Underbelly (39 page)

Bad news spreads fast. About 7am, Harris declares, ‘I had occasion to ring (a racing identity) at his home … towards the end of this discussion I said to him: “Incidentally, there is a scandal at Randwick. The police are everywhere. They think trainer George Brown may have been murdered.” (The identity) said he'd already heard.'

At Randwick races later that week Harris approached a punter well known at the time for landing huge plunges on Brisbane races.

In his statement Harris swears: ‘I asked him 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. The men 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 men 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 rumours.

One, easily discredited, was that Brown owed SP bookmakers $500,000. Friends and relatives told police he'd always been a small bettor, 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 the 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 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, though, the head of the New South Wales homicide unit in the mid-1990s disagreed, saying the cause was still being investigated.

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, dismissed 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 quarter century later, the silence lingers. Racing people once close to Brown stayed nervous, tight-lipped and anonymous all that time.

‘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. 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.'

But they all agree on one thing. That George Brown died because he did not substitute another horse for Risley.

WAYNE Brown, blond and blue-eyed, is hauntingly similar to his father, George. For years, at the races, people would stare at him, then introduce themselves as ‘friends of your father's'.

They feel sorry for him. Some, he senses, are even ashamed that racing somehow led to the terrible thing that happened when he was a kid. Back then, his mother says, he would sometimes ask her: ‘Mum, how come they can find all these murderers, but not Dad's?'

Wayne, as his father did, had an ambition to be a horse trainer. Like his father, he worked with horses since before he left school: strapping, riding work, the lot. Later he drove a horse float to save the money to help set up. He even married an accountant who was working for the Bart Cummings stable.

Some day, he once told the author, he'd train at Randwick. Some day he'd get stables on the course the way his father was going to. Meanwhile, George Brown's boy has a friendly word for everyone in the racing game.

Almost everyone, that is.

The New South Wales homicide unit suggests that any information about George Brown's death can be supplied anonymously.

‘It was stupid and the blokes who did it were so foolish they made the Three Stooges look like High Court judges.'

 

MONEY talks. In racing, sometimes it shouts, which is why bookmakers around Australia were alarmed about Brisbane racing well before George Brown was tortured and killed in April 1984.

Something stunk in Queensland, and the stench reached Sydney. Money poured onto Brisbane horses that showed fantastic form reversals. Among the ‘smarties' in on the racket were some who plotted their moves in the pubs, clubs and coffee joints in the Kings Cross strip. People whispered that Sydney gangsters and racing identities like Mick Sayers and George Freeman had inside knowledge about the Brisbane connection.

‘The same guys keep backing the right ones – and they always won,' said swashbuckling bookie (and betting plunge specialist) Mark Read about the strange events north of the border.

Then came the Fine Cotton debacle. The ‘ring-in' (secret switch of a quality racehorse for the battling bush horse Fine Cotton) might have won a fortune for those in on the rort, if the original plan had been followed. But by the time the race was run in the Spring of 1984, the plot had turned into a farce that disgraced not only the obvious perpetrators but two of Sydney's biggest racing identities – father and son bookies ‘Big Bill' and Robbie Waterhouse.

The Waterhouses never got jailed – as two of the hands-on organisers did – but they (and others) were disqualified from racing for life for ‘prior knowledge' of the ring-in, a penalty later reduced on appeal. Speculation about the two Waterhouses' alleged role in the rort has never faded despite their claim they were just ‘following the money' by backing the horse.

This is how it happened, though some details – and some players' identities – remain cloudy.

ON Saturday 18 August 1984, local apprentice jockey Gus Philpott was legged on a runner in the Second Commerce Novice at Eagle Farm. It was an ordinary race and, as far as Philpott knew, he was on a very ordinary horse: an eight-year-old plugger from the backblocks that should have been around 40-1 in a city race. But for reasons Philpott couldn't fathom, the horse with no form had been backed off the map. As he cantered to the start the cash flooded in for Fine Cotton all over Australia – and in betting shops in
Vanuatu, Fiji and Papua New Guinea. The coast to coast plunge was worth pay-outs of around $2 million – enough to buy a street of houses in 1984.

The dogs were barking that something dodgy was on and so even the sleepy Queensland stewards were watching hard, aware that their already-tattered reputations were under the microscope. Philpott rode the now hot favourite (backed from 33-1 to 6-4) perfectly, winning in a photo finish. What he didn't know yet – but the world was soon to find out – was that his mount was really a multiple city winner called Bold Personality, crudely dyed and painted to look more like the country cousin, Fine Cotton. It was a lousy disguise, even if the lunatic betting hadn't raised suspicion.

Even before the horse got back to the winner's stall, the crowd was jeering ‘Ring in!' and the dye was starting to run down the imposter's legs. By then a worried steward was asking the trainer, shifty small timer Hayden Haitana, for the horse's registration papers. Haitana, as much a con man as a trainer, went through the motions of searching for the papers then expressed surprise that they were ‘missing'. The steward obligingly suggested checking with the owners for the papers and reporting back to the stewards' room. Haitana knew a chance when he was given it: he gulped down a beer at the bar then walked off the course – and vanished.

To the embarrassment of police in several states, he wasn't seen again until he came out of hiding to appear on
60 Minutes
many days later to plead he had acted under duress.

It was an obvious line of defence and the chatty Haitana was no stranger to telling lies – but that didn't mean he wasn't genuinely frightened. Even if he hadn't raised the spectre of George Brown's torture and death five months before, it loomed large. And he did raise it – claiming a standover man had threatened him and his family: ‘He showed me his gun and then he said “Look at this here – do you want to end up like the trainer Brown?” '

The case made headlines right up until Fine Cotton finally died in early 2009 in suburban Brisbane, aged 32. It was a notorious debacle. As an anonymous ‘insider' told a Coffs Harbour reporter many years later: ‘It was stupid and the blokes who did it were so foolish they made the Three Stooges look like High Court judges.'

But the funny thing is that the plotters might have got away with it but for a stray kangaroo.

Maybe.

AS HORSES go, Fine Cotton was an unlikely celebrity. A plodding bush galloper with neither flash pedigree nor performance, he was only one step ahead of the knacker's van most of his career.

So when a stranger offered to buy the eight-year-old at a country meeting in early 1984, his owners jumped at it. They couldn't have guessed the gelding would be at the centre of a scandal that would haunt racing and bemuse Australians for a quarter century.

Key aspects of the Fine Cotton affair are still a mystery – a fact that galls some authorities. Most intriguing is the question of who masterminded the nation-wide plunge on the horse that raced as Fine Cotton at Eagle Farm that day.
It is almost certain the same people were connected with the previous series of ‘form reversals' that made Brisbane racing stink of corruption in the early 1980s.

The generally-agreed facts of the case are these: in early 1984, a smart Sydney galloper, Dashing Soltaire, was bought for $10,000 and sent to Queensland, where two men began combing country tracks for a cheap, slow horse that resembled him. They found Fine Cotton. Like Dashing Soltaire, he was a brown, had similar white markings and was foaled the same year (1976) so would have at least a partly correct brand on his shoulder. He had won a few bush races but was well past his limited best.

The two horses were kept in training and, in August, Fine Cotton was given several starts within a few days to ensure Brisbane stewards were used to seeing him race and so would make only a cursory check at a later date.

Meanwhile, both horses were transferred to Hayden Haitana, a transient Coffs Harbour trainer. Why him? It appears that his brother, jockey Pat Haitana, had met an inveterate hustler and horse dealer called John ‘The Phantom' Gillespie while having a ‘holiday' in Boggo Road jail in Brisbane some months before. Inevitably, Gillespie spruiked a ‘foolproof' way to make money by substituting a high-quality horse for a poorly performed one in a weak race, then betting up big.

Pat Haitana suggested his brother Hayden – then training a small string in Coffs Harbour – as the man to prepare the plunge horse. Within weeks, the jailhouse scheme was turning into reality, with the purchase of Dashing Soltaire and Fine Cotton.

Fine Cotton was entered for the Second Commerce Novice at Eagle Farm on 18 August. So far, for the bad guys, so good. But in racing, disaster is only ever a hoofbeat away, and the scheme was derailed not only by the lunatic leaking of the ‘mail' about the sting, but by the sort of accident that makes racing the ultimate game of chance.

With only days to go, the horses were being trained from a paddock on an isolated property near some bush, and a kangaroo startled Dashing Soltaire, which galloped away and hurt itself. Had Fine Cotton been hurt, it wouldn't have mattered. But, as usual in racing, good horses get hurt and slow ones don't.

Haitana knew the plan was now a disaster in the making but when he tried to pull out he was told it was too late – and he was assured that stewards, police and even racing writers had been ‘fixed'. Haitana would later say he would rather risk being caught than anger those he said were acting for the scheme's backers. Already the tip had been leaked to far too many people, which would mean an avalanche of money on race day.

It meant he and his helpers had to find another substitute – quickly. Apparently desperate to appease ‘heavy' people involved, they bought Bold Personality, a city winner with ability – but the wrong colour and markings. He was a bay, not a brown, and did not have white on his legs in the same places as Fine Cotton. He was also foaled in 1977, not 1976, which meant every identifying brand on him was different from Fine Cotton's. Added to which was the fact that too many people were by this time a party to the plot, not only because Haitana talked too much when he was drinking, which was most of the time. An anonymous racing source
told a reporter years later: ‘Hayden was notorious for being a bullshit artist, particularly when he'd been drinking, which was pretty frequent. He could have sat around the bar and described the plan down to the tiniest detail and not a single person would have believed a word.'