The Gangland War (49 page)

‘I don't trust journalists,' she says in the first minute after sitting down to a light lunch and a big coffee near her office. She makes the same generalisation about not trusting most police and some lawyers — particularly prosecutors — but she is wise enough to add quickly that she respects the Melbourne legal establishment ‘enormously'.

She is bitter at the way she has been portrayed in the previous two-and-a-half years, and there is no reason to think she has changed her mind since. She is furious at a Sydney magazine heading a story ‘Thug-a-bye baby' in 2004. She imagined she would be treated with dignity after discussing her application to have sperm taken from her murdered partner's body and stored in the vain hope she could one day have his child. It was a vain hope in both senses of the word, some would say. Not only was the gesture doomed to fail because of legal barriers, but some cynics would see an element of vanity and publicity-seeking in her attempt to have a test-tube ‘love child' fathered posthumously by her killer lover.

One thing seems certain: if Garde-Wilson had never met the dashing killer who variously called himself Lewis Caine and Sean Vincent, the odds are that few outside Melbourne's gossipy legal circles would ever have heard of the solicitor with the Sloane Ranger surname.

Apart from her reputation for annoying the bench, distracting prosecutors and attracting a certain macho type of criminal
clientele by wearing plunging necklines, high heels and tight skirts that often fail to hide her suspenders and stockings, she would be just a hard-working young lawyer trying to survive in the piranha pool of criminal law. On ability, she should have prospered — but, as the cliché goes, she found love (and friends) in the wrong places and it threatened to torpedo her career. It still might.

For a conscientious solicitor, Garde-Wilson is vague about dates but it seems she met the man who called himself Lewis Caine soon after she arrived in Melbourne in mid-2002 with the now defunct firm Pryles & Defteros, after West Australian authorities had closed down its Perth branch office.

Caine, who was facing a drink-driving charge at the time, hired Zarah Garde-Wilson's employer, George Defteros. Defteros was a well-known criminal lawyer and one-time Northcote pub bouncer, who has since stopped practising because of charges, later dropped, that he was part of a gangland murder conspiracy.

Defteros introduced Caine to his hard-working junior and she fell for the would-be gangster, who had not long been out of jail after serving a long sentence. Most lawyers say that declaring herself willing and able for Caine was Zarah's second mistake. The first was working for Defteros, who had apparently thrown her into criminal legal work with little supervision or guidance about the fine line between lawyer and client. Defteros may simply have been distracted by his own heavy workload but there can be little doubt that in most criminal firms lawyers dating clients is frowned upon.

Garde-Wilson insists she has no regrets about choosing to work for Defteros ahead of a job offered by the West Australian Prosecutors' Office, and it's easy to believe her. She says her heart was always in defending the under-dog.

The trouble was that her new love interest Caine was more an attack dog. He had served twelve years for kicking a stranger
to death outside a nightclub in 1988. Born Adrian Bligh, the estranged son of a senior Tasmanian policeman was a martial artist with a mean streak. In prison, he relished being a standover man in the high-security divisions. Most who met him after his release saw trouble looming.

But the then inexperienced young solicitor saw a tender side to the hard man who, at 37, was thirteen years older than she was. He was, she says, ‘my first and only true love', a claim at least one of her relatives thinks is literally correct — suggesting that the studious Zarah had not had a serious sexual relationship before.

Ask her about Caine and she says, ‘You can't help who you love.' She adds, ‘There's not much I can say on the record.' She does not say much more off the record, and no wonder.

Raking over a lost love, a tarnished reputation and the odds of a ruined career isn't easy. Her eyes fill and she falls silent. It's hard to tell if she is masking emotion, using the lawyer's trick of buying time to frame careful answers or deciding whether to say anything at all.

After a long pause, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. She returns, composed, and talks a little of her two years with Caine. She uses the sort of ready-made phrases heard in soap operas — ‘we were soul mates' … ‘I still feel him here with me' … ‘he totally supported my career' … ‘it was all good' — but, to do her justice, sounds as sincere as any grieving partner would in such circumstances.

She won't be quoted about supposedly ugly scenes with Caine's relatives, who have criticised her over the semen harvesting, saying they believed he did not want children. She says she has more idea of his wishes than people who had hardly seen him for years, a reference to her claim that Caine was bitterly estranged from his family.

In her defence, she says Caine was not her own client, he had served his time and his debt to society, and their personal
relationship was no-one else's business. She paints a picture of a genuine love match — albeit with a man who predicted he would not live past 40 and had no visible means of support other than the dole and gambling. It is this that has made people question her judgment, although it is not the only reason.

Others, not only police and prosecutors but fellow defence lawyers who routinely act for criminals and are comfortable in defending their right to do so, describe Caine in terms of a manipulative sociopath using a vulnerable young woman for his own selfish ends. Less obvious, perhaps, is the possibility that she subconsciously used
him
to rebel against her sheltered, establishment family background; her own Caine mutiny, so to speak.

When the film-maker Geoffrey Wright based a version of
Macbeth
on the Melbourne gang war, he modelled Lady Macbeth on Garde-Wilson rather than the ‘usual underworld wives' because of what he saw as her glamour and complex motivations. She was ‘sensual, smart, sensitive and dedicated' yet chose to ‘swim with sharks' and tried to save them, he told the author.

‘Zarah, like Lady Macbeth, represents the complete collapse of a moral perspective in a quest for hopeless love,' he concludes. ‘The triumph of misplaced emotion over intellect.'

Why? Wright guesses at some psychological conflict that makes her ‘committed to “her man” no matter how bad he is.'

Garde-Wilson is oddly ambivalent about her past and scoffs at the idea that it could have any bearing on her adult life. Perhaps the lady protests too much. She says she is not estranged from her parents (now in Queensland) but adds, ‘I have always been self-sufficient, always been on my own little plane, always fought my own battles. I love my family, but we are on different levels.'

She projects an image between cool professional and romantic maverick that comes across in photographs and film footage of her, but in the flesh, a whiff of the obsessive loner hovers over her. At a distance, and through a lens, she might appear to be a
languid, privileged amateur filling in time slumming it with the cheaper people and indulging in rough trade, but that is not quite right.

The fact is that in many ways Garde-Wilson is as self-made as the next person and more than many in her profession. She has had to overcome obstacles and achieved her goal through hard work and self-motivation, starting from a low base. She got into law at James Cook University at Townsville in 1996, worked hard and switched to University of Western Australia. She did not make a huge impression on her fellow students or lecturers there but did the work to get good results. She recalls topping property law one year (‘the guy who marked it said it was better advice than you get from the Crown Solicitor's Office') but set her heart on crime work ‘because it's about defending people's liberty'. Some would call it a romantic streak.

As a senior student she worked voluntarily at Pryles & Defteros, which had represented notorious Perth crime figures like John Kizon and Coffin Cheaters motorcycle gang members, among others. She worked hard and the shrewd Defteros offered her a job after she returned from a six-month scholarship in England in 2001. She was thrown into the deep end of criminal defence work, sink or swim. She swam, at least for a while.

For someone accused of naivety and being conned, Garde-Wilson has no illusions about some crooks. She is scathing about the Perth scene ‘because it's run by Coffin Cheaters and bent police'. Once, after representing a wealthy gangster (not Kizon) she stepped into a courthouse lift with him and he leered and said, ‘Do we rape you now?' Her face hardens at the memory. ‘Who says
that
to a 22-year-old?'

The answer is: the sort of people who run gangs and strip joints, deal in drugs, guns and vice, and corrupt others and use violence to get their own way. The sort that the best criminal lawyers end up defending.

On the day the author interviewed Zarah Garde-Wilson, a middle-aged man in a new silver Mercedes sedan was parked in the street outside her office, waiting to see her. It was George Williams, father of Carl Williams, the western suburbs drug dealer who used to be, with Tony Mokbel, Garde-Wilson's biggest client until he was sentenced to 35 years for his part in planning a series of murders. She has been close to the Williams family. Too close, according to lawyers, police and many people in the media. One of the black marks against her is that after Caine was killed, she moved out of the city apartment, shattered, and went and stayed with the notorious Roberta Williams, outspoken estranged wife of Carl.

Why? ‘Because I had nowhere else to go,' she says with a shrug. ‘These people were the only ones who extended a friendly hand.' She seems to mean it. But did the crooks? Or were they just using her? Tough questions.

A senior Melbourne barrister who regularly appears in Perth met Garde-Wilson there in her first year with Pryles & Defteros. Later, he would be amazed at the transformation in her when she came to Melbourne after the firm was forced to close its Perth office in 2002.

‘The change was unbelievable,' he recalls. ‘In Perth she was slightly pudgy, outdoorsy, more casually dressed, but in Melbourne she'd lost a lot of weight and wore high heels — and those clothes.' Everybody knows what he means by the clothes: plunging necklines, skirts always tight and often short, a penchant for black.

The inference was she was hell-bent on impressing Caine and dressed in a way that appealed to men like him. She got what she wished for. Caine, being hell-bent on living fast and dying young, got his too.

The lawyer and her lover moved in together at a sharp building called Leicester House in Flinders Lane — a smart address, but they were renting a one-bedroom flat and ‘sitting on milk crates', a neighbour recalls. ‘It was no penthouse but it was a big step up from what he (Caine) was used to,' he adds, referring to Caine's previous lodging being a prison cell.

The neighbour would meet the odd couple in the lift — the well-spoken, private-school girl and the cocksure ex-crim who could not disguise the jailhouse swagger and edgy manner, somewhere between pimp and pugilist. Of Caine, he says, ‘My wife was bringing her mum in with some shopping some day and he was all polite and helpful, asking if he could carry it up for them. But you wouldn't trust him. All these blokes are the same. I know the type — charming up to a point but they turn on you in a flash. You give them a big hello but keep walking.'

In early 2004 a private detective drinking at the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Carlton on the city's edge saw Caine with a notorious former prisoner and a known gunman. The detective sensed something about Caine and mentioned to friends later that he seemed ‘a cocky young fella, up on his toes' and looking for trouble. If so, he soon found it.

On May 8, 2004, a Saturday night, Lewis Caine's bleeding body was found dumped in a Brunswick street — and was instantly labelled victim number 25 in the underworld war. Ten days later, armed police swooped on the gunman, known as The Journeyman, who was seen drinking with Caine at the hotel days before. It was a big arrest, and one that would have reverberations for a long time as the Purana Taskforce and prosecutors unravelled the tangled and treacherous web of criminal connections surrounding the ‘war'.

The bloodsoaked end of Caine's relationship with his lady lawyer — and its bizarre postscript — pushed the then unknown
Garde-Wilson towards centre stage of the biggest show in town. Caine's murder (and the leaked sperm story) made a private peccadillo into a public ‘scandal'. The social and professional gulf between the doomed lovers gave it a dramatic frisson that caught attention all over Australia.

With her piece of rough trade shot dead, Garde-Wilson was suddenly the Lady Chatterley of Little Bourke Street; the tragic love interest in a drama with real bullets, real blood and a testtube of real semen. Her reaction to being thrust into the public eye caused problems that have dogged her ever since.

No-one could doubt her devotion to the dead killer. Having just set up her own firm, she added his name to make it ‘Garde-Wilson & Caine' — a lapse of judgment and taste later quietly remedied, probably under pressure from the Law Society. The name on the frosted glass door was, by 2006, a more conventional ‘Garde-Wilson Lawyers' but for the legal establishment the damage was done. And still is.

A detective who investigated Garde-Wilson's underworld connections says Caine's murder should have flagged the danger of mixing the personal and the professional, but it actually pushed her more offside.

She could have pulled back, ‘maybe even gone interstate and started again,' he says. Instead, she shed any pretence of professional detachment by staying with Roberta Williams — a convicted drug offender, media junkie and, for a while, a key player in the gang war.