The rise and fall of a gangland lawyer: How a taste for cocaine was Andrew Fraser’s undoing

Born into a respected Melbourne family, criminal lawyer Andrew Fraser had the world at his feet, until he took a liking to cocaine.

Not long before Andrew Fraser’s world collapsed, the then controversial criminal lawyer was walking along the footpath in Melbourne’s legal precinct when he saw a friend across the street.

The friend had sometimes attended what Fraser’s crew called the “Negroni Commission”, a floating group that lunched monthly at the Botanical Hotel in South Yarra over negroni cocktails, fine wine and (in Fraser’s case, although not exclusively) the best cocaine that his clients could supply at a price.

The friend suggested a coffee but Fraser bellowed something like, “No, no – gotta go and get a big bag of the white stuff!”

Fraser’s behaviour that day was so brazenly reckless that the friend later called a mutual acquaintance and predicted Fraser was “going to fall and fall hard”.

Andrew Fraser fell and fell hard. Picture: Jason Edwards

“It would have been bad enough anywhere but it was in Lonsdale Street outside the courts, with lawyers and police everywhere. He had been getting more and more erratic. It was almost as if he wanted to get caught.”

Fraser could not recall the incident later, as it blended in with a pattern of behaviour that led to a downfall some saw as inevitable.

A distinguished “silk” who still rates Fraser as a friend saw the same self-destructive bent at close range.

One evening, the barrister saw Fraser arrive at a favourite 1990s haunt, the Botanical Hotel in South Yarra, in a flashy muscle car full of people who had obviously been partying hard. A rapper and his entourage on a night out would have made a quieter entrance.

Back then, Fraser’s shrinking group of friends and growing list of enemies agreed he was confident to the point of cockiness and loved being centre stage. But his friends also saw offhand generosity where others saw only faults. He was the last to leave a party — and first to pick up the bill.

Behaviour like Fraser’s might have been shrugged off in Sydney’s more rakish circles, but it raised eyebrows in Melbourne’s staid legal establishment, where criminal lawyers tend to be regarded as a necessary evil rather than stars.

Not that Andrew Roderick Fraser was a blow-in. He came from a family with deep roots in the Melbourne legal and business world. His father, Roderick Fraser, was a World War II bomber pilot who returned from the war to an accounting practice in Melbourne for the rest of his working life.

Andrew Fraser at the Melbourne Magistrates in 1999, as he faced charges of trafficking, possessing and using cocaine as well as possessing ecstasy. Picture: Alan Funnell

Fraser’s maternal grandfather was William Harrison, a respected Melbourne solicitor who practised in Bank Place in the city after returning from World War I, where he was wounded at the Somme.

Fraser’s father had gone to school at Wesley College with Ken Haines, a Kokoda veteran who set up the general legal practice Haines & Polites in 1951. When “young Andrew” showed interest in the Law, he started there as an articled clerk.

Fraser admired his own father and Haines as fearless war veterans who had earned the right to question authority and not to suffer fools, whether in uniform or wig and gown.

Like the two older men, the young Fraser had the confidence of the gifted schoolboy athlete (which all three of them had been) and he spoke the language of the football locker room.

All of that helped him become a knockabout criminal lawyer who relished the combative cut and thrust of criminal cases, in which bluff and bluster, tactics and timing mattered far more than the “black letter law” of precedents and judgments.

But Fraser’s connection with the Melbourne legal world runs deeper than his representing a long list of villains.

His grandmother’s brother, William Scurry, was a decorated war hero who served in both world wars and, notably, invented the “drip tin” ruse that allowed unmanned rifles to fire at intervals during the brilliant Gallipoli withdrawal in 1915.

The talented Scurry was also a noted sculptor and executed the Lady of Justice sculpture at the Supreme Court in Melbourne as well as busts of prominent judges.

Fraser’s family background didn’t help when the axe fell. It only deepened the disgrace.

So how did it happen?

He traces the start of his decline to the day the leader of an outlaw motorcycle club gave him a bag of cocaine as a gift before he went to the 1985 Grand Prix in Adelaide. It was a casual thing, almost a joke. But it was enough. The drug went straight to his brain.

Andrew Fraser had “the wrong personality type” for trying cocaine. Picture: Jason Edwards

“I’m the wrong personality type,” Fraser says, referring to the highly addictive effect that any form of “upper” has on someone with his restless and ultra-competitive nature.

What began as a Friday night indulgence soon became a Saturday night treat. Then it was Thursday night as well. Within 10 years of his first “taste”, Fraser had a raging habit, costing him a staggering amount of money. He would end up spending $1000, which shows why he would be foolish enough to become involved with people planning to import cocaine: he needed a cheaper supply to maintain his habit.

To the Melbourne establishment, the rock star criminal lawyer was like having Bon Scott in a church choir: impossible to ignore and headed for a bad end. For Fraser, abusing cocaine compounded the flaws of a compulsive personality already hooked on the most addictive drugs of all, adrenaline and applause.

Conniving with his supplier to import the drug showed he had lost touch with reality.

The fact that one of Fraser’s “Negroni Commission” regulars was a judge, and another was destined to be, didn’t help. It probably made it worse: Fraser was not only trashing his reputation but tainting theirs. He was too hot to handle.

Crooks nearly always give each other up. But, in the end, Fraser did not take one person down with him after his arrest in September, 1999. He took the rap for all of them.

As a barrister friend of Fraser said afterwards: “Frase, you spent your career sticking it up the system and when the time came the system stuck it up you.”