Gangland lawyer Andrew Fraser faced death as he lived — on his own terms

Underneath the bluster, bulldust and bellowing laugh, the late Andrew Fraser was brave and stoic, Andrew Rule writes.

Andrew Fraser was someone you heard plenty about before you met him, not all of it good.

His friends acknowledged his faults and many of his critics conceded his good points.

Fraser could be outrageously rude, crude and loud, sometimes all in the same sentence, usually in a story of which he was the hero.

But underneath the bluster, the bulldust and the bellowing laugh was a rogue who could be likeable. A rogue who, facing prison and later terminal illness, was brave and stoic.

Right to the end this week, he stuck to the code of honour and gallows humour he’d inherited from his war veteran father, who’d survived multiple bomber missions over occupied Europe and was admired by his wayward son.

When Fraser was diagnosed with the bone cancer myeloma in 2011, the doctors told him he had five to seven years to live. It was a neat reversal of his 2001 prison sentence — seven years with five years minimum.

Right to the end, Andrew Fraser stuck to the code of honour and gallows humour he’d inherited from his war veteran father. Picture: Jason Edwards

With the cancer, he joked, he didn’t care if he got more time. Which is exactly what happened.

Miraculously, he stared down the death sentence for more than 12 years. Right up until Wednesday morning, when his second wife Lindy Allen and his son Lachlan came to his hospital bedside to say goodbye.

First, he made a few telephone calls.

“I’m pulling the plug,” he told this reporter, his voice raspy but recognisable.

Among those he called was a judge, who as a young barrister had been part of the circle that gathered around Fraser the rainmaker.

Earlier in the week the judge had told Fraser he could drive (to Albury) to see him on Friday.

“Don’t waste the petrol,” quipped Fraser, who knew he wouldn’t be around.

The judge was in court when Fraser called on Wednesday. When he played back the message later, he heard Fraser thanking him for his friendship … and saying he loved him.

“(He was) a softie after all,” the judge mused afterwards.

Lindy Allen, Fraser’s second wife, countered his frantic tendencies. Picture: David Caird

Fraser made a few more calls then asked for the oxygen to be turned off. He drifted into the big sleep with the loved son whose mother he had betrayed, and with the big-hearted woman who had helped him find redemption in the past 16 years.

He had a bit to redeem himself for.

Andrew Roderick Fraser was from a respected and mostly respectable Melbourne family with roots in the legal and business establishment.

His father, the wartime airman, was an accountant who worked in legal circles. Relatives were in the law. His sister married a distinguished barrister. A great uncle designed the brilliant time-delay device that retreating Diggers used to keep up sporadic rifle fire at Gallipoli for hours after they evacuated the trenches.

Fraser changed from gifted private-school athlete — he was a star hurdler — to a street smart criminal lawyer who took on the colourful slang of painter and docker clients he represented when he started work in the 1970s.

Fraser made big bucks representing cashed-up clients such as billionaire scoundrel Alan Bond.

Before Fraser’s era, prudent criminal lawyers like the late “Mr Frank” Galbally made a point of not socialising with their clients apart from a single polite drink.

But Fraser wasn’t prudent. He was a risk-taker who liked being on first-name terms with underworld figures. He specialised in winning bail applications then briefing sharp barristers with the best chance of beating the charges at trial.

In the dog-eat-dog world of criminal law, the lawyer who keeps the most clients out of jail attracts work, and that’s what Fraser excelled at. He learned his craft “on the tools” as an articled clerk. “Black Letter” law wasn’t his thing.

Not everybody who worked with or for Fraser recalls him fondly.

A current coroner who started her criminal law career working with him says the principals of the firm never forgave him for the disgrace he brought to them and to the profession when he was arrested on drug charges in 1999.

One partner, from a distinguished legal family, had been shocked to find a bag of cocaine in his desk well before the drug squad nailed Fraser.

He had belittled and beaten police in court so often that there was a queue of them waiting for him. Even his favourite “crook”, Lewis Moran, warned him to “pull up.”

When news of his passing buzzed around legal circles this week, Fraser was still getting mixed reviews. Picture: Craig Borrow

Fraser sometimes characterised his downfall as an act of revenge orchestrated by a corrupt drug squad sergeant, Wayne Strawhorn. Apart from humiliating detectives in court too often, Fraser had secretly told a police contact (whom he mistakenly trusted) about Strawhorn’s “setting up” of several underworld figures.

But the treacherous policeman immediately tipped off Strawhorn. From that moment Fraser was doomed. But instead of pulling his horns in, he was so hopelessly addicted he gave Strawhorn’s cronies enough rope to hang him.

His fall began long before, when a bikie boss tossed him a bag of cocaine as a gift just before he went to the first F1 Grand Prix in Adelaide in 1985.

From the moment Fraser first used “the white stuff” he loved it. He had an addictive personality, the athlete’s need for speed that thrives on applause and adrenaline. Cocaine filled a hole that kept getting bigger.

From the moment Fraser first used the ‘white stuff’, he loved it.

At first, he once said, it was Friday night after work. Then Saturday night. Then Thursday night as well, until Thursday night to Sunday night became one long party, fuelled with the big money he made representing cashed-up clients all the way up to billionaire scoundrel Alan Bond.

In the end, he used cocaine every day. It cost him thousands of dollars a week, his marriage, and, ultimately, his career and the respect of his peers.

Fraser’s fall is well-known. So is his personal story of redemption since meeting Lindy Allen, a successful arts consultant, whose calmness countered Fraser’s frantic tendencies. Oil on troubled water, as someone once said of them.

For all his macho posturing, he gave young women lawyers a square deal.

When news of his passing buzzed around legal circles this week, Fraser was still getting mixed reviews. One coroner, who as a young lawyer worked with Fraser for a memorable two years, credits him with teaching her more about the rough and tumble of criminal law than anyone else had. It made her, and others, street smart and sure-footed when dealing with crooks and police, prosecutors and “the bench”.

The first thing Fraser told her was something like “Sit your bum down there and listen.”

He was heroically crude and crass and delighted in shocking people, but she never found him as creepy as some more “respectable” figures. For all his macho posturing, he gave young women lawyers a square deal.

The coroner does not want to be named because Fraser’s name is still tainted. But she points out that she and three other women who learned from him are now all senior members of the profession.

Against that, the feelings of a seasoned criminal lawyer who worked with Fraser in his early days are still mixed.

On balance, he liked him. But, he adds, “He was arrogant and he brought everything on himself. When mistakes were there to be made, he made ’em.”

Actor David Wenham, pictured with Richard Cawthorne, caught Fraser’s flawed character in the drama Killing Time.

He will never forgive Fraser for the way he treated his first wife. Actor David Wenham caught Fraser’s flawed character in the drama, Killing Time, an insight into the party-boy world of Porsches, private jets and international ski resorts.

In the years between when he successfully represented the accused Walsh St police killers (starting in late 1988) until his arrest in 1999, gossip overtook reality.

A few bent police (like Strawhorn, himself later jailed) hated Fraser because he knew their secrets, leaked to him by crooks who bribed them.

Former AFL player Jimmy (Jim) Krakouer with Fraser, who was always aggressive in his defence of his clients.

Many honest police hated him because they sometimes took their cue from the bent ones, and because he too often humbled them in court.

He represented all sorts. From knockabout robbers and thieves to white collar crooks through to murderous, erratic, drug-trafficking vermin like Dennis Bruce Allen and his feral pack of half brothers and hangers-on, hyenas in the criminal zoo.

Crooks liked Fraser because they sensed a quality they often talked about but few of them actually had: he was “staunch” and would not give anyone up. And he was aggressive in their defence in a police interview or a court.

After court, he was the leader of the legal crew that called itself “the Negroni Commission,” a reference to their favourite cocktail, a taste that extended to fine wine and (for some) the finest cocaine. The group included many people who now pretend otherwise, including silks and judges.

When the axe finally fell, one of Fraser’s fellow travellers swiftly agreed to testify against him in a case that proved he’d given advice to his own cocaine dealer on how best to import the drug.

Andrew Fraser faced death the way he’d lived life: on his own terms.

It turned out that the dealer was using an innocent young woman as a “patsy” to help with the importation, which could have got her a long sentence if police and lawyers had not realised she was ignorant of her travel companion’s plan.

Instead, it was Fraser who got the stiff sentence. But he showed he was made of tougher stuff than most crooks and many lawyers.

“Crooks nearly always give each other up,” says a barrister who was close to him then. “But Fraser did not take one person down with him. He took the rap for all of them.”

His longtime professional opponent, prosecutor Peter Faris QC, grudgingly admired Fraser’s grace under pressure.

Faris has seen a lot of crooks and lawyers in half a century. Of all of them, he thinks only Fraser has come out of jail a better person.

Faris bags the legal establishment for the way it crushed Fraser. “He shouldn’t have got five years,” he says. “He was a scapegoat for all the lawyers who did coke.”

In the end, Fraser faced death the way he’d lived life: on his own terms.