Racing rogue Rod Weightman’s rough trot in prison
Disgraced harness trainer-driver Rod Weightman started to associate with serious crooks after he was disqualified on doping charges in 2004. And he soon found out such alliances can make you a jailhouse target.
Andrew Rule
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Not every family has a rogue, but every rogue has a family.
When Rod Weightman’s elderly mother had a triple heart bypass two weeks ago he reckoned he was the likely cause.
“I’m three quarters to blame for that,” says the man not long out of prison over charges linking him to a drug baron that a judge called a “new Tony Mokbel”.
When Weightman went inside, his mother would take the train from Ballarat to St Albans, then a cab to Port Phillip Prison.
When he was moved to Loddon in 2013 then Dhurringile in 2016, she would drive, often alone. No wonder he sends her flowers lately. He owes her.
Prisons are hard places not because of locked doors, barred windows and razor ribbon but because of the people in them. There are thieves, smugglers and bash artists. And there are also prisoners, many of them worse than the guards.
Weightman gets on well with people but he had his share of baggage in prison.
The disgraced harness trainer-driver started to associate with serious crooks after he was disqualified on doping charges in 2004.
Such alliances can be lethal in jail.
Publicity surrounding Weightman’s arrest in 2011 and subsequent court conviction made it clear he’d been close to Bandidos bikies, and with the “new Mokbel”, Mohammed Oueida, who was involved in a shooting war with other Lebanese crime families in Melbourne’s northwestern suburbs.
It was Oueida who lived in a huge house on acreage at Greenvale, and who had a light aircraft, a Ferrari, eight-hole golf course and resort-size pool.
It was Oueida who survived being shot by a rival Lebanese gangster outside a mosque in Coburg in April, 2017, just months after release. It was Oueida who left Australia soon after and apparently runs his Melbourne rackets from the Middle East.
When Weightman first got to prison, merely being associated with one group made him a target for rival groups: crime families with bikie affiliations.
A “turf war” shooting or firebombing on the streets of Coburg or Craigieburn one day could detonate a jailhouse attack within hours or days.
Tense times for the horseman whose name had first hit the headlines in 2004.
Police swooped on Weightman’s property at Smythes Creek on April 28 that year, looking for drugs and stolen property. What he didn’t know until they led him outside, handcuffed, was that harness stewards were also invited. One of them was holding a tray of 62 vials of blue liquid.
“That really tops off the morning,” Weightman said.
A stolen mower and cannabis found in a shed would eventually cost him $4400 in fines but the vials were the big problem.
Until that moment he was happy in the knowledge he had the best winning strike rate of any trainer-driver in the land. Now he was toast.
Five years earlier, Weightman and his father Alan had bought a broken-down old pacer, Kotare Craft, for a song. The horse had once been very good. The Weightmans thought they could bring him back as a 10-year-old.
They bathed, bandaged and massaged his three bad legs, got him swimming hard and jogging gently to build wasted muscles. The old horse bloomed.
All the Weightman family and friends backed him at his comeback start.
He broke a track record at Horsham, winning by 10 lengths. Then he won at Moonee Valley in a promotional race for Blue Ribbon Day, a police public relations exercise.
Mounted officers escorted Kotare Craft back to scale.
The then chief commissioner, Neil Comrie, presented the trophy rug with the blue and white check ribbon on it.
Weightman’s mum was proud of him and he was proud of the rug: instead of tossing it in the stable with the rest, he kept it in a cupboard at home. Which is where the police found it when they searched the house — and left it draped over the end of his bed.
Cop humour that still makes Weightman laugh.
For three years after Kotare Craft’s brilliant comeback, Weightman perfected the knack of rejuvenating old horses that had lost form.
In 2003 he heard of a horse chiropractor selling what was later dubbed “blue magic”, an injectable drug that relaxes muscles and airways and helps horses breathe.
Weightman added “the blue” to his father’s old-time remedies for the usual ailments that afflict older horses: skeletal strains and pains and exercise-induced bleeding from the lungs. Whatever it was that he was doing, it worked.
And as he started to win more races with patched-up horses, backslappers gave him better horses to choose from.
His strike rate went from a commendable 20 per cent to an eye-catching 35 per cent to a stratospheric 45 per cent. It wasn’t that he won, it was that he won so often.
It all ended when he was arrested (for the police charges) then disqualified for five years for seven positive swabs to propantheline bromide, the active ingredient in what the media dubbed “blue magic”.
Outed from every racetrack and licensed racing stable, unable to make a living the only way he knew, he should have hit hard times. He didn’t seem to.
If asked, he would explain he’d sold his property, truck and harness equipment.
Missing the camaraderie of the track, he bought a Harley and started hanging out with outlaw bikies. He became the Ballarat connection for Muhammad Oueida’s drug distribution network, which police watched for 15 months before striking.
Weightman had gone from frying pan to fire.
When transferred to Dhurringile prison farm, he was chosen alongside mild-mannered “society murderer” Matthew Wales to mentor young prisoners. He was also recruited by Merrigum football club as a part-time trainer.
Now, 14 months after leaving jail, he is settled on a rural property with his partner, Samantha. He cannot handle any horses registered to race, but a Victorian Racing Tribunal hearing last Thursday has allowed him to take the first step back towards the only trade he knows.
He was granted the hearing because the first thing he did when he left jail was to face up to unfinished business with harness racing stewards.
Back in 2008, he’d been caught sending illicit drugs to a Perth trainer, and subsequently failed to appear at an inquiry into the offence — and so was automatically “warned off” every racetrack indefinitely.
A painstaking submission on Thursday by Harness Racing Victoria’s head of integrity, former detective Brent Fisher, outlined everything Weightman has done wrong — and done right, in that he has voluntarily urged current trainers not to pull the wrong rein like he did.
Fisher ended by recommending Weightman be given a seven-year disqualification backdated to 2008, the date of the offence. It means he can feed and water registered horses again, though not as a trainer.
Brent Fisher knows Weightman’s chequered past. He and his stewards hope that at the age of 54, the talented rogue has turned a corner while preparing show horses and supplying quiet hacks for disabled riders.
Weightman has somehow managed to support Kotare Craft, the old horse he rescued in 1999. Kotare is out in the paddock, still going strong at 32 years old. Weightman bought him a new winter rug last month.
Can a man that does that be all bad? Not according to his dear old mum.
Brent Fisher’s staff will wait and see.
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