Lawyers, drugs and money: How Andrew Fraser became lawyer of choice to Melbourne’s underworld

For 20 years Andrew Fraser’s world was awash with cops, crims and coke as Melbourne’s underworld lawyer of choice, and a lunch at Flower Drum started it all.

Andrew Fraser flew too close to the sun. The abrasive gangland lawyer made his name and his fortune by advising some of Australia’s biggest crims — then lost it all by becoming a crim himself. Career, money and marriage were sacrificed to the cocaine addiction that put him in prison for five years. Today, Fraser is a changed man. He has remarried, lives quietly in a remote country hideaway and, apart from his own health battles, devotes time to helping people with his legal know-how. It’s a world away from Porsches and private jets, but he is content. In this exclusive series, Fraser looks back on a dangerous life - to the time when he represented the Walsh Street killers, was treated as a trusted insider by one of Australia’s oldest crime families, and antagonised the dirty cop who brought him down.

In the 20 years before his fall, Andrew Fraser became the doyen of Melbourne crime lawyers, taking the title from the revered “Mr Frank” Galbally.

In that time Fraser acted for dozens of crooks and met many more but two stand out: Lewis Moran and Dennis Bruce Allen.

Moran was from the inner west, crime “royalty” bred and born in his family’s big brick house in Lang’s Rd, near the showgrounds. His father, Des sen., was an SP bookie in a local pub, and his mother a “nurse” for a prominent illegal abortionist.

Allen’s base was a rat’s nest of cheap houses he owned in the now coveted pocket of Richmond between the Cherry Tree Hotel and the Yarra.

Fraser trusted Moran a lot more than he liked Allen, a violent and depraved drug dealer who end up heavily addicted himself, making him even more erratic.

But business was business. Moran paid him by referring a stream of clients. Allen paid with an endless stream of cash.

Fraser met Moran through the respected barrister Phil Dunn at a lunch at the Flower Drum restaurant.

For 20 years Andrew Fraser was Melbourne’s underworld’s lawyer of choice.

As a crime figure, the nuggety Moran was an all rounder. He was a skilled pickpocket, something he never quite gave up even when he was making plenty of cash in other ways. He and his brother “Tuppence” (Des jun.) were tough street fighters but used guns only when necessary.

Their legitimate business was in the meat industry, running a slaughter line at the old city abattoirs that once stood in Smithfield Rd on the city side of Flemington racecourse. But they were always involved in illegal SP bookmaking, race fixing and opportunistic receiving of stolen goods. It was Lewis’s son Jason and stepson Mark who moved the family into the lucrative business of drugs, one that eventually cost them all their lives.

The Morans cultivated a wide range of contacts from “knockabouts” in racing stables, abattoirs and the waterfront, up the scale to bookmakers and bank managers, lawyers, magistrates and police. Especially police.

Tuppence could get a race fixed and Lewis could get a “blue” fixed, meaning he could nobble criminal charges through corrupt contacts. He even once allegedly “fixed” a murder charge for a northern suburbs criminal who killed a man outside a Carlton hotel, but it supposedly cost the killer $50,000.

Moran, cunning and cautious, was always looking for an edge. He was looking for better legal advice and had heard Fraser was the answer.

“Lewis was sick of using a lawyer called ‘Roy’ who was half mad,” Fraser recalls.

Crime patriarch, the late Lewis Moran gave Fraser credibility in the underworld.

“Roy used to charge them a random amount based on whatever phone number he first saw when he opened a telephone book. So if the number was someone in Flemington it would start with 376 and so he’d charge $3760. But if it was a number from the otherside of town starting with seven it would be twice as much.”

Moran asked Fraser for his card. Fraser gave him a handful and, with that gesture, consolidated his standing as the underworld’s “go to” lawyer.

“Lewis told me that I’d need to be available to be on call at night — but that he’d never waste my time. And he never did.”

Moran was so well-connected in crime circles around Australia that he sent a stream of new clients to Fraser. His circle of influence was extraordinary.

It was Moran who indirectly led controversial Perth tycoon Alan Bond to hire Fraser in high-profile fraud cases. It turned out that Moran knew a world-class conman who knew Fraser’s friend, former Collingwood hero Murray “The Weed” Weideman.

Dennis Allen (left), with his half brother Victor Peirce.

Allen playfully points a pistol at the head of his mother, Kath Pettingill.

“I never charged Lewis anything because he sent me so many blokes who did pay. He’d sometimes ask for a favour for a ‘good bloke’ in trouble but he’d tell me which ones ‘had plenty’ and to charge them accordingly.

“The night Brian Kane was killed, Lewis rang at 3am and asked me to go to the homicide squad to help Brian’s girlfriend, who was with him in the pub when he was shot.

“She hadn’t asked for a lawyer but I got her out of there. There’s no doubt who killed Brian. It was Russell Cox — he pulled down his balaclava just before he shot him and said ‘I owe you this one, (expletive deleted)’.”

“The other shooter was Rodney Collins. He was such an evil piece of work that he was one of four blokes I declined to act for. The others were Ollie Dietrich and his mate Greg Middap and a lunatic named Mike Juric, who got deported and then died. Good riddance.”

Dennis Allen was the dominant and most deranged and dangerous of the evil bunch of sons produced by former prostitute, gangsters’ moll and police informer Kath Pettingill, widely known simply as “Kath”.

Kath had given birth to Dennis at 16 and he believed she was his big sister until she broke the truth to him as a teenager, a shock that didn’t do anything for his volatile mental state and violent streak.

Fraser outside the Cherry Tree Hotel. Picture: Jason Edwards

She brought him to see Fraser in his 20s, when he was “moving up” from her sordid world of running brothels to drug dealing in their patch of Richmond, where Kath had an understanding with local police who took “freebies” from her brothel workers and cash from Dennis.

“I think some of his mates must have heard of me and were passing the word,” Fraser recalls of the cocky young criminal, who consumed prodigious amounts of speed that made him unpredictable and senselessly violent.

“Dennis was always polite to me, listened and took my advice but his only redeeming feature was that he had a lot of money,” Fraser said. “Clearly, he was a dreadful person.”

He recalls that after Allen’s first bodyguard Victor Gouroff vanished in the early 1980s, Allen was walking in the street alongside police when he banged on the boot of an old Valiant parked at the kerb and yelled ”How are you, Victor!” and laughed.

The police insisted on popping the boot to check Gouroff’s body wasn’t in it. It wasn’t. Like most of Allen’s other victims, Gouroff’s body was never found.

One that was found was the former Hells Angel, Anton Kenny. Allen had cut off his legs with a chainsaw to fit him into a 44-gallon drum that was dumped in the Yarra.

Allen’s next bodyguard, known as “Tommy the Turk,” wore suits with a white shirt and burgundy tie — and a handgun under his coat.

Fraser outside Allen’s former Richmond home. Picture: Jason Edwards

When well-known sport journalist Scot Palmer took over the Cherry Tree Hotel in Allen’s patch, he wanted to clean up the rough little pub’s image by discouraging Allen’s criminal crew.

Perhaps mistaking the bodyguard for a bent accountant, Palmer told him he couldn’t drink in the pub lounge any more.

The well-dressed gunman grabbed Palmer by the lapel and hissed “I’ll drink anywhere I want to,” then jammed his pistol barrel in the terrified publican’s nose.

The gunman won the battle but Palmer eventually won the war, turning the pub into the forerunner of the fashionable Cremorne watering hole it now is.

But in the 1980s, that part of Richmond was very much Allen’s domain. His runners tossed packages of drugs into his backyard from the old suburban trains (one with windows and doors) as they rattled past. His money set up brothels and massage parlours and paid off police.

Fraser recalls Allen’s cunning when it came to hiding drugs in plain sight — and his crazed attitude to police and authority.

“He would buy heroin and crush it and flatten it then cover it in glad wrap and hang it on the clothesline in the backyard with a doona over it, then crank the line up high so it was well above any dogs the police might bring in.

“His other trick was to buy a heap of potted azaleas, pull them out of the pot, stick the gear in the bottom of the pot then put the plant back in and then bury the pot in the garden so the plant looked as if it was growing in the ground.

“With guns, he’d dig a hole up against the boundary fence then go sideways into his neighbour’s yard to bury the gun. That way, if the police dug it up, he’d prove it wasn’t on his property.”

Even though Allen shot at police surveillance posts in nearby towers, he seemed to be Teflon coated. He was charged dozens of times but nothing stuck to him because bought his freedom from some police with information and from others with cash.

He once asked Fraser to get an adjournment in a hearing at the old Coroners Court. Fraser declined. When they got to the court,it was surrounded by fire trucks because it had been firebombed, and so it was closed for the day, if not longer.

“Told ya I’d get it adjourned,” Allen said.

Paul William Higgins, probably Victoria’s most corrupt cop, was one of a pair that Allen paid weekly for a long time. Allen once showed Fraser a fat, unsealed envelope with $14,000 cash in it.

“Why 14 grand?” Fraser asked him, puzzled by the number. “A grand a day for a week — for two coppers,” Allen retorted. It was a fantastic sum at a time when Allen was buying up workers’ cottages around Richmond for less than $25,000.

Higgins, a rapist as well as a bash artist and standover man, was eventually arrested and jailed at massive cost to the Police Association, which unwisely subsidised his defence. But his alleged accomplice, who is still alive, was never formally questioned.