03 | Bondy | Burn the b*stards

Diamonds, mansions and mistresses, Bondy has been living the high life, but his ruthless pursuit of success begins to have devastating consequences for his marriage to Eileen. After his win in the America’s Cup banks lend Bond billions and he’s doing deals with the likes of Donald Trump. But his true character is revealed when he becomes a beer baron and ruins the lives of people on the edge of his empire. This is episode 3 of a 6-part history podcast series from ABC Rewind for Radio National and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  There are a lot of perfectly sensible reasons to start a war. Territory, resources, pigs. Wait, what?

• 0:13Speaker 02

  You've got to pay for that pig.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Yes, a pig, a pastry shop, a football game, sometimes even birds.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  They don't seem to be easy to kill.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  History is filled with some stupid wars. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are diving right into them with me, Mark Vonnell.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Search No One Saw It Coming podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  Just a warning that this episode discusses mental health and suicide.

• 0:46Speaker 03

  When Alan Bond arrives home in Australia in October 1983, fresh off his America's Cup win, Perth throws him an epic party.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  The city went wild. No one had seen anything like it.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Nearly half a million people line the city's streets hailing their hero, Bondi. The man who'd achieved the impossible, ending the 132-year reign of the New York Yacht Club. Western Australia's newly-elected premier, Brian Burke, is there.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  Everything was right over the top and the parade was led by the America's Cup, followed by that great big winking kangaroo. And then along came Peter Allen, singing I Still Call Australia Home, followed by a parade of cars a mile long.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  When Bondi triumphantly raises the cup to the sky, the crowd roars. His wife Eileen rides next to him, lapping it up. They're the darlings of Australia, the golden couple.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  For a weekend, the city welcomed Alan Bond. They forgot that some of them thought that Alan was a bit of a con man and others thought he was a bit sharp by half and they all just loved and supported him.

• 2:04Speaker 03

  But just weeks after the parade, Alan makes that trip to Paris, the one you heard about at the end of the last episode, where he's filmed in front of the Arc de Triomphe, looking very triumphant and very intimate with a woman who is very much not his wife. Her name is Diana Bliss and take note, one day she'll profoundly change Alan and Eileen's lives. But for now, when Eileen sees the pretty young blonde on the news, she cracks it.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  Basically, she wanted to teach Alan a lesson.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  When Alan gets back to Australia, she kicks him out of the family home and banishes him to their city apartment. Lesley Green, head of PR for Bondi's America's Cup Challenge, says it then gets real messy.

• 2:54Speaker 05

  She took all his clothing up there, all his Savile Row suits and shirts and ties. And he gets dressed and comes down to Bond Corporation to start work. And one of the directors looks at him and he said, Alan, I think there's something wrong with your pants. And Alan looks down and he went, oh my God. What Eileen had done was she had cut off six to eight inches of one leg of each pair of very expensive pants so that he could really never wear them again.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Safe to say, Eileen wears the pants in that relationship. Of course, it's not just Alan's personal life that is getting messy.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  This hero raising the America's Cup to the sky is also a man of questionable business dealings, of multiple flirtations with bankruptcy, a man who makes a habit of crossing the line in the bedroom and the boardroom.

• 3:57Speaker 06

  Look, I think the intriguing thing about Alan Bond is that there's this duality to him. He's a white collar con man, but also a national hero, a folk hero.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Alan Bond, Bondi, is a walking contradiction, a chameleon. Behind his larrikin facade is a man with a silver tongue. Yes, he's charming, but he's also cunning and ruthless. He believes there's one set of rules for him and another for everybody else. Well, I guess we'll see about that.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  I'm Mark Humphreys and from ABC Rewind, this is Bondi from Hero to Zero. Episode three, Burn the Bastards.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  When Lesley Green is recruited as the head of PR for Bond Corporation, she's stoked. It's a big job. Alan Bond's the man about town. His fingers are in a lot of pies. Some of those fingers might be a little dirty, but Lesley doesn't know that yet. So when she's invited to her very first board meeting, Lesley's excited and a little bit nervous. She takes the lift to the 51st floor of Bond Corp's headquarters and enters the boardroom where Alan introduces her to the executive team.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  He said, I think this is a milestone moment. We've never had a woman around this board table before. And I said, oh goodness, I'm flattered, you know. And one of the other board members suddenly piped up and said something that absolutely stopped the room. We have had women in this boardroom, but they haven't been around the table. They've been on the table on a Friday night.

• 5:54Speaker 05

  And I just, I just froze. I realised that this sort of talk and these sort of so-called jokes were common in this company.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Yuck. But if it makes you feel any better, most of the men from that boardroom are now dead. And dare I ask, how does Bondi respond?

• 6:19Speaker 05

  He laughed outrageously with all the other directors and I sat there looking like an idiot.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Around the same time as this woman on the boardroom table incident, some colleagues take Lesley aside and give her a heads up. They say.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  Now, you're new here and Alan's overseas, but he's coming back shortly. And every time Alan comes back from overseas to sort of re-establish his authority, he always fires somebody and we never know who it's going to be. I was a bit terrified. He wanted to rule. He wanted everybody to know that he was in charge and they better look out.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Sounds like HR wasn't really a thing at Bond Corporation. In the 1970s, Alan Bond was scraping through deal by deal. Somehow with that silver tongue and sheer determination, he survived. And now that he's won the cup, now that he's been photographed with President Reagan, rubbed shoulders with some of the world's richest men, had his mug on the front page of newspapers around the world, he's made it. The world is Bondi's oyster.

• 7:35Speaker 07

  The America's Cup is what made Bond essentially because he suddenly had bankers flocking to his door.

• 7:41Speaker 03

  This is journalist Paul Barry.

• 7:43Speaker 07

  At one stage, he had 54 bankers lending him money. And they all think, well, here's a guy who's never going to give up, you know? His performance in the America's Cup just suggests that he's a bloke you can trust. He's a bloke that will look after our money. It gives him a lot of respect and so it fires the starting gun for Bond to borrow billions and billions of dollars and just become 10 times larger than he was previously.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  And look, there's no doubt that winning the cup has given Bondi a huge leg up and when Eileen's not around, a leg over. But he's also in the right place at the right time because in the mid 1980s, Australia's entering a new era, an era which, according to author Quentin Beresford, favours risk-taking entrepreneurs like Bond, the era of the corporate cowboy.

• 8:36Speaker 06

  The Hawke Keating government had deregulated the economy. 16 foreign banks were allowed to set up in Australia to complete with Australia's Big Four. What you had was an avalanche of credit. There was money to burn, money to lend, and it was free-wheeling capitalism. And this just plays straight into Alan Bond's personality.

• 9:06Speaker 07

  It was enormous, you know, Bondi and Skyes and Elliot and people like that. People thought that Australia had suddenly invented a new, a new way of doing business, a new way of making money.

• 9:17Speaker 03

  With all this new borrowed money, Australia's corporate cowboys go on a spending spree.

• 9:25Speaker 03

  Bondi does what all self-respecting tycoons do and buys his first TV station in Perth, Channel Nine's Swan Television. But what he really wants is to create Australia's first national TV network. So he buys Sydney and Melbourne's Channel Nine from Kerry Packer in a staggering billion-dollar handshake. To quote one of Channel Nine's own shows, it was literally the.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  The eyes of financial analysts are watering, but Alan Bond holds firm.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  I think the first network across Australia is important and I think we intend to take that network to other parts of the world.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Although Alan decided at an early age that he would never go down the mines, he certainly wasn't opposed to buying them. Back in the 1970s, he'd bought a majority share in oil and gas conglomerate Santos and a small interest in the Pilbara. But now he's like a little Pac-Man, swallowing up gold mines along the famous Kalgoorlie Strip, the Golden Mile. Bondi has big plans. He wants to merge them all into one giant operation and call it the Super Pit. It's prescient. The Super Pit becomes Australia's largest gold mine and thrusts Bondi into the mining big league. Bond control companies will soon be a major player in not only national, but

• 10:51Speaker 03

  in world gold production.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  With TV stations and mines under his belt, the next logical item on Bond's shopping list is a fleet of blimps. Blimps, you say? Well, we call them blimps. Alan hates the word, preferring to call them advertising balloons. And he starts imagining putting people in them.

• 11:18Speaker 06

  The 600, which is now just flown, can carry 22 people, which means that if you'd like to fly out of Niagara Falls, or Ayers Rock, or around the pyramids, at the same time advertising Camel cigarettes, this you could do with an airship.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Huh? What is this guy smoking? Something stronger than Camel cigarettes, I'd wager. But wait, there's more. Bond is the first person to start importing Hyundai's. He bankrolls the first private university in Australia and names it, you guessed it, Bond University. He buys an American brewery that also produces baked goods. Bond doesn't just have his fingers in a lot of pies, now he's got them in tarts, quiches and danishes.

• 12:05Speaker 06

  He's way more interested in the thrill of the next deal. That's what really motivated Bond. You know, the risk-taking nature of Bond. He thinks he's the best wheeler-dealer in town, in the world, probably.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Problem is, every new deal is a new line of credit.

• 12:24Speaker 06

  His modus operandi of doing this was to borrow, borrow, borrow.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  You'd think at this point someone would have put a stop to this. And analysts do start challenging Alan Bond's frightening amount of debt, his whole business model. But the lenders don't listen.

• 12:40Speaker 06

  He had this deadly persuasiveness. He used to say, get me into the bank and I'll come out with the money. And that's how he convinced these hard-headed bank CEOs and executives to lend him 14 billion.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  He's like a bank robber where the bank is actually happy to hand the money over. But if the cash dries up, well, his whole empire could come unstuck in a heartbeat. And we're talking about 14 billion dollars of debt. That's gotta be a heavy weight to carry. But remarkably, it doesn't really seem to bother him. His PR queen, Lesley Green, remembers being told this on her first day on the job.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  Do you know the difference between Alan Bond and other people? And I said, um, no, what? And he said, well, other people don't sleep if they've just borrowed a million dollars. Alan Bond doesn't sleep unless he has borrowed a million dollars.

• 13:41Speaker 03

  Good to know Bondi's sleeping well at night, because it sounds like those who work for him are not.

• 13:47Speaker 06

  And, you know, he'd come home from a trip and he'd get back to Bond Corporation and his executives would just be left with the mess of how to make all this run.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  And on one particular trip, Bond comes face to face with the one person who might possibly understand him better than anyone else. Someone who shares his audacity, his recklessness, even his infidelities. Here to tell this story is a man named Tim Phillips. You'll find out who he is and what he does later in the series. But for now, take it away to him.

• 14:23Speaker 06

  Alan Bond had taken a trip from London to New York on the Concorde, when the Concorde was still a thing in those days, and he'd sat next to Donald Trump.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Must have been like looking into a mirror. So what do these businessmen who'll do business with anyone do? Well, they do business.

• 14:43Speaker 06

  During the course of that flight, which, if I remember correctly, was about three and a half hours, he negotiated to buy the St. Miritz Hotel in New York for 180 million US dollars. And they had reached that agreement and scribbled the agreement, both signed by both of them on a napkin from the Concorde. When Alan got back to the hotel, he sent a fax to his CFO and said, you've got to find 180 million dollars really quickly.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Who knew a napkin could be a legally binding document? But if you work for Bondi, you'd better be ready to handle anything that comes at you. The crassness, the bold moves, they're not contained to the boardroom. The Bonds are living big. Not long after Lesley starts working at Bond Corporation, she's summoned to lunch with Eileen. Lesley suspects she's being vetted to make sure she's a genuine hire and not one of Alan's floozies. Eileen rocks up, brandishing a diamond ring the size of a small melon.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  I said, my gosh, that is the most beautiful diamond ring I've ever seen. And she said, oh, oh, she said, it's a bit dirty at the moment. I've got to get it cleaned. So she summoned the waiter, took the ring off her finger and she said, take this out to the kitchen, talk to the chef, get him to put it in a saucepan of boiling water with some detergent and boil it up. And the poor, the young waiter went, oh my God, we can't do that. And she said, yep, yep, no, just tell him. So the poor kid wanders off and eventually comes back with the ring. It's sparkling clean. And she said, ah, that's better.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Contracts on a napkin, diamond rings in saucepans. These rich folk are just like us. But no doubt about it, the Bonds are living boldly.

• 16:37Speaker 06

  There's fleets of Mercedes-Benzes, there's yachts, of course.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  There's a private jet, lavish power lunches at the iconic Mediterranean restaurant in Perth. And the lift to Alan's office penthouse is lined with animal hide, rumored to be endangered rhinoceros leather. Bonds also dabbling in the art world, investing in iconic pieces like Manet's La Promenade. The wealth is eye-watering, and so is their real estate portfolio. The Bonds own a penthouse in Sydney's Double Bay, two in Manhattan, four luxury homes in London, an entire English village. And when a mansion in Perth isn't quite mansion-y enough, they do the only logical thing.

• 17:23Speaker 06

  We bought the block next door for millions of dollars just to build a big mansion.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  This sprawling estate becomes the family home in Dalkeith that looks out over the Swan River. There's a 12-car garage and eight bathrooms, one of which has a phone next to the loo so Bondi can do business while he's on the shitter. And local journalist Alison Fan says the mansion is quite something inside.

• 17:50Speaker 06

  The furnishings were a little bit astonishing. You had these ebony black female statues, you know, bare breasts as soon as you walked into the entrance, which would be inappropriate today.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Finally, some nudity in this podcast.

• 18:04Speaker 06

  The whole thing that you would expect to have is a Hollywood movie star's home, and that's what it was.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  From the outside, they're living the dream. But there are whispers about Bondi's indiscretions.

• 18:17Speaker 06

  I'm sure Eileen knew about her affairs because everybody in Perth was talking about them. He didn't seem to hide them in any way. Every time that he met up with someone, the cameras were on him. But Eileen was very much her own woman, and whatever arrangement they had between them was their business.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Despite Alan's wandering eye, hands and third leg, Alan and Eileen are a powerhouse team. By now, they've raised four kids and built an empire together. But the name being whispered more and more loudly around town is Diana Bliss, the young woman pictured with Alan in Paris. The 1980s really was a golden era for men falling in love with women named Diana. Her friend Joanna Johns says Diana captured Bondi's heart.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  You know, Alan was married and she didn't go talking about it in details. But, you know, the little tag that people might want to give her for having been his mistress, that I think that she just wasn't making ever any demands on him. She didn't call him, she didn't chase him. I think he was the one that was pursuing her and wooing her.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  So Eileen is dealing with all this, but she's a tough cookie. She sucks it up and gets on with things.

• 19:39Speaker 06

  She was very flamboyant and didn't give a damn what people thought. She was, you know, just a fun person to be with, very generous, laughed a lot. Sort of was a good balance to Alan.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  It's been said that the best thing about Bond was Eileen. As charming as Bond could be, when he wondered something, Eileen could do it effortlessly.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  She owned a room, but not in that kind of scary way. She'd walk into a room and you'd think, wow, oh, that's great, Eileen's here.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Eileen's a fixture of the social column Melissa Hoyer writes for The Sunday Telegraph.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Everyone was dull, dull, oh dull, what about the dull?

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Everyone loves Eileen. She's warm and fun and a lovely mum. The only questionable thing about her, her fashion choices. Eileen had a very quirky fashion sense. She was never subtle. Lesley Green remembers Eileen turning up to an America's Cup function one night in what can only politely be described as Australiana.

• 20:45Speaker 05

  She turned up in a dark green mini dress, which is supposed to look like a sort of an Australian forest. And in the middle of that, there was a three-dimensional, enormous koala bear, fur and everything. Its eyes were stuck on the front as well. And I didn't, I didn't know where to look.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  I've heard of a painting's eyes following you around a room, but never a dress's. And it wouldn't be a story about 1980s corporate cowboys without mentioning the parties. The most indulgent would have to be the wedding of their oldest daughter Suzanne in 1985. It begins with the invitations. White leather wallets with gold medals tucked inside, etched with a portrait of the bride and groom. Standard stuff, really. On the day of the nuptials, the who's who of Australia is chauffeured to St. Patrick's Church in Fremantle. Channel 7 journalist Alison Fan is there.

• 21:45Speaker 06

  The Bonds were the number one news, you know, item in Perth, in West Australia. People were waiting outside like they do with royalty.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Suzanne arrives in a 1932 vintage Rolls Royce, wearing a $60,000 designer gown. The reception at the family's Dalkeith estate is epic.

• 22:05Speaker 06

  Fireworks, the whole bit that you normally reserve for movie stars.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Then there's the cake, a six-foot-high tower of profiteroles. Bond must have had his fingers in those too.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  There is, as one observer has said, a touch of class.

• 22:21Speaker 07

  And a touch of crass.

• 22:26Speaker 07

  And the bash must have cost a million dollars or more.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  And to think I first got married at the registry of births, deaths and marriages. No wonder it didn't last. Now, here's the thing about these 1980s corporate cowboys. They understand the power of marketing, of how a lavish lifestyle looks. Bondi's not just flaunting his wealth because he can. Author Quentin Beresford says it's strategic.

• 22:53Speaker 06

  Bond saw conspicuous consumption as a tool for business. That if you project success, it will give you leverage in the banks, that the banks will find you a compelling customer.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  In other words, if you act rich, you can be rich because the banks will think you're good for the money.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Bondi's decadence, his bold acquisitions, his cutthroat nature in the boardroom, it's all paying off. The problem is Bond also has those pesky debts. He needs a cash cow. And he wonders, what's something Australians love that's bound to bring in the bucks?

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Ah, yes, beer. Bondi already owns the Swan Brewery. This jingle is spooking. A jingle with lyrics specifically celebrating Bond's own America's Cup win.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  His blimps, sorry, advertising balloons, also float over Perth promoting his beer. But now he ups the stakes. Journalist Paul Barry says Bondi doesn't want to just be the beer king of WA. He wants to wear the national crown.

• 24:13Speaker 07

  And then he bought Tuise, which had New South Wales and Castleman in Queensland, which is far, far bigger than Swan. And that involved borrowing $2 billion. And that was just, again, completely stratospheric.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Another two bill on the ledger? Ah, she'll be right. Bondi isn't worried. He's no stranger to financial risk. But there's another risk here, something he doesn't account for, a blind spot. His move into brewing on the east coast is about to ruffle some feathers.

• 24:45Speaker 07

  And he then just behaved really stupidly.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Paul Barry's covering this story for the ABC at the time.

• 24:52Speaker 07

  It is beer essentially that keeps the Bond Group afloat. Beer that pays the bills. And for Bond, the beer market seems to be going bad.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  It's going bad because Bondi commits a mortal sin.

• 25:05Speaker 07

  He angered Queenslanders enormously by putting WA breweries on the Forex tin, which, you know, they hate because it's the Queensland beer.

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Here's the thing, in the 1980s, states are very protective of their beer. If you put a Waratah on a VB tin, Victoria really would be bitter. So mucking around with Forex, it 100% does not pass the pub test. And it only goes downhill from here.

• 25:34Speaker 07

  And he cut down the credit that the publicans got from 30 days to seven days. So that really screwed them, the people who were selling his beer. So they thought, well, bugger this, I don't want to sell his beer anymore.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  Queensland's publicans turn off the taps to any beers owned by Bond. And that hurts. But it's what Alan does next in New South Wales that's a disastrous move. Something that will completely tarnish his image as a kickabout national hero.

• 26:04Speaker 07

  I think for my parents, the pub was much more than just an income for them. Both my parents loved a yarn. They loved meeting people and providing a, really a social service.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Peter Lynch is just a teenager when his parents, Reg and Joan, are running the Pimble Pub on Sydney's North Shore. It's a typical 1980s pub. Coin-operated space invader machines, some pool tables and dartboards. An old school place that reeks of sour beer and cigarettes. And for younger listeners, yes, you could smoke indoors in the 80s. You dodged a bullet there. Anyhow, Peter is a pub kid. The Lynch's live in the rooms upstairs.

• 26:45Speaker 07

  It's all about the friendships and the community that they provided through a hotel to welcome people. I'm sure a number of people came in there just because they were lonely.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Reg and Joan are in their late 50s when they buy the lease to the Pimble Pub. The plan is to run it for a few years and build up some cash for their retirement nest egg. And in the 1980s, Tuise makes it easy for people like the Lynch's to do this.

• 27:12Speaker 07

  The view was there was nothing safer in the hotel industry than a Tuise lease. Because you would get support from the brewery. And so it was one big family, really.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  This is how it works. You buy a pub lease from Tuise. It's called a goodwill. At the end of the goodwill lease, if you've increased the market value of your pub, then Tuise gives you a payout reflecting that, which Paul Barry says is usually a solid amount of cash.

• 27:40Speaker 07

  And these guys have basically put their life savings, a lot of them, into a pub on the basis that they can buy a lease for, say, a couple of hundred thousand dollars, do a great job building up the trade at the pub and then sell it for $500,000 when they retire.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  So by the time the Lynch's buy the Tuise lease for the Pimble Pub, it's a well-trodden path. As close to a guaranteed cash injection as you can get. But when Alan Bond buys Tuise, things take a turn. Peter's dad, Reg, immediately gets a bad feeling.

• 28:13Speaker 07

  My father didn't trust Alan Bond from the beginning. My father worried and the other hotels, they were given some notices to quit, meaning they had to leave the hotel, leave their business. Bond comes in and says, I've looked at the contract. I can take your leases away without compensation and that's what I'm going to do. And they go, you can't do that. You'll kill us. You'll take away our life savings. You can't do that. And people just looked at having their whole lives destroyed.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  Because unfortunately, Bond can do this and he does. There's a clause in these agreements that says Tuise has the right to cut the leaseholders loose with no compensation. But this has never happened. It's just not the way Tuise has ever done things. Alan Bond, however, well, he's a different beast.

• 29:05Speaker 07

  People were incredibly depressed. The leaseholders tried to negotiate with Bond. And they were told by the man that they were negotiating with that Bondi had said, my advice to you is burn the bastards. And that became a sort of slogan for the Tuise leaseholders.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  The leaseholders are not going to take this lying down. They set up a fighting fund to take on Alan Bond.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  The group says, by trampling over 70 years of tradition, our hotel is trying to hijack $30 million of hoteliers' life savings, which were paid as goodwill into buying their leases.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  The group takes Bond to court, pleading its case, but it's David versus Goliath.

• 29:49Speaker 07

  We weren't getting anywhere. It seemed like all the decisions we were making, Bond found out about them and/or Bond's team did. And then they would come at us in some other way. So it looked more and more like we were going to lose my parents' livelihood.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  And their home. All this stress is taking a serious toll on Peter's dad, Reg. He's just had heart surgery and the fear of losing his retirement savings pushes him to the edge.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  My father was getting more and more depressed. And he was going to his doctor and he was trying to get help. He was on Serapax, an antidepressant drug.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  No matter where Reg goes, he can't get away from the stress.

• 30:33Speaker 07

  There was a Swan blimp, which would fly over Sydney all the time. And Swan was the beer from Western Australia that was like this reminder to us looking up that Bond is like monitoring us all the time from the skies.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Those bloody blimps. One day, Reg wanders off and doesn't tell anyone where he's going. A day passes and there's still no sign of him.

• 30:59Speaker 07

  So I walked over the Raaway Bridge from the hotel to the police station.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  And it's there that Peter and his family's lives are changed forever.

• 31:10Speaker 07

  They said, oh, some news has just come in. I was invited into one of the back rooms of the police station and told the news that my- My father's body had been found and all indications are that he'd taken his own life.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Peter's in complete shock.

• 31:29Speaker 07

  I left the police station and walked back over the bridge and I distinctly remember stopping on the bridge, this news that I was about to deliver to my family, how everything is going to change. I needed to be strong, whatever that meant, for my mother because I knew when I delivered this news, she's going to need all the help and support she can.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  It's not until days later that police find a letter that Reg has left behind.

• 31:56Speaker 07

  Saying that he, he just could not fight the fight anymore with Alan Bond. Their threats were too much for him. He just couldn't find any other way out of it. And that we needed to maintain the fight to get what was owed.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  The leaseholders fight for months, but Bond's legal team is brutal. It's not giving an inch. In the end, 10 families, including Peter's, lose their pubs.

• 32:22Speaker 07

  For my mother, she was absolutely devastated to have to be forced out.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Peter, his mum and his sister are left to find a new home.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Eventually, there is a win of sorts. The court orders Alan Bond to pay the leaseholders compensation.

• 32:42Speaker 07

  When we heard the news, it was a bittersweet, certainly for my family, but I was thrilled that at least my mother would have some money to retire on and not be without a house and basically be thrown on the street, which was what was going to happen.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  But the win has come at a huge cost.

• 33:00Speaker 07

  Everybody who knew my father remember him as this, you know, incredibly happy, funny, joking, always trying to help other people. He had an unbelievably generous heart. And that's how he should be remembered.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  More than four decades later, Peter's words for Alan Bond are pretty kind, considering.

• 33:22Speaker 07

  I don't have any hatred for him, but I also feel a huge amount of pity for him, that he didn't use his talents to try and make the world a better place when he clearly had so many talents. Just absolute sadness because it still has a daily impact on my life. So many families around the country are worse off for Alan Bond even existing, which is such a tragedy for a human being.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Now, this story, what happens with the Tuukni's leaseholders, is not something many people remember or even ever knew about Alan Bond. But they should. This is not the larrikan Alan Bond, the triumphant winner of the America's Cup, our nation's hero. This is the other side of Alan Bond, the ruthless one.

• 34:13Speaker 06

  There's more rogue about Alan Bond, there is lovable, in my view. But that image of him as the battler, of the bloke who took Australia to the world sporting stage, it's been very hard to erase.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Here's a less curated version of Alan Bond from his PR manager, Lesley Green.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  Alan was charming and pleasant and whatever. And at other times, you never knew, you never knew when the mood would change. And he would snap or jump up and down or say something which was terrible. You were, you were on your guard the whole time.

• 34:53Speaker 03

  But Paul Barry has the harshest words.

• 34:56Speaker 07

  I don't think he felt any guilt or any shame. He certainly had no fear. He was incredibly persuasive, incredibly manipulative. And so I think, you know, he fits the classic pattern of someone who really doesn't have the normal emotions that most of us have. So he, he was never afraid that things would go wrong. He was always confident that he'd be fine. And he treated people badly, but he didn't, it didn't sort of kind of seem to register with him that he was doing that. He was so narcissistic and so interested in his own advancement.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  Indeed. Takes a special kind of ego to quit school at 14 and then name a university after yourself. But what Alan does know can't be taught. And by 1987, Bondi is one of Australia's wealthiest people. Not the richest, though. Someone has beaten Bondi to become Australia's first billionaire. Someone who'll play a key role in bringing him down.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Next time on Bondi from Hero to Zero, Bondi's empire is facing a wipeout. He's up against something he can't buy or charm his way out of. Something he can't control.

• 36:08Speaker 06

  No one has ever seen falls of this magnitude anywhere, anytime in the history of financial markets.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  The global financial world implodes and everything Bond's worked for could be wiped out in the blink of an eye. It's horrific. It is panic. And there's no signs of it stopping at the moment.

• 36:26Speaker 07

  I have to say it's a bloodbath. Everyone thought Bond was going to go bust.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Things weren't getting any better. And in fact, they were getting worse.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  So what does he do? Bond decided stupidly to poke the bear. Goodness knows why. Roland became incandescent with rage and he declared war on Bond. Bondi from Hero to Zero is an ABC Rewind production for Radio National, produced on the lands of the Naluma, Gadigal and the Jodhikwaring people. I'm Mark Humphreys. Catch you next time.

• 37:07Speaker 03

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