Podcast companion: Passion, powder and pills make a fine yarn

Names have been erased to protect the guilty. So you’ll have to guess which former sportsman police smuggled into St Kilda Rd police station a decade ago. NEW ANDREW RULE PODCAST - LISTEN NOW. 

Andrew Rule and Jon Anderson talk in this week's podcast.

Names have been erased to protect the guilty. So you’ll have to guess which former sportsman it was that the detectives smuggled in through a back entrance leading from the underground car park at St Kilda Rd police station one day a decade ago.

Detectives would later deny it with a straight face because they maintained the white lie of “plausible deniability” by making sure the sporting figure didn’t get near the drug squad’s interview rooms and was not seen by anyone except a couple of people already in on the secret.

The key players deliberately avoided the official routine of escorting their big fish past bored and gossip-prone security guards at the front entrance.

A household name with an appointment at the drug squad would turn into a rumour within the hour, and be in the Herald Sun next morning.

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It was, to use one investigator’s sardonic line, time for “a cup of a tea and a Teddy Bear biscuit”. Translation: time to warn the famous ex-sportsman he had tripped up.

The bad news was he had randomly come under surveillance as part of an investigation into a cocaine “dealer to the stars” supplying a conga line of television and sporting people.

It seemed that his “pillow talk” with a young woman whom detectives dubbed “the hairdresser” strayed from sweet nothings to discussion of buying the stuff that kept them lean, lively and up late at night. The young woman — not the sportsman’s long-suffering wife — was no hairdresser, although she supported a few.

The detectives’ message was sugar-coated but clear: you are not a target. Yet. But you soon will be if you don’t pull your head in.

The quantities of cocaine our hero was handling suggested one of two things to the cops: either he was a generous host and crazy for the stuff or he was trafficking on the side to his showbiz friends.

Police did not set out to snare the ex-sportsmen and his high-profile mates, but wanted to use them to set a trap for the real target, the celebrity dealer.

It was, of course, the era when Ben Cousins and other Eagles were coming to notice, victims of the 2006 West Coast premiership party that never ended. The joke went then that once upon a time players just wanted to win “Charlie” (as in the Charles Brownlow Medal), “but now they want to snort it”.

Former AFL player Ben Cousins with his lawyer Michael Tudori in 2012.

The tastes of elite players and jockeys had extended beyond French champagne and Crown lager well before Cousins’ fall.

Former star criminal lawyer Andrew Fraser mixed in those circles in the days before he was jailed for conspiring to import cocaine. His reputation opened certain doors back then.

Fraser would recall the night he was at “a Melbourne hotel favoured by AFL footballers and during the evening I was invited upstairs for a line of cocaine. I stepped into the room to find three star footballers with something in common: they were all premiership players ... and they were all snorting white powder”.

Sport in general, football in particular, was never innocent. But in the era before smartphones made every punter and passer-by into a potential reporter or spy, and when a tame media turned a blind eye, it was easier to keep the curtains closed on the less savoury aspects of sporting “culture”.

But the self-destruction and subsequent exposure of the Cousins West Coast cohort shone light into a dark corner. The first chink appeared in early 2007 with the story that an Eagles player — later named as Chad Fletcher — had “flatlined” in a Las Vegas hospital after a football trip drug mishap late the previous year.

The club line was that Fletcher had suffered an allergic reaction to a travel inoculation. It’s possible his grandmother believed that for a while, but no one else did. By the time Fletcher got himself arrested snorting a white powder in a Kings Cross toilet and had derailed his career, surely even Grandma realised he was a naughty boy. But he wasn’t Robinson Crusoe.

Tales about the now pathetic Ben Cousins rank with the downfall of his one-time manager Ricky Nixon. None of the stories is good, but one at least shows Cousins to be a more kindly spirit than the inner circle of other ex-players who seem to share most of Nixon’s vices.

Late at night in December 2006, a passing driver rescued a dazed, confused and shivering Cousins from a South Melbourne street and drove him a few blocks to make he wouldn’t be run over. Cousins could hardly talk (he was taken into police custody later that night) but he mumbled his thanks and tried to give the good Samaritan $50.

Somewhere under the drug-addled exterior, the brilliant player and flawed person who put the “Charlie” into the Brownlow was still a generous soul.

That’s more than can be said for two instantly-recognisable former sportsmen sometimes seen on the Mornington Peninsula. The well-known pair spent a few hours drinking at a Flinders hotel then got up to leave. When they couldn’t find a cab, they had no hesitation asking a young local to give them a lift to a nearby property.

The youth was eager to help his “heroes”. But after they completely ignored him on the short journey, he changed his mind.

He later told friends the arrogant pair got out with barely a word and didn’t even offer the price of a taxi fare. Interestingly, that story has gained momentum in the last week or so.

ONE well-liked household name wasn’t at Flinders with the other two. He is more forgetful than arrogant, as revealed some years ago when he persuaded a younger woman it would be a good idea to go back to his house.

The genial host was more an old-fashioned player and so the visitor was most likely offered cold beer than hot drugs. She also got a hands-on tour of the master bedroom, she later confided to a friend.

At the conclusion of the tour, she left. But imagine the dismay of her absent-minded love rat when he spotted a pair of earrings on the bedside table and could not recall if they were his visitor’s, or if they belonged to his temporarily absent wife.

There was nothing for it but to hide the earrings and make a discreet phone call to establish their provenance, as art dealers put it.

All this, of course, pales into nothing compared with the one-time Crows star taking a fishing tackle box on a team trip. The little square compartments inside it didn’t have hooks and sinkers, just heaps of brightly coloured pills.

Then there’s the “love boat” that used to cruise Port Phillip loaded with hard-partying guests who paid plenty per head to be sure that whatever happened on board stayed on board.

All interesting stories but not ones you’ll hear on television or radio “just at the minute,” as Bob Davis used to say.

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