The sad ‘breaking bad’ of Bomber Thompson, the footballing virtuoso

It was outside the coaches’ box, away from the stadium lights, that “Bomber’’ Thompson’s life spiralled out of control.

Mark Thompson yesterday. Picture Jay Town.

There are few people who saw football quite like Mark ­“Bomber” Thompson.

From his place high in the stands, behind the glass of the coaches’ box, Thompson could distil from the mayhem below the critical move that needed to be made, the message that needed to be sent, the lever that needed to be pulled to swing a contest, a match, a season. For those two hours each week, he was a virtuoso, a man with a rare sporting gift.

It was outside the coaches’ box, away from the stadium lights, that Thompson’s life spiralled out of control.

What remains of that life is now finely balanced. Having captained Essendon to a premiership and coached Geelong to their drought-breaking flag in 2007, having been celebrated and feted and publicly revered, Thompson is facing ­serious criminal charges of trafficking two drugs of ­dependence: ecstasy and ­methyl­amphetamine, commonly known as ice.

This time, Thompson can see no way out.

He is adamant he did not ­traffic drugs, but has confided in friends that he cannot co-operate with police for fear of reprisals by those to whom he foolishly opened his Port Melbourne home.

He is what career criminals call a square head: a 54-year-old ­father of three with no previous criminal convictions who, having dedicated his working life to keeping young footballers fit, strong and moti­vated, now stands accused of breaking bad.

It is a dramatic, abject fall from grace. Yet those who know him well are not entirely surprised.

“Bomber carried off this dual lifestyle,’’ an Essendon figure said. “Everyone thought he was an amazing player, coach at Geelong and great Essendon person. Superficially he probably was but once you drilled down, it was just a mess. Most people didn’t see that.’’

Such was Thompson’s erratic behaviour in his final year at ­Essendon in 2014, his last as an AFL coach, that the club kept a discreet log recording episodes ­ranging from the bizarre to deeply troubling.

Karl ‘Bang Bang’ Holt. Picture: Mike Dugdale

Detailed in its pages are the time he walked out of the club at 11am, only to be found asleep in his car by a security guard five hours later. The time that, less than an hour before an AFL match he was supposed to coach, his fellow coaches and staff had no idea where he was.

There are the training sessions missed without explanation. His no-shows at important meetings. The occasions he would arrive late, lathered in sweat, looking as though he hadn’t slept the night before or indeed, for days.

It is tempting to sheet all of this back to the Essendon drug scandal: a sporting, political and legal wrecking ball that swung through Windy Hill in 2013 and over the next three years, lay the club, its players, staff and lifelong friendships to waste.

Thompson, by his own reckoning, was consumed by the scandal. He is haunted by the role he played in bringing to the club Dean Robinson, a headstrong conditioning coach who in turn introduced to Essendon the now discredited and bankrupt sports scientist Stephen Dank.

At the same time, Thompson bristles with injustice at how he was treated by the AFL and, later, by his own club.

It is simplistic to see Thompson’s personal crisis solely through this prism. Although his behaviour deteriorated after the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority and the AFL launched a joint ­investigation into suspected doping at Essendon, it didn’t start there. At Essendon, successive management regimes stretching back to 2010, when Thompson was hired from Geelong to mentor newly appointed senior coach James Hird, suspected Thompson of using drugs.

Thomas Windsor. Picture: Bendigo Advertiser

Well before the supplements scandal broke, Essendon staged an intervention. Thompson was called to a meeting in chief executive Ian Robson’s office where he found Robson, club president David Evans, Hird and club doctor Bruce Reid waiting for him. They each expressed concern about his welfare.

It was left to Reid to ask Thompson the question they all had: whether he was using drugs. Thompson vehemently denied it and consistently has to anyone who has since asked.

There were also problems at Geelong, where Thompson became the first Cats coach in 44 years to bring a premiership cup to Kardinia Park.

The year before the premiership, he split from his wife and mother of his three children who were living in Melbourne.

He moved permanently to Geelong and started a relationship with a much younger woman. He grew distant from old friends and became untethered from his support network.

In his final years at the club, his players started seeing him at the same nightspots they frequented, at hours when all of them should have been in bed.

He grew rich from a local property development and started keeping company with a clique of similarly wealthy men who could afford to live fast and loose.

One of them was said to have kept a permanent address at Crown casino.

By the time he joined Essendon at the end of the 2010 season, having misled Geelong about his intentions, his arrival was ­ac­companied by worrying tales from a not-so-Sleepy Hollow. Essendon officials noted his short concentration span and his difficulty looking people in the eye. Which brings us to Bang Bang.

Karl “Bang Bang” Holt is hard to miss. His shaved head is ­covered with tattoos. His black Mercedes coupe carries the personalised licence plate ONBAIL.

Mark “Bomber’’ Thompson. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

On January 4 this year, police ­intercepted Holt and his girlfriend, Katia Drcec, on a stretch of the Princes Highway just outside Geelong. Inside his car, they allegedly found more than 100g of methamphetamine, a crack pipe and $2380 in cash.

From there, police paid a visit to Drcec’s mother’s house in Mill Park where they found more drugs and cash and a semi-­automatic pistol.

The arrests of Holt and Drcec led police to search for Holt’s well-known business associate, the burly, heavily inked Thomas Windsor. They found him at a property at Lara, where his rented Toyota Corolla was parked on the front lawn. Checks on the car revealed that a parking inspector sighted it two days earlier in the Port Melbourne street where Thompson owns a converted warehouse. Further checks revealed Thompson had paid for Windsor’s car rental.

On January 5, armed members of the Geelong Divisional Response Unit executed a search warrant on Thompson’s property. Nobody was home but when they forced their way in, police discovered a trafficable quantity of drugs and an array of equipment commonly used by those in the trade to weigh, package and mix their ­illicit products.

The largest stash of drugs found at the address was nearly a kilogram of MDMA, otherwise known as the party drug ecstasy. More problematic for Thompson is a series of smaller packets of the same drug, with a combined weight of 134.6g, found in a locked storage room leading off his bedroom.

According to police, these packets were found to have traces of Thompson’s DNA. Police found them next to Geelong ­Football Club memorabilia that Thompson had kept since his glory days as a premiership coach.

Thompson’s home is in a row of warehouses in a narrow street. He has lived there since 2010. Police allege Windsor has also been living there for a while, running a criminal enterprise from the same premises where Essendon used to hold its regular coaches’ meetings.

When Thompson appeared in Melbourne Magistrates Court on Tuesday to answer the charges against him and apply for bail, police said they had found a handwritten lease agreement between Thompson and Windsor on the kitchen table.

Police say they also have evidence of an exchange of a large sum of money between the pair.

Windsor, Holt and Drcec are currently remanded in custody, waiting for committal proceedings on charges of trafficking commercial quantities of drugs. Thompson successfully applied for bail on the condition that he have no contact with his co-­accused, surrender his passport and report to police three times a week. His immediate fate will be decided on summary, by a magistrate. Two of the key questions he will be asked to answer is how Windsor came to live at his home and what he knew of his alleged criminal activities.

If Thompson is to be believed, Windsor is a house guest who ­simply refused to leave.

They met, Thompson liked him, and offered him a place to stay.

Thompson maintains he had no involvement in any drugs Windsor allegedly distributed or sold from his Port Melbourne warehouse, where Windsor had the run of a self-contained flat.

Thompson’s lawyer, David Hallowes SC, told the bail hearing that the trafficking charges would be “vigorously denied’’.

Thompson is charged with three such counts. Each one carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison.

As news of Thompson’s troubles spread, many old friends reached out to the fallen football hero. One told The Australian that he visited Thompson recently, some weeks after the police raid, and was struck by how healthy and relaxed he seemed.

Another was planning to meet Thompson last night to offer what help he could.

They are terribly saddened but not genuinely shocked at where it has ended for Bomber. For many years, he has been watching the game with his eyes half-closed.