Underbelly 11 Page 6

  1967, November 25: Percy joins navy.

  1968, March 9: Stationed in Sydney.

  1968, May 18: Simon Brook, 3, is abducted and murdered in Glebe. Percy writes in his diary of abducting and murdering a three-year-old. The details in the diary match the fatal injuries inflicted on the victim.

  1968, August 5: Percy goes on eighteen days leave from navy. Tells police he stays in Melbourne.

  1968, August 10: Linda Stilwell abducted from St Kilda foreshore. Percy was on leave at the time, had a map marked in the area she went missing and told police he was in the area on the day.

  1969, April 1: Stationed at Cerberus.

  1969: Probably attempted abduction of a twelve-year-old girl on a bike near the Cerberus base. Victim later identifies Percy as a suspect.

  1969, July 27: Abducts and murders Yvonne Tuohy from Ski Beach. Arrested later that day. Police find his diary filled with violent sex fantasies.

  1970: Found not guilty of the Tuohy murder on the grounds of insanity.

  CHAPTER 3

  Playing on thin ice

  One cocaine-using player told him more than half the team were into it. ‘At first the club didn’t want to believe it. Now they say “Our blokes do it – but they’re no worse than any other club.” They are kidding themselves.’

  ELITE AFL players are young and rich, and often act as if they are above the law – but they are not invincible. A high-flying premiership player learned that the hard way in the spring of 2006 when he almost died in an American hospital.

  The strange circumstances surrounding a super-fit professional athlete being revived after ‘flatlining’ is a story most football insiders know – but none talked about it publicly until the story was blown open in early 2007.

  ‘Mate, it’s right but they’d hang me off the grandstand if I went on the record,’ a respected former player and official told one of the authors.

  ‘It’s such a small world, football.’

  Like several other well-placed sources who confirmed the story, he made it clear that the game’s unwritten code of silence (‘what happens on the footy trip stays on the footy trip’) was in this case reinforced with corporate spin and implied threats of reprisals against anyone who broke ranks.

  The perceived risk of lawsuits has smothered all but the most oblique references to the mysterious medical emergency that could have ended with the player coming home from the end of season trip in a coffin. (Instead, he spent several days in hospital before being able to travel – and did not rejoin his team-mates.)

  There are potent reasons for such an explosive scandal to stay ‘in club’. The AFL and its sixteen clubs have much at stake: multi-million-dollar sponsorships could evaporate if the lucrative AFL ‘brand’ was damaged with one burst of bad publicity.

  And publicity couldn’t get much worse than exposure of what really happened in that Las Vegas hospital in late 2006.

  On the record, players and club officials go along with the club’s cryptic explanation dismissing the incident as a routine medical matter. Off the record, insiders have told friends and relatives their man overdosed.

  This fits a pattern of misbehaviour by AFL players, and a tendency for clubs to cover up for those considered too valuable to lose. This comes at the expense, sometimes, of lesser lights axed to protect sponsorships and the game’s billion-dollar brand image.

  THE spectre of alcohol and substance abuse hangs over the Las Vegas episode as it hangs over other strange incidents – the arrest, for instance, of Geelong’s Steve Johnson in Wangaratta in early 2007.

  Worried householders called police after he staggered into their yard late at night and allegedly tried to drink from a bottle of suntan oil on their patio. (There is no suggestion that Johnson was anything but inebriated.)

  Then there is the weird behaviour of Carlton’s Brendan Fevola in attacking an Irish barman during a big night out after a winning day at the races during the 2006 tour of Ireland. This was eclipsed by Eagles midfielder Daniel Kerr’s bizarre late-night attack on a Perth taxi driver outside a hospital where he had taken a friend after a sudden bout of illness in a nightspot. Kerr is unlucky like that – his girlfriend was already in hospital after suffering a seizure.

  Kerr’s erratic lifestyle is notorious even in a city where footballers’ excesses are mostly forgiven by adoring fans, some of whom run AFL clubs. The sort of fans who supported Brownlow medallist Ben Cousins when he left his car on a busy highway and bolted to avoid a booze bus. And when he was found unconscious near Melbourne’s casino after another long night – more of that later.

  A young woman who went out with Kerr has told close friends she was shocked because he could not remember where he was – or who he was sleeping with – after he woke from ‘a big night’.

  One night over summer Kerr asked her to pick him up from a party (where he had been involved in a fight). When she arrived he looked at her blankly and said: ‘Who are you? Are you my lift?’ She stopped seeing him after that.

  Another regular at Perth’s nightspots told the authors that Kerr ‘is constantly out of it and makes no secret of it. He sits around in bars and slurs his words. He doesn’t recognise you from one day to the next’.

  On December 16, 2006, one of Kerr’s team-mates narrowly escaped being caught in a police raid on the Red Sea bar, where he had been drinking with members of the Coffin Cheaters motorcycle gang.

  A well-known former Eagle was close friends with a champion dubbed ‘the Cocaine Kid’ – and shared his taste in drugs.

  ‘Girls I know used to go around to his house and he would be snorting coke off the coffee table,’ the woman said. ‘One of the girls commented one night about a year ago, “Don’t you have to play football?” and he said “Are you trying to break my balls?” ’

  At the time, the player acted like the gangsters he hung around with; now, he is reputedly trying to regain the promise he showed on the field, but still hangs around with a tough crew after hours.

  There was a sinister element to the big man’s edgy lifestyle: neighbours noticed people visiting his house at all times of night.

  They were relieved when he moved out.

  FOR all their on-field success, the Eagles have the worst reputation for drug and alcohol-fuelled misbehaviour. Other clubs have troubles – some inherited when they take on problem players ‘released’ by original clubs – but the Eagles are notorious for flying too high.

  ‘Drugs are rife at West Coast,’ a former club official declares. ‘At first the club didn’t want to believe it. Now they say, “Our blokes do it – but they’re no worse than any other club”. They are kidding themselves.’

  One cocaine-using player told him more than half the team were ‘into it’, he says.

  Worse, at least two club stars were ‘into the super, whizz-bang stuff’ so heavily that their supplier gave them other drugs to mask the effects of post-game binges. The supplier, he says, is a supporter keen to trade A-list ‘party’ drugs to rub shoulders with A-list players.

  This person is not, as some might assume, well-known Perth identity John Kizon, although Kizon’s socialising with key players has long caused heartburn for club officials.

  West Coast was warned about the Kizon connection in 2001 when a police source tipped off the club that crime investigators had taped conversations linking Brownlow medallist Ben Cousins and the since-disgraced Michael Gardiner with underworld figures. (Gardiner was sacked by the Eagles after a high-speed car crash while drunk.)

  The inference of a drug link was strong (if not necessarily true) as Kizon is a convicted heroin trafficker and has nightclub and entertainment interests.

  The charismatic and calculating Kizon, a former boxer from Fitzroy who remains a fitness fanatic, was a friend of the late Alphonse Gangitano; he flew to Melbourne to be a pall bearer at the gangster’s huge funeral after Gangitano was shot dead in early 1998.

  He is close to the Coffin Cheaters – a gang whose influence is arguably gr
eater in Perth than that of any outlaw gang in any other Australian city.

  In Perth he is admired by some; feared by many. It was inevitable he would make contact with the local heroes, the Eagles. Gangsters and stars often find each other.

  In Grand Final week, 2001, police saw Kizon meet Gardiner and Cousins at the Crown Casino complex; the three drank together at Fidel’s Cigar Bar later that night.

  Despite warnings, the two players did not distance themselves from Kizon; they were seen drinking with his Melbourne friends after an Eagles–Carlton game in early 2002. The Carlton connection is interesting, as the criminal Moran family – of which three members were killed in the underworld war – was closely connected to the club for three generations.

  One of Carlton’s great finals players reputedly played under the influence of drugs – ‘his eyes would be rolling around like mad’ recalls a contemporary – and later became a dealer among younger players.

  He saw a Carlton player at a nightclub during the finals in the late 1990s and, while commiserating with him for being dropped from the side, slipped the embarrassed player some drugs. He is still reputed to deal to players – and he isn’t the only one.

  THREE years ago, Carlton recruits Laurence Angwin and Karl Norman were exiled from AFL football for turning up to a morning ‘recovery’ session under the influence of ecstasy. Angwin now plays for South Cairns, Norman with Mooroopna in country Victoria.

  Carlton is quick to discredit Angwin because of his troubled history but his story has not changed.

  Originally from interstate, he claims AFL players in Melbourne introduced him to ecstasy.

  ‘There would have been eight blokes (Carlton players) there that day who wouldn’t have passed a test. Five out of the nine in the leadership group couldn’t make eye contact with us when they called us in because they’d been out with us. You can’t hit a circle of footballers where there’s not something going around.’

  Angwin’s point is backed by a former AFL coach of impeccable character and high standing. He tells the story of a Crows star (with reputed shady connections) taking a fishing tackle box on a team trip. Inside it were not hooks and sinkers, just dozens of brightly coloured pills. Drugs.

  That might disappoint some club officials but it won’t shock them.

  Having taught players that drinking shows up in skinfold tests, they’re now coping with a relentless rise in drug use. Drugs might fry your brain or stop your heart but they don’t put on weight and, for young risk-takers on big money looking for a good time, that’s a big attraction. Clubs are getting nervous about this.

  In fact, there’s already a quiet move to reverse the collateral damage done by the push against drinking. A former coach says some clubs are quietly reviving the practice of players having a few drinks after the game.

  ‘Don’t worry too much about the skinfolds – we’ll work it off on the track’ is the attitude. Just like the old days.

  But it’s hard for some to go back to the mild side after walking the wild side. One All-Australian player who made too much of his days in the sun, boasted brazenly to a club official: ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve had (a beauty queen) snort coke off your d—’

  The beauty queen is going well, but the player’s career is in ruins.

  THE West Coast Eagles should not delude themselves that ‘eastern staters’ are out to get them or their football code. If that were the case, explain the kind action of a Melbourne soccer player who rescued a dazed and confused Ben Cousins from a street corner in December, 2006, hours before the Brownlow medallist was photographed unconscious outside Crown Casino and later taken into custody by police.

  It happened a little after 2am on Saturday, December 2, when the good samaritan stopped at a traffic light near the casino and saw a young man standing in the street ‘shivering’.

  ‘I asked him if he was all right and he walked towards the car and I realised it was Ben Cousins,’ he said later.

  Cousins is renowned for being able to run all day – and a long way at night to avoid a booze bus – but this time the iron man of the midfield could hardly move.

  Cousins was so ‘out of it’, the social soccer player – and Aussie rules fan – later told friends, that he offered him a lift to get him off the street for fear he would be run over.

  Cousins waved a $50 note and mumbled that he wanted to go ‘back to’ Eve nightclub, a few hundred metres away, and threw himself into the back seat of the car.

  The 30-year-old driver, who did not want to be identified, says he was shocked and concerned at Cousins’ distressed condition.

  ‘He was sweating and paranoid. He had his hands over his face and was looking around as if he was frightened someone was chasing him. He said someone had hit him – he pulled up his shirt and showed me his stomach. He was jumping all over the back seat. I think I can tell the difference between being drunk and drugs and I’d say he was tripping out bad – his brain was fried on some hard-core stuff, I’d say.’

  Cousins was aware of his condition and concerned about being recognised, the driver said.

  ‘I had a girl with me who didn’t recognise him until I said his name and then he said, “No, no. It’s not me!” He stayed in the car about five minutes, talking. I really gave it to him. I said, “What are you doing, ruining your career, mate?” And he said, “No drugs, no drugs, I don’t want that”.’

  The driver took him to the nightclub from where Cousins had claimed, he had been ‘chased’ earlier.

  ‘I don’t know if someone really chased him or not,’ he said. When the driver politely refused his offer of payment, Cousins thrust a $10 note at him, got out and walked unsteadily towards the casino.

  That was the last the driver saw of him until a photograph of his famous passenger appeared in the newspapers two days later. Someone had caught Cousins ‘asleep’ on the ground near the casino before the police came and locked him up for four hours.

  The friendly soccer player still has the $10 as a memento of his brush with celebrity. He is not the only person who likes being around famous sports people.

  According to a former head of the Victorian drug squad, John McKoy, footballers can be victims of the appeal they hold for ‘ordinary’ people, including some of the most ordinary of all – drug dealers and gangsters.

  McKoy, who spent eleven years in the drug squad before retiring as a detective chief inspector in 2000, said elite footballers had to be careful because drug dealers liked to cultivate high-profile people.

  ‘They target celebrities like footballers and entertainers.’

  He said the link between footballers and drugs went back a long way. ‘In the past, detectives came across some prominent footballers on the fringe of major drug investigations.

  ‘We didn’t pursue them any more vigorously than anyone else.’

  But he confirmed persistent rumours that some players crossed the line.

  A famous and much-loved larrikin Collingwood player acted as a bodyguard and stand over man for an amphetamines dealer who was later killed in a road crash. And a failed league ruckman became a drug dealer who for years displayed more speed in his hip pocket than he had ever shown in the forward pocket.

  Another former drug squad detective was astonished to discover that several players in a suburban football competition, in which he had played and later coached, took ecstasy and amphetamines at weekends.

  ‘When I returned to my club to coach after five years away, I found that a lot of players were on the stuff on Saturday nights and would be awake all weekend. I’d be going to work at the drug squad Monday to Friday to catch blokes like Mokbel and the Morans and players in my own comp were buying their product.’

  Former AFL coach Damian Drum, now a Victorian state MP, warned the AFL three years ago that substance abuse was part of a hedonistic lifestyle that threatened to wreck young players’ lives.

  ‘I wrote a three-page letter to (AFL chief executive) Andrew Demetriou after the Cant
erbury Bulldogs (sexual assault) case, warning him that our boys would be next,’ Drum told the authors.

  ‘Most of them have too much money and time on their hands. While they are playing they are treated like gods and then they’re tossed aside. It’s not good for them.

  ‘It’s an unhealthy lifestyle in the present – and it doesn’t prepare them for the future.

  ‘We can’t make them all work, but we could at least make them qualified.

  ‘Players should be either full-time students or learn a trade so that they come out with a qualification – and the AFL should look at the US college sports scholarship system as a model.

  ‘In America, sports scholarship holders have to get up early and do their academic work until early afternoon, then they meet their coaches and then they train. After dinner, they study again. Of about 80 at each college, only three or so make it to the top level – but they all have a qualification to go on with.’

  Being educated meant players and athletes would mix with people outside the hothouse of elite sport, which would inject ‘a sense of reality’ into players’ lives.

  Young players, especially, can be left in a vacuum and have to kill time outside training hours in any way they like. The result, says Drum wryly, is that ‘the only qualification they get is a degree in PlayStation 3’.

  A WEEK after Damian Drum made his warning, Melbourne’s Sunday Age newspaper broke the story that one of Australian football’s biggest stars was under discreet investigation by drug squad police as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into a so-called ‘rat-pack’ of cocaine users in sport, media and entertainment.

  And, much to the satisfaction of the West Coast club, he is not (and never was) an Eagle.

  The former star of a Melbourne-based club has maintained a high profile in the media since his retirement from the game he played with distinction.

  Persistent rumours of his links with a drug dealer prompted detectives to monitor his activities in early 2007.

  The result, according to a well-placed source, is that the colourful football identity has unwittingly led investigators to the dealer, allowing them to gather evidence that could be used to lay charges.