- From: The Australian
- October 30, 2007
- From: The Australian
- October 30, 2007
- From: The Australian
- October 30, 2007
• From: The Australian
• October 30, 2007 12:00AM
THE shock of being slapped with a seven-year maximum jail term for cocaine importation was still fresh when Andrew Roderick Fraser donned rubber gloves to scrub excrement from walls in the Melbourne Assessment Prison. For Fraser, the former lawyer to Alan Bond, footballer Jimmy Krakouer and underworld patriarch Lewis Moran, prison was a long way from his Falls Creek penthouse. "I needed a wake-up call and I got that in spades," says Fraser, who at the height of his success owned a $2 million bayside mansion and drove a Mercedes convertible.
"I had started to believe my own bullshit, or as my grandfather would say, started drinking my own bathwater," he tells The Australian before the release of his first book.
Just more than a year after his release from prison, where he served almost the full five-year minimum term of his sentence, Fraser's arrogance may have been tempered but his indignation has not. It spews with a bubbling ferocity from the pages of Court in the Middle, as the disgraced lawyer takes aim at corruption within Victoria Police, the state's broken jail system and the criminal justice machine that plumped his pay packet for 28 years but showed no mercy when he broke the law himself.
Fraser pleaded guilty in late 2001 to being knowingly concerned in the 1999 importation of 5.5kg of cocaine from the African republic of Benin. Police estimated the cocaine had a street value of up to $2.7 million. He also pleaded guilty to trafficking cocaine to his former friend, forensic psychologist Tim Watson-Munro, and to possessing two tablets of ecstasy, which he now claims were planted.
Fraser's co-accused, Werner Paul Roberts, Roberts's wife Andrea Mohr and Carl Heinze Urbanec, were also convicted over the cocaine importation.
Though the former lawyer swore he would stay "under the radar" on his release from jail - where as a protected prisoner he was housed for a good chunk of his sentence with a host of Victoria's most sadistic criminals - keeping his mouth shut is not Fraser's forte.
"Every time I fart it seems to be front-page news," he says. In fact, it was the sombre business of putting away a serial killer for another murder that catapulted the former solicitor into the headlines this year, following Fraser's release from prison in September last year.
Fraser, 56, was the star witness in the trial of Peter Norris Dupas, who was convicted in August of stabbing to death 25-year-old Mersina Halvagis as she tended her grandmother's grave.
In jail, Dupas - who had been convicted of the sickening mutilation murders of two other women - had confided in Fraser and made stunning admissions to the Halvagis killing, including a prison-cell pantomime that the former lawyer displayed before a Supreme Court jury.
As the prosecution's trump card, Fraser's credibility was under sustained attack during the Dupas trial. There was much material for defence barrister David Drake to work with.
At the peak of his cocaine habit, Fraser was consuming an extraordinary amount of cocaine, even by an addict's standard. Thousands of dollars' worth of white powder - at times as much as 3g a day - was disappearing up his nose every week. It was a fact that hadn't escaped the attention of corrupt senior detectives within the Victoria Police's now-disbanded drug squad.
Though Fraser's lawyers tried hard to obtain details of the information that police relied on to gain court approval to bug his office, home and car, police have never revealed what instigated their investigation. The public record says they had intelligence from an informer. But the integrity of the officers who put that information on the public record is now questionable, and the disgraced lawyer has his own explanation.
It is a story that cannot be separated from the murky world of Victorian policing in which, by Fraser's account, suspects are routinely bashed, defence lawyers lay complaints only to be told at the police station desk to "f..k off", and corrupt police unofficially support bail for the criminals they protect.
While Fraser stresses his book is not aimed at all police, most of whom are honest, he singles out one man for instigating the investigation that sunk him. Fraser's relationship with Wayne Strawhorn - convicted last year of trafficking drug precursor chemicals to the Moran crime family - began with some unsolicited advice passed through Lewis Moran, crime clan patriarch and one of Fraser's top clients. Stop buying cocaine "from the bloke who drives the gunmetal-grey seven series BMW", was the warning delivered by Strawhorn before a police bust on Fraser's dealer.
But Fraser, whose reputation among police had been sealed years beforehand with the recording of some notorious expletive-laden advice to one of the men acquitted of the 1988 murder of two police constables at Walsh Street in Melbourne's South Yarra, was not interested in any mutual back-scratching. His head awash with cocaine and what he says was a sense of righteousness, the disgraced solicitor made a telephone call to the now-disbanded National Crime Authority. According to Fraser, it was a call that triggered corrupt police to kick off an operation to save their skins.
Three of the four detectives who investigated Fraser - Strawhorn, Malcolm Rosenes and Steve Paton - have been convicted of drug trafficking offences.
The fourth man in the investigation team, Paul Firth, resigned from the police force subsequent to Fraser's conviction.
All four men served in the drug squad during the controversial "controlled buy" scheme, which Strawhorn personally convinced senior police to approve. Under the scheme, police purchased methylamphetamine precursor chemicals from legitimate sources, then sold the chemicals at a greatly inflated price to drug dealers. The scheme was designed to enable police to monitor the movement of the precursor chemicals through underworld networks to the ultimate drug cook.
But Fraser was told by clients, as well as separately by a solicitor and a barrister, about a dodgy variation on the controlled buy scheme. Drug squad detectives were providing precursor chemicals to drug manufacturers, he says, giving them the green light to cook drugs, then splitting the proceeds of the sales.
To cap off the scam, Fraser says, police were then turning around and arresting their associates for drug offences. Strawhorn was the prime mover of the scheme. "Strawhorn went after me as a self-preservation tactic," Fraser says.
Seeking to blow the whistle, Fraser had made a confidential telephone call to a trusted source within the Victoria Police, who advised him to call another trusted detective within the NCA.
"(When I made the call) I thought: 'This is just outrageous, these blokes are running round making a fortune, and they're pinching blokes at the same time.' Talk about having your cake and eating it too."
He told the detective "that under no circumstances should this matter be raised with anybody in the Victorian police force because of the drastic consequences it could have for me", Fraser writes in the book.
But the NCA detective told ethical standards detectives within Victoria Police. "There were officers in that squad who had plenty of their own skeletons in the closet and any serious complaint such as this would surely get back to the drug squad," Fraser writes. The lawyer believes his suspicions were spot-on. An encounter with Strawhorn in Melbourne's legal precinct barely two weeks later terrified him. As Fraser walked down the street towards his office, Strawhorn passed him in the opposite direction, eyeballing the lawyer.
"He looked at me and, pointing two fingers in a pistol-like action, he cocked his thumb at me in a shooting action," Fraser says in the book.
"He did that with his right hand, then lowered his hand, walked across the footpath to me and said, a few centimetres from my face, 'Don't talk out of school.'
"I didn't say anything but I nearly vomited, I got such a fright," Fraser tells The Australian. "My knees were literally knocking together. I could have easily fallen over or passed out at the time. I just thought, everything's going to hit the fan now, well and truly."
But the fear was not enough to combat a serious addiction to cocaine, and Fraser continued using the rich man's drug in ever-increasing amounts. After police went to the Victorian Supreme Court and obtained warrants to bug his office, home and car, he gave them more than they had bargained for.
The full tape recordings have never been made public but the segments that were played to a Victorian County Court jury during the trial of Fraser's co-accused, Roberts, exposed Fraser in all of his cocaine-fuelled megalomania.
To the backdrop of cocaine snorting, Fraser talks of his athletic prowess as a hurdler at the Box Hill Athletics Club. He could have really gone places, the lawyer says.
"I am not saying I would have made the Olympics but I might have made the Commonwealth Games," he was caught on tape saying.
Fraser is also taped discussing the ill effects of heroin, a night out in a bar "full of sheilas and I'm too shit-faced to do anything about it", and is even caught on tape having a conversation with his wife while simultaneously having sex with a prostitute, whom he paid in cocaine.
To police, Fraser was one of many defence lawyers who went too far in their dealings with clients, becoming immersed in a criminal world and abandoning their professional principles. For his part, Fraser is calling for a royal commission into the activities of the drug squad, which he says may reveal that police corruption has extended as far as members of the force being willing to kill to bury evidence against them.
"I would have thought the only way that sort of frank and honest disclosure can come about is by means of a royal commission," Fraser says.
For now, there is another battle brewing for the disgraced lawyer. Australian Federal Police and Victoria Police are investigating whether Fraser has broken federal and state law aimed at preventing criminals from profiting from their crimes through writing Court in the Middle. If the investigations have legs, a civil legal battle will be on the cards. It is one fight the former solicitor - now denied his former daily fix of adversarial courtroom biffo - is ready for.
"They won't be getting one cent to wipe my shiny arse," he says.
R v Fraser [2004] VSCA 147 (27 August 2004)
Where is he now?
