‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this one, Doc,’ muttered Brero.
‘Whatever you do, Michael, if we get him into your car, don’t drive back over the West Gate Bridge. I wouldn’t rule out a grand gesture.’
I noticed the colour draining from Michael’s normally rosy cheeks as we entered the pub to confront our prey. Poor Michael – this was turning out to be some birthday.
‘Fuck! It’s the Doctor and Brero! Have a fuck’n drink, boys,’ slurred the Major as he stumbled from his stool in an attempt to greet us. ‘Meet Davo, me mate from old,’ he added, dragging across a couple of chairs from an adjacent table.
The third member of our posse, Greg Lyon, a junior barrister on the team, looked on anxiously.
‘Don’t let him drink any more, Tim – he’s in enough trouble as it is,’ he muttered as the three of us sat down, exceptionally keen not to offend the walking bomb before us. It was clear that the Major was out on a frolic and the chances of getting him to leave were minimal. No amount of training can adequately prepare you for this type of situation.
The Major burst into song, momentarily relieving the tension.
‘There’s a track on her back from her arsehole to her crack along the road to Gundagai,’ he bellowed in unmelodious tones.
This was the moment to act. ‘Look, mate, we can’t stay here singing like this. The cops are sure to be called and all shit will break loose. Why don’t we go somewhere else, have a singalong and then go back to court?’
‘I’m not going to fuck’n jail. I’ve had enough. The cunts can shoot me before I’ll be locked up,’ was his warm response.
At the time of his arrest, the Major had been remanded in custody with bail refused, until his lawyers had managed to secure his release. The experience of incarceration had been highly traumatic, with the Major witnessing the usual repertoire of prison psychopathy, like jail yard bashings and a gang rape. Once had been enough for him.
Another tactic was called for.
‘What if I can persuade His Honour not to lock you up but instead to consider a spell in the Vaucluse Private Hospital?’
‘No fuck’n way.’
‘Look, Flanno,’ interjected Michael, ‘if you come back now we might just be able to pull Tim’s idea off. Otherwise the soggies will be here soon and it’ll be all over. Think about Ange and the kids.’
The ‘soggies’, better known as the Special Operations Group, were an elite division of the Victorian Police whom at the time were used to deal with situations which were perceived to be highly dangerous to the public. They did not muck around and generally shot to kill.
Michael’s reasoning seemed to strike a chord. Whatever his failings, the Major loved his wife, Angela, and their children. And besides, the thought of doing unarmed battle with the Special Operations Group of the Victorian Police seemed altogether too daunting, even for our pumped-up hero.
‘Well, maybe,’ he slobbered.
‘Good, it’s settled then,’ I said. ‘Let’s go out to Michael’s car and drive back,’ I added as I tried to manoeuvre the staggering Major through the hotel door.
Once out of the building, he appeared to waver. ‘Just gotta splash the boots, blokes,’ he blurted, making a beeline for the Williamstown railway station rosebed across the road. Just at this moment, the local three o’clock school bus pulled in to drop off a number of young female students. Thankfully, before the Major could relieve himself, he was distracted by a passing patrol car, which miraculously drove on.
This apparent act of cowardice, in the Major’s eyes, stimulated him to start imitating a police siren at the top of his voice. ‘Wwwrooo, wwwrooo,’ he shrilled. A small crowd was starting to gather at a safe distance. I realised that the whole catastrophe was gathering an unstoppable momentum. I feared the worst.
‘Fuck’n do something, Doctor,’ stammered a now panic-stricken Greg Lyon.
A number of cars had by now pulled over to the side of the road, with the Major busy demanding to see the occupants’ driver’s licences. His impersonation had obviously been highly convincing.
Brero’s quick thinking saved the day. ‘Come on, Sarge,’ he said as he moved beside the Major. ‘It’s time to hop in the patrol car. There’s an APB for a job in the city.’
This act of brilliance tickled the Major’s humour. He played along by hopping into Michael’s convertible BMW. ‘Right, off we go then,’ he said.
‘Remember the grand gesture, Michael,’ I whispered as his car zoomed off towards the city. The faint sound of its ‘siren’ could still be heard as Greg and I followed in hot pursuit in a taxi.
After this little performance, it was easy to convince the judge that the Major was a fruitcake who should be in a psychiatric ward rather than a prison cell. The judge ordered that the Major be immediately assessed.
The Major was not impressed.
‘The Queen can have my body, but she’s not taking my fuck’n suit, ya dogs,’ he yelled as he hurled his tarnished brown trousers, coat, shirt and poorly matching tie into the court before being unceremoniously frog-marched to an adjacent holding cell. His worn jocks and gartered socks added a certain poignancy to the moment.
Grand gesture, indeed.
The Major had first been referred to me some years before that fateful day. His lawyers were at their wits’ end as to how to deal with him. His psychiatric history was complex. He had spent all of his working life with Telstra, initially as a linesman and then, as the years progressed, as a trainer of linesmen. He was also an enlisted man, who had devoted much of his spare time to training as an army reservist. Apart from the residue of a traumatic childhood spent in an orphanage, his early life had appeared quite normal. The Major had worked very hard to overcome the disadvantages associated with his formative years and at the appropriate time, he’d married his sweetheart. He was also the proud father of a son and a daughter.
Life had progressed swimmingly for this devoted family man, with well-deserved recognition from those who had dealt with him professionally. Regular promotion in both the armed services and ‘Civvy Street’ reinforced the Major’s perception that he was a can-do sort of bloke and that no problem, no matter how seemingly difficult, was insurmountable. But in 1993, the Major suffered the first of two serious breakdowns, which eventually saw his early retirement due to ill-health. The diagnosis at that time was one of a depressive illness, apparently precipitated by the long hours of work and attendant stress which he had endured over the years. Being a work-related injury, he was legally entitled to compensation and his superannuation benefits.
Since ceasing work, the Major had done it hard. He found it difficult to come to grips with the changes to his life and financial circumstances. A few hare-brained schemes to earn a quid had come to naught and he eventually hatched a plot to become a private investigator. His years of military training, he reasoned, would stand him in good stead to handle the rigours of the work. As a part-time commando, the Major knew all about the operational side of stealth and undercover work and was keen to ply his skills with all of the enthusiasm he could muster.
Bruno Grollo was a highly successful man. Much of Melbourne’s skyline bears the signature of Grocon Pty Ltd, the Grollo family company. With his brother Rino, Bruno had developed the business from a small concreting concern to the most prolific construction company south of the border. To many they were local heroes, personifying the great Australian myth that anything is possible with true grit and tenacity.
Bruno, however, was unhappy. For some totally unfounded reason he was concerned that one of his sons, Daniel, was possibly involved in using drugs. A streetwise operator, Bruno was well-versed in the follies of youth and keenly aware of the rampant drug scourge which was mushrooming in Melbourne. Through a mysterious and somewhat misguided process, he had sought out the Major to tail Daniel to determine whether or not this was the case.
A player with an ever-vigilant eye for the main chance, the Major had bigger fish to fry than this. Up
on hearing that an ATO investigation into Grollo’s affairs was underway, he decided, without advising his client, to embark upon a folly of his own in order to derail the ATO investigation. He reasoned that by doing so he would ingratiate himself with Bruno and – voila! – his financial misery would end. In addition, and in a bizarre twist of fate, the person holding the extensive ATO Grollo file was an old mate of the Major’s from his army days. The Major saw this as a clear opportunity. And so the stage was set.
As it came to be revealed during the course of the trial, the Major’s mate recognised the unparalleled chance to snare a very big fish and played the role of a double agent. He strung the feckless and intermittently psychotic Major along by pretending to keep his bribe money, which the Major had claimed came directly from Bruno. This, of course, had not been the case. The Major had paid the bribes from his own pocket, hoping that he may be able to help Grollo and, as their friendship developed, himself. It was ultimately determined by the jury that poor Bruno knew nothing of this until he was raided by the Federal Police and charged with the conspiracy.
Regrettably for the Major, who was generally several hops behind the pace, the raid had occurred on the very same day that Telstra was poised to settle his compo claim. The confluence of these issues was enough to send him right off, a psychological position he maintained throughout my dealings with him over a number of years. Because of the raid and the charges which accrued, the compo claim was stalled, arising in part because of an argument that the Major may well go to jail and was not deserving of any payment from the government.
My first encounter with the Major had occurred at my Melbourne office. I had been well briefed about his precarious mental state by my instructing solicitor. Having absorbed his file beforehand, I decided to tread warily during the first session. The Major, for his part, was overwhelmingly friendly and keen to tell his side of the story, as well as his unique views on the universe and how it all worked.
‘Ever wondered about the Foreign Legion, bloke?’ he enquired during the first half-hour of our meeting. I thought this to be an irregular approach, but decided to see where it led.
‘No, Major, why do you ask?’
‘Well, you know how them blokes can march across the Sahara Desert without fuck’n cark’n it? Same as grandfather clocks, bloke marches exactly the same number of beats a minute. Their chant keeps their metabolism going, just like a grandfather clock.’ He proceeded to march around my office, chanting as he skipped, ‘Wey ee ee o’la . . . wey ee ee o’la.’
My heart skipped a beat.
The Major had been under psychiatric care for many years. The consistent diagnosis during that time was a depressive illness. He had a history of attempted suicide, long periods of social withdrawal and a heart filled with dread about the future. In contrast with his medical record, however, his behaviour on our first encounter was anything but depressed. He was frankly manic, with all of the signs of lunacy, including euphoria, flight of ideas and many of the symptoms of manic depression.
Now described as bipolar disorder, manic depression is one of the so-called affective disorders. It is a cruel illness. The sufferer experiences a pattern of extreme fluctuations of mood, ranging from bizarre highs, with feelings of invincibility, to the depths of depression and despair. At such times, the patient is typically out of touch with reality and can best be described as mad. Treatment is lifelong, involving medication to stabilise the patient’s mood, and psychotherapy, which can be of some benefit once the patient returns to a position of tentative sanity.
Unlike most of the afflicted, who may take days or weeks to shift from one mood state to another, the Major’s mood was far more mercurial. He could be euphoric one moment and suicidal the next. Adding to his despair, he had responded poorly to his medication over the years. He was hence very unpredictable and, to some of those who dealt with him, perceived as highly dangerous. While I never had any sense of being threatened by the Major, I was nonetheless always careful to treat him and his feelings with respect. There were occasions, however, when his madness bulldozed its way through even my most subtle attempts to communicate.
Shortly after the underpants episode, having successfully persuaded the judge not to send him to jail, the Major was duly certified and placed in a locked ward for the criminally insane located within the picturesque gardens of Melbourne’s Mont Park Psychiatric Hospital. Such a dramatic step during a trial would normally lead to the proceedings being adjourned, if not abandoned altogether. But not in this case. The trial had already suffered interminable delays as a consequence of the Major’s antics and His Honour Judge Barnett was determined to continue.
The Major was conveyed under escort to court each day, where he would spend most of his time asleep in the dock. At the conclusion of the proceedings, he would be driven back to the hospital, where he would eagerly await my arrival in the company of Michael Brereton.
I was on a razor’s edge during this period. Although once again I was enjoying being involved in an exceptionally high-profile criminal trial which attracted big fees, I was increasingly troubled by the extensive working hours that had been demanded of me. Not only were the defence team reliant upon my advice and capacity to manage the Major, but as the trial progressed so too was the judge, who insisted that each day, before the jury arrived, I report to the court about the Major’s condition. I found this bizarre as by this stage he was in a locked ward for the criminally insane at the Mont Park Asylum.
Huge demands were also being placed upon Michael in terms of his broader practice and extensive work hours. Despite being heavily medicated, the Major failed to improve. Michael and I were on a tight leash. It was apparent that the Major was in no fit state to be joined to the proceedings. And yet, because of the attitude of the bench, we had to do all that we could to expedite his recovery so that he and his co-accused did not suffer a possible miscarriage of justice.
Adding to the tension, the mood of the jury also seemed to be shifting. Most of them had placed their jobs and careers on hold in order to serve their community. Generally, jury service may last for a week or so and causes at worst a slight disruption to a person’s routine. This trial, however, had blown out beyond all expectation, and at the time of the Major’s hospital admission, it was expected to continue for at least another six months. We feared that the Major’s antics, rather than convincing the jury of his madness, would instead lead to a guilty verdict.
In order to vary the routine of our visits, Michael and I would occasionally see the Major in the rose garden, a soothing place where he and other patients were permitted to free range during the day. On one such occasion, the Major leapt up, military-style, and commanded his fellow hospital troopers to stand to attention.
‘Listen up, men,’ he barked. ‘There’s too many fuck’n snails in this fuck’n garden. They’re all a bunch of cunts . . .’
I could see that his address was resonating with some of the others as they gathered round to hear him continue.
‘While we’re locked up here all fuck’n day these little bastards are free to come and go as they please. They munch on our roses and then when we’re forced into our rubber rooms, they fuck’n climb over the wall and go out to party all night. Where’s the fuck’n justice in that?’
An escalating cloud of agitation began to brew among the ranks. The Major was at his finest when addressing his troops prior to battle. The mood was growing darker by the second. Yet again, the colour was draining from Michael’s cheeks. As one of the country’s top entertainment attorneys, he’d dealt with some serious crazies at the sharp end of the rock’n’roll industry, but nothing had prepared him for this.
‘I’d hate to be a fuck’n snail right now,’ I whispered. ‘No sudden moves, okay?’
The Major continued: ‘We’ve gotta teach these cunts a lesson. We’ve gotta send them a message. Work detail – all men take up your arms.’
A number of the now mesmerised patients reached for any twig or stick
that was lying around.
‘Right, on the count of three, chant with me . . . I’d rather be a hammer than a snail.’ The Major proceeded to clobber the hapless critters to the tune of the classic Simon and Garfunkel song, ‘El Condor Pasa’.
Within moments, the other patients went to work pulverising any visible snail, singing along in jangled unison.
Yet another day at the office!
Common sense and legal principle dictated the Major’s trial should have been aborted but it wasn’t. This trial would ultimately be best remembered for its capacity to bend time-honoured legal conventions, as well as for its devastating and corrosive impact upon all who dared (or were forced in the case of jury members) to be involved.
To most it was plainly obvious that the Major was in la-la land. He would regularly lie down in the dock where he was not visible to the court. During one brief mid-morning adjournment, the Major was escorted to the holding cells located in the building’s basement. Within seconds of his cell being locked, he’d ripped out his shoelaces and fashioned a makeshift noose, which he lassoed around the door handle and his neck. It was only due to the quick thinking of a prison guard, who managed to cut him down, that his life was saved. This was no gesture, and I was consequently required to stay at the court each day for the duration of the proceedings to make sure it didn’t happen again. Then, at the end of the day, there would be the long peak-hour drive to the hospital to give the bloke support.
Although I was well paid for my efforts, I was increasingly concerned that I would lose my broader practice altogether. I had no availability during the day and new clients could only be scheduled for late afternoon appointments. I was becoming increasingly frazzled. The Major had been taking up most of my working day for what seemed like years.
Michael was also noticing the strain. Towards the end of the trial, it was only our regular stops at McDonald’s – a culinary ritual we established early in proceedings – which broke the tension. Our attachment to the restaurant and all that it represented was graphically illustrated during an early morning conference at Brero’s office.
Dancing with Demons Page 14