by Larry Writer
Cottoning on to my misgivings, Chris invited me to his office and gave me a grilling. He asked me about myself and encouraged me to ask him about his business. I was almost convinced, but I wanted an hour or two away from him to decide. He said to have a think and give him my answer over lunch at Diethnes Greek restaurant in the city. I always think best when I’m eating so to better mull things over I hared it down to a favourite restaurant, Bill & Tony’s in Stanley Street, Darlinghurst. There, in the dining room–sitting alone at one of the tables covered with the trademark red-and-white-checked tablecloth, gulping down an enormous pasta meal with green cordial –I weighed up the pros and cons. My answer to Chris Murphy would be yes.
Sweating like a hog from my huge early lunch and the uphill run from East Sydney into the city, I rendezvoused with Chris at Diethnes at 1 pm. He was dining with some equally high-flying colleagues.
Chris’s first question to me was what did I want to eat and because my stomach was still bursting from my brunch at Bill & Tony’s, I told him I wasn’t hungry. (When I saw the delicious Greek food they ordered I could have cried!) ‘Well,’ Chris continued, ‘good to see you’re watching your diet for training. Anyway, the part-time job with me – are you in or out?’
I told him, ‘I’m in.’
He said, ‘When can you start?’ I told him eight tomorrow morning. He said to go and sign with the Solicitors Admission Board first. Next morning I did that, then I appeared at Chris’s doorstep on the corner of Elizabeth and Liverpool streets ready to work.
I had not considered a career in the law any more than I’d considered a career as an astronaut. Yet it made sense. After all, I knew loads of blokes who’d been in court. Also, I was a stroppy little bastard and could imagine myself shaping up well before a judge. The money, once I was admitted to the bar after I graduated from Law School, would be excellent. And it would give me a chance to live a full life and still have some left over to help out people in trouble and doing it tough. Along with my love of having fun and partying and playing sport, there was a part of me, down deep inside and not often seen perhaps, that wanted to help people like those I’d grown up with in Camperdown and Woolloomooloo, people like my own family. For this more generous side of me, I thank my mother. I inherited it from her.
I reckon I could have had no better mentor than Chris Murphy. In many ways, he made me the man I am today. He was so kind to me. I loved him, and he was one of my father figures. Chris has a big heart and a code of fairness, and many people experiencing hard times have benefited from his generosity. Along with his kindness, he is charming and charismatic and unbelievably well read. He is also – and I don’t think he’d disagree – hot-tempered and strong-willed. He gravitates to controversial cases and I’m not alone in saying that, except for the QC Chester ‘Walks On Water’ Porter, on his day Chris is the best courtroom performer in the country. To watch him at work defending someone is a master class. If I was on trial for murder, and at risk of being locked away for life, Chris Murphy is the man I’d want defending me.
In the office, too, as I observed him juggling his cases, and performing in court, as often as not getting his clients off, I received an at-the-coalface grounding in what would become my career. People from all walks of life came to Chris. Career criminals, celebrities, politicians, sportsmen, lots of people in the public eye – thirty-one Bandido bikies after the Milperra massacre, the Rolling Stones, Matthew Newton, Darren Beadman, Joe Cocker among them. Their alleged crimes and misdemeanours ranged from defamation to drug possession, assault, murder, robbery, fraud and affray. Many of the cases he takes on are the tough ones that other lawyers run a mile from.
I started working for Chris and that’s when the adventures began. We had some wonderful times and he treated me like a brother. Chris was extra hard on me, and he was extra soft. He is a fine judge of people and he knew when to ramp me up so much that the hairs on the back of my neck would bristle, and how to quieten me down so I’d change my mind about belting him. He has said to me that he was never sure how I’d react when he gave me a bollocking. ‘I half expected you to knock me on my arse.’ But, basically, we got on well. He is a complex man … I don’t try to work people out, people are who they are. He has always had enemies and some of them may have had a case. Chris Murphy is one of a kind.
I gave the responsibilities that Chris assigned me my best shot. For a while, because of my erratic hours being Chris’s legman, I managed to juggle my job with him with my role at the building society. It was too good to last. After a few months, when I’d worked my way to a more responsible position at the building society, I found it more and more difficult to disappear from my desk at all times of the day to do a job for Chris, or train at the club, or go to evening classes from six to nine at uni, and then go out drinking and gambling. Not surprisingly, everything – my legal work and studies and my boxing – began to suffer. I went to Chris and said, ‘Sunshine, this is all too much. It’s killing me.’
He simply repeated what he’d told me from the outset. ‘Steve, let me tell you something. I know more about you than you know about yourself. If you don’t get through this, it’s for no other reason than you didn’t want it bad enough. That’s all. You’ve got the ability to be my clerk here and if you want to do it, you’ll do it.’
I did want to be a lawyer and I wanted to be an Australian amateur boxing champion. The building society work was the odd one out. I resigned. But I still needed to earn money. Without my regular wage from the building society, what I was earning with Chris was not enough to pay my way and help James keep a roof over our head and food in the fridge.
‘What should I do?’ I asked Chris.
He accused me of being soft and said I should toughen myself up. ‘Why don’t you bugger off and sweep the streets for a living?’
I was angry at him because I thought he was having a go at me. As usual, whether he meant to or not, he had given me some good advice. What could be better than getting up before dawn and walking the streets of the city, doing an honest job of physical work, then finishing in time to do all the other things that filled my day and night? Bruce Collins from the PCYC and the boss of the Cleansing Unit at Sydney City Council had helped me land a part-time sweeping job before. Now he signed the papers to give me a regular sweeping gig, every morning from five until nine. Then it was to Chris’s office, then to boxing, then to the Law School, and then out on the town boozing. What a life. I knew I was alive.
Working and hanging out with Chris, I learned plenty about fairness. If Chris sees something that he believes is wrong he has to put it right, no matter what it costs him, or what it costs the person he designates to take care of the business at hand. At this period in our relationship, that person was usually me. One night soon after I started working for Chris, he and I were walking together in Oxford Street when we saw two guys picking on a bloke. Chris said to me, ‘ That’s not right. Go and sort it out, Steve.’
I strode over to where the pair were shoving and hitting their victim and I told them, ‘Leave him alone.’
One screamed at me, ‘Fuck off, or you’ll cop it, too,’ while his mate began stealthily circling around behind me.
I said, ‘Mate, let him go.’
The thug with the big mouth shaped up to me, and I returned the compliment. He was obviously unsettled by my calm refusal to be intimidated, so he turned to Plan B, which was to start raving about how he was a kick-boxing champ. That’s when I knew I had nothing to worry about. Real kick-boxing champs who get into street fights don’t advertise the fact. A true fighter doesn’t pass up the advantage of surprise. I told him he was a poser. He shut up. I stared him down. He dropped his fists and grabbed his friend and the pair of them sauntered away. When they reached the corner they summoned enough courage to shout some abuse at me, but when I advanced on them they hoofed it, vanquished and humiliated. Chris is not a fighter, not with his fists anyway, but he knows how to get things done.
We became g
ood friends. As the old cliché goes, we worked hard and we played hard. I’d gambled and drunk since I was a teenager. That was nothing. Moving in these new exalted circles, meeting high rollers of sport and the media as well as some, as they say, fairly colourful characters, I got carried away and I took my boozing and betting to a higher, more destructive, level. I was suddenly a very popular guy. Everybody, it seems, wants to hang out with a boxer.
Chris was a gambler, brave and ballsy. One Saturday afternoon in 1990 we went out to the races at Canterbury and he backed every winner. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and when it was time for the final race I was desperate to recoup my losses so I asked him for some advice. ‘What do you like in the last?’
‘There’s a thing called Snow Plough,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘It’s the best of a real bad lot, and the odds are terrific.’
Snow Plough it was. I put what little money I had left in my wallet on that horse and hoped for the best. Anyway, nearing the end of the race, Snow Plough hit the lead, but soon began to falter. Chris yelled, ‘Look, the tail’s wagging, it’s giving up!’ But I didn’t hear, I was hollering myself hoarse, exhorting Snow Plough home. Somehow the nag hung on, and won. I was screaming and jumping and punching the air. Chris’s tip had won me $9000.
Buoyed by my gambling successes, I gambled plenty, and when I was drinking, my defences would drop and I gambled even more.
Somehow, though often hung-over and broke, I dragged myself into the office each day, and into the boxing gym to prepare for title fights, and then perhaps after a bit of work for the council, to uni every night. Looking back, I wonder how I did it. The fact was that I had a massive amount of energy, and even at my fuzziest I knew that as well as for myself, I was doing all this for Mum and for James.
In 1994 I graduated from Law School with Honours. The night I graduated I got drunk and was arrested. A mate, he’s dead now, God bless him, said to me, ‘Stevie, you’ve earned it, go to the pub and tell the publican, who’s a great mate of mine, that I sent you and he’ll give you drinks on the house all night.’ Trouble was, I had rewarded myself for graduating by downing many drinks on the way to that particular pub. By the time I arrived and slurringly demanded my free booze I had forgotten my benefactor’s name. Understandably, the publican got nasty. I got nastier. Bouncers came running from everywhere. Punches were thrown. The police were called. I was thrown into jail until I sobered up and was charged with being drunk and violent. They reckoned when I was off the air I had trashed the police station. I was given a good behaviour bond.
In 1995 I was admitted to the bar.
That day, a reporter and camera crew from television’s Today Tonight filmed a story about me: the boxing, street-sweeping lawyer. To celebrate, I went out and got hammered.
I received a letter from Cliff Haynes, the general manager of Sydney City Council. Addressed to ‘Stephen Dack, Cleansing Unit,’ it read, ‘I was privileged to see the Today Tonight report … and the story of your life so far. May I congratulate you on your admission to the bar and your personal achievements. You are an inspiration to all those who are aware of your story and a role model for young people. You are a great example of what an individual can achieve if they set their mind to it and you reinforce to everyone that there is no substitute for hard work.’
I wonder whether Cliff would have written that letter praising me as a role model had he known what I was getting up to.
Every Friday night a bunch of us lawyers met at the Criterion, Crown or Castlereagh hotels in the city and got smashed. We’d go there under the pretext of discussing the law, but our meetings always kicked off with four schooners of beer and then we graduated to spirits. I’d be sitting there with the other legal eagles like kings among those gilt mirrors and little table gas lamps that pubs had in those days, knocking back the Jack Daniel’s, and in the morning I’d wake with a throbbing head and if I hadn’t lost my briefcase the night before I’d open it and my legal papers would be covered in drink stains.
People might be surprised to know how heavily the legal fraternity drinks. Perhaps it’s because of the tightly wound characters who become lawyers, or the dog-eat-dog aggression and ruthless questioning in the courtroom that you have to be able to cop and give. Maybe it’s because there is so much at stake, a client’s freedom as often as not, so the stakes are high. You have a win, you celebrate; you lose, you drown your sorrows. The same number of brain cells are destroyed, the hangover next day is just as deadly.
It was around this time, when alcohol activated the X factor, the addiction gene that I have inherited from my father, that I became dependent on drinking. I didn’t drink every day, or at least I didn’t get drunk every day. But two or three times a week, sometimes four, I would binge-drink myself into oblivion.
Chris Murphy and I had first met because of our shared love of boxing. A highlight of my time with Chris was when in May, 1996, we went to the United States to see the Lennox Lewis vs Ray Mercer world heavyweight title fight at Madison Square Garden, New York. Another world heavyweight champ, Evander Holyfield, whose ear would be famously chomped by Mike Tyson in a title fight the following year, was also on the card. Lewis won on points in the twelfth round, so we got our money’s worth. Another thrill was when I turned my head and sitting in the seat next to me was Eddie Futch, the legendary boxing trainer who trained Joe Frazier, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes and Trevor Berbick, all of whom beat the mighty Muhammad Ali. Eddie was eighty-five then, and had just a few years left to him.
Chris stayed at some $600-a-night hotel, I stayed at the YMCA. Once a Woolloomooloo boy, always a Woolloomooloo boy. I got up early each morning in the week we were there, and walked all over that fabulous city. My favourite part was the East Village area where there are lots of small coffee houses, like the one I went to, the Lucky Strike; nothing flash but with loads of authentic character and colour, like Latteria and the Tropicana and some of my other favourite haunts in East Sydney.
The following anecdote about Chris is typical of his style. We were talking about the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. I knew all about it because Bruce Farthing had given me chapter and verse down at the PCYC gym. Chris was intrigued and I told him that the author Norman Mailer had written a terrific book about it called The Fight. Chris went out and found that book in a bookstore, read it from cover to cover overnight and next morning at breakfast he was telling me all about the fabled stoush.
Practising the law, I was finding, did suit my combative instincts. It’s by nature an adversarial existence, just like boxing. My go in court and around the legal traps was pretty much similar to how I was on the street. I minded my own business, kept to myself, but if I was crossed I did not back down. Chris described me in an article he wrote about me in his weekly column in the Sun-Herald as an ‘in-your-face legal clerk’.
One day when I was working on a case with Chris I was standing in the food queue at the Downing Centre criminal court complex in Liverpool Street in the city, waiting to buy my fruit salad lunch, looking immaculate in my dark blue suit. A man I knew to be a crook took one look at me and decided I was a soft touch. He marched right up and, snarling ‘Scram, mate, I’m next in line,’ he shoved in front of me.
I smiled and said, ‘You’re fine, mate, go right ahead. No worries.’ I didn’t want trouble at my workplace.
Sensing he had the upper hand, the hoodlum’s bullying instinct kicked in and he escalated the animosity to another level, loudly heckling me to impress his girlfriend who had pushed in with him. Mindless stuff like, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are, in your pin-striped suit?’
‘I’m nobody, mate. Listen, I don’t want any trouble in here.’
‘Oh, you don’t want trouble, eh? You don’t want me to give you trouble. Who the fuck are you to tell me what to fuckin’ do?’
Obviously, turning the other cheek was not going to work with this dope. Now this was my kind of situation. I was in my element, back in
a Woolloomooloo face-off. I glared at him and said very softly, so only he and his girlfriend could hear, ‘Let’s go outside. You and me. Right now.’ The bloke turned white and apologised, standing aside so I could reclaim my rightful position in the queue. Like many bullies, he powdered when someone called his bluff.
Sometimes in the years since, I’ve wondered what became of that fellow. If you’re reading this, mate, I hope you’re okay and you’re not pushing guys in suits around anymore. Sometimes appearances can deceive. Where did you come from? What made you so aggressive to a total stranger when at heart you were a coward?
Usually the cases I worked on involved a defendant charged with public drunkenness, drug possession or dealing, getting into a street fight or theft. The most common question people ask me today about the law is, would I ever defend someone I knew was guilty? I answer that I would not. So I ask only if my client is innocent and if they tell me yes, then I ask them for their version of events – I don’t want to hear their life story or irrelevant information – and my sole criterion for deciding strategy is the information I am supplied with. I then learn what facts the prosecution is resting its case upon, and try to dismantle them. It is not my job to determine guilt, it’s the jury’s. Just as it is the prosecution’s role to get a defendant convicted, it is my brief to defend him and, by dismantling the prosecution case or sowing a seed of doubt in the jury’s collective mind, help them reach the conclusion that he must walk free or receive a lesser punishment. Sometimes creating a seed of doubt about a single aspect of the charge is sufficient. Everybody is entitled to be defended in court. That’s the system. I believe that it is better to see ten guilty defendants released than to convict a single innocent person. I have got clients off charges and later learned that they were guilty. So long as I can look at myself in the mirror and know that at the time I believed in their innocence, I can live with that.