Underbelly 6 Read online

  The jury also sees the peephole the depraved Frederick Krope drilled in the bathroom wall to spy on his daughters in the shower. This is even better.

  What gives the case an extra piquancy, a dimension beyond the actual dry facts, is that one of the daughters is Miss Australia 1978, Gloria Krope. During the trial, Galbally takes the Crown by surprise by calling her.

  He presents her as Beauty to her father’s Beast – the girl who left home at 16 to get away from a violent degenerate she feared would injure or kill them if they had dared tell the police about him.

  Miss Australia is a dream witness, but is it enough to stop her brother doing life?

  By 1978, Galbally has represented some 300 accused killers and is famous for swaying juries with his inspired oratory, great flights of imagination and persuasion. He has stared down tremendous odds before, but this will be his greatest test.

  Jeremy Ruskin, later a distinguished Queen’s Counsel, worked for Galbally then. A quarter of a century later, he often recites Galbally’s opening words as a party trick, his voice suddenly stentorian as he weights each word with his old boss’s splendidly overwrought enunciation: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Two Thousand Years Ago Aristotle Said: “We Cannot Love Those We Fear!”’

  Every word demands capitals. Out of context it is over the top, more Frank Thring than Lincoln’s Inn. But, in the courtroom that day, it is mesmerising.

  By the time Galbally sits down – and no one knew better how to time a pause or an exit – there is hardly a dry eye in the house. The Kropes were acquitted. Frank’s son David Galbally says a quarter century later that the firm did the case for nothing.

  But even if the Kropes had been forced to sell their house to pay the fees – as some cynical people suggest – it would have been worth it.

  They might have paid someone else everything they had … and still have gone to jail.

  TERRY Forrest, son of a judge, later a QC, was raised on courtroom drama, but he had never seen or heard of anything quite like it.

  Articled to Galbally’s firm, he was assisting in a murder trial late one morning when a shaft of sunlight shone through a skylight above the bar table.

  Galbally whispered to him to note the exact time the sun hit the window.

  Next day, Galbally was making his closing address to the jury. He sneaked a look at his watch as he built towards the climax. Without missing a beat, he stepped back and sideways at just the right moment – the sunlight broke through the window and lit him like a spotlight as he delivered his magnificent final lines.

  ‘He looked as if he had a halo,’ Forrest recalls in wonder. ‘What an alliance of stagecraft and advocacy. He brought Hollywood to the law.’

  And he did. When Raymond Burr, the American actor who played the famous TV lawyer Perry Mason, came to Melbourne he not only met Galbally but put on the latter’s wig and gown so that a photographer could take their picture together.

  The Law Institute, a conservative institution concerned about the propriety of legal practitioners ‘advertising’, was not amused. Others were.

  One colleague who saw the picture couldn’t resist it. ‘Who’s that with Frank?’ he quipped, putting a new twist on an evergreen joke. No one was surprised, later, when Galbally managed to win a private audience with the Pope. At his peak, he was the most persuasive advocate in the business: Rumpole of the Blarney.

  Galbally said he detested the Rumpole tag – because, he claimed, the role of the fictitious barrister was nothing like the real thing. Galbally might have protested too much. For no one at the bar table produced as many Rumpolean moments as he did.

  Such as the time (reveals his nephew, top criminal barrister Bob Galbally) that a rifle used in an alleged murder clicked audibly while a firearms expert held it in the witness box.

  Galbally seized on it, booming ‘Did you hear that? It went off!’ then suggested the weapon was dangerously faulty, which would imply that his client had not necessarily pulled the trigger. The prosecution wasn’t impressed, but the jury bought it.

  But the old master’s best-ever ruse, says Bob Galbally, was beating a murder charge against a battered wife in northern Victoria by getting Bob (then assisting his uncle) to ply an expert witness with wine over dinner at a local hotel … while Frank borrowed a vital psychology textbook from him to study overnight.

  This not only allowed him to construct a novel defence, it prevented the prosecutor from seeing the book until just before the hearing started next morning.

  By the time Galbally cross-examined the hung-over expert witness, it was all over.

  The prosecutor was furious, but it was too late.

  IT WAS an underworld murder case. The mother of a painter and docker brought in the only money she had – a jar full of coins – and put them on Galbally’s desk as down payment for the defence. David Galbally looked at his father doubtfully. ‘No,’ said Frank firmly, answering the unspoken question, ‘we’ll go across (to court) and do the case anyway.”

  Galbally often used religious imagery. This appealed to juries but prosecutors tired of it. After Galbally had made a particularly passionate plea, one prosecutor drily told the jury that although the defence had likened the accused to Jesus Christ, there was one important difference … ‘Jesus didn’t shoot his mother.’

  IT is alleged that lawyers are an unsentimental lot, criminal lawyers even more so. It is the nature of their calling that they can and do conjure up crocodile tears, as insincere as the sweet talk of an even older profession.

  Peter Ward is a criminal lawyer, and a seasoned one, but the last time he saw Frank Galbally he wept real tears.

  Galbally, Ward’s mentor, barely knows him any more. One of the keenest minds of his generation has been eaten away by Alzheimer’s disease, and arthritis has crippled his once strong, athletic body.

  Although Galbally vaguely recognised a few close friends and relatives the day Ward visited him, he rambled disjointedly.

  This was a man who had spoken Latin as fluently as he could swear, who loved the Classics as much as he loved Collingwood Football Club, and whose memory had been so sharp he was renowned for brilliant cross-examination without using notes.

  That visit to an eastern suburbs nursing home, Ward says, ‘was probably the saddest experience of my life’, an ordeal he fears to repeat. Many months later, his voice cracks and his eyes brim as he speaks of the father of eight who treated him, and many others, like one of his own.

  It was Galbally who gave the young Ward his start in the law almost 30 years ago. Back then, he had been the finest defence advocate in Australia, and possibly the world.

  A tall, handsome man with silver hair, silver tongue and a sometimes impulsively soft heart, he had given the struggling law graduate a second chance when others wouldn’t give him a second glance.

  Not that you could blame the law firms, Ward adds quickly. His university results were average and, even if he hadn’t owned up to defective eyesight in letters to prospective employers, it would immediately have been obvious in interviews. It was 1974, there were no anti-discrimination laws and plenty of promising graduates to choose from, all with good eyes, good results and good connections from good schools.

  Ward was knocked back dozens of times before he came to Frank Galbally for advice because he knew his son, David, at law school.

  The Galballys were like that. Galbally senior was at the zenith of his fame then, probably the only lawyer who was a household word across Australia the way only a few sport and television stars were. He was busy, but he gave the nervous young bloke with the bad eyes time to talk. Then he gave him a job as an articled clerk.

  Ward was overwhelmed with gratitude for a gesture Galbally had no need to make and which, on the face of it, might not have been in the best interests of the firm.

  But either Galbally saw something in Ward that others hadn’t, or he was lucky. Half a lifetime later, Ward is a senior partner in Galbally & O’Bryan, and still grateful for getting the
break that put him on the bottom rung of a ladder he has tenaciously climbed ever since. He sits in his William Street office, key player in a powerful and lucrative practice, groping for the right words to praise the man he calls ‘the Bradman of criminal law’.

  ‘I owe my whole working life and success to one man,’ he begins. ‘It sounds pretty cute, but there it is. He showed no prejudice and gave me a chance no one else would have. I am in his debt.

  Ward’s story of Galbally’s generosity might be remarkable but it is not the only one. Galbally has helped a lot of people. One became a state premier, one became chief justice, at least 10 became Queen’s Counsel, the legal system’s silk department.

  Then, of course, there were his clients. Of some 300 people he represented on murder charges, close to 90 per cent were acquitted. They were grateful, too.

  Most were ‘domestic’ deaths, involving people with no criminal records. But also among them are retired gunmen, survivors of the docks war of the 1960s and 1970s, who still call him ‘Mr Frank’ and speak of him with reverence.

  As a lawyer, ‘Mr Frank’ was a story teller.

  For all his brilliant memory and wide reading, he didn’t bother too often with the intricacies of case law, though he was probably better at it than his detractors allowed, and he always had plenty of detractors ready to whisper unproven and unprovable allegations against him.

  Galbally’s art lay in building a story from the accused’s viewpoint, telling it with the power of a Shakespearean actor, often in the present tense. He had a perfect ear for the words to move a jury.

  He played to jury members’ emotions more than to their ability to weigh facts.

  Jailhouse lore has it he used to scrawl a note on his clients’ briefs, a reminder that their instructions – their version of events – should be ‘a reasonable story that fits the facts’.

  The rest was up to him. No one did it better.

  FRANCIS Eugene Galbally was born on October 13, 1922, eighth of nine children of William Stanton Galbally and the former Eileen Cummins.

  The Galballys were originally Irish Catholics from County Clare, but William had been born in the more tolerant atmosphere of Australia, a product of what his descendants jokingly call a ‘mixed marriage’. His mother was Presbyterian. William’s wife Eileen was half-Irish and half-English. Although devout Catholics, the couple’s ‘mixed’ ancestry seems to have left a legacy of tolerance as well as toughness; their children never showed the sectarian bigotry common in the first half of last century.

  William and Eileen had moved to Melbourne from Sale in Gippsland, where their families had farmed. William, who had fought in the Boer War as a teenager, was a tailor in the city until the Depression forced him to sell the family house in semi-rural Ivanhoe and go on the road as a travelling salesman.

  As if feeding nine children was not enough in hard times, the doughty Eileen fought for her brood to be educated. The oldest children – Kathleen and Jack – helped educate the younger ones at Catholic schools. The young Galballys were clever, worked hard and stuck together, a trait that was to survive the toughest test of all – their rise to affluence.

  Kathleen became a teacher and, later, an anaesthetist. Jack did law, started the firm that was to become Galbally & O’Bryan, entered politics and was to become State Opposition Leader and, later, a Queen’s Counsel.

  Two brothers, Robert and Bryan, became doctors. In the next generation Robert’s son Bob, Jack’s son Peter, and Frank’s sons David, Francis and Paul were to become lawyers. Their siblings entered other professions, the public service and business. In two generations, the Galballys had gone from niggling the establishment to joining it.

  All played a part but Frank took the biggest role, and at centre stage. He always did. Despite the Depression – or because of it – Frank and his brothers and sisters were hungry for success. Hard times brought out the best in Eileen Galbally’s children, and she nurtured it.

  In those days, big Catholic families often had one child join the priesthood. When Frank finished school at 16, he thought he heard the call.

  His devout mother was delighted, his war veteran father less so, hinting that the boy might like to ‘see more of the world’ before committing himself to a lifetime of celibacy.

  Hints weren’t enough; in 1939 he went to Corpus Christi College in the old Werribee Park mansion. There, before realising his father was right, he spent three years studying logic and philosophy. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December, 1941, he had an excuse to leave.

  Three of his brothers had already joined up. He left the seminary and joined the navy.

  Ships were scarce; he had to wait to embark.

  He trained with Collingwood, and later claimed to have played a few games under the legendary Magpie coach Jock McHale. In an autobiography, he describes playing ‘a blinder’ after being concussed by the legendary ‘Captain Blood’, Richmond hero and hard man Jack Dyer.

  He doesn’t mention a story, told by his son David, that he hit Dyer, who threatened to ‘kill him’ before the end of the game, prompting Galbally to develop a sudden injury at half-time. It sounds right. He could always think on his feet. And none of his stories ever lost anything in the telling, especially if he starred in them.

  The young Galbally’s football career was cut short by an axe – not one wielded by the Magpie selectors, but a razor-sharp racing axe his father had borrowed on a trip to Gippsland.

  One morning, Frank took the axe to cut firewood on the Yarra bank about a kilometre from home. His first blow went through the wood and almost cut off his right foot above the ankle. Blood spouted metres. Holding the wound, he crawled towards home.

  By the time he got there, he was too weak from losing blood to crawl up the hill to the house. If his father hadn’t heard his faint calls, he could have died in the garden.

  They said he’d lose the leg but a surgeon called Leo Doyle sewed it back. He was in hospital two months. The leg was still bandaged when the navy called him in, but he had passed his medical before the accident.

  The doctor was a Collingwood supporter who had seen him play football and waved him through to take up his post, or so the story goes.

  He was only a lowly Supply Assistant and he might have played for Collingwood but Galbally wasn’t another boy from the boot factory. He felt the sting of poverty and empathised with battlers, but he was a self-improver heading somewhere better.

  He’d had elocution lessons and three years in the seminary, and had the cultivated voice that was to become his signature in court. In the navy it got him into a few fights, but he was big and strong and won enough of them to speak any way he pleased.

  Galbally was a natural leader of the ‘lower deck’, a role he was to play all his working life.

  Once, the officers brought four pigs on board the corvette Gympie, ready for a future barbecue on an island somewhere. The pig pen was next to the ventilators, which didn’t affect the officers, but it made the crew’s quarters unbearable as the stench wafted through.

  Typically, Galbally had a plan that would challenge authority. Late one night, he got four sailors to put the pigs in bags, opened the sleeping captain’s cabin door and threw the pigs in.

  At first, the dazed captain thought it was a torpedo attack. By the time he worked out he had pigs in his bed, the conspirators were ‘asleep’ in their bunks.

  Galbally feigned anger and rushed out, complaining about the racket waking up honest crewmen trying to get some rest after a hard day’s work. They’re your pigs, he told the astonished captain, who soon got the message.

  The pigs were unloaded at the next island, to the crew’s delight. It wasn’t until the war ended 18 months later that Galbally told the truth. ‘It was me. I did it, you bastards, because you were so unconcerned about anyone on the lower deck’, was the way he recalled his defiant admission in an interview in 1982, although he published a much blander version in his autobiography later.

  Life below
decks in the navy taught him, by the age of 22, that he had the power to persuade people. It was a valuable discovery, this power that he would use to spellbind juries over the following four decades.

  It is tempting to look for turning points. Perhaps his brush with death on the Yarra bank was one: the sort of experience that might supercharge ambition in a restless and clever young man. And surviving wartime dangers, while disturbing to some people, might have reinforced the impulse not to waste his life, to dedicate himself to worthwhile causes.

  Other, more romantic, motives also pricked his ambition. On leave in 1944, he had fallen in love with Bernadette O’Bryan, a judge’s daughter and one of Melbourne’s most eligible young women. Galbally was too poor to marry.

  He had to work fast. He persuaded Melbourne University to let him cram its three-year law course for returned servicemen into two years. He passed. When he finished his degree in 1947 he borrowed the price of an engagement ring. But his future father-in-law, Justice Sir Norman O’Bryan, told him he couldn’t go to the Bar, living hand to mouth as a novice barrister, and also support a wife. If he wanted to marry Bernadette immediately, he should join a law firm as a salaried solicitor, the judge said.

  It wasn’t a hard decision. The couple had wanted to get married for nearly three years, so Galbally immediately joined his big brother Jack’s growing law firm. He was happy to do office work as a solicitor, but Jack sometimes did court appearances for clients to keep their costs down, and told his younger brother he should do the same.

  He excelled at it. But he never went to the Bar – instead carving out a career in the unconventional role of a solicitor advocate.

  Married in June, 1948, Frank and Bernadette Galbally moved into a Hawthorn flat just off Barker’s Road, near Xavier College, and started what was to become a big family.

  Meanwhile, he defended his first murder case in 1950 and a dozen more in the following five years. When Jack was promoted to the State Labor Cabinet in 1952, Frank took over the big cases, and never looked back.