Bouncers and Bodyguards (28 page)

These moments of crisis and amusement, along with witnessing such things as Richard Krajicek smashing up three rackets in succession in the tunnel and Elena Dementieva in a towel, helped hold off the urge to simply sleep off the night before. When play was suspended, there was time to gloat at the court coverers, whom we often competed with for the title of easiest job in Wimbledon. Meanwhile, the real scandals took place in the little nooks and crannies around the complex. I knew of at least one incident of escorts having sex in the No. 1 Court players’ waiting room, and it became standard practice for escorts to use their all-areas privileges to dupe guards into letting mates in for free through the less well signposted gates. I could go on.

For any security professional, there is nothing worse than seeing your work undertaken by amateurs. Not only does the employment of underqualified people reduce the number of positions available for those fit for the job, but when those without adequate training or experience take up roles they are unprepared for there will inevitably be a devaluation of the profession as a whole. This is what made the situation at Wimbledon even more tragic.

Despite all of the above being revealed to managers over a pint every evening, I was offered the job of escort team manager a year later. This fact alone suggested that policies and practices were unlikely to change any time soon, making the All England Championship a high-profile accident waiting to happen. However, the introduction of SIA licensing meant that within a couple of years the approach to security at Wimbledon was completely revamped and thoroughly professionalised. Just as well, really.

H
ow many times had I asked myself the question, ‘What the bloody hell am I doing here?’ God only knows. These days, however, I don’t need to ask that question as much as I used to. Going from operations to administration and then into training over a 12-year period means that I now have something of a luxury ride. Monday-to-Friday hours, holidays with the kids and only the occasional weekend interruption when courses are on or we are undertaking professional development with our trainers, clients, etc.

My venture into the world of security and close personal protection has been an eventful one – nothing spectacular or heroic, but a steep learning curve nonetheless. And my experience in a multitude of security activities over 12 years has led me to where I am today. I give lectures, write training materials, design e-learning content and undertake a whole host of educational tasks related to delivering training for the purposes of being issued a security licence in New South Wales, Australia.

Twelve years ago, you probably wouldn’t have bet two bob on me making it through in one piece, let alone getting to where I am today. Well, I am here to tell you that you should have bet the farm on me – you’d be filthy fucking rich by now!

It all started in 1995. I had just finished a stint working as a pathology courier, driving around to doctors’ surgeries, picking up pathology materials and taking them back to the labs. On the return trip, I would drop off the results. Anyway, long story short, shit happened, and I took my then employer to court for allowing me to be potentially exposed to pathogens. The union was as weak as piss and didn’t defend me, even though I had photographic evidence. I went on stress leave and eventually left the job, and the missus and I ended up moving from the sunny northern beaches of Sydney to a place two hours north on a lake. It was a beautiful spot, but there was one big problem: I had no fucking job. Great!

I applied for roughly 300 jobs of varying types: delivery driver, office clerk, sales rep – hell, I even applied to sell bloody cars! No takers what so bloody ever. Not a single call back. The arseholes didn’t understand common decency.

By that point, I was pretty much all at sea, and I decided to try an advert for security-officer training. If only I had known then what I know now. I rocked up keen as mustard, ready to be the best I could be – sound familiar, anyone? – but I was dismayed to find that I had to fill out reams of paperwork over the course of two days and then sit an exam. Struth, I had been charged up to throw people around and be all Starsky and Hutch on a brother’s ass, but instead I found that I had to do schoolwork. I mumbled under my breath as I found a seat near to someone whom I considered to have equivalent bodily hygiene and prepared myself to be dazzled by the lecturer’s renditions of cop-type stories.

It turned out that the lecturers were in fact actual cops, from the robbery squad of all places, moonlighting at the weekends as instructors. It also became apparent that it was an open-book exam in which you could check the answers. If you could read, you would pass, so to speak – unless you were a complete stargazer!

After passing the exam, I was given a serious-looking certificate that I took to the cop shop, where I filled out some more forms, and,
voilà
, I was licensed to work. I had a choice of licensed categories I could apply for: static guard, armed guard, bodyguard or bouncer. I figured what the hell and ticked all the boxes. And that was that. I was licensed after just two days’ textbook training. I had no practical instruction and no experience, yet I could legally offer my services to provide the licensed activities listed above! Luckily for me (and for the rest of the free world), I wasn’t satisfied with just two days’ theory and began a quest to find mentors in the business to teach me how the job should really be done.

My search wasn’t always successful. Being something of a rabbit caught in headlights, I was taken for a ride by some bastards, but overall I met and learned from some very switched-on people, many of whom I am honoured to have known, let alone worked with.

At one point, it got to the stage that I had six different uniforms in my car, and I seemed to be continuously wearing a duty belt (fully equipped with holsters, handcuffs and all the ‘works and jerks’), a firearm, dark blue pants, black shoes and a T-shirt. I’d get a phone call and be told what uniform to put on, and off I’d go into the blue yonder. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, day in, day out. I loved it. I was doing everything a boy could wish for: working with ‘stars’, doing all sorts of covert stuff, getting mentored by the best of the best and loving it. However, there were many occasions when I thought I was centre stage in a Frank Spencer show but still managed to walk away as the ‘hero’.

I remember my first cash-in-transit job. It was a typical day. I was at my boss’s house, all tarted up but with no place to go, when another guard dropped round. We started to have a chinwag, as you do, when lo and behold the phone rang. It was a job: two armed guards were required to transport a consignment of cash from a vault in one bank to another vault in another bank. It sounded simple enough. So, after taking no notes during the briefing, my newly acquired buddy and I jumped into his car and made our way to the job, which was about 40 minutes’ drive away.

As we were driving along, we got into some serious chinwagging, and it turned out that we shared the same birthday and had similar hobbies. (He was a pom, but I didn’t hold that against him.) Anyway, while we were gasbagging away, both of us forgot what we had been told in the briefing – neither of us could remember the name of the bank we were supposed to go to. The only thing I could remember was the letter of the alphabet that the name of the bank started with. So, when we arrived in the town, we went to the first bank we saw that started with that letter.

Let me set the scene for you: it was 5.45 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, and the bank was closed but the staff were still on site. We knocked on the door. We were dressed in full uniform, complete with ID and guns, looking a million dollars. A member of the staff asked if they could help us, and we responded by saying that we were there for the ‘job’. The woman looked at us in a puzzled fashion and then said, ‘Come in and we’ll sort this out.’ The bank was an old one with no screened counters, and the vault was open. There was money as far as the eye could see. The woman told us to wait and went off to speak to someone. When she returned, she told us that no one knew anything about our job. ‘It’s all right, love,’ I said. ‘I’ll call the boss and see who stuffed up.’ We were then escorted out of the front door and back onto the footpath, where I got on my mobile and rang my boss.

‘Boss, we are here at Bank X, and they reckon they know nothing about our job.’

‘No fucking wonder, brainiac. You’re at the wrong fucking bank.’

I experienced a sudden constriction of my bowel muscles as I anticipated my boss jumping out of my phone and kicking me in the arse. An abrupt disconnection awoke me from my stupor, and we both hurried to the correct bank to start the real job, which was now behind schedule by 45 minutes after we had dicked around in the wrong location to begin with. It could only get better, right? Wrong.

We arrived at the correct bank this time and walked into a branch that was obviously moving, given the boxes and packing material lying around. A very attractive young lady (or so I thought) was on the other side of the counter, folding perforated cardboard packing boxes into shape. ‘I see you have spent time working at McDonald’s,’ I said, trying to be all that. It was then that I noticed her lapel badge: ‘Branch Manager’. Aw shit, not again. How many more screw-ups could I make? Plenty, as it turned out.

The branch manager gave me a stern look and said, ‘Where’s the strongbox?’

‘And what strongbox is that?’ I replied.

‘The one you are going to use to carry the contents of our safe up the street to the other bank?’

‘Oh, that strongbox.’ Nobody had told me anything about a fucking strongbox. ‘We’ll simply use one of your McDonald’s folding boxes,’ I said, suddenly realising what was coming out of my mouth.

‘OK,’ she replied.

The safe was then opened and its contents piled into a box. Anyone who tells you money isn’t heavy is a liar. About $400,000 in cash, cheques and other valuables was to be transferred, and we got ready to walk to the other bank, which was about 800 metres up the street.

‘How are we going to do this?’ the manager asked.

‘Well, we’ll go first, and you can follow at a safe distance.’

‘OK.’

I looked at my partner, and his face told me that he had never done this before either! As we walked out of the front door of the bank, some space opened up between us and the manager, and I said to my mate, ‘If anyone comes within 20 metres, give ’em the stare. If they come within ten metres, rest your hand on the butt of your firearm and give ’em the stare. If, after all that, they are still coming towards us on a mission, shoot the fuckers.’

He agreed that my suggestion sounded reasonable, and we continued on our way. As luck would have it, we arrived at the other branch without any issues whatsoever and surrendered the box to the new safe for storage. Job completed, we both exited stage left and returned to the car. The ride home was somewhat quieter than the ride up. Eventually, we both looked at each other and burst out laughing.

As a footnote to that tragedy, the branch manager actually rang my boss and raved on about how cool, calm and collected we were and that we’d done the most professional job she had ever witnessed from security guards. If only she knew.

My next big adventure brought me into contact with the dizzy heights of stardom and arguably the biggest celebrity of them all: Tom Cruise. It was during the filming of
Mission: Impossible II
in Sydney that I had one of the funniest cock-ups of my career, although it actually turned out brilliantly. In fact, there were several cock-ups, and not all of them turned out too brilliantly, come to think of it.

I received a call from a guy I knew who told me to get my sorry ass down to Sydney for some high-paying work doing crowd control on a movie set. I grabbed another mate, and we ended up working on the periphery of a shoot in The Rocks precinct of the city.

During the filming, Tom and Nicole were apparently splitting up or something, but don’t quote me on that – I ain’t a columnist. Anyway, word came down that no paparazzi were allowed anywhere near the shoot. My mate and I were at our assigned posts when we heard the head bodyguard screaming on the radio about a ‘pap’ photographer with a telephoto lens, taking shots from the hill just above us. The guard assigned to that location said that there was nothing he could do, as it was public space. The head bodyguard was seething. We decided to head up and see what was happening. My mate was tall – about six feet seven inches or more – and when we arrived on the spot he walked in front, around and underneath the camera to block the photographer’s view – it was hilarious. The photographer sure as shit pissed his pants, because he took off at a great rate of knots. Victory was ours.

Shortly after that, the bosses started to migrate towards us to see who we were and what our story was. We then started to get the cushier jobs and better hours, including overtime rates, because it was obvious that we could do the job effectively and legally. This was uppermost in the film people’s minds, what with the publicity and all.

My first fuck-up happened out the front of a government building they were filming in. They had a movie prop in the form of a sculpture out in front. It was fenced off, and my job was to look after it. One morning, a police security officer from the government building came wandering down to have a look at the sculpture. ‘Excuse me, officer,’ I said. ‘I can’t allow you past this point.’

‘You what?’ she growled.

‘I am sorry, but I cannot allow you past this point,’ I replied. I have never seen such a shade of purple and red before, and the steam coming out of her ears was breathtaking.