Underbelly 6 Page 15

  His big break came on a Sunday night in 1955.

  He was asked to defend a Geelong policeman charged with shooting his wife. The policeman, James Broome, admitted arguing with his wife some time before the shooting because of his infatuation with a cinema usherette, and his suspicions that his wife was having an affair with a taxi driver.

  But Galbally persuaded the all-male jury to see things his way – that the shooting was accidental.

  To do this the jury, significantly, had to ignore the ‘verbal confession’ homicide detectives claimed Broome had made to them. Galbally was one of few lawyers willing to accuse police of lying on oath to strengthen circumstantial cases. Juries often believed him.

  After the verdict, Galbally took Broome to the felicitously named St Francis’s Church in Lonsdale Street, where they prayed together. It wasn’t the last time he took a client to the church after a big win. Nor the last time the Press was there to record it.

  Veteran journalists recall a postscript to the Broome trial. That evening Galbally and Broome went to The Sun newspaper office in Flinders Street, where Broome was handed a beer while Galbally dictated Broome’s ‘own story’ in the first person to a reporter. It stopped his client making any embarrassing mistakes and it painted the defence counsel in a favourable light.

  The story safely fitted the facts – and covered two pages. Galbally’s name was made. For the next 25 years, it just got bigger.

  IT wasn’t obvious until later but, by 1980, when Galbally appeared for the painters and dockers union at the Costigan Royal Commission into the activities of the union, his best work was probably behind him.

  He was justly famous for his astonishing acquittal rate. He had been awarded the CBE and three Italian national honours for his work for migrants, he was first president of the Australian League for Democracy in Greece, and had chaired a Federal Government migrant services report and a multicultural affairs body.

  He had been lionised, quoted and feted – not least by Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who had capitalised on Galbally’s public split with Labor in 1975 to enlist his help in wooing the ethnic groups with which Galbally was popular.

  Known by all, admired by many, Galbally aroused hatred and contempt in some. A profile of him published in 1982 reflects the controversy stirred by the Costigan Royal Commission, which exposed bottom-of-the-harbour tax avoidance schemes and aired startling allegations about illicit activity everywhere from the docks to the board rooms of the rich and powerful.

  ‘To his detractors he is a money-making, publicity-seeking, social-climbing political opportunist always with an eye to the main chance,’ law reporter Garry Sturgess wrote in The Age that year.

  ‘To his admirers he is the pre-eminent advocate battling injustice. A religious man who has spent a lifetime pushing the causes of the “lower deck”.

  ‘But the man is more complex than ever his detractors or admirers would allow. No one phrase … seems to capture him, but a jumble of words may … Frank Galbally is: emotional, eccentric, humane, ebullient, grandiose, madcap, vain, impulsive, childlike, generous, magnetic, bitter, opportunistic, enigmatic, imperious. In short Frank Galbally is: theatre.’

  It was a well-observed description of a complex man with all of the ambiguous loyalties demanded of a top criminal lawyer, whose professional success relies on earning and keeping the trust of clients that could never be his friends. It can be a lonely path, for all its rewards.

  Galbally’s critics enjoyed the Costigan Commission. It aired a rumour – categorically denied and comprehensively discredited by Galbally – that he had taken $10,000 cash from the then secretary of the ‘dockies’ union, Jack ‘Puttynose’ Nicholls, and put it in the boot of his outsized Mercedes Benz.

  Galbally, outraged by this smear, was to point out that if he had wanted to carry a bundle of cash he would indeed put it in the boot for security – and so what? But he denied being paid the cash or carrying it for anyone else.

  Twenty years on, the cash-in-the-boot story lingers as obstinately as if it had been proven true, proving only that if mud is thrown, some sticks.

  Why was Galbally the target of innuendo? He had always been frowned on by some sections of the legal establishment – after all, he was Catholic, Collingwood, worked for criminals and, worst of all, was conspicuously successful without going to the Bar. But, in 1975, his switch to the Liberal cause during Whitlam’s dismissal earned him a new batch of enemies.

  Few maintained their rage. Most couldn’t help liking Galbally and tolerated his maverick ways.

  His brother Jack, a Labor stalwart, laughed off the ‘defection’ with the line: ‘Francis is a great advocate but a howler of a judge.’

  Not so indulgent was prominent Labor lawyer Peter Redlich, who accused Galbally of voting with his wallet because Labor had curbed civil lawsuits claims with its reforms.

  It was true that, for all Galbally’s high profile in criminal trials, Galbally & O’Bryan’s main income came from its civil practice, largely handled by his brother-in-law, Peter O’Bryan. It was also true that while he loved spending money, he was not motivated by it. His generosity was legendary. He took many cases for small fees, and some for nothing. This did not endear him to all his learned friends.

  Galbally’s critics have mostly fallen silent. He has outlived many; some are as frail as he is; others might think it churlish to criticise an ill and ailing old man.

  There are, however, some interesting witnesses for his defence. They tell of a man whose common touch and impulsive generosity shone through his disguise of cultured diction, perfect tailoring, expensive cars and the trappings of wealth.

  John Cain, Victoria’s Labor premier for most of the 1980s, hardly mentions Galbally’s political defection, saying that he had been ‘seduced’ by Malcolm Fraser. Cain implies it was more of a tiff than an act of treason and that Galbally might have been a ratbag, but never a rat.

  Politics is a cold-blooded art, and Galbally was too passionate about too many things to play the game the way the professionals do.

  Cain, usually so cautious, enthuses about Galbally’s generosity when he did his articles with the firm in the 1950s. He doesn’t spell it out, but his working for Galballys showed that in an era when many law firms still hired exclusively from one school – and, consequently, one religion – the Galballys were unfashionably liberal.

  Cain was a Protestant and had gone to the ‘opposition’ Scotch College.

  That didn’t matter to Galbally & O’Bryan, whose founders were proud products of the Catholic education system, but readily hired people of varied backgrounds and disabilities, including two blind solicitors.

  Galbally once employed a young woman with a disfiguring birthmark – and paid for plastic surgery to remove it because she couldn’t afford it.

  Cain recalls that Galbally let him ‘just come along to court and listen and learn, which was a luxury for an articled clerk’. He describes him as ‘articulate, earthy but with great rhetorical flourishes … he could convey what the law was about in ordinary words’.

  Victoria’s Chief Justice, John Phillips, harbours deep affection for Frank Galbally. As a law student in the 1950s the young Phillips used to hang around courts to see ‘this tall and very graceful figure … sweep in, usually with an entourage, always immaculately dressed’.

  He describes Galbally as ‘a very eloquent man – you could hear a pin drop when he spoke to juries’.

  As a raw young barrister, the future Chief Justice was ‘comprehensively cleaned up’ in court one day by Jack Galbally.

  He was surprised, soon after, to receive a brief from Frank – the first of many. ‘I think he knew,’ says the Chief Justice 40 years on, ‘that I had no contacts in the law.’ Years later, when he was a successful QC, Phillips went to the Krope trial to study Galbally’s technique.

  When the Galballys finally sold their huge family home in Ivanhoe in the late 1990s, the Chief Justice and a group of barristers who had
learned their craft from Galbally gathered with friends and relatives to pay tribute to the man in the wheelchair. The Chief Justice, a keen singer, brought an accompanist and sang Neapolitan love songs. It was the end of an era.

  Future visits would be to a nursing home.

  Among the group that day were Tony Howard, Michael Rozenes and Jeremy Ruskin, all Queen’s Counsel, members of a galaxy of legal stars who started with Galbally’s firm. Rozenes, like Peter Ward, is emotional about the man who treated him like family. He describes him as a mentor and an ‘idol’ who ‘invested the criminal law with class and depth of perception about what hurts people … and drew no distinctions between people’.

  The only frightening thing about Galbally, he says, ‘was that, watching him, you thought you’d never be that good. But he would encourage us and say, “You don’t have to be me”.’

  Ruskin, now a sought-after defamation specialist, calls Galbally ‘a great matinee idol’ who could mesmerise juries – and some judges – with oratory. ‘And he would do cases with the same passion at Brunswick Magistrates Court as he did at the Supreme Court.’

  He thinks that although Galbally’s skills were timeless, his brand of advocacy would not work today because it appealed to traditional values of home, hearth and church that have been eroded in the past two decades.

  For a largely working-class audience brought up, if not law-abiding, then God-fearing, the message was clear: Mr Frank was on God’s side.

  After all, he’d studied to be a priest.

  ‘He was larger than life with a huge aura but, paradoxically, able to relate to the normal men and women on the jury,’ says Ruskin. ‘He would never patronise them.’

  John Walker, QC, did many cases with Galbally, and rates him the most successful defence advocate in the world. He points out an astonishing fact: the great English barrister Marshall Hall had a success rate of about 50 per cent, the famous American attorney Clarence Darrow’s strike rate was less than 60 per cent – but Galbally’s was between 80 and 90 per cent.

  ‘I have seen juries visibly moved by him. I actually saw tears wiped away by a judge,’ says Walker.

  Not everyone loved him, he admits – and explains why. ‘The Bar generally denigrated him at dinner parties and pubs. They said he took the easy ones but, in fact, he did the hard ones.’

  Galbally’s real influence was outside the legal profession. David Galbally realised how much when he went to train with Collingwood under-19s and an assistant groundsman introduced himself with the words: ‘Anything you want, you tell me and I’ll look after you, son. I owe your father everything.’ He later heard the man’s first wife had suffered an unfortunate accident in the bath, and Frank had rescued him from the resulting investigation, in which it was suggested there had been foul play.

  The first time David went to court with his father, he marvelled at how a hush fell when they entered. ‘He was a fighter. If he had any fear he never showed it. Once he represented a bloke called Frankie Bayliss and won. A cop followed us back to the office and while Dad was disrobing, he grabbed Bayliss and put a gun to his head.

  ‘Dad, in his singlet and trousers, picked the cop up and threw him against the wall, gave him a dressing down, then threw him out. I thought then, “You really do care. You want to protect people”. He didn’t even report the cop. He never held grudges.’

  But David’s cousin Bob Galbally says his uncle did fear one thing … losing. Despite his reputation, he was humble in victory, but hated failing in court. It hurt him.

  Bob saw him defend about 120 alleged murders, and lose about 15 of them. Each time, he sent someone else to court to hear sentence pronounced.

  When David ‘took silk’ to become a QC in 1996, his father was proud because it was a sign the family had been recognised by the legal establishment. But when the old and ailing man called to congratulate his son, he warned: ‘Davie, you’re not going to triple your fees, are you?’ And he wasn’t joking.

  He gave his children a lot of advice. Two things stick in David’s mind.

  One was ‘be like Jesus … kind to all men’. The other was always to walk towards the cameras.

  CHAPTER 11

  A juggler who lost his nerve

  When it came to drug dealing, Andrew Fraser was incredibly dumb.

  ANDREW Fraser was a lawyer always on the lookout for his next case. That’s why some of Australia’s most notorious criminals always carried his business card and why he always carried a mobile telephone.

  Some criminal lawyers, like police, are always on duty.

  But when he walked into one of his many favourite bars in late spring in 1998, he was looking for a drink, not a client.

  The Dogs Bar in St Kilda’s Acland Street was part of Fraser’s beat.

  He mixed easily with the eclectic crowd, made up of the fashionable and the questionable.

  Fraser saw a friend drinking with a tall, middle-aged man who spoke with a strong German accent. He walked over and was introduced to Werner Paul Roberts, a man who was looking for a lawyer to help him settle a Workcover case.

  Fraser was a specialist in criminal law but business had slowed and his lifestyle hadn’t. He would take the case.

  But it didn’t take long for the two men to realise they had more in common than a Workcover settlement. For years, Fraser had loved to use cocaine, while Werner was in the business of selling it.

  Werner didn’t need to be told he had found both a lawyer and a customer.

  He could see what many, including police, judges and fellow lawyers couldn’t. Fraser was a hopeless coke-head.

  The drug dealer would later tell detectives there were ‘certain signs’ that convinced him from the first meeting that the high-flying lawyer was a high-flying user. ‘He sniffed and he was hyperactive … He was pretty keen on it, from what I gathered.’

  Fraser, had been using cocaine ‘off and on’ for more than a decade. Despite having seen hundreds of clients whose lives had been ruined through drugs, he had the arrogance to believe he would be different. He could control it. He was wrong.

  The former schoolboy athlete was a full-blown addict and, by September, 1999, with Roberts as his dealer, he was consuming at least four grams of cocaine, valued at $1000, a day.

  Battling bankruptcy and a shrinking law practice, Fraser became a drug-trafficker to fund his own insatiable appetite for cocaine. He would later admit to 3AW’s Neil Mitchell that ‘in the last year I would have spent over a hundred grand’ on the drug.

  Fraser spoke to Mitchell after he was charged, but even then his answers seemed insincere. He was trying to build a defence to the indefensible.

  Just two years after the chance meeting at the Dogs Bar, Fraser was forced to stand in the dock of the County Court as he was sentenced to prison for helping Roberts import up to $2.7 million worth of cocaine from Africa.

  One of Australia’s best-known lawyers, whose client list included business tycoon Alan Bond, footballer Jimmy Krakouer and killer Dennis Allan, had become a professional wreck whose 30-year career had fallen, by his own admission, ‘down the shit-chute’.

  His banister, Con Heliotis, QC, argued in court that Fraser was a victim and that it was foolishness, not greed, that turned him into a criminal who pleaded guilty to trafficking cocaine, possession of ecstasy, and being knowingly concerned in the importation of cocaine.

  Many witnesses were called to give character evidence on his behalf: the Fraser they knew was a caring and compassionate man, a ‘completely idiosyncratic Australian character’, a loyal friend and an adoring father.

  He was of the ‘work hard, play hard’ school. Long, boozy lunches, meetings with notorious criminals and living on the edge was part of the lifestyle he loved. But he wanted more.

  Fraser was first introduced to cocaine at a party around 1987. Some years later, suffering burnout because of his constant working hours, he found out his neighbour was a dealer, and soon graduated from ‘the occasional line’ to frequent use
.

  But with Roberts able to supply his demands, Fraser’s cocaine use became chronic and uncontrolled. He claimed he was never high when representing clients, but police listening devices recorded a man seemingly obsessed with cocaine.

  ‘He was clearly out of control and many of his associates had no choice but to distance themselves from him,’ Heliotis said during his plea hearing.

  But not all his colleagues turned away.

  Police recorded some legal identities speaking to Fraser in cryptic terms. One asked for a ‘book’, with Fraser later asking if he liked the volume and then saying it was ‘suitably inscribed’.

  Detectives suspect Fraser was selling small amounts of cocaine to fellow lawyers and associates, including well-known former psychologist Tim Watson-Munro. Contrary to rumours that swept Victoria’s court system, no judges were ever implicated.

  Heliotis told Judge Leo Hart that Fraser’s addiction highlighted his characteristics of being driven and narcissistic, suffering mood swings, and wrestling with ‘a constant conflict between his ego and his insecurity’. It sounded like a fair summary.

  His constant exposure to the hard edge of the criminal underworld, a family history of substance abuse, and a desire to be accepted left him flawed and vulnerable, the court heard.

  ‘He was a person who had to succeed, who had to be liked by his peers, or, at least, if not liked, admired,’ Heliotis said.

  Fraser was a juggler who lost his nerve. ‘I think he thought as if he needed the drug to keep him at the top of the profession, which was where he aspired to be,’ said one character witness, David Brown, a Melbourne senior counsel who had known Fraser for many years.

  ‘He developed the personality of someone who thought he was bullet-proof, who thought he was beyond others. His greatest friend became cocaine.’

  August 16, 1999, was the beginning of the end for the man who believed he was indestructible. At around 5pm, Fraser arrived at his Lonsdale Street law office. Werner Roberts, by then a close associate, was waiting for him in the reception lobby.