By Martin Curtis
True Crime
The Fine Cotton Fiasco
Peter Hoysted and Pat Sheil
Ebury Press, $34.99
George Brown was a financially strapped, small-time Wollongong horse trainer who agreed to switch a faster horse for his plodder, a nag called Risley, at a race meting at Doomben, Brisbane, in April 1984. On the day, Brown had second thoughts and didn’t go through with it. Risley lost. So did the Sydney race fixers behind the scam. So did Brown, whose badly burnt corpse was found two days after the race meeting in his car in a rest stop on the Bulli Pass.
Bold Personality, one of the horses used as a ring in for Fine Cotton, enjoys retirement with a new name, Percy.Credit:
The smell from the killing of Brown would permeate thoroughbred racing for a decade and is the preface to the Fine Cotton affair, Australia’s dodgiest known horse race. The fear of sharing a destiny with Brown persuaded a group of fringe-dwellers with racing connections that they could not back out of their horse-substitution sting arranged for Eagle Farm, Brisbane, four months later.
What happened next is in the realm of the dark art of Elmore Leonard or Joel and Ethan Coen. Peter Hoysted and Pat Sheil have been piecing together the related episodes of this yarn, chasing down insiders, for years. It was only after Hoysted was interviewed by Richard Fidler on Radio National that the riches of the story as a true-crime classic were revealed. The program was downloaded more than a million times.
The substitution of the undistinguished Fine Cotton by a better horse called Bold Personality turned out to be such a debacle that the whole country was suddenly alerted to the shady nature of horse racing and the extent of corruption in the Sunshine State.
Chris Masters’ Four Corners program exposing the police-protected brothels and casinos of Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley was still three years away, but the large contingent of Brisbane detectives at the track that day – all there to back Fine Cotton for a win – graphically showed that the Queensland police force was indeed the best that money could buy.
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In one of the book’s many cameo parts the elderly Mona Lewis, the mother of Queensland Police Commissioner Terry Lewis, arrives at Eagle Farm tightly clutching her purse and strides purposefully to a bookmaker to place a $1000 bet on Fine Cotton while her son preens in front of a mirror in his bathroom, comfortable in his corruption.
In another, a nervous Catholic priest, Ted O’Dwyer, turns up at the Appin greyhound-racing track in Sydney’s west to place $4000 – and $100 of his own – on Fine Cotton. The priest was on an errand for leading bookmaker Robbie Waterhouse, who – after an Australian Jockey Club inquiry – would be banned from racetracks for 14 years for betting on a race knowing it was fixed.
But the best scene of all involves buckets of Miss Clairol Brown Shade No.4 hair dye, three half-pissed race fixers and the stoic, bay-coloured Bold Personality (himself a substitute for the original ring-in) who needed to be coloured brown to pass off as Fine Cotton.
There was jubilation across the country when the horse racing as Fine Cotton narrowly won the Second Division Commerce Novice Handicap, but shouts of ‘‘ring-in’’ from a few in the crowd at Eagle Farm drew stewards’ attention to the painted pony.
Father Edward 'Ted' O'Dwyer was involved in the plunge on Fine Cotton.Credit:
The winner was disqualified. All bets stood, meaning those who backed the horse lost their money. The Sydney underworld was beset with intrigue when it emerged that George Freeman, the Sydney criminal and SP bookmaker had backed the horse that came second, Cabaret Kingdom, and so cleaned up while every one else did their dough, Robbie Waterhouse and Father Ted included.
By 1984, Australians were waking up to the fact that serious crime – organised and disorganised – was emergent. The 1977 murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay had revealed the ruthlessness of criminals with connections to drug trafficking and the Calabrian mafia in Australia. Several royal commissions during the 1980s revealed corruption, most notably the Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland, which led to the jailing of Chief Commissioner Lewis and the laying of corruption charges against the Minister for Racing, Russ Hinze.
The decade closed with the assassination of an Assistant Commissioner of the Federal Police, Colin Winchester. With the acquittal last year – after a retrial – of the Treasury official David Eastman for Winchester’s killing, that crime, like the Mackay murder, remains unresolved.
As does the sadistic murder of George Brown.
The story of the Fine Cotton affair adds fine grain to the bigger spectacle of crime and police corruption in Australia in the 1980s. The book is dedicated to the memory of the only heroes in the whole story – Fine Cotton, Bold Personality and the original substitute, Dashing Solitaire.