The Man Who Fell To Earth

The Age

Friday October 31, 2008

Peter Wilmoth

Nine years after he was arrested on cocaine charges, former solicitor Andrew Fraser has reinvented himself as a public speaker and bestselling author, writes Peter Wilmoth.

Of all the trauma, loneliness and terror he endured over five years in jail, and of all the things he wished he'd never seen, there is one memory that Andrew Fraser cannot forget: the sight of his two children walking away from him after visiting hours had ended at Fulham Prison in Gippsland. "It was awful, that's the only word for it," Fraser, 57, says today. "It was minimum security so I could actually stand and watch them leave. You were supposed to feel elevated after a visit but after I saw the family I was shattered I couldn't go with them."

In a Middle Park cafe - one of Fraser's old haunts before his spectacular public demise in 2001 - he talks about the differences between his old life as a cocaine-snorting, hard-partying criminal lawyer and his new life as a man who has little money and lots of time on his hands but who has developed what he regards as a priceless outlook on the world. "For the first time in my life, I'm comfortable in my own skin," he says. "I was always driven by the fear of failure. Now I've failed, failure is no longer a fear because I know what it's like to fail.

"It's never as bad facing the music as you reckon it's going to be. I love Polonius in Hamlet: 'This above all: to thine own self be true.' And if you're not, you're wasting your time, you are delusional and you will get nowhere.

"I sat down and I had many long, lonely hours sitting in a cell pondering my past."

There was a lot to ponder. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Fraser was a high-spending, hard-living criminal lawyer. His roster of clients included slain gangland figure Jason Moran, Hells Angels bikers, tycoon Alan Bond, Dennis "Mr Death" Allen - of the notorious Pettingill family - and AFL footballer turned drug runner Jimmy Krakouer.

It was a time of hard work and harder play. As he told Steve Butcher of The Age: "I was single, good income, full of bullshit and bad manners." But there was a cost to this frenetic life. Fraser later said he suffered "burnout" from working long hours with Alan Bond in Perth, heading back to Melbourne where he would keep working over the weekend. It was around this time that the lines of cocaine he enjoyed at home and sometimes in his conference room at his office became more than just a social habit. Before he was sentenced, he said he had spent more than $100,000 on cocaine in the previous year.

When it came, Fraser's crash was comprehensive. In 1999, police seized cocaine with a street value of $2.7 million from his co-accused and client Werner Roberts, who had imported the cocaine from Benin, in West Africa. Fraser pleaded guilty to being knowingly concerned with the importation of the drug, and with trafficking a few grams to a friend. The court found that Fraser was incidental to the importation of the cocaine.

In December 2001, Fraser was sentenced to seven years jail. Judge Leo Hart branded Fraser "dishonourable and disgraceful" and said his behaviour "involves a degree of public scandal, which reflects on the profession as a whole".

He was a long way from the talented 400-metre hurdler at the Box Hill Athletics Club of whom legendary coach Percy Cerutty once wrote: "I'm impressed with your type, approach and ability. I feel sure you can get somewhere in athletics and life, but remember - it is you who must use your brains and do the work and eventually succeed, as I feel sure you can."

In every life, there are turning points. Many of Fraser's combined to ensure the virtually complete disintegration of his life as he knew it. But there was a turning point after his release that helped construct his new one. It was the day Sandy Grant, chief executive officer of Hardie Grant Books, gave him a call asking whether he would be interested in writing a book about his life and experiences.

"I went down there and said, 'Bugger it, too hard, I don't want to know about it.' Sandy said, 'You're not going to make a million dollars a year but if you write the way you speak, we can see you making a living out of writing for the foreseeable future.'" Fraser was persuaded. The book became last year's Court in the Middle, which details Fraser's life up to the time of his conviction; its strong sales inspired his new title, Lunatic Soup, which charts his time in jail and some of the people he met there. He has an outline for the next book and has been approached to write about "a really interesting case that's just concluded".

Revisiting his time in jail for Lunatic Soup was traumatic. "This time, I had to take myself back to a specific dark period that I really don't want to be revisiting," he says. "A couple of times, I got stuck on it and I just could not take myself back there and I had a couple of weeks off."

Any illusions that life in jail had a structure and ultimate purpose and was a journey towards some sort of constructive rehabilitation were quickly shattered. "I went before the classification board - you're supposed to sit down and discuss your placement and your rehabilitation with them. I was greeted by a little bloke (who) just looked at me and said, 'Well, you're a f---ing nuisance aren't you?' I said, 'I beg your pardon?' He said, 'You heard, siddown. You're going to Port Phillip.' I said, 'Hang on, what about going up the bush?' He said, 'No, you're going into maximum security.' I said, 'Why? I want to talk about this.' He said, 'You're not listening, f--- off.'

"That was the extent of the discussion about my placement and my rehabilitation. So two hours later, I'm sitting in maximum security with (double murderers)

Peter Dupas, Leslie Camilleri and Raymond Edmunds (aka Mr Stinky)." His experience in jail reaffirmed what as a criminal lawyer he had only suspected: that the system doesn't work. All jail does, he says, is teach offenders new tricks and new ways of reoffending. "It's an oxymoron, jail rehabilitation," he says. "I happen to have a degree, so I'm one of the lucky ones. I thought I might go back and do another arts degree. I've got five years, who knows what I could do? It took me over a year to see anybody to assess me for my suitability for education."

When working as a lawyer, Fraser had heard of his clients being cast adrift in the prison system, but he was "detached". "And because you're detached it doesn't have any impact on you. 'Oh yeah? Is that right?' Pat 'em on the shoulder and away they go and you walk out the door and jump into your Benz and drive home. When it's actually happening to you, the impact is profound indeed."

Fraser's plan on his release was a quiet life working on a friend's farm. But at Port Phillip's maximum security facility, he had spent a lot of time with Peter Dupas, who is serving two life sentences with no parole for the mutilation murders of Margaret Maher in 1997 and Nicole Patterson in 1999. On his release, Fraser gave evidence that in prison he had witnessed Dupas wordlessly acting out the brutal stabbing of Mersina Halvagis as she tended her grandmother's grave at Fawkner Cemetery in 1997. Fraser's evidence of the "pantomime" was the trigger for the decision to send Dupas for trial over the murder. The evidence helped secure another life sentence for Dupas. Fraser applied for part of a $1-million reward posted by the Victorian State Government (Dupas has appealed the conviction, which means Fraser has received none of the reward). The application ensured another media swarm.

Now Fraser has found the equilibrium he has long sought. He is happy writing, working the talk circuit and speaking to school groups about the dangers of drug use. He was pleased to accept an invitation to do some labouring for a group preparing for the Grand Prix. "These blokes gave me a go when I said I needed a quid and they said, 'Well, it turned out not to be a charitable exercise, you actually really pulled your weight.' And I was pretty proud of that."

His life changed further two years ago when a blind date went well. "(My friends) Jill Singer and Kate Durham invited me out for a girls' lunch and Jill wanted to know who I was going out with and I said, 'Well, you know, a bloke's been in jail for five years, it's a bit of catch-up footy.' She said, 'I've got just the lady for you to meet.' She rang Lindy (Allen, the chief executive officer of Regional Arts Victoria) and said, 'You've got to meet this bloke, he's this, he's that.' And Lindy said 'Hang on, if he's that good, how come he's still single?' That's when Jill said, 'Well, there is one catch: he's been a very naughty boy.' And so Lindy Googled me. She doesn't do drugs, never has, not interested, but she said, 'I'm in the arts world.' She said, 'Christ, if everybody who did drugs in the art world was in jail there'd be no one left standing.' So she said, 'I'll meet him.' And we hit it off straight away."

Fraser now lives in Abbotsford with Allen. "I've got a terrific life. I'm fit and I'm well, I've got a lovely lady, nice house - well she's got a nice house ... I've got different aspirations now.

"I would like to think I'm a completely different person to the one who went to jail. I don't have such a high opinion of myself. I would like to think I'm more humble, and that's a word that wouldn't readily spring to mind when people spoke of me."

When Fraser was released in September 2006, he knew he was facing a new life on virtually every level. Many friends dropped him ("They've got their, inverted commas, position in society to maintain") but some stuck. Such as Anita Harris. They met 17 years ago at St Kilda's Spuntino cafe, where Fraser and his wife went every Saturday morning. To Harris and other close friends, Fraser's decline was a shock. "At age 50, you don't expect to be visiting your dear friend in a maximum security prison," she says. While Fraser was in jail, Harris and Fraser would speak nearly every morning on the phone, do the quiz in the newspaper together and often just laugh. She would send packages to Fraser, second-hand books and sometimes cooking implements such as muffin trays and measuring spoons because Fraser would cook for his weekend visitors. "We'd get up at sparrows on a Sunday morning and drive up," Harris says. "Andrew would want to know the rough time of arrival and there'd be morning tea - buns, pastries, lunch of marinated satays and salad and muffins for dessert."

Fraser pushed the envelope sometimes. "He asked my husband to send some satay sticks. Peter said, 'Are you kidding? Do you know what a satay stick could do in jail?' But he got them." Harris says Fraser is a new man. "The things that were important back then - the apartment at Falls Creek, the Mercedes - have absolutely no relevance to the life he's living now. His strength and resolve is admirable. He is my loyal special friend and I'm very proud of him."

Barrister and human rights advocate Julian Burnside met Fraser in the mid-1990s and didn't like him at first. Too rough, he thought. "But I quickly came to see the endearing character beneath the surface. He really has a heart of gold."

Burnside says Fraser is back to his old self, the Aussie larrikin with the old-fashioned expressions. Fraser's mobile recently dropped out while talking to Burnside; Fraser said its battery was "as flat as a shit-carter's hat".

"He had an awful time because in part it was such a catastrophic fall - he thought he was bulletproof - and, in part, because the system really paid out on him," says Burnside. "He'd made a lot of enemies among police. The fact that he did so long in maximum security was not only disgraceful but very hard for him. His life truly fell apart."

Burnside has seen a new side to his friend, and much of the credit, he says, goes to Lindy Allen. "She's a great person and she's been a real lifesaver for him. She came along when he was tentatively exploring the world he'd left and I don't think he would have got back to his old self nearly as quickly without her. Lindy has been a very civilising influence. He is now going to the opera and enjoying it."

Fraser has been tempted to link the pressurised life of a criminal lawyer with the indulgent lifestyle and subsequent downfall. "Every day, you're going to court for somebody whose arse is hanging in the breeze and it gets you down ... I think it's an easy correlation to arrive at, but I'm not quite sure. And don't worry, I've thought about it a lot. I don't know whether I just started to believe my own bullshit, that I was indestructible, that I was good at what I did, making a very good living. You don't make as much writing books, I can tell you. However, you're sitting at your computer and you're writing away and you look out the window, the sun's come out, I'll go for my run now. You can't put a price on that."

As happy as he is, there are scars that will never heal. It was "awful" for his parents (his father died last year). "For people who are the ultimate in conservatives, to have all this happen at their stage of life was shattering for them. Some people in their social circle ostracised them, too."

Fraser's wife "put up with a lot for a long while". "When I went to jail you can sense what's happening. The marriage didn't survive." His children, Lachlan, 17, and Olivia, 15, live with their father about half the time. They were 10 and eight when he went to jail. Knowing what he put his kids through remains painful. "I think more than anything that's the one thing I can never forgive myself for," he says. "I still think about that regularly. And my former wife, for that matter. What an awful thing for somebody to do to somebody else. I would have left her better catered for financially when I went, but I didn't and that's an eternal regret. I've just got to try and do whatever I can for the kids, give them a good and loving home and be there for them."

Do Lachlan and Olivia find it in their hearts to understand? "I think they do. They're both pretty realistic kids and I think they've had a fairly rapid growing-up period." The private school they attend has been supportive. "The school has been fantastic to me, to the kids, and in terms of the fees," Fraser says. "They did whatever they could to insulate the kids from being taunted by other students. Of course, there were undercurrents. And some parents - who all know who they are - ought to know better, suggesting the children should be taken out of school because of me and things like that. And the school said, 'Well, that won't be happening.'" The school put Fraser in touch with its old-boy network too. "I would get letters from blokes I hadn't seen since school. You get a letter and you turn it over and think 'You can't be serious, I haven't heard from this bloke for 30 years.'"

He walks off through the Middle Park village. There's a happy buzz around, mothers pushing babies in prams, people checking their Tatts tickets, a young couple showing off to each other, the normal pulse of life in the suburbs. And Andrew Fraser relishes all of it. Near the end of his book, he writes: "My life continues to be a great adventure. All I have been through has left me taking nothing for granted." (m)

© 2008 The Age

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