Last Bets: A true story of gambling, morality and the law

By Michaela McGuire

On a Sunday evening in July 2011, 40-year-old Anthony dunning was pinned to the floor of Melbourne's Crown casino by security staff. Four days later, he died in the intensive care unit of the Alfred Hospital. The incident was reported to the police by two friends who were with dunning on the night—not by Crown casino. Later that week, a spokesperson for the police said that even though Crown had no legal requirement to report such incidents, 'they probably had a moral obligation' to do so. Crown casino said that its employees were just doing their job. Three months later, a young security guard was charged with manslaughter.
Michaela McGuire follows the trial, trying to make sense of the gap between ethics and the law. She speaks to problem gamblers and psychologists, a casino priest and David Walsh, Australia's most notorious gambler. Last Bets is true crime writing at its best—disturbing, gripping, and unnerving. A must-read for gamblers, the gambling industry, law makers and everyone who cares.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780522862409

Book preview

Index

Prologue

ON THE FIRST Sunday evening of July 2011, 40-year-old Anthony Dunning was pinned to the floor of Melbourne’s Crown casino by security staff. He had been at the footy that afternoon with two friends and, six hours after the Pies beat the Hawks, Matthew Lawson, a 26-year-old security guard, decided that Dunning was drunk and asked him to leave the casino. Dunning died in the intensive-care unit of the Alfred Hospital four days later. Police were not notified until Dunning’s two friends, who had been with him on the night, made a report the following morning. Olivia Ferguson and Matthew Anderson had been escorted separately from the casino and ejected on opposite sides of the premises. Ferguson had lost her glasses as she was taken out of the casino and, disoriented, confused and unable to see properly, described blurry landmarks over the phone until her partner, Anderson, was able to find her. The pair couldn’t locate Dunning and had no idea what had happened to their friend. The twenty or so calls they made to his mobile that night went unanswered.

I’m overseas when I first read a report about the incident. I haven’t written anything substantial in almost two years, and am miserable because of it. An advance from my publishers has been sitting in my bank account untouched for months, but I can’t bring myself to begin writing the book I’ve promised them. My boyfriend suggests going overseas and getting out of my own head. A change of scene will help, he says. I max out my credit card and use my advance to buy plane tickets. We set off on a two-month holiday, and I’m still jetlagged when I start picking fights with him out of boredom.

The first big one happens in a grand old casino in the Czech Republic, the baroque majesty of which was immortalised in Casino Royale, where we sit drinking wine beneath a twinkling chandelier. He wants to gamble and show off his Russian. I’m not interested. I hate casinos, I say. I once worked at one for six months, and never want to set foot on another gaming floor. He insists that isn’t a valid reason, I dig my heels in and we walk back to our hotel in silence. As I trudge after him through Karlovy Vary’s picturebook streets, I realise he has a point. I can’t articulate why I hate gambling any better than a four-year-old can pinpoint why they hate broccoli. Instead of admitting as much, I think about whether or not there might be a story in this.

Although I’m too sore to say so, I realise that I’ve been relying on the same excuse for years. Every time I’m asked if I’d like to join in a social game of poker, have a bet on the Melbourne Cup or kick off a night out at a casino, I lazily and reflexively call upon the six miserable months I spent waiting tables in the highrollers room at Brisbane’s Treasury casino as the reason for my loathing of gambling. I hated all the elements of that job: scrubbing out ashtrays, staying awake for graveyard shifts and living out my weeks in a permanently jetlagged state, fetching cups of tea for the punters who would hit me on the arm and screech their orders at me. Sometimes I’d linger on one of the outdoor balconies at the end of a long night, gulping in fresh air as the sun came up over the river, casually entertaining ways that I could injure myself just enough—accidentally slice a finger when restocking the lemon wedges behind the bar, perhaps—that I’d have to be sent home early. One day, after boldly declaring to my family that I’d rather throw myself off one of those balconies than work another shift, I quit and found part-time work elsewhere to see me through my final year of university. I’ve instinctively hated casinos ever since but can recognise that it’s an adolescent loathing, one without any sophisticated or particularly well-thought-out reasoning behind it. Truth be told, I would have hated that same combination of cigarettes, late nights and hospitality work even if they hadn’t been happening inside a casino.

There’s something else, too. Some months beforehand, I’d received an email out of the blue from one of my uncles. It was addressed to the entire family; my mother and her siblings, and my two brothers were all cc’d in. ‘Please forgive me for everything I have done,’ it began, before explaining in a remarkably matter-of-fact way that, unbeknownst to the entire family, my uncle is a gambling addict. I was shocked. It didn’t seem plausible that my soft-spoken, unassuming, rather chaste and boring uncle could have lost over $100,000 in just a few short years. Aftershocks of surprise and betrayal rippled through my family. During the fallout, my eyes were opened to the murky morality that sustains a problem gambler.

My boyfriend and I continue to make our way through Eastern Europe. In the month since we’ve left the Czech Republic he’s written a film script and numerous short stories, and each day while he sits at a small wooden desk in our Budapest apartment, I scroll through newspapers from back home and glower at him over the top of my computer. I’m reading widely about gambling, but my lines of enquiry are stunted, lacking any real focus.

Then, one day, I stumble across the Age’s headline ‘Man dies after casino fray’, and my heart skips a beat as I wait for the story to load. The story is light on detail, saying only that Anthony Dunning became unconscious as he was restrained by casino security guards, and that another man and a woman had also been involved. Just a few hours later, though, there’s a new story, along with a videoed statement made by Senior Sergeant Ron Iddles. It’s not an eloquent statement—he begins by mispronouncing Dunning’s surname—but there it is, right at the end. Iddles looks up from his typed statement and says to the news cameras, ‘I think they [Crown casino] probably had a moral obligation to contact the police.’

It’s a curious phrase, one that snags instantly in my mind and doesn’t budge. ‘Under the Crown policy, where someone’s removed from the premises, there’s no obligation on Crown to actually tell the police and for whatever reason, the police weren’t called,’ Iddles elaborates in the online article, and I imagine the edge of sarcasm in what he has to say. ‘It would have been great to have been notified at the time or have the local police attend for the purposes of identifying witnesses, interviewing members from Crown casino.’

The terse, slightly sensationalistic news report raises more questions than it answers, questions that spin wildly through my mind. What had really happened that night? How had it become writ that the casino’s security would function as rogue operators? Was there anyone at Crown that night who thought to question protocol? Were the bouncers involved concerned? Did they think to call the hospital? Or was Anthony Dunning just another drunk patron, that Sunday evening just another night on the job?

Later that week, Crown casino’s spokesperson, Gary O’Neill, expresses ‘our most sincere sympathy to the friends and family of Mr Dunning’, and tells reporters that the three or so security guards who had been involved ‘were not performing their normal duties’. Crown appears to be doing everything it can to ensure that the story will blow over quickly: temporarily standing down the bouncers who had been involved, offering restrained sympathy in the face of what was already being cast as an accidental tragedy and now, apparently, cooperating with police. I half-expect the story to disappear.

It doesn’t.

Four days after Dunning died in hospital, a former police officer contacted Melbourne radio station 3AW after he and a group of friends were ejected from the gaming floor by Crown security guards for no obvious reason. In an apparent reference to Anthony Dunning, a bouncer allegedly told the former officer to, ‘Fuck off, mate, we don’t want another bloke having a heart attack, now, do we?’

What the hell was going on at Crown? Not only was a man’s death not reported to police but within a matter of days it was being used as a malicious warning to other patrons.

Over the next week I follow Dunning’s story as it develops, wondering what exactly this gap between what is legal and what is ‘probably moral’ allows a casino to do. As I try to puzzle out the meaning of this one phrase, made by an inarticulate cop halfway across the world in Melbourne, I begin to think that maybe my antipathy towards casinos isn’t entirely irrational after all. Maybe there’s a reason I could never quite put my finger on what it is about these places that sets me so ill at ease that I’m willing to pick a fight with my boyfriend instead of addressing the issue directly. I decide that if I’m going to find out, the answer will lie in this strange space between what’s merely allowed and what most people would understand to be OK.

I set up a Google alert for Anthony Dunning’s name and, a couple of months later when I learn that a court date has been set, I email my publishers. I know what I want to write a book about. While I’m waiting for a response, I circle the date in my calendar.

1

The Bouncers

THE CROWN CASINO BOUNCERS, as they became known in the months to follow, are to make their first court appearance on 17 January 2012. Matthew Lawson, the 26-year-old bouncer who has been charged with manslaughter, will appear with four of his colleagues: 23-year-old Benjamin Vigo from Hoppers Crossing and 39-year-old Cameron Sanderson from Northcote, who face charges of common law assault over the same incident, and 25-year-old Nicholas Levchenko from Highett and 29-year-old Jacques Fucile from Essendon, who face charges of recklessly causing injury with regard to another, related assault. I work as a legal secretary around the corner from the Magistrates’ Court, and on the morning of the committal mention I ask my boss if I can be excused for an hour. A committal mention is a short, preliminary hearing prior to a full committal hearing, where matters in dispute will be discussed and charges will be heard. It’s here that the bones of the story will start to be laid bare.

I wander up to the court just before 10 a.m. and take a seat in Courtroom 12. I drift into the courts often enough as part of my job, to file documents at the registry or hand a missing set of paperwork to my boss or a barrister, that I feel familiar with the little rituals and formalities of the place. Today, now that I’m here as a writer rather than just another cog in the legal machine, I’m suddenly nervous.

A distant friend is sitting in the row in front, her head neatly bowed over the papers she’s shuffling. ‘Lidia,’ I say, and she turns to me and grins. Lidia is a criminal defence lawyer whom I met on a camping trip last New Year’s Eve.

‘What’re you doing here?’ she says.

In a low voice, I tell her that I’m researching a story and Lidia moves to sit beside me. ‘Press sit over there,’ she says, and I realise that, thinking as an employee of a law firm rather than a writer, I’ve automatically sat on the same side of the courtroom as the assembled defendants and their counsel. I feel like a friend of the bride who’s sat down on the groom’s side of the church. ‘You’re in the thick of it here,’ Lidia says with a wry smile.

‘We’ve got a good magistrate today,’ she goes on to explain. ‘That’s why there’s a bit of a buzz. Everyone’s changing tack.’ I look around the court and see that she’s right. The room is filled with people huddled in groups of two or three, furtively whispering to each other, rearranging documents and, I imagine, trying to decide just how far they can push this magistrate. Lidia asks if I am here to watch a specific case, and I tell her what I know about the Crown bouncers. ‘That’s why all the media is here,’ she says. We look at the two small rows of chairs that make for a press gallery and see that they have filled entirely while we’ve been speaking. ‘Spikes over there works for the Herald Sun,’ says Lidia.

‘Spikes?’ I ask, before noticing the gelled peaks of a man’s head. Spikes has arrived later than the other journalists and stands chatting to them, his hands spread squarely over his hips, before he eventually saunters over to a spare seat a few rows behind us. The bench clerk announces the arrival of Magistrate Jack Vandersteen, and as we rise in unison I crane my head to get a better look at this kind judge.

It seems that most of the attending lawyers have decided to seek an adjournment. The magistrate grants most of the requests and excuses the representatives, who bow gratefully before hurrying out of the court. A large man with poor posture pleads guilty to a charge of aggravated assault and is directed to pay his bail downstairs. Two Chinese men, one in a suit and one in a shiny athletic jacket, are led into the dock, and Lidia leans over to me. ‘Are these your guys?’

I freeze, then shake my head. I know the names of the defendants and that they are not Chinese, but the suggestion that they might be ‘my guys’ has thrown me. I’m still not sure what side of the courtroom I should be sitting on. The bench clerk announces the first committal mention, and after four cases are assigned their numbers, ‘my guys’ are called. Tony Hargreaves, the lawyer for the defence, stands and moves to the bar table. His grey hair is pressed flat against the back of his head in tight curls, and when he turns briefly to his left I can see that, although he appears to be reasonably young, his cheeks are already drooping down his face. From my limited experience with criminal law I know him by reputation, and that he’s a very good and very expensive defence lawyer. I doubt very much that a 26-year-old bouncer can afford his services, and assume that Crown casino is footing the bill. All five cases are to be

Reviews for Last Bets

[mjlivi · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I had high hopes for this book, feeling the same mix of ambivalence and distaste for gambling as McGuire and hoping for something insightful and fresh on the topic from her book. The story is set up around the manslaughter trial of bouncers from Crown Casino, in a very similar way to the way that Anna Krien's Night Games uses the rape trial of a footballer to explore sex and gender issues in Australian sport. Unfortunately, McGuire's book didn't really take the broader story very far, instead getting hung up mostly on the trial (with a slightly out of place but interesting interview with David Walsh to break things up). As a story of a tragic death and troubling legal process the book works well, but as an examination of gambling, morality, regulation and law in Australia it falls a bit short.