Gangland This Unsporting Life

By James Morton and Susanna Lobez

Sport has always attracted organised crime. Huge sums of money are wagered in every arena, and rorts, swindles and unsporting behaviour have shadowed players of all codes. Cricket and footy are not immune, with Heath Shaw and Ben Cousins caught up in gambling and drugs, and NRL star Ryan Tandy in match-fixing. Plenty of punters have criminal connections—Alphonse Gangitano and the Moran brothers. Drugs play a major part on and off the fields of play (looking at you, Essendon Football Club and Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks) with horses and greyhounds also routinely doped.

James Morton and Susanna Lobez investigate the cheating underbelly of sport, from the first cricket pitch invasion in the 1890s through to the contemporary scandals that will leave you wondering if there is such a thing as a sporting chance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780522874815

Book preview

GANGLAND

GANGLAND

THIS

UNSPORTING

LIFE

JAMES MORTON & SUSANNA LOBEZ

VICTORY BOOKS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

Level 1, 715 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

www.mup.com.au

First published 2019

Text © James Morton and Susanna Lobez, 2019

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2019

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Cover image of greyhounds: 1953, Sam Hood.

Dograces, Home and Away, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, courtesy copyright holder.

Text design and typesetting by Typeskill

Cover design by Nada Backovic Design

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522874808 (paperback)

9780522874815 (ebook)

Contents

Introduction

1It’s Just Not Cricket

2On and Off the Field

3The Peds

4On Ya Bike!

5Ringers

6Jiggery-pokery

7Nobblers

8They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

9The Hoops

10 When Rogues Go Racing

11 Cooking the Bookies

12 Fur, Feathers and Skin in the Game

13 Scullduggery

14 Gone to the Dogs

15 In the Ring and on the Mat

16 After the Game Is Over

17 Two-up, the National Game

18 And the Future?

Notes

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

Index

Introduction

How does one begin? ‘Begin at the beginning,’ said the King in Alice in Wonderland, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’

Unsporting practice in Australia started with the arrival of the First Fleet, but sadly there is no place at which it will stop.

The 2000 Sydney Olympics, although lauded as the ‘best games ever’ by IOC head honcho Juan Antonio Samaranch, was not above the skullduggery. It would therefore seem to be an ideal place from which both to look back and to look forward.

Before the games were officially opened there were serious doubts about drug taking by athletes. It was feared it might become not a question of who was the fastest and strongest but whose drugs were the stronger and longer lasting. On the bright side, however, there was a great deal to anticipate, including the great American athlete Marion Jones’ announcement that she was going to do her best to win five golds in track and field events. It was a promise she seemingly fulfilled to great acclaim.¹

There were many successes. The Harbour Bridge was lit with thousands of light bulbs. Cathy Freeman’s all-white suit when she lit the Olympic flame was memorable, even if the equipment temporarily malfunctioned and she had to stand under a waterfall while it was reset. There were the mascots: Olly (short for ‘Olympics’), a kookaburra; Syd (for ‘Sydney’), a platypus; and Millie (for ‘Millennium’), a spiny anteater. Alas, and perhaps unsportingly, their roles were hijacked by the unauthorised and anarchic Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat.

A creation of Sydney cartoonist Paul Newell, along with ‘Rampaging’ Roy Slaven and HG Nelson, the avatars of popular sports satirists John Doyle and Greig Pickhaver, Fatso was banned for a time after winners were seen carrying him after their events but was quickly reinstated after public outcry. Fatso was eventually auctioned off for over $80,000, bought by Kerry Stokes, now the Seven Network chairman, with the money going to a children’s charity. A statue of Fatso became part of the Olympic Memorial Park but sadly he was damaged in September 2010. The next month he vanished after the Grand Final.²

But, so far as Australian athletes were concerned, things other than mascots had already started to go sour. Just before Australia’s discus thrower and medal hopeful Werner Reiterer took a drugs test he admitted, ‘By the way, I’m presently full of drugs.’ He was using eight banned substances, including anabolic steroids, human growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor. Unbelievably, when the test result came back a few days later Reiterer had a clean reading.

To his eternal credit, Reiterer ignored the test result and retired that spring. Later in 2000 he detailed in his autobiography Positive his drug use and explained why, as an athlete, he starting taking them:

I was training my guts out every day, exhausting myself, risking injury and being beaten again and again by guys I knew who were on drugs. It’s the way a lot of us get involved [using drugs], seeing the cheats win, knowing they got away with it.

Not everyone behaved as well as Reiterer. For a start the whole of the Bulgarian weightlifting team was disqualified after it was found a significant number of members had been taking drugs. There was an offer that if a fine was paid the clean lifters could stay, but it was declined. In all, fifteen Olympians throughout the various sport disciplines were disqualified for taking drugs or later admitted they had done so.

Then there was the case of the female Chinese gymnast, a member of the bronze medal team. There were serious issues over the date of her birth and when it became clear she was fourteen, and not the minimum age of sixteen, the team gave up their medals.

Sixteen-year-old Romanian gymnast Andreea Răducan was also disqualified and stripped of the gold medal she won in the all-round gymnastics competition at the Sydney Olympics after she tested positive for pseudoephedrine. A stimulant that is the active ingredient in medicines such as Sudafed, it had been banned by the International Olympic Committee but not by the International Gymnastics Federation. Răducan received the pseudoephedrine in cold medication from a team doctor, who was subsequently suspended for the next two Olympic games. Earlier, Răducan had won gold in team gymnastics and silver in the vault. She had tested negative following those events and was allowed to keep the medals. Her 2015 appeal over the gold medal was dismissed.⁴

In the short term, however, the best (or worst) was yet to come.

The Paralympic basketball tournament was won by Spain against Russia, but some journos thought that a number of the men, who had to have an IQ of less than seventy-five to qualify to play, could have played professional basketball in Australia. They were correct. Of the Spanish team, only two met the criteria and, of the others, one was a journalist, another an engineer and several had degrees. In their first game the team was so far ahead at half-time that they were told to ease up in the second half to avoid discovery.

Carlos Ribagorda, the playing journalist who blew the whistle, thought other members of the Spanish Paralympic team did not really qualify either. There had been no proper testing and a great deal of connivance by the authorities. He played in other Paralympic tournaments as well and thought a number of athletes from other countries were not really qualified to be paralympians. But he said nothing about it, saving his story for his post-Olympic special.

And as for Marion Jones? There had been allegations and whispers that had begun in the early 1990s when Jones had missed a random drugs test, saying she had never received the notifying letter. In 2008 she served a six-month prison sentence over her involvement in a cheque fraud scam and when she came out she still denied she had ever taken drugs, saying that all she had swallowed was flaxseed oil. In her 2004 autobiography, Marion Jones: Life in the Fast Lane, she partly blamed the 2002 breakup of her marriage to shot-putter CJ Hunter on the fact that Hunter had tested positive for steroids four times before the 2000 Olympics, tainting her own drug-free image. Then some years later came the admission by Jones that she and Tim Montgomery, the sprinter and the father of her first child, along with Hunter had all used drugs ironically known as ‘The Clear’ prior to the Sydney Olympics. Montgomery later served a five-year sentence for dealing in heroin in 2008.

In the longer term it took until 2013 for the cyclist Lance Armstrong to admit his elaborate drug-taking regime and to be stripped of his bronze medal for the men’s Individual Time Trial at the Sydney Olympics, among many other awards.

Why do sportspeople cheat? One line of thought is that they think:

I am fitter, faster, stronger and more adroit than you. Therefore I deserve the attention of an adoring public. I will date anyone I like, and have people itching to be seen with me and become my friend.

In the end I shall have more money and a better job and will be the darling of the press and social media.

I will be wined and dined and I can stay gratis in the best hotels, paid for by admirers or the management. I can behave in the most outrageous way possible—terrorise my girlfriend, beat up my ex and destroy her condo, be photographed simulating sex with a piglet—and my adoring fans will forgive me because they will put it down to exuberance, not drugs and alcohol, and anyway they will want me to be the hero on the track next Sunday or kick a goal and score or win my heat.

I will never be charged because I am the highest of the Australian highs: the elite sports star. If I am convicted my lawyers will make sure it will not be recorded against me. My sport will benefit with more money coming their way because of my medals. So will my country, which will be proud of me.

When I retire I will be head of security, not a night watchman; I will be on the boards of companies instead of the wages clerk; I will be able to tour the country and, with luck, give motivational talks internationally for exceptionally large fees. Better race results—coming fourth in a semi-final heat is not the same as hitting the winning six or scoring the winning try—will lead to better rides, better horses in my yard, richer pickings, more winnings.

The career of a sportsman is not necessarily as long as that of a lawyer or an accountant. Very few last as long as jockey Danny Miller, still riding winners at the age of seventy—fifty years after he rode in the Melbourne Cup.⁵ Boxers do not generally last beyond forty and for a contact sport, such as Australian Football League (AFL) or rugby league, a player of that age would generally have reached the non-sporting equivalent of senility. So money has to be made early on. It is, however, too rarely saved for times ahead.

Not every jockey can become a trainer; not every cricketer and footie star can become a coach. For jockeys perhaps there is strapping or work riding. For boxers, wrestlers and martial arts fighters the options are more limited—it is often a choice between the twilight world of the nightclub door, bodyguarding, debt collecting or the stand-over. For almost all ex-sports players, the days of adulation and recognition will be gone. For some it is a series of hip, knee and back operations followed by the wheelchair. In many cases it is a slide into dementia from head injuries, and for others a decline into drug taking, the dole, alcoholism, crime, prison or suicide.

According to David Frith, author of Silence of the Heart, in Britain the percentage of former professional cricketers who commit suicide is apparently higher than the average male suicide rate and higher than players of any other sport. This, of course, may be because of a relatively small statistical sample.⁶

The year 2018 was not a good one for Australian sport. Three snooker players were suspended because of allegations of match-fixing and a tennis player was banned for throwing games. Earlier in the year three Australian cricketers, including the team’s captain, were suspended for tampering with the ball to promote reverse-swing, and the Wallabies’ rugby captain had just been suspended for being found in possession of cocaine. Two Australian cricketers were also allegedly among those being investigated along with English players over spot-fixing; that is arranging so many runs are made, no balls are bowled, or wickets fall in a certain period of play—there had been stories in the media in late May of an attempt to fix the pitch in a forthcoming cricket series between England and Sri Lanka. In October the television station Al Jazeera repeated an allegation of corruption in a number of international games, including at least one Australian player.

What is fair and what is unsporting on the field or in the ring? Clearly some things are unacceptable, but in other cases the matter is not so clear.

In the 1920s the New South Wales gambler and horse owner Bob ‘The Baron’ Skelton pulled off two betting coups. In the first, anxious to obtain better odds on his horse, he imported a well-known South Australian jockey to ride for him. He paid an official to put up ‘Wright’ as the jockey’s name in chalk on the runners’ and riders’ board, indicating he was a jobbing jockey and that the horse was not fancied. It won easily. The second occasion was at Kensington in Sydney, when he put up ‘J Nugent’ as the rider. No bookie fielding that day had heard of Nugent and the odds lengthened. Skelton’s men then plunged heavily into the ring and the price shortened to odds-on favourite. Nugent was in fact the leading rider Mick Hayes. In the subsequent outcry Skelton produced documents to show Hayes had legally changed his name to Nugent. He changed it back the next day.

Which, if either of those, was unsporting conduct?

Bad form isn’t unique to Australians and the dividing line between legitimacy and unsporting behaviour can be thin. At the beginning of the 2018 Premiership Rugby Union season in England in a match against Saracens, a Gloucester player apparently pretended to touchdown after the try line, something that would result in a 20-metre dropout. Instead he dropped the ball on his boot, gathered it up and ran the length of the pitch to score a try. His effort came to nothing. Unfortunately he had not only fooled the Saracens, he had also fooled the referee, who had blown his whistle for a dropout. The question then raised was whether his action was cheating or the equivalent of selling the opponent a dummy.

In a cricket match in India in 2019, a bowler ran out the non-striking batsman for backing up too far out of his crease and had not previously warned him. Was this unsporting play or the equivalent of throwing out a player in a baseball game who is trying to steal a base?

This Unsporting Life is about the dark side of games, where players cheat and are encouraged to do so by management. Where they mix all too closely with the underworld and, in many cases, even if they have not started as part of that milieu, they sink into it. Whichever way it is wrapped up, it is about money and power.

Sports gambling was legalised in Australia in the 1980s. By 2014 we had become, per capita, the biggest gambling nation in the world, with $23.6 billion wagered that year. With sports now clearly branded as part of the gambling industry, and as crooks and other criminals find their way into the sheds, the relationship between match-fixer and match day has been created. As Richard Hinds wrote in the Daily Telegraph, ‘athletes will consider gambling the way they might consider PlayStation games’.⁷

Chicanery is worldwide and often management sets the bar low. At the end of November 2018 the Irish soccer club Ballybrack FC announced the sad death of one of their players, Fernando Nuno La-Fuente. Minutes of silence were held at other grounds in honour of La-Fuente, who in fact was still very much alive. The announcement of his death had been a rort to get a game postponed. The club wrapped up its apology as best as possible:

This grave and unacceptable mistake was completely out of character and was made by a person who has been experiencing severe personal difficulties unbeknownst to any other members of the club.⁸

Often the culprit is exonerated and endowed with victim/hero status. What’s the bet someone can out-weasel that?!

It’s Just Not Cricket

1

It was shortly after the drinks interval on Saturday 24 March 2018 that, metaphorically at least, the pavilion roof fell in on Australian cricket, and for that matter Cricket Australia. The roof at the time was in Cape Town where South Africa was the host nation. It had been an unhappy Test match from the start, with Australia having a hard time in the series.

It was then Australian bowler Cameron Bancroft was clearly seen on the television coverage and on screens around the ground apparently rubbing the ball with a small yellow object. After Bancroft realised that he had been seen, he was shown on the screens hiding the object in the front of his trousers. He was then approached by the umpires and he showed them a dark microfibre sunglasses pouch he took from his pocket. The umpires inspected the ball, and chose neither to offer the ball to the South African team to replace it if they wished, nor award them five penalty runs. This indicated that the ball had not been altered in any noticeable way. The aim behind ball scraping, however, is to have one side smooth and the other rough so that the bowler can produce a delivery that swings more than an undoctored ball.

At the press conference at the end of the day’s play, Bancroft, who was accompanied by Australia’s captain Steve Smith, admitted that he had been shown attempting to alter the condition of the ball using a short length of yellow adhesive tape to which dirt and grit had adhered, forming an abrasive surface.¹

Andy Pycroft, the match referee, charged Bancroft with a Level 2 offence of attempting to alter the condition of the ball. David Richardson, CEO of the International Cricket Council (ICC), charged Smith with ‘conduct of a serious nature that is contrary to the spirit of the game’. Smith accepted the charge and the proposed sanction of two suspension points, which equated to a ban for the next Test match, four demerit points being added to his record, and a fine of 100 per cent of his match fee. Bancroft accepted the charge against him, was handed three demerit points and was fined 75 per cent of his match fee.

Over the next few days all sorts of explanations were offered. First up was Bancroft, who said the following day, ‘I panicked quite a lot. That obviously resulted in me shoving it down my trousers’. Next to bat on 29 March was captain Steve Smith, who broke down in tears as he explained, ‘It was a failure of leadership, my leadership. I will regret this for the rest of my life. I’m gutted.’ And finally on 31 March the man designated to become the villain of the piece, vice-captain David Warner, who opened the Australian innings with Smith in Cape Town and who was said to have promoted the rort, expected the worst: ‘In the back of my mind I suppose there is a tiny ray of hope that I may one day be given the privilege of playing for my country again, but I am resigned to the fact that that may never happen.’²

In the wash-up and after an investigation into the incident by Cricket Australia, Bancroft admitted he used sandpaper, something cricketers use to smooth their bats. Smith also admitted that he knew of the plan in advance of Bancroft’s actions. He said the plan was made during the lunch break by the ‘leadership group’, which he did not name. Smith said it was a ‘big mistake’, but when questioned by the media, he added that he would not be standing down as captain.

Smith and Warner were banned from elite cricket for twelve months and Bancroft copped nine months.³

How could this have happened?

The country that had been seen as a plucky underdog in the first Ashes Test in 1882 had slowly morphed over time into Australia becoming the force in international cricket in the mid 1990s. With that success came confidence, and a deep-seated love of touting their team as the model for how things should be done in the sport.

Wasn’t cricket the ‘Beautiful Game’ until, at least in England, soccer usurped it?

‘It just isn’t cricket,’ our parents told us, and in turn their parents had told them when explaining the meaning of fairness and good, well-mannered behaviour. But it turns out cricket had an undeserved reputation. It never was a game for gentlemen. Well, perhaps that is not quite true. There is no doubt that come harvest time the aristocracy would roll up their sleeves and bowl a few overs to the labourers, and that was one reason there was no 1790 revolution in England. However, money is usually always a consideration.

From the beginning there was heavy betting by the aristos and landowners who arranged fixtures solely for the purposes of gambling. Their lordships thought the game was a good medium for the employees to provide the opportunity on which to gamble. And in their turn the lower orders could not see why they should not benefit by taking a bit on the side from their opponents’ sponsors not to perform.

In the eighteenth century it had been a brutally competitive game played for high stakes. In 1775 William Waterford was convicted of manslaughter and received nine months (compared with a bigamist who received twelve that year) after the death of George Twigg in a match on Bakewell Common in Derbyshire. By the late nineteenth century gone were the days when catches could be made in hats or shirts; gone were non-strikers blocking bowlers from catching returns, nor could fielders block batsmen. Now there was no need for the proprietor of the Artillery Ground in Finsbury in London to patrol the boundary and spectators with a ‘smacking whip’, as was used as crowd control at prizefights.

In 1817 William Lambert, then the leading English professional cricketer who, the year before, had written ‘Rules for Playing The Noble Game of Cricket’, sold the match between England and the XXII of Nottingham. He was banned from Lord’s cricket ground and never again played in a first-class match.

For the nineteenth century country parson, the Reverend James Pycroft, cricket was fundamentally English. Writing in The Cricket Field he extolled the virtues of Victorian cricket as opposed to the game played in the previous century: ‘Foreigners have rarely imitated us. English settlers everywhere play at cricket; but of no single club have we heard that dieted either with frogs, saur-kraut or macaroni.’

Of his previous life, Pycroft, who played what would be now considered to be four first-class matches between 1836 and 1838, wrote, ‘The temptation [to cheat] was really very great—too great by far for any poor man to be exposed to’. He favourably compared the virtues of Victorian age cricket with the disgraceful state of play at the turn of the century when:

Lord’s was frequented by men with book and pencil, betting as openly and professionally as in the ring at Epsom, and ready to deal in the odds with any and every person of speculative propensities.

It was an attitude adopted by the members of the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) in Australia when cycling racing was introduced there in the 1890s.

Sadly Pycroft, far away in his Dorsetshire parsonage, did not appreciate what was actually happening in the wider world. Or perhaps things did change in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In Australia the first Indigenous man to be recorded playing cricket was ‘Shiney’, who in 1835 played for the Sorrell and Carlton clubs against Hobart Town. When he died—apparently killed on the water-front—a local doctor John Clarke acquired his head and smoked and preserved it in whisky, before on his own death bequeathing it to the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. It was only after considerable lobbying by Shiney’s great-grandson, activist Michael Mansell that it was returned to Australia in 1990.⁴

To make up the sides on rural stations around the country where cricket was played, pastoralists often enlisted their Indigenous station hands and stockmen whose tribal people lived nearby. In the 1860s William Hayman from the Western District of Victoria formed a team of men from three local tribes—Jardwadjali, Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk. By 1866, with the help of cricketer turned coach Tom Wills, the team was considered ready for Melbourne where, on Boxing Day 1866, they were trounced by the Melbourne Cricket Club. At least the eight thousand spectators were reported to have enjoyed the match.⁵

More matches were played and a Sydney tour arranged, but there the team’s funds were embezzled and they were stranded. Rescue came from Hayman, a new coach Charles Lawrence, the ex-all England player, and financial backers who saw the moneymaking aspects of this team. A tour of England was planned for 1868. They were the first Australian XI, paving the way for the Ashes. Had the organisers delayed a year, the Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act would have prevented the players from leaving their ‘reserves’.

Although the 1868 tour is seen as a landmark in Australian sporting and social history, in fact like all other sports it was about money. The organisation of the first Australian team to tour England was not undertaken in an effort to integrate the Indigenous community and make improvements to their lives. However altruistic it may seem and have been portrayed, it was the exploitation of an ‘exotic’ culture to make money from them.

Some saw it as a kind of ‘zoological’ display and observed that disparaging terms were used to describe the players. But London’s Sporting Life raved about the ‘native Australians’ and expressed surprise that they were not ‘savages’ but rather ‘perfectly civilised’.

In addition to playing cricket, at the end of each day the team was required to perform ‘traditional Aboriginal sports’ for the crowds—boomerang and spear throwing—and one man, Jungunjinanuke, known as ‘Dick a Dick’, wielded a club to deflect cricket balls thrown by spectators. However, The Times described the tourists as ‘the conquered natives of a convict colony’ and their participation in county cricket as ‘a travestie [sic] upon cricketing at Lord’s’. London’s Daily Telegraph was perhaps more complimentary when in May 1868 it commented, ‘Nothing of interest comes from Australia except gold nuggets and black cricketers’.⁶

For the men the tour was gruelling. Forty-seven matches were played in a four-month period, plus on-field entertainment. However, their ability was something of a surprise to their hosts and to the cricket elite of England. The team won fourteen matches, lost fourteen and nineteen were drawn.

Not only was the tour taxing, for some of the players it was also tragic. The trip was against the explicit advice of the Central Board for Protection of Aborigines and the team had to board the boat for England secretly. Two members died before the ship even sailed from Melbourne. Another player known as King Cole contracted tuberculosis and died in England following a bout of pneumonia. Three more died within five years of returning to Australia. In addition to their sense of displacement they were exposed to infectious diseases and introduced to alcohol. The survivors came home to little fanfare and after a couple of matches at the MCG most went back to their stations, soon to be corralled into the ‘reserves’.⁷

From the playing point of view the success of the tour was Unaarrimin, also known as ‘Johnny Mullagh’, who scored 1698 runs, bowled 1877 overs, 831 of which were maidens, and took 245 wickets. Pressed on occasions into keeping