He chose to go to the principal.
Then it was the principal’s turn to make a choice. Either the photographs and the story went in the newspapers or he could arrange a program for pupils to visit the sheltered workshop to learn that handicapped people should be treated decently.
The principal saw things Murphy’s way.