Underbelly 11 Page 15

  Keith was not Jewish, just a good bloke who didn’t like what he was seeing, Vorchheimer said later.

  By the time Vorchheimer reached the bus, someone else had joined in, too: the driver of the grey car was demanding the hat, his prized Italian Borsalino that had cost him $US180 on an overseas business trip. Someone threw it from the bus onto the footpath near the pusher – but the yarmulka was still missing.

  Again he went to the driver’s window ‘to plead for my yarmulka’. Again, he says, the driver brushed him off – ‘and the rest of them were swearing at me’. He moved to the passenger side, and remonstrated with two young men through a window, demanding the yarmulka’s return.

  That’s when the punch landed. He thinks whoever did it was hidden behind the two people he was arguing with. The only clue was that he thought the assailant was wearing a pink tie. He saw his yarmulka thrown on the ground and grabbed it. He had a broken cufflink and his eye stung.

  Two women were comforting his sobbing children. A crowd gathered, circling the bus as the driver tried to reverse from the car blocking its path. Everyone who saw it thought it looked like an attempt to escape before police arrived. It was a logical enough conclusion.

  Then Menachem Vorchheimer made his stand. He walked to the front of the bus and sat down in its way. That’s when the more sober passengers might have guessed that their mates had picked the wrong man. One who fights back … and who just happens to run a $60 million-a-year company.

  THREE police cars came from St Kilda police station – which, like Sydney’s King’s Cross and Darlinghurst districts, is a place where young police learn fast from streetwise colleagues. In ‘the job’, as police call their work, to be stationed at St Kilda once meant being in ‘the St Kilda Police Force’ – a wry acknowledgment that for a long time the station represented the law in a traditionally lawless area, home of Melbourne’s red-light district, cheap boarding houses, tough pubs, strip joints and drug dealers, and all the ‘punters’ that various forms of vice lure from elsewhere. Added to this sometimes pungent brew was the multicultural mix, but especially the relatively high number of observant Jews who live in the area that some themselves refer to jokingly as ‘Jew Town’: overwhelmingly diligent, law-abiding citizens, but magnets for the sort of stupid, racist abuse that had bubbled over on this day.

  The police soon found out that the mini-bus was chartered by a ‘punters club’ of players and coaches from Ocean Grove Football Club. They also learned something else: that the driver was an off-duty policeman. But this snippet would stay discreetly hidden until a reporter dug it up some days later.

  In fact, the police used much discretion in the discharge of their duties. They did not breathalyse their off-duty colleague, presumably because he seemed sober. Nor did they take statements from his passengers on the grounds that they were probably not sober.

  This makes sense, as statements from intoxicated people are useless in court. And, at that stage, it must have seemed unlikely that it would end up in court.

  Traffic was banking up behind the besieged mini-bus, so it seemed smart to move it on quickly. No-one was volunteering useful information and it must have seemed easier to send the bus home than to take twenty people into custody to try to identify the culprits.

  Senior Constable Jim Tzefer gave Vorchheimer his mobile telephone number and assured him ‘justice would be done’. Diplomacy and discretion, all at once.

  The footballers had come to Melbourne that morning from their seaside hometown on the Bellarine Peninsula, about twenty minutes past Geelong, for a day of punting and drinking at Caulfield races – a classic example of the end-of-season trip, although it was not actually being run by the football club proper.

  The driver, Senior Constable Terry Moore, was not a ‘local’ and did not belong to either the football club or the punters club. He was an acquaintance of an assistant coach, Craig Fagan, a casual connection that Moore must have cursed later when it struck him how much trouble doing a ‘favour’ had caused him.

  The most senior figure on the bus was the playing coach, Matthew Sproule, recruited the previous season from Melbourne’s tough western suburbs competition. Sproule handled betting for the syndicate that afternoon. It hadn’t been a wild success – ‘We turned $200 into $100’, he joked later – but that would be the least of their worries. They might have been better off to punt more and drink less.

  The group had been joined late that afternoon by another Ocean Grove player who had got to the races independently and hitched a ride home on the bus. Young, slightly built and likeable, with a few drinks on board he turns into what his family calls the ‘class clown’.

  A son of former Baptist missionaries, he later admitted yelling insults. It’s hard to believe he was the only one. It’s also hard to believe, but nonetheless true, that his surname is Christian: meaning that a Christian called Christian travelling on a Christian’s mini-bus would end up in strife with non-Christians.

  The bus left the car park around 6pm, skirted the racecourse and headed west down Balaclava Road through Caulfield towards St Kilda – normally a logical short-cut for anyone heading for the Westgate Bridge and Geelong.

  But it ran through Melbourne’s orthodox Jewish heartland – on Saturday evening, when the streets would be full of people walking to worship dressed in clothes not seen in downtown Ocean Grove.

  It would have been prudent for the driver to warn his rowdier passengers to shut the windows and behave. As it was, the white mini-bus attracted attention before it went past Vorchheimer and his two children. Aviva D., a professional woman old enough to have five children and cautious enough not to have her surname published, saw the bus cross Orrong Road around 6.15pm.

  ‘One guy was leaning with his chest out the window, and he yelled out a crude sexual reference,’ Aviva recalls. ‘Something like: “I’ll take you from behind”.’ She finds racist abuse worse than sexual harassment, as her mother is a Holocaust survivor. (Later that same night, she says, someone in a car shouted ‘Heil Hitler!’ and did a Nazi salute.)

  Aviva was walking towards St Kilda. When she got to the Hotham Street intersection, she saw the white mini-bus stopped, surrounded by angry people. She wasn’t surprised. Later still, walking home, she saw police cars and an ambulance and heard about the assault – which is why she called talkback radio when the story broke a few days later. She wasn’t the only one.

  Eli Solowiejczyk, too, had been walking near the same intersection as Aviva and heard racist abuse. He later made a statement to police about it and got in touch with Menachem Vorchheimer.

  Michael Granek, a member of the congregation at the Mizrachi synagogue in Balaclava Road, began his usual half-hour volunteer security shift on the synagogue door at 6pm that evening.

  About half-way through his shift he and the professional security man with him, a former Russian policeman who guards the synagogue every week, saw ‘a white mini-bus full of males hurling abuse’.

  At the time Granek shrugged it off. ‘Drunks drive past and think it’s tough to call out “Effing Jews”,’ he says. ‘I don’t take it personally. It’s ignorance, alcohol, bravado in front of their mates, and it happens maybe three times out of four that I am on duty. But this time I heard shortly afterwards that someone had been bashed.’ He later contacted both the police and Menachem Vorchheimer.

  The Christian’s bus from Ocean Grove was not the only mini-bus causing trouble in the area that evening – a fact that would lead to some confusion about the route it took, and led to understandable speculation that a bus full of racist rednecks was criss-crossing St Kilda looking for Jews to abuse.

  Some of them might have been racist rednecks but they weren’t roaming St Kilda looking for easy targets to yell at. They were just picking on the ones they saw as the bus took its perfectly logical way from Caulfield racecourse towards the Westgate Bridge towards the Geelong Road and home to Ocean Grove.

  A Caulfield man, Nathan, who wants to remain anonymous
because of his work, was walking down Glen Eira Road – parallel with Balaclava Road —with his young son around 6.15pm when they saw a mini-bus full of men banging the vehicle’s sides. ‘They yelled “Fucking Jews” at us,’ he recalls.’ I would like to get them in a room and give them an earful.’

  When Nathan heard of the assault on Vorchheimer, he assumed the group he had seen was responsible. But another witness, Yoshi Aaron, who works for Australian Jewish News, had noted details of a mini-bus in Glen Eira Road when its occupants yelled abuse at him and his wife: it was a Thrifty hire vehicle, registered 1377 NE. Not the Christian’s bus.

  The fact there were two buses on different routes led some people to assume racist thugs were combing the district. As stated, there was no evidence of this. But what did happen was bad enough and Menachem Vorchheimer is not going to let anyone forget it.

  THREE months after the battle of Balaclava Road he sits at his dining room table only a few hundred metres from where the incident happened, re-telling his story so far and mapping the campaign ahead.

  He has a husky voice and speaks quietly, but lots: words rush out as new thoughts strike. On the table is a pile of papers and folders, notated for ready reference. A tiny scar is all that’s left of the cut eye. Feelings are harder to heal.

  As he talks, his baby son climbs over him, gurgling happily. Vorchheimer is a fond father; his life revolves around family, faith and work. Each evening he tries to be home to see the three children before bedtime. Each morning he rises early to pray at dawn before going to work at his firm’s Dandenong South warehouse, where his 130 employees range across ‘maybe twenty’ nationalities. ‘I’m the only one with a beard and yarmulka,’ he says.

  He has to make many overseas trips but dislikes being away on the sabbath, because that is time set aside for family and worship. Late in 2006 he left on a Sunday, as usual, and went to Hong Kong, Britain and Singapore but still managed to get home in time to spend the sabbath with his family. Of the five nights away he spent one in a hotel bed – the rest were on aircraft.

  This fierce devotion to family could be a reaction to his own troubled childhood, though he speaks fondly of his father, Ludwig, whose influence lingers sixteen years after his death.

  Ludwig Vorchheimer fled Germany to avoid the Nazis in 1938, aged sixteen, was interned in England as an enemy alien during the war, then lived in America before coming to Sydney in the 1960s. He married an Australian, Sarah Coleman, a convert to Judaism twenty years his junior.

  Surviving the Holocaust turned Ludwig towards the strict orthodox Lubavitch sect. He raised his four sons the same way; they grew up straddling two cultures. Menachem, the second son, went to Sydney Boys’ High before being sent to Melbourne to a traditional Yshiva school.

  The boys’ grandfather Norm Coleman played rugby league with St George and was a ‘Rat of Tobruk’ in the Australian Army in World War 2. The family descends from John Palmer, purser on the First Fleet flagship Sirius, later a commissary and magistrate in colonial Sydney.

  The irony amuses Vorchheimer: he’s one of a tiny minority of Australians to trace their origins back to the First Fleet, yet is heckled by yobs no doubt because they think he looks ‘un-Australian’.

  As a boy in Bondi, he followed Balmain Tigers (‘Benny Elias, Gary Jack’) and loved cricket: ‘I was a right arm spinner – like Greg Matthews. My best figures were four for six.’

  His parents’ marriage ended bitterly. By 1988 the brothers had moved to Melbourne with their ageing father, leaving their mother in Sydney.

  When Ludwig was hit by a car that year, he was badly brain-damaged and a bedridden invalid until his death three years later. The tragedy cast the boys adrift.

  An early sign of the steel in young Menachem was when, at fifteen, he persuaded the Victorian Guardianship Board that he and his brothers and their invalid father should not be under the guardianship of their estranged mother. It was a tough call for a teenager to make but one his mother came to accept.

  The boys were fostered by generous Melbourne Jewish families. Emmanuel Althaus, who took Menachem into his family, jokes about it (‘We were young and stupid – my wife was young and I was stupid.’) but admits it wasn’t easy to ‘civilise’ the ‘feral boy’ who had been doing the best he could for a long time. He is, however, pleased with the result of his tough love: a good education, good marriage and good career have turned the foster-son into the sort of success story any parents would be proud of.

  Menachem says: ‘I had to mature fast and stand up for myself. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t had to do that.’ At 28 he became chief executive of a textile firm. Now, at 33, he has boosted the company’s growth in a way that suggests he will become a business giant.

  Which meant that when he turned his sights on the Ocean Grove Football Club and the police force, as one of his targets concedes ruefully, ‘he certainly got everyone’s attention’.

  A SWIFT, heartfelt apology by those at fault would have settled it. But Menachem Vorchheimer thought that the approach made to him was too little, too late, and too cagey to be convincing.

  ‘It’s like someone stepping on your foot,’ he says. ‘If they apologise, you forget it. But if they try to say they didn’t do it, or maybe it was actually your fault, then you can’t accept it.’

  When his telephone rang on Monday, October 16, almost 48 hours after the incident, it wasn’t Ocean Grove calling. It was his local member of parliament, to say she had called a media conference. Vorchheimer had spoken to politicians on both sides of politics earlier that day. Each suggested going to the media to ensure that the police and the football club took him seriously.

  The story was splashed on the front of the Herald Sun next day and got a big run on talkback radio and television. The news hit Ocean Grove hard – people there would still be talking about it months later. But no-one connected with the mini-bus contacted Vorchheimer that morning. And there was already a hint someone was trying to spin the story against him.

  A reporter from the Geelong Advertiser, Ocean Grove’s nearest regional daily, called and asked what his ‘version’ of the incident was – as if there were some doubt about the facts. The question was absurd: it implied that a prosperous, peaceful, religious man pushing a pram would deliberately attack a bus full of footballers and contrive to have his hat stolen and his eye cut. For what?

  Vorchheimer was livid. Someone was trying to smear him to protect the footballers. His suspicion hardened when he heard people were peddling a story that he had ‘tried something similar’ with Qantas. (This referred to a minor matter years before, when he had challenged Qantas for failing to provide a kosher meal ordered and paid for in advance.)

  The next call was from Andrew Demetriou, head of the Australian Football League, making a gesture on behalf of the national game. Vorchheimer was grateful – but Demetriou’s urbane and well-timed diplomacy only underlined the deafening silence from the real wrongdoers, with the effect that the Ocean Grove Football Club now looked completely wrong-footed.

  ‘I said to Andrew “Thanks, but it’s not your job to fix this up. If you can find my phone number surely they can”,’ he recalls. The swift response from the AFL left its country cousins at Ocean Grove looking mean-spirited, apathetic and insular. All of which was unfortunate for the football club’s president, a local lawyer called Michael Vines.

  Finally, late that night, Vines, telephoned Vorchheimer to offer an apology and assurances that he would try to identify who was behind the ‘alleged’ offences. Vines was well within his rights to try to protect the interests of his players and his club but what Vorchheimer interpreted as a faintly adversarial tone rankled him more each time they spoke.

  Vines soon felt the same way about Vorchheimer. Months later, he commented: ‘In this country we have a legal system we follow’ – rather as if Vorchheimer were a conniving peasant fresh from some corrupt totalitarian state, not an urbane, highly educated Australian like Vines himself. It was, p
erhaps, an innocent but unfortunate slip.

  Vines underlined the fact that the football club had no official link with the punters’ big day at the races. Like a principal whose students are caught shoplifting after school, he was stuck with a mess not of his making, half-blamed for something over which he had no control. He was keen to identify offenders but naturally wary of the club wearing any blame for what they’d done. Vines soon scared the younger players: one ashamed lad confessed to yelling taunts, another to grabbing the hat. The problem was that, initially, no-one would own up to punching Vorchheimer.

  Vines argued that if a punch had been thrown, a seasoned courtroom veteran like himself would surely have uncovered it while cross-examining the players.

  When he did not produce the puncher, he switched tack – urging Vorchheimer to accept that his eye was accidentally ‘scratched’ in the tussle. This would have neatly removed the threat of an assault charge, no doubt to the relief of all concerned at the football club.

  The lawyer – and police – knew that as things stood then, if an assault charge had been laid it would not have stood up in court. But Vorchheimer wouldn’t accept the ‘punch-lite’ theory. From the first week, he saw that the chances of the affair ending with genuine remorse and a handshake were slipping away. If the puncher would not own up, he would gun for the target he could clearly identify – the off-duty policeman driving the bus.

  He spoke to his friend Norman Rosenbaum – a Melbourne lawyer famous for his fourteen-year legal battle in New York over the race-hate killing of his brother Yankel in 1991. Rosenbaum said to get a criminal lawyer. He suggested a seasoned barrister, Remy van de Wiel, QC.

  The urbane and wily Van de Wiel lives on the other side of the city, in Clifton Hill. He is not an especially religious man but he has the civil libertarian’s dislike of injustice, and the defence lawyer’s sharp and sceptical eye for any sign of police misconduct.