Why DID Australian millionaire pay hitman to kill his Scots business partner?
As tycoon is jailed for 39 years after dramatic trial...
FOR a time, Michael McGurk and his business partner Ron Medich must have felt as if they could rule the world – or at least their distant corner of it. Property tycoon Medich, with his shock of white hair and steel-rimmed glasses, was a familiar face among the movers and shakers of Sydney society and a permanent fixture on Australia’s rich list.
McGurk, a wheeler-dealing expat Scot, had a taste for adventure matched only by his thirst for money. Together, they forged a formidable partnership driving forward their considerable business interests with likeminded ruthlessness.
It seemed like nothing could go wrong. Until they fell out, in explosive fashion. The ramifications of their feud would end in bloody murder for one and a life sentence in prison for the other.
This week, Medich’s trademark snowy buzz-cut and heavy-set jowls were once more centre stage. However, he was not pressing the flesh at some smart society do this time, but climbing handcuffed into the back of a police wagon to begin a 39-year jail term for arranging the murder of his former business associate almost a decade ago.
After one of Australia’s most sensational trials, a judge at New South Wales Supreme Court told 70-year-old Medich he was guilty of an ‘abhorrent and heinous crime’. He will be 100 before he can apply for parole and will likely die behind bars. His multi-million-pound business empire now lies in tatters, destroyed by a toxic hatred of one man.
That man, in the latter years of their association, had turned from useful ally to unwelcome rival and Medich wanted rid of him. He was no longer certain who he was dealing with. He wasn’t the first to feel that way as, throughout his turbulent life, McGurk always had something of the chameleon about him.
His talent for reinvention had brought him far, from his humble origins in the Glasgow slums to a life of luxury halfway round the world.
HIS murder proved shocking, not just because of the brazen manner in which it was carried out, but because of the enthralling detail it would unearth about his shady past and how it led him into the path of an assassin’s bullet.
The killing in 2009 was brutally efficient. Less than half an hour after Kimberley McGurk had sent her husband out to collect their eight-year-old son Luc from a friend’s and get a takeaway meal for dinner, she heard her child’s bloodcurdling cries. ‘Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, quickly, Daddy!’ screamed her terrified son. ‘There was a pop and there is blood,’ he stammered as she pushed past the quaking youngster and raced out into the cool September night. By the driveway to the family’s £1million home in Sydney’s exclusive north shore suburb of Cremorne, McGurk lay dying next to his black S-class Mercedes, executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.
While the victim was buried in a coffin decorated with a Saltire and a Celtic football top, Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford, commander of Sydney’s homicide squad, confirmed the gangland-style hit was clearly ‘targeted’.
Friends and neighbours could not fathom it; here was a selfmade millionaire with strong Catholic faith who, with his Australian wife Kimberley, had raised four ‘beautiful, wellmannered kids’ with no airs or graces, despite their wealth.
Police soon formed a different view. As detectives dug ever deeper into McGurk’s complex private world, their biggest challenge was deciding which of his many enemies most wanted him dead. They, too, were struggling to get a handle on this slippery character.
Alongside devoted family man, police would place the labels loan shark, property speculator, failed businessman, debt collector, violent extortionist, alcoholic, cocaine addict and alleged supplier of prostitutes to the well-heeled and famous.
So adept was he at changing his spots that, at one point, investigators could not even be sure of his true name and age. In his colourful, brutal life, the born gambler and rampant egotist even dared to try to sue on of the world’s richest men, the Sultan of Brunei, after claiming the absolute monarch welshed on a multi-million-pound agreement to buy a rare miniature Koran.
After shaking apart McGurk’s multi-layered existence, detectives were finally able to piece together the astonishing conspiracy which led to his death.
WITHIN a year, four people were convicted for their part in the murder including hitman Haissam Safetli, accomplice Christopher Estephan, getaway driver Senad Kaminic and their ringleader, ex-Australian boxing champion Lucky Gattellari.
The most sensational twist was yet to come, however, when Gattellari identified his childhood friend Medich, the son of Croatian immigrants, as the criminal mastermind who ordered the hit. He certainly had motive. Before McGurk’s death, the pair were embroiled in numerous court actions, each alleging they were owed vast sums of money by the other from various property deals.
But how did this disparate pair, born worlds apart, drift into each other’s orbits?
Michael Loch McGurk’s trajectory through life was anything but direct.
Born into the working-class poverty of Leith, Edinburgh, in 1958, his parents soon divorced and his mother, Jane, remarried and moved to Glasgow’s tough Gorbals district. Her second husband, Bob Rushford, adopted Mick and changed the boy’s surname to Rushford when he was 12 in 1970, two years after his mother gave birth to a second son, Bobby.
According to a childhood friend, Mick was a stocky boy with a beaky nose and a mop of unkempt ‘Beatles-style’ hair.
William Sykes, now 51, said they grew up in ‘the original slum area’, infamous for incubating gang violence. He said: ‘We would hang around as a group, play football together with lots of our friends, the usual stuff.’
Although young Mick went to the Catholic school and Mr Sykes to the Protestant school, they were inseparable and often hung out at Mr Sykes’s mother’s fruit shop, where Mick was ‘quite a family favourite’. They stayed friends until 14, before losing touch.
Ambitious to make his name, Mick moved to Australia in the early 1990s where he worked as a salesman for ECC, a Sydney-based lighting firm. He reportedly fell out of favour when he substituted cheap lights for quality fittings for a project at a five-star hotel.
While employed by ECC, customs officers found out a Scot called Michael Rushford had overstayed his temporary visa.
Served with a deportation notice, he left Australia, travelling to New Zealand, via Fiji. He soon returned with a new passport and new identity as Michael Loch McGurk – his original birth name. The only difference was he altered his birth date to shed six years.
He may have retained his thick Scots brogue, but Michael McGurk now claimed to be 45 and born in 1964, on January 26 – Australia Day. He would soon marry local girl Kimberley, allowing him leave to stay. Aside from his two identities, he displayed two personalities. To family and friends he was a doting father and generous community fundraiser; but in business he could be ruthless and violent.
CLOSE friend Richard Vereker, who has written a book called The Fast Life and Sudden Death of Michael McGurk, said McGurk suffered from a rampant cocaine habit and an inability to resist a business deal, however unlikely.
In 2005, McGurk and two associates bought a matchbox-sized hand-written copy of the Koran, kept in a jewel-encrusted silver case, from a retired KGB colonel in Russia and thought they had persuaded the Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah of Brunei to buy the 400year-old relic as a wedding gift for his latest bride, former Malaysian TV presenter Azrina Mazhar Hakim. When the £4million deal failed to materialise, McGurk’s company Garsec tried to sue the Sultan for breach of contract at Australia’s Supreme Court, but the case was thrown out. The outcome caused bad blood. One associate, David Rahme, said he lost tens of thousands of pounds investing in the Koran scheme.
He said: ‘He [McGurk] obviously stepped on a lot of toes and made some pretty bad enemies.’
The Koran disaster failed to dent McGurk’s belief in himself as a ‘super-salesman’. He chased business across the globe, from Iran to Beirut, London to Bali, always scheming, often spending money he did not have.
He rented offices in downtown Sydney, but much of the business was done in nearby pubs. He chopped from dotcom deals to football coaching clinics. Fine print on property deals was a way of extorting money. He is even said to have diddled his dentist out of about £14,000 in reconstruction and veneer work and never paid for a replica of Nicole Kidman’s necklace in Moulin Rouge he had made for his wife. ‘All [his deals] ended badly and he thought nothing of making enemies – even of his friends,’ said Mr Vereker, adding that McGurk would blow up to £8,000 a week on cocaine, ecstasy and alcohol binges.
He also splashed out on a plush harbourside family home, taking luxury ski holidays and sending his children – Nicola, Lochlan, Mia and Luc – to Sydney’s most exclusive Catholic school.
He was less indulgent of his Scottish relatives. His elderly mother rarely saw her son after he emigrated. ‘I went over there about four times when Michael was alive and met his children. He had lovely kids and a lovely lifestyle,’ she said two years ago. But she added: ‘He was leading a funny life. There’s no way I’d have moved over there. I wouldn’t have trusted him.’
A mother’s instinct was unerring. His lifestyle was, indeed, a front. He owed a property developer £4.15million when he died and the Mercedes beside which he met his end was about to be repossessed.
Embroiled in numerous property disputes, McGurk was due to appear in Sydney’s Supreme Court the day after he was shot in relation to one case. His lawyer had to inform the judge that his client had been murdered. In the weeks before his death, McGurk seemed to sense he was a marked man. He had voiced his fear that a hitman was on his trail.
He wrote a note naming the businessman who wanted him dead and left it with a friend to give to police in the event of foul play.
MCGURK also claimed to have secret tape recordings allegedly implicating Medich along with high-ranking planning officials and politicians in corrupt high-stakes property deals.
But according to Gattellari, Medich’s former right-hand man and the Crown’s star witness, McGurk was killed because their ongoing civil disputes – which exceeded £470,000 – were making Medich the ‘laughing stock’ of Sydney and had ‘humiliated’ the father-of-six in the eyes of his estranged socialite wife Odetta.
‘That f ****** b ****** is ruining my life. That b ****** is making me look like an absolute idiot,’ Medich ranted. Medich, who was also convicted of ordering the intimidation of Kimberley McGurk in August 2010, was first arrested in late October 2010 and originally tried for murder last year – but the jury was unable to reach a verdict.
The Crown won a retrial and despite expending millions of his estimated £45million fortune on numerous legal challenges in a desperate attempt to keep himself out of prison, justice finally caught up with Medich. In his calmer moments in his cell, the shamed tycoon may come to realise that he will also never be truly free of his former business partner.
For McGurk, the chameleon, will be the ghost that taunts his killer from beyond the grave.