Andrew Fraser’s $1000-a-day coke habit left him vulnerable

Andrew Fraser looked in the mirror one morning, admitted he had a coke problem and promised to quit. He kept the promise until lunch time.

Doing the wrong thing harmed Andrew Fraser’s career as a crime lawyer but he believes that doing the right thing put him behind bars.

Fraser’s exploding cocaine use in the late 1990s cost him clients, who were wary because he was breaking the crooks’ golden rule: “Don’t get high on your own supply.”

In fact, Fraser’s longtime client and best underworld contact, Lewis Moran, warned him that using drugs would be his undoing, something the cagey old crook feared for his own son Jason Moran and stepson Mark.

“The boys are out of control,” Moran senior told Fraser. “It will be the death of us all.” Which it was for him and his two sons, as all three were killed in the underworld war that Jason and Mark Moran had ignited by shooting Carl Williams in the belly in 1999, in an argument over drug dealing.

Fraser took the point and vowed to give up the white powder that had taken over his life since his first “taste” in 1985.

Lewis Moran warned Fraser that using drugs would be his undoing.

“I looked in the mirror one morning and admitted it to myself. ‘You’ve got a habit’ I told myself, and decided to give itup then and there.

“I kept that promise right up until lunch time,” he says in a series of revealing podcast interviews for the Herald Sun, recalling the hold the drug had over him.

Apart from the damage to his reputation, his law practice and his family life, Fraser’s $1000 a day cocaine habit made him vulnerable because it gave corrupt police something to threaten him with.

But that did not happen until he became a threat to a corrupt network of Drug Squad police under the smart but sinister Det.Sen. Sgt. Wayne Strawhorn.

“I started to hear the same story from different sources,” says Fraser. “Crooks, clients and lawyers were all telling me that Strawhorn’s crew was running red hot.”

Fraser’s sources suggested that rogue detectives were getting precursor chemicals wholesale from a legitimate source under the cover of an ongoing police sting operation.

They would then take the products to known amphetamine “cooks” and offer them the chemicals on the basis that half the finished “speed” would be handed over as payment. The sting worked well — apart from the fact, as it turned out, that bent police sold much if not most of the drug to street dealers.

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But the corrupt police were not satisfied with preying on criminals to sell drugs for vast profits. They also wanted to make enough arrests to hose down suspicion and to assure successful police careers.

“The story I kept hearing was that the coppers would take their half of the speed one day, then come back the next day before the cook had got rid of the other half and arrest them in possession,” Fraser said.

Despite his own recreational drug use and increasingly reckless disregard for the law and professional ethics and etiquette, Fraser was angered by Strawhorn’s brazen criminal behaviour.

He had a string of clients and contacts who told him police had “robbed them, flogged them — and then arrested them as well.”

Fraser did not believe he could speak safely to anyone in the state police force but decided to contact the National Crime Authority, as it then was.

“A policeman I knew assured me I could trust a particular guy in the NCA,” Fraser said. “He was wrong. The person I contacted called Strawhorn the same day and told him ‘Fraser is onto you’.”

And so, Fraser says, his decision to blow the whistle on corrupt state police blew up in his face.

Ex drug cop Wayne Strawhorn outside the Supreme Court.

“From that moment I was in big trouble.”

As Fraser sees it, Strawhorn’s sinister influence over the drug squad immediately swung its resources against him to neutralise the threat he posed.

In one outlandish escapade, he claims, rogue police broke into Jason Moran’s house to retrieve 5000 ecstasy pills they had earlier planted to “load him up”.

Now that the rogue police wanted to concentrate on nailing Moran’s lawyer rather than the Morans, they apparently wanted the pills as potential ammunition in the dirty war that ended in Fraser’s arrest in 1999.

In the end, Strawhorn’s crew didn’t need the ecstasy pills to be planted in their target’s possession as “throwaways”. Fraser did their work for them. He was recorded in several compromising conversations, notably giving advice to a would-be cocaine smuggler planning to import 5kg of the drug.

It was a serious crime and a terrible lapse of judgment that would eventually condemn him not just to disgrace but to more than five years in jail from 2001 to 2006.

The first thing Fraser did when he was arrested was to vow again to give up drugs. This time he did. It couldn’t save his career or his reputation — but it undoubtedly saved his life.