Eccentric businessman Geoffrey Edelsten dead at 78

Businessman, former doctor and one-time Sydney Swans owner Geoffrey Walter Edelsten lived an unpredictable life of curious ­chapters, each more eccentric than the last.

Geoffrey Edelsten has died aged 78.

Geoffrey Walter Edelsten lived an unpredictable life of curious ­chapters, each more eccentric than the last.

The businessman, medical ­entrepreneur and disgraced doctor, who died on Friday at his St Kilda Rd home in Melbourne at the age of 78, once owned the Sydney Swans football club and was addicted to ostentatious displays of wealth. He gave his first wife Leanne – she was 19 and he was 41 – a pink luxury car. It was claimed at the time he also gave her a pink helicopter (Edelsten insisted the helicopter was his – and was blue and white).

Their flamboyant lifestyle made them celebrities, a description soon to be prefaced ­permanently with the word “controversial”.

As well as his career as a doctor, Edelsten was known for his television appearances – he was in the fourth season of The Celebrity Apprentice Australia – and for his collection of wives. After Leanne there was 25-year-old Californian fitness instructor Brynne Gordon, who appeared on Dancing With The Stars. Their wedding was said to have cost $3m. Finally, he married Gabi Grecko – 46 years his junior – known for her exotic social media posts and who now is a New York rap artist ­reportedly going by the name of Glitta Fox.

Edelsten was born in the inner suburb of Carlton in 1943 to Jewish migrant parents. He had a solid schooling at Melbourne’s Princes Hill public school before attending secondary school at the acclaimed Mount Scopus College and going on to complete a degree in medicine at Melbourne University.

Geoffrey Edelsten his pink helicopter in 1981.

But before moving to NSW to work as a general practitioner he was employed in Melbourne hospitals and pursued a career in pop music. He launched a now forgotten label in 1967 called Scope!! that issued a couple of equally overlooked singles by a band called The Last Straws whose two songs carried co-writing credits for Edelsten.

Unfazed by that setback, he produced a single the following year with a supergroup of sorts that included Glenn Shorrock and other members of The Twilights, The Groop and The Strangers. The band adopted the name Pastoral Symphony and its single Love ­Machine became one of 1968’s big hits. Not for the first ime Edelsten became entangled in legal issues and the opportunity passed.

Thereafter he worked as a GP in rural NSW, learning to pilot a plane so that, he said, he could help patients living remotely who couldn’t afford medical care. Soon after he established his first practice at Sydney’s Coogee and then expanded it to the western suburbs. He also was involved in a business delivering pathology services that was put into provisional liquidation in 1971. ­Rebadged as Morlea Pathology Services, the company prospered and Edelsten expanded his network of practices.

Geoffrey Edelsten watches a Swans game from the stands in Melbourne, Australia. Picture: Getty

In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles and – according to a website he established to counter the “mistruths” told elsewhere – socialised with the likes of Diana Ross, Barbra Streisand, Sylvester Stallone, Julie Andrews, Shirley MacLaine and John Travolta.

He reportedly established a few clinics there, but was soon back in Australia. He had been returning regularly to build his network of surgeries, which he reinvented with the Hawke government’s launch of Medicare in 1984, festooning his practices with chandeliers and grand pianos and, it seems, welcoming as many reporters as patients. All the ­patients were bulk-billed, and his clinics saw thousands of them a week.

Geoffrey and Leanne Edelsten in Sydney in 1984. Picture: Rob Walls

In 1985, Edelsten became the first private owner of an AFL club – the life member of Carlton buying the Sydney Swans for $2.9m. The Swans saw success onfield and boasted stars such as Brownlow medallists Greg Williams and Gerard Healy, and lured Warwick Capper to the team. But Edelsten resigned as chairman not long after. Three years later he was bought out by ­investors, one of whom was Mike Willesee.

In 1988, Edelsten was struck off the NSW medical register for using unqualified staff for laser surgery. And things turned sour in 1990 when Edelsten, on the evidence of a taped conversation ­between he and Leanne, was found to have perverted the course of justice and to have hired hitman Christopher Dale Flannery. The Medical Tribune reported that Edelsten “is not of good character in that, between ­approximately 10 January 1984 and approximately 15 April 1984, he had a conversation with a criminal, whom he believed to be a professional standover man and murderer, with a view to obtaining his assistance to intimidate by threats or violence a former ­patient whom the applicant ­alleged was harassing him.”

He was jailed for a year.

And his unlucky streak continued in 2012 when thieves made off with $1.4m worth of cars he owned, including an $800,000 Lamborghini Aventador.