Brown’s dream of making it as a trainer didn’t wilt, but his wife did. Rose Brown said later she knew he loved the children, but if it came to spending his last ten dollars on a bag of chaff instead of groceries, the horses would get the chaff. Rose hated racing’s uncertainty.
They parted amicably. Rose, her daughter and two sons went back to Darlington Point. They kept in touch, and when he could he’d send money. ‘I couldn’t fault him, only that for him the horses came before everything else,’ she was to recall. ‘I still wanted him to be successful.’
SUCCESS came, but slowly. Despite getting a few city winners, Brown struggled to balance the books. Two of his owners, Geoff Newcombe and Dick Keats, arranged a bank loan so he could pay fodder, float and farrier’s bills.
‘He’d eat bread and jam three times a day to feed his horses properly,’ recalls Keats. ‘He’d ride work himself. I remember him riding a rogue horse he had. He’d wrap his legs in newspapers for padding to stop the blistering, because he didn’t want to spend money on long boots.’
Yet it looked as if Brown was making it. He was getting bigger owners, and had some boxes on the course as well as rented stables in Tweedmouth Avenue, Rosebery. He had been earmarked for a 20-box complex ‘on the hill’ on the racecourse, a sign of recognition.
Photographs don’t do George Brown justice, say those who knew him. For all his travels and his craggy face, he had a naive quality that prompts the Brisbane trainer Laurie Mayfield-Smith to say of him: ‘He struck me as somebody out of The Sullivans. He wasn’t the gangster type. He never bragged about betting, or anything else.’
But Dick Keats noticed changes in Brown in 1983. One was that he started to wear better clothes, giving up the fusty suits he’d stuck to in the tough times. Keats guessed the trainer was spending cash he hadn’t had before. He couldn’t guess where it came from.
And it was clear Brown was worried. By the end of that year Keats and Newcombe had trouble talking to him, and he looked haggard. ‘His weight dropped right away. He wasn’t happy,’ he recalls.
BY late 1983 Queensland racing stunk. The smell hadn’t yet hit the public, but interstate bookmakers were nervous about bizarre form reversals in Brisbane.
The once-fearless Mark Read and several other big Sydney bookies cut Brisbane bets to a quarter. They knew that when certain people plunged large amounts on Brisbane races, they always won.
The first public whiff of scandal came in early 1984, when two horses, Wishane Myth and Aquitane, were scratched after being nobbled.
Meanwhile, George Brown was more quiet and moody than ever. He wasn’t the type to pour out his heart, but relatives caught hints of inner turmoil in telephone calls.
He told his sister Jean and his brother Manny he was getting threatening calls. Specifically, he had been told that his horse McGlinchey ‘won’t win’ on at least two occasions. He told Jean he didn’t know ‘who would want to do this to me’.
Some time in the two weeks before his death, he told his estranged wife he was worried because he’d been approached to ring-in a horse in Brisbane. He’d been offered ‘big money’, but didn’t want to do it. She asked him who’d made the offer. He said he ‘couldn’t say’.
Rose Brown was uneasy. On an earlier trip to Sydney for the children to see their father, she had taken ‘a couple of funny phone calls’ at his flat.
When she had told him about the calls, he passed it off as a former lover of Pat Goodwin, the woman described as his de facto. He blamed the same man for attempting to burn his car in the street a few months before. In light of later events, Rose doubts this.
KAREN Godfrey was only eighteen but in the year she’d worked with Brown – ‘he was more like a workmate than a boss’ – she’d proved herself. So when he sent three horses to the Brisbane autumn carnival in late March 1984, she got the job, with a veteran stablehand called Jackie Paull.
Star of the trio was Different Class, a city winner named after the horse Brown had strapped for Gregory Peck in England. The others were a promising maiden called Young Cavalier, and a bay filly called Risley.
Risley had won two weak races in Sydney the previous year but was not, on form, any better than 14-1 quoted against her winning the last race at Doomben on 31 March, a Saturday.
Brown flew from Sydney for the races. He met his old workmate ‘Chunky’ Brown. They had a drink ‘for old times’ sake’.
If George Brown was surprised – or worried – that Risley’s registration papers hadn’t been checked early that day or at trackwork during the week, he didn’t show it. When stewards called for the papers just before the race, he said they were at the stables nearby. He went to get them, and was fined $50 for being late.
As he saddled Risley he told Godfrey there was ‘a bit of money’ for the filly, but that he didn’t like her chances. It was some understatement. Risley was backed from 12-1 to 8-1 in Brisbane and Sydney – and, curiously, from 14-1 to 4-1 at Wollongong. Someone down south liked her chances. Someone who wouldn’t be happy when she ran second last.
When Brown checked the filly after the race, ‘he was really quiet,’ the strapper recalls.
Brown’s sister, Jean, and her husband were there that day. They later recalled he was concerned by Risley’s poor run, and had criticised the jockey. They drove him to the airport after the races. They never saw him again.
ARTHUR Harris was in that era an odd man out in Sydney racing. Known for mathematical skill and a phenomenal memory, he is no ordinary racecourse tout, in character or style.
A psychology graduate, philosophy expert and prizewinning classics scholar, Harris turned to setting race markets instead of bridge or chess. For a decade he was a form analyst for the bookmakers Bill Waterhouse and his son Robbie. Until 1985, that is, shortly after they were warned off every racecourse in the world over the Fine Cotton scandal.
David Hickie, a Sydney investigative journalist and racing expert, says of Harris, ‘Arthur carries the history of the last 30 years of New South Wales racing in his head.’ Harris is also a trenchant critic of his former employers.
This goes back to early 1978, when Robbie Waterhouse was accused of involvement in allegedly trying to nobble a greyhound at Wentworth Park greyhound races, and subsequently attempted to implicate Harris to deflect blame.
Harris never forgave him, although he later worked for the Waterhouses again. In 1986 he appeared on the ABC program Four Corners, accusing Robbie Waterhouse of trying to cover up the botched race-fixing.
Both Hickie and former AJC chief steward John ‘The Sheriff’ Schreck describe Harris as honest, and with racing’s interests at heart. That assessment, combined with his passion for keeping records, makes his recollections of some events very interesting.
By the time Risley went to the barrier at Doomben, the Sydney races at Rosehill were over. Harris was amazed at the amount of money being bet on the unknown filly. He was also surprised to see first-hand how much a well-known bookmaker bet on her.
In a statutory declaration he later swore for the New South Wales Thoroughbred Racing Board hearing he stated several intriguing things. One was that he had considered backing Risley himself because of the confidence of a bookmaker he knew, but decided not to, ‘as I formed the opinion that on its ratings it would be hard pressed to win … I did, however, watch the horse closely on the closed-circuit TV. After the race I went to (the bookmaker) and said: “It did absolutely nothing”.’
GEORGE Brown was rattled. On the Sunday morning after the Doomben race, the small daughter of a friend walked into a loose box where Brown was treating a horse. He screamed at the child. Her father was shocked; they had never seen him behave that way.
Next morning, Brown met another trainer, Les Bridge, at the track to return a borrowed saddle. Years later, Bridge chooses words carefully as he recalls it. ‘He was concerned about some race in Brisbane. He said he was disappointed with the way the horse ran.’
Bridge talks of how much he liked Brown, the
n adds suddenly: ‘I know he was unhappy with what happened in Brisbane.’ He pauses. ‘I hope they dig up something.’ Another pause. ‘You hear different things … but you hear a lot of things in racing.’ End of interview.
That Monday night, Brown was due for dinner at his partner Pat Goodwin’s house, a few streets from his Rosebery stables. He didn’t make it.
Goodwin later told police she had called him about 6.50pm to say there’d been a call from Brisbane. She said he told her: ‘It’s been a quiet night … I will leave here at 8 o’clock. I have to drop in on – ’
Then he had paused and said: ‘I’ll be there at ten past eight.’ Goodwin claimed not to know who he intended to see.
An owner, Ted Hendry, rang him twice, at about 7.20 and 7.40, and spoke briefly. Rose Brown rang either just before or just after Hendry’s second call. She needed money to take their son Wayne, then eleven, to Sydney to see a specialist. It was a request he would never usually deny, no matter how broke.
But this time, she says, he ‘wasn’t himself’. He curtly accused Wayne of ‘bunging on’ the illness. They were staggered. He had never acted like that before.
‘It didn’t sound like him,’ she says. ‘I wonder now if he was with whoever killed him.’
TRAFFIC was light on the F6 freeway at Bulli Tops, near Wollongong, in the hour before midnight. But one driver noticed a car on fire about 50 metres off the northbound lane, and reported it at the toll booth, 23 kilometres away.
A freeway patrol came, but reported the fire was no threat to traffic. Later, someone called the Fire Brigade, which relayed the call to the Bulli volunteer brigade. It was 28 minutes past midnight.
After putting out the fire, the volunteers saw something in the passenger seat of the blistered green Ford. It was a body. Or what was left of it.
When Senior Constable Peter Strik, of the crime scene unit, arrived the body was lit up by flood lights, but barely recognisable. The hands, feet and forearms had been burned away.
‘It was just a lump of charcoal,’ Strik was to say. ‘There was no way it could be identified by sight.’ Although he didn’t know about the broken bones until the post mortem was done, he could see the stump of the left arm twisted from its socket. He automatically treated it as murder.
‘It just didn’t look right. I’ve always wondered why we never got anywhere with that one,’ he muses.
ARTHUR Harris was asleep in the unit he used as an office on Tuesday 3 April, when the telephone woke him at 6am. It was Joe Amphlett, who worked for the Australian Jockey Club. He sounded alarmed. He said police believed a body found in a burned-out car overnight was George Brown, and that he’d been murdered.
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.
17
FINE COTTON UNRAVELLED
‘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 racin
g, 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.
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