Underbelly 5 Page 17

  A lifetime later, Jean’s voice quavers as she describes the bond between them. At night, if she was frightened, the little boy would sleep with her. By day, they weren’t bored or lonely.

  ‘George rode a pony called Nellie,’ she says. ‘If he fell off he’d get straight back on. He’d always catch her himself. He was so small he’d climb up on a gate to bridle and saddle her. He never had toys or any other children to play with. He had animals.’

  The motherless boy’s favorite was a motherless foal he’d reared. He also had a dog, a cat and a calf, and talked to them the way other children talked to each other.

  The Browns rarely saw outsiders. George, like Jean, grew up painfully shy with people outside the family.

  In 1952, when George was seven, his father died. The property was sold, Jean went to work in Toowoomba, and George went to live with his married sister, Lesley, in the nearby district of Drillham.

  He missed Jean. Like many a lonely child, he survived by nursing a dream. He wanted to train horses.

  Meanwhile, his brother Manny, a top rodeo rider, had gone to England and become a minor celebrity by training as a bullfighter, an ambition that ended when he was gored at his debut in Spain.

  Manny returned to England to breed and break in racehorses. In 1962 he married. George, seventeen, sailed to England to be best man. He stayed five years.

  MANNY Brown got his little brother jobs with good horse trainers. He graduated to the stables of Major Peter Cazalet, where he strapped a horse called Different Class, owned by Gregory Peck, and schooled the Queen Mother’s horses over jumps. Within six months, he was riding in steeplechases.

  After 30 rides, and a broken collar bone, he gave up race riding to concentrate on training. He was, he decided, getting too big to be a jockey, anyway. About 1967, he decided to come home.

  Brown became foreman for the then prominent trainer Brian Courtney at Mentone and, later, Caulfield. He met a country girl, Rose Effting, at a dance in 1969. He was polite, barely drank and didn’t smoke – a rarity in racing stables. They married at Cheltenham in 1970; the first of their three children was born the next year.

  At Courtney’s that year, Brown was pictured in a turf magazine holding two of the stable’s best gallopers. One, ironically, was the crack sprinter Regal Vista – later the medium of one of Australia’s most celebrated ring-in scandals, when he was substituted for the plodder Royal School, at Casterton.

  Soon after, Brown went to Brisbane to work for the trainer Fred Best, at Hendra. He worked with another Queenslander with the same surname, Graham ‘Chunky’ Brown, who remembered him as ‘one of the kindest men with a horse you’ve ever seen’.

  When George Brown left to try his luck with a trainer’s licence back in Victoria, his mate wasn’t to see him again for almost 13 years – until the day they met before a race at Doomben that was probably George’s death sentence. But that was later.

  Brown’s first winner was an old horse called Mark’s Kingdom, at Nowra races, trained from stables behind a house his father-in-law owned at Darlington Point, in the Riverina. He worked a few cast-off gallopers, broke in young horses for other people, dreamed of being a city trainer.

  The chance came when he landed a job as a private trainer for a retired bookmaker and wealthy owner, Jack Mandel, who had stables next to Randwick racecourse. The boy from the bush was now a bit-player in racing’s Hollywood, training alongside the biggest names in the game: T. J. Smith, Cummings and Begg.

  A couple of years later he took the plunge as a public trainer, working from rented stables around Randwick. It wasn’t easy. Skill and dedication aren’t enough to win success in the toughest business outside the boxing ring.

  For all his experience, the shy horseman didn’t have the flair for self-promotion, the head for figures or the ruthlessness shared by the big names. He landed more than his share of wins with a small team, but winners weren’t as regular as the rent and fodder bills.

  Brown’s dream of making it as a trainer didn’t wilt, but his wife did. Rose Brown said later she knew he loved the children, but if it came to spending his last ten dollars on a bag of chaff instead of groceries, the horses would get the chaff. Rose hated racing’s uncertainty.

  They parted amicably. Rose, her daughter and two sons went back to Darlington Point. They kept in touch, and when he could he’d send money. ‘I couldn’t fault him, only that for him the horses came before everything else,’ she was to recall. ‘I still wanted him to be successful.’

  SUCCESS came, but slowly. Despite getting a few city winners, Brown struggled to balance the books. Two of his owners, Geoff Newcombe and Dick Keats, arranged a bank loan so he could pay fodder, float and farrier’s bills.

  ‘He’d eat bread and jam three times a day to feed his horses properly,’ recalls Keats. ‘He’d ride work himself. I remember him riding a rogue horse he had. He’d wrap his legs in newspapers for padding to stop the blistering, because he didn’t want to spend money on long boots.’

  Yet it looked as if Brown was making it. He was getting bigger owners, and had some boxes on the course as well as rented stables in Tweedmouth Street, Rosebery. He had been earmarked for a twenty-box complex ‘on the hill’ on the racecourse – a sign of recognition.

  Photographs don’t do George Brown justice, say those who knew him. For all his travels and his craggy face, he had a naive quality that prompts the Brisbane trainer Laurie Mayfield-Smith to say of him: ‘He struck me as somebody out of The Sullivans. He wasn’t the gangster type. He never bragged about betting, or anything else.’

  But Dick Keats noticed changes in Brown in 1983. One was that he started to wear better clothes, giving up the fusty suits he’d stuck to in the tough times. Keats guessed the trainer was spending cash he hadn’t had before. He couldn’t guess where it came from. And it was clear Brown was worried. By the end of that year Keats and Newcombe had trouble talking to him, and he looked haggard. ‘His weight dropped right away. He wasn’t happy,’ Keats recalls.

  BY late 1983, Queensland racing stunk. The smell hadn’t yet hit the public, but interstate bookmakers were nervous about bizarre form reversals in Brisbane.

  The once-fearless Mark Read and several other big Sydney bookies cut Brisbane bets to a quarter. They knew that when certain people plunged large amounts on Brisbane races, they always won. The first public whiff of scandal came in early 1984, when two horses, Wishane Myth and Aquitane, were scratched after being nobbled.

  Meanwhile, George Brown was more quiet and moody than ever. He wasn’t the type to pour out his heart, but relatives caught hints of inner turmoil in telephone calls.

  He told his sister Jean and his brother Manny he was getting threatening calls. Specifically, he had been told that his horse, McGlinchey, ‘won’t win’, on at least two occasions. He told Jean he didn’t know ‘who would want to do this to me’.

  Some time in the two weeks before his death, he told his estranged wife he was worried because he’d been approached to ring-in a horse in Brisbane. He’d been offered ‘big money’, but didn’t want to do it. She asked him who’d made the offer. He said he ‘couldn’t say’.

  Rose Brown was uneasy. On an earlier trip to Sydney, for the children to see their father, she had taken ‘a couple of funny phone calls’ at his flat.

  When she had told him about the calls, he passed it off as a former lover of Pat Goodwin, the woman described as his de facto. He blamed the same man for attempting to burn his car in the street a few months before. In light of later events, Rose doubts he meant it.

  KAREN Godfrey was only eighteen, but in the year she’d worked with Brown – ‘he was more like a workmate than a boss’ – she’d proved herself. So when he sent three horses to the Brisbane autumn carnival in late March 1984, she got the job, with a veteran stablehand called Jackie Paull.

  Star of the trio was Different Class, a city winner named after the horse Brown had strapped for Gregory Peck in England. The others were a promising maiden
called Young Cavalier, and a bay filly called Risley.

  Risley had won two weak races in Sydney the previous year but was not, on form, any better than the 14-1 quoted against her winning the last race at Doomben on 31 March, a Saturday.

  Brown flew from Sydney for the races. He met his old workmate ‘Chunky’ Brown. They had a drink ‘for old times’ sake’.

  If George Brown was surprised – or worried – that Risley’s registration papers hadn’t been checked early that day, or at trackwork during the week, he didn’t show it. When stewards called for the papers not long before the race, he said they were at the stables nearby. He went to get them, and was fined $50 for being late.

  As he saddled Risley he told Godfrey there was ‘a bit of money’ for the filly, but that he didn’t like her chances. It was some understatement. Risley was backed from 12-1 to 8-1 in Brisbane and Sydney – and, curiously, from 14-1 to 4-1 at Wollongong. Someone down south liked her chances. Someone who wouldn’t be happy when she ran second last.

  When Brown checked the filly after the race, ‘he was really quiet’, the strapper recalls.

  Brown’s sister, Jean, and her husband were there that day. They later recalled he was concerned by Risley’s poor run, and had criticised the jockey.

  They drove him to the airport after the races. They never saw him again.

  ARTHUR Harris is an odd man out in Sydney racing. Known for mathematical skill and a phenomenal memory, he is no ordinary racecourse tout, in character or style.

  A psychology graduate, philosophy expert and prize-winning classics scholar, Harris turned to setting race markets instead of bridge or chess. For a decade he was a form analyst for the bookmakers, Bill Waterhouse and his son Robbie … until late 1984, when the Waterhouse father and son were warned off every racecourse in the world, over the Fine Cotton scandal.

  David Hickie, a Sydney investigative journalist, publisher and racing expert, says of Harris: ‘Arthur carries the history of the last 30 years of NSW racing in his head.’

  Both Hickie and former AJC chief steward John ‘The Sheriff’ Schreck describe Harris as honest, and with racing’s interests at heart. That assessment, combined with his passion for keeping records, makes his recollections of some events very interesting.

  When Risley went to the barrier at Doomben, the Sydney races at Rosehill were over. Harris was amazed by the amount of money being bet on the unknown filly. He was also surprised to learn first-hand that a well-known bookmaker had backed Risley.

  In a statutory declaration Harris swore in September, 1997, for the NSW Thoroughbred Racing Board, he stated several intriguing things. One was that he considered backing Risley himself because of the confidence of a bookmaker, but decided not to, ‘as I formed the opinion that on its ratings it would be hard pressed to win …

  ‘I did, however, watch the horse closely on the closed-circuit TV. After the race I went to (a bookmaker) and said: “It did absolutely nothing”.’

  GEORGE Brown was rattled. On the Sunday morning after the Doomben race, the small daughter of a friend walked into a loose box where Brown was treating a horse. He screamed at the child. Her father was shocked; they had never seen him behave that way.

  Next morning, Brown met another trainer, Les Bridge, at the track to return a borrowed saddle. Years later, Bridge was to choose words carefully as he recalled it. ‘He was concerned about some race in Brisbane. He said he was disappointed with the way the horse ran.’

  Bridge talked of how much he liked Brown, then added suddenly: ‘I know he was unhappy with what happened in Brisbane.’ He paused. ‘I hope they dig up something.’ Another pause. ‘You hear different things … but you hear a lot of things in racing.’ End of interview.

  That Monday night, Brown was due for dinner at Pat Goodwin’s house, a few streets from his Rosebery stables. He didn’t make it.

  Goodwin later told police she had called him about 6.50pm to say there’d been a call from Brisbane. She said he told her: ‘It’s been a quiet night … I will leave here at eight o’clock. I have to drop in on …’

  Then he had paused and said: ‘I’ll be there at ten past eight.’ Goodwin claimed not to know who he intended to see.

  An owner, Ted Hendry, rang him twice, about 7.20 and 7.40, and they spoke briefly. Rose Brown rang either just before or just after Hendry’s second call. She needed money to take their son Wayne, then eleven, to Sydney to see a specialist. It was a request he would never usually deny, no matter how broke.

  But this time, she says, he ‘wasn’t himself. He curtly accused Wayne of ‘bunging on’ the illness. They were staggered. He had never acted like that before.

  ‘It didn’t sound like him,’ she says. ‘I wonder now if he was with whoever killed him.’

  TRAFFIC was light on the F6 freeway at Bulli Tops, near Wollongong, in the hour before midnight. But one driver noticed a car on fire about 50 metres off the northbound lane, and reported it at the toll booth, 23 kilometres away.

  A freeway patrol came, but reported the fire was no threat to traffic. Later, someone called the fire brigade, which relayed the call to the Bulli volunteer brigade. It was 28 minutes past midnight.

  After putting out the fire, the volunteers saw something in the passenger seat of the blistered green Ford. It was a body. Or what was left of it.

  When Senior Constable Peter Strik, of the crime scene unit, arrived the body was lit up by flood lights, but barely recognisable. The hands, feet and forearms had been burned away.

  ‘It was just a lump of charcoal,’ Strik was to say. ‘There was no way it could be identified by sight.’ Although he didn’t know about the broken bones until the post mortem was done, he could see the stump of the left arm twisted from its socket. He automatically treated it as murder.

  ‘It just didn’t look right. I’ve always wondered why we never got anywhere with that one,’ he muses.

  ARTHUR Harris was asleep in the unit he used as an office on Tuesday, 3 April, when the telephone woke him at 6am. It was Joe Amphlett, who worked for the Australian Jockey Club. He sounded alarmed. He said police believed a body found in a burned-out car overnight was George Brown, and that he’d been murdered.

  About 7am, Harris declares, he called a racing identity at his home. Towards the end of a discussion with him, Harris recalls saying: ‘Incidentally, there is a scandal at Randwick. The police are everywhere. They think trainer George Brown may have been murdered.’ According to Harris, the racing identity said: ‘I know about it.’

  At Randwick races later that week, Harris approached a man called Jerry Kron, who bet heavily on Brisbane races when big plunges were being landed.

  In a statement tendered later at an inquiry, Harris swears: ‘I asked him (Kron) what he knew of the George Brown murder. He said: “He was supposed to do a ring-in … He got cold feet and did not switch horses. The money went on SP and they lost heavily. They sent a couple of men around to teach him a lesson. They were high on drugs and went too far”.’

  Two years later, in the homicide squad offices, Harris says a detective called Jim Counsel told him the same story, of two Tongans ‘who flew from Brisbane on the Sunday before George Brown was murdered and flew back the morning after he was murdered with plenty of cash. They purchased a new sports car.’

  RARELY had so many police worked so long on a murder and produced so little. From the start the case was clouded by two flimsy theories that attracted headlines and fed rumors.

  One, easily discredited, was that Brown owed SP bookmakers $500,000. Friends and relatives told police he’d always been a small punter, rarely betting more than $50 for himself. Experts said Brown’s financial affairs showed no sign of big punting.

  Then there was the theory – pushed hard by certain racing and media people within hours of the killing – that it was a ‘crime of passion’, a brutal variant on the staple homicide police call a ‘domestic’.

  In fact, the cold-blooded abduction, torture, murder and public display of t
he broken body, had the hallmarks of an underworld execution by two or more killers, with the intention of creating fear. Some domestic.

  A detective who worked on the case still claims his inquiries showed only $3000 was bet on Risley nationwide. Therefore, he says, the murder was probably not connected with a ring-in gone wrong, and was more likely a ‘crime of passion’. Intriguingly, 13 years after the murder, the then head of the NSW homicide unit, Jeff Leonard, said the possibility that it was a domestic was still a viable theory.

  David Hickie, who checked with bookmakers at the time, says tens of thousands would have been bet on Risley to force interstate odds from 14-1 to 4-1.

  John Schreck, later in charge of cleaning up racing in Macau before moving to Hong Kong, dismisses the chances of Brown’s murder being a domestic as ‘a million to one and drifting’.

  A MONTH after the murder a journalist, Errol Simper, interviewed many racing people, then wrote a story that included these telling paragraphs:

  ‘Besides sadness, there is a considerable amount of silence among those who knew the trainer. They prefer not to discuss his death and, if they do discuss it, many refuse to be identified.

  ‘Some are seemingly – and understandably – very nervous. If nerves aren’t the explanation, then the matter may be even more strange. Taut, blanket silence is hardly a typical reaction from people who have just seen an innocent and respected friend and colleague outrageously murdered.’

  A generation later, the silence lingers. Racing people once close to Brown are still nervous, tight-lipped and anonymous.

  ‘Money got a bit short for George,’ explains a former Sydney trainer cryptically, ‘but he got cold feet. Honest people find it hard to do dishonest things.

  ‘Nothing will ever be opened up. It’s too big. I think you’re better off letting sleeping dogs lie. Karma will get the bloke behind it. He’s stewing in his own juice.’

  Another friend of Brown’s says he is angry at what happened, but scared. ‘What you are doing is terrifying,’ he told the author. ‘I have made phone calls and been told to drop it. It’s too dangerous for me and my family … It’s too big, too political, for the police.’