Underbelly (37 page)

The group was later disbanded.

POLICE and Murphy go back a way. Never one to bother with fancy cars, for years he drove a red Honda Civic with the number plates VERBAL, an audacious swipe at the once-common police practice of getting convictions by swearing falsely that an accused had verbally confessed to a crime but wouldn't sign a written statement.

The car was often vandalised outside courts and police stations, a good reason not to drive a Ferrari to ‘work', even if he could be bothered with conspicuous success symbols.

He had death threats from corrupt police. They were just getting back at him, really.

As a teenager and young lawyer, Murphy bred and raced greyhounds. He named one dog ‘Constable Plod' and another ‘Oink Oink' – a story he tells, ironically, walking from his office to the Royal Commission on police corruption.
He laughs gleefully at the memory of punters in the betting ring ‘all calling out “Oink Oink!” '

Minutes later, in the huge Royal Commission hearing room, Murphy gets bored and slips outside for coffee. His client, private detective Michael Oliver, won't be on until later in the week, and the evidence is dull.

It wasn't dull last January when Murphy was hauled before the Commission and grilled over his sources for a sensational front-page story he wrote for the Sun-Herald newspaper, for which he has written a racy ‘law' column since 1990, mainly poking fun at the police and judiciary.

Murphy's exclusive revealed that the notorious criminal and star informant ‘Neddy' Smith had been secretly taped, in his protection cell in Long Bay, boasting to another prisoner that he'd committed six unsolved gangland murders.

Ordered to reveal his sources for the tape transcripts, Murphy played his inquisitors like a matador taunting a bull, prompting the journalist Evan Whitton to reach for the dictionary to define ‘bravura'. The words he found were: ‘a florid passage or piece requiring great skill and spirit; a display of daring; a brilliant performance'.

Not your average family solicitor.

SO who is Chris Murphy? And what makes him run? Trying to answer that is like trying to trap a bubble of quicksilver: touch it, and it shoots away. The truth is he's not too sure himself.

During a lunch break at the Royal Commission, he sat at his usual corner table in his then favourite restaurant, Tre Scalini, eating his usual snapper with mineral water and
pondering the question. Meanwhile, he talks about a dozen other things.

Back then, the fashionable setting fitted Murphy's reputation as one of the Sydney social A-list, a heavy-duty party boy on the prowl with a succession of models and actresses twenty years his junior. Since a heart scare a few years before, he rarely drank, and tried to get more than three hours sleep a night, but he was still a workaholic who played hard. Since then, he has married and had small children.

Some days he used to sit at this table with the then top jockey Shane Dye, whose brashness and success mirrored Murphy's own, and irritated some people the same way. Other days, it might be James Packer, then heir to Australia's greatest fortune he would inherit on the death of his father Kerry. Or ocker advertising guru John Singleton, a mate Murphy once defended on an assault charge. Or television executives negotiating for him to host the pilot of a new show – something he says Clive James told him he should try.

Murphy appeared on one of Geoffrey Robertson's hypotheticals, on drug use. And he defended the villain of the piece, naturally, when
60 Minutes
put the domestic cat ‘on trial'.

Like one of Runyon's Broadway wise guys, Murphy knows nearly everybody worth knowing, and many who aren't, in a city where colourful racing identities have rubbed shoulders with colourful advertising, police, media, business, union and political identities ever since the Rum Corps.

His boon companion in the 1980s was David Waterhouse, brother of Robbie, the bookmaker once warned off every racecourse in the world over the Fine Cotton ring-in.

Another friend, who once shared Murphy's bachelor apartment in the fashionable Connaught Building, was a professional punter who accompanied Murphy on legendary betting expeditions.

Murphy dubbed the pair ‘the odds couple'.

Neighbours at the Connaught have included missing hit man Christopher Dale Flannery, media star Richard Wilkins and the late singer Michael Hutchence. It's that sort of place.

Murphy admits being a ‘mad punter' since childhood. He won't comment on rumours he used to go high-rolling in Las Vegas with Kerry Packer, but reckons he used to be second only to Packer punting on horses during a purple patch in the 1980s. In one month in 1987 he spun $400 into $3 million at the track – including a win of $365,000 on one horse. He reputedly gave away $300,000 to friends and lost the rest, plus a beach house and other property, on Elders-IXL shares.

That would worry some people. Murphy laughs about it. Boom and bust has been his life cycle, and still is.

His grandfather, Samuel Murphy, was born in the Rocks under the Harbour Bridge, blinded at Gallipoli, and returned to rear eight children. Six of Samuel's sons fought in the next world war.

One, Vincent Birdwood Murphy, brought home a pregnant Welsh bride of gypsy blood, Christine Evans, to a life almost as poverty-stricken as she had left behind in the
valleys. Christine, cursed with brains, was determined to give her children the education she had missed.

Chris was the second of six children raised in a two-bedroom war service house in Lakemba, shared with his grandparents. So a total eleven people were thrust together by poverty and fierce family loyalty into a two-bedroom house.

How the knockabout kid from the wrong side of town came to be a sometime millionaire, consort of beautiful women and playmate of the rich and powerful, is a very Australian story.

It's the story of a poor policeman's son who became a cop-baiting lawyer who boasted he ‘never did deals' with police.

Murphy doesn't criticise his father, but is ambivalent about him compared with his admiration for his mother. He describes her slaving heroically in factory jobs to keep the family together and educate her kids.

The lawyer in him sees a mile off the inference that he's spent his life getting back at police because of some grudge against his late father. He shrugs it off.

‘People look for some Freudian thing,' he says. ‘Dad had that violent Irish temper when he was drunk, but so did a lot of other people.' End of subject.

One old friend says she suspects the teenage Murphy once took up boxing so he could ‘stand up to' his father. Another tells the story differently. Sure, Chris wanted to be a fighter when he left school, but his furious mother had told him, ‘I haven't worked in a factory all this time so you can be a boxer.' Then she burnt his boxing gear.

This seems in character with the feisty woman Murphy describes so fondly years after her death. If there's one reason he didn't end up either behind bars like some of his mates or merely the smartest truck driver in the street, it was his mother's belief in her children.

He worked his way through law at university, digging ditches, driving trucks, doing anything he could to ‘make a quid'.

This taught him things law lectures didn't. Then he worked for a veteran criminal lawyer, Mark Murray, who taught him some tricks.

He learned his trade around the courts. The Milperra case won him contacts and a profile and a street reputation as a guy who got results, and the rest is history.

So much for the public Murphy. Privately, he's complex: the tough guy who's a soft touch, a good hater but impulsively generous, the workaholic hooked on adrenalin and deadline pressure, hungering for the applause that comes from making it look easy when everyone knows it's not.

‘If there's one thing that motivates me,' he said, ‘it's injustice.' He still gets angry when he talks about how, 30 years ago, a sadistic teacher used to hurt boys who wouldn't fight back until the day Murphy, then 16, jacked up.

Then there's loyalty. ‘One of my earliest memories is when I was four, coming home on the bus with my sister, who was five. A big girl, about 15, hit her. We went home crying.

Next day Mum got on the bus with us and knocked the big girl out of her seat.'

It's 5.15pm. Murphy watches Channel 10 news to see how his client has been treated. He yells to his secretary
to call the station's chief of staff, and grabs the telephone. ‘Listen,' he barks, ‘about …'

Five minutes later, he's still talking.

CHRIS MURPHY'S idea of justice is illustrated by an incident involving his youngest sister, Anne. Born with Down's syndrome, she was in her late 30s and travelling daily on a school bus to a workshop for the handicapped when she started to get upset about using the bus.

Murphy found out an 18-year-old schoolboy had been taunting her. He armed himself with a camera, got on the bus, sat next to the culprit and began taking photographs of him.

The youth demanded to know what he was up to.

‘Welcome to the worst day of your life,' Murphy said, then told him who he was. ‘I'm going to school with you all day, to see what sort of a system turns out people like you.'

In the schoolyard Murphy gave the boy a choice: he would follow him into class or they could go straight to the principal. He chose to go to the principal.

Then it was the principal's turn to make a choice. Either the photographs and the story went in the newspapers or he could arrange a program for pupils to visit the sheltered workshop to learn that handicapped people should be treated decently.

The principal saw things Murphy's way.

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

 

IT'S not easy to break a man's arms and legs. It must have taken two men – big, powerful men – to do what they did to George Brown before they killed him.

It was impossible to tell, afterwards, in which order the killers broke his bones. Impossible to tell how long it took, or why they did it that way. Were they trying to get information from him, or sending a warning to others? Or, most barbaric of all, were they inflicting pain for its own sake?

This much is known. Whoever killed George Brown systematically tortured him first. They twisted his left arm until it was wrenched from its socket and the bone snapped. His right arm was shattered above the elbow. ‘Like a green stick,' recalls a policeman whose thoughts still often turn to the far-off night he was called to a nightmare.

They used a blunt instrument – probably an iron bar – to do the rest. Both legs were broken above the knee. Death, when it came, was from two savage blows that fractured the skull.

They put Brown's broken body in his old green Ford, and drove into the country for nearly an hour, followed by a getaway car.

There, on a deserted freeway, late at night, they rolled the Ford down a gentle slope about 50 metres off the bitumen.

They doused it and the body in the front seat with what police call ‘an accelerant', probably petrol, and set fire to it. Then they drove away – and vanished.

This was not a gangland slaying in Chicago or a drug war in Miami. George Brown was not some Mafia hitman being repaid in kind. He was an Australian horseman.

It happened on an autumn evening in Sydney, in the hours before midnight on 2 April 1984. In the long years since, no one has been charged with the murder. And in the racing world Brown belonged to, where he was liked and is still mourned, the betting is that no one ever will be.

But few talk about who killed him, or why the case remains unsolved. They're too frightened. The sort of ‘muscle' reputedly hired to do the job still roams Kings Cross: human pit bulls that attack on command but don't always stop.

THE long road that led a bush boy who loved horses to the big city and violent death starts in the outback. George Charles Brown was born at the bush hospital in the tiny
Queensland town of Miles on 6 December 1945, the last of his parents' four children.

His father, Alan Brown, had fought on the front line in the Middle East, then New Guinea. During the war, his wife, Margaret, and three older children had lived in Brisbane.

Alan Brown was a bushman, and when he was discharged he used a war-service loan to buy a property called Warramoo, 3500 hectares of lonely country twenty kilometres from Miles.

The baby was eleven years younger than the youngest daughter, Jean. Next was Alan junior, known as ‘Manny', then Lesley, the oldest.

When George was fifteen months old, his mother died. Jean, then thirteen, became mother, teacher and playmate to the infant with the fair curls and blue eyes. She taught him his first words and, later, to read and write.

She didn't have to teach him to ride. Like his big brother, one of the best horsemen in the district, George loved horses. He sat on a pony before he could talk, rode all over the property behind his sister's saddle at three, and struck out on his own soon after.

There was no telephone, no radio, no television, and no school for Jean and George. Their father and brother often rode off for up to a fortnight, droving cattle, leaving the two home alone.

A lifetime later, Jean's voice would quaver as she described 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 told the author.
‘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 favourite was a motherless foal he 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.