by Larry Writer
In the most heartbreaking case I ever handled, the defendant was a young man who lived four doors down the street from me in my Woolloomooloo days. I left the neighbourhood, he didn’t, and his circumstances trapped him and brought him down. His case was typical of what can happen in Woolloomooloo. My friend was a young single father who, after a big drinking session at the pub, went home to put his young son to bed. The boy drifted off, only to be woken soon after by drunken shouting in the street below his bedroom window. A group of homeless men who couldn’t get a bed at the Matthew Talbot Hostel were drinking and carousing. The lad’s father, his anger fuelled by his drinking, went down to tell the men to shut up. A fight broke out. A homeless man was stabbed and died. My neighbour was arrested and charged with murder. I managed to have the charge reduced to manslaughter. Nevertheless he served a prison term. Life for him will never be the same.
When I was first out on my own I was asked to give a lecture to federal police recruits on a defence lawyer’s point of view. These guys were suspicious of criminal defence lawyers like me, taking the position that they work hard to catch a crook and I set him free on some trumped-up technicality. They sat there in the room, arms folded, their body language antagonistic. I wondered how I was going to get through to them. In time, I said, with an edge to my voice, ‘Okay, everyone, hands on the table. No more crossed arms. I want this to be a co-operative exercise.’ Dismantling their aggressive body language opened the way to a fruitful discussion. I think they saw where I was coming from and that I was an important part of the legal process. I gave them the sport analogy: I don’t hate you, I am simply your opponent, just doing what I have to do to win for my client, and doing it within the rules. It’s nothing personal. It’s the system.
In early 2007 I defended the Hells Angel bikie Christopher Hudson on a car-stealing charge. He was a big, strong, good-looking kid who not long before had been shot at point blank range in a Finks vs Hells Angels battle at a kick-boxing match at the Royal Pines resort on the Gold Coast. We hit it off and I believed his version of events over the car theft matter. I got him off on a technicality, and he was even awarded costs of $12,000. He then went to Melbourne and on 18 June that same year, while under the effects of ice (crystal methamphetamine), alcohol and steroids, Chris shot dead a man who was trying to stop him assaulting a woman on the corner of William Street and Flinders Lane, and he wounded another as well as the woman, who was his girlfriend. He was arrested.
I visited Huddo in jail a few times. I had to have a full body search each time. He wrote me a letter asking me to appear for him, but I turned him down. For murder and wounding he was sentenced to thirty-five years in jail. If I had not got Hudson off the car-stealing charge, the chances are that with his record he would have been in prison on 18 June and that that good samaritan, a 43-year-old lawyer and devoted father and husband, would still be alive. I am sad at what happened, but I couldn’t have known what Hudson would do in the future when I did my best for him on the car theft matter. My job was to get him off that charge based on the information at my disposal and that’s what I did.
Still, he wrote a beautiful letter thanking me for all I’d done and assuring me he was my friend. I may be the only person on earth to think this, but I believe Christopher Hudson has the potential to be rehabilitated. There’s a quality somewhere there.
I can only take each case on its merits and be true to myself, the law and my client. If I do all that, I sleep easy.
I’ve helped a lot of innocent men and women walk free from the courtroom. It’s a fact that many people who are charged with a crime should never have been. Often they find themselves facing a fine or jail because they have been wrongly implicated or accused. The majority of police are straight, but there are some who have no problem in bending the rules or the evidence to see someone convicted. I’ve never made much money from the law. This is because most of the people I defend are broke. I have represented a number of these pro bono, for free. Like when I slip a homeless person a $50 note, this is my way of giving back to the more helpless members of our community.
All that said, many defence lawyers have a bad reputation, and some of them have earned it. Nor is the prosecution always blameless. In trying to win a conviction, a prosecutor might resort to dirty tactics: a defendant might be verballed, false evidence might be planted, and an innocent person might be put in jail. For a defence lawyer who is up against these shenanigans, it’s a bit like going into the boxing ring with an opponent who has a horseshoe hidden in his glove.
An Englishman came to me with what seemed a most unlikely story. He had been arrested and charged with importing a large quantity of ecstasy in a surf ski. He told me he had been in a Sydney pub and another drinker mentioned that it was his wife’s anniversary soon but he and she would be off travelling around Australia on the big day. The drinker had bought a surf ski overseas as an anniversary present for his wife and he was wondering if the Englishman could pick it up when it arrived at the airport and hang on to it until he returned from holidays and could present it to his lucky wife. The Englishman told me that without thinking twice he said he’d be happy to. Of course when he went to collect the surfboard, which the authorities had come to learn was stuffed with drugs, he was arrested.
The Englishman’s story, at first, sounded unlikely. For instance, he had no contact details for his drinking mate, and in this day and age it is rare for someone to go to such trouble for someone they’ve just met. And, hello! A surf ski to be picked up at an airport. Alarm bells should have rung. Would have rung, for most people. Not so my client. I agreed to defend him. The truth was, I believed him. There was something about the way he told me his sorry tale that made me think he couldn’t be making it up.
My job, as his solicitor, was to hire a barrister to defend him in court. The barrister, it turned out after some weeks incurring costs representing his client, did not believe the Englishman and tried to convince him to plead guilty to a lesser charge. ‘You’ll get a couple of years, whereas if you defend this you could be in for ten or twelve.’
The Englishman bridled at the suggestion. ‘ The reason I told Mr Dack that I’m innocent is because I am. I’m not serving any time at all because I’ve done nothing wrong. You’ll run my case and you’ll run it hard. If I smell that you’re running dead on me, I won’t pay you a cent and I’ll hire another barrister.’
This barrister, I suspect, was ‘rubber-hosing’, which means running up a big bill over weeks and months making your client believe you are doing everything to help him, but really doing little. The barrister tried to convince the client to cop to a lesser charge and horse-trade a shorter sentence. The Englishman said he wanted no part of this, and good on him.
I felt responsible, so I encouraged him to do what he threatened. I found him another barrister, and this man, who is a fine professional, got the Englishman off, and rightly so.
I acted for a kid from the ’Loo named Luke, a good boy who got mixed up with the wrong crowd. When he was implicated in an armed robbery and charged with conspiracy to murder (he was carrying a toy gun), his mother, a lovely lady, told James, and James asked me to help. Luke was looking down the barrel at sixteen years in jail. I got him a much lighter sentence, and he deserved it.
Another time I represented one of four teenagers who were charged with attacking a man in the street, purportedly not knowing he was carrying a baby in a pouch on his stomach. They were out looking for a bloke who had stolen a girlfriend’s phone at a pub in Pagewood. They were in a car with the girl trawling for the culprit. They saw a man walking on the footpath. They asked her, ‘Is that him?’ She said it was not. They said, ‘Fuck it, let’s get him anyway,’ and they stopped the car and set upon the innocent man, raining punches and kicks on him. The baby he was carrying received a fractured skull. My client was there but played no part in the attack. I got him off. The other three received custodial sentences. The Crown appealed, and I cross-appealed. The original verdict st
ood. Today that young man is leading an exemplary life.
People ask me how I can bring myself to defend outlaw motorcycle gang members. ‘Easy,’ I say, ‘they’re human beings and every human being is entitled to be defended.’
To me a Hells Angel bikie is no different to any other person walking down the street. They do bad things – but tell me who doesn’t from time to time. Often alcohol is a factor, and I can relate to that. And sometimes they are accused of doing things they haven’t done. That’s where I come in. I’m not trying to talk it up or talk it down – that’s what it is. Just as the actions of a small number of rugby league players have tarnished the entire code in some people’s eyes, so, too, the actions of a small number of bikies have given the entire tribe a bad name.
One of my more memorable cases was when I represented Jeff Harding, the champion boxer who had given me such a pasting in my second amateur fight and who went on to become world champ. He had been charged after he drove through a red light and he’d had a little more to drink than he should have and then roughed up the police who pulled him over. I didn’t act for him initially but I handled his appeal over the severity of the sentence he had received. The judge said to me in court, ‘Are you giving this man the path of direction?’ which was his way of hinting to me that he regarded Jeff’s offence so dimly that if Jeff continued with his appeal and lost, the judge would very likely exercise his power to increase the sentence. I told Jeff that this was how I was interpreting the judge’s words and Jeff said, ‘I couldn’t give a stuff. The appeal goes ahead. Just get up there and do your best for me.’ I did. I argued as hard as I could for Jeff and at the end the judge didn’t increase the sentence. He didn’t decrease it either. He left it exactly as it stood.
Jeff Harding was another portent of what I would become. He let alcohol rule him. Jeff had trouble coming to terms with life after retiring from a sport at which he had excelled. Nothing he ever did after his retirement gave him the fame or the satisfaction that boxing did when he was winning world titles and having momentous battles with the English champion Dennis Andries.
I ran into Jeff around the traps, and represented him when he got into trouble. He was a nice man. It was the booze, always the booze, that derailed him. There was a time when he’d walk into bars around Sydney and proclaim to everybody who he was and start telling the story of some famous bout. He’d tell the tale so well that his audience hung on every word. But at the end of every round he’d refuse to continue with his saga until someone bought him another beer. He’d get twelve free beers for recounting blow-by-blow descriptions of the whole twelve-round fight, then he’d make his apologies and move on to another pub and another audience, another twelve rounds and another twelve free beers.
After he’d been involved in a series of alcohol-fuelled assaults, I fronted Jeff and said, ‘Sunshine, if you get into alcohol-related trouble again I won’t be able to act for you. I can’t stand by and help you kill yourself, which is exactly what I’m doing by keeping you out of prison. I’m telling you this as a friend and as a lawyer.’
I was expecting him to give me a hug and say, ‘I’m sorry, Stevie. I’ll change my ways.’ But he didn’t.
Instead he said – no, he yelled, ‘You prick! Who are you to give me advice? You’re facing charges yourself!’ And Jeff, I’m ashamed to say, had a point. By this time, the late 1990s, I was well and truly off the rails myself. Recently I’d got drunk and fought with a bouncer or three at the Clovelly Hotel and been charged with assault. More about that in a later chapter.
After a few minutes when it looked like an unsanctioned fight was going to erupt between us, Jeff calmed down and we shook hands and parted friends. ‘You’re dead right, Stevie. I’m going to stay out of trouble and not give all the bums out there a chance to laugh at me.’
I said, ‘Jeff, I hope you’re right.’
The Hitman stayed off the alcohol and out of strife for eight months, then my phone rang. ‘Stevie, how are you?’
‘Sunshine, good to hear your voice. How have you been, mate? Everything good? Want to go for a cup of tea?’
‘Can’t, mate, something’s happened.’ The booze had claimed Jeff again … Of course, I defended him.
Today, after nearly twenty years – the first seven as Chris Murphy’s legal clerk and the balance, after 1996, as a solicitor and barrister with my own firm, Stephen Dack & Associates, in Elizabeth Street, Sydney – I am getting tired of practising law. The constant cases of man’s inhumanity to man are beginning to seriously depress me. Some days I wake up longing to hear some good news in the day ahead and I know I’m going to be disappointed. Also, my naïve sense of fair play and my refusal to do the dirty on anyone I have represented in my legal career have cost me money and clients. I’ve had clients beg me to help them and then when I’ve successfully defended them they’ve gone missing when it came time to pay my bill. Also, lawyers I considered to be my friends have stolen my clients. You know who you are. Maybe it’s time to try something new. Right now, in March, 2009, I’m thinking hard about what the future holds for me.
But, can I tell you, I’m lucky to be alive to have that decision to make. In 1997 I was well and truly in the grip of alcohol and stumbling down the same path as the homeless alcoholics I’d befriended on my street-sweeping run. Drinking was seriously affecting my health and my career. My whole life. I had girlfriends, and when sober I was a charming fellow who was good fun to be around, but inevitably when I binge-drank – which was three or four times a week by then – I showed another, uglier side, and became a man who was angry, abusive, violent and hopelessly irresponsible. Just like my old man. If a girl had any sense she ran a mile. Most of them were smart girls indeed. Some were not, or they just loved me too much to see the danger signs, and they paid the price.
[STEPHEN]
gloves off
After losing my third shot at an Australian amateur boxing title in 1990, I didn’t fight again, except in the odd exhibition, for six years. During that time I pursued my career in the law, and when I climbed into the ring for the last time, I did so as a pro. I had agreed to give my purse to cancer research, in memory of my mother. I wanted to close the door forever on boxing by bleeding for a good cause. The six by three-minute round bout, which was held on 20 January 1996, was with a 23-year-old from Penrith and it was on the undercard of Kostya Tszyu’s title fight against Hugo Pineda at Parramatta Stadium.
This was supposed to be a gift fight for me, an easy swansong. It turned out to be one of the toughest fights of my life. I was a month short of thirty-one, rusty as hell, and my increasingly heavy drinking guaranteed that I wasn’t the fighter I had been in my amateur days. But as always, I’d trained hard, got very fit, and sharpened my technique sparring with top fighters Nader Hamdan and ‘Digger’ Rowsell, brother of Justin. When I signed on to fight I was told the Penrith bloke I’d be up against, whom Johnny Lewis had signed for the bout, was having his first pro fight. As was the case with Goran Midic in the Melbourne fight all those years ago, the information was not strictly correct. This was my opponent’s debut pro boxing match, but he’d had twenty-seven professional kick-boxing bouts and won twenty-four of them. He was young, hard, fit and mean. Just as I was stepping into the ring I heard the ring announcer, Peter Peters, declare, ‘If Dack thinks he’s in for an easy night, he’s got another think coming.’ Peters was on the money.
All that day it had been a scorcher, the mercury hovering around 38 degrees. Then right before my bout a mighty southerly buster hit Parramatta. The temperature plunged to 25 degrees, the wind howled and the rain fell. As the ref gave us our pre-fight instructions I looked down into the front rows of the big crowd. I saw a sprinkling of celebrities and rugby league players, I saw Kerry Packer and John Singleton, Chris Murphy, and of course James, my biggest fan. All through the fight I could hear him yelling, exhorting me on.
I can still hear James’s voice ringing out, louder than everyone else’s, ‘You’re killing him!
Finish him off!’ This is when I was getting whacked from pillar to post. Later, on a video of the fight, I heard announcer Peter Peters say, ‘Gee, listen to Steve Dack’s brother James! I don’t think he’s watching the same fight I am!’ James was trying to encourage me even though I knew he was talking rubbish. If a bloke has hit me with a good shot I know it’s a good shot! But I loved James for his support and enthusiasm. He got so emotional when I was fighting and so upset my opponent’s mates that sometimes he had to be pulled away from ringside for his own safety.
My opponent was really good. From the opening bell it was a war. I built an early points lead, but as the fight went on, I grew weaker while he got stronger. He kept coming at me. In the last round we went toe to toe. I’d hit him with my best punch and he’d hit me with his. The crowd was on its feet. James was screaming himself hoarse. The other bloke and I were both out on our feet, flailing away at each other. When the final bell rang, as boxers do, we embraced and thanked each other for the fight. The referee called us to the centre of the ring. We stood either side of him. He raised my hand in victory. I didn’t look like a winner. My nose was spread all over my face and my eyes had been smashed closed. I was bleeding from the mouth. It was time to retire, which is what I immediately did.
Boxing took me around the world, taught me about diet and fitness, gave me memories that will stay with me always. When I was at my lowest ebb in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I would wake up sick as a dog from drinking, caked in vomit, my wallet gone, and still feel positive about myself because I had been a boxer. I’m proud of what I achieved in the ring. I fought for the Australian title three times. I was New South Wales champion a number of times. I fought overseas and won a gold medal. But I can’t say how good I was, all I can say is that much more often than not, I was the victor. I learned in my fighting years that the higher I went up the ladder the more difficult it would be to win because there were people just as hungry, if not hungrier, than me; people just as talented, if not more talented, than me. I was a realist. There is always someone who is better than you. My ego was always in check. I was never one to say, ‘He got me with a lucky punch. I’ll beat him next time.’ If someone clobbered me in the ring I gave him full credit. He deserved that. I know James is proud of me, because he has photos of me in my boxing days on his wall at his home, and has kept all my press clippings. My mother would have been proud of me if she’d seen me fight. Every fight I fought, I fought for her. Even my father – I think even he might have been impressed and given me a hug and said, ‘Well, done, Sunshine.’