Inside Out : An extraordinary story of ambition, addiction and redemption 9781742247359, 9781742234250

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Greg Fisher is the general manager of Our Big Kitchen, a community centre in Bondi, Sydney. Along the way he has risen to the top of the corporate world and crashed to the deepest and darkest of places.

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A NewSouth book Published by NewSouth Publishing University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA newsouthpublishing.com © Greg Fisher 2015 First published 2015 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Creator: Fisher, Greg, author. Title: Inside out ISBN: 9781742234250 (paperback) 9781742242064 (epub/mobi) 9781742247359 (epdf ) Subjects: Fisher, Greg Fisher, Greg—Imprisonment. Businessmen—Australia—Biography. Drug dealers—Australia—Biography. Criminals—Rehabilitation—Australia—Biography. Dewey Number: 363.450992 Design Josephine Pajor-Markus Cover design Xou Creative Cover image Don Arnold Printer Griffin All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard. This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

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CONTENTS ‘Allow me to reintroduce myself ’ viii Every opportunity 1 From Superfish to the jet set 14 Entering the corporate whirl 24 The woman in my life 30 Corporate stress 37 Heartache and new horizons 43 The Satellite Group 51 Air kisses 66 Living the life 75 Crashing 86 Dealing 98 Enter Tina 107 Jail 118 ‘I’ll have someone finish you off’ 132 Surviving 151 An unlikely paradise 162 Work release 168 Our Big Kitchen 180 Release 198 My second chance 210 Acknowledgements 227

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‘ALLOW ME TO REINTRODUCE MYSELF’

I FEEL SICK. MY HANDS ARE SHAKING AND I’M QUEASY.

I’m at a gala dinner for one of Australia’s richest men, the tough, no-nonsense Harry Triguboff, owner of the massive property development company Meriton. The grand ballroom of Sydney’s Sofitel hotel is packed with 500 of his family, friends and colleagues who have gathered to celebrate his eighty-first birthday. Rather than buying an expensive gift for the multibillionaire, the guests are here to raise money for the Bondi Yeshiva Centre, an organisation close to Triguboff’s heart. As its general manager I’m here to speak about Our Big Kitchen, a community kosher and halal certified industrial kitchen that occupies the basement of the Yeshiva Centre. I have been in this role for 18 months. In my previous life as managing director of The Satellite Group, I was used to giving speeches. I’ve never shied away from the public eye. I enjoy connecting with an audience and making a pitch. Indeed, part of what

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made me successful was my ability to think on my feet, to display confidence even if I felt unsure, and to wine and dine the most famous of figures. Yet here I am, trembling as I wait in the wings. As I take my place on the stage, I look at my 20-yearold daughter, Carly, sitting in the audience. Carly is a confident young woman who is studying to become a history and drama teacher. She has helped me put my speech together, and she knows how I’m feeling. Carly and I have worked hard to ensure the speech will capture the hearts and minds of the audience. I know that they are here because of Harry rather than a deep commitment to the cause. But I need them to see beyond the surface of what we do and to understand that by donating to the Yeshiva Centre, they are doing more than supporting a specific part of the community. Their dollars will help people with disabilities, those suffering from cancer, families who were going through particularly difficult times financially. Everyone knows someone who needs a hand. I take a deep breath. I’m quivering. I look at Carly and she smiles back reassuringly. I begin, and explain that ultimately OBK is all about second chances – second chances for people with disabilities who need to feel part of the community; second chances for the homeless by reskilling them with a barista training course; second chances for prisoners taking part in the Corrective Services work release program, a program

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available to less than one per cent of the jail population, which allows low-security inmates to take their first steps towards reintegration into society. I take another deep breath. I once again look at Carly. She keeps smiling. I swallow. ‘Allow me to reintroduce myself: I am inmate number 378121.’

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EVERY OPPORTUNITY WHEN I WAS A KID MY MUM USED TO SAY I’D EITHER BE

very successful or end up in jail. As it turned out, I’ve been both. So how did I go from being a bright, welleducated, loved and connected corporate high-flyer to serving seven years and ten months in jail? I had a privileged childhood. I grew up in Sydney, in the affluent eastern suburbs. My parents, Rosalind and Jack, worked hard to put my sister Pam and me through private schools and we were given every opportunity to follow our passions. We were loved, supported, and encouraged to succeed. Ours was a typical Australian Jewish family with a combination of British and Eastern European heritage. My parents had met at a Jewish National Fund youth ball in 1958, and I was born in September 1965. For the first 18 years of my life I lived in a bedroom the size of a shoebox next to my parents’ room in our modest duplex apartment in comfortable Woollahra. At the end of each school day I would drop my school bag at home and race next door and up a flight of sweeping

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stairs to our neighbour Edith Gonda (or EE as I used to call her) and eat her Hungarian dough biscuits with jam and a spattering of icing sugar sprinkled on top. EE was like a third grandmother to me. Her main company through the day was her long-haired white cat, Pinky. Pinky would hiss at me whenever I visited, as if she hated me taking her owner’s fond attention. Property development began at a very young age for me – my first significant construction was a tree house. Together with kids from the neighbourhood, I built our play house in the sky by hammering wooden planks into a forgiving old Moreton Bay fig tree. Every weekend we would swing on a rope tied to a huge branch that seemed to have grown just for this purpose, pushing off from the top of the tree and flying through the air. If I fell and ran home in tears, I received a symbolic splash of Dettol and a bandaid on my wounds and would then be sent off to play again. Other adventures included collecting tadpoles from the creek down the hill at Cooper Park, putting on puppet shows for our parents, and watching episodes of Skippy, Flipper and Here’s Lucy on TV. We looked forward to our exotic meals out, which in those days meant dinner at the local Chinese in Rose Bay. Pam and I would have to dress properly, which made the dinner all the more of a treat. My favourite Chinese dish is still beef and black bean sauce! My love of cars also started young. My pride and joy was my Matchbox car collection. We had a long,

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wide hallway in our house. The flower stand became a shopping centre, and in my imagination I created a range of other buildings, including a school and a hospital, across the carpet. I had a Mercedes for the weekend, trucks, a fully fitted-out campervan, and a range of other cars on the street. I would spend hours with those Matchbox cars and I drove my parents nuts by leaving them lying around in the hallway every day; whenever people came to visit they had to be cleared away. One year, when I was nine, we went to Fiji on holiday and when we returned all my cars had vanished. I was devastated, I just couldn’t understand what had happened. My parents seemed as incredulous as I was.  The first member of my family to arrive in Australia was Emanuel Phillips in 1826. He had been sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the colony of Australia as his punishment for accepting half a chest of stolen tea. Emanuel’s marriage to his cousin, Hannah Phillips, in 1831 was the eleventh Jewish marriage to be registered in Sydney. His family later moved to New Zealand. The next members of my family to arrive in Australia were my great-great-great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Abraham Jacob Solomon and his wife Julia (nee Isaacs), who arrived in Adelaide from London in 1849. Abraham was the Reader at the first synagogue

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in South Australia. Their son married Emanuel Phillips’ granddaughter. My great-great-grandfather, Nathan Jacobs, arrived from Poland in 1879. Nathan was sent to Australia by his family, who were determined that he escape the Czar’s army. During this period, Jewish boys of 13 years and over were conscripted by the Czar for a period of 25 years. It was likely that – should they survive – they would be assimilated, i.e. would have lost their Jewish identity, by the time they returned home. Jewish families did everything they could to avoid their boys joining the army as it was an almost certain death sentence. When Nathan arrived in Australia he quickly began to establish himself. His first deal was to sell a pair of boxing gloves he had won in a competition, in order to buy silver toothpicks, which he then sold to Hansom cab drivers. His entrepreneurial spirit ultimately led him to Sydney and the construction industry. Many of his buildings still stand today, including Gladstone Hall in Rose Bay, and Miriam and Clarice Courts in Todman Avenue, Kensington. Nathan married Amelia Davis, whose family had arrived in Melbourne in 1859, and they moved up to Sydney and became members of the Great Synagogue. Their seats remained in my family until only recently, when my parents gave them up to become members of the South Head Synagogue in Rose Bay, where my sister and her family go. Whilst no longer seat-holders, my parents remain members

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of the Great Synagogue for sentimental reasons; they were married there and have seen many of their own and their friends’ family celebrations in the aisles of the synagogue. Skip a few generations and Nathan’s granddaughter, Meryl, married Neil McLean. These were my grandparents on my mum’s side. Neil and Meryl moved to Campbelltown in 1946. They were looking for a place to expand their chicken-raising venture, which had outgrown their Lindfield site. At the time, Campbelltown, a good 50 kilometres south-west of Sydney, was not even considered a residential area. My Nana (Meryl) told me that St Elmo, the 37-acre property they were shown, was not sewered and had no hot-water system. Along with poor drainage, damp walls, broken windows, a rotted veranda and plaster ceilings, most of which had fallen down. A renovator’s delight! Having taken it all in, she and my grandfather sat in a tea shop looking at each other, each waiting for the other’s reaction. My grandmother liked the challenge of the place and said they should take it; my grandfather immediately agreed. My grandparents moved into St Elmo and after two and a half years of hard work, their new chicken farm was established. But just at that moment, Campbelltown Council declared St Elmo, with its ideal building sites, a residential area. My grandfather immediately forgot about his chickens and saw the opportunity to subdivide the estate and build a suburb of modern brick houses

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for private buyers. He put together the St Elmo Estate Special Purchase Plan for Australian ex-servicemen, which offered a completely new kind of deal. He transferred title to the block of their choice to the ex-servicemen, and supplied the architect’s fees. After the deposit was paid, the balance for the land and the architect’s fees was paid off at the rate of one pound per week interest-free until the total had been acquitted. This enabled an ex-serviceman to go ahead and build immediately, and live in his own home while paying off his land. Mum tells me the soldiers’ appreciation was such that the default rate was very low. Had my grandfather been more of a hard-nosed businessman, he could no doubt have made a lot more money than he did. From Campbelltown, my grandparents moved to the tallest apartment building in Point Piper with views all over Sydney Harbour, and then later to a small waterfront apartment in Lane Cove. I loved going to their place, especially on Sundays when Nana cooked her lunch of lamb, peas and gravy served with roast potatoes. Dessert was always apple pie and ice cream and tea was served with Iced Vovos and those mixedfruit shortbread pocket biscuits. Over lunch, Grandpa would inevitably spin one of his yarns. He once told me that every Boxing Day the police would come to their apartment as his guests and they would ceremoniously rip up all the parking tickets he had collected over the year. I loved his stories and never questioned any of

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them. ‘Who cares? Why let the truth get in the way of a good story?’ I always thought. Mum’s brother, Ron, was a television writer. In the 1970s, Ron wrote very successful shows such as Spyforce, Bellamy, The Young Doctors and Glenview High for legendary producer Reg Grundy. Ron’s wife Liz was the daughter of a Christian minister, so none of my first cousins on my mother’s side were Jewish. Every year we happily joined their Christmas celebrations. Ron’s house in Killara was like a movie set on Christmas Day. We would enter the huge circular driveway surrounded by bush at the front of the house and park our car under one of the gum trees. As soon as we walked into the house, it was bedlam – kids, dogs and cats running amok, glasses overflowing with champagne for the adults and fizzy drinks for the kids. It was usually stinking hot and they had a pool with every blow-up contraption imaginable. There were swings and a slippery dip for the kids to play on. Ron’s spectacular Christmas dish was a turkey stuffed with a duck, which was stuffed with a chicken, which was stuffed with stuffing! One of the adults would come out dressed as Santa Claus and we would all sit around the tree opening presents for hours. Descended from British roots, Mum might have a stiff upper lip but I call her ‘the warmest iceberg in the world’. Initially, she presents as cool and aloof, and I certainly don’t remember many cuddles growing up;

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she is not a particularly demonstrative woman. But beneath the reserved exterior lies a wonderfully warm, kind and generous woman of great intellect and sound judgment. My mum is very happy in her own company and has never sought friends for the sake of it. When people describe me as no-nonsense or aloof and distant, I know where that comes from. Luckily, I’ve also inherited Mum’s logic and organisational skills. Before she married, Mum was a fashion model. Photographs from that time show how absolutely stunning she was. Her aunt Phyl Dvornik (nee Jacobs) – a formidable, glamorous woman who had also been a model – encouraged her, but Mum was never that keen; she thought it was all ‘too stupid’. Phyl always said Mum could have been a world-class model with her incredible navy blue eyes, and that she ‘threw her life away for all this Jewish nonsense marrying your father’. (Mum’s family were non-observant Jews; Phyl’s attitude to my father did eventually soften over the years.) Phyl was an astute businesswoman. She started her business career in Wollongong with a large fashion store and modelling school. She was very successful and managed to purchase the building. She then expanded her business to Kings Cross and Rose Bay. When I was growing up Mum worked in the Rose Bay store to help pay Pam’s and my school fees. Phyl’s success enabled her and her husband, Chris (a successful engineer), to travel to Europe for three months each year.

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On my father’s side, my grandpa Joseph Fisher fled the anti-Semitism that was rife in Poland and arrived in Australia in 1926. Two years later, having established himself, he sent for his wife Faye and son, Sam, who arrived in Sydney in 1928. The Sydney Jewish community of the late 1920s was very small and a stark contrast to the thriving social and cultural world the Fishers had left behind in Poland. Uncle Sam went to Haberfield Public School and quickly learnt to speak English, acting as an interpreter for my grandmother, especially when they went shopping. My grandmother was miserable. Unable to return to Poland, she missed her extended family who had moved to the British Mandate of Palestine (later Israel) and her lack of English only heightened her feelings of isolation. Economic conditions during the Depression, combined with my grandmother’s loneliness and longing for her family, meant that the Fisher family left Australia for Palestine in 1934. Uncle Sam told me they arrived in Port Said on a cold rainy day in December. They then travelled by train to Haifa and on to the village of Kfar Hassidim, where they were to stay. There were no roads in Kfar Hassidim, only dirt tracks, and Uncle Sam remembered being afraid that the horses and carts would sink into the mud. Life was primitive. The houses were wooden huts with no electricity. Cooking was on a Primus stove and lighting was by lamplight.

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Life was a daily struggle amid the increasing hostility which resulted in the Arab revolt of 1936 (the year my father was born), so my grandfather decided that he couldn’t raise his family in Palestine and once again decided to try to make a go of it in Australia. He arrived back in Sydney on 2 March 1937. My long-suffering grandmother ultimately put the greater opportunities for her husband and sons over her personal happiness and in 1939 she and her two sons left Palestine to join my grandfather back in Australia, travelling on the Orontes. This was the second last ship of its kind to pass through the Suez Canal before the outbreak of World War II. Later they discovered there were many well-known members of the Jewish community on that ship, including the composer George Dreyfus. My grandfather died suddenly when Dad was only 14. Dad was forced to leave school and take various jobs to pay the household bills and help put his younger brother, Mark, through school. His older brother Sam helped out when he could, but he had only just got married when their father died and had limited resources. Dad finished his schooling at night, went into real estate, and did well. He had a knack for understanding how much a property was worth and putting together deals that made everyone happy. He later moved into merchant banking, where he used the same skills. As a child I listened to Dad’s business negotiations and learnt from his successes, although Dad has been more

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considered and cautious than me. Dad was always the kingmaker within an organisation, not the king. This allowed him to focus on his priorities – his family and community work. At heart, Dad is a community man and it is here that he thrived due to his great sense of humour, his empathy and real love of people. I like to think I’ve inherited some of these traits. I look up to my Dad with pride for his endless contribution to shaping the culture and dignity of our local Jewish community. In recent years he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for his community work. It is an honour that reflects the perseverance and determination it took to build his life from humble immigrant beginnings to become an influential, and generous, man in his community. As with my mum’s parents, I enjoyed a close relationship with my father’s mother. Grandma was small, just five feet tall, and grew even smaller as she aged. Her hair was a perfect light brown until the day she died. Grandma was the ultimate ‘Yiddishe Mama’. She relished her Friday nights and the Jewish festivals because it meant we all got together. She would host us with delight, dishing up her home-made kreplach (pasta pockets filled with minced meat and onion) served in chicken soup. I used to sneak into the kitchen to get extra helpings after everyone was done. Her chocolate cake had a unique ‘Grandma ingredient’ that I have never tasted in any others. While Grandma had her

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own opinions and expressed them freely, she was also open to other people’s views and ways of life. Her sons had different levels of religious observance and different life opportunities and she never favoured one over the other. She was as supportive of Sam, who created his own industrial clothing company, as she was of my father, who had to study at night school and became a self-made man, as she was of Mark, who became a pharmacist. I became closer to Grandma as I got older. I would drive past her place in Bellevue Hill and see her looking out the window. I would pull over and wave to her from the street. Her face would light up and I would go upstairs and spend an hour or so with her, eating chocolate cake with a cup of black tea. I listened to her stories about her late husband, whom she loved, and the struggles they endured to resettle their family after arriving from Poland. She would also tell me stories of her daily excursions to Bondi Junction and back. She repeated these stories over and over but I didn’t mind. Maybe all her grandchildren thought this way, but I felt I was Grandma’s special favourite. By 1990 Grandma had become unwell and was hospitalised. I sat with her as she lay dying and held her hand. The last thing she said to me was, ‘I am going to see my husband again’. It struck me just how much she had lost in her life and how she never let us into her own sadness and loss. As she lay there, the lines on

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her face disappeared (apparently due to the increase in bodily fluids) and it was as if she was going back in time to when she was young and beautiful. She was moving on to the next stage of her life, ready once again to meet up with the man she loved. It’s my favourite love story.

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FROM SUPERFISH TO THE JET SET

UNLIKE DAD, MY MOTHER WAS BROUGHT UP IN A NON-

observant Jewish household. When my parents married, Dad left it to Mum to decide whether they would have a kosher home or not. Mum decided that we would. I think it’s partly because she is a stickler for doing the right thing, and because she married into a family where keeping kosher was important. Keeping kosher is a central tenet of the Jewish religion. The word itself means ‘fit’, i.e. to only eat certain foods and to prepare them in a specific way so that they are fit to eat. This means not eating pork, only eating fish with scales, not mixing meat and dairy products in the same meal, and only buying those products that have been approved by the Kashrut Authority. At a deeper level, Mum also wanted the sense of family and meaning that a Jewish home can provide. Pam and I were brought up in a home where our Jewishness was important, along with a sense of pragmatism and balance. As a family we would eat out at restaurants

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around Sydney, but not eat prawns or pork (unlike strict Orthodox Jews, who only eat at kosher restaurants); we went to Synagogue every Saturday but we drove there (rather than walking). On the other hand, every Friday night we shared a family dinner at home and our parents sent Pam and me to a private Jewish school, Moriah College, for much of our education. My family was heavily involved in Moriah. At one point Mum was head of the Parents and Friends Committee, and in 1982 she headed up a fund-raising appeal for the school. Uncle Sam was the president of the school and oversaw the massive expansion both of the numbers of students and of its infrastructure. Sam negotiated directly with the Premier of New South Wales, Neville Wran, to secure much larger premises for Moriah. From its small campus in Bellevue Hill, the school moved to its current location in Queens Park. Schoolwork bored me and I was forever being tossed out of class and sent to the principal’s office. On sunny days my friend Paul and I and a group of friends would leap over the fence and go for a swim at Paul’s place next door. Whenever we heard a teacher call out to us, we’d silently huddle at one end of the pool where we couldn’t be seen. When asked later about our wet hair, we would say we had got so hot in the playground that we poured water over ourselves. I am sure our teachers knew better than to believe our stories, but they had a sense of humour about good clean fun and managed

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to strike a balance between discipline and our need to assert our independence. Once I was caught by the deputy principal when I was smoking behind a fence. I was in Year 7 at the time, but my creative juices for excuses started early. I said that everyone wanted to try smoking and I was no different. Of course I knew it was bad – which is why, I said, I was smoking a herbal cigarette. I wasn’t, of course – but my excuse only landed me a firm warning! Mum was often called to take me home because of my disruptive behaviour. I’m quite sure that the only reason I wasn’t expelled was because of the shame it would have brought on Uncle Sam. Though I did come close to being kicked out of school on more than one occasion. I was totally uninterested in the academic side of school. For me it was everything else that mattered: I loved the sport, I had loads of friends, I was in the school cadet corps, I played the trumpet in the school band, and I was in every school play. When I was in Year 7 or 8, I played Joseph in the musical Joseph and his Technicolour Dream Coat, which meant singing a number of songs solo. ‘Close Every Door to Me’ was one of the songs I remember pounding out. As I was singing this very sensitive and emotional ballad, I looked out at my friends at the back of the school hall. There was my best friend, Glen Lees, rolling on the floor with laughter. 

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Yet for all the fun, it was during my teenage years that I was first diagnosed with depression. I struggled with feelings that I didn’t belong, and had a constant fear of disappointing people. My GP was Dr Mark Sacks. Mark and his family lived upstairs from us in Woollahra, and I grew up playing with his children, Carla and Elliot. Our families had barbeques and went to the beach together. So when I visited him in his Paddington surgery, I felt that I was talking to a friend. Mark was British and came from a family of doctors and intellectuals. One of his brothers was Dr Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author whose book Awakenings was made into a film starring Robin Williams. When Mark diagnosed me with depression, he told me not to fear it and explained why it was necessary for me to go on medication: ‘Greg, if you break your leg, then for a while you will need crutches to help you walk. You won’t need them forever – just until you feel you can cope without them. It’s the same with our minds ­– sometimes we feel overwhelmed and we need some support. You will take these pills for a while and soon we will ease you off them. While you are on them, we will talk, and hopefully start to get to the bottom of your depression once you are in a better place from the medication.’ It seemed very logical. And it worked. 

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One thing I was incredibly focused on was my swimming. I became interested in swimming by chance one day when a sports-freak friend, Adam Ensly, took me to Prosser’s swimming pool in Woollahra. It was a 25-metre heavily chlorinated indoor pool surrounded by three levels of wooden seating and slippery concrete floors. I competed in my first race, stopping about 25 times in one lap. But I loved it. It all seemed very exciting to me – being part of a club, being called to the race and stepping onto the blocks. I was addicted. I joined the Maccabi Club when I was eight years old. Maccabi is a Jewish umbrella organisation whose motto is, ‘To connect our Jewish community through sport’. Swimming became my life. During the week, I would get out of bed at 4 o’clock every morning to train at Heffron Park pool in Maroubra and then return after a long school day to train again. Mum was a ‘supermum’ who drove me around wherever I needed to be, ensuring that all meals, homework and coaching were incorporated into the day. Every weekend we travelled to regional pools where I represented Maccabi and we competed with other clubs. The big thrill was going interstate for carnivals – Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth. Swimming appealed to my competitive nature. If I won, the glory was all mine. At school, I was called Superfish, which still makes me smile. But all competitive swimmers will tell you that training is a lonely and repetitive process, a relationship

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between you and the black line at the bottom of the pool. So eventually, at 16, I stopped. I was burnt out and, more importantly, I had discovered socialising. My interest in girls (and guys) had started and I was already feeling internally conflicted. I was excited about both – being physically with guys but also having girlfriends and being out on the scene. Like many of my friends, I also smoked and drank, neither of which were conducive to a serious swimming career. Mum pushed me to continue until she realised she could push no further and, as always, my parents ultimately supported my choice.  I have always had a love of boats. When I had my Bar-Mitzvah at 13, I received about $650 cash as presents from some of our guests. With that money I bought my first boat – a Flying 11, which I kept at the Woollahra Sailing Club in Rose Bay. My boat was bright blue and was called Rif Raf. My parents would drop me at the club, tell me to have fun and be safe. My friends and I would rig up the boat and off we would sail, often right out to the Heads of Sydney Harbour. When we capsized (which happened often) it just made it all the more fun. In fact, whenever I took someone new out I would make a point of deliberately capsizing – I loved the shock value.

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A couple of years later, I talked my parents into taking me to the Sydney Boat Show at Darling Harbour. We boarded a stunning 25-foot New Zealand-designed yacht, a Farr 7500. It had six bunks in two cabins, a full galley kitchen, separate toilet and wide side walkways on the deck. It had a deep blue hull and cream deck. I turned to Dad and said, ‘Imagine all the great father-son bonding time we would have on this.’ Dad looked at Mum. In a cheerful, fun-loving way I remember with such joy, Mum said, ‘Pretty colour, Jack – buy it.’ Dad laughed and said, ‘Why not?’ He called over the salesman, did the paperwork and handed over a cheque. I couldn’t believe it – it was one of those moments when you think you just have the coolest parents on earth. And the joy continued. Once the boat was delivered to the Point Piper marina to be moored, the fun started. Once the three of us took the boat out for a sail. The wind was a fairly gusty 20–25 knots. We were near the Point Piper peninsula when we were hit with a really strong gust. I pulled in the mainsail tightly to maximise the effect. The boat keeled over sharply and Mum fell into the centre of the boat between the bench seats. She was literally squealing with delight. I couldn’t stop laughing. Dad, on the other hand, who wasn’t very confident on the water, said in a stern yet humorous voice, ‘Son, you get this boat upright or I’m selling it when we get back’. He

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didn’t sell the boat but neither did he come out on it much after that.  Despite my being unmotivated academically, my parents pushed me to complete my Higher School Certificate. I achieved a woeful 286 out of 500. I applied for six different university courses, although I was clearly not ready for university study. So with my parents’ support, I took myself off to Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I enrolled in a special seven-month course created by the university for overseas students. It was designed to introduce us to Israel – its history, language and contemporary issues. Another student I met by chance in the Old City of Jerusalem invited me to Yeshiva Ohr Somayach, a centre of higher learning in Jewish Studies, and I spent a few months there. There was something uniquely special about studying in the Old City, knowing that generations of students had preceded me there. When I was younger, I used to study Rashi (the language of one of the original commentators on the Torah) at the Great Synagogue after school, and Rabbi Apple taught me to translate from Rashi to classical to modern Hebrew to English by looking at the root of each word. It is something I can still do, and I always get a thrill when I achieve the translation. Yeshiva in Israel gave me the

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opportunity to reconnect with that learning. It was a welcoming, inclusive environment where I was happy. It also gave me a deep appreciation of the Orthodox community. To me, those who study the Talmud and Mishna (the Rabbinical analysis of the commentary on the Old Testament) are like lawyers, tracing back arguments and looking for the logic in life. I look back on that time with great fondness. After I left Israel, I travelled around Europe and then met up with Aunty Phyl in Malta. For some years Phyl and her husband Chris had been spending every summer on the Maltese island of Gozo. They had fallen in love with the place and rented the same large villa every year, with the same driver and cleaning staff. After Chris died, Phyl continued to visit Gozo, and when she heard I was in Europe, she insisted I come to the island ‘for a swim’. She said, ‘Get yourself to Rome and I will look after the rest.’ This I did and it was the start of a very close relationship – I ended up making three visits to Gozo over the years. Phyl loved to cook and enjoyed making exotic dishes. The most important thing for her was that I was not kosher. She found it unbearable that the rest of my family would not eat her weird (but delicious) concoctions, whereas I would try everything. On Gozo, there were epic dinner parties. Phyl’s friends were ex-pats from all over the world, and even though they were all more than 40 years older than me, I loved their company, and their stories of fabulous

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From Superfish to the jet set

lives of travel and excitement. It was as though they were stuck in a time warp and they believed themselves to be royalty. I didn’t care – I loved their jet-set fantasy and entered it willingly. It was my first exposure to this world and I loved it.

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ENTERING THE CORPORATE WHIRL

IN ONE OF MY CALLS BACK HOME, MUM SAID THAT I’D

been accepted into the University of Wollongong to study commerce. She was thrilled. All I could think was, ‘At least it’s a year away.’ All I knew about Wollongong was that it was the city of the BHP Steelworks, and I imagined it to be a grey and ugly place, full of smoke. When I got back to Sydney I resisted going to university for as long as I could, but when I eventually got there, I was blown away by the beauty of Wollongong. The university sits under a huge mountain among lush green gardens, five minutes from a magnificent beach. I immersed myself in university life, playing squash and working hard. I had grown up in my year overseas and felt ready to study; I also found the subjects interesting and had a structure around me that got me into the right frame of mind. I finished second in my year. I was in Wollongong from Monday to Thursday, and in Sydney for the rest of the week. In Sydney I earned money singing in the Great Synagogue choir

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and teaching Jewish scripture at North Sydney Boys’ High School. Due to my strong university results, for my second year I decided to transfer to the University of New South Wales. The structure that had served me well in Wollongong fell away in Sydney and I began working more and more part-time jobs, losing all interest in study. I spent my time on the university lawn at lunchtime and was more interested in how I could be financially independent than in throwing myself into my academic work. I started off as a part-time delivery driver for Pizza Pizazz on Bondi Road while I was still at university. I quickly became the manager of the store and got my first company car – a pink Daihatsu with a huge black top hat and a light on top flashing ‘Pizza Pizazz’. I loved the job, partly because of the crazy car, but also because it tapped into my competitive nature. I was determined to beat the record for how many pizzas we could get out a night and how quickly we could do it, and found innovative ways to manage orders. Our store exceeded all expectations. I was then sent to manage the most successful store they had, over the bridge in Neutral Bay. I realised that if I made the pizzas myself, I could reduce labour costs. With that insight and my way of controlling the phone calls coming in so as to maximise speed and efficiency, we beat all the records. The 18 months I worked there brought some of my most exhilarating professional moments.

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Every parent has a dream for their child and my father was no exception. He was from a tradition where commerce was seen as a good solid start for a Jewish boy who would one day support a family of his own. My dream, however, was to be a pilot. Rather than dismiss this crazy notion altogether, my father at least arranged a loan with a bank for flying lessons, which I then paid back through my various jobs. So there I was, 20 years old, taking flying lessons at Bankstown airport. I started at the Chieftain Flying School and was flying solo after 8.2 hours of instruction. I was allowed to fly at no higher than 4000 metres and no further than the foot of the Blue Mountains. I would arrive at Bankstown just as the sun was rising and be one of the first planes up, then fly over Hoxton Park, Eastern Creek raceway and Prospect Reservoir. The sense of freedom and the adrenalin rush were exhilarating. Flying was mostly sheer fun and joy, but I did get into a couple of serious situations. Once when taxiing back to base after landing, I crossed a runway without clearance. The bollocking I got when I returned taught me never to do that again. Another time, I had been given my sequence to come in to land and was flying parallel to the runway when the control tower sent out the message ‘Charlie November Victor’ (my plane call sign) ‘Pan Pan Pan’ (emergency). The Goodyear blimp was floating too close to me so I was ordered to bank (turn sharply to the left) and abort my landing sequence. It was scary for a moment, but

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then utterly thrilling. As much as I loved it, in the end I didn’t pursue flying because I couldn’t afford to take it any further. By the time I could, life had moved on.  I had always had a taste for business and was keen to keep developing it. In fact, my very first holiday job while I was still at school was working for a firm of stockbrokers my Dad knew. I was put on the floor of the Futures Exchange. The phone from head office would ring down to the floor and I would take the call, write down the order and give it to the appropriate person in the pit. I would get back the paperwork and report back. I was in a suit, working on the floor and I felt like was the managing director of the world. Eventually the lure of the business world won out over my studies and in order to work full-time I transferred to studying by correspondence with the California Pacific University, which credited all my prior work at the University of Wollongong and the University of New South Wales. I would go on to graduate with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 1992. While completing my degree, I held a couple of fairly unspectacular jobs as a junior accountant before responding to an ad in the paper for a research assistant in a funds management company. I didn’t even know what a property trust was until just before the interview,

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when I asked a friend of mine, Nicki Sirtes, who worked at AMP. She explained that a trust was like a company but had units instead of shares. Being able to use that snippet of information in my interview made me seem intelligent enough for the junior role on offer. And so in 1989 I joined Aust-Wide Management. My job at Aust-Wide was to provide updated analysis to the industry researchers and advisors on managed trusts. This enabled me to quickly learn about our products and gave me significant contact with the industry. I was lucky because the senior funds manager had just been posted to the Malaysian office and all the work was left to his number two, Phil. The company had every intention of recruiting another funds manager, but I pushed hard to be given a go. I was confident I could do it. I said, ‘I’ll continue to be the research analyst but I also want to manage some trusts. Give me a go and if you are not happy with me you can still employ someone else. I’m a cheap option for you.’ So I was given the responsibility of managing the company’s two residential property trusts as well as a commercial property trust. This was one of the most exciting times of my life as it introduced me to the corporate whirl. I was in my mid-20s and engaged with senior management in strategic decision-making for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of property. I was on a steep learning curve and I loved every minute of it. Looking across Sydney

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Harbour from my office on the top floor of the North Sydney office block every day, life couldn’t have seemed any better. A happy childhood, world travel, university, cars, a great social life and a burgeoning career. It was all coming together. So the next step was obvious – marriage and kids. Of course that’s what it’s all about for a nice Jewish boy.

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THE WOMAN IN MY LIFE

ON ONE OF MY BREAKS FROM UNIVERSITY, I WENT SKIING

with a bunch of friends. We were in Perisher Valley when I met Michelle. Sitting in the Perisher Terminal shopping centre, I was cradling my head in my hands when Michelle came up to me and asked me what was wrong. I didn’t know her but she was with a group of mutual friends. I explained that I had a headache and she put her fingers on my head and massaged my temples. I looked up at her and smiled. In a sweet, somewhat cheeky way she said, ‘I’m really good with my fingers, aren’t I?’ I was instantly attracted to Michelle’s energy, vivaciousness, infectious laugh and warmth. When I discovered she was of Hungarian descent, I found her even more attractive, given my childhood love for my Hungarian neighbour, EE. We became very good friends very quickly. Life with Michelle centred around food and family. Her parents and her brother Rob were like an instant Brady Bunch. They were loving and welcoming,

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making my integration into their family quick and easy. We would have brunch, lunch and dinners together and spend summers by the pool at their Dover Heights home. Michelle’s family were very hard-working people and I had a deep respect for their work ethic. They had a factory in Darlinghurst where they manufactured women’s clothing, which they sold at markets all around Sydney. It was nothing fancy, just very practical mix-and-match clothing. Michelle’s parents had always been involved in working at the markets and she had been encouraged to make her own money from a young age, so she understood the value of a dollar. In Michelle, I saw my future wife – someone I connected with on many levels. She is the only woman I’ve ever felt this way about. But the truth is, I always knew I was gay. When I was young, I didn’t know the label or understand what it would mean as I got older and faced the choices I would be forced to make. I wanted the traditional Australian Jewish home: the wife, the children, the nice house, the cars, the shul (synagogue), the Friday night dinners, the festivals and the family traditions. I wanted to be the dad going to children’s concerts and sports activities. Motivating and encouraging the next generation always held great appeal for me. But my interest in men only increased as I grew older and developed physically. I had started meeting gay guys – back then you could easily get into bars and clubs well under age. At the same time I dated girls, as

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this was the normal, expected activity. It was only as I matured that the pull towards men developed into more than a simple physical urge. It became a desire for an emotional connection. Once I realised that, my life got more complicated. It’s true, too, that as I was growing up attitudes to gay men were different to mainstream attitudes now. When I was a teenager, homosexuality was still illegal in New South Wales (it would only be decriminalised in 1984). In 1982, when I was 17, the first case of HIV/ AIDS was diagnosed in Australia and ignited fear, panic and prejudice among the straight community. Being anti-gay was considered to be justified in the wake of this ‘gay killer’ disease. As a young man I felt a need to contain my conflict of identities and to pursue the path that was expected of me. Both identities were real, and both valid. I felt a genuine love for Mich, as I have always called her, and I look back on our dating era with fondness. Michelle was special and made me feel special. She was a real lady – she took time in choosing what to wear and was always meticulously groomed for our dates, like they really mattered to her. And we had fun – we laughed together, we discussed politics, business ideas, travel and ideals. So when I was 24 and we had been dating for a couple of years, I asked her to marry me. In April 1990 we were married. Our wedding was at the Great Synagogue, opposite Hyde Park in Sydney.

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Michelle had four bridesmaids and I had four groomsmen and, as with all wedding preparations, we had our share of ridiculous conflicts. The bridesmaids were dressed in white with a black frill across the middle. The earth-shattering question was ‘Should they be wearing white shoes or black shoes?’ My family felt that wearing black shoes would make them look like Minnie Mouse. But Michelle wanted black and that’s what ultimately prevailed. I organised a convertible vintage Rolls Royce for Michelle and for everyone else we had a stream of vintage Rolls Royce sedans. Of course on the day of our wedding there was light rain and so the roof of Michelle’s car, which she shared with her father, had to be up. Michelle knew that I was gay and had been with men. In fact almost one entire table at the reception was full of gay guys, some of whom were my previous partners. I remember their faces well. They looked at me with a combination of bemusement, shock, support and understanding. But Michelle and I had discussed how much I wanted a traditional family life; I was committed to it and truly loved her. I wanted it to work. When, as part of the Jewish marriage ceremony I smashed the glass under the chupa canopy in the Great Synagogue, I had mixed emotions. When the groom smashes the glass, it is a symbol that even in times of great joy, we should remember the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. This is a way for

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each of us to remember that life brings good and bad, bitter and sweet. It was a poignant moment. On the one hand, I felt absolute joy that I had secured the life I wanted; on the other, I felt instant fear that I wouldn’t live up to expectations. I pulled myself together and embraced the decision. Michelle and I bought our first home and renovated it together. We went on a fabulous world honeymoon. We stayed on the Greek island of Santorini in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. Our bedroom was cut into the rock like a cave and had no windows. I was in heaven, a cool pitch-black environment in which to sleep. For Michelle it was torture, as she loved to sleep with light in the room. But that wasn’t the only thing she had to suffer: after one particularly exhausting day of sightseeing, I instantly fell asleep and snored my enormous snore. Michelle ended up not sleeping a wink. She said my snore was doubly loud as the cave echoed it back. But she was always a good sport and just laughed it off. Santorini was also our debut as bikies. We hired a moped – I drove it with Michelle clinging onto me from behind. I had no idea what I was doing. On a steep hill, I twisted the handle full-throttle and then released the brake. The bike did a big wheelie and Michelle nearly fell off the back, receiving a nasty burn to her leg from the exhaust pipe. We just laughed, and still do to this day.

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Our honeymoon continued to Israel. One Friday night, we went to the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. At the end of the Sabbath evening service, we noticed a large group of people had gathered. We went to see what was going on and before we knew it, we had been put together with an American–Israeli man and told we would go with him to his family home for the traditional Sabbath family dinner. The man was very kind. He said he would walk us to his home. Now, Michelle had broken her toe the previous evening when she got up in the middle of the night, so at this she looked at me as if to say, ‘This had better be a very short walk’. It wasn’t. It was 45 minutes across Jerusalem, by which stage Michelle’s entire foot had swollen beyond belief. We then went up three flights of stairs to the apartment. The meal was something to behold. It started with gefilte fish (balls of minced fish), which I normally love. But these were grey and soggy. Michelle looked at me pleadingly to eat hers, but I refused! And then our giggling began. Eventually the meal ended and we were left to walk home. Of course on the Sabbath religious Jews do not drive. But the minute we got outside the flat, Michelle felt her toe, and the gefilte fish episode entitled her to lay down the law. ‘Get me into a taxi now’, she insisted. I agreed without hesitation. But just try getting a taxi in the religious section of Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Thankfully one eventually came. Our

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kind Arab driver saved the day and drove us back to our hotel. In those early days of our marriage, we had a ball and life was sweet.

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above Mum in her modelling days, late 1950s below Happy memories: with my sister Pam in the backyard of our Woollahra home, 1970

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above Superfish: me aged 11 (top row, second left) below My bar mitzvah: with Grandma Faye Fisher (left) and Nanna Meryl McLean (right)

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above Lots of pizzazz: my 21st birthday below Michelle and my wedding day, 1990

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above New friends: with Marilyn Koch, Joh Bailey and Scott Hepburn (far right) below On the inside: with Luke, Carly and my parents, Dawn de Loas correctional centre, 2010

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above A collage of family photos in my prison cell below Together again: at my niece Talia Seidman’s wedding, Israel 2013

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above Our Big Kitchen: with Premier Mike Baird (second right), Rabbi Slavin (third right), federal Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull (centre), NSW Attorney General Gabrielle Upton (centre) and executives from SecondBite at the launch of Meals that Matter, 2014

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Toby Centre Sydney © Toby Evans

Acknowledgements

below The OBK team at work below left Father and daughter: with Carly, 2013

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above A proud day: graduating from the degree I began at Cooma jail, May 2015 below With Luke

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CORPORATE STRESS

WHEN I JOINED AUST-WIDE IN 1989, PROPERTY VALUES

were through the roof. I remember very clearly the excitement when Grosvenor Place in Sydney (part of the Aust-Wide Grosvenor Place Trust) was being talked about as a property with a value of close to $1 billion. But then came the property market crash. Not long after I got back from my European honeymoon in 1990, everything changed and prices plunged. Waterfront apartments in Sydney’s Neutral Bay dropped in value by over 60 per cent, and more affordable residential property fell by 40 per cent. Commercial property fell between 50 and 70 per cent. Corporate life went from long boozy lunches to focusing on restoring value for the trust’s unit holders. The company entered a whole new era, and suddenly things became serious in a way they had not been before. That’s not to say that we had been lazing around when times were good, but now our mettle was being tested. For the first time I realised that job security was not

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automatic. I had to put my head down and work hard, which I did. Aust-Wide Management’s two residential trusts were unlisted and there was a massive run on redemption requests due to the uncertainty caused by the crashing property values. People wanted to get their money out of what was now seen as a risky investment and put it somewhere safe. As with other unlisted property trusts at that time, redemptions were frozen by Aust-Wide. The alternative would have been to pay redemptions as they were called upon and properties would have been sold at fire-sale prices, returning only a fraction of investors’ original money. Our attention shifted from the day-today management of properties to creating strategies to restore investor value. At that time there were a number of independent research companies analysing the fund management companies. James Purvis headed up one of those research companies, Purvis van Eyk. James was good friends with Grant Smith, managing director of a competitor company, Global Funds Management. Knowing that the industry was not comfortable with Aust-Wide’s management of its trusts, I decided to try and jump ship. I was still a relatively new and inexperienced fund manager, but I did hold a position of responsibility, and while I had not been party to the decisions of AustWide that were now being questioned, if I stayed with the company, I felt I would risk becoming tainted.

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I approached James Purvis to set up a secret meeting for me with Grant Smith. I didn’t have great confidence that Aust-Wide could successfully fend off some of the allegations that were being raised. And at a simple opportunistic level, I realised that this could be a gamechanger for me, an opportunity to accelerate my own career by jumping ahead into a more senior position. James came through. He set up the meeting and Michelle and I were invited to Grant’s holiday home at Mackerel Beach on Sydney’s Pittwater for a Saturday barbeque. Michelle and I were both excited. It was the kind of thing I dreamt of – a secret meeting with a rival at a beach house. On the morning of the meeting we went to get our hair done. We then went to Palm Beach and organised a water taxi to take us across to Mackerel. Of course our perfectly done hair was blown away in the wind and the moment we arrived we realised we were way overdressed for the occasion – Grant and his wife Jackie were very casual and friendly. Grant and I went for a long walk along the beach together, leaving Michelle and Jackie to chat. By the end of the walk, I was employed at almost twice my existing salary. This was a hugely opportunistic and contentious move on my part. I was about to take all my inside knowledge of Aust-Wide to a rival company, double my salary, drive a fancy car and work in a big corner office.

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 At Global I was put in charge of the Property Funds division in 1991 or 1992. My first task was to head up a takeover of my former employer, Aust-Wide Management. This was a very aggressive move and in the end was only partially successful. Apart from the Property Funds division which I led, there was also a Mortgage Trust division, an Ethical Trust division, a Finance division, and a division for the former Estate Mortgage Property Trust, which held the Opal Cove Resort, a place that would later come back to haunt me. We had monthly meetings where each department head had to present their results. With the partial achievement of the Aust-Wide takeover, as well as some restructuring of the other property trusts I managed, I was proud that I turned my division around from a basket case to the most profitable division within Global by 1992. On the home front, Michelle and I continued to have a wonderful life. We had a deep connection and were great friends. Sometimes, between the laughter and the teasing and the fun and the day-to-day living, we were intimate just like any other married couple. And in 1993 our daughter Carly was the wonderful outcome of that. Becoming a father was without doubt the happiest day of my life. I was with Michelle when Carly was born at the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington.

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The moment after Carly was born, I accompanied her as she was weighed and cleaned before being handed to Michelle. Mich and I shared tears of happiness. The joy on Michelle’s face is something I will never forget. The pride I felt then was greater than anything. The fact that I was gay was completely irrelevant. My life felt complete. It was as if I had made all the right decisions.  In the business world, profitability may win you favour in a ruthless corporate environment, but favour does not buy loyalty. Soon after Carly was born, Global acquired a new major shareholder, Tyndal. They were not interested in my aggressive takeover approach to growth that had added tens of millions to Global’s funds under management. The Trusts had developed to optimum growth and now only required maintenance and oversight. They removed Grant as managing director and brought in their own management team. I was made redundant – my big salary, fancy car, corner office, travel and lunch perks were all gone. My value in the funds management world was now negligible. I had shown disloyalty to one company, so I went from being the cleverest kid on the block to the most disloyal one. On top of all of that, the corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), had launched an investigation into the takeover of

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Aust-Wide. I never faced any charges but nonetheless it was a long and traumatic investigation for all involved. There was no way I was going to get another job. I showed a lot of bravado as I reassured everyone, especially Michelle, that I would easily get another position. But deep down I was worried about our financial situation and didn’t have a clue what I would do next.

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HEARTACHE AND NEW HORIZONS

FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS AFTER LEAVING GLOBAL I

dabbled in advisory work with a couple of pretty unsuccessful ventures. I even took a shot at the restaurant game, purchasing three restaurants in quick succession. The toughest gig in my portfolio was the one that from the outside looked so easy and had every reason to succeed. It was a restaurant located on the corner of Oxford and Flinders streets at Taylor Square, in the heartland of the gay community. It was two levels above the street, a perfect spot to watch the Mardi Gras parade, which turns from Oxford Street to continue down Flinders Street to the Hordern Pavilion. Patrons at my restaurant were in the box seat. Indeed, during Mardi Gras we pulled out the massive windows and replaced the tables and chairs with stadium seating and buffet service. Lobsters and champagne were served by drag queens in amazing costumes and we charged a fortune. But that moment of successful trading could not compensate for the rest of year. It would have been better for my

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health and conscience to have given $250 000 to a charity than to have gone through 18 months of constant losses and significant stress. I had assumed there was a link between understanding property and running a restaurant business. ‘How hard can it be?’ I thought to myself. Fundamentally I had no understanding of how to buy stock at the best possible price, how to create a menu and what percentage margin to put on each dish. Lesson learnt – only invest in what you know. Owning a restaurant in the heart of Sydney’s gay precinct only highlighted another problem. The restaurant was an excuse to be out late at night, and the temptations of being out late at night on Oxford Street were not good for my marriage. While I enjoyed my relationship with Michelle, the reality was my attraction to men had continued and, indeed, intensified. Looking back, I can’t believe how naïve I was to think it would simply disappear because of a marriage ceremony. For a long time after we were married, I tried to remain true to my vows and to maintain the highest respect for Michelle. I lived in conflict and while I can’t remember exactly when I first wandered, I do know that I hated myself for it. I felt utterly selfish, as if I had no regard for the woman I loved and respected. I hated being in this place, being this person, and each time it happened all I wanted was a magic wand to appear and make me straight, so that it would never happen again.

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 In 1995 my brother-in-law, Richard Seidman, introduced me to an English guy called Jonathan Broster. Jonathan was a small-time property investor who had purchased a property on the corner of Caroline and Abercrombie Streets in Redfern. This property had previously been owned by my Uncle Sam; for decades it had been his industrial clothing factory and when he retired, he sold it. To increase its value prior to sale, Richard had redesigned it into 19 small apartments. It was now a DA-approved site, and Jonathan purchased it. But there was a problem: only about a week before Jonathan was due to settle, he failed to secure funding. So Richard introduced Jonathan to me and asked if I could help. At that stage, I still had extremely good contacts in the finance world and I knew exactly which broker or direct funder to go to for which kind of property. Funders change their lending criteria based on their portfolio exposure, so keeping up-to-date with those changes was key. I contacted a broker in Melbourne and told him that I had a small ‘sweet fish’ for him but that I needed approval within 48 hours. Our relationship was of great mutual trust – in the past if I had said that a loan was bankable, it had proven to be so, and if he said he could get the loan set, it was. I sent him the application and within 24 hours it was approved and the settlement proceeded on time.

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I charged Jonathan $18 000 for my work. This does sound like an extraordinary amount of money for making a couple of phone calls, but it was a very small amount in terms of the millions in profit that Jonathan stood to make with this deal. And had he not settled on time, he could have lost his ten per cent deposit. Far from being bothered, Jonathan respected what I did and we became friendly. In fact that $18 000 became the subject of many great laughs between us over the years. If we were at a restaurant and I commented on how expensive the wine was, he would stop me in alarm and facetiously say, ‘Oh, you think that’s expensive? Let me tell you about a couple of phone calls I once had to pay for!’ Jonathan and I had a good working chemistry and we decided to join forces and do property deals together. And so The Satellite Group (TSG) was born. By this stage, I had been out of Global Funds Management for a couple of years and hadn’t earned much since. I was married to Michelle and living in our Waverley home. I drove a leased seven series BMW but I was unable to meet my lease obligations and we were one missed payment away from having our house repossessed by the mortgagee. So my hook-up with Jonathan and access to potential property deals using his small capital base, alongside my extensive property and finance contacts, was a relief. I needed to make it work. I moved into Jonathan’s small office in North Sydney and we started looking for property deals.

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Soon we found what I will always call my ‘Alan Bond’ property, reminiscent of when Kerry Packer sold Chanel Nine to Alan Bond for one billion dollars and bought it back from him for about three hundred million dollars a few years later. You only get one of those opportunities in a lifetime and mine was in Mary Ann Street, Ultimo.  In early 1996, after we both turned 30, I decided to separate from Michelle. I knew that we both deserved to be in an honest relationship. I wasn’t giving that to myself and I wasn’t giving that to Michelle. The time had come to face Michelle and my family, to fix this so that we could all move on. I met Mum at the Gelato Bar on Campbell Parade in Bondi. As we sat together over an Eastern European cheese and cherry strudel and coffee, I told her I intended to leave Michelle. Mum asked me straightaway if I was leaving her for a man. I’d always thought Mum knew that I was gay and there was relief in discovering that was true. I was terrified about telling Dad. Telling another man that you are attracted to men feels strange. And Dad is so traditional; I just didn’t know how he would respond. I felt too ashamed to speak to him directly and asked Mum if she would do it for me. I should have known better because he called me a little

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later that day to say that Mum had spoken to him and that I had his one hundred per cent support and love. The conversation with Michelle was heart-wrenching. She was devastated and immediately started sobbing. She asked if there was some way we could work through this or even find a different way of living together. I was clear that I didn’t want to explore any alternative options; I knew that remaining married would only cause further pain, distrust and upset for both of us. While I accepted that I was the cause of the pain, we had both taken a risk that we could make this work simply by wanting it to. To say the least, we had been naïve about the difficulties of a gay man trying to live in a straight marriage. Just because we wanted it to happen, didn’t mean it was possible. I don’t know exactly what Michelle was thinking at the time but she wasn’t angry at first. I’m sure there would have been competing emotions rushing through her, including the disappointment of not being able to have more kids together, the shame and embarrassment of telling her parents and friends, and having to face the issue of my sexuality openly. We went to counselling to help us process our emotions. In one session when I was alone with the counsellor, she explained to me that Michelle would experience a range of emotions including shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing and acceptance as she came to terms with our separation. On the few occasions

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Heartache and new horizons

Michelle did express anger towards me, I remembered this advice. I was in an impossible situation, knowing I was the cause of Michelle’s pain and also being the person trying to heal that pain. She was my best friend and I wanted to be there for her. We reached an agreement that Carly would live with Michelle and I would be free to see Carly whenever I wanted to. We also agreed that we would do things together, including holidays. To this day, I am delighted that we never had to have a formal agreement and am proud that we found a way to jointly parent our daughter. Our desire to be there for Carly encouraged us to find ways to remain good friends. But it wasn’t only about being there for Carly. As tough as it has been at certain moments, there has always been a lot about Michelle that I loved then and that I still love now. I still appreciate her warmth, vivacity and sense of fun. These qualities have meant that I have wanted her in my life, not only for Carly but simply for who she is. While I felt excitement about the future, I knew I had crushed the dreams and plans Michelle and I had made together. The day I finally left the family home, Michelle was crying and so was Carly. I walked out the back door, past the swimming pool we had put in together, and through the rear exit. I had a suitcase in my hand and that was it. I was feeling enormous pain as I looked back at two people I loved so much, especially

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my daughter who didn’t really know what was going on – only that her parents were both so sad. My sister Pam was fantastic. She immediately said she would always support me. She said Michelle and Carly would always be welcome in her home, as would any future male partner. Pam has an incredible sense of family and apart from that, we have always had a great caring love for each other. There was no way that any of her religious beliefs would impede her sisterly care of me. Although I was very fortunate to have the love, affection and understanding of my family in coming out, that didn’t mean it was easy, and my depression returned. I felt a great sense of loss and terrible guilt that I had let so many people down. There was the reality of Michelle and her family; the impact on our two-year-old daughter Carly, our mutual friends (who mostly rallied around Michelle), and some ugly gossip. Mostly this was about the fact that everyone had always known I was gay. Some people thought I was cruel to have married Michelle and taken her for a ride. Others thought Michelle was silly for having married a guy everyone knew was gay. But even with all that going on, I knew I was in a fortunate position.

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THE SATELLITE GROUP

THE YEAR 1996 ALSO SAW THE BEGINNING OF THE

Satellite Group. The site in Mary Ann Street, Ultimo, was approved for 95 apartments and 11 shops, a ten-minute walk west from Darling Harbour. Nine of the shops were down a dingy alleyway called Systrum Street. They were not on a common walkway and they all faced a back alley with poor natural light and little sense of safety. It was no retail paradise and the shops were doomed from the start. The remaining two shops were on Mary Ann Street itself. I began negotiations to buy the site in September. The vendor wanted $6 million. Yet the market was only offering him $4 million. On the basis of a structured deal, which would give the vendor $3 million on settlement of the land and $3 million on completion of the entire development, I could achieve $6 million for him. At first the vendor thought I had a real cheek to offer him such a deal. However, in the end the temptation to take at least $2 million more than what the market was

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offering was worth the risk to him. He took the gamble and a deal on my terms proceeded. We managed to have the shops down Systrum Street rezoned from retail to residential, which meant we had 104 apartments to work with and just two shops. The building was designed like four long, thin, independent buildings adjoined, stretching from the old Dairy Farmers building in Mary Ann Street and terracing down a very skinny site to the Powerhouse Museum. We called the development ‘Powerhouse Apartments’. And so The Satellite Group started business with its first $24 million project. Because we started The Satellite Group with this deal, I felt that if we couldn’t gear a property 110 per cent, I wasn’t doing my job well. It was my arrogant way of saying that I was clever and creative in structuring a deal. The Ultimo deal became my benchmark – I believed that we should enter into property deals with as little capital equity in the property as possible so we could leverage our position and acquire more properties. I knew that I was at the top of my game in terms of understanding the finance instruments available and in negotiating each stage. I think this is when my deep passion for doing deals crystallised and I realised that my hunger for the deal and my love of negotiating was far greater than my interest in seeing the projects through to completion. Once I secured the deal, my attention waned, and I was happy to hand it over to Jonathan to

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The Satellite Group

manage. My passion lay in finding the next deal, and the next, and the next. Securing the Ultimo deal thrust me right back into the media limelight. In my earlier fund management days I had received significant media exposure for the aggressive takeovers I was leading. But now I was back with a company and a development site of my own. I was feeling pumped, full of enthusiasm and confidence. Once again I was being recognised for my property and financial structuring abilities and I was ready to drive TSG forward.  Once I left the family home, I was free to simply be me for the first time in my life. I had flirted with the gay scene in the ’80s, but now, 15 years later, I could immerse myself in it. If you were young and gay in Sydney in the ’80s and ’90s, you knew Oxford Street. The main gay venue was the Albury Hotel, just next to St Vincent’s Hospital. It was the most incredible place; owned by a true visionary of gay entertainment, Lee Jennings. On one side of the hotel was a grand piano. On Sunday late afternoons and evenings, a flamboyant pianist would play tunes while men of all ages would sing at the top of their voices. It was high camp at its best. It was friendly, inclusive, cheeky, fun and often a little raunchy. One thing was for sure; it was always a brilliant night out.

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On the other side of the pub there was a long bar famous for drag shows, seven nights a week. The drag queens wore huge wigs, enormous shoulder pads and unimaginably high heels. They would rip along the bar teasing the drinkers. The place would be packed with sweaty men of all ages. The younger ones had their shirts off, adding to the vibe of edginess and fun. Gay life was filled with dazzle, and much more camp than it is today. Perhaps that was in protest, to get the message across that we wanted to burst out of the closet and be accepted. Today’s gay nightclubs and bars have become much like other venues. I miss the brightness and splendour I grew up with. Now there is also a far greater emphasis on drugs. It used to be about a few drinks and maybe an ‘eccie’, but now the gay drug scene has everything from ecstasy to GHB, ice, cocaine and more. Back then you could walk into the Albury and go home with a date within 20 minutes. I had my share of one-night stands and I won’t deny that I enjoyed that scene. I had been on a few dates with men before I got married. But I never took them seriously because in my mind it was only a fun part on the outer edges of my experience. It was not going to be my life. Now I was free to explore the possibility of an emotional relationship with a man. My first real relationship was with Michael, who came from the Central Coast. We had a chance meeting in a bottle shop on Oxford

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The Satellite Group

Street. We started to chat, went for a drink and the relationship developed from there. Soon after we met, Michael moved in with me and we were together for almost seven years. In this, my first gay relationship, I was faced with new realities. While being out on the gay scene was loose and constant fun, a relationship was very different. I quickly realised that just because I was now in the type of relationship that reflected who I was, it faced the same issues as any other relationship. Once you have to work out who is going to cook or clean or pay the bills, the usual drudgery kicks in. The thrill of the chase is replaced with a picket fence – just painted pink not white! I was also Michael’s first gay relationship, so the challenges hit both of us simultaneously. While we had many happy times, I remember the constant paranoia each of us had about whether the other was looking sideways at another guy. The relationship began to sour when I became aware he was a gambler. As he explained to me, gambling addicts are very secretive and manipulative because they don’t want to tell you when they have lost or won. When they lose, they are embarrassed and ashamed. When they win, they admit they have been gambling. We began to fight terribly and once that fighting became physical, it was clear the relationship had to end. While I was learning a lot about gay relationships, the one constant through it all was my love for

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Carly. I have always adored her. At one point, I had started dating a guy who invited me to breakfast with his friends. Well, that was the day I had Carly. She was only too happy to meet my new friends. Even though all the other guys were fantastic about Carly being there, the guy I was dating said he didn’t know if he could deal with a kid as part of a relationship. I said I was a package deal and always would be – and I was off. Carly lived with Michelle but she was a big part of my day-to-day life. I picked her up from dance classes, watched her in dancing competitions, took her to parks on weekends (her favourite was Lyne Park in Rose Bay, where we could look at the boats together and she could run around in the playground) and ate at restaurants across Sydney. Carly, Michelle and I enjoyed many fabulous holidays together, many after Michelle and I had separated. We went to Noumea, Fiji, PNG, Hawaii, the Bahamas, Disneyland and DisneyWorld. On one occasion I went to Club Med Noumea with Carly, Michelle and Michael. One day Carly introduced us to another guest as, ‘My mum, dad and Michael, Daddy’s boyfriend’. There were quite a few raised eyebrows but Michelle and I got on so well, we always had a laugh about it. 

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The Satellite Group

By 1999 The Satellite Group had Ultimo (104 units), Pyrmont (126 units), Point Piper (two luxury units), Rushcutters Bay (36 units), Rose Bay (eight luxury units) as well as the Beresford and Beauchamp pubs, along with a huge site at Airlie Beach in the Whitsundays. I was unstoppable. My attitude was, ‘If I can finance them, why not do them?’ Of course it was not only my money; Jonathan was my business partner. He came from a much more conservative background but he got caught up in my enthusiasm, and happily joined in. The media attention that had begun when I moved from Aust-Wide to Global Management was now ramping up and I was becoming a player in the property scene. The press was supportive of me. A cartoon in the Sydney Morning Herald business section depicted me as the ‘Acquisitive Mr Fisher’ in a bold pin-stripe suit surrounded by a city skyline. In another, I am sitting on a satellite dish holding an oyster. My eye for fashion and a focus on how I looked had also kicked in. My suits were impeccably tailored and crisp. My dinner suit was from Giorgio Armani, my overcoat from Louis Vuitton. I made sure I was always tanned and my hair well-groomed. Courting the media had become an important part of my role. For Christmas 1998, Jonathan and I hosted a TSG thank-you function and invited our bankers, lawyers, valuers, consultants and the media to a lunch

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at the Ritz Carlton on Macquarie Street, Sydney. At that stage we were still an unlisted public company but I gave a report to our guests about the past year and I spoke as if I was reporting to shareholders at an Annual General Meeting. In fact I got so caught up in the moment that at the end of my speech I spontaneously announced that, ‘In light of the success of TSG to date I anticipate that when we meet in one year’s time TSG will be listed on the ASX’. I knew full well that by making that announcement, I was creating an exciting news story at the sleepy end of the media year. I knew we would receive massive coverage. And we did. When I came off the podium, Jonathan came up to me asked, ‘When did we decide to list?’ to which I said, ‘I guess right now’. Because our relationship was rock solid, we laughed and became determined together to make it happen. The Satellite Group float was about focusing on the needs of one affinity group – the gay and lesbian community. My desire to focus on assets for this community was about bringing together my now open life as a gay man with my commercial expertise. I saw that there were insufficient quality assets for the gay community and I felt the opportunity existed to offer the community something better. Research supported the fact that the gay community had greater disposable income: typically, double-income-no-kids couples had more to spend on themselves. There was therefore a ready-made

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community able to spend money on quality assets such as resorts and apartments which catered to their style, taste and needs. The purpose of the float was to re-position the assets of the company away from the traditional residential developments we were doing and instead to build infrastructure for this community. Developments such as resorts specifically for the gay and lesbian market, specific health-care facilities, retirement villages, as well as new clubs, were our focus. Our company would recognise the general differences that would make such directed property investment attractive. For instance, we recognised that an 80-year-old lesbian was likely to have had a different life to that of an 80-year-old straight woman. As such, she would want a retirement home that catered to her needs and interests, where she would be surrounded by like-minded people. We appointed Kim Jacobs from Inteq Limited to act as our advisor for the TSG float. His job was to assist us with assembling a board of management, engaging the correct consultants, supporting the writing of our prospectus, and finding a suitable underwriter. As the founding director, and knowing my strengths, I wanted to be the chairman. But Kim advised me that I was too young to be the chairman and that in order to raise the money, we needed someone a little bit older and with a stronger profile than I had. Someone, he suggested, like Kerryn Phelps. I accepted this on the basis of her

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knowledge of the community, her political connections through her presidency of the Australian Medical Association, and her obvious intellect and drive. The board ultimately consisted of Kerryn Phelps as chair, me as managing director, my father Jack Fisher as executive director finance, Greg Gahl as executive director media, David Chapman and Stephen Bartlett as non-executive directors, and Jonathan Broster as company secretary. I was determined that Jonathan and I would sell 50.2 per cent of the company for $20 million. Dad was running the finance division at the time and doing a great job. While he and I have very different approaches to doing business – Dad is pretty old school – it gave me a great sense of pride to list on the ASX with my dad beside me on the board. And I think it gave him a lot of pride, too. Dad believed that the company had great prospects. His conservative business background, however, naturally made him uncomfortable at times with the gay focus the company was to take post-float. I remember once after TSG purchased the Beresford pub in Bourke Street, Surry Hills, it was reported in the paper the following day. The accompanying photo showed a flamboyantly dressed gay man at Mardi Gras, not the property asset. I know this stereotype annoyed Dad. Notwithstanding that, he was very focused on the marketing and financial areas of the company and saw significant opportunities for us.

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As it turned out, the interest in our float was so high that the ultimate underwriter, Shaw Stockbroking, requested that we accept $25 million for that 50.2 per cent share of the company. Of course, Jonathan and I were thrilled and agreed. Inteq had achieved a brilliant result for us. Because we wanted a company that was specifically aimed at the needs of the gay and lesbian community, we followed the dictum that you should own the voice to your market. When I looked at the gay media assets across Australia, there was a wonderful group of likeminded publications at state level, each published in a little office with few resources. I saw an opportunity to take these cottage industries and give them a more national voice. Each paper would, however, also retain a local section. The media and PR arm of TSG was conceived. In terms of property development, many people think the life of a developer is glamorous – finding properties, whipping about in a convertible and waiting for fat cheques to roll in. The reality is that it is hard, strategic and detailed work. Finding the right site means extensive analysis of the location, assessing the existing infrastructure around it and gaining access to future plans. Being a property developer also means understanding the complexities of commercial property law and being able to negotiate deals. The process is never simple – it involves talking to the property valuers

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to ensure you have a good handle on the site’s value and can be confident that the end value of the property you are intending to sell is realistic. You need to make sure that the contract with your builder is watertight so that you don’t have cost overruns and that it matches the sales contracts for the prospective purchasers. You want to be certain that the profit you represent to the bank will come through. From my time at Aust-Wide, I had learnt the value of putting together a strong team and rallying them around me. The combination of my mother’s organisational skills and my father’s people skills meant it came naturally to me. I took property development seriously. I had the best lawyers, builders, consultants and marketing executives. I surrounded myself with the best because I understood the risk involved and the level of skill required to make good judgments. I also paid people well. Second, I was innovative in marketing and financing. I was one of the first developers to provide video walk-throughs of apartments. Back then, it was a long, costly, detailed process to uplift the architectural plans to a format that could be used for video. And it required cutting-edge technology. I thought it was worth it and my judgment was right; this marketing method was hugely successful. My time at Aust-Wide had taught me the value of glossy marketing materials and I stopped at nothing to produce the highest quality marketing bro-

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chures. I was selling a lifestyle, not just a property, and the advertising needed to reflect this. My motto was always that I sold money not property; property is just the underlying commodity. The way I saw it, I was selling the ability for people to get onto the property ladder and to buy an apartment in the most convenient way. I aimed to make it easier to get a property through me than through anyone else, much like my grandfather had done in Campbelltown. Where other developers would turn away, I would help an individual secure a deposit bond. If a customer ultimately had 95 per cent of the funding required, I thought nothing of lending the balance, secured by a second mortgage which the purchaser could repay over time. My eye for creative ways in which people could afford to buy their homes meant that I got presales quickly. I would often market on the basis of ‘100 per cent finance available’. Even though it was hardly ever taken up, it focused the buyers’ attention on my properties over those of other developers. I wasn’t afraid of taking a risk or putting across my point of view. I developed a name for myself as a market commentator due to my strong analysis of the potential value of an area. I was one of the first second-tier property developers to invest in the Pyrmont area. In 1998, a number of banks began expressing a view that the Pyrmont and Ultimo area was becoming over-supplied and as such they would drop the amount they would lend

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on each apartment being sold. This had the potential of creating buyer uncertainty and forcing prices in the area down. I was called by the press to respond and I was ferocious in offering an alternative opinion. From my perspective, what we had in this area was a unique offering, the closest residential suburb to the CBD, just a short walk away across the old Pyrmont bridge; Darling Harbour was becoming an internationally known tourist attraction with light rail and bus infrastructure in place; there was a casino at one end of the area and Broadway at the other, and in between there were cafés, gyms, shops and parks. I could think of no area where there was a greater number of essential components that would support a strong increase in the number of residents. I said that the banks should not undermine the forward thinking of government city planners and developers who were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the area. In my opinion, an area with all those features, being well invested in by companies such as Meriton, Mirvac and Lend Lease, ought to be supported by the banks. A-tier companies of this ilk do not go into an area without significant due diligence. The more people living there, the stronger the community would be. To me it was pure logic. Ultimately the banks did change their positions. I don’t think it was due to what I said but I was not scared to put forward my views, even though I was only a second-tier developer.

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The Satellite Group

Finally, I had a great deal of confidence; I backed myself. This is essential for a successful property developer because at the end of the day, you are taking a calculated risk. Having done all the analysis, and using whatever knowledge you have to make a judgment, you are ultimately still taking a risk. The risks are big, they are real and there is a long time between the decision and the reward. I revelled in the various components. The intellectual negotiation with the lawyers, the creative thinking that goes into a great marketing campaign, and the commercial nous to put in place the right commercial and legal documents. I enjoyed dealing with the lawyers as much as I enjoyed sitting down with the designer and determining the colour scheme for the carpet. It was a time in my life where I felt in my prime. I was straddling two worlds. One, the serious corporate property development world and the other, the more creative world of marketing and public relations. After success on the property development front, I wanted to spread my wings into the creative world of marketing. I saw both as different means to the same end – a way to continue to expand a dynamic investment organisation. At TSG I was now being introduced to a world of creative, driven business people.

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AIR KISSES

IN EARLY 1999 A MUTUAL FRIEND BROUGHT JOH BAILEY

to a party I threw in my apartment in the Horizon building in Darlinghurst. We hit it off immediately. Joh lived on level 24 and I lived on level 25. Joh hated the fact that he was one level below me and that he had a view out west, while I had a view over Sydney Harbour! There was an instant spark between us, and in retrospect it was clear that part of that spark related to our mutual success: I was heading up a property development company, and he was – and still is – the highest profile hairdresser in Sydney. But that wasn’t the only element in the magic of our connection; when there were no paparazzi around and it was just the two of us at home, we got on brilliantly. We would drink martinis – usually too many – and land up on the floor of my apartment roaring with laughter for hours on end. My relationship with Joh gave me the confidence to be openly gay. I watched as people admired Joh for his obvious good nature and talent as a hairdresser. Every-

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Air kisses

one wanted him in their homes. Everybody wanted to be with him because he was, and still is, a great guy. He was so much more than his sexuality. Joh and I lasted only a short time as a couple and when we broke up there was no animosity. We were a terrible mismatch and we laugh now about the fact we lasted as long as we did. We’re too similar, too naughty. A classic example occurred one Friday night. We both said we were having an early night and Joh went down to level 24 to go to bed. The minute he walked out of my apartment, I changed and headed out to Arq nightclub at nearby Taylor Square, the biggest gay club in Sydney. Unbeknown to me, he headed out to another gay club, the Midnight Shift. At 5 o’clock the next morning, I left Arq and went to the Shift, only to find Joh flirting his way from one end of the room to the other. I stared at him and he gave me one of his infectious, cheeky smiles. ‘Well, I needed some milk and went to the shop… I just happened to walk past here and I was sucked in. I’ve been trying to get out ever since.’  There is a part of all of us that is fascinated by celebrity. None of us thinks it is real and certainly I didn’t ever imagine I would be a part of it. I had always fantasised about a world of riches and privilege, whether it was the BMW Matchbox cars I collected as a kid, the glamour

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of Aunty Phyl’s jet-setting lifestyle, or my drive towards financial success. I wanted wealth and I pursued it shamelessly. But not for a second did I imagine that I would be a part of the super-rich who were able to buy anything, spoil others and, on the outside at least, just laugh and carry on. Joh was my entree to this world of fantasy. His hairdressing salons were dotted around Sydney, with his flagship in Sydney’s ritzy Double Bay. Over the years his clients included Elle Macpherson, Linda Evangelista, Olivia Newton-John, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Kylie Minogue and Judy Davis. Most famously, he looked after the late Princess Diana for the entire time that she was in Australia in 1997. Joh’s position in the A-list celebrity world was obvious. Everyone felt special with Joh. He laughed at people’s jokes, if someone drank, he drank with them (usually more than they did). When we first met it would be fair to say that I was somewhat star-struck and felt a little intimidated by him. It’s also fair to say that in meeting him, my whirlwind introduction to Sydney’s social A-list began. Joh immediately introduced me to his business partner and close friend Marilyn Koch. Marilyn is herself a part of the Sydney scene. She has an incredible personality and acid wit, yet at the same time there is a Jewish-mama side to her that endears her to all. She and Joh have a recipe that works. Over decades of working

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together they have created a successful and sustainable business. Marilyn manages everything in Joh’s life – his work appointments, the parties he attends and the guys he dates. As soon as Joh and I started going out, Marilyn contacted my personal assistant, Claudia Prosser, and together they matched my diary with Joh’s and decided when and where we would spend our evenings. I was swept up in it all. I had my housekeeper at home, Jocelyn, who managed my business travel needs, and I now had a manager for my personal life, too. It later became clear that part of Marilyn’s role was ending Joh’s relationships on his behalf – he didn’t like the messy bits. I learnt quickly that it was important to look the part. As soon as we started dating, Joh didn’t hesitate to tell me I was too fat. He put me on a low carb, high protein diet that I followed to the letter. Shaves of meat and water were all I was allowed. No fruit, dairy, junk food, carbs or anything else; just meat and water. I lost 20 kilos in three weeks. One time Joh and I met at a restaurant, joining a group of friends. Joh was horrified that my hair was lifeless. He immediately summoned me to the bathroom where he used a combination of soap and water to style my hair for the evening. A-listers focus on first appearances. Looking one’s best in every way is paramount to attracting attention. But I learnt that while from the outside it may look like superficial airheads trying to outdo each other in a

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trample towards the right photographers for the right publications, that is not entirely the case. While the beautiful hangers-on were always welcome (they only made the party glitzier and more beautiful), the best of these people were clever, thoughtful, creative and motivated, and were using every marketing and PR opportunity to promote their businesses. Marketing is all about aspiration and desirability. The people I grew to know and love threw themselves into this public world to achieve success. And they put their hearts and souls into it. I developed a healthy admiration for their levels of drive, commitment, sheer focus and success. They say some people will go to the opening of an envelope. Marilyn made sure Joh and I went to the right ones – those with the requisite glitz and glamour, the right photographers and fabulous food. One of the first events I went to with Joh was the opening of a new Gucci store in the city. It was there that I met Benji Shagrin, a highly excitable personality with whom I became very close. If anyone knew how to give air kisses, it was Benji. I remember how he made a bee-line for me at the Gucci store, making it his absolute business to get to know Joh’s new beau de jour. He adored being part of that world, helping to make celebrities’ travel dreams become a reality. He always sought to create that extra bit of sparkle. When you stepped off the plane, Benji would make sure you stepped right into a limo. He knew how to give celebrities that extra bit of pampering.

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It was exhilarating to watch the ribbon be cut, walk into Gucci and then read in the papers the next day that Joh and I had attended the function together. In fact, after that opening, the Sunday Telegraph ran a story about Joh and I being the next ‘it’ gay couple. That story developed into a talk-back radio segment in which people called in to express their views as to whether a gay couple ought to be announced in a major publication. Nowadays, who would stop to consider the fact that a gay couple was out for the first time together? I’m glad I put myself out there to be part of that change. I am also aware that so many others before me fought hard so that I could have the courage to come out as a gay man.  In the lead-up to the listing of The Satellite Group on the Australian Stock Exchange, I felt like I was at the top of my game. The float, billed as the first pink float in the world, was getting significant media attention, both here and internationally. I was billed as the next Harry Triguboff and being courted by the media. Never before had an entrepreneur built an organisation specifically aimed at the long-term needs of the gay and lesbian community. For me, it was the merging of different parts of my life. I was excited at the prospect of pushing social boundaries. I knew that my approach

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would challenge the conservative business world. I also felt a great sense of obligation to the gay community. The combination of emotional conviction and commercial drive created the spark that became TSG. I felt euphoric. I had grabbed the attention of the business world and secured their support to launch this new investment concept. Listing the company was about to make me very wealthy and that energised me and gave me a sense of power. And to top it all off, I had unwittingly stepped into celebrity world. The attention was intense. Amidst all this business and personal hype, TSG became the darling of the stock market. The expectation was that the enthusiasm for our stock would be so great that as soon as the bell rang on the first day of trading, our shares would shoot up in value. However, on the day of the float, in September 1999, the unexpected happened. Rather than responding as anticipated, the stock fell due to a massive selloff. No one knew what had happened. My stockbroker called me. I was at lunch at the Summit Restaurant in Australia Square, just across the road from the Stock Exchange. ‘Greg what are you up to? What’s going on?’ his voice was urgent. ‘I’m at lunch. What’s this about?’ I had not even looked at the share trading, I was so confident that our stock was about to take off.

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‘Numbers are dropping, we are haemorrhaging. Have you offloaded all your shares?’ I had over $7.5 million worth of shares. I had worked many long hard years to build this company and take it to the point of floating it on the ASX. The worst thing I could do would be to sell out on Day One. ‘Of course I’m not selling out. I have no intention of bombing TSG like that. What is this about?’ As we later discovered, one individual who had requested a large portion of shares off-market had decided to sell on the first day. At the time, I had been thrilled to have him on board. Perhaps his circumstances had changed or perhaps he was being a shrewd player on the market, buying at a certain price and selling when the market was most excited. To this day I don’t know and I have never harboured any ill-will toward him. The nature of the stock market is speculative and investors are entitled to make investment plays as they see fit. But the impact was immediate. Instead of the share price going up, which was what everyone had expected, it fell with the sale of his shares. While we ended the day back where we had started, the enormous hype surrounding the float disappeared. From that moment the bubble burst, the honeymoon was over. The market focused on strict investment criteria; investors watched my every move and analysed my performance every day with respect to the underlying assets of the company.

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Despite our somewhat disappointing first day, all of us at TSG were still extremely confident and excited. We had successfully floated the company together! We moved into our new offices in College Street, Sydney, across the road from Hyde Park. They were exciting times. From having people spread all over Sydney, we now had a staff of more than 60 people in one place. It was a thrill to walk from one end of the office, where property plans were being discussed, through the finance division where loans were being facilitated for our property purchases, through to our large media area. There was a lot of team building, bringing people together from all backgrounds and different sexual orientations, inspiring cohesion and creating enthusiasm for the future expansion. It was good fun for everyone involved and the media continued to support us.

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JOH AND I DECIDED TO GO TO CHIVA SOM, A HEALTH

retreat in Thailand. Harry M Miller, the celebrity agent, made a call for us so we could get in at the last minute. As soon as we arrived we discovered it was a ‘dry’ resort. Joh was horrified: ‘This was never going to be on – I’m on my holidays – we need martinis!’ So I followed Joh around the backstreets of Thailand. With his arms flailing and a steely determination in his face, Joh and I trawled until we found what we wanted. Meanwhile I had a ball at the resort, snapping away at all the celebrities until I was told in no uncertain terms to stop! We had loads of massages, enjoying every possible pampering possibility. We even decided to have a little acupuncture. Tiny needles were placed into us and we were instructed that they were to remain under little band-aids for a few days. ‘Are you serious?’ Joh said. This was clearly never going to happen: firstly they were ridiculously uncomfortable and secondly it would have meant an uneven tan later. Painfully we peeled them off each other that night.

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It was on that holiday that I got to understand a guy who, out of the limelight, was like everyone else. He worked extremely hard and was appreciative of the break, just like the next person. It was great to hear of Joh’s western suburbs upbringing, his love for his family and how they too enjoy his celebrity and good fortune. We left Thailand ten days later with fabulous (non-acupuncture-marked) tans. On our return, Joh, Marilyn, one of Marilyn’s daughters and I jumped straight into my BMW to travel to a wedding in the country. The bride was Kellie Barker, and this was her second wedding; about seven years previously she had lost her first husband, famous Australian jockey Noel Barker, in a fatal riding accident. Joh and Kellie were longtime friends and he was there as a guest — and of course to do her hair for the magnificent wedding, which was held in a stone church in Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands, about two hours south-west of Sydney. Kellie’s and my friendship has outlasted the marriage and I still refer to her as Princess, a term of endearment many of us bestow on her. Kellie’s wedding was an opportunity for Joh to introduce me to many people from his world. He warned me that I would be unlikely to get on with his ex-partner, the high-profile clothing designer Peter Morrissey. I think Joh said that so we wouldn’t swap stories about him. As it turned out, Peter and I hit it off straight away and still remain good friends.

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Peter is a great example of how being an A-lister can help build a personal brand. His clothes became more than just the fabric and the design, they represented a lifestyle everybody wanted. Peter’s early design career was in partnership with Leona Edmiston, and they were a dynamic duo, designing clothes for INXS at the height of the band’s success. Peter also dressed the likes of Kylie Minogue, Naomi Campbell, Jon Bon Jovi and other stars. The uniform worn by Qantas staff across the world was for many years also Peter’s design. His indisputable talent as a designer was highlighted because of his media exposure, which included being at the right parties with the right people. Joh has built his profile in much the same way. His clientele, his personality and his social life are intertwined. He doesn’t just cut someone’s hair, he infuses glamour into his creations. I met many wonderful people at Kellie’s wedding − TV personalities, event managers, publicists, fashion designers, journalists, photographers and socialites. People like Charlotte Dawson and her then-husband, former Olympic swimmer Scott Miller, Jill Waddy, Nikki Andrews, Jonathan Ward, Alex Zabotto-Bentley and his then-boyfriend Michael Murphy (whom I later briefly dated), Alex Perry, Andrew Whitlam (known as Baci), Victoria Morish, Mark Coppleson, Jayson Brunson and his partner Aaron Elias, Melissa Hoyer, Stuart Membery, Victoria and Robert Fisher (no relation) and Olivia Korner.

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I was overwhelmed by the warm welcome I received from these people. I thought that this world of fabulousness would be cold and exclusive, and that I would feel awkward and out of place. But at that point, I was flying high. I had listed my company on the Australian Stock Exchange, I was the darling of the media and I had a lot of money. This all meant I had enough self-confidence to feel that I belonged. My own success was based on selfdetermination, drive, personal promotion and talent. And these were the same attributes I saw in the people that I was meeting. My new friends were also welcoming to Carly, who enjoyed meeting them. Carly, who was six or seven at the time, became the face of the Summer Foxtel commercials with Kellie Barker’s son Nathan; this was all due to Kellie’s and my friendship with Roger Wyllie who worked for Foxtel. One of my greatest delights during this time was the magnificent boat I bought, a Dyna craft cruiser with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, multiple TVs, a full galley kitchen and a fly bridge which comfortably sat about 15 people. As someone who has always loved boats, this was less of a showpiece and more of a fantastic way to be on the water. It had a mooring at Woolloomooloo’s Finger Wharf, right in front of the famous Otto restaurant. Otto’s owner, Maurice Terzini, would send down platters of food to the boat, served by half a dozen waiters in their full black and whites. It was fabulous and we all enjoyed it. I had been brought

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up to share what I had and this point in my life was no different. I always let young people drive my Porsche – it was wonderful to watch the thrill on their faces. And I never tolerated anyone being pompous. One day on the boat, a guest asked my skipper to get him a glass of champagne. I told him it wasn’t Alex’s job to fill our champagne glasses and suggested he do so himself and bring one for Alex, too. There was no room for selfimportance in my world. Everyone quickly learnt that.  While on the outside my new friends were celebrities, behind the razzle dazzle of the cameras and parades they were regular people with the ups and downs that we all have. Not long after we met, Benji Shagrin – that master of the air kiss at the Gucci launch – asked me to have dinner with him at the Imperial Peking in Double Bay. He confessed he was desperately lonely. A lot of his public hurrah was just that. He was gay. He knew it but he was extremely fearful of telling his parents and sought my advice. For me by then it was simple: don’t go down the wrong road just to please your family; ultimately you will hurt everyone, including yourself. We became very close from that moment. Our relationship has always been platonic and he refers to me as his big brother. The truth is, my advice caused him almost a

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decade of pain as his family struggled to come to terms with his sexuality. But Benji stood firm and continued to build his life, so when his family was ready to accept him unconditionally, he was ready to re-engage. I also became good friends with Charlotte Dawson and Olivia Korner. Both of them lived in the Horizon building and our proximity meant we shared in many of each other’s more challenging moments. In 2000 I was on holiday with Olivia and Charlotte in Noosa when the Women’s Weekly published an article on the collapse of Charlotte’s marriage to Scott Miller. We were sitting at breakfast, and as she read the article she became emotional and agitated. She was furious. She slapped the magazine closed, shoved her chair back, stood up and declared she had been defamed. She said we were heading back to Sydney so she could deal with it. She launched legal proceedings against the magazine that lasted almost a decade. Charlotte was well known as a model, a TV presenter and fashionista, but as a close friend, she would often talk to me about her insecurities. Charlotte often self-medicated with uppers and downers, mixing these pills with alcohol, which left her in a state of heightened depression for long periods of time. At other times she was bright, intelligent, funny, warm, insightful and deeply caring about her friends. I was heartbroken when I read about her death. I had no idea how badly her drug and alcohol usage was messing with her mind.

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I was too heavily into the drugs of my own choice at the time of our close friendship. Having seen the commercial value of the social scene for myself (as well as enjoying the friendships within it), I allowed myself to be swept up by it all. But becoming a part of the A-list social scene meant becoming a part of the A-list drug scene. I would regularly knock on the door of an exclusive club in Darlinghurst on a Friday or Saturday night, a club that could only be accessed by those known to the owner. Its patrons were media moguls, journalists, celebrity photographers, A-listers and many a drug dealer. As I entered I would see the open use of cocaine, flowing martinis and champagne. The vibe was one of debauchery, gluttony and sheer fun. There was an unspoken code that whatever happened in the club stayed in the club. The world at that time looked only bright and filled with business opportunities, friendships and contacts. Like everything else I was experiencing at that time, the possibilities excited me. I wanted to know and explore everything – what the A-listers did, what made their lives exciting, what happened at their parties, what lay behind the media hype. Once I started to meet people in this world, I quickly wanted more. I felt special. I was proud that my business success was being acknowledged by this group and that it was granting me access to places I could not have gone before.

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The downside, of course, was that once I was seen to be a part of this world, many people thought I had changed more than I had. In fact I never lost my focus on my business activities and putting in a hard day’s work. But perception is everything and I let myself down not paying more attention to that. Some of my old friends did not come on the ride with me and realised I was going too far. But I continued to embrace my new celebrity friendships and all that went with them.  One of Joh’s closest friends was the fashion designer Alex Perry. Alex’s manufacturing outlet was in the street behind Joh’s Double Bay salon. Alex’s place was three storeys up, with everything, including the walls and concrete floors, painted white. There was a changing room for the ladies and a large manufacturing area with huge cutting tables and numerous machinists. It was easy to be caught up in the excitement of what he was doing. Alex was dressing the finest names in town, those who could afford his expensive gowns. He had a brilliant reputation for making wedding gowns and bridesmaids’ dresses. Over time, his business grew to a point where he dressed all the celebrities nationally and even some internationally.

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Alex was utterly charming. He was very talented, proud of his work, and incredibly driven. He talked little of his home life with his wife and more about his social life with Joh and others. Rarely did Joh and I go out to a nightclub without Alex joining us. Alex wouldn’t hesitate to take his shirt off at the clubs and mix it with the best of them and have a great night out. He didn’t have much of a ‘stop’ button. When my Horizon apartment was being renovated I moved into the Gazebo Hotel in Kings Cross, and on occasion Alex would stay over after late-night partying. It was Joh who requested I speak to Alex about supporting his business. Alex wanted to make a big splash for the Mercedes Benz 2000 Fashion Week, but was short of funds. Joh felt that Alex was on the cusp of making it big and that providing support to him would be a good way for TSG to attract celebrity attention. Alex and I met at Dee Bee’s Café in Double Bay and he explained to me that Fashion Week was an opportunity for him to significantly expand, and if he didn’t take it, he was going to have to contract the business. I proposed that The Satellite Group sponsor Alex Perry’s Fashion Week show through a loan of $220 000 with reasonable terms. I felt this made complete sense and was in line with our goals. TSG was always trying to appeal to the aspirational buyer. Alex Perry was just another way to remind people what TSG stood for. I was profiled in the press with

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Joh Bailey at the time and my name was becoming widely known. I wanted to use this to draw attention to TSG. I also took the decision to further guarantee the loan so that in the event that Alex couldn’t afford to repay the money to TSG, I personally would be legally bound to do so. Looking back, it’s almost unbelievable that given my financial and corporate background, I didn’t do enough at the time to record properly the financial details of the agreement. But I didn’t. This left a vacuum in which a deep misunderstanding developed between Alex and me about the terms of the loan when it came up for repayment. Because of my relationship with Joh Bailey and the interest in me in the social pages, at TSG we made the decision to use my name in the hope that the press coverage would then draw in the company. The strategy worked and the following day the Daily Telegraph reported that Alex Perry’s Mercedes Fashion Week 2000 show had been sponsored by Greg Fisher, managing director of TSG. It never occurred to me that by doing this I had committed a breach of the law. I’d never been to a fashion show before. Knowing Alex and Joh, I had free access everywhere behind the scenes and was mingling with fashion designers and journalists. Compared to the dry world of corporate affairs, this was a life filled with pizzazz and excitement. I had invited friends to attend the show and was proud

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to see the flyers on each seat stating, ‘Alex Perry proudly sponsored by Greg Fisher’. Little did I know how those words would come back to haunt me.

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CHAIR KERRYN PHELPS AND I WERE GETTING ON WELL

and we were excited about TSG’s future. We’d meet regularly to discuss what was going on in the business. I would often have breakfast at her place in Double Bay, usually a bagel with smoked salmon and black coffee. The meetings were informal and relaxed. I took very seriously the idea that I was a high-profile gay man working side by side with a high-profile lesbian to build the gay community. I wanted to make it work. While we had successfully raised $25 million, we had an enormous amount of work in progress that required cash. By early 2000 we were experiencing a tightening of our cash flow. We were, however, continuing to meet our financial obligations as and when they fell due. I had the full support of the banks and there was no talk of any of our funders calling in any loans. We were working through our property developments, each of which was at a different stage. I was a very active managing director, intimately involved in our property

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and finance divisions as well as keeping abreast of the publications side. I worked closely with my father on the finance division. TSG, through its finance division, secured a license from GIO Insurance to issue deposit bonds for off-theplan buyers. Dad was very active with this part of the business but also assisted with funding proposals for our other properties. I enjoyed working with my father although by this stage I was feeling the weight of being a managing director at the age of 34, even though my confidence was still intact, or at least my bravado was. I had a lot to juggle, including 160 staff Australia-wide to pay every week, and keeping capital sums of money invested in order to complete our properties. This was no small task and I was feeling overwhelmed. I’m good at having a vision and getting people to buy into it. But there are better people to run the day-to-day operations and implementation. I was struggling with the technology decisions and organisational dynamics that needed attention. But we had reached an agreement prior to the float that I would be managing director, and here I was. In addition to a tightening cash flow, it became clear that we were not going to meet our prospectus revenue forecast. On 20 June 2000 TSG issued a statement to say that we were not going to make an interim dividend in the first year. This perpetuated the uncertainty about our business that had begun on the day

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of the float with the faltering share price, despite our meeting all our obligations to the market and complying with all ASX regulations. Our share price began to fall steadily. The pressures continued. As the share price declined, the board became more and more agitated with me. I was not providing the answers they wanted in response to the share price. While my relationship with Dad continued to be strong, he often voiced his view that our focus on assets for the gay community was not necessarily being welcomed by the conservative business world. While I respected Dad’s views, in my opinion to have changed course so soon after the float was not an option. Dad has always had the capacity to both challenge and support me simultaneously, so our relationship never soured even though we had different views at this time. Dad also knew from his extensive experience that share prices rise and fall. Given that the underlying assets of the company were strong, he offered his views as observations, rather than as forceful remonstrations.  At this time I was the subject of intense media scrutiny, not only in regard to my activities at The Satellite Group. My entire career was now put under the microscope. It was an overwhelming period. Publicly I had to maintain a sense of confidence and composure. Pri-

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vately I found some of the press very confronting. One of the most difficult to deal with was an exposé of my business activities over the past ten years. The intention of the article was to pick out my poorest decisions over the decade and present them as at best a failed career and at worst as the work of a con-artist. I will cop fair criticism that over a decade or so of being a young executive I made some commercial decisions unwisely or too aggressively, and most certainly with the benefit of having an older head on my shoulders now, I would do things differently. But it is hard when you see only one side of the ledger being reported. I made many good, clever and market-leading decisions in that time as well. At the end of the day, however, I have always accepted that in choosing to undertake my career in the media spotlight, I lived by the sword and died by the sword. I’d had tremendous support from the media when things were going well.  On 3 July 2000 I was called into the boardroom to respond to queries from the board. At this point shares had fallen from 50 cents to a low of 15 cents, but I had no warning that there was to be anything unusual about this particular meeting. I left my office and crossed the reception area to the boardroom. Halfway across I realised I had forgotten something, and went back to my

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office to get it. When I went to the security door, my card didn’t work. I was annoyed and told the receptionist that my card needed to be fixed. I saw a group of security guards in the foyer but thought nothing of it. With TSG’s media interests, property and finance, we often had an array of people in our reception, and certainly not all of them were there to see me. So I continued to walk to the boardroom. As I entered, I saw the members of the board waiting for me. I noticed that the company lawyer was also in attendance, but thought nothing of it and greeted him. I sat down in my usual seat at the head of the table. As soon as I sat down our lawyer informed me that the meeting’s real purpose was to advise me that I had lost the confidence of the board. I had two options available. The first was to tender my resignation, both as managing director and director. If I did this the board would notify the Australian Stock Exchange that I had retired for personal reasons. Alternatively, if I refused to resign, option two was for the board to vote me out as managing director and to call an Extraordinary General Meeting of shareholders and put a resolution that I be removed as a director (the board only had the right to sack a managing director, not the right to remove a director). My initial response was to take option one. As soon as I did this, however, I realised that my choice to resign could be seen as an admission of unacceptable conduct

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by a managing director. I immediately sought to withdraw my resignation. It was too late. The die was cast and my request to withdraw my resignation was denied. Dad abstained but his vote would have been irrelevant anyway, given the numbers. When I left the boardroom, the five large security men, all dressed in black, were waiting for me. They took me into my office, allowed me to pack a few things, escorted me down to my car and saw me out of the building. The board sent an announcement to the Australian Stock Exchange and the media explaining that I had resigned for personal reasons. The first thing I did was call my then partner, Michael, who met me at Morgan’s coffee shop on Victoria Street, Darlinghurst. I was in shock. As soon as we sat down, my phone began ringing. Every newspaper was calling me for a comment. I held to the story that I had resigned for personal reasons. That was accepted by all the journalists, and was how it was reported the next day. One journalist, however, Ben English from the Telegraph, said to me, ‘Come on, Greg, I’ve just been told by someone at TSG that you were escorted out of the property’. I couldn’t deny it and the truth was out. The nightmare began. Everyone wanted to know what was going on, and the fact that I hadn’t told them the full story the day before hadn’t endeared me to them. They could smell blood and they wanted the inside gossip.

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The board called in the Australian Securities Investment Commission (ASIC) to conduct an investigation into the allegations, which amounted to a criminal misuse of my position as a company director for personal gain. To this day, I am unsure why the board took this action without first talking to me, given the strong working relationship we had developed. Things moved quickly. I resigned on Monday 3 July, and by Friday 7 July ASIC had issued a summons to appoint a receiver to my private companies (separate to TSG), which would have frozen all my assets. ASIC raised three sets of charges against me around the misuse of funds. The first was that I misused company money to purchase a large boat; the second that I misused TSG money to acquire for my personal interests an investment in a virtual tourist attraction in the city of Sydney called Sky Tours; and the third was that I misused TSG money as a director for personal gain by promoting Alex Perry at Mercedes Fashion Week. From the outset I maintained my innocence. The idea of misusing my position as company director for personal gain had no logic to it. I was the largest shareholder in the company; I had also personally guaranteed every single decision undertaken at The Satellite Group. Not only had I given my guarantee as an individual, I also provided a guarantee from my personal family trust which held all my assets (my houses, cars, shares, etc.). So in the event that a deal went sour, all

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shareholders stood in a preferred position to me because there could always be a call on all my assets to cover the loss from any bad decision. So my head was always on the chopping block. I was the only director at TSG to provide such a guarantee – this was at a time when some directors did everything to quarantine their assets away from their corporate decision-making. I always said that if I’m in charge, my assets ought to be firmly on the line – that way people knew I had skin in every decision I made. If TSG failed, I had more to lose than anyone.  On 12 July I managed to prevent ASIC’s appointment of a receiver for my personal assets, but by this time TSG had started selling off properties. It was frustrating and heartbreaking to watch. I was desperate to get it back, and told the press: ‘This company has great potential and many opportunities and I need to get back in and run it’. Meanwhile in the TSG boardroom, Kerryn Phelps was trying to pursuade the board that TSG be put into voluntary administration. She failed and resigned as chair on 9 August. The most difficult part of the experience was knowing the impact my removal would have on the company. In December 2000, when TSG went into liquidation, I was horrified that all the employees lost their jobs

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and their superannuation. These were talented people who had been employed in the community for a long time. My intent had been to increase the profile of the gay community, but instead here I was walking down Oxford Street feeling like a pariah. Dad also found it difficult to hear the criticism that was being levelled against me. He was often conflicted, agreeing with some of what people were saying about me some of the time, and yet he wanted to support me. He certainly spoke to me on a number of occasions to get fuller explanations. But he probably accepted my explanations more quickly than others would have. There was no question in my mind that he would back me. Dad tendered his resignation from TSG shortly after I was removed. Once I was sacked he was excluded from all decision-making and meetings so did not feel he could continue to hold the position of a director.  While I had been having a fabulous time on the social scene, I probably looked more like a playboy and less like a managing director. I had my Mercedes and Porsche, a great apartment, a stunning boat and for much of the time I was dating Joh. I was living my dream. I had also developed a sense of entitlement that I deserved this wonderful life, given how hard I was working and

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how much money I was making. Arrogance and entitlement, a heady mix. This was exacerbated by the fact that I believed that as the MD of a publicly listed gay company I had to be ‘fabulous’, even if that was somewhat manufactured at times. TSG was a part of a commercial and social revolution and I was its spokesperson; I took a great deal of pride in that. We were being courted by the big alcohol and car companies who wanted us to promote their brands and help them reach the pink market. The more I got caught up in the glitz and glamour, the less confidence I gave the market that I could sensibly and responsibly run a property development company. My business structures were very complex and it was this complexity that ultimately led to the amount of litigation we had. The more parties involved in a deal, the more complex it became and the more exposed we were. I had been too aggressive in terms of risk and debt and it ultimately came back to bite me. Looking back it is clear that what we should have done was to have had a greater amount of equity capital in each deal and to have reduced the number of deals we did. We should have completed each project successfully rather than spreading the limited capital we had over so many properties and having so many legal arrangements in place at any one time, each of which had the potential to blow up (which some of them did). I was facilitating overdrafts from the bank on the understanding that funds would

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be flowing in from other developments. The banks had confidence in me but in retrospect I should have slowed down. As Mum said to me on more than one occasion, ‘I think you should be more cautious, you are growing too fast’. And finally, I could have done a better job of taking the gay community and the board along with me. I was imposing my vision on the company and telling everyone how great it would be, rather than working with them to achieve the outcomes I wanted. This meant many people within the organisation had little understanding of what I was trying to achieve and saw only my personal wealth and flamboyant behaviour and not the vision and opportunities I was focused on creating. These things are easy to say with hindsight. At the time, I felt like a complete failure and sank into a deep depression. For the first few months after I left TSG, I was still paid a salary and had access to my cars, but by the end of the year my assets were frozen and everything was taken away. Luckily, Michelle and I had reached a settlement years earlier, so she and Carly did not suffer financially from this. Five months later, at the end of May 2001, I was committed to stand trial on three sets of charges of dishonestly using my position for personal advantage and one charge of making a false statement to gain financial advantage. In the meantime I went to court to get some of my own money released, but only got half of what I

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requested. I felt an increasing sense of insecurity, fearful that I would not be accepted. How was I going to keep up the persona of the corporate tycoon if I wasn’t driving my fancy cars and wearing my stylish clothes? The old feelings of not fitting in that had been triggers for my depression in the past had been masked by the high-flying corporate life, the flamboyance and drive to succeed. The first week after I was asked to leave, I put on a suit each morning and went into the city to have lunch. But I soon realised that I was achieving little and spending a lot. Very quickly my sense of self worth declined and I realised I had no purpose or place in the corporate world. I was only of interest to the drug scene; and so that is what I gravitated towards. I was feeling increasingly depressed, coming to terms with the full enormity of my loss. This was different from the type of depression I had felt before, where medication had been of significant help. This was a feeling of utter hopelessness and defeat. It was a full body blow. The only things that helped me feel better were the uppers I took. The occasional high soon became my daily pastime as the uppers also contributed to my sense of confidence. But with my assets still frozen and my drug use on the increase, it was an obvious and seamless move for me to go from using to selling. I was now a drug dealer.

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DEALING

DRUG DEALER. THE WORDS CONJURE UP IMAGES OF A

thin, dirty guy selling heroin on a street corner. But here I was, in my post-TSG life, wearing expensive clothes, attending the best parties in Sydney and living a life that many would envy. People think drugs are an all-or-nothing game but that is not the case. In the same way that one glass of wine doesn’t make you an alcoholic, taking drugs as part of your weekend entertainment doesn’t make you an addict. On a Friday or Saturday night, I would join the journalists, photographers and A-listers for a few drinks and a few lines of coke. At $200 for a gram of coke it was a fun night out that I could easily afford for myself and for others. I gradually became a heavier user as I had less to do in my non-corporate days. I used drugs to fill the boredom and to ease the pain of watching the public destruction of the company I’d worked so hard to build. I was shocked and spent and found comfort and relief in a haze of drugs.

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I approached the dealer I used to buy from and asked him to sell to me wholesale. He’d still make a profit and I would be able to make an income supplying my good friends. It was an easy way to make a living. I would be out anyway on a Saturday night but now I would be supplying ten grams of coke along the way. It made me $500 a night. I enjoyed the attention I received when I walked into a party because I had the drugs. It is amazing how many ‘friends’ you suddenly make when you can give them what they want. From just going out on a Friday or Saturday night, I was now out five nights a week selling my wares. From being a social pastime, drugs were now my life. There are clear signs that you have moved from social use to dealing. You move from picking up an extra gram of coke or a pill for a mate to having a room full of people waiting for you to turn up at a party. You get all the best invitations and notice that you are the first port of call for everyone in the room. Every time you make a sale to a friend, you join in (you do it out of your own stock so that outwardly you are being seen as a helpful happy friend, but in reality it’s cheap marketing so they always come back to buy from you). And finally, you seek out the highest person on the cocaine pyramid so that you can get the purest coke for the cheapest price. This allows you to just add ten to 15 per cent of ‘junk’ such as creatine (a harmless amino acid available in health food shops), and increase your return while still achieving

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a higher quality product for the market. My coke would be 70 to 80 per cent pure, compared to most others that were 30 to 40 per cent pure – so of course people wanted mine as it went further. I quickly outgrew my dealer and approached someone further up the chain. My new big-time dealer gave me sound advice: ‘If you treat drugs like a business, you’ll do well. If you treat it like a lifestyle, you will go to hell.’ If only I’d listened! He lived by this motto – he worked nine to five. He was never available for pick-ups after hours. If you were late he wouldn’t wait; he never made an extra phone call. All these years later I’ve got no doubt he continues to drive his ute during business hours, carting drugs around Sydney. By the time he gave me this advice I was already a heavy user and well into the cycle of addiction. Much like the way a junkie craving his next hit will jump through a window to steal some money, I became desperate if my drugs ran out. The only difference was I could afford my drugs and didn’t need to break and enter to pay for them. I was well beyond running it like a business and was immersed in the lifestyle. I spent most of Wednesday night to Monday morning clubbing. I went home only for a quick shower and an occasional nap. People came by my apartment, which became a centre of partying, sex, champagne, baths and drugs. I would get so caught up at times that I could easily forget where I had put the money I owed my dealer.

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Not having money to pay my dealer was not an issue we could negotiate. Once he confiscated my Range Rover. He called me to clear out some of my personal things before he drove it away. He was as nice as pie on the outside but there was no question that he was dissatisfied and would take my car until I paid up. On the surface I was all bravado but the truth was I was devastated, depressed and hating what life had become. On the one hand, taking drugs gave me a sense of utter invincibility, as if I could handle anything. But on the other, it made me feel like an utter loser. The cash flow meant that I could once again pay the bills and, like anyone who’s been out of a job, this was a big relief. But with it came a constant paranoia, fear of being dobbed on, and being pestered with calls at all hours of the day and night by customers. I tried to keep things with Carly as normal as possible but it was becoming more and more difficult for me to maintain a routine with her. At one point I effectively became homeless, evicted from the Horizon as the payments on my home stopped. I couldn’t bear the public embarrassment so I moved into a five-star hotel in The Rocks for six weeks to keep up appearances. From being a high-flying businessman, I had sunk to being a dealer making money in the gutter. My deals had gone from the boardroom to the back alley. I lost my identity. I lost my soul. My purpose, so strong in the establishment of TSG, was decimated.

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The fight to clear my name felt like an endless battle as court cases dragged on. The combination of depression and my addiction meant I had to keep taking drugs because without them I felt I had no personality. At the hotel I continued my drug trading. On one occasion a dealer came to visit me. We spent over half an hour counting the pills he had come to buy as well as the cash he had brought to pay me. Suddenly he pulled out a gun and pointed it at my head. He told me not move. He threw all the pills into his bag, grabbed the cash and made off with the lot. I was in shock. But I was also desperate. Most of the money I should have been paid was going towards paying for the large bag of pills that I had on loan as credit. Now I had none of the drugs and no money to pay for them. I felt like I was flying down a cold, dangerous rabbit hole. I came to an arrangement with my dealer to pay it off over time. As good as it is when it’s going well, when it turns sour there’s nowhere to hide.  The first time I was arrested on drug charges was on 20 November 2003. I was due in court with barrister Charles Waterstreet on TSG matters and the night before I was staying at my then boyfriend Peter’s home in Surry Hills while he was away. The police raided the apartment at 7 a.m. There was a large bang as they

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knocked down the door, then 12 policemen with guns were all over the apartment searching for drugs. I had only gone to bed a few hours before and was delirious when they arrived. They screamed: ‘Police search warrant, stay where you are!’ Then they flew up the wooden stairs – the noise of all those heavy boots was deafening. ‘Is this your place?’ they shouted. An officer’s torch shining in my face quickly sobered me up. ‘No’, I said, confused and fatigued. I was still lying in bed, trying to get up and work out what was happening. ‘What’s in that box?’ an officer asked, pointing to the lunchbox on the table by the bed. ‘Drugs’ I answered. They were Peter’s but I had been selling them the night before. That was the first time I heard the words, ‘Mr Fisher, you are under arrest…’ I was terrified. How was I going to explain my non-appearance in court in a few hours? I remember begging like a child, almost crying, ‘Please sir, don’t arrest me, these are not my drugs, this is not my apartment’. ‘Doesn’t matter’, the policeman barked. ‘The fact that you have admitted knowing about the drugs gives us the right to arrest you.’ Someone had told the police that Peter was dealing. I was there that night simply because Peter’s apartment was close to the court where I was expected first thing in the morning.

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I didn’t know what to do. My eyes were darting around the apartment searching for a way out. I said to the officer, ‘Please, I need to go to the toilet’. He immediately directed another officer to take me. I wasn’t allowed to pee on my own. In fact the cop stood right next to me and watched me pull out my penis and piss, making sure that I was not trying to destroy evidence. I was indignant, outraged at the disrespect. It didn’t occur to me for one moment that they were treating me like the average junkie. And that they had every right to do so. Meanwhile the police were checking my belongings. In my wallet they found half a gram of coke. This allowed them to get a warrant to search my Double Bay apartment (I had moved there some time after my stay at the hotel room in The Rocks), which they proceeded to do. (Some time later, when I was in jail on remand, the police officer who came to interview me told me that until they raided Peter’s place and found that half gram of cocaine in my wallet, I was never on their radar. They had never heard of me or my drug dealing.) The officer then said, ‘OK, Mr Fisher, you are now going to be conveyed to Surry Hills police station where you will be fingerprinted and formally arrested’. ‘But I am due in court on corporate matters and I have to go.’ ‘Well, that will be a matter for the arresting officer and no doubt he will talk to your solicitor when you get there’, he said.

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I pressed the issue and asked, ‘Well, can I at least get dressed ready for court because I am in the middle of a trial?’ The officers allowed me to do that. Little did I realise the irony of the moment. I later saw that I had put on a different pair of trousers to my suit jacket. I was dressed like a junkie. When I arrived at the police station, I was able to contact Charles Waterstreet who immediately came down to see me. In the meantime, the police had gone to my apartment. They came back an hour later to say they had knocked down my door but on entering my apartment they had come across a cage which had a door that prevented them getting into the apartment. I had put this cage there for just this eventuality – should I be home when the police raided, it would give me enough time to get rid of the drugs before they could gain entry to the apartment itself. I gave them the key to the cage and they found my safe. In it was a small stash of drugs and cash. Because the amounts they had found were insignificant (personal use quantities), the police granted me bail, pending a future hearing. I was free to go at that point. I rushed to Charles’s chambers. Just before we left to go to court, I asked him, ‘Do you think I will go to jail over this drug thing?’ ‘Probably’, he said. I decided there was no way that I could deal with jail and the shame I would bring on my parents and

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daughter. I said to him, ‘I’ve just got a few things I need to go and do’. But Charles saw through me and said, ‘Just come with me for one minute’. I went with him and he locked me in the library and called an ambulance. I was left in the library for what seemed like forever. I paced up and down, my mind racing. I wanted to get out and run away. I thought about taking a taxi to the infamous Gap in Watsons Bay and jumping. It would be a relief to end my life as a dealer. Paramedics arrived and instantly sedated me, taking me to St Vincent’s Hospital where I was locked in an observation room. I was later seen by doctors and social workers and eventually I convinced them I was at no risk of self-harming. The suicidal moment had passed, but I realised that my time was up. At that moment, I felt that the lies and manipulation could not continue. And yet they did, as soon as the reality of having to pay my bills returned.

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ENTER TINA

IT WAS ONE THING TO HAVE BEEN IN THE MEDIA FOR

corporate fraud, it was quite another to be publicly outed as a drug dealer. The reaction in the Jewish community was swift and understandably harsh. The community was abuzz with gossip. Everyone had an opinion when the story broke: I knew he was on drugs, how else could he afford his lifestyle? How could he do that to his family? We pity his parents and daughter, is there no end to the shame he can bring? They had a field day with the story; I had 19 charges laid against me relating to the supply of an array of drugs and the importation of approximately a quarter of a kilogram of cocaine. I was out on bail – my parents had put up a $10 000 surety. Michelle was very concerned both for me and for Carly and asked me to give them some space. I am sure she was also ashamed, but she never threw it in my face. It is quite amazing that through all the difficulties I had at the time, Michelle never tried to stop my access to, and relationship with, Carly.

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I had to pay the rent and so I kept dealing. That is the power of drugs, combined with difficult circumstances – even the law is not a deterrent; being on bail for drug charges didn’t stop me from dealing, it wasn’t a warning I paid any attention to. I already felt broken, the police interference didn’t help me feel any better about anything or change me in any positive way. I was on a very destructive path, and dealing felt as if it was all I had. I was addicted to drugs. I kept trying to downplay it to everyone, saying it was for personal use. After all, I was on bail at that point. It wasn’t a serious commercial quantity. A few months later I was hugely relieved when the charges were dismissed. Peter, whose drugs had been in the apartment when I was arrested, accepted sole responsibility for those drugs and for the importation of the cocaine from South Africa. However, when he realised the length of sentence he would receive, he became a Crown witness against me in a deal to have his jail time reduced. With Peter’s and the police’s evidence against me, the charges were reinstated. Around this time I was at a friend’s house in Double Bay and we were having a great night with the usual red wine and coke. I walked into the kitchen and a friend of hers was smoking something out of a pipe. I asked what it was and he said to me, ‘Greg, you don’t want to know. Don’t touch it. I’m losing everything.’ I said that I would just have a try and again he

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Enter Tina

warned me, ‘Greg, don’t do it. Your life will never be the same.’ ‘Oh, stop being so melodramatic’, I said and reached out to inhale the vapours coming out of his pipe. Whoosh. It was incredible. Ice brings up your heart rate, you feel sexy, loving, confident and social. It’s a complete rush. By then a lot of the cocaine on the market was of poor quality, as dealers were trying to make more money by cutting it further. This was pure stuff. For the rest of the evening, I would periodically run into the kitchen to have another quick smoke. That was it. I’ll never forget it. And everything he said was true. If you have a relationship with Tina, as the drug was called, you can’t have any other relationships. Tina takes over your life. You become completely dependent; if you run out of ice you go crazy, you have to find it and you have to keep it with you. Ice becomes your friend and confidante, your personality, your entire life. When ice was introduced into the Sydney scene it was marketed as being 100 per cent pure – the purest form of speed. You would pop it into a glass pipe, light it underneath, the crystals would melt into liquid and the liquid would vaporise into smoke. Inhaling that smoke gave you the most exquisite high. It was so pure and so intense that it was sold in deals of 0.1 gram, a quantity that could last you a whole night. At $50 to $100 a deal, it was cheap compared to coke. And it made you alert and sexually confident compared with coke, which

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was increasingly having physical side effects. I carried different sized pipes with me and would often nip into a bathroom, take out a small pipe that fitted into the coin pocket of my jeans, and light it. Any of the ice left over from the previous smoke which had hardened would once again vaporise and I would get my fix and go off dancing. As a drug, it’s easy to manage. It also goes well with any other drugs. If you’ve taken too much of a downer, ice will lift you up again. If you feel yourself crashing, you just reach for some ice and the ‘whoosh’ comes back to restore you. I very soon became addicted. I dropped kilos in weight, had pale skin from being inside so much of the time and big black rings under my eyes. Without Tina I lost my sense of humour, had no confidence and was unable to interact with others. I walked away from my family. My parents continually rang me but I avoided them. I didn’t go to my sister’s fortieth birthday party and eventually they relied on me less and less to be a part of the family. Like all addicts, I became a master manipulator, coming up with a story for everything. When my family commented on the disappearance of two beautiful paintings I had had hanging in my lounge (which my dealer had taken when I hadn’t paid on time), I simply said I no longer liked them and had sold them; when they were concerned at the amount of weight I had lost, I told them that it was much healthier than being a fat blob; and when they commented on

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how tired and drawn I looked, I barked back that they would be too if they had had their company ripped from under them and were fighting for their corporate survival. I wish at that point I’d had the courage to talk to my parents about my addiction and the debts I had accumulated. Instead, I continued the façade and the lies. I know my parents would have supported my rehabilitation and assisted me financially. The fact was that asking for that help would have meant accepting my failures and acknowledging my addiction. And I was not anywhere near ready to do that. My beloved Aunty Phyl saw what I had become and couldn’t bear it and took me out of her will.  With the lies, homelessness, family separation and feelings of utter hopelessness, my addiction only grew. No longer was I part of the real world. I had collapsed totally into the underworld. I hated myself. I hated looking in the mirror. I was so ashamed of who and what I had become. I felt there was no way back and secretly I just wanted my life to end. There is no glamour in drugs and drug dealing is the absolute pits. Yet despite these feelings, it was at this time that I met Luke, my soulmate and life partner. There was an instant attraction between us, and when I look back I

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do wonder if we weren’t in fact brought together by a higher being to save each other, as if we had to go on a very difficult journey together so that we could both develop as individuals and ultimately go on to help others in troubled circumstances. At first we only saw each other casually. I often joke that Luke is the longest one-night stand I have ever had. He came into my life with true empathy and understanding based on his own life experiences of coming out. Both of us had struggled to come to grips with our homosexuality in light of our religious upbringings; mine Jewish and his Christian. While I pursued marriage and fatherhood, Luke was engaged to a woman for a couple of years. He felt enormous pressure to succumb to the expectations of his traditional Christian family and to pass onto another generation the ideals he had been brought up with. Not long before the wedding, Luke realised the enormity of the mistake he was making and didn’t want his future wife to go through the heartache that marriage would have brought. In the most heart-wrenching decision of his life, he broke off the relationship and moved from Adelaide to Sydney to seek Reparative Therapy through Hillsong church. This 12-step program aims to take you from gay to straight. They teach you to reject your gay identity, treating homosexuality as a behavioural identity that you can kill off by not responding to it and acting out those behaviours. In its place they teach you to take a Chris-

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tian identity that connects you with God and gives you wholeness, healing you of homosexual brokenness. Luke took part in this program for two years, and it left him feeling utterly worthless. At one point he felt that suicide was his only option. Not long after we met, I moved from my Double Bay apartment on traffic-soaked New South Head Road into a quiet town house tucked at the bottom of a hill on leafy Edgecliff Road, Woollahra. Luke began staying over more regularly, and before long moved in with me. Our relationship became tumultuous. He developed a drug psychosis from smoking too much ice, and constantly thought he heard multiple voices all around him. He was paranoid and thought people were talking about him and laughing at him. He was often exhausted and started missing work at the television network where he was employed. He started to use less than me, and tried to encourage me to slow down. But I kept going.  Through all of this I never stopped loving Carly or wanting to be a part of her life. While my reliability and the degree to which I was present diminished, I adored Carly as much as ever. During the school holidays in January 2005, Luke and I took Carly to Coffs Harbour. She was 11 years old. It was now almost nine years since

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I had left my marriage. Michelle had primary custody of Carly, and I was pleased that she was willing to allow me to take Carly away. I was so excited – I had reduced my drug intake and felt confident that I could be away and have a ‘normal’ holiday with Luke and Carly and forget about the whole drug nightmare. I just wanted to be with my daughter. I wanted to be in a happy place and jump in and out of swimming pools and simply delight in her company. We decided on Opal Cove in Coffs Harbour for a short break. It was a very comfortable, familyoriented hotel with a banana plantation leading down to the beach. The resort had memories for me: back in my funds management days, it was in Global’s portfolio and I had had a lot to do with it. I was suffering from paranoia due to my ice addiction and had a strange sensation that I was being watched. One day we drove to an airfield where Luke went sky-diving, then on to the Big Banana, Coffs’ iconic tourist attraction. As we were driving along, I had pangs of anxiety that I was being followed. At the Big Banana, we went straight to the restaurant where we ordered their famous banana thickshakes. As I drank, I became increasingly anxious and I asked Luke to look after Carly for a minute. I went outside to the car park and smoked a cigarette. But instead of becoming more relaxed, the sense that I was being watched only intensified. The next day, Luke, Carly and I were jumping in and out of the resort’s pool. It was a fantastic place to relax

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and play with an 11-year-old child. There was a water slide that kept us amused for hours. Carly squealed with delight as we raced each other down the slide into the pool. ‘Come on, Dad, once more.’ This went on and on. I climbed out of the water, picked up a ripe mango and started cutting into it. At that moment, I looked up and saw a group of people walking towards me. You can tell a detective a mile away, the requisite smart pants and crisp shirt. A tall, calm 30-something woman whom I recognised from my earlier arrest, said, ‘Hi Greg, we’re detectives from Sydney and we’d like to have a chat with you’. I nodded. ‘But first, please put down the knife.’ My heart sank. I went numb. ‘Not here, not now, not in front of my daughter like this.’ She suggested we have a chat in private and Luke immediately said, ‘We’ll come too’. I felt a great sense of dread. Until this moment Carly hadn’t known about any of my criminal activity. I was afraid for everything she was about to experience. The detectives advised me that they had a search warrant for our villa at the hotel as part of a sting they were conducting across five locations. In order for the operation to succeed they needed to operate simultaneously; if word had got back to me while I was away that a sting operation had taken place, there was a risk that I would flee. That was why they had to arrest me in Coffs Harbour and couldn’t wait for me to return to

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Sydney. The fact that I was already on bail meant I was likely to be locked up immediately and held until the case had been processed. My anxiety the previous day had been justified; they had indeed been following me all day from the airfield to the Big Banana. The detectives conducted a thorough search of the two-level villa, going room by room with a video camera, asking me a series of questions about what they were finding. They took computers, cameras, phones and papers. Carly sat on the stairs with a towel over her head. She was terrified, despite Luke’s attempts to comfort her, and had no desire to be videoed by the police. After 45 minutes I was formally arrested. ‘You’ll be coming down to the station.’ ‘When will I be coming back…? I have my daughter.’ ‘We don’t know. We can help to make arrangements for your daughter. It will be up to the arresting officer at the station whether or not he will grant you bail.’ I gave Carly a cuddle, explained that Luke was going to look after her and that she would be okay. She cried and clung to me. Even though I had disappointed her by leaving home when she was two years old, this was different. It would hit the papers and would cause her embarrassment, hurt and upset. All I could think about was that I had to get back to look after Carly. All my selfish drug-fuelled behaviour and all my responsibilities as a parent ran through my head.

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It was one of the lowest moments of my life. I was at true rock bottom. My friend’s words that evening in Double Bay when I first tried ice had been prophetic. I felt I had now lost everything. But it was just the beginning.

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I WAS TAKEN TO COFFS HARBOUR POLICE STATION AND

given the right to make one phone call. I called my father. ‘Dad, I’m in trouble. I’ve been arrested on drug charges. I need your help.’ Dad immediately got in contact with his lawyers, who told me that they would brief a local solicitor overnight. That wasn’t good enough for me. In a shrill voice, I explained to the lawyers that I was in a police cell and that I needed to get out to look after Carly. The lawyers told me to calm down and accept that there was nothing that could be done, as the officer in charge hadn’t granted me bail. My only hope was that the judge would do so the next day. It was unbearable knowing there was nothing to do but wait. I later found out that Dad had considered coming up to Coffs Harbour but his lawyer advised there was no point. He knew I wasn’t going to get bail. I can only imagine what was going on inside my

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parents’ minds, despite Dad’s measured and reassuring response. The upset, the shame. I know they were wondering if they could have done more to intervene. They knew I had been lying to them about the drugs and they tortured themselves over how they had accepted my lies and excuses. They had seen my physical deterioration and witnessed my detachment from the family. But it wasn’t their fault. My manipulation and lies were world class. One Friday night at their home I had dropped a little bag of cocaine as I was coming out of the toilet. My brother-in-law picked it up and asked me about it. I blamed my ex, Michael, and assured him I would deal with it. Short of throwing me into rehab, nothing they could have said would have changed anything, because I believed I was invincible. I was also an addict. I had gone to Opal Cove to enjoy my first-ever holiday with Luke and Carly. Instead, here I was in a twoby-three-metre cell in the windowless basement of the local police station. Ultimately I was charged with ten offences relating to a period of drug dealing between 20 November 2003 when I was first arrested at Peter’s place in Surry Hills and 14 January 2005 when I was arrested in Coffs Harbour. I accepted those charges and felt an enormous sense of relief when I pleaded guilty. Finally the nightmare was over. I didn’t know where my life would go to from there, but I knew I would not be going back to drugs. However, my journey to the depths of despair had

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only started. The cell was empty other than a one-inchthick rubber mat. The metal bars prevented me from seeing anything other than a dim light at the far end of a long corridor. I was still in my resort gear – the beige shorts, colourful t-shirt and thongs I had been lazing about in by the pool. I felt scared and ashamed. Normally humour would set in when I was having a difficult moment, but in this case the shock was so great and the anxiety so intense that I could think of nothing but getting out. I held onto the fact that I knew it would all be over in the morning when I’d be granted bail. My arrogance led me to believe that whatever trouble I was in, I could easily deal with it by using a fleet of lawyers and a fat cheque book. When I realised that I wasn’t being released and was formally in custody, all I could think of was, What can I do to get out of here? I complained of claustrophobia and started hyperventilating, thinking that this might get me out. Instead the police simply called an ambulance. At the time, all I wanted was to commit suicide. I had shamed my family so badly, it would be better if they mourned me once rather than having to worry about me every day. This thought wasn’t new. During the period of my drug dealing I just hated myself. I knew the day of reckoning would eventually come and I always thought that when it did I’d simply take my life. I almost craved it. When the ambulance arrived, I was taken out of my cell. I looked down the long corridor of the police

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station and saw an open door at the end. There was no barrier. There were no bars. I could see straight into the open car park. The sky was a deep blue and freedom was steps away. I considered making a run for it. Luckily, I decided not to. I later discovered that if I had, I would have had an E-classo (escape classification), which would have meant maximum security for the majority of my time in jail. That one split second of sanity saved me a significant amount of bad jail experience in the future. The next day in a tiny court upstairs in the police station, I sat in the dock for a few minutes while my appeal for bail was denied. It was clear that there was no way I was ever going to get bail as the presumption against bail existed at that time. No country court was going to override that. Luke came down to the cells with my solicitor to see me. I was feeling incredible loss and regret. Luke could see fear in me and I saw the same in his face. He told me he had spoken to my parents and had called Michelle to make arrangements for Carly to fly home the next morning. It had been a long night for the two of them as Carly cried herself to exhaustion while Luke comforted her. This was the start of Luke having to take responsibility for everything in our lives. Suddenly he was thrust into a position where he had to deal with everything from the lawyers, to retrieving the dogs that were in a kennel in Sydney, to moving house because he couldn’t afford our place on his own. He also

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had to deal with a whole lot of phone calls and questions from family and friends who continually wanted updates. This was completely outside his comfort zone. Luckily, he didn’t have to deal with any calls from the drug world – they could read about what was happening to me in the press. I’ll never forget the first time the cell door closed. The sound of the metal door crashed in my ears and my reaction was immediate: the party is over, the music has stopped, and the mirror ball is no longer spinning. It was over. I’ve often been asked how I came off drugs once I was in jail. I was lucky. I went from addict to non-addict with the slam of that door. I had no physical symptoms and from that moment I’ve never wanted to take a drug again (although there is greater access to drugs of any description on the inside than there is on the outside). I now realise I was fortunate to be caught and jailed. After all, you don’t see any old ice addicts. The destructive power of that drug is like no other. Luke also had to change his life, and he too came off drugs very quickly. This was for many reasons, not the least of which were the reality of his financial position and the amount of responsibility he now had. At first, Luke didn’t handle the pressure well. He would go on drug and alcohol benders and go through periods of intense resentment towards me. He was under enormous pressure without much support around him. But over time I saw him gradually take control. I was

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proud when Luke purchased his first home, something my dad helped him negotiate. To his great credit, Luke worked a number of jobs to ensure that he could look after himself as well as being there for me.  Learning to cope with jail means learning a whole new set of rules. After a night spent in a completely bare police cell in Coffs Harbour, I was transferred to Grafton jail, further north. Prisoner transport trucks are large white vehicles with a series of very small windows at the top. They are sectioned off inside so they’re like mobile jails. From the outside they look like meat trucks, which is exactly how it feels being inside one. I was handcuffed and placed at the very end of the truck, facing backwards. The seats are made of steel and are slippery; the air conditioning is freezing and air is heavy and putrid from the cigarettes that inmates had been able to ‘cheek’ (hide between their bum cheeks). I was cold and felt incredibly sick. As the prison van bounced along country roads, winding its way up to Grafton, my nausea was heightened by the combination of claustrophobia, the smell of vomit and the stench from previous inmates. When I arrived at Grafton, I was asked whether I wanted to go into the ‘main’ or ‘protection’. I learnt that protection was a smaller, and arguably safer, part of the

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prison, but that once you went there, you couldn’t move into the main area without the risk of a severe bashing. Protection is offered to inmates for a range of reasons that might make you more vulnerable to violence. The governor said, ‘I’ve read the papers. I know who you are and the inmates will know who you are. You are gay, Jewish and are known to have money. I’m prepared to put you in protection but it’s your choice.’ I chose protection. While I’m sure it was somewhat safer than the main, I still had my share of terrifying jail experiences. The protection unit in Grafton was tiny, with the only outside area being a small balcony. I was put in a ‘three out’, a cell with three people. I was on the top bunk. My cellmates were an Aboriginal guy and a heavy-smoking Croatian. I was scared and felt vulnerable so kept my mouth shut. I soon learnt what was the most valuable commodity in jail when I offered them one of my cigarettes (‘tailored’ versus their ‘rollies’). They immediately smiled and offered me a ‘brew’ (cup of tea). With no kettle in the cell, they took aluminium foil from the dinner container, and put one end in the electric socket and one end into cold tap water to boil it. I realised these guys were being kind and looking after me. I also realised I had a lot to learn – this was my introduction to the resourcefulness of inmates. Grafton jail was where I was introduced to prison rules. First and foremost, never ‘dog’ or dob on another

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inmate, never confide in a ‘screw’ (prison officer) and always know the difference between ‘green’ (inmates) and ‘blue’ (screws). You eat when you are told to. You walk on the balcony when you’re told to. You discover when it’s best to go to the toilet because otherwise you’ll need to crap in front of your cellmates. You learn very quickly about a ‘courtesy flush’. If you do need to crap in the cell, you flush as soon as you drop, to reduce the smell. If you don’t, you risk a thumping. You can’t complain to anyone. Not to the blues and not to the greens. ‘Sweepers’ are fellow inmates who have a privileged position. They’re allowed to work and are out of their cells for longer periods than other inmates, preparing meals, cleaning or performing other duties as directed. If you complain about not receiving your food or about something being untidy, you are effectively complaining about a fellow inmate not doing his job properly. And that can have severe consequences. There was jail jargon I needed to learn: ‘Got a bunger there, bro?’ (Have you got a cigarette?), ‘fit’ (needle), ‘knock in’ (get in line), ‘knock up’ (buzzer to get guards’ attention), ‘He’s a Peter’ (thief ), ‘spider’ (child sex offender), ‘boneyard’ (protection).  When I finally arrived in Sydney from Grafton, I was put into a holding cell in Silverwater’s Metropolitan

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Remand and Reception Centre (MRRC). Once in a holding cell, it was like being the proverbial lion in the cage – I paced up and down, waiting and waiting. Eventually, I was taken to the Sydney Central Local Court. Charles Waterstreet was again representing me. As well as being a prominent barrister, he was wellknown to my family. He made an application for me to get bail, which was refused yet again. I was immediately sent from the dock to the cells underneath the streets of central Sydney. I remember being in those underground cells and looking up to see people in normal clothes walking past the bars. As an ordinary citizen you would never know what was below you. As I looked up at people in suits on just another working day, my sense of dread, shame and despair was heightened. When Charlie came down to talk to me after the judge refused me bail, I was upset and fed-up and made a flippant remark that I would rather be dead than go through all this. I was surprised to learn later that Charlie took my comment seriously, and suggested to the officers that they keep an eye on me. As soon as I was returned to jail, I was met by three burly officers. ‘You’re not going to your cell; you are going to the dry cell. Take off your clothes and glasses. Leave them in the office.’ A dry cell is like a normal cell except it only has one bed and the entire front is glass. The blanket can’t be folded (it’s the kind of blanket that you have over you

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when you are having an x-ray). The cell is designed to have no edges. Everything is under video surveillance, even going to the toilet. You feel completely vulnerable and exposed, standing in only your underpants, knowing you are being watched non-stop. I asked to have a shower, thinking I might feel better after some clean water poured over me. I was taken to the shower room and in the middle of the floor was a turd. Just as I thought I couldn’t feel any lower in life, I did. In jail, dignity dissipates and you realise that you are the lowest of the low. You are no longer part of the world, no longer someone who has rights. If you complain, the guards just laugh at you. Their response is, ‘Well, don’t come to jail then’. So you keep everything inside you. In the dry cell, you don’t have a TV so time goes incredibly slowly. The next day I was seen by a team of assessors who realised my comment to Charlie in the court had been just a throwaway line and so I was released.  Barely a month after my jailing on the drugs charges, the final act of the long-running TSG court cases played out. In October 2004 I had been found not guilty on four charges of misusing TSG funds. However, in December I was found guilty in relation to the Alex Perry matter.

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Now, on 11 February 2005, Justice Stephen Norrish of the District Court passed sentence: I was to serve two and a half years in jail, to be released after six months if I entered into a two year good behaviour bond. In his judgment, Justice Norrish reflected on my suitability and performance as a managing director, confirming my original concerns about the role. He said that while I was a diligent and active managing director in working with the board, my focus on the big picture distracted me from some of the day-to-day management details that I should have been attending to. The judge made it clear that he felt that the Alex Perry investment was ego-driven, and I can understand why. I had committed myself beyond my own personal capacity but I couldn’t withdraw from the agreement without losing face amongst the A-list crowd, whose approval I craved. I accept that I committed a breach of the law. But I can truly say that I never sought any personal advantage from it. What the judge said was a reasonable observation, after all by this stage I was being seen in this A-list world regularly and my ego was definitely on the rise. While it certainly could be seen as ego-driven, I was firmly of the view at the time that by making the loan to Alex Perry, TSG would benefit significantly from the exposure to this world of celebrity. I still believe that my decision to use Alex Perry’s fashion profile to boost the awareness of the gay media under my control had significant merit and I

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stand by that position. If I was to do this deal again, however, I would obviously ensure that TSG was the named sponsor rather than using my own name. Just as importantly, I would ensure that there was proper documentation in place to reflect that this was a loan and what the terms of that loan were. It is most certainly the job of the board to step in when it suspects that something untoward is being done in a business. But it is equally incumbent on a board not to make rash decisions that have the potential to rip down a company. The fact is that after all the legal proceedings, the board’s decision to remove me precipitated the ultimate collapse of the company. At the time I was removed from TSG, there was no talk from the banks about calling in loans, the building sites were under construction and the publications were distributed on time. We had a tight cash flow but we were still solvent. Therefore, in my view, if the board held such concerns, the commercially sensible thing to have done would have been to pursue one of the many other options available before throwing out the baby with the bathwater and sacking the managing director. The board could have called in an independent forensic accountant to test the claims against me; it could have required another director to work alongside me for a period of time; or conducted an internal investigation or asked me to step aside as managing director pending an investigation, but not remove me as a director.

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Any of the above actions would at least have allowed for the concerns of the board to be duly tested. Of course there would have been the risk of such reviews becoming public knowledge, with possible loss of confidence but even so, that loss of confidence would be less than the impact of removing the managing director. It would still have been open to the board to take the action it did in calling in ASIC. In the interests of the shareholders and in order to retain the confidence of the company’s funders, removing me should have been the last resort, not the first. This was reflected in the judge’s statements that he could not conclude that my conduct contributed to or caused the collapse of TSG. I had waited a long time, spent nearly all my money, and suffered greatly to hear those words. Yes, I had breached the law on the Alex Perry matter but the other allegations raised by the board had been rigorously tested in court and found to be untrue. Many of us suffered as a result. While my parents were happy it was all over, they were also very upset for me and utterly exhausted by all the years of court cases. A few weeks after I was sentenced, Justice Norrish ran into my dad on the street. He told Dad that he could see I came from a good home and that he was confident I would get through this period and successfully reintegrate into the community. I remain very grateful to him for making those

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comments – it was an act of the utmost humanity to acknowledge good parents whose love for their son had taken them on such a long and distressing road.

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WHILE I WAS ON REMAND ON THE DRUGS CHARGES

I seriously contemplated suicide and made one attempt. Leading up to the hearing, I was on medication for depression. I was given pills every day. Instead of taking them, I stored them in an envelope marked ‘Return to Doctor’ in my cell. As an inmate you are not permitted to store medication in case you use it for suicide or trading. There are huge penalties for breaching these rules. So rather than hide my pills, I left them in the envelope on my desk so that if they were discovered there could be no question of my attempt to make use of them. On many occasions my cell was ‘ramped’ (searched) and the envelope lay untouched. My plan was working. The day before sentencing, though, during a routine ramp, the medication was questioned. Luckily my excuse was accepted and the medication was taken away with no punishment. The next day I went to court to learn my fate. It was Friday 24 November 2006 and Judge Chris

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Geraghty of the District Court sentenced me to a non-parole period of seven years and four months for drug trafficking. With the six months I received for the Alex Perry matter, I would spend seven years and ten months behind bars in total. It was lucky those pills had been confiscated because once I heard that I was about to spend almost eight years in jail, there was no question in my mind that I would have taken them. I had made up my mind that if I got more than a couple of years, I was going to kill myself. My actual suicide attempt was with an elastic and a clip which bound my legal papers. I stood in front of the mirror looking at myself. I saw a sad, pathetic, defeated and lost soul. I was clear that I did not want to do this jail time and I was determined that my family move on. I felt that I couldn’t recover from the disgrace and I would never again have a place in the community. I looked in the mirror and it was with relief and almost strange excitement that I thought I had found the way to end my life. I put the elastic around my neck and pulled hard. The next thing I knew I was in a haze on the floor. While I hadn’t managed to kill myself, I had managed to faint through asphyxiation (and was feeling deeply aroused as a result). Typical me, I had wanted to kill myself but instead I found sexual gratification. It’s well known that asphyxiation can lead to, and is sometimes

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used for, sexual arousal. The most famous case being that of Michael Hutchence who was found hanging in the Ritz Hotel in Double Bay. Had I secured the elastic to the bed and then pulled, I too would have died. Just for the record, despite the unexpected thrill, I have never repeated this activity.  There is a big difference between the MRRC, where you go pending sentencing, and where you go after you are sentenced. Because of the chronic overcrowding in New South Wales’ jails, while awaiting sentence in the MRRC you can be continually moved around to other jails across the state as they bring you to and from court appearances. I was put in jail in January 2005 and sentenced nearly two years later. Luke and I managed this period with naïve hope and optimism. For the first nine months, I continually made bail applications and we both held onto the thought that I would soon be out on bail and we could deal with everything together. Later, when it got closer to sentencing, we lived in hope that it would be a short sentence. When we heard the length of the sentence, we immediately broke it down into chunks – this number of years in maximum-security jail, this number in minimum, then I would move onto work release and home leave and so on.

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In my first 12 months in jail I think I was moved about 13 times. Over time you learn how to manipulate the system so that you are moved around as little as possible. One way is for your lawyers to seek a ‘legal hold’ because they need to see you every week in preparation for a complex case. For a period, that worked for me. Another way is a ‘medical hold’, where a legitimate medical need could keep you in Sydney. In the lead-up to being sentenced, I was diagnosed as bipolar. I’m still not sure whether this was a valid diagnosis or whether it was a way of explaining a particular period of depression. Nevertheless, I used that diagnosis to keep me in a medical ward in Sydney for four months. The mental health medical ward was known by inmates as the ‘spinners pod’. I would sit in the corner of the yard and make sure the guards saw me dribbling out of my mouth. The spinner’s pod might have got me out of a transfer or two but during my time there I also saw awful things, including a man who couldn’t stand jail any more and dived head-first from the first floor railing. He survived but was badly injured. Eventually the pod’s senior officer in charge said, ‘Greg, listen, enough of the bullshit, you’re moving to a normal pod’. I said, ‘Okay but make me a sweeper there’. He agreed and put me in charge of the laundry. Luke kept track of me so that as soon as I got to Silverwater, he came with my parents to visit me. Visits were allowed three times a week and most times he

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was there to see me. Luke and I made the decision to stay together and we both worked hard at it. Once the length of my sentence was clear, we questioned whether we should stay together. My mother suggested to Luke that he should, for his own sake, move on. Equally, for an inmate to have a partner on the outside can be sheer torture. The head miles you do imagining your partner’s life and every move in the outside world is tortuous. One day when I called Luke, he answered the phone without using any of the words of affection that we normally used with each other. I noticed the change and immediately asked him why he was being so serious. He replied, ‘The walls are thin and I don’t want our neighbours to hear our conversation’. I couldn’t help but feel that something else was going on. And there was. Luke had dabbled with the idea of leaving me and had started seeing someone else. He quickly realised our relationship would not survive this and ended it. I didn’t speak to Luke about this again while I was in jail. For me it was a long, agonising week between awkward silences. It was difficult for Luke to stay and it was difficult for me to keep him.  One of my earliest moves was to Lithgow prison. Lithgow is two and a half hours from Sydney, and the town itself is very picturesque, with magnificent rolling

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mountains and lush green pastures, in stark contrast to the maximum security jail. The jail becomes even more daunting when you know that from the air, the prison building is shaped like a coffin. My first time there, I was put in a cell with an Asian man who spoke no English, who had travelled with me in the prison truck that day. On arrival, I discovered the jail was in lockdown. I spent three very long days with a man I couldn’t communicate with, and no TV, books or any other form of diversion. I had nothing other than the clothes on my back. No soap, toothbrush or anything else. I felt like an animal. Finally after three days the cell was opened and we were allowed out. A couple of weeks later, I returned to Sydney for ten days and was then brought back to Lithgow. This time I was put in a section of the jail with a man named Amos. Amos was one of the people who became my family on the inside. Amos was in jail for murder. He was a little wacky. He was a completely passionate messianic Jew. While I didn’t connect with his views, I did admire his knowledge. He could hold a theological argument better than most. He was intelligent and devoted to his religion and family. I respected him for that. During our time in jail together, I spotted him doing some bizarre things like baptising inmates in the showers (even though this isn’t actually a Jewish practice) and hanging his prayer shawl from the ceiling of his cell to create a canopy under which to hold his religious services. Amos

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had committed murder when he was 18 and was serving a 12-year sentence. If you go into jail that young, you become a survivor. When I arrived at Lithgow, Amos made it his business to protect me because I was a Jew. A few days into my second Lithgow stay, I discovered that an inmate from the main (the main part of the prison, as distinct from the protection part, where I was) who knew me, had put out a call for me to be bashed due to some previous drug dealings. I was told that it would happen when I was least expecting it. There was nothing I could do. Going to the officers or the police was not an option. I lived with a sense of dread until Amos stepped in. By then, he had done six years in that jail and had earned his stripes. Once he made the call that I was not to be touched, I was safe. I’ll always be grateful to Amos for looking out for me. But even with Amos’s protection, I wasn’t completely out of harm’s way. The inmates in my section still had to perform their role in ‘jail code’ and carry out some kind of punishment towards me. Inmates can make your life hell without laying a hand on you. They would come in and help themselves to my food. If I looked at them the wrong way they would threaten me. And like everyone in jail, I had my fair share of being beaten up for small or non-existent misdemeanours. I lived on a rollercoaster of fear and reassurance. I could never be complacent. Living this way for years is a recipe for Post

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Traumatic Stress Disorder. It can take a long time to get back to a normal way of living. During my second stay at Lithgow jail I was put in a cell with John Travers, one of the state’s most notorious inmates, who had been found guilty of the packrape and murder of Sydney nurse Anita Cobby in 1986. Besides spending 18 out of every 24 hours in a cell together, there were frequent lockdowns when he and I would spend over 72 hours together in a three-by-three metre cell. Being housed with one of the state’s never-to-be-released inmates terrified me. I contacted my solicitor to express my concerns. My solicitor then contacted the governor of the jail who immediately assured me that I would be safe. He explained that John was actually a model inmate. If we got on well, he would likely become my ally and protector rather than cause harm. And that’s what happened. John was about the same age as me, at that time in his late thirties. He had short, dark brown hair and a fit, taut body. He took great pride in his appearance and even though he had nobody to impress, he was always clean-shaven and well presented. He was also wellspoken, challenging my assumptions about someone who had started smoking pot at 13 and grew up among generations of poverty. By the time I met him he was a bit of a loner and a big reader, often reading biographies of other murderers. John provided me with a lot of reassurance, telling

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me not to worry about any continued threats from other prisoners. Strangely, I began to quite like him. But he also sickened me. I tried to discuss his crime with him whenever he brought up the hope that one day his sentence might be commuted to life imprisonment as opposed to never to be released. His argument was that he’d done a significant stretch of time and was not the same person he was when he committed the crime at 18. At times I’d think to myself, this guy couldn’t be the person who committed those heinous crimes. He’d become a jail friend and I found myself being quite sympathetic. But at other times, it was obvious to me that he could never be released. When we got close to discussing the crime, John’s answers were always evasive. To this day, I have no idea what he really thinks and feels about it and certainly he has shown no public remorse. Regular transfers mean you never get a sense of stability. Each day when I heard the rattling of the guards’ keys, I wondered if they were coming to my cell. When it was my turn and the officer barked, ‘Fisher you’re on escort, you’re on the truck. I’ll be back in 30 minutes to get you. Pack your shit,’ I would feel an immediate sense of despair, dreading what lay ahead. Moving was not just about spending time in a different place. Moving meant a long day of travelling, waiting around, and discomfort. It meant no phone contact

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with Luke or my family until I was settled into the next jail, and even then it could take up to two months to facilitate. The process was also profoundly upsetting for my family, who would often find out that I had been moved only when they arrived for a visit. Only towards the very end of my time in jail did my sister Pam tell me about the day that she and her husband Richard went with my parents to visit me at Silverwater prison, only to discover that I had been moved just hours before to Long Bay jail. When Dad went to the window and announced himself for their booked visit, he was told by the guard that, ‘Inmate 378121 was put on the truck this morning’. Pam could see horror, fear and anger in Dad’s face as he responded loudly: ‘You are to refer to my son as Gregory Fisher, not as some number. And you are to treat me and his mother with some dignity and respect. My son is not a piece of meat to be spoken about in this way.’ Dad was almost in tears and Mum and Pam had to take him away and comfort him. When I was in a jail in Sydney I would get visitors every week or even twice a week. Apart from Luke and my parents, who came as often as they could, it also meant a lot when friends visited. My old boyfriend Michael came to visit, and Joh Bailey came several times. It was always fun seeing Joh – though of course it was mixed with embarrassment at being seen at my worst in my ugly prison greens. Of course I played it up

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with the inmates and officers – everyone loved having a celebrity come in, and had a laugh that my hair better look OK. When he was up from Adelaide, Luke’s father Denis accompanied Luke to see me. While I had always got on well with Luke’s parents, because of their religious beliefs I sensed that they would have much preferred that Luke was in a relationship with a woman. Yet not only did Denis come to visit me in jail, he and Luke’s mum Helen would often send me cards with beautiful encouraging words designed to lift my spirits and give me hope. But when I was in prisons further away from Sydney, I’d see my family and friends far less often. On top of these moves there was the inevitability of a long wait for my few possessions (which often took weeks to arrive), without which jail is almost unbearable. All of these concerns made each move traumatic for Luke, my family and, of course, me. During one visit, I remember Luke explaining how he hated the fact that I had all the power in our relationship in terms of when we talked. I would ring up and expect him to be in a good mood and ready to talk to me. But sometimes when I phoned he was out with friends, at other times he might be at work, or tired or just not in the mood to talk. I would call for our six-minute allocation and I would want him to be his warm, friendly, loving and kind self. I had to explain to him that in no way did I feel that I was in control.

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I didn’t have a choice as to when I got out of my cell. I didn’t know how long the line would take until I got to the phone and when I would eventually be able to make my call. And then I only got six minutes. But it made me realise that Luke was suffering from my loss of liberty as much as I was. A lot of the punishments that I had to endure, he had to endure as well. Over time, a sentenced jail becomes ‘home’. I soon realised that I was moving into other people’s territory; I needed to conform to their rules and establish new relationships. If inmates don’t create alliances and friendships, they become very isolated. As an inmate, you need to realise that you are no longer part of the outside world. You have to say to yourself: this is my home. This is my family. I have to create networks. If you keep thinking about how things are on the outside, you will go mad. On occasion, inmates seek intimacy with each other. This is much less often about sex than it is about a hug or a smile or a normal conversation. In jail you can feel so low, dejected and forgotten that all you want is a sense of normal human interaction. While it is true to say that life is a series of moments, in jail this is amplified. A touch can do more to make you feel human than anything else. A hug that might make you smile on the outside might save your life on the inside. When those moments of connection happen, you extract everything out of them, say thank you and move on.

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Another one of my remand jails was Long Bay. I remember as a kid going on school excursions to La Perouse and going past the jail and thinking to myself: that looks like a huge scary place and I’ll never have anything to do with it! It was everything you imagine a jail to be. It was built of old, tall, ugly, brown brick walls, surrounded by barbed-wire. Officers with guns stared back at you as loud metal doors clanged closed. Cells had hard beds, the walls moved with cockroaches. The filth was unimaginable. I first arrived at Long Bay after muster (roll call). I had no property with me and I was put into a cell on my own. Using the intercom, I buzzed up and explained to an officer that I was struggling on my own. I was feeling very emotional and wanted to be put with someone else. Many officers would have told me to ‘Piss off, Fisher – sort it out tomorrow’. Or would have asked if I intended to self-harm, in which case I would have been put into a safe cell. This officer, however, went to an inmate who had a broken leg and was in a double bunk across the hallway. He was prepared to let me share with him and I stayed with him for a month. It was another of those moments of humanity. He realised that I was really struggling and he was happy to have the company, so we got on fine. On yet another return to Long Bay while on remand, I was taken up two flights of loud, metal stairs, escorted all the way to the very last cell, put inside and the door

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closed behind me. No property, no food, nothing. I lay down on my bed and looked up at a mass of cockroaches. I hated them. For hours and hours I whacked them with my shoe. Eventually, I just put a sheet over my head. But even then I could still feel them crawling over me, one by one. I felt like I’d been thrown into a pit. I had nothing to watch or read, no one to talk to, only cockroaches for company. And I was stuck in there for two days. You can go mad dealing with that kind of stuff but ultimately it just forces you to develop a thicker skin. Long Bay was where I had my first bashing. There were phones in the yard. The phones were big, old, chunky, wall mounted black ones but they were our key to brief happiness and so our most treasured possessions. At Long Bay there were about two phones per hundred inmates per yard. Once you finish your call, you go to the back of the line. If you go for a walk, you lose your place. So you stand in line all day. You wait in line for the precious moments and then you might get voicemail. David was an inmate with mental health issues. I was sitting near the phones on a wooden picnic table. My head was in my hands as I waited for my turn on the phone. For some reason, David thought I was trying to push in. I was just sitting waiting and all of a sudden my glasses flew off, I had a bleeding nose and David was screaming at me, ‘Are you trying to fucking push in on me?’

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I was taken to the clinic, where they cleaned me up. It was the first time I showed any emotion in front of anyone in jail. That punch triggered every feeling I had had since I was incarcerated. I couldn’t stop crying. With other inmates, you need to be careful not to show any weakness. You have to pull yourself together. I had a massive black eye and swollen face. Going into the visitors’ area that weekend was humiliating, but the alternative was not to see loved ones. It was very hard for my parents to see me like that. When Luke visited me at Long Bay, we were never too affectionate. We never kissed but just sat close together. At the end of one visit, the notorious gangster Neddy Smith said to me, ‘If I ever see you being so fucking close again, I’ll have someone finish you off’. Even though he was suffering from Parkinson’s by that time and was pretty wobbly, he was still formidable and his reputation made him scary. I was terrified and shook for the next 24 hours but didn’t say anything to anyone. What choice did I have? You can’t talk to anyone else because it would show your weakness, you can’t talk on the telephone in case someone is listening to you, and you obviously can’t talk to the cops. These are things that make jail more than a loss of liberty – they make it terrifying. I also had better times in Long Bay. I managed to get a job in the laundry. This meant I was taken out of the cell at 6 a.m., hours before anyone else. Even during

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lockdowns, I got out of my cell. Eventually I became head of the laundry. When I was young, I used to watch the TV show, Prisoner, set in the fictional Wentworth Detention Centre, where Bea Smith was the head of the laundry. She was a rough, tough woman who was also known as fair among other inmates. She was the one handing out the jobs and keeping the girls in line, and was often the negotiator between inmates and officers. I used to say, ‘If I ever go to jail, I want to be Bea Smith’. Inmates teased me that I should have been careful what I wished for.  After I received my sentence, my status within the prison system changed from that of a maximum security, unsentenced inmate to a B Classo, a medium-level inmate. Fairly soon after being sentenced, I was called to Classification to work out where they were going to send me. As a B inmate I was given a choice of two jails – Cooma or Junee. The classification officers allowed a bit of time for an inmate to decide which jail to go to; after all, they would be spending significant time there. I had been through a number of jails while awaiting sentencing: Grafton, Lithgow, Long Bay and others. I chose Cooma, which was a four and a half hour journey away, near the Snowy Mountains. I had heard that Cooma was great for B Classos – the guards were

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friendly and it was good for education. I discussed these options with Luke. Despite the distance from Sydney, we both liked the possibility of educational opportunities for me, as well as the good reports we’d heard from others about Cooma. Cooma is a medium security jail and was a big turning point for me. It was to be the first time I properly settled into jail life and created my own territory. On transit to Cooma, I had to spend some time at Goulburn jail. Goulburn was the most terrifying of all the jails in the state. It was like the set of a bad American TV show. I looked up to see four levels of cells stretching upwards, narrow corridors, officers watching the yard with guns. A group of us were told we would be spending one night there on our way to Cooma, ‘Except for you, Fisher. There isn’t enough room for you down there so you’ll be spending some more time here.’ I thought I had been transferred to hell. All the steps and walkways of the jail were metal so that everything echoed through the cells. The sound of huge doors banging and men shouting and swearing at each other reverberated through every bone in my body. Everything was covered in dust so that I never felt clean, even after a shower. They often used Alsatians to subdue inmates, and when they brought in the dogs, who were trained to bark on demand, five to six at a time, the howling was terrifying. It defies the imagination. From 8 am to 3 pm we were in the yard, regardless of the weather. The

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toilets were in the middle of the yard itself, with only a waist-high wall around them for privacy. There was no privacy in the showers either. They were in a small, cramped area with limited hot water, which meant inmates often had to shower together to save time. Thongs were also a must or tinea was an inevitable consequence. Every day in the yard I watched as tennis balls full of drugs were thrown from one yard to the next. I watched inmates unscrew the mouth-piece from phones where the drugs and short ‘fit’ (needle) were kept. It was revolting. The guys would sit around in a circle and pass the fit from one person to the next without proper cleaning. I was told by the inmates that the screws were fully aware of it but turned a blind eye as they much preferred inmates to be stoned – they were less trouble. The fights that occurred were usually due to a shortage of drugs. Goulburn was previously known as the Killing Fields because of the number of murders of inmates from different ethnic backgrounds. Because of this, the yards were divided into sections – Lebanese, Asian, Aboriginals, and General. I was told that because there was no place for me anywhere else, I could either go into the Aboriginal yard or into Segregation, where you barely see the light of day. It felt surreal. What choice did I have? The officers put me in the Aboriginal yard. I stood on one side of the yard, and all the Aboriginal

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guys were on the other side. It felt like slow motion as a group of large men started walking towards me. As they approached, I felt a weird mixture of fear and calm. I was obviously scared to be the new guy on the block and the only white man to boot, but at the same time none of them looked particularly aggressive. If anything, it felt as if they were walking towards me with a sense of curiosity. I also noticed one of the guys, who was shirtless, had a fantastic body – perhaps my gaydar was going off! What could I do? When they were two steps away from me I said, ‘Look, if you don’t mind a white Jewish gay guy here, then I don’t mind you guys’. They burst out laughing. While I wasn’t the biggest or strongest in jail, a sense of humour became my survival mechanism.

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I EVENTUALLY ARRIVED IN COOMA, A WELL-RESOURCED

small jail with only 140 inmates. The guards were country people and pretty friendly. One of the big downsides was that it was physically a very small jail. At times, I would be able to see treetops from a higher floor but that was about it, no plant life or lawn existed anywhere, it was all concrete and sandstone. Cooma had the best ‘buy-up’ in the jail system because inmates were allowed to purchase items available from the Woolworths shopping list, giving us access to a broad range of goods. Inmates were permitted to spend $60 per week; when I left this had increased to $80 per week. We would search specials from the newspaper and make sure we were maximising our dollars. I ordered fish, chicken, sausages and steaks. Small cooking groups formed among the inmates and my group of four prepared dinner together every night. We had an electric frying pan and a rice cooker, which we could also use for pasta, so between us we made spaghetti bolognaise,

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grilled fish, salad, steak and veg, and bangers and mash. The whole aim was not to accept the prison food we were given, to eat something different. It made us feel almost normal. It annoys me when some say that having good food, cooking utensils, a TV and so on is too luxurious for jail life. It annoys me because it misses the fundamental point that jail is the punishment. The loss of liberty is a penalty almost impossible to fathom if you haven’t lived through it. I would challenge anybody to move into the presidential suite of their favourite hotel and agree to be locked up for eight years with only one visitor a week. You can enjoy the magnificent view, order any food you want, float in a bubble bath, pamper yourself and watch TV. But I can guarantee you that if you are forbidden to leave that room and you have a guard out the front to ensure you do not try, it will take only an instant for you to understand how meaningless the luxuries become in the context of the loss of liberty. Moreover, ordering good food on the ‘buy-up’, learning to cook a healthy meal for four dollars and sharing cooking responsibilities with others is one of the life lessons that jail can teach. Indeed, this is one of the benefits for both the inmate and the community when time is up and the inmate becomes a citizen again. To me it is obvious that whenever there is a potential for inmates to learn life skills it should be encouraged. The best time to do that is while they are incarcerated

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– they are of no potential threat to the community as they learn to cook for themselves and others, to budget, clean, and get along with each other. It is extremely short-sighted to think that healthy food is a ‘luxury’ or privilege for the inmate, as if making our own meals makes up for the loss of liberty. Despite the delineation of green and blue, many officers were good people, and understood that gratuitous punishment of inmates by officers was inappropriate, unprofessional and very possibly illegal. These good officers often spoke to me as if we were having a conversation in the real world. Basic things like, ‘How’s Luke?’, ‘How’s your daughter doing?’, ‘Tell me more about The Satellite Group’. These basic conversations in jail are gold. For me they meant that I was not pond scum; I was human and just an inmate doing my time before returning to the community. They were an important part of what got me through my jail time. When I got to Cooma, I had meetings with the education officer, the welfare, psychology and the programs managers, as well as with my nominated officer. Everyone in jail wants a job as it helps beat the boredom. I became the education sweeper and I absolutely loved it. I worked with Judy Young, the Senior Education Officer. Judy would organise a range of TAFE courses and I would support her by organising the weekly roster, supporting my fellow inmates to take an interest in what was available. A lot of guys came to me for help and

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I would sit with them as they did their homework or encourage them to talk to Judy. Judy was about 60 and had over 30 years’ experience teaching in schools. One day I asked her how she could do this thankless job, with so many of the inmates dropping out each year. She said to me, ‘For every one that makes it through, it makes the nine who tried and failed worthwhile’. Judy simply loved what she did and did it all for the right reasons. She was a bright light in a dark place, personally fighting the system to get access to resources to help inmates. Very early on in jail I realised that I was going to have to re-skill. I wasn’t going to be welcomed back into the corporate world after my spectacular downfall. When I got to Cooma, Judy helped me explore my options. I wanted to do a general degree but one that had vocational value. I explained my desire to work in the community once I was released (I wanted to be able to marry my commercial experience with community organisations). Eventually Judy and I found the Bachelor of Human Services degree majoring in Community Services and Indigenous Studies at the University of Southern Queensland. I started in 2008 and eventually finished the degree in 2014. It was perfect for me. Every night I’d sit in my grey three-by-six-metre cell, with only a very small window above head height, so I couldn’t see out, and study. My table was metal, painted

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blue, with rust coming through it. I juggled my books between the desk and my bed in the dull light in the cell. It was hardly an optimum study environment but I made it work – I went into my own zone. I had a cell to myself in Cooma. It was my space and I controlled it. It was the only control I really ever had in jail. I found the course content logical and straightforward. I was averaging distinctions and Judy was incredibly supportive. She helped me overcome many of the challenges of being a correspondence student without computer access. She spoke directly with the tutors and examiners who found alternative ways for me to be assessed. One day I had to give an oral presentation to the class for my Community and Scholarship course. Judy arranged with the university that I give a talk to the lecturer over a speaker-phone instead. The lecturer agreed and soon I was standing in Judy’s office presenting my paper on what factors could be improved in the New South Wales prison system to assist prisoners with their re-entry into society and to assist the community with its needs. I achieved 91 out of 100 for that one, and in some ways it was the start of my making sense of my jail experience. Being in Cooma, I had far fewer visits to look forward to. In some ways, being away from everything I knew and completely integrated into jail life was a relief. Now that I was sentenced and a medium classified inmate, I knew I would be at Cooma for at least two years, until I

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was eligible to progress to minimum classification status, at which point I could seek to return to a Sydney jail. As such I didn’t have the continual anxiety about where I would move next. I threw myself into my studies; I worked out and got physically fit. For the most part, the officers were nice and some staff, like Judy, were exceptional. In addition to my university work, I undertook a number of programs relating to my offence, including an anti-drug-dealing course that highlighted all the negatives of drug dealing, such as living with constant paranoia, the inevitability of jail, et cetera. All the things I had already learnt first-hand. I did the course largely to progress within the jail system. Prisoners are expected to participate in programs designed to address their offending behaviour. I do think these courses really help and while I was well and truly beyond any thought of drug dealing at this stage, I was happy to do the course and share my experiences with other inmates. I also completed some other basic TAFE courses in tourism, first aid, and electrical tagging and testing. I also undertook a course to become a peer support inmate, learning specific skills to assist other inmates. With my studies and my peer support work, cooking with fellow inmates as well as training, life was as good as it could be in a medium-security jail and I was fairly happy. Through all my time in jail, Luke and I talked about our dreams for the future, which centred around clean living, jointly setting goals and rebuilding our lives,

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with world travel and new ventures. As soon as I got to Cooma I wanted to make it clear to Luke that I meant what I said. Luke knew that if he waited for me, we were not going to go back to the life we had before. I wanted life to have meaning and I knew he did too. During his visits we talked more than we ever had before. It became clear that my studies were in line with his outlook – he’d done a lot of missionary work in Papua New Guinea and China when he was involved with the church. What I wanted to do after jail in terms of community work had an attraction for him and I think was part of the reason he decided to stick it out and wait for me. It took about 18 months after my arrest before Carly first visited me back in Silverwater in Sydney. Michelle and I had agreed that we would not press Carly to visit, but as soon as she said she wanted to see me, Michelle brought her in. That first visit with Carly was very tough. In Silverwater I was in the white jumpsuit that maximum secruity inmates had to wear for visits. I felt embarrassed and ashamed, but Carly was very loving and put me at ease. I know that at first she had been confused, scared and angry and it had taken her some time to feel ready to see me. After that first visit, she would come every month or two and we would speak regularly by phone. Of course it was more difficult for Carly to visit me in Cooma but she still came every few months. Cooma was much less oppressive for visi-

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tors, as they could enter the cottage-like visitors’ room straight from the street. I was thriving but life certainly wasn’t perfect. Other inmates were sexually active with each other, but I was the only one who was openly gay, which made me vulnerable. People often want to know whether those nightmare shower scenes you see in the movies actually happen. The answer is yes. The shower blocks at Cooma were not managed by the officers and there were no cameras inside. They were at the end of the building with about eight showerheads per block and no partitions. There were white tiles on the floor and up to the ceiling. Some gay friends might joke and say that it was like a gay porno fantasy. And very often it was a fun, social scene. Inmates would unwind after prison work and laugh, and I was happy to be part of that. One day, though, I had the experience every prisoner dreads. I was taking a shower when I was circled by a number of inmates (one of whom was in for murder). They were all naked and one was sent to ‘go cocky’ and keep an eye out for officers. They made it clear that they wanted to have sex; there was no mistaking the graphic gestures. As I registered the seriousness of the situation, I began to panic. They were laughing about it. ‘This is your lucky day, this is what you love, isn’t it?’ ‘We’re all of us going to have party time.’ ‘You’ve been dreaming about this day all your life.’

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The taunting was terrifying. I tried humour. ‘Look guys, not today, I’ve got a headache.’ They pushed me around. I was completely naked. They continued to push me from one to another in a big circle. ‘Come on guys, that’s enough.’ They realised that I was rejecting them and then the mood changed. They started bashing me. Suddenly I was on the floor. They kicked me absolutely everywhere. I had blood coming out of my mouth; I was beaten black and blue. Hours later I was still trembling. I was in agony and my body was bruised all over. I sat on my bed until muster and then lined up on my cell number out in the yard. I had to hold my own. Inmates are clever never to bash you in the face, so to the officers I looked fine. I had to walk normally. I had cleaned up the blood around my mouth and had no physical signs on my face. Then I had to live with the people who had bashed me, day in, day out. A few days later, one of the men walked past me and casually said, ‘Oh sorry, mate, it was just a bit of a misunderstanding’. I continued to feel scared, vulnerable and ashamed of having been kicked around. I had felt utterly helpless. I kept getting angry with myself for not fighting back, for not being physically stronger. I’d never had fights in school, I didn’t know how to fight. Ever since I’ve left jail, I’ve gone to the gym regularly, building strength and taking comfort

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from being 15 to 20 kilos heavier. I’m never again going to allow myself to be as small as I felt that day. While it was a traumatic experience, I wasn’t raped. I didn’t fight them off physically, but something stopped them pack raping me. Perhaps my previous life gave me confidence or an aura of authority that made those guys stop. It may also have been because if I’d been raped I would have had to report it to the authorities and have medical checks done. Most of these guys had hepatitis and knowing that I would go for a medical check may have made them careful. The next day I had to act like everything was normal. So it all went into my nightmares. I still get anxiety pangs when I’m in bed. I don’t doubt that Luke and I have to deal with some form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but I am not going to dwell on it or let it dominate my life. Judy’s boss, Sharron McAtee, was the manager of programs and another outstanding officer. Sharron oversaw the classification of prisoners. In some of the jails it would take months for inmates’ classifications to be changed. But Sharron made sure that on the very day that I had four years left on my sentence and was eligible to have my classification changed to a C (minimum security), it happened. Sharron told me about Dawn de Loas at Silverwater, which was the best jail in New South Wales. It was the step-down prison for inmates at the Special Purpose Centre in Long Bay jail who were

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unable to be placed elsewhere in the system. Inmates from that jail were generally those who had given evidence against co-offenders, judges, police officers and the like. Sharron advocated for me to spend my last four years there.

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AN UNLIKELY PARADISE

I’LL NEVER FORGET ARRIVING AT DAWN DE LOAS.

The doors of the prison opened and the truck reversed into it and I thought I was in paradise. Cooma had been built almost a century ago with high stone walls, lacetopped with double razor wire all the way around. The time out of my cell was spent in a small concrete courtyard enclosed by windowless walls. At Dawn de Laos, I was amongst rolling grass and beds of red and yellow roses. It was a sunny day. The sky was bright blue and the flowers were so colourful they literally hurt my eyes. I rushed to take off my shoes and stand on the grass. Standing with bare feet on the grass I felt human again. Dawn de Loas had around 80 inmates spread over five blocks of Big Brother-like buildings. There were ten rooms per house, each of which had a large communal kitchen, lounge and TV. The houses were situated in communal gardens and each one had a terrace. Most importantly, we could see through the fence to the outside world. We still had occasional lock-ins but the

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overall approach of the officers was, Don’t cause problems, don’t make us do more work than we have to and we won’t come down hard on you. Dawn de Loas had a large garden filled with plants and flowers that inmates took great pride in maintaining and nurturing. It had a walking path that spiralled through the grounds, which I made very good use of every morning and afternoon, often with other inmates. There was a tennis court, which could be converted to a volleyball court. There was also a large veggie patch made up of several very large raised beds. There were a number of inmates who were chefs. ‘Uncle Benny’, originally from Singapore, was in his fifties. He had been in and out of jail on drug charges in four different countries for 30 years. He’d also been a chef for many big-name hotels across Asia. He showed us all how to make Singapore stir-fry, Thai food, and various Chinese dishes. I’m no master chef, but I’ve learnt a few basics from him. Before jail I’d seldom spent less than $200 on take out. Now I learnt how far $4 could go to cook a healthy, delicious meal. The grounds also housed a nursery. There were tens of thousands of seedlings and saplings, which inmates had the opportunity to work with. This work was intended to benefit the community. Inmates considered a low security risk and close to finishing their sentences were given the chance to take hundreds of small plants at a time and plant them in

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council-designated areas, either newly developed landscapes such as the parks around Homebush, or other areas around Sydney that were being reforested. The nursery provided work for inmates, and was a source of personal pride and dignity, which extended into beneficial community development. I remember being picked up in a minibus which took us to the Lane Cove River. There we hopped onboard a small tinnie and were taken to the other side of the river, where we planted seeds. We were in the middle of nowhere and the officers allowed us to jump in the water for a moment of sheer fun. I connected well with the general manager of the centre, as well as the officer in charge of inmate jobs, Tim. He had a lot of work to do so he was delighted that he could hand over responsibility to me for sports activities, management of the buy-up, welcoming new inmates and a whole lot of other jobs. Eventually I had my own air-conditioned office, which I kept locked, and when officers needed something I used to unlock it for them. Unfortunately, new officers came in who didn’t like the freedom I had and gradually took these roles away from me, but ultimately I went on work release so it mattered less and less. Indeed, under new management a range of the best of things went, under the banner of ‘security concerns’. The veggie gardens were ripped up and concreted over, as was the nursery. Eggs made their way on and off the buy-ups list. Despite all of this, Dawn de Loas remains

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a great example of what a rehabilitative jail experience can be, helping prisoners successfully reintegrate into society through education, the work release program and a culture of respect and support. While it still suffers some of the inefficiencies of a big institution and occasional rogue officers wield their power through inappropriate means, it’s well on its way to benefiting and protecting society while simultaneously developing inmates. Soon after I got there, former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld arrived. Marcus had been jailed for two years for lying to evade a speeding fine. I had known Marcus my whole life, he had been friendly with my parents since before I was born, so it was of great comfort to both of us that we were together. I had always viewed him as a protective figure, and because I had been in jail for four years by this point, I could now offer him some protection and care. I was really surprised by Marcus’s attitude. I thought he’d be more shattered than he appeared to be; and knowing that he can come across as a bit of a snob, I thought he might lord it over the inmates. But no; Marcus befriended them, helped them write letters to loved ones and to construct their arguments so they could give better instructions to their lawyers. He helped with tax returns and insurance policies. He was patient and non-judgmental and listened to every story with the utmost attention. He ate with the other inmates.

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He cooked with and for them. Apart from being a top barrister and a former judge, Marcus was well-known for his work on human rights. The way Marcus behaved when no-one was watching showed me that his life’s work came from the heart. Marcus became friends with Peter, a 21-year-old man who was in jail for a minor drug-related matter. Peter had grown up with a drunken father who had regularly beaten his mother. Eventually, he managed to get his father removed from the family and put in a home. Unfortunately, Peter’s father was murdered in the home, and Peter could never overcome the guilt he felt about arranging the move. His mother had also been in a truck accident (his father had been the driver), which resulted in her losing a leg. Peter felt a huge sense of responsibility towards her but was unaware of a number of services that could assist her while he was in jail. Marcus spent hours explaining each one and helping Peter access them and generally supporting him. At one point, when the jail withdrew financial support for a TAFE course that Peter was studying, Marcus personally paid for the course so that he could continue. To this day, Marcus retains an active interest in Peter’s life. Through all of this, Marcus didn’t lose his sense of humour. Every day he received dozens of letters from female fans, many of whom would come to visit him. He would roar with laughter at some of the graphic displays of love. He also held onto his deep sense of

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fairness, indignation and forcefulness when things went wrong. His health was failing him and he was very sick at times. One time he arranged with the central office that he be taken under guard to get medical treatment outside the prison. But on the appointed day, he was unable to go because of a lack of staff. He was furious and unloaded a scathing attack on the officer in charge. He said he would not move until everything was rearranged for him, which it ultimately was. Compared with the horrors of the maximum-security jails I had been in, Dawn De Loas seemed like a kind of paradise. I was eating well, I had great space in which to exercise and I enjoyed the company of Marcus and many others. I eventually became part of the work release program, which meant I had a daily taste of freedom.

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WORK RELEASE ‘YOUR SANDWICH IS READY, WOULD YOU LIKE A

drink with that?’ I turned to the fridge where I was confronted by an overwhelming collage of colours and shapes. I felt a wave of dread; I felt paralysed. ‘No, just the sandwich, thanks.’ I was fighting to hold back the tears. I left the shop and stood on the pavement trying to catch my breath. For the first time in so many years, I had been asked to make a choice. And it had resulted in a panic attack. This is pathetic, I thought to myself, look what I am reduced to. I used to be the managing director of a publicly listed company and now I can’t even choose a drink. In my first moment of reconnecting with the real world I had failed the most simple task. How was I going to cope? Was I ever going to be able to function outside jail? I walked away from the shop with my sandwich, thirsty and embarrassed. A little further on was another shop and I tried again, but once more the wave of dread left me dizzy. This time I pushed through, made the

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decision and chose a drink. I was simply choosing a Ribena over a Coca-Cola but it was one of the hardest decisions of my life. Such is the power of institutionalisation. I had been living in a system designed to break self-confidence. The hardest thing about jail is not when they lock the door on day one. It’s when they unlock the door on your last day and give you back your freedom. You are not the same person who entered the system. After years of having the security, and what becomes the comfort, of jail, the moment that responsibility for your life is back in your hands is terrifying and requires a major readjustment. In the same way that a patient who has been bed-ridden for a long time needs physiotherapy to get the strength back into their legs before they can walk again, so too a person who has become paralysed by an institution needs to learn to function again. The basis of institutionalisation is its mindnumbing boredom. When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room and an hour goes by, you begin to think, ‘This is getting ridiculous’. Multiply that one hour by 23 and that is a day in ‘segro’ (a segregation cell). This is the isolation cell to which many inmates are sent for days, weeks or even months at a time for a variety of reasons, such as being in transit, being a threat to others, or alternatively being threatened and needing protection. You are only allowed out of segro for one hour of the day to walk around. You have no access to magazines

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or books. There is not even a TV in the corner to keep your mind off the stale, thin mattress in the tiny cell. It can literally make you crazy. And the people who lock you in there know it. Some of them take pleasure in watching the torment. In jail you are told when to move, when to eat, when to get up, when to go to bed; you stop thinking and just obey. It’s the only way to survive. You don’t have to make decisions, and you lose your ability to do so. Your freedoms are removed but you also find a different freedom in not having them. I didn’t have bills coming in any more, I had no rent to pay, no car to maintain. Suddenly I had no external stresses. You live in a jail cocoon and eventually you begin to feel secure within the institution that has stripped you of freedom. The dream of walking out of the jail doors on my own kept me going for years. The months that lead up to it were a mixture of intense excitement and fear. The excitement of being free again and being treated as an equal in society, of wearing jeans and a t-shirt, was enormous. But the fear of failure was also very real. I had seen so many changes on TV and heard about them from my family, Luke and my friends that I was anxious about being able to reintegrate. Before I went into jail, Google was a relatively new search engine, there was no gmail, no GPS navigation or Google street view. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. Touch screen computers were a science-fiction fantasy. Apple iPods were small brick-

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size devices with a dial for file navigation. The concept of a smart phone didn’t exist. I’d heard the word ‘app’ while in jail, but I’d never seen one, didn’t know how to get one and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. BPAY wasn’t a widespread payment system, and I didn’t know how to pay by waving a credit card at a machine. A technological revolution had taken place and I felt an alien in my own city. My first day out was not to go home, but on work release. Six years into my seven years and ten months sentence, I had earned the privilege to participate in the work release program. This meant I could leave the jail during working hours, typically Monday to Friday, for an eight-hour work day in the community. Inmates can apply to work at the employer of their choice, and if the organisation is prepared to take them, then the jail undertakes a security check, both on the organisation and the individuals within it who are to be the worksite supervisors for the inmate. Dad was chairman of the board of the Jewish Cemetery Trust at Rookwood Cemetery, only a few kilometres from Dawn De Loas, and so I applied to do work release there. Under Dad’s direction, Rookwood was one of the first cemeteries in the world to archive their graves online. The website allowed you to see a photograph of the plot, and closer detailed photographs of headstone information. This meant any relative anywhere in the world could get online and visit their family’s graves, see

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the grounds, learn about their family history and pay their respects in their own way.  When I started to work at the cemetery I was only approved to work on the grounds outside. This meant mowing the lawns, cleaning the plots and assisting with burial services. I watched as the diggers used the back hoe and excavator to create six-feet deep graves and decided that I wanted to learn how to operate those machines. I asked Dad if the cemetery would fund me to learn. He agreed, as did the jail, and after a three-day course I earned my back hoe and excavator licences. I was so proud. But when I had the opportunity to dig my first grave using the excavator, it took me over an hour compared to the 20 minutes it took the experienced guys. Everyone was really supportive, including Dad, who gave me the big thumbs up even though I could tell he was a little embarrassed.  I met such genuine, good, kind people at Rookwood: Tony, the groundsman, had worked there for over 25 years. He had the driest sense of humour, often saying he worked in the dead centre of town. His daughter Amanda, the office manager, was incredibly engaged with her work and highly sensitive to Jewish customs and practices. The other groundsmen I worked with were a close-knit team, a knockabout bunch who were always ready with a quick joke, and warm and welcoming from day one. The first day on the job, I was sweeping leaves off

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graves. It was a great feeling to be out of jail, I was so grateful for any work and relished the opportunity. But I was also feeling incredibly broken. My dad walked down the path to visit me. I couldn’t hold back my emotions any longer. I burst into tears and wept in his arms. I felt the years of pain: the shame, the grief, the horror of confinement, the suffering of being isolated and detached from the people I loved. It was the experience of buying the soft drink that morning. It was my sense of loneliness and alienation. I wept and wept. I couldn’t stop clutching my dad. He just stood there and held onto me. He had never left me alone before and he wasn’t going to start now. Eventually the weeping subsided, and I took a deep breath. ‘Are you okay, son?’  ‘I don’t know if I ever will be. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy to have a job here, but this is me now, picking up the leaves and rubbish. I feel so disconnected and out of place.’  Dad said, ‘I promise you, it’s going to be okay. We are all 100 per cent behind you and we’ll never let you fail.’ ‘But I couldn’t even buy a drink this morning, and everything is so expensive, I don’t know how to budget.’  Dad laughed and immediately pulled out his wallet to put a few more dollars in my hand. ‘Stop worrying’, he said.

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It wasn’t the few dollars that made the difference, it was seeing that he was really there for me. I wasn’t going to go through this alone. The effort Dad made to reach out meant everything to me. After a while, I achieved additional approval from Community Compliance Group (CCG) to work in the office, and for telephone and computer use, as long as I had no internet access. (Some prisoners on work release have used internet access to further their criminal activities, so it is standard practice not to allow any inmate internet access on work release.) I could use the intranet, access files on the internal database and operate certain business accounts. I was in my element again.  I soon learnt the procedures for business operation. I saw Amanda coordinate many services and burials. A new extension to the office building had recently been built with a new chapel for funeral services. I saw an incredible opportunity. For the Jewish community this created a space where the service and burial could be done at the same place, something which had not been possible until then. The new room had beautiful stained glass windows, featuring many Jewish symbols such as the Torah, wine glasses, bread, candles and light. I began to plan a marketing scheme that would advertise the new facilities and also generate additional business. Over time, other inmates came to Rookwood on work release. Amos, the Jewish friend I had met nearly six years earlier at Lithgow jail, was first to join me

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working at Rookwood. He was particularly good at cleaning the grounds. He would use the leaf blower to clear sites, then spray the weeds. I decided to use his cleaning role as an add-on sales item. People who lived overseas and were unable to visit Rookwood and maintain their family plots themselves could buy a grounds care package, so they knew their plot was cleaned once a month and kept presentable.  Rookwood soon became a burial ground with competitive pricing and facilities. With a staff of 14, the lawns and gardens were kept beautifully. There were also plots for the poor, as a significant part of JCT’s charity arm was to help look after people who couldn’t afford to pay for a burial. Luke began to come to JCT for part-time freelance photography work. He took hundreds of photos of graves for the JCT website. This was also a way for us to see each other in a more social environment. We were never left alone together, but at least we were not locked behind thick heavy doors and razor-wire fences. We could have a cup of tea and eat a biscuit – a taste of normal. Luke also helped take photos of the new chapel extension. We worked with a graphic designer to create the JCT brochure. It was sharp, smart, bright and colourful, showcasing the stained glass window and the beautiful grounds. It was designed for people who had never been to Rookwood, or even considered it. Making a cemetery appealing is a marketing challenge.

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 It was while I was on work release at Rookwood that my Aunty Phyl died. Mum was her oldest and closest remaining blood relative and it fell to her to organise the funeral. It was held at the Rookwood crematorium. I asked Mum if I could say something at the service. I knew there would be a big turn-out of family and friends, and I was very nervous about how I would be received, but I wanted to honour Phyl. It would be my first public appearance since going to jail. Speaking at Phyl’s service was an important moment for me. Carly and Michelle were there, as were most of my family. I was able to tell some stories about Phyl, about her travels and her culinary adventures and her interest in people. And I asked her forgiveness for the hurt I had caused her, and for what I had done to my family and the community. In front of everyone I promised her I would continue on the right path, and thanked her for the love and kindness she had shown me. It was a very sad day, but in connecting with my family and the community, it also felt like a new beginning.  There is a real pride that comes from work: being useful on a work site, where you are valued, with something to contribute, and there is personal satisfaction in

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completing a job. Every day as I walked out of jail, my head would rise and my stride became more positive. I would feel the creative juices begin to flow in my brain, ready to engage with others. Once at work, I would not even think about jail. Unless someone asked me specifically about my jail life, it just didn’t occur to me. I felt completely normal. But at the end of the day, when it was time to return to my cell, the darkness would descend. As I got closer to those thick metal doors, my chin would lower, my eyes would return to the ground and I would feel that slump in my posture. I would feel depressed every night, returning to the isolation and subjugation of jail. I’d press the intercom buzzer, stand and wait for the officers to come and let me in. Whilst some officers were very friendly, so many seemed to resent inmates being allowed to go out. All too often I was greeted with, ‘Oh, Fisher, you’re back, all right let’s go, let’s see what you’ve tried to smuggle in’. No trust, no praise for the attempts at rehabilitation. Just put-downs. The ‘security check’ seemed to be a routine operation in dehumanisation, an attempt to recondition the prisoner to his environment, as if eight hours away would allow him to forget. Every day returning to jail was like the first day all over again. It goes without saying that despite this process, life was definitely a lot sweeter having work release and I was grateful for it.

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One day, as we were all getting ready to go to Rookwood Cemetery, the officers told us we were not going to work. The general manager of Dawn de Loas had shut the program down due to a security concern. The work site was under review. We never found out what the security concern was. Nor did they inform the cemetery; they were not obliged to. The site was closed and we were all unemployed. Beside the obvious emotional impact on us, I heard from Amanda that the strain on JCT was significant. Overnight, they lost a significant number of staff upon whom they were relying for upcoming funerals. One thing the general manager could tell us was that neither JCT nor any of us had done anything wrong, so we were permitted to seek work elsewhere. And he assured us that we would be given every support in finding alternative work. He said that he would instruct the work release officer to contact MTC (the employment provider) to assist us immediately. To his credit, this did happen and so I began a very interesting relationship with the manager of MTC, Kerry. While the general manager was willing to get me re-employed as soon as possible, MTC could only assist once I had 12 months or less of my sentence to go. They would provide my prospective employer with a subsidy from the government towards the cost of my employment. Some employers are happy to take inmate employees without the benefit of a subsidy, in which

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case inmates can start work with more than 12 months of their sentence to go. I had started at JCT with two years of my sentence left to go because JCT was happy to employ me without a subsidy. While other inmates were permitted to volunteer at a work release site prior to being employed, the jail was reluctant to give me this opportunity. Kerry had to toe the jail’s line. At the time, I thought she was being hardnosed towards me (jail paranoia at its best). As soon as I was released from jail and became the general manager of OBK, Kerry immediately accepted me in that position and we have had a very professional and harmonious relationship ever since. I credit Kerry as being the first person to have taken my transition from inmate to general manager in such a professional way. Of course Dad was unhappy that JCT was shut down as a work release and decided to search his own avenues for possible work opportunities. He rang Rabbi Dr Dovid Slavin to ask him whether he would consider me for Our Big Kitchen.

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OUR BIG KITCHEN

OUR BIG KITCHEN WAS THE BRAINCHILD OF RABBI

Dr Dovid Slavin and his wife Laya. Rabbi and Laya look like your stereotypical Chabad Jews. Rabbi has the requisite black beard and always wears a white shirt and black trousers. Laya usually has a young child around her ankles, her own or someone else’s, and is always modestly dressed. But beneath the surface stereotype are two unique individuals. Rabbi has a drive that is rooted in his New York upbringing. Besides his role as founding director of OBK, he is the Ambulance Service of NSW chaplain, he sits on the Cancer Institute, is the co-founding chairman of Gift of Life, and has a PhD in Jewish history from Sydney University. He is never late for a meeting, will take a call no matter who it is, and feels a deep sense of responsibility to the community that OBK serves. With a warm smile, Laya has a soft prettiness and generous energy. But it is her genuine desire to help and put others at ease that defines her. Her thoughtfulness and care was

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the antithesis of the neglect I experienced in jail. The kitchen began soon after Laya, a hairdresser, started making wigs for women undergoing chemotherapy. Laya wanted to do more to help, and told her husband that they had to cook meals for these women and their families, as they were often too sick to cook for themselves. So they turned their house into a food factory, cooking, packaging and delivering food. Laya told Rabbi that her Taj Mahal from him would be a large commercial kitchen where her community work could expand and people could become empowered to support the work for others. Rabbi eventually found a site for it in the basement of a three-story building on a steep hill in Bondi. Below the Yeshiva Centre’s synagogue and school, there was potential to excavate and create a kitchen. Many scoffed at Rabbi Slavin’s enthusiasm. I’m not sure if it was his passion for good deeds or his fear of hindering Laya’s ambition that kept him going. Eventually, in early 1997, the heavy machinery arrived and the belly of the building was carved out. What would normally take eight months took nearly 10 years, as the kitchen was built entirely on donations of building materials and kitchen equipment. Much of this came from the Greek and Italian communities. They say a slow-cooked stew is the best kind. This slowbuilt kitchen grew to generate over 50 000 meals a year while running a host of programs for the community.

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The advisory board was chaired by Peter Debnam, the former New South Wales opposition leader, and former Supreme Court judge David Kirby was an advisor. For the Rabbi, there was never a question about taking me on work release from prison. While some around him were concerned about the community’s response to a Jewish inmate working in the kitchen, he was not. He was, however, aware that he would need to manage things carefully, and he was also sensitive to how Michelle and Carly would feel about it. As part of the community, they were a part of the Kitchen’s life and the Rabbi wanted to make sure they weren’t hurt in the process. Michelle was immediately supportive, and wished me only the best. I cannot thank her enough for her generosity of spirit and genuine support. I remember the OBK job interview well. That morning I went into immediate stress mode about what to wear. (Once you are approved for work release, you are permitted to have five sets of clothing brought in from the outside.) Should I go casual? But I want the Rabbi to know that I’m serious. But I don’t want to look like I think I’m above the other guys. These thoughts swirled round and round in my head until finally I settled on a suit but no tie. I was interviewed by the Rabbi, the general manager, Rebecca, and the operations manager, Mel, who commented that I was ‘somewhat overdressed for the

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occasion’. I felt a sense of dread when she said that but laughed it off in a show of bravado. Eventually the Rabbi walked me around the kitchen and said, ‘Don’t worry, Greg, you’ll get the job’. He took me into the storeroom where hundreds of pots and pans were stored. I came to learn that the storeroom was one of the Rabbi’s favourite rooms. With the door closed it offered rare privacy and the ability to talk freely. He described how much he was looking forward to my coming to work at OBK and how much he would support me. He also made it very clear how much work there was to be done.  Having got the job, I was over the moon and wanted to start immediately. OBK, however, was a charity reliant on the MTC wage subsidy and so I had to wait until I had exactly 12 months on my sentence to go. I offered to volunteer at OBK without pay until my start date, which the Rabbi approved, but the jail refused. The delay was unbearable. Every day I had to sit in jail while everyone around me went out on work release. Besides the loneliness and slow passing of time, I had to contain my paranoia that it was just never going to work out. I’d also had a taste of freedom during my time working at the cemetery, so it was even harder to spend day after day locked up in jail.

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The eight-week wait seemed interminable. Eventually, on 14 November 2011, it was time to start. As I was getting ready, I felt the thrill of anticipation and the nausea of sheer terror. Not only was I leaving jail to go to work, I was going to Bondi, the heart of the Sydney’s Jewish community, the place where I had grown up and where my family lived. I’d be coming face to face with people I hadn’t interacted with for years. I knew many of them thought very little of me. I left the jail with my mates George and Benny, who already worked at the Kitchen. There was no fanfare. I simply got up, responded to my muster call at 6.30 a.m., got dressed, ate and then it was out the door. George, Benny and I walked to the bus stop, caught the bus to Auburn and trains to Bondi Junction. The walk from Bondi Junction station to Flood Street, Bondi, where OBK is located, was surreal. We walked through the Bondi Junction mall, grabbed a coffee from a shop in Westfield and walked along. I had imagined that going through Bondi Junction I would know every second person and I was excited, albeit nervous, at the prospect of seeing them. The reality was I bumped into no one that I knew. In fact, for my entire year of work release I don’t think I saw more than two or three people I knew. This surprised but also saddened me. I felt I had been forgotten. As soon as I got to OBK, Rabbi Slavin and Laya

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were there to greet me. It felt more like I was being welcomed into their home as a guest, rather than as a worker. If moments in jail had felt like hell, meeting Laya was like meeting an angel. Her warmth, openness and genuine care were almost too much to bear. I was also welcomed by Rebecca and Mel. Mel’s white Maltese terrier dog, Molly, came up and gave me a lick. I fell in love instantly. I know now that the Rabbi expected me to bring a lot to the Kitchen and was excited at the prospect. But at the start, nothing was more important than just mucking in, getting my hands dirty and doing the same work as everyone else. Because there wasn’t much activity in the Kitchen from day to day, George and I used to mop the floors for something to do. We had no idea what we were doing. We would turn on the hose and flood the kitchen floor and then walk around in gum boots sloshing the water from one end to the other. It was a big mess for the sake of ‘cleaning’. We still laugh about how clueless we were. When we did have to cook meals, Benny was in his element. He knew how to make the most exotic meals with very few ingredients. I learnt to cook many things from him over the years but the first dish he showed me was a curry. I took great pride in how easy it was to make a tasty curry – I found my signature dish. If OBK needed a dish and I was on, it was Greg’s famous (Benny) curry every time.

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Soon my work focus began to shift. I started to formalise group meetings. It was important for people to be welcomed, to hear a greeting from the Rabbi, to be told what they would be doing for the day and how to go about it. I began to take the lead on welcoming groups and, because we didn’t always have a chef with us, I also began to coordinate the cooking. Every group got to make and eat Greg’s famous Benny curry. To this day, the Rabbi and George laugh when they hear the word curry. It was a fun time and to everyone’s relief my one-trick cooking pony was soon sent to the stable and my organisational skills were brought to the fore. I wasn’t allowed access to email so the Rabbi and I found a way to start our own intranet – he would write a document and save it in the Greg folder. He’d then phone me and tell he it was there. I would open it, read it and make comments and call him back so that he knew changes had been made. It was slow, cumbersome and frustrating. But jail gives perspective on these things, where simple letters or forms can take weeks or months for an exchange to take place, so we just got on with it. A few months in, Rabbi asked me to prepare a prospectus of what OBK could do. I quantified what existing programs there were, and how they could be improved. And then I talked about a range of other options. In total, I listed 33 potential opportunities for

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the Kitchen, how it could expand and the kind of outreach it could perform within the community. In the Kitchen I saw an incredible idea but with minimal business flow and no business infrastructure. I couldn’t understand why this industrial-size commercial kitchen was not buzzing. The programs seemed good and community-oriented, so I didn’t understand why there was no dollar value attached. I couldn’t understand how the bills got paid until Rabbi explained to me that all salaries were paid out of a number of regular donations. It was so obvious that there had to be a better way, some kind of user-pays system. I’ve never believed not-for-profit needs to mean not-for-revenue. We didn’t need to charge commercial rates and we wanted to retain the community feel, but we had to start charging. I knew that if people were paying they would also start placing more value on what the kitchen was offering them. I also looked at it from a marketing angle. Originally, when asked about the kitchen, there was a long breathless list of programs. ‘We do this and this and this and this…’, you would here people say. By the time you were finished listening you would be hyperventilating or close to it. Also, if we were honest about it, we weren’t really delivering on all those programs. So my first aim was to just get some runs on the board and to start bringing revenue into the kitchen. I called a meeting of the caterers who used the kitchen for their businesses and explained to them that things

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needed to change. Until this point, there were about ten caterers who used the kitchen. They would come in without notice and use as much bench and fridge space as they needed. While it was very social, I recognised that it was neither good business for OBK nor good business practice for the caterers. We put in place a contract that outlined the rights and responsibilities of both OBK and each caterer. It included an hourly charge and storage fee. I was met with immediate resistance and told that I would kill the community spirit of the place with my commercial imposition. I held my ground and explained that OBK had to pay the bills and the cost reflected community pricing, not the commercial cost. We did lose a couple of caterers, but we have gained many more and those who originally resisted the changes have now seen their own businesses flourish as they have become more efficient and taken on more business. Today, they have stability and security, a sense of ownership and professionalism. We’ve lost none of the community spirit and they have become a core part of the functioning kitchen. Then I started to work on the corporate programs. I used them as an opportunity to talk about second chances and to tell my story so that people got a real sense of what it meant to get another chance in life. Within a year, it would be fair to say that I had changed almost every aspect of what we did. There were structures and processes in place, we were earning revenue

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and had increased the budget ten-fold. There was an increased sense of professionalism and tidiness. This wasn’t about putting icing on the cake; this was about changing the recipe. Of course it came with challenges. Not long after I started, as I was running a group from JEMs, Jewish education organisation, I looked up straight into the face of Claudia, my PA from TSG days. Claudia had not only lost her job when TSG collapsed but she had also invested in some shares and lost her investment. I hadn’t spoken to her since then and I never really knew how she felt about me. As soon as I saw her, my whole body went hot and cold at the same time. It was the moment of confrontation. As soon as she saw me, her face lit up and I waved. She came straight over and gave me a hug and I felt intense relief. I said, ‘I’ve never known what to say to you’. With a warm smile she said, ‘Greg, that’s all in the past. You look fantastic and it’s so good to see you.’ Her response was so beautiful, and it gave me a deep sense of confidence that I could move forward. Claudia’s response has been indicative of the overall feeling I have had from the community. Most people who come to the kitchen from the Jewish community (and many from outside those circles) know who I am and my background. They have been truly amazing. They have been genuinely warm and encouraging. Perhaps it is my openness about my circumstances they appreciate. Perhaps they can see in real tangible terms

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that I am focused on helping others. Indeed, many parents have sent their troubled children to me for guidance and support, which I have readily provided. OBK has been very well supported by all levels of government. Little of that support has been in financial terms – but their endorsement of OBK’s work heightened our profile and credibility in the community, which was equally important. Over the years, OBK has hosted Governor General Quentin Bryce, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Treasurer Wayne Swan, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, New South Wales Premier Kristina Keneally, as well as the US ambassador and ambassadors and consuls-general from many other countries. On one occasion I met New South Wales Governor Marie Bashir. She came into OBK when we had our usual challah bake underway and thoroughly enjoyed mingling with the 60 or so volunteers. Rabbi Slavin introduced her to me and explained that I was a currently serving inmate. Her response was magnificent. She congratulated me on being at OBK and giving back to the community. She expressed her view that those who sought a second chance and demonstrated that a second chance was deserved ought to be given one. I joked with her about my convict ancestry and, just before she left, I asked with a cheeky grin, ‘Your Excellency – you are an appointment at Her Majesty’s pleasure?’ ‘That is correct.’

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‘Well, would it be too much to ask for an official pardon at this point so I can go home?’ She laughed and told me my time would come and wished me well. Oh well – at least I tried! It was becoming clear to me that OBK was a place for second chances. But it wasn’t only about a second chance for me. In jail, I had made a good friend, Jimmy. When we met, Jimmy and I both had about four years left to go on our sentences. He was more than 20 years younger than me but we developed a close friendship. Jimmy started his career in crime at 12 when he stole his first car. He was in and out of juvenile justice centres (juvie) and jails endlessly until he was 25. As Jimmy will tell you, his car stealing progressed to stealing ATMs. On one stint out of jail, he did get a job but was sacked after three months for stealing money from the till. With my encouragement, and his own determination to better himself, Jimmy did the right things in jail, progressed to a C Classo and was granted work release. He applied for a job at Our Big Kitchen. In his interview, he recounted his criminal career to date and said, ‘I’m not good for much and you’ll probably want to get rid of me in the first week’. The Rabbi shook his head and replied, ‘You are perfect for the job; you are hired’. Jimmy couldn’t believe it. He was very shy around people and his sense of self-worth had been crushed.

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When Jimmy started, he said to me, ‘Greg, I will wash up till the cows go home, at the back of kitchen, but don’t ever put me in front of a group’. Well, the next day there were a number of groups in OBK and I needed someone to run the cookie table. Jimmy had to do it. It was a simple matter of explaining to children how to roll out the dough, hand-cut the cookies and put them on trays. When I asked him to do it, he bolted out the front door of the Kitchen. I was determined to get him back in so I went to the kids and said, ‘After three, we all shout together, “We need you, Jimmy”’. Jimmy reluctantly came back to the Kitchen and ran the cookie table, nervously but well. But he nearly killed me. He told me I’d breached his trust, not to mention our friendship. ‘Jimmy, fair enough, what I’ll ask you to do now is to spend the next couple of weeks eyeing out what we do at OBK. Then come to me and tell me what you think you’d be good at and enjoy doing.’ A few weeks later, Jimmy asked me if he could learn how to bake. We called in a baker to train him and he became so proficient at it that he ended up creating a much improved challah recipe. Every Thursday at challah baking, 20 to 30 women came to the kitchen to bake with Jimmy (some from the wealthiest of families in the eastern suburbs). They loved him and he loved guiding them. He became friends with Jenni, whom Laya had met when Jenni’s

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husband was in the cancer ward. Jenni and Jimmy would bake together and then sit outside and chat. In the past, Jimmy would have been looking at her jewellery and wallet and working out ways to make them his, but he realised that he was needed and had no interest in stealing from her. The joy he got from knowing he was appreciated was something completely new to him. Jimmy went on to lead other groups, including teenagers from organisations such as WAYS youth support service. He had an enormous positive impact on these kids. Ultimately, Jimmy became a shift manager and stayed on a year after his jail sentence ended. When he felt the time was right, he left OBK with our blessing. He is earning better money and supporting a family. He’s now a tax-paying citizen rather than a tax-costing criminal. He has also become a coach for the Under 7s football team in Minto. When he was first asked to be the coach for the football team, he said no. Then he looked at the faces of kids and realised he could do it. The team came second in the competition and he is continuing as the team’s coach for the Under 8s. Jimmy is a great example of the good that can happen through the jail system. Someone who’d been pushed down was finally given an opportunity to work, and fortunately he chose somewhere like OBK. He learnt about being needed; he learnt about giving to others; he earned a full wage and learnt about the

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concept of budgeting and only getting what you can afford; he formed friendships with people he thought would only ever look down on him. Not long after he started, he realised that he was somewhere special. He cut off a bit of the blind in his cell and did a painting on it. It takes pride of place at the front of OBK. At the centre is the OBK logo, then it is dotted, darker on the outside and lighter towards the logo. The Israeli flag and an Aboriginal flag and a couple of animals of significance in the Aboriginal world are placed around the edge, representing understanding and compassion. Jimmy formally presented the painting to Rabbi Slavin in front of the Commissioner for Corrective Services, Peter Severin, when he came to visit OBK. We relayed everything about Jimmy to the Commissioner except for where Jimmy had got the canvas… that has remained our secret until now. Severin had been invited by Rabbi Slavin to see for himself the good work of what the Rabbi called the ‘joint venture’ between the Kitchen and the jails. Rabbi would say that OBK was the carrot and jail the stick, and the combination served the inmates well, which was why the program was so successful. I met Peter Severin at the door and introduced myself. He said, ‘Yes, I know who you are. I have been looking forward to meeting you.’ I was heartened by his words. Rabbi had also invited Eva Banozic, the head of Corrective Services Community Compliance Group and Peter, the man-

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ager of the Community Services clients at OBK (who was also my parole officer). In the Kitchen that day we had 100 students from my former high school, Moriah College. They were cooking their end of school lunch that they would have later with their teachers back at the school. At one point I called all the students and their teachers together for a quick chat. ‘As General Manager of OBK I want to congratulate you all on finishing school. You could have chosen to go out and have a muck-up day. Instead you have come into OBK to make lunch for yourself and others. You have also made extra for us to send out to people in need – on their behalf I thank you. ‘You will leave school now and commence your life as adults in the community. If I may give you a bit of advice, it is not to fear failure. Many of you know my background. I too went to Moriah and came from a privileged background. I went for it in life and enjoyed great success. I also found failure and went to the depths of despair, ending up in jail. What I have found is that even from such a low point where everything seemed utterly hopeless, I recovered. I recovered because there are people in the community who want to see people get back up again and are prepared to make it happen. ‘I feel privileged that I am standing here with you, strong enough to tell my story and wish you great strength and good fortune. Remember to help others

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as you become more and more successful – it will make your success that much more valuable and meaningful.’ The teachers came up to me after those words and thanked me. The school brought back new graduating students the following year and intend to make it a regular thing.  I think about Jimmy’s success and can’t help remembering Matt, with whom I shared a cell in Grafton jail. He was a short, stocky and very cocky 30-year-old guy. When he arrived, he was instantly friendly and immediately set about organising himself. As I was in the cell first I had the privilege of the bottom bunk, and he got the top one. He unpacked his belongings, placed them in perfect order, folded his few clothes, placed his shoes neatly under the bed and then started chatting to me. He had just been sentenced to four years jail. ‘Oh no, it’s not my first laggin’ [sentence]. Nup, just time for my rest – I can always rely on the cops to give me a sabbatical at the right time.’ ‘It really doesn’t bother you?’ I asked. His MIN (prison number) started with a 1. Mine started with a 3 – 378121. Based on 20 000 new inmates a year, it meant he had been coming to jail since he was about 18 years old; you hold your MIN number forever, so if you come back in, you get the same one.

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‘Mate, it’s like this: I’m out for a few months or if I’m lucky, a few years. I make a shitload of money and party. I get all the girls – it’s all good. So in my line of work [dealing], you know you’re going to get caught. I know that. It doesn’t bother me. It’s the cost of doing business.’  I was floored. ‘But you don’t feel ashamed that your family sees you coming in and out of jail?’ ‘Not at all. When I’m out I look after them. They all know what I do. My dad was in jail and my uncle’s in Parklea [jail] now. It’s all good. You do this work, that’s what happens.’ For Matt, going to jail was just part of doing business. It wasn’t punishment – it was more a matter of geography: sometimes he was in jail, sometimes he wasn’t. For someone like Matt, with little education, if the community did not support re-skilling him, the underworld would always be ready to tool him up for a return to crime. Punishment without comprehensive rehabilitation and support for integration equals high levels of recidivism, which is what we have in the New South Wales prison system.

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THE FRIDAY BEFORE I WAS DUE TO BE RELEASED,

Luke came to see me at OBK. He was obviously distressed. We had both been feeling anxious about my release – we were two very different people from when we had lived together before. We were both drug free and Luke had matured significantly. His career had progressed, he had bought a home, and he had been forced to take on new levels of responsibility that pushed him beyond his comfort zone. By now he had taken full control of his life and was proud of his independence and the life he had made for himself. And that life hadn’t included me being with him out of jail. Luke called me into the driveway next to OBK. He was fidgeting and nervous. He was struggling to work out how he could create a new normal existence with me. My coming home would mean huge changes for both of us. Luke felt that if we made the changes bitesize, things would be more manageable. He thought one way could be for me to move to my parents’ first off, so

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we could get used to me being out before we got used to living together again. But Luke liked to get to the point and so came straight out and said, ‘Can you go and live with your parents when you get out on Monday?’ His abrupt question was not so much a discussion about how to manage our mutual anxieties but a further stomp on my already crushed self-esteem. I felt I had been kicked in the guts and whacked across the head at the same time. I knew we were both feeling anxious. And I was as worried as he was about those awkward first moments when we would be completely on our own. But after all these years of waiting I knew the time had come for us to give it a go. Also, at a more practical level, going to live with my parents would have meant I needed to go back to the Parole Board and get approval for their address. That could take a few days and would mean I wouldn’t get out on Monday. I told him that I would see what I could do and he left. After the conversation I was emotionally exhausted and physically drained. I could barely walk. Jail had made me used to not being in control, but this time I had to find a way to fix it. And I knew that that would be virtually impossible. I went back into OBK and sat in the office with my head in my hands, trying to make sense of it all. I realised I couldn’t deal with this on my own and went upstairs to see the Rabbi. As I walked into his office, I broke down. He immediately assured me that everything would be okay. He told me not to

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worry and that he would contact Luke. To this day, I’m not exactly sure what he said but it was enough for Luke to welcome me home on the Monday of my release. Luke and I agreed that if either of us felt too uncomfortable, I would immediately apply to move to my parents’. On that basis, Luke didn’t feel trapped and could get back to feeling excited. So could I.  My release date was Monday 12 November 2012. For the inmate, the day of release is one of great anticipation, but for the jail it is just another day, another process and more paperwork. There is no farewell party. Amos and Marcus had already left, but I said goodbye to Jimmy and George before they left to go to work at OBK. They each gave me a big hug and I could feel their genuine excitement for me. Then there I was, alone in the work release pod. The day before, I had started taking down my photos and felt a strange sense of sadness. Even though I was excited about getting out, I was leaving behind what had become my comfort and my life. The photos of my parents, Carly, Luke, my friends, the rest of my family and photos of sunsets that Luke had taken for me, had been my companions. I’d looked at them every day when I got back to my cell. I had fallen asleep staring at them and woken up to them. They had followed me through every jail and every cell I

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had been in. They had done the journey with me. Those photos got me through some dark periods. I decided to keep the pictures because even though they would remind me of my time in jail, they would also remind me of what had kept me grounded during the darkest of moments. In packing up my things, I also realised how little I had and how little I needed in order to survive – a few sets of clothing, a few photos, a TV, a kettle, a rice cooker, a sandwich maker and a few toiletries. All of them very valuable commodities in jail. I left most my belongings behind, so that those with less family support could benefit from them. I walked out of jail with a small bag of photos and not much else. As for the drug addiction that had got me into jail in the first place, it had disappeared with the slam of that first jail door at Coffs Harbour and it never returned. To this day, I have no urge to use drugs. In fact, at almost 50 years old, I know that my body could no longer take the abuse that I dished out to it in the past. When I was called to the office for my final release, I walked through the rose gardens that had greeted me when I first arrived. I looked across to the other pods in the jail, and waved to the inmates not on work release and people called out, ‘See you Greg, all the best’. I got some big waves, pats on the back and some hugs, too. While I knew it was unlikely I would ever see these men again, I looked back at them with a deep sense

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of gratitude. These people had become my friends. We had done everything together – laughed, cooked, gone to the gym, gone for walks, discussed future plans, girlfriends, partners and solved the world’s problems. I had never met so many people from so many backgrounds before going to jail. And I know that I’m better for it. I say to Carly now as she travels the world, ‘Don’t just go to the theatre in New York and think that is making you worldly. Make sure you mix with people from all walks of life, that’s what will expand your horizons.’ As I walked out of jail in a pair of jeans and t-shirt, Luke was waiting for me. I gave him a hug. ‘We’ve made it’, I said. And indeed we had. We walked to Luke’s car, a small silver VW Polo, and Luke handed me the keys. I hadn’t driven on the roads for nearly eight years and I was determined to drive myself away from jail. I hopped into the driver’s seat and we set off to my parents’ place in Potts Point for an early lunch. For weeks before I got out, Dad had talked about taking me shopping for clothes. ‘Son, as soon as you get out, we are going straight to buy you everything you need. Your mother and I want to do this for you.’ I knew it meant a lot to Dad and Mum. Their generosity from the moment I stepped out of jail was extraordinary in every way. They wanted me to know that I was not alone. They wanted to give me whatever I needed to get back on my own two feet and survive the

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re-integration process. They were determined I would have as smooth a transition as possible. And they knew how difficult it was for me to make choices, so Dad kept saying, ‘I’ll step back and you can just take your time. Just be kind to yourself.’ He kept repeating this idea of being kind to myself. And eventually it began to make sense. My sister Pam and her husband Richard were also amazing. They wanted Luke and me to have some time together away from family and friends, and paid for us to have a five-day holiday on the beach at Port Stephens. This would give us an opportunity to start the process of rediscovery on neutral ground. As Luke and I drove along Parramatta Road towards Potts Point that first day, I was overwhelmed by the traffic and changes in road conditions, but I got us there. Dad came downstairs to sort out the parking with Luke and I went up to see Mum. The front door was unlocked. I knocked and walked in. Mum was standing on the balcony. She heard the door open and swung around. She opened her arms as far as they would go to hug me. It was a display of love that I had never seen from her before. And it was also a sign of her utter relief: I was home. I have never felt such deep and intense love from my mum as I did at that moment. That hug has motivated me ever since and given me the confidence that everything would be okay. I believed in that hug. And it changed everything. I suddenly realised that I didn’t need to prove myself through great corporate

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successes or having lots of money. Mum just wanted to see me happy. She wanted to see me in a good place emotionally and she wanted me to be part of the family. Dad and Luke joined us and I stood on the balcony of the apartment, taking in the magnificent view over Sydney Harbour. It was a beautiful sunny day. The Opera House and Harbour Bridge glistened in the sun and welcomed me back to Sydney. I looked over at corporate Sydney and saw new tall buildings – and many of the familiar ones that had been there before I went into jail. I realised how much had changed but also how much had stayed the same. I just hadn’t been a part of it. Sitting at my parents’ table with Mum’s beautiful crockery and cutlery was very special. Most of my meals for the previous seven and a half years had been eaten out of a meal tray, with plastic knives and forks. It felt strange holding heavy cutlery again, like a child learning to eat. I sat in a daze, staring at my parents and Luke as they talked and tuning in and out of the conversation. But I felt a deep sense of calm and peace. After lunch, my dad took me to David Jones, his favourite shop. I kept turning to him and asking, ‘Am I taking too much?’ All he said was, ‘Everything you have chosen looks great. Just make sure it fits properly.’ Dad just encouraged me to keep going. He wanted me to stand tall in the community. He wanted me to look good and feel good. No son of his was going to feel inadequate.

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Remembering how my mum and dad reacted is such a sobering reminder of how much I have to live for. I am not sure if it is because I realise how much they love me or because I recognise what I put them through. When people ask me when I’ll be back in the corporate world to make more millions, they have no idea how low on my priority list that is. After the shopping spree, Luke and I dropped Dad home and started the journey to our home, the three-bedroom house Luke had bought in Springwood in the Blue Mountains. The house was old and unrenovated and Luke had kept everything from before I went to jail. Luke and I had very different definitions of ‘tidy’. Luke had cleaned the house for days leading up to my release, but when I got there I found it completely cluttered which was difficult to cope with after the institutionalised order of jail. I made it my mission to get the house in shape. Luke had wanted to sell it a few years earlier and move back to Sydney, but I begged him to keep it because I wanted the space and tranquillity when I left jail. But I soon appreciated how unrealistic it was to live there while I was working at OBK and doing a two-hour commute each way every day. I wasn’t aware that Luke was taking bets on how long our ‘country living’ would last. Some said one month, others six; he gave it three, tops. On my second day of sitting unmoving on the M4, I rang Luke and said, ‘I can’t do this, the traffic, the

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commute, it’s doing my head in. I am moving to my sister’s in Rose Bay and we have to find an apartment in Sydney.’ ‘No problem’, he said, quietly over the moon. ‘I’ll start packing straight away’. We rented an apartment in Centennial Park and started looking for a new home. We wanted a sense of openness and space. After looking at many apartments we finally found one in a new high-rise, with spectacular views to the city, to the Blue Mountains to the west and south to Wollongong. It was perfect, with floor to ceiling windows. I knew coming out of jail would be hard. But I didn’t anticipate how much pent-up anxiety and anger I would feel. At the start, Luke’s and my relationship was very tenuous. We had to deal with being intimate again and simply being in each other’s space. It felt like an arranged marriage, slightly forced and very awkward. When Luke feels forced into anything, he withdraws, so between us we made a few poor choices in the early days. But we just kept talking things through. Every few weeks there would be an emotional explosion. Once I threw him out of the apartment at 3 a.m., but the minute I did that, I knew I didn’t want to live without him. And he felt the same way. It took weeks to trust each other again. His anxiety led him to drink on a few occasions, which scared me, and so we had to figure out how to work through his emotions. I wasn’t the only

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one suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was feeling it too. There were periods where he would get up in the middle of the night to find me lying on the couch in a fetal position, crying and violently shaking, as if I was being beaten up again. It would take hours for him to calm me down and then I’d feel embarrassed and inadequate. I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming from horrific nightmares, which terrified him. Luke said it was scary watching someone living out a trauma, shouting responses to his attackers. But we just kept talking about it. I went to therapy. He went to therapy. We were both determined to make it work.  The first Friday night after my release, we went to Pam’s place. Mum, Dad, Luke, Carly, Pam, Richard and my nephew Zac were all there. Sitting at the Sabbath evening table, ready to start with my sister’s famous chicken soup, a traditional must, I felt I had never left. I was home, I was with my family and there was nowhere else I’d have rather been. Before Richard led the grace before the meal, I asked to say a few words: ‘Thank you, all of you, for standing by me and helping me to get through everything. I am truly sorry to the community for what I did. But I am especially sorry to all of you here.’

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I turned to Carly: ‘No parent should put their child through the shame and hurt that I put you through. I know sorry doesn’t cut it. All I can say is that I am here now – I am ready to be the father I should have been. I am full of love and concern and pride for you. From now on, in addition to your Mum, to whom I am most grateful for all she did in raising you, you have your other parent to rely on. You will see it in action as we re-build our relationship. To Mum and Dad and Pam and Richard – thank you for everything. I promise that I will be a son and brother that you will be proud of. I will never shame you again. And to my incredible partner Luke, you have stood by me and been my rock. We have a journey ahead and it will have its challenges but I am excited and I love you deeply.’  When I finished, I said that this would be my only apology because I wasn’t going to be able to keep apologising. ‘I now have to get on with my life and enjoy it and continue to do the community work I love.’ Carly excused herself from the table. She was teary and clearly needed a moment on her own. She was only a little girl when I went to jail and now she was a confident and mature young woman. I realised our relationship needed to evolve slowly. She needed time to adjust to having a father back on the scene and I too needed time come to terms with having a 19-year-old daughter in my life. I think we were both confident deep down that the connection we had maintained throughout my

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time in jail would ultimately help our process. I was enormously proud of my daughter. I had taken two weeks leave after I was released from jail. On my first day back at work, Cassie Atlas, who had been involved in the kitchen for years, took my hand and handed over the office to me. ‘It’s all yours now, Greg.’ She was so happy for me. ‘Now you can get to work without the handcuffs on.’

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MY SECOND CHANCE

IT’S NOW TWO AND A HALF YEARS SINCE MY RELEASE.

I drive to OBK in my Mazda and park on the street. I walk down the steep driveway and into the kitchen with an enormous sense of pride. Sometimes I will have had breakfast at my friend Adam’s café, Arno’s, in Double Bay. If not, one of the guys at work, usually George, makes me a coffee served in a plastic cup and we get going for the day. On any one day, I walk into a combination of children’s parties, corporate events, barista training for the homeless, mothers’ groups, caterers’ cooking and more. In the midst of it all is Laya. Her unique brand of kindness means she is crying when others cry, smiling when they smile and cheering them along as they struggle. I call her OBK’s ‘hugologist’. As for the Rabbi – all I can say is that I never thought I’d have a Rabbi’s number on my speed dial, let alone on my list of favourites. Rabbi has become one of my closest friends. We work well together with our

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different but complementary styles. I am more corporate and structured, whereas he will allow things to develop organically. We laugh a lot together and I have to admit that when, in private, he lets rip with some swear words, I like him even more. He is part of the Chabad sect, which promotes inclusion and tolerance and respect for others of all faiths and backgrounds. He says he chose me to be GM simply because he saw me as the best person for the job. I’m sure he would prefer I was more religious and me being gay would not be his ideal – but that is not important to him. What is important to him is the delivery of support and hope for as many people as possible, and that is what we work on together. I love the fact that OBK is a Jewish organisation simply by ownership, but is non-denominational in practice. In terms of our contribution to the Jewish religion, few organisations do more on a practical level than OBK. We host kosher workshops for students, provide low-cost community dinners for all the Jewish festivals, challah bakes, pastoral care by Rabbi and Laya, we support all the Jewish schools and Jewish communal organisations, and facilitate Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies. More kosher catering comes from OBK than any other kitchen in Sydney. We promote tolerance and understanding of the Jewish faith by hosting inter-faith school activities and ensuring that everyone feels welcome. But OBK runs

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so much deeper into the community through our work with the homeless shelters, shelters for women suffering domestic abuse, refugee organisations, hospitals and hospices, school programs and corporate team- building sessions. And we pride ourselves in being great supporters of the essential services by promoting ‘thank you’ gifts for the ambos, police and fire fighters. Every day at OBK brings its surprises. One day the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) phoned OBK to inquire about a corporate team-build. I picked up the phone and suddenly heard the words, ‘Hello, I’m calling from ASIC’. If ever there was a time when I felt my heart thud to the floor it was when I took that phone call. The paranoia from the past few years had not completely dissipated. The woman on the other end of the phone advised that they wanted to organise an off-site team-building program for ASIC staff. It would be our largest ever, with 130 participants. I felt an utter sense of relief, accepted the booking and then went to work on how we could accommodate 130 people, all of whom would be participating in food preparation. I remember speaking to Rabbi Slavin just before the group arrived, and saying ‘With my luck so-and-so will turn up’. As I said those words, the man in question appeared right in front of me at the door of OBK. This man is no more than five feet tall and reminds me of Danny DeVito.

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He looked at me and said, ‘Ah, I was wondering if it could possibly be the same Greg Fisher’. To which I immediately replied, ‘It’s wonderful how life moves on, good to see you’. Total bravado. My legs were like jelly, and Rabbi pulled me aside and asked me if I was okay. I told him that when I took this booking, the first person I thought of was this man. When ASIC launched its investigation all those years ago into the Global Funds Management takeover of Aust-Wide, this man had put me under enormous pressure. Ultimately I was cleared of everything, but it was a traumatic experience. As it turned out, that day with ASIC at OBK was hugely successful and it showed me that my past would always be with me but I could deal with it effectively. Another time, the policewomen from Gosford police station came to OBK for a team-building program. One senior police officer worked at the Rose Bay police station but lived in Gosford and so decided to join her Central Coast colleagues. The group arrived and I did my usual welcome and explanation about OBK. They then went into the kitchen to make lunch for themselves and people in need. As is normal practice, once all the preparation work is complete and the food is cooking away, I take the participants back to the reception area for a talk. I often talk about the second chances that OBK gives to so many, and point to the coffee machine at the back as an example of the barista

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training course that we run for homeless people. I talk about opportunities given to people with disabilities to come in with their carers. And then I highlight the work that we do with Corrective Services. I explain that OBK employs some of its staff from the jails and that we host many court ordered community service clients every day. But this time it felt different. I felt strangely at ease with these police officers and so I expanded my talk to include my own story.  I explained that prior to going to jail I reported three times a week to the Rose Bay police station. Much to their surprise, I expressed gratitude for having been stopped in my tracks as a drug dealer and big drug user and sent to prison. I told them that my very fortunate eastern suburbs upbringing gave me no excuse to enter the underworld. And I also told them that they effectively saved my life because my drug addiction was so great that, had it continued, it would most likely have been fatal. The officer from Rose Bay came up to me at the end of the day and asked if she could give me a hug. I remember well immediately taking that hug and saying to the group, ‘Wow, I’ve now been hugged by a cop, my journey is complete’. The thing about the Kitchen is that this kind of thing happens for everyone – it seems to be a centre of connection. I went to work one Friday. It wasn’t an especially busy day – a couple of caterers were doing their own work and our community challah bake was in

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its usual rhythm. We did have one event organised – a meeting with a number of members of the Greek community, including the Greek ambassador and consul general, the mayor of Thessaloniki, the local deputy mayor and various councillors and their entourage. It was set up as the start of Rabbi Slavin’s thank you to the Greek community for the enormous support they had shown in getting the Kitchen up and running. Other than that, I intended to catch up on administration. They were due to arrive at 11 a.m. and we had set up a magnificent buffet. The consul general had said to us, ‘Don’t go to too much trouble, just something a little Israeli and maybe a little Spanish. And maybe something a little sweet and something a little savoury.’ The table for 20 was set up and everything was in order when Ben, our operations manager, knocked on my door. He looked nervous said he needed to speak to me urgently. I wondered what he had done. Shaking, he told me that a group of 80 kids and nine school teachers had just arrived. They had originally booked and then cancelled without ever rebooking. The principal acknowledged that they had forgotten to tell us they had decided to come but now here they were. I told Ben not to worry, got the management team together, gave a series of instructions and the kitchen flew into action. Within five minutes, we had reconfiguredthe kitchen to accommodate the school group, the challah baking and our Greek dignitaries.

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When the Greek contingent arrived, they were blown away by all the activity. It was truly an OBK day – unscripted in every way yet all the pieces fell together. And it came with a story: the mayor of Thessaloniki, when inaugurated, had worn the yellow star that Jews had been forced to wear during World War II. He did this as a mark of respect because at that time a third of the city was Jewish. They had all been taken away and, as he said, with them the soul of the city had been removed. His decision to wear the star was to be seen to stand on the right side of history. This was very emotional for Rabbi Slavin, whose family survived the Holocaust. Our eldest volunteer was also there, herself a survivor. We introduced her to the group and told her what the mayor had done. She started to talk about her own story of survival, and the horrors that still remain with her. It was a very powerful moment, made even more so by the fact that she was holding onto a young woman for support. That young woman was one of our German interns. A little later I called all the school students together to join the Greek group. After a short welcome, the Rabbi said a few words, followed by the mayor, the consul general and the ambassador and finally the deputy mayor of Waverly Council. While the speeches were going on, Simon, one of my managers, told me that about 40 per cent of the children there were in fact Greek, as were a number of the teachers and support

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parents. At the end of the speeches, I asked if any of the children wanted to say anything. A young girl shot up her hand and came over and said thank you to the Greek group, in Greek. I couldn’t have scripted it better myself. Things like this are just part of what makes OBK the unique place it is. It is unique in another way, too. I find it remarkable that I am working side-by-side with David Kirby, a former judge of the Supreme Court. David knows that I am a former inmate, and yet every day I supervise and motivate and mentor current inmates, community service clients and juvenile justice clients. Only recently he said, ‘You know, Greg, I have watched you build the business side of things by developing programs that continue to help people and demonstrate your real empathy for others. I really thought that a man with your obvious talents might have stayed at OBK for only a short while post-release, yet you have stayed on. You have boundless energy, you support so many people and I can see you do it with a real love. Not one inmate who has completed their time at OBK on work release has ended up back in jail – that is just a wonderful outcome.’ His words are a huge inspiration. 

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On the way home from work, I often stop off at the gym. I started to build my strength in jail after the attack I went through, and when I came out of jail feeling fit I wanted to continue to do so. I also never want to feel small, weak and vulnerable again. I joined a gym almost straight away and got myself a trainer. I chose Andrew Yi, a handsome Aussie Asian guy who didn’t trigger my gaydar, which was perfect – I didn’t want any distractions! Andrew is in his mid to late twenties. He is a dedicated, focused and caring trainer and we have become good friends. He doesn’t just help me exercise my body; he has allowed me to speak freely and find some space for the emotions that continue to pulse through my body every day. He has helped me find pride in my body and in myself. Luke and I have also delighted in travelling together. When I was in jail we would talk about it and when I was released, I was determined to make it happen. In the first year I was out, my niece in Israel got engaged and everyone went over to Israel to celebrate the wedding. I couldn’t believe that the family reunion I had dreamt of in jail was actually going to happen. We both went to Israel to witness one of the most lively weddings – the union of an Aussie girl, my niece Talia, to a Yemenite Israeli, Itai. Carly and Michelle were with us as well, for the wedding and for a few days of touring afterwards. It was special to be with all the people I love.

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Luke and I have also travelled to Thailand to learn to ‘cook with Poo’ (her name means rosewater in Thai) at her famous cooking school. Located in the slums of Bangkok, and now endorsed by Jamie Oliver, the school helps those in poverty. We also visited the Hub, a shelter for homeless children, an initiative of the Australian Reverend Bill Crews of Exodus Foundation fame introduced to us by Kids Giving Back, a wonderful international volunteering organisation with whom OBK works extensively. Kids Giving Back raises money for cookie-making equipment and an instruction video done in Thai. OBK, and Rabbi Slavin specifically, have helped make all of this happen. Besides giving me a sense of grounding and financial capacity, the Rabbi has continually encouraged me to travel for work, to consider ways OBK can learn from other countries and communities and to bring those ideas back to expand our work. As I write, OBK has just launched a new program, Meals that Matter, in conjunction with SecondBite, a food collection agency which captures perfectly good food that would otherwise go to landfill (such as surplus food from supermarkets). The food is brought to OBK to be converted to meals for those in need. The agreement enables large corporations to come to OBK and learn about the work of both OBK and SecondBite and then participate in converting the raw produce into meals.

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Meals that Matter was launched at OBK by the Federal Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and Premier Mike Baird. In his welcome, Rabbi Slavin thanked me for negotiating this deal, acknowledging that my work would result in many more people being helped. After the formalities were over, I found myself back in the storeroom with all the pots and pans. I was with the Rabbi, Malcolm Turnbull and Premier Mike Baird. In the presence of our guests, the Rabbi thanked me again for putting the deal together and then went on to tell the politicians about my background and my time in jail. Rabbi was not only demonstrating his pride in enabling so many people in the community to help others in need, but also emphasising how he promoted the concept of a true second chance every day. According to the Rabbi, when he escorted each of the dignitaries independently back to their cars, they both commented on how impressed they were with what he is doing for prisoner rehabilitation. It is my hope that my life experiences may be used for community good. Of course, my work at OBK enables me to perform grass-roots community work every day. But it is my hope, which the Rabbi supports, that I will be able to engage with government and others to secure better outcomes for the community as well as for the prisoners themselves, a desire I enunciated to David Elliot, the NSW Minister for Corrective Services when I met him during his recent visit to OBK. It is

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very important that we take a community response to supporting former inmates. If the community doesn’t give inmates a second chance in life, there is an underworld only too ready to re-tool them for a return to a life of crime. While I don’t think it’s necessary to have gone through the experiences I have in order to contribute to effective change, I do believe my difficult experiences have given me insights into a range of issues that could be of help to others. Since I became the general manager of OBK in November 2012, our team has created community programs to enable corporate participants, school children, and many others to participate in the process of giving. We have provided almost 200 000 meals to those in need; created new programs to support people with disabilities and created permanent employment opportunities for people with disabilities; and hosted more than 250 schools and over 15 000 students.  I have also changed the business model of OBK from being 100 per cent donation reliant for its operations to being 20 per cent donation reliant. By mid-2016 I expect OBK to be 100 per cent funded by revenue from programs. This means that future donations can go towards expanding our infrastructure and services, rather than the running of the operation itself, thus supporting even more people in need.

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 Today, 13 years into our relationship, eight of them spent with bars between us, Luke and I have a relationship that is strong, real, and genuine. It’s an incredible love story and we are both proud and grateful. No relationship is perfect or without its hiccups and dramas. But you can tell when you are in something that is going to last. As Luke says, ‘If you like someone, you can make anything work’. We made jail work and we worked to make post-jail work. We still do, every day. He accepts and embraces the life I have with Michelle, and with our daughter Carly. When I look at Luke, I see a handsome, intelligent man with a quirky, dry sense of humour. I admire his creativity. I am touched by his empathy, understanding and interest in people. I am blown away by how he truly listens. Luke is interested and interesting. And I love him. I’ve often been asked how, as an openly gay man, I have been able to find a place in the Orthodox Jewish world. I’ve been able to eventually make peace with both my gay identity and the Jewish identity I’ve grown up with. From an Orthodox perspective, homosexuality is simply not accepted. As a result, many gay Jewish people find a home in more liberal or Reform Jewish communities. However, the Reform community was not for me. Not because I believe there is anything wrong with

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Reform, but it’s not where I grew up and I wasn’t prepared to go there simply because I felt I was an outcast somewhere else. If I wasn’t good enough for my Orthodox Synagogue then I just wouldn’t go. Today, I am fortunate to work for a Rabbi whose Chabad ethos is so greatly focused on inclusion that he is able to accept me for who I am. He doesn’t count the number of commandments I follow. I have never felt more welcome or more seen for who I am than by Rabbi Slavin. Surprisingly, all my dreams to live a fulfilled life, express my Jewish identity and have warm family connections are more real today than ever before. I haven’t always had this sense of confidence about my place in the Jewish community. When I first left Michelle, I assumed I’d have no place there at all. I stopped going to Friday night dinners with my family, I withdrew completely from Jewish life and barely acknowledged my Judaism. Years later when I was at the height of my success in corporate life, I used to say to my father that I was miserable. I felt I had no soul. In retrospect it is clear that the reason I felt so empty was because I had withdrawn from my family’s Friday night dinners and my community. Sacrificing my religion had robbed me of much of my identity. It was only much later when I was in jail that I knew I needed to reclaim my Jewish heritage. I wanted my life and my family back. I wanted Friday nights and the traditions. I didn’t want to take on every ritual or

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protocol. I’ve never been that religious. But I wanted to feel part of the community and, as facile as it may sound, I wanted to try to be a good Jewish man who cared for people. I’ve now reached a point of genuine comfort within the Orthodox Jewish faith. I have found my place. I live my life without imposing it on others. I don’t go walking into Synagogue holding Luke’s hand. But I do walk in with Luke and proudly introduce him as my partner. In September 2014, on the thirty-sixth anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah, I was asked to read the Haphtarah (a portion of the Hebrew scroll known as the Torah), at an Orthodox synagogue. Mum, Dad and Carly were overseas so couldn’t be there. But sitting in the shul with me were Luke, my favourite 90year-old volunteer from Our Big Kitchen, Eri (a Japanese friend), Pam, Richard and Zac. This is me in my uniquely blended life. This is me, happy and content. In May 2015, I finally attended a graduation for the university degree I started back in 2008 in Cooma. As I stood with my graduand peers singing the national anthem with my family standing a few rows behind, I walked up thinking of the dark place I did most of my studies, and I felt very proud. This was my very personal moment. 

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Of course, while I am content, I do carry scars from the past. I still grapple with depression and anxiety from time to time. It is often associated with feelings of shame and embarrassment about my behaviour over those horror years. Just recently my father had a cancer removed from his nose. I was so happy to be here for him, but it reminded me that when he had had major stomach surgery, I was in jail. He had been very unwell and I wasn’t there for him or my mother. At the time, I just prayed that he would survive as I knew he always feared not being around when I was released. So now I feel happiness that I will always be here for Dad, and incredible regret that I was not around before when he needed me. These sorts of examples are endless. I see photos of my daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, which was celebrated one year into my incarceration. I was not there. I still feel utter shame and deep sadness when I recall that. Sometimes that sadness drags me into deep depression. So while I am proud of living a life that transcends my depression, it can still occasionally rear its dark shadows. But I no longer take anti-depressants. I am very reluctant to take any medication unless it is absolutely necessary. My life experiences have given me great strength to deal with difficult matters with a clear head and logic. 

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I’m currently preparing for another corporate function where I’ll be expected to introduce OBK and talk a little about myself. This time I won’t be introducing myself as inmate number 378121. Not because I don’t need to and not because everyone already knows but because it seems so much less relevant. As the Rabbi once said to me, ‘Greg, going to jail will be like looking in a rear-view mirror. The more you do, the further it will recede into the background and the less significant it will become until it is no longer there at all.’ Yet again, the Rabbi is right.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To be afforded the opportunity to tell my story is something for which I am extremely grateful as I hope that my life experiences, both positive and damaging, will help others through their own journey. Straight up, my initial thanks goes to Elspeth Menzies of NewSouth Publishing, who heard me giving a speech in 2014 at Pecha Kucha at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and suggested that I write a book about my life. I am very grateful to Elspeth and everyone at NewSouth Publishing for all their support and encouragement. I do not claim to be the sole author of this book. Carmel Pelunsky was my ghost writer. I thank her for the long hours we spent together, for her humanity and deep compassion, for her support and enthusiasm, and above all for keeping my story very much in my own words. I thank my wonderful life-partner, Luke Power, with whom I have shared so much of my life. Luke’s empathy and love, his intelligence and his overall input into my book makes it his as well. I also thank

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my editor, Linda Funnell, and the cover photographer, Don Arnold, from Smartset Photography. In presenting my story, I do so with brutal frankness, which is harrowing and confronting in places. I want to thank my parents, Jack and Rosalind Fisher, and my sister and brother-in-law, Pam and Richard Seidman, for their support for me writing this book. It would be much easier for my family for me to leave much of my story in the past – I thank them for their selflessness in this regard, as well as for the unconditional love they have always given me. For their understanding and support while I was writing my book, I wish to thank my management team at Our Big Kitchen: Ben Biermann, Simon Feldman and George Karounis, as well as the Advisory Board comprising Peter Debnam, David Kirby, Richard Andrews (also executive director), Ron Denning and Barry Groom. Very special thanks to the co-founders of Our Big Kitchen, Rabbi Doctor Dovid Slavin and his wife Laya. Their support for me and trust in me in my role as General Manager has been humbling. Their acceptance and understanding, warmth and inclusion is beyond measure. Rabbi Slavin encouraged and supported me in writing my story. I am deeply honoured to donate all my proceeds from the book to Our Big Kitchen. I thank my ex-wife and good friend, Michelle Fisher. Finally, I dedicate my book to my daughter, Carly

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Fisher, whose love I do not take for granted. I have written this book only because Carly allowed it, a testament to her selflessness and desire to support other children exposed to difficult circumstances. I salute my daughter for her bravery and conviction.

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