Why I fear freedom

You might expect Glenn Wheatley to be excited about his sentence for tax fraud ending. Instead he's filled with trepidation, he tells Cameron Stewart.

You might expect Glenn Wheatley to be excited about his sentence for tax fraud ending. Instead he's filled with trepidation, he tells Cameron Stewart.

Not long ago, Glenn Wheatley’s daughter Kara invited 10 of her girlfriends over to the family’s luxurious home in suburban Melbourne for her 21st birthday party. It was a pretty low-key gathering but Wheatley, the music entrepreneur and former rock star, was beside himself.

Overwhelmed by a sudden anxiety attack, he stayed upstairs in his bedroom, panic stricken, until he forced himself to go downstairs and say hello.

Gaynor Wheatley says her husband has lost his confidence in the 15 months he has spent in prison and in home detention since pleading guilty last year to a tax fraud worth $318,000. “It has all been a very confronting experience for him,” she says. “I am nervous for him when he is released – I am nervous what people’s reaction will be towards him.”

At midnight tonight Wheatley will be a free man. He will symbolically cut the electronic ankle tag that monitors his movements and be free to leave his home and resume normal life.

When we meet at his house in South Yarra, there are still several weeks to go. We sit at his dining room table, Wheatley flicking nervously through notes he has prepared for our interview. He’s wearing blue jeans and a blue shirt – the sort of casual clobber he’s favoured for decades – and he looks fitter and younger than you might expect of a 60-year-old who has just lived through the worst time of his life.

It is the first time he has spoken publicly about his conviction and time in jail, and he is apprehensive. He has chosen to tell his story exclusively to The Weekend Australian Magazine rather than take up lucrative offers such as the Nine Network’s 60 Minutes, because he does not want to be accused of profiteering.

But he is nervous. As we speak it becomes clear that Wheatley is a shell of the man he once was.

Gone is the sunny optimism, the entrepreneurial confidence and the gift of the gab which once defined him. Instead, he is hesitant and edgy, traumatised by his experience and frightened about how the world outside will judge him. He lurches erratically from one topic to another, sometimes stopping himself to apologise, check his notes and get himself back on track.

“I’m still a bit fragile,” he admits. “Sometimes I would like to think I am mentally tough but at other times I know I am not. That’s part of the price you pay for incarceration.”

He knows he should be desperately looking forward to the moment tonight when he is finally free. Instead he says: “I have more a fear of freedom than I do excitement. I fear being a bit of a sideshow when I get out. I would love so much to be anonymous and just slip back into society but I know it won’t happen.”

***

GLENN WHEATLEY had promised himself he would remain calm. But as he rose to his feet in Melbourne’s County Court, his heart betrayed him, thumping through his body like a bass drum as Judge Tim Wood lifted his gavel.

“I sentence you to 30 months’ jail with 15 months suspended,” the judge declared. “You will spend a minimum of 15 months in jail.”

Wheatley stood mute.

“I was numb, I could not believe what I had just heard,” he recalls.

It was July 19, 2007. Wheatley had been optimistic as he prepared for court, leaving work folders open on his desk at his home, expecting to return to them that afternoon.

Gaynor had made lunch, believing her husband would not be jailed because of his guilty plea. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, 15 months in prison and a lifetime of public humiliation beckoned.

“The next hour was probably the worst in my life,” says Wheatley.

Court officials bundled him into a small holding cell. As the door closed, his body started to quiver. Tears flowed. It was the “anxiety attack from hell”, he says.The cell door soon swung back open and the guards ordered Wheatley to remove his clothes for a body-search.

“You had to strip completely naked, run your fingers through your hair, show behind your ears, open your mouth wide, lift up your scrotum, turn around and then bend over and spread the cheeks of your arse. It was degrading and humiliating.”

The man who had lived a red-carpet life as the manager of John Farnham, the Little River Band and Delta Goodrem was taken to a small windowless cell inside a transport vehicle for the trip to the Melbourne Assessment Prison (MAP).

“I had suffered claustrophobia all my life but this was the worst,” he recalls. “It was the smallest confined space I had been in and I began to hyperventilate. All I could do was close my eyes, take some deep breaths and try, try, try to be calm.”

When Wheatley arrived at the MAP he was strip-searched again. As he was being processed, prison officers debated the best John Farnham concert they had seen, as if mocking his fall.

He was then presented to the governor of the MAP, who ordered that he be taken to the jail’s isolated protection unit because his high profile would make him a target for other prisoners. “Just watch your back and remember, no one is your friend in here,” the governor warned him.

The guards took Wheatley to his 2m by 3m cell, handed him a plate of beef stroganoff and slammed the door.

He flicked on the TV in his cell and watched the nightly news. His was the lead story on every bulletin, with reporters doing live broadcasts outside the jail. Then came the crunch. One reporter said on air: “Glenn Wheatley has agreed to dob in others.”

Wheatley stared at the screen, dumbfounded. It was not true; he had promised to co-operate fully with authorities, not to spill the beans on others. But it was too late.

He could hear a rumble of angry voices from the other cells, echoing across the prison. Other prisoners had been watching the same news report and began yelling at him.

“Hey rock star, you lagging on others?” shouted one.

Wheatley shrank back in fear. “My safety was completely compromised,” he says. “It is dangerous for anyone to be seen as a lagger in jail.”

Wheatley flicked off the TV, lay on his bed and began to sob. Eventually the small slit in his cell door opened and two Valiums were handed through to calm him down.

He swallowed them and tried to sleep but he couldn’t because the guards – believing he was dangerously unstable – kept his cell light on and checked on him every 60 minutes.

Glenn Wheatley, former rock star turned multi-millionaire rock manager – a man with a stellar career, a gorgeous wife, three kids, a luxury home and everything to live for, had hit rock bottom. He had been placed on suicide watch.

***

FIFTEEN months on, Wheatley has survived. He was luckier than many prisoners, who are isolated from family and friends and who lack the money to fund visits. His was no gulag experience, and he expects little sympathy from the public. When The Weekend Australian Magazine ran an interview with Gaynor Wheatley early this year, many readers were critical. One letter summed up the general mood: “Boo-hoo, Glenn and Gaynor, still in South Yarra, driving the BMW 4x4, and renting a house near the prison for visits. Talk about doing it tough. I don’t mind a bloke earning a big quid, but how about paying your share of tax as well?”

Wheatley says he is ashamed of what he has done: “I should have known better. I made a monumental mistake and I have paid a terrible price ... there will always be people who think I am a crook. I hope that in time people will see that I am basically a good person.”

He says he carries no bitterness – about the incarceration or the tax prosecution – yet his body language suggests otherwise.

The longer we speak, the more it becomes clear that he harbours a smouldering anger and resentment towards those people and agencies responsible for putting him in jail – the Australian Tax Office, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the judge, the former government and, most of all, himself.

He describes as “spectacularly stupid” his fateful decision in 1994 to begin dabbling in complex tax-dodging schemes using overseas tax havens.

He says he initially did it to ward off bankruptcy after he lost his fortune in a failed nightclub venture, yet he has no credible explanation as to why he kept doing it until 2003 when the threat of bankruptcy had long passed.

But he is still not willing to accept full responsibility for his actions. He says his financial advisers led him into tax-minimisation schemes without telling him they were illegal.

“I knew what I was doing was a grey area,” he says. “But I was very naive and spectacularly stupid in that I did not believe I was committing a criminal offence with the risk of going to jail.”

Wheatley desperately wants public redemption for his crime but this explanation – where he casts himself as a gullible victim of bad advice rather than as a calculating tax dodger – will be viewed sceptically by many.

He appeared to have no doubt he was breaking the law when police raided his home in June 2005. He rolled over immediately and co-operated fully. In return the Commonwealth Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions, David Adsett, told Wheatley’s solicitor, Paul Galbally, that the DPP would ask the sentencing judge not to impose a jail sentence. Barely a month later, the then Commonwealth DPP, Damian Bugg, reversed the decision, saying Wheatley’s crimes were too significant to argue for him to be spared jail.

“I think the DPP were duplicitous,” says Wheatley. “They went back on their word. The 24-page statement and video that I gave under oath at the Crime Commission was nothing short of a death warrant.”

He is also critical of Judge Wood for the length of his sentence, which was at the top end of the scale for such a crime. Says Wheatley: “I don’t want pity from anyone, but all things considered, I think I was harshly treated, I was targeted and made an example of.”

Then there is the ATO, and Operation Wickenby – the $300 million tax fraud investigation, the largest ever conducted in this country, which after four years has only posted one successful conviction: Glenn Wheatley.

Wheatley claims he was made an example of for purely political purposes. “I was the poster boy for Operation Wickenby,” he says bitterly. “They have made an issue of my case despite the fact that I am only a minnow. I have been good (newspaper) copy, I have been a good whipping boy and I have paid the price of celebrity.”

He continues: “I believe Operation Wickenby is in tatters. It is nothing short of an embarrassment for the five agencies involved – they have bungled their investigation. There were much bigger fish to catch than me but I have been their only conviction after four years because I made it easy for them. I pleaded guilty and confessed. I was an easy kill.”

He falls silent and then shakes his head slowly. “I was a very easy kill.”

***

AN EASY KILL is exactly what prison officials feared Wheatley might be. A soft, milky-skinned, high-profile millionaire from the top end of town was always going to be a target for hard-bitten crims, even in a minimum security prison.

After the news had described Wheatley as a dobber, the MAP governor isolated him further. “There is no way that you are going down into mainstream (prison areas) as you would be bullied or stood over and probably hurt,” he told Wheatley.

So each of Wheatley’s first six days in jail consisted of 23 hours in his cell and one hour walking in a small exercise room with six other carefully screened prisoners.

It was hardly a scene out of Papillon: Wheatley was not chasing cockroaches across his cell for food; but for someone who until then had enjoyed a five-star life, prison was a deeply confronting experience. “I was just not coping at all,” he admits. “I kept thinking, ‘This is only day one and I have 457 days more…’ I couldn’t see straight.”

On the second day in jail he was strip-searched, handcuffed and led past the other prisoners – the so-called “walk of shame”’ – for his first meeting with Gaynor and their children, Kara, Sam and Tim. “When I saw them I just cried,” he says. “We sat around the table holding hands for an hour. I couldn’t say I was fine because I wasn’t fine, I was a mess.”

When his family left, the guards tried to give Wheatley a crash-course in prison etiquette for his own protection. “Don’t ask what anybody is in for and don’t under any circumstances talk about your personal life, particularly your family,” they told him. “If they think they can get anything from you they will. Be it smokes or money, they will stand over you. They all know you are rich, they all know who you are. Watch your back; they are not your friends.”

With these golden rules ringing in his ears, Wheatley was transferred on his sixth day to the Beechworth Correctional Centre in northern Victoria, a low-security prison perched on a hill overlooking a valley. “It was a prison farm, but at least I could see the sky above me and I had space,” he says.

The inmates at Beechworth were a mixed bag of petty thieves, white collar criminals and drink drivers, as well as hardened criminals including rapists and murderers who were approaching the end of their jail terms.

The whole jail was anticipating Wheatley’s arrival and as he entered the prison a group of inmates broke into the riff of the Masters Apprentices hit Turn Up Your Radio.

In Beechworth Wheatley was placed in a unit that housed eight prisoners, with a single bedroom for each and a shared kitchen, living room and bathroom.

He was told that his daily routine would be to wake up at 6.30am, work from 8.50am to 4.15pm, have dinner at 6.15pm and lockdown at 9pm.

His celebrity status initially made other prisoners wary of him. They kept their distance and so did he.

Then one day a Channel 7 news helicopter appeared, hovering above the prison in the hope of filming Wheatley walking in the prison yard.

The chopper caused an uproar among the prisoners, who ran outside to greet it. “Some were waving, some were dropping their pants and mooning the chopper,” he laughs. “‘We’re going to be on television,’ they yelled.”

The chopper incident broke the ice with the other prisoners, who began to approach Wheatley and introduce themselves. They loved sending him up. In the gym, they would play his band’s old hit Turn Up Your Radio full blast as he walked in, then fall about laughing.

But there was also a dark side. Wheatley saw other prisoners getting roughed up and feared for his safety.

“There is a hierarchy in jail – it has its own communities, its own language, its own kings,” he says. “There was always blood on the floor, and you just had to be careful and negotiate your way out of situations.

“I never got hurt but I was scared. There were times when I used to lock myself in my cell from the inside because I felt I was targeted. I was too high profile and I had a family who came to visit me – the other prisoners were jealous.”

Wheatley was lucky to befriend a large Tongan called Josh with whom he shared the police van on the drive to Beechworth. “For the first few months at Beechworth he kept an eye on me,” Wheatley says. “When I walked in front of all the other prisoners he would walk a pace behind me and give the others a look as if to say, ‘Don’t even think about it.’ God bless him – he was a huge comfort for me.”

Wheatley says he was never propositioned or threatened sexually by other inmates, but he knew sex occurred in the prison and he was careful not to place himself in vulnerable situations.

In his first few months in jail, his mental state was fragile. He was moody, introspective and prone to long bouts of depression. “I didn’t really talk to anyone,” he recalls. “Loneliness was a problem. The inmates were not the sort of people who I would ever be hanging with on the outside. A lot of strong-arm boys covered in tattoos, sitting around talking shit, cussing, smoking Ox and talking pussy.

“When I went on the (prison) walking track, I put my headphones on and sunglasses to send the others a message that I don’t want to talk.”

He was assigned to factory work, including making spa baths, something he describes as “monotonous, tedious work”. One day, as he was sweeping the floor, the Little River Band came on the radio. “They played It’s A Long Way There, the first song I ever produced for LRB,” he recalls. “I broke down when I heard it. It made me think, ‘God, I used to be someone, and now I am sweeping up the prison floor in my prison overalls. What went wrong – how did my life go so terribly wrong?’”

Wheatley was luckier than most prisoners because his family visited him each weekend, and he frequently had visits from old friends such as John Farnham. Code names were used when Farnham visited in order to prevent it being leaked to the media.

Sometimes Wheatley put the prison guards offside.

One day he was hauled up to the guard’s centre and ticked off because he had signed a birthday card for the nine-year-old son of an inmate. “Your autograph could become currency here and be traded for smokes,” the guard growled at him. “That will cause us problems – and worse, it will cause problems for you.”

Other times he put prisoners offside. “Hey Glenn, buy us a f--king pouch (of tobacco),” one prisoner, known as Psycho, yelled at Wheatley as they lined up at the canteen one day. “Come on, you got the f--king money.”

Wheatley replied: “Not in here mate – we all get the same money each week in here.” Psycho looked as if he wanted to take it further, but pulled back.

Three months into his sentence, a letter arrived for Wheatley which instantly enhanced his reputation in the eyes of his fellow prisoners. It was from underworld identity Mick Gatto, asking Wheatley if he could keep an eye on a new arrival at the prison who was the son of a Gatto associate.

Gatto also gave him some advice on how to survive in jail. “Do your work, train hard and mind your own business,” Gatto wrote. “The jails are full of lowlifes trying to find an angle. Respect always.”

Says Wheatley: “There are no secrets in prison and everyone knew I had got a letter from ‘the Big Fella’. My stocks rose sharply that day.”

Wheatley’s only goal during his first four months in jail was to make it to November 29, the date when his legal appeal would be heard. He was so convinced the judge would overturn his sentence that he washed his sheets on the morning of the appeal, expecting to be released later that day. Instead, he got a phone call from Gaynor. Wheatley’s lawyers had abandoned the appeal after Judge Alex Chernov warned that the court “may feel compelled” to increase, rather than decrease, the length of the sentence.

“I was crushed,” recalls Wheatley. “The walls were closing in on me again just when I thought I could see freedom. I shut my cell door, lay down on my bed and just cried.”

If Wheatley was expecting any sympathy from his fellow prisoners, he was mistaken. “The c-nt deserved what he got, he thinks money can get him off,” one was overheard to say.

“You gotta stop crying about it, stop being a pussy,” another told him. “You show crims in here that you are bleeding and they will circle you like sharks and eat you up.”

Wheatley went outside in the rain to escape his fellow inmates. “Walking in the rain so no one can see you crying, eh?” yelled one prisoner.

Wheatley knew now that he would spend Christmas and his 60th birthday in jail. He met with the prison psychiatrist to help deal with the prospect, but as Christmas approached the days seemed to stretch out forever. “The daily routine was like Groundhog Day,” he says. “There was no favourite time of the day. The worst time was to wake up in the middle of the night. These were the most stressful times.”

Wheatley’s celebrity was also causing him grief. He was banned from joining other prisoners in visits to the gym and other outings because his presence might attract media coverage.

He had formed a band with other prisoners called Her Majesty’s Finest. The group had practised for six weeks to put on a gig at another prison, but at the last minute Wheatley, who played bass, was told he was not allowed to perform because of the publicity it might attract.

On Christmas Day no family visits were allowed, only phone calls. The wardens donned Santa caps and Wheatley had lunch with the other cellmates in his unit. One, who was in for murder, proclaimed his New Year’s resolution: “I will not murder anyone again,” he said with a smile.

On January 23, Wheatley spent his 60th birthday in prison. Gaynor had told him to walk outside at 4pm and look out towards a hill overlooking the prison. “I could see her car arrive on the hill and then a lot of activity,” he recalls. “The I saw a massive number of balloons making their way up to the sky while they flashed the headlights and waved. It made my day.”

When the parole board ruled that Wheatley would be allowed to serve the last five months of his sentence at home, the decision was not popular with other prisoners. Some hated him for it. The guards warned him to keep his head down as his release date approached. “This will be your most vulnerable week in jail,” one told him. On his last night in jail, Wheatley found a newspaper rolled up on his bed. He opened it to find human faeces smeared alongside a story about him. Another prisoner summed up the general mood of the jail when he growled: “I suppose the limo will be picking you up.”

Instead it was a fleet of cars which greeted Wheatley when he finally stepped out of Beechworth at 5am on May 19. The early morning release was a botched attempt to fool the media. But the pack had camped outside the prison and were waiting as Wheatley was driven through the gates by his son, Tim, in a black four-wheel-drive.

The chase was on with six media cars and eventually three news helicopters tailing the Wheatleys down the Hume Highway. It became an OJ Simpson-style romp, broadcast live on TV and radio. Inside the car, Wheatley stared in bemusement at the circus around him. “I felt like the Pied Piper,” he recalls. “It was bizarre, dangerous and totally over the top.”

It took Wheatley several days to calm down from the chase and adapt to his new life as a prisoner in his own house. “I kept going to the fridge and looking at all the fresh food,” he says. “The fact that I could now sleep in a bed almost as big as my cell was such a luxury.” It was infinitely better than Beechworth – he was allowed to live with Gaynor and the children, resume his business, use the internet and email, and have unlimited visitors. The only restriction was that he was not allowed to leave home without prior approval, and could not drink alcohol.

***

GAYNOR WHEATLEY says she had no idea what frame of mind her husband would be in when he came home. “I thought he would want to take over my kitchen and garden but alas I have only had one meal from him,” she says.

Instead, Wheatley has thrown himself back into work, setting up a new radio subscription service called Stripe, which allows people to access 30-odd stations dedicated to specific music genres through the mobile phone network and online. He has also written the draft of a book about his conviction and imprisonment, but says it will not be published until next year at the earliest, after the dust has settled.

Wheatley sees Stripe as the key to his rehabilitation in the business world, and has devoted his time in home detention to launching it. “It is terribly important to me,” he says. He will also continue to manage musicians, including best friend Farnham. Work will be the vehicle through which Wheatley will seek to re-enter the social world he left behind.

But it won’t be easy.

“The Australian psyche is such that we love to see winners fall, we love to see successful people take a dive, and I’ve given some people ammunition for that,” he says. “But my reputation is important to me and I am going to fight to get it back.”

He takes a sip of coffee and stares glumly out of the window.

“Looking back on the last 15 months,” he says slowly, “I can’t think of it as anything other than a complete, total and utter waste of my life.”

Staff writer Cameron Stewart’s previous article was “Stories that shook the world” (September 13-14), about the biggest news events of the past 20 years.