Rick Williams allegations racking up
- Kelmeny Fraser, David Murray
- The Courier-Mail
- June 09, 2015 10:09AM
BRUCE McLean was sitting on the porch of his highset Goodna home, a warm cup of tea in front of him.
Looking up in surprise at the unexpected arrival of a Courier-Mail reporter, he listened to the explanation for the visit – research into his former boss, the newly elected Labor MP Rick Williams.
At first he declined to comment, saying he’d rather not get involved but in almost the same breath politely offered the reporter a chair. It was from this humble porch overlooking the dark narrow road as it pushed up towards hilly acreage that McLean’s story would slowly tumble out over the coming weeks.
At times during that first meeting, McLean would duck into his house to grab a fistful of bread, tossing it down to a persistent flock of parrots on the lawn beneath while offering a quick apology for the diversion.
While it was breadcrumbs he was throwing to the birds, it would be a political grenade that his words would hurl at the feet of the state’s minority Palaszczuk Government over its MP for Pumicestone.
McLean wasn’t the only one to speak up.
In a four-month Courier-Mail investigation, other associates including family members, neighbours and various people who had the misfortune of crossing Williams raised their personal concerns about his position of power in Parliament.
Hundreds of documents, including court transcripts, exhibits and judgments, also shed light on the character of Williams, a man who once took to the rooftop of his financial planning business to protest against corporate giant Suncorp.
The claims and material have set off the second integrity crisis for the fledgling Labor Government since its election in January.
Labor had already been forced to part ways with the Member for Cook Billy Gordon, only months after its dizzying climb to office, over revelations he had not paid child maintenance and had hidden past criminal charges from party vetting agents.
But a second cloud had hung menacingly over the tranquil island of Bribie Island in the form of wildcard MP Williams – and the storm was about to break.
Labor MP Rick Williams is facing a tide of allegations.
The 58-year-old Williams denies any impropriety but is now facing a tide of allegations.
The first public revelations came in February, just days after the election, when The Courier-Mail reported that a
Cairns law firm had publicly accused him of extortion several years earlier.
Williams had picketed the small firm’s office over a court case he had lost. In that case, Williams had refused to pay a commission to a real estate agent who had sold his home.
A court had found he was in the wrong and ordered him to pay up, but he took issue with law firm, William Graham Carman, which represented the real estate agent.
During the dispute, Williams agreed to a recorded interview with the firm’s manager in which he outlined the numerous other companies he’d taken on – Suncorp, the Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, and a council mayor – and his aggressive tactics to get what he wanted.
“I’m not the person who goes away,” he explained.
In the same conversation he name dropped his half-brother – convicted killer and standover man Jack Cooper, also known as Mr Fix It. Cooper was reportedly shot dead, but Williams speculated in front of the law firm manager that he may in fact still be alive.
Political enemies would regret it, he explained, detailing how he would deal with a mayor that was causing him trouble.
“I will spend $100,000 if I have to, to put someone in as mayor next time around,” Williams bragged.
Labor state secretary Evan Moorhead called in lawyers to listen to the recording and conceded the behaviour of Williams was entirely inappropriate, but not illegal.
The recording indicated Williams warranted further investigation, and there were others keen to talk about their dealings with the first-time MP.
As he settled in to his Bribie Island office, Williams was fighting out a
messy feud with his estranged stepdaughter.
“I have serious concerns about Rick’s fitness to serve as an MP,” she said, detailing wideranging allegations against Williams.
Williams had also
locked horns with residents in his canal-front street over parking while running a tow truck business in the years before getting elected.
They found him to be abusive and aggressive. A damaging tape recording emerged of one encounter, when Williams confronted a neighbour about a council complaint.
“Honestly, the parking situation is out of control. You had a wreck, you had a ... car parked there, told us that you will leave it there forever and a day and you will register another car to put behind it. Correct?” the woman asked.
“I did tell you that,” Williams replied.
“Why? Why would you want to do that to me,” the neighbour responded.
Among the tips from other sources was that a former employee of Williams’ Ipswich financial planning firm by the name of Bruce McLean could be a key witness to his activities back then.
McLean had apparently told people at the time about his then-boss Williams asking if he could find someone to have his ex-wife Carol’s boyfriend Andrew Roberts “done over”.
When McLean agreed to talk, he confirmed the claim, and had detailed, typed notes from the time about a host of other allegations.
McLean’s Goodna home is a five-minute drive from the small office where he once worked for Williams’ firm Intrinsic Financial Planning Solutions – a corporate agent for Suncorp.
He had met Williams in church in about 1985, working as a prison officer at the time.
Williams had split with his first wife Carol, says McLean, and aside from a car and laptop “didn’t appear to own very much at all”.
That soon changed when Williams bought a home and then in 2001 a modest weatherboard office that was the headquarters of former local MP Bob Gibbs.
The office would later become the scene of a highly public dispute between Williams, then 47, and Suncorp when he launched a hunger strike on its roof surrounded by placards in 2004.
He told media he had been short-changed by Suncorp when it paid $77,000 for his client list.
“I’ll be living up here until they make me a reasonable offer so I can get on with my life, or they’ll be bringing me down in a pine box,” he said.
Overlooking the yellow arches of the Goodna McDonald’s would have been trying had the hunger strike been true. But Williams, in his recorded meeting with the Cairns law firm five years later, admitted jumping off the roof each night and going home.
“You don’t go into these things to die, you go into these things because some bastard needs to be taught a lesson,” he said.
The protest hit its mark and Williams walked away from Suncorp with a “seven-figure” payout. But his financial planning days would come back to haunt him.
McLean claims that among other practices Williams asked him on “at least three occasions” to forge signatures on client paperwork at the firm. The Courier-Mail does not suggest the actions were illegal, but they point to potential unscrupulous conduct that appeared to warrant further investigation.
There was another claim in McLean’s notes, which others had also hinted at, that a former teenage office assistant had raised concerns about sexual harassment.
Disturbingly, the notes recorded a claim that Williams told McLean they should say the junior assistant, Jessica Walsh, offered them sex for an extra $100 a week in case she lodged a complaint.
McLean took his concerns about Williams to Suncorp at the time. Williams discovered McLean had turned whistleblower and sacked him. McLean went on to work with another corporate agent.
“As hard as it was, and is, I have left it in the Lord’s hands and asked Him to handle it,” he wrote in an email to a colleague at the time.
That was until Williams got into Parliament, and there was a knock on McLean’s door.
“I was really concerned that the Rick Williams I knew, that he would be in any kind of political leadership,” McLean explained this week of his decision to speak out.
“If I stood by, I would be a shocking Queenslander.”
His allegations needed to be checked and finding some of the people at the time would prove challenging.
Andrew Roberts, the former boyfriend who Williams allegedly wanted “done over”, had just moved house. His neighbour said to go to a local pub and find a Scotsman drinking a Guinness who might know how to contact Roberts. Sure enough the Scotsman came through.
When Roberts answered his mobile, the first thing he said when asked about the MP was that Williams had tried to hire someone to get him done over. Roberts said he knew because Bruce McLean, worried about his safety, had warned him at the time.
Roberts, admitting his own past imprisonment for assault, said he took a statement from McLean to police but it wasn’t signed under oath so they couldn’t act. Williams had made his life hell, to the point he’d left town, he claimed.
A friend of former office assistant Jessica Walsh remembered the suburb where her family once lived, which eventually led her to be traced to the US. Her first response when asked about Williams was that in her opinion he was a “sleaze”. She claimed he’d called her sexy and touched her leg when she was only 17.
Records were obtained from a court case in which Williams was committed to stand trial on a sex-assault charge involving a separate 18-year-old woman.
Transcripts showed the woman accused Williams of groping her in a swimming pool, but she had an extensive history of mental illness and prosecutors did not proceed with the charge, presumably because of a lack of evidence.
Separate court records showed Williams’ half-brother Jack Cooper, the convicted killer, had told a psychiatrist in 1985 that Williams had been involved in drug dealing before turning to God. Then there are concerns from multiple sources about Williams’ dealings with an elderly financial planning client, Bill Rogers. Williams borrowed more than $20,000 from Rogers and for a period co-owned an Ipswich property with him.
A concerned employee of Williams sent letters to the financial regulator and Suncorp. Williams says he was not questioned by either and that Rogers was a long-term family friend.
The Courier-Mail doesn’t know whether the allegations are true. Just that there is enough to warrant further investigation. But it all adds up to a major headache for Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, who has pitched her government as ushering in a new era of integrity. Police are examining the material for any evidence of potential illegality. Beyond that, the Premier will have to consider whether Williams is fit to remain in her ranks, and whether it is appropriate for him to return to a powerful parliamentary committee overseeing police after she stood him down.
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