By Kate McClymont and Patrick Begley
Dr Jeremy Cumpston – a former bankrupt, All Saints soapie star and “conscientious injector” – has recently made several cameo appearances in the real-life courtroom drama of his patient, convicted tax fraudster and money launderer George Alex.
Alex’s colourful life has featured a dizzying array of business failures, bankruptcies and untimely deaths. In one year alone, three of Alex’s close business associates – two standover men and a Hells Angels bikie boss – were murdered.
Former soapie star Dr Jeremy Cumpston testified that his patient George Alex was too ill for jail.Credit: Janie Barrett
Misfortune struck again when one of Alex’s most trusted employees turned out to be a serial killer.
This week, justice finally caught up with Alex, the long-time facilitator of connections between organised crime, the construction industry and the CFMEU.
Alex, 53, is facing a lengthy jail term after being found guilty of a conspiracy to defraud the Tax Office of $10 million using construction labour-hire companies and associated payroll operators.
But after the jury returned Alex’s first guilty verdict for money laundering, instead of Alex joining his co-accused behind bars, Cumpston arrived at court, wearing a navy blue blazer over his medical scrubs, to tell Justice Des Fagan that sending Alex to jail was “a terrible idea and very dangerous medically”.
In 1998 Jeremy Cumpston, left, played the “lovable rogue” nurse Connor Costello in the medical drama All Saints.
Described on his “drJ Clinics” website as a “conscientious injector”, Cumpston offers “age-defying and energy restoring” cosmetic treatments from within a dental surgery in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
The doctor said Alex had an opiate addiction due to his atrophying leg, which Cumpston predicted would be amputated “at some stage in the next 10 years”. An abrupt withdrawal of opiates could cause “sudden death”, he said.
When Cumpston expressed the view that taking his patient into custody immediately was not an “ideal” situation, the judge retorted, “We are really not looking for ideals here, doctor.”
Much to the judge’s annoyance, on Monday he learnt that over the weekend Cumpston arranged for Alex, who was under house arrest, to be admitted to Northern Beaches Hospital to undergo opioid replacement therapy.
George Alex pictured outside the Supreme Court in DarlinghurstCredit: Jessic Hrmoas
Alex was already facing a maximum term of 25 years’ jail for the money laundering verdict. On Tuesday, after a six-month-long trial, he and three co-accused, Lindsay Kirschberg, Gordon McAndrew and Pasquale Loccisano, were found guilty of the tax charges.
A fifth conspirator, Mark Ronald Bryers, had already been found guilty. Bryers was bankrupted in New Zealand in 2009 with personal debts of $220 million following the collapse of a property investment scheme, misnomered Blue Chip.
He moved to Australia under the name “Mark Ryan” and continued with his questionable schemes.
“I get suspicious when someone comes to Australia, leaves a train wreck in New Zealand, changes their name, then goes and buys up companies and then it falls over. Can you give us an update of what ASIC is doing here please?” then-Nationals senator John “Wacka” Williams asked executives from the corporate watchdog about Bryers in October 2015.
Left to right: George Alex, the late Alex “Little Al” Taouil and Mick Gatto.
While Bryers and the others are behind bars as they await their sentencing in November, the matter of Alex’s detention will return to court on Friday. Alex has been ordered to attend the hearing.
This is not the first time Alex has used the services of the Double Bay “wrinkle relaxer”. In 2014, Cumpston provided a medical certificate explaining that the three-week delay in Alex’s appearance before the royal commission into union corruption was due to his admission to a mental health facility.
Evidence given at the commission suggested that Alex had been bribing union officials who were happy to turn a blind eye to his illegal practice of “phoenixing” companies, even though the CFMEU was publicly campaigning against the practice which often left workers out of pocket.
Rather than pay workers’ entitlements or tax obligations, Alex’s labour hire companies, which provided workers for construction jobs, would collapse only to re-emerge debt free via another corporate entity.
It wasn’t just his companies that avoided paying tax. In 2009, the Tax Office was pursuing Alex for a $1.2 million tax bill. Rather than pay, Alex was bankrupted in 2011.
Bankruptcies are normally discharged by law after three years, but Alex remains an undischarged bankrupt due to his refusal to co-operate with his trustees. He declined to hand over his passport, did not provide a statement of affairs and hid valuable assets including property as well as his secret interests in scaffolding, labour hire and traffic management companies.
As bankrupts are precluded from being company directors, for years Alex used “straw” directors to front his businesses for him.
One close associate whom Alex used as a “front” was Joe Antoun, who had been in and out of jail for the past 30 years, including serving a term for extortion.
Joe Antoun was fatally shot at the front door of his Strathfield home in December 2013.
In 2013, Antoun and Alex came up with a crackerjack idea. To avoid having to hand any money to his bankruptcy trustee, Alex and Antoun engineered a sham defamation payout – the largest in Australian history – even though it was unclear exactly what slanderous statements had been made about the pair which would justify $6.2 million for Alex and $150,000 to Antoun.
As one of the people responsible for uttering the supposedly hurtful words, the twice bankrupt “Big Jim” Byrnes later testified that “any person of any reasonable sense would probably realise it [the defamation payment] was a sham”.
There was a second agreement for Antoun to receive $5 million, to be paid in instalments, from which he would then channel the money to Alex.
Alex’s bankruptcy trustees launched a Federal Court action to claw back some of the millions for Alex’s creditors.
Justice Bernard Murphy observed that Alex “operates in a criminal netherworld” and concealed his business interests from his bankruptcy trustees.
Antoun operated “in the same shadowy world”, said the judge, adding that the extortionist was unable to give evidence, “having been fatally shot in his driveway on 16 December 2013”.
The court also heard that Melbourne underworld figure Mick Gatto had determined that Alex owned the Queensland labour hire business at the centre of the dispute and that Kevin McHugh, a former union official, who was at the time aligned with Byrnes, had to buy it from Alex.
Murphy said he had “no difficulty in accepting that McHugh thought the bankrupt [Alex] and Gatto had criminal associations and a propensity for violence” and that McHugh feared he might be “hurt or even killed if he did not do what he was told”.
However, the judge also said it was “implausible” that McHugh was an ordinary businessman “innocently caught up in a world of ‘bikies’ and associated criminals”.
In a day of dramatic raids on the Gold Coast and in Sydney in July 2020, McHugh was one of those arrested as part of Alex’s crime syndicate. This followed an 18-month investigation by a combined taskforce of the Australian Federal Police, the Tax Office and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which was looking at the failure of Alex’s companies to pay millions of dollars in tax.
McHugh, who was charged with conspiring to defraud and dealing with proceeds of crime, died before the trial.
The murder of Alex’s business partner hit another close associate particularly hard.
In 2009, Abuzar “Abs” Sultani was a fresh-faced 20-year-old just out of jail for stealing an ATM while doing his HSC. In jail, he met people who would introduce him to the construction industry where he met Antoun and later Alex.
Years later, Sultani told a psychiatrist that the construction industry was one of “extortion, intimidation, violence and killing” and that he had joined the Rebels bikie gang so that people “would have his back”.
Serial killer Abuzar “Abs” Sultani is serving multiple life sentences. Credit: Seven News
After obtaining a commerce degree from Macquarie University in 2015, Sultani became a central figure advising Alex on his criminal enterprise of tax evasion as well as acting as a straw director for a host of Alex’s companies.
Like his boss, Sultani had an aversion to paying tax. In 2016, he pleaded guilty to failing to lodge a tax return since 2011 and was fined $750.
When asked what he knew about Sultani at Alex’s bankruptcy examination in 2014, Byrnes told the Federal Court that Sultani was smart but “very dangerous”. Apart from running Alex’s tax minimisation schemes, Byrnes said Sultani “stands over” people who owed money to Alex.
In 2012, Sultani signed a union deal on Alex’s behalf with the Victorian branch of the CFMEU. The agreement, which was orchestrated by Gatto, gave Alex an inroad to major Melbourne building sites.
Pasquale Barbaro was murdered in 2016 outside George Alex’s Earlwood house. Credit: Fairfax Media
“G is the master manipulator that sits on top of all his brothers,” underworld figure Pasquale “Pat” Barbaro complained to an associate about Alex and Antoun in an intercepted conversation in June 2013.
Later that year, on December 16, 2013, Sultani dropped Antoun home after a meeting at Alex’s Earlwood home. Ten minutes later, Antoun was shot four times in the upper body when he answered a knock on the door.
Sultani, who regarded Antoun as a mentor, was devastated. It was widely believed that Barbaro was one of those responsible as he’d previously threatened to kill Antoun over a dispute about an alleged $750,000 debt Antoun owed to Griffith wine merchants.
Three years later, on November 14, 2016, Barbaro, 35, had just left Alex’s Larkhall Avenue home where the pair had spent hours discussing a business dispute. It was 9.30pm when Barbaro climbed into his late model Mercedes.
Sultani, who a court later heard had been tipped off about Barbaro’s whereabouts, drove up to Barbaro’s car and fired four shots through the passenger window. It’s not suggested that Alex was involved in the murder.
To investigators, the murder appeared personal. Barbaro, who was badly wounded, got out of the car and ran down the street before collapsing. His killer then fired five rounds into the back of his head and neck as Barbaro lay face down on the ground.
Days later, Sultani and his accomplice Joshua Baines were emailing each other after watching Channel Nine’s A Current Affair, which featured eight unsolved murders including Barbaro’s. The program disclosed that Barbaro’s killing was partly captured by a CCTV camera.
Sultani: “Just seen current affair lol – I don’t care – Just been thinking about hoodie lol – Just curious if they got me or not … ”
He also said: “Hahahahah wooshk got him few in back of head … He went quick bro and didn’t suffer lol – I know that Pasq was a big rat – Can’t believe the shit we’ve pulled off and we don’t even get raided lol or questioned – Hopefuly [sic] it stays like that …. Yeah spiderman lol – Snookered hahaha.”
Baines replied: “Lmaooooo snookered brother he got splattered.”
Sultani then wrote: “Love you my brother ... We’ve got a bond together that know [sic] one would understand,” to which Baines replied, “Love ya to [sic] my brother you want maccas?”
As it turned out, Sultani had murdered three people just that year. In sentencing him to three life terms in 2021, Fagan described Sultani as “a serial killer” with no remorse. Baines was jailed for 36 years for Barbaro’s murder.
In November 2023, Sultani received a 28-year sentence for offences including knowingly directing activities of a criminal group, serious assaults, robbery, firearm offences as well as supplying commercial quantities of prohibited drugs.
In January this year, Sultani, 35, pleaded guilty to his fifth murder: the 2015 assassination of Rebels gang member, Mark Easter, whose nickname was “Spiderman”.
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