Andrew Rule: Inside Bill Waterhouse’s ‘appalling’ scandals
Liar, cheat and master manipulator — bookmaker Bill Waterhouse was all that, and more. Now that “Big Bill” is dead, his full involvement in Australian racing’s most appalling scandals can finally be revealed.
Andrew Rule
Don't miss out on the headlines from Andrew Rule. Followed categories will be added to My News.
When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Australia was under threat, William Stanley Waterhouse was a strapping young man whose sharp intelligence was matched only by his instinct for self-preservation. The odds that he would enlist were 1000-1 and drifting.
Bill Waterhouse came from a line of smugglers, cockfight promoters, gamblers and sly groggers. For him, dodging military service came as naturally as robbing widows and orphans. War was not for fighting, it was for black market profiteering. Patriotism was for mugs.
Waterhouse was able to claim he had to run a farm bought expressly so he could claim an occupation classified as an “essential service”. But he left nothing to chance, studying medicine (automatically exempt) then taking up law as the war ended.
It was an early insight into how a liar and cheat manipulated others for profit all his life.
Waterhouse practised briefly as a barrister until his older brother, Charles, died at 39, leaving a widow and four children — the ones he would later rob of their inheritance, igniting a legal fight that split the family in the 1980s.
When it came to criminal behaviour, “Big Bill” wasn’t choosy: as a bookmaker and punter he was a race fixer who paid off trainers, jockeys and nobblers; as a developer and hotelier he bribed or blackmailed police and politicians. He smuggled currency to secret offshore bank accounts, ran an illegal casino and invested in wildlife and drug smuggling.
Apart from assuming control of brother Charles’ deceased estate, he took over his bookmaker stand as well, a cash business so lucrative the young barrister didn’t return to court except as defendant or plaintiff.
Waterhouse, who died last week at 97, broke many laws and most moral codes in a life on the make in a city on the take. He was involved in the three most appalling scandals in Australian racing history. The full stories can now be told, but they are not the only ones.
BIG PHILOU’S AGONISING DEATH
Bart Cummings died in 2015 hating Waterhouse. Cummings, like his contemporary T.J. “Tommy” Smith, was not naive, sentimental or overly angelic. But he couldn’t forget, let alone forgive, the “nobbling” of his great stayer Big Philou before the 1969 Melbourne Cup.
Big Philou started scouring uncontrollably less than an hour before the Cup, twisting in agony and exploding with diarrhoea. He was scratched 39 minutes before the race he could and should have won.
A strapper that Cummings had recently sacked was the prime suspect. His name was Les Lewis. He had telephoned Waterhouse’s Sydney office that month, and had apparently flown to Sydney to pick up cash.
He bolted to New Zealand, was extradited for questioning but refused to put himself in danger by talking.
On his death bed in 1997, he confessed, no longer afraid of Waterhouse’s pet gunman, the deadly Bertie Kidd.
The nobbling of Big Philou, distressing for the horse and its connections, robbed punters of “Cups double” payouts. Big Philou had won the Caulfield Cup and had been heavily backed to win the double. Bookies stood to lose staggering sums. Waterhouse had form: he had paid two notorious “fence jumpers” to nobble favourites in Sydney for years.
The truth was never quite proven, so Waterhouse was able to stare down the accusations with the help of a few tame reporters. But Big Philou’s rider, Roy Higgins, was savage in denouncing the nobbling, pointing out that if the drug had taken effect a little later, the horse could have collapsed in the run and brought down half the field, killing horses and riders.
“You got these evil human beings out there that would do that to a dumb animal, just for an illegal dollar,” Higgins said. Whoever did it, he said, “I’d spit on him”.
But Cummings got his revenge. It was in 1974, when he was training the magnificent mare Leilani.
Waterhouse, arrogantly assuming the Big Philou outrage was history, asked Cummings for any inside information. Cummings, deadpan, assured him Leilani wasn’t fit and could not win. Waterhouse rushed to exploit the “tip”, luring a gold rush of punters to back Leilani. He filled his bag with “mug” money.
Leilani won easily. Waterhouse approached Cummings, quivering with rage and hissed: “What was that for?”
Cummings answered: “That was for Big Philou.”
We know this is true because the bookmaker’s youngest son remembers it clearly. His name is David Waterhouse and he did not speak to his father for 27 years for good reasons.
GEORGE BROWN’S UNSOLVED MURDER
The strongest reason of all is the unsolved torture and murder of a battling Sydney horse trainer, George Brown, in early 1984. The killers twisted Brown’s left arm until it was wrenched from its socket and the bone snapped. His right arm was shattered above the elbow with an iron bar.
Both legs were broken above the knee. Death was from a caved-in skull. Then they burned his broken body in his car beside a freeway north of Sydney. The sort of nightmare crime we associate with Mexico or Colombia.
George Brown was a former jumping jockey who loved horses. But in the new year of 1984, friends and family saw his easygoing character change. He was under pressure.
Brown had been coerced into pulling the sort of “ring-ins” that would become notorious later that year. It seems he did one or two under duress then could not extricate himself.
In late March 1984, he took a slow filly named Risley to Doomben races in Brisbane.
The accepted version of events is that Brown refused to go through with the ring-in.
Apart from anything else, the substitute horse he had been told to use was the wrong gender.
The plan had depended on Risley being inspected by a steward on arrival in Brisbane well before the race. But as starting time got closer the steward had still not checked Risley. Brown feared that the later the stewards saw the filly, the more likely it was they would spot the gelding saddled to run under her name.
Brown’s nerve cracked and he saddled the real Risley to run. She ran second last after being backed in from 14-1 to 4-1 at Wollongong, and from 12-1 to 8-1 at city meetings, an interstate plunge that completely ignored her weak form and was inexplicable unless the backers thought the race was fixed.
Brown returned to Sydney a frightened man. He was killed a week later.
INFAMOUS FINE COTTON AFFAIR
Bill had been up to his neck in the third scandal attached to the Waterhouse name, the Fine Cotton affair of August 1984.
The scam depended on a quality galloper running in the name of the inferior Fine Cotton at Eagle Farm.
The problem was that the original choice as ring-in, Dashing Solitaire, which looked like the plodder Fine Cotton, had been hurt in a paddock accident.
So another horse, Bold Personality, was swung in at the last minute. It looked nothing like Fine Cotton.
This was, of course, why the people handling the horses that day were forced to dye Bold Personality in a clumsy attempt to make it look more like Fine Cotton.
They knew it wouldn’t work. But when they tried to tell the scam’s Sydney backers that, they were told to shut up if they didn’t want to end up “like George Brown”.
The inevitable debacle led to Bill Waterhouse and his son Robbie being “warned off” indefinitely for acting with “prior knowledge” of the ring-in.
It was generous of the authorities to let them back into racing some 17 years later.
THE QUESTIONS STILL REMAINING OVER SCANDALS
Questions over George Brown’s murder remain unanswered.
One well-informed family member maintains the actual hired “heavy” was a standover man we will call “Tongan Tommy”, helped by up to three of his countrymen.
Bill Waterhouse was a longstanding friend of the then King of Tonga, which was why he became Consul-General for the tiny island nation in the 1970s.
Apart from any social cachet, this gave Waterhouse diplomatic immunity.
He had consular number plates for his car and, more importantly, could use diplomat pouches on international flights.
Arthur Harris, a form analyst who worked for Waterhouse for some 20 years before the 1984 scandals, knows the family as well as anyone.
He points out that for a long time Bill Waterhouse used a colourful priest, Father Edward O’Dwyer, named in the Fine Cotton inquiry for placing large bets for a “friend” — meaning Waterhouse.
O’Dwyer died in 2016 and so cannot refute accusations that he exploited the former immunity of priests from Customs searches to carry huge amounts of black cash out of Australia to be banked secretly on Bill’s behalf.
When the priest lost his immunity from searches, Harris says, Waterhouse switched to using Tongan diplomat pouches.
The Tongan connection had other advantages, according to sources familiar with international bird-smuggling rackets. Waterhouse sent a racing identity and convicted criminal, Gabe Hayek, to Papua New Guinea in the 1980s to obtain birds of paradise.
The live birds, according to a Queensland exotic bird breeder and a former federal police investigator, were flown to Tonga then sold on at huge profit to a Qatari oil sheik with reputedly the world’s largest collection of rare birds.
David Waterhouse, Bill’s estranged son, did not speak to his father for 27 years after giving evidence against him and older brother Robbie in the Fine Cotton inquiries.
David recalls his father sending corrupt police chief Bill Allen to his illegal casino in Rockwall Crescent, Potts Point, to pick up weekly cash bribes for the then premier, Neville Wran. Sometimes young David would be sent on the errand.
But he realised he was as expendable as everyone else on a trip to Tonga in 1980, when Bill asked him to “mind” an illegal marijuana crop there.
“I said to him: ‘So you’re a common criminal drug dealer’ and flew home next morning,” David Waterhouse recalled this week.
He won’t be attending his father’s funeral, which is to be held just before Christmas.
“No one loved Bill,” is David’s summary. “Good riddance.”