Blonde Ambition

  The reality was Coote didn’t have another seven years at Sweaty Betty—she had two more. Her relationship with Roxy would also sour. In 2015, she would quit—and be asked to give the car back, which she did. As she would explain endlessly to friends, associates and the Insta-curious, it was only ever a company car.

  CHAPTER 6

  Love

  A force of nature

  Nick Curtis

  UNTIL SHE MET Oliver Curtis, Roxy’s love life—along with her income and net worth—had been something she guarded. Even her difficult relationships with her parents and sister were spoken of more openly than was her love life, which she did her best to preserve and keep secret from her Sweaty Betty staff and friends. It wasn’t because she hadn’t had boyfriends; she had. There had been a steady stream of men in her life since high school. But until Curtis, or ‘Oli’ as she called him, her relationships had been short-term affairs—sometimes just a few months, sometimes longer, and increasingly with very private men.

  Everyone agreed Roxy knew what she liked in a man. Unquestionably he was rich. His father likely was too. Roxy, it could be deduced, had three types—the budding entrepreneur, the investment banker and the society prince. Dynamic entrepreneurial types held a particular appeal—here was someone with whom she could share her ambitious business plans and hopes for conquering the world of fashion and glamour.

  Mixing with Sydney’s young eastern suburbs private-school set via her old alma maters Kambala and SCEGGS, Roxy was always going to brush up against the lads from Sydney’s prestigious boys’ schools. Early boyfriends were plucked from schools that had educated scions from some of the nation’s richest families.

  Raja Farah was a Cranbrook School old boy from Bellevue Hill, the seat of Sydney’s establishment. The school was located in the same street as Kerry Packer’s private compound, Cairnton, and just a few blocks from Sydney Harbour’s southern shoreline, from which you could see the most expensive motor yachts in the country moored and watch seaplanes groaning with the weight of their affluent cargo rattle in to land beside famous harbourside restaurants just a stone’s throw away in Rose Bay. Farah studied economics at the University of Sydney and went on to found, while still in his mid-twenties, Robbie Barsman, a successful clothing manufacturing and retail company specialising in hospitality uniforms.

  Roxy’s relationship with Farah preceded Sweaty Betty and was long-lasting by Roxy’s standards. In the end it ran out of gas at about the same time Farah’s career was taking off in 2003. Raja would enjoy successive triumphs, initially with Robbie Barsman and then as CFO of industrial and corporate workwear garment manufacturer Joseph Dahdah in 2004. Later he would open his own café in California, Lucca.

  Farah, his friends agreed, was warm and congenial—perfect first serious boyfriend material. He would also help inspire the model, as her father had, for one of Roxy’s three preferred suitor types. Raja was ‘type one’—the budding entrepreneur.

  Following Farah would come Adam Abrams, also a ‘type one’ and a Sydney Grammar School old boy. Abrams’ future, following his PR career at Markson Sparks! and the establishment of his own agency, Uno PR, in 2007, lay in bars and nightclubs. He would launch the floating summer venue The Island on Sydney Harbour—essentially a barge for hire with booze—and the cocktail bar the Darlo Country Club in bustling Darlinghurst on the CBD’s eastern outskirts. In 2014, Abrams would move into broader investments with a cleaning company, Whizz, with his nightclub and coconut water business partner Julian Tobias.

  Friends of Roxy’s from that period maintain her relationships lasted, on average, about a year. ‘I was looking for a wingman,’ she told Fairfax Media in 2013, ‘… someone to be nice and kind. A companion … [but] every relationship I had would end arse-up.’

  She knew at least part of the blame lay with her. She struggled to prioritise love. After Sweaty Betty opened its doors, she simply didn’t have a lot of time for boyfriends, and holding excitement-loving Roxy’s interest had never been easy. After Abrams, and post breast enhancement, she would be linked briefly to Home and Away actor Mark Furze, designer Liam Wellstead and then to soccer star Dwight Yorke—these associations propelling her into Sydney’s cliquey social pages.

  A fling with James Tesoriero looked for a while to be a serious diversion from the work that consumed her. Tesoriero was the antithesis of the men Roxy usually pursued. The Epping Boys High graduate hadn’t grown up in the power-obsessed eastern suburbs. He was in fact the closest thing to a ‘westie’ anyone could recall seeing on Roxy’s arm. Tesoriero, friends would say, was great fun, sweet, good-looking and undeniably cool. Like Roxy, he was a seller through and through. He worked in sales for streetwear brand Converse, one of Roxy’s clients, moving to Urge Footwear in 2007, which is what he was doing when Roxy’s circle came to know him. As popular as James may have been with Roxy’s friends, he didn’t exactly fit the mould she had created in her mind’s eye of the perfect match.

  Unlike Beau Dixon. Dixon would fuel Roxy’s fascination for her ‘type two’ ideal suitor—the investment banker. ‘Type twos’, Roxy would find, could be hard to come by. Most, it seemed, were taken. The perfect specimen had presented itself in Dixon, another Sydney Grammar old boy with a bachelor of business from University of Technology Sydney who was making a name for himself in banking. There was only one problem with Beau—he was already in a relationship with the daughter of Jacenko family friends. The ‘Battle for Beau’ would test the fortitude of both the Jacenkos and the Faust clans.

  The Fausts owned one of the city’s best-known jewellers, Dustins, in the historic Strand Arcade, and were just as well connected socially as the Jacenkos. Roxy would have to use her considerable charms to win Dixon from her friend, pretty blonde Chloe Faust, with whom he was in a long-term relationship.

  When she succeeded, the impact was felt in the near corners of Sydney’s eastern suburbs Jewish community as former friends Doreen Jacenko and Judy Faust fell out over Roxy’s act of wanton thievery and selfish romantic design. But Roxy was only following her mother’s example. A boyfriend was just a boyfriend. It wasn’t as though Roxy was stealing someone’s husband—and leaving a 2-year-old toddler and 5-month-old baby without their father.

  Roxy’s ‘type three’ was the society prince. She found the ultimate specimen in Ned O’Neil, the handsome, rugged son of property magnate and yachtie Denis O’Neil and his aristocratic wife Charlotte, a cousin of Britain’s third Baron Glenconner, Colin Tennant. The O’Neils were close friends of former prime minister Paul Keating and his family, and were ridiculously well connected. They lived the textbook Sydney upper-class dream—they had expensive yachts, owned a historic Federation mansion in Bellevue Hill and kept a weekender an hour’s drive north at Palm Beach where antique seaplanes ferried sightseers on day trips.

  The athletic and seafaring O’Neil, a boating enthusiast, was considered an excellent catch and would have made a fine husband for any of Paul and Annita Keating’s three daughters. Most agreed the Scots College-educated O’Neil was a credit to his old man. That he and his two brothers, Jake and Toby, were heirs to a fortune put conservatively at $100 million and thought to be worth much more made him a trophy catch.

  When Roxy started seeing O’Neil she discovered one of the main impediments to the relationship was that his parents were notoriously private. It was almost impossible for media to locate photographs of Denis O’Neil when he attempted to sue Cascade Coal in 2014, a company linked to corrupt political powerbroker Eddie Obeid. Denis had worked hard at being inaccessible to the media.

  As a result, the couple would keep their relationship under wraps. It was O’Neil’s hope not to inconvenience or embarrass his parents. The O’Neils neither wanted nor needed publicity—and you couldn’t always separate Roxy, the indefatiguable publicist, from it. There would be no appearances in the social pages for Roxy and O’Neil. Their relationship would start quietly and end more quietly. Word of their split would be the first most would know
of their relationship.

  One relationship that did manage to glance The Sunday Telegraph’s social pages involved convicted drug dealer and married man John Macris. In 2009, gossip writer Ros Reines reported Roxy had ended a relationship with nightclub owner Macris—a rival to Sydney’s notorious Ibrahim family.

  A year didn’t go by that one of the Ibrahim brothers—John, Sam, Fadi or Michael—wasn’t named in association with criminal activities in Sydney. John, a nightclub owner in Kings Cross, was described in the 1995 Wood Royal Commission into police corruption in New South Wales as the ‘new lifeblood’ of the drugs trade in the Cross, something he denied. Between the four brothers, there had been charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, manslaughter, kneecapping, kidnapping and gun racketeering. It was an impressive list. Only Michael and Nomads bike gang boss Sam had served time. Charges against John, the inspiration for a season of the Underbelly television drama, and Fadi had been dropped due to lack of evidence.

  Macris and Roxy had had a ‘tempestuous’ relationship over a period of three years from about 2005 to 2007. The relationship would be interrupted when the solidly built Macris was sentenced to spend two years in jail in 2005 for supplying a commercial quantity of drugs. Upon his release in 2007, Macris would have a public falling out with John Ibrahim. Macris would tell a court in 2013 the fallout was over an unpaid debt—he claimed Ibrahim owed him $400 000 for work done on Ibrahim’s Oxford Street nightclub, Goodbar, where Roxy had worked for a spell.

  Two years on, Macris was again at the centre of legal proceedings, this time a conspiracy-to-murder case. Michael Ibrahim, convicted killer and youngest brother of the Ibrahim clan, was accused of trying to kill Macris, believing he was responsible for a much-publicised hit on his brother Fadi in 2009. In an unsolved case that would shock Sydney, Fadi Ibrahim was shot five times by an unknown gunman while sitting in his Lamborghini outside his home on the city’s whitebread north shore. The police investigation that followed gave rare insight into the inner workings of the two families. A protected witness for the Director of Public Prosecutions, known only as W1, told the court Fadi and the Macris brothers, John and Alex, had fallen out over money and drug deals. In 2014, the case against Michael and an alleged accomplice fell over.

  During an investigation in 2013, the NSW Crime Commission would freeze Macris’s assets, including a terrace house in Surry Hills, an apartment building in Marrickville, a Chippendale apartment that was once targeted in a bombing and a property development company, JAT Developments. The Crime Commission had Macris’s unexplained wealth in its sights. After approaching the Supreme Court, the Crime Commission made its case that Macris, who had no recorded job, pay the state government the equivalent value of his unexplained wealth. It further linked Macris to a luxury car dealership, Jemson Motors, and a side business reselling expensive watches.

  Roxy’s relationship with Macris—a man said to appreciate ‘volume and quality’ in his women and the ‘latest and greatest’ sports cars—would come to a head after Roxy threatened to expose the couple’s relationship to Macris’s wife. Macris’s marriage would subsequently end and he would move to Greece to live in some sort of obscurity with a Playboy centrefold.

  Roxy would maintain a link to him through his sister-in-law, Jessica, Roxy’s best friend. Jessica, better known to Sydney’s social set by her maiden name, Ingham, was variously described in the media as a racing heiress and chicken heiress. Her great-grandfather founded the Ingham Chicken empire. Jessica married Macris’s brother Alex in 2013 in a lavish $500 000 wedding on the lawn next to the Sydney Opera House. The following year the bridegroom would tell a court he had used his father Stelios, seventy-two, as an unsuspecting drug mule to transport $13 million or 26 kilograms of methamphetamine oil in three jerry cans in his Ford Falcon station wagon. Police later found another three plastic containers and a metal drum containing a further 24 kilograms of the oil at a rural property. Stelios would be acquitted after being bailed for $2.1 million. Representing the family in court was solicitor Kiki Kyriacou, a criminal lawyer who also represented John Macris—and Roxy following her dust-up with Ruby in 2008. Roxy likely sought legal instruction when someone with a can of white paint defaced the front of her office with graffiti around 2006–07. The graffiti—the word SLUT writ large—may have gone unnoticed in the light industrial area of Beaconsfield where the young city-fringe dwellers lived a short walk from the public housing of neighbouring suburb Redfern. But it was harder to miss the word SLUT painted in 1-metre-high letters on the front of the Jacenko family home in Rosemont Street, Woollahra, one of Sydney’s poshest suburbs.

  Harder still to miss, it was painted on her own recently acquired $2 791 000 house in Nelson Street, Woollahra. The only person common to those three addresses was Roxy, and clearly she’d made someone angry.

  Roxy might have considered her relationships with boyfriends Farah, Abrams, Yorke, Tesoriero, Dixon and O’Neil as merely good fun and practice for the ‘real thing’. She wasn’t one to wait by the phone when a relationship was over. She was too busy.

  But there was one property prince who would break her heart. Nabil Gazal was the son and heir of Nabil Gazal Sr, known among Sydney’s business community following his death in 2010 as ‘Old Nabil’. The Lebanese-born businessman had some interesting quirks. Those who had gotten close to the old man had learned not to look surprised when they walked into his lavish Vaucluse home to be confronted by the bizarre sight of a Bedouin tent pitched in the lounge room.

  Old Nabil was the classic Australian migrant success story. He had migrated to Australia where he had built a property development company worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That company, Gazcorp, was behind Sydney’s controversial Orange Grove development, which would be named in two Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) investigations. In 2004, Gazcorp had found itself at the centre of a political scandal after its retail shopping mall rival Westfield argued successfully that land on which Gazcorp had built the factory outlet centre Orange Grove on Sydney’s western outskirts wasn’t zoned for retail usage. When the courts ruled in Westfield’s favour, Liverpool City Council, having approved the development in the first place, approached the NSW Government to have the site rezoned retrospectively. The government, under NSW Premier Bob Carr, refused to intervene, leading to the closure of sixty-three retail businesses and the loss of 400 jobs.

  The development would linger in the public eye for a decade amid allegations of corruption and bribery. It would briefly entangle Premier Carr and his chief of staff before both were cleared of corruption by ICAC. Then a separate ICAC inquiry into illegal Liberal Party fundraising would reveal the Gazals had entertained members of the NSW Liberal Party on their 82-foot luxury yacht Octavia, named in honour of Old Nabil’s mother.

  Born of a Lebanese father and a Swedish mother, Nabil Gazal Jr was everything Roxy admired in a partner. He was intelligent, worldly, rich and annoyingly unattainable. He was also two years younger than Roxy and may not have been ready for a serious relationship with the PR dynamo. Gazal did admire Roxy—he liked that she had her own business—something to distinguish her from the hoards of eastern suburbs gold-diggers who had taken to tailing him at parties. But if it was marriage she wanted, the Gazcorp director would prove a disappointment. He was not ready to be tied down. He not only had his hands full with the family business, a father whose health was failing and the ICAC investigation, he was still in his twenties.

  Roxy, or so some members of the Gazal family felt, was a bit brash for a family who, like the O’Neils, valued their privacy highly. While Old Nabil admired Roxy’s pluck well enough, his wife Maud had misgivings about the relationship. The messy public ‘cat-fight’ with Ruby hadn’t helped Roxy’s chances of being accepted by Sydney’s privileged classes and though she was adept at being Jewish in the company of Jews and Christian in the company of Christians, this didn’t sit well with all old families.

  The couple’s relationship would end around
the time a fistfight on the jetty of the exclusive Royal Motor Yacht Club in swish harbourside Point Piper, one of the nation’s most exclusive suburbs, made the news. Fairfax Media’s society scribe Andrew Hornery had learned Rose Bay police had been called to a drunken brawl on 25 January 2010 after revellers from one luxury yacht climbed on board another yacht only to discover they weren’t entirely welcome. The two boats involved, as it happened, were Nabil Gazal’s Octavia and Denis O’Neil’s Illusion—belonging to the family of Roxy’s ex-boyfriend Ned.

  The Gazals and the O’Neils were related through the marriage of Gazal Jr’s older sister Nicole to Ned O’Neil’s brother Adam. On the day in question, the Gazals, including Nabil Jr and Nicholas, his younger brother, were cruising on the harbour celebrating Nicholas’s birthday when the O’Neil boat purportedly pulled up alongside. Roxy, too, was out on Sydney Harbour and may have been among revellers who leaped into the harbour to swim to the other boat. The newspaper report quoted a ‘Gazal insider’ saying: ‘Things got ugly when a couple of very, very drunk passengers from the [O’Neil] boat climbed aboard Octavia … They were not welcomed and when they were told to leave they were not very happy about it.’ The ensuing punch-up at the yacht club was ugly and well beneath the social standing of the two families.

  As to whether it was related to red-headed Gazal Jr’s break-up with Roxy was unclear. At the Sweaty Betty offices, staff beheld something peculiar as Roxy shared the news that her romance with Gazal, ‘Junior’ as he was known, was over. Roxy would contact her parents, and ask both Doreen and Nick to come to see her at the office. They complied and the three of them proceeded to climb into a car parked outside the building, where Nick and Doreen consoled their eldest daughter for what witnesses would say was ‘hours and hours’.