container, and is scanned through security.
His case is to be heard in court two, where the spiky-haired, moustached Balmer is seated at the bench talking to another defence counsel and the police prosecutor.
Cook nods at Balmer, takes a seat in the back row and begins to read the newspaper again.
He immerses himself in it as a few cases are heard: an eighteen-year-old woman up on ninety-six theft charges, a middle-aged man trying to shake a fraud charge over an insurance claim for damage to his car, and a younger man charged with the sexual assault of his former partner.
‘The matter of Frederick Williams to court two please,’ the female clerk says finally. Frederick Williams is Frederick William Cook. Fifteen years earlier, seeking to overcome a bad credit rating, he had changed his name by deed poll. An hour later he was opening bank accounts and being offered credit cards.
Cook has been fretting about the hearing for weeks, fearing another spell in prison. The case had been adjourned a few times while Balmer sought a psychiatric assessment and a pre-sentencing report.
Now he asks magistrate Anne Goldsbrough if he can ‘be so bold as to seek another adjournment’. There have been delays in receiving the reports and, mindful of the suspended sentence and seeking to highlight ‘exceptional circumstances’, he is reluctant to proceed without them. He says one doctor had told him ‘incarceration would be detrimental to his [Cook’s] mental health’.
The magistrate agrees to hear the case in May. She tells Cook he is free to go.
‘Keep up the good work, Your Honour,’ he says, raising laughs around the bench. And with that, the old showman emerges: Cook smiles, rises to his full height, puffs out his chest and heads for the door with the swagger so often seen at VFA grounds.
Thirty minutes later, Cook and Balmer have coffee across the road from the court. Balmer, often described as a ‘knockabout’ criminal lawyer and with a client list including Mark ‘Chopper’ Read and Mick Gatto, first represented the former football champion in the late 1980s. He remembers it vividly. Facing drug charges, Cook was given a good behaviour bond. ‘Your Honour, you can give me a bond for the next twenty years because I won’t be coming back to court,’ he told the judge.
But since then he’s had to call on ‘Bernie The Attorney’ at least once a year. Balmer regards him more as a friend than a client — they talk two or three times a week, even when he’s not in trouble — and he has taken on his latest driving offence on a pro bono basis. Cook is promising to ‘sling you some money down the track’. But the lawyer isn’t exactly factoring it into his end-of-financial-year accounts. When people speak to him about Cook and observe he’s led a remarkable life, Balmer corrects them. ‘Mate, he’s led three lives.’
WHEN you mention Fred Cook to people who haven’t seen him for a while, they invariably respond with a question: ‘How is Freddie?’
You suspect they really want to ask, ‘Is he off drugs?’ They are pleased to hear he hasn’t used for a few years. Cook was on amphetamines for more than two decades. He has long been removed from the lifestyle he enjoyed as a football and media figure and the proprietor of the Station Hotel in Port Melbourne.
When old friends saw him after his slide it was usually on the TV news, after he had been arrested or dealt with in court. He was inhabiting a world they didn’t recognise and they felt powerless to pull him away from its orbit.
Yet affection for him has never wavered. People who know him well speak of a sociable man who was always generous with his time and money at the peak of his popularity. They acknowledge his flaws and foibles — his self-destructive streak and tendency to take things to excess, an ability to sniff a short-cut and an immaturity apparent when he casually sprinkles his female conquests into conversation (his wife, Sally Desmond, says he’s sixty-six going on fifteen; his sister Pam says he never grew up). But they describe him as a ‘loveable larrikin’ or ‘scallywag’ or ‘likeable rogue’ with a capacity to lighten the mood around him. They wish only the best for him.
‘Mate, I wasn’t saddened by what happened to Freddie. I was heartbroken,’ says his former school mate and Footscray teammate Ricky Spargo. ‘Such a lovely bloke and to see him go down like that … We all loved the bloke. My mum’s 101 and she’s loved him all her life, like my old man [former Footscray player Bob Spargo] did.’
He can barely talk about Cook’s post-football life. ‘Nah, can’t cop it. That wasn’t my Freddie.’
Spargo was thrilled to learn Cook was doing okay. He hasn’t seen him for a long time, but thinks of him often and always fondly. He doubts there is a bad bone in his body.
Balmer holds the same opinion. He says Cook did and still does put friends first. ‘Nothing he’s been through has knocked that quality out of him,’ he says. ‘He looks out for others more than he looks out for himself, and as a consequence of that he’s left himself destitute. And it’s sad, just tragic.’
Former Port Melbourne coach Gary Brice was devastated as he watched Cook’s life unravel. He speaks about him with the warmth that football coaches reserve for players who won them premierships. Cook played in three flags under Brice.
‘It was a disappointing period of his life. Very disappointing,’ he says. ‘Hopefully he’s got it under control, because I guess with that sort of addiction you never get over it. It’s something you have to live with and manage through your life.’
Cook is living on the Mornington Peninsula, where he headed with his future wife Sally Desmond after he was arrested for drug offences for the first time, in 1986.
But he cannot tell a redemption story, a tale of emerging stronger from a wretched experience. It’s a daily struggle to stay clean. He has said it hundreds of times: ‘I didn’t use yesterday, I haven’t used today and I probably won’t use tomorrow.’
If someone produced white powder, a spoon and a clean needle and told him he could use with no consequences, away he’d go, jabbing his arm as quickly as he could. But he knows the consequences only too well.
In the beginning he took speed to keep up with his many commitments, time management in powder form. A few months earlier he had been asked to retire from Port Melbourne, his footballing home for fourteen years. He says now that drugs were his way of substituting the surge of adrenaline that came from kicking hundreds of goals and winning premierships.
It’s a familiar tale: a feted sportsman losing his way after his career ended and the cheering had stopped. Few fell as far or spectacularly as Fred Cook. In his later years, when he should have been speaking about his career or commenting on football affairs, he was trotted out to talk about criminal figures, including Kath Pettingill for the special The Mother of Evil. He told how she marked one lot of foils green (for amphetamines) and others red (for heroin) when her son Dennis Allen was shifting drugs at a furious rate in Richmond in the 1980s.
Allen had money falling out of his pockets then. Cook says he would be equally flush if he had a dollar for every time he’d been told he had the world at his feet — and squandered it. ‘Pissed it away,’ is how he puts it. His regret runs deep, but he tries to suppress it, thinking he’d go mad if he brooded over his many mistakes. Besides, he says, it’s hard enough to deal with the present, let alone the past.
COFFEE
