Kerry Packer's House Of Hookers Still Holds Dangerous Secrets

What Journalist Will Be Brave Enough To Reveal The Politicians And Business Leaders Who Accepted Packer's Sex Bribes And Corruption?

By Darryl Mason

In our story yesterday - Kerry Packer : King Of The Whores - we mentioned that journalist Paul Barry had faced legal threats over the inclusion, in his 1993 biography The Rise And Rise Of Kerry Packer, of key details about Kerry Packer's involvement with prostitutes, and the bordellos he set up for the pleasure of himself, his mates, Australian politicians and key business leaders in Barry's earlier version of the book The Rise And Rise Of Kerry Packer.

Barry has now explained all this in greater detail in a remarkable interview.

The immensely sad story of Carol Lopes, the woman Packer used to recruit his hookers, is filled out by Barry. And points to the ABC for not burying the lead.

Media magnate Kerry Packer used paid sex to advance his business and political interests, an expanded edition of his biography has revealed.

The revised edition of The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer says the former PBL boss had a long-term mistress who supplied him with prostitutes and effectively ran a brothel for him and selected friends.

Mr Packer gave her a house and paid her regularly. He put her in a Los Angeles business but after it went bust, their contact stopped.

"She felt that she was being punished for that and she couldn't see Packer thereafter, she couldn't get through to him," Mr Barry said.

"She would dress up and go down to Consolidated Press and sit in the foyer, trying to see him, and she would be ushered away.

"She would try to ring him and she would write to him, and she would sit outside his house. She wasn't able to see him.

Barry denies it is cowardly of him to release the story after Mr Packer's death.

"I think you would have been suicidal to write something like this about Kerry Packer while he was alive," he said.

"I think he was personally quite a frightening man, anyway. He was rich enough to keep you in court for evermore, even if he didn't have a case against you.

"He had been very aggressive in pursuing legal action against journalists. He would sue them personally to make sure their own assets were at risk.

"I think it would have been legally extraordinarily unwise to publish this while he was alive."

The author says he left the stories out the original edition because he feared he would be sued for defamation.

"...the stuff that we really baulked at is the personal stuff, even though it involved allegations about a brothel being run for him and paying off business and political mates.

" ... when you've got a very rich and powerful man who has a lot of dealings with government and with politicians, who is running or causing to be run a brothel or a bordello to reward people he does business with or can have favours from, I think that's absolutely in the public interest to know about that. I think the public has a right to know about it."

So are Australians really that interested in finding out which particular politicians and business leaders frequented Kerry Packer's bordellos? Do they really want to know such details?

In short, is there still life to be found in this story for investigative journalists, seeing as Barry refused to name the politicians involved in his biography?

To gauge the level of interest from Australians in this story, here's three screenshots taken after the Packer's Bordellos story had been online for almost 24 hours.

From the News Limited homepage (the central hub site for all of Rupert Murdoch's Australian city daily, rural and suburban online newspapers) :




From the Sydney Morning Herald :




From the Melbourne Age :



It's worth noting that this is one of the few occasions where a story about a dead Australian businessman has beaten stories about American celebrities, or cute animals, or violent murders, to the top of the 'Most Popular Stories' rankings.

More than a million Australians, a massive slab on the Australian online news readership, accessed this within hours of it being published. Millions more read about in newspapers across the country, and heard it reported on radio.

Australians clearly want to know more, and it would not be presumptuous to say that they want to know who the politicians and business leaders are who were bribed, or repaid for favours, with free visits to Kerry Packer's bordellos full of very expensive prostitutes and escorts.

But will Australian journalists dare to dig deep and crack the rest of this story? Will they find out who these politicians and business leaders were, and what they did for Kerry Packer that earned them such generosity?

We'll hazard a guess :

No. Not a fucking chance in hell.

Some secrets are not worth discovering for those who dare to dig too deep, and go so far as to name names. Some closets are too full of skeletons to even dare to think about opening. You might get a bone in the eye.

Many prominent Australian journalists and senior ranking politicians will rip and tear each other to shreds in public, and in private, but they still have boundaries they will not cross. Even when it involves the use of prostitutes for bribery and to repay favours that have led to massive wealth gathering.

Hopefully in a few weeks, or months, we can update on this story here and highlight some excellent mainstream media investigative journalism that has told Australians which politicians allowed themselves to be bribed and corrupted by Kerry Packer, but we seriously doubt it.

Too many people, in politics and in the media, have shared secrets they never want revealed.

And once those kinds of tidal waves start hitting the beach, lots of people end up getting swept away.

Kerry Packer : King Of The Whores

Kerry Packer : King Of The Whores

By Darryl Mason

So what does SONAP means?

Sex Only, No Appearances in Public.

Why does it matter? Read on.

Money can't buy you love, but it can buy you the influence of politicians, if you're prepared to lay out tens of thousands of dollars to import the finest prostitutes in the world to your private bordello.

Just ask Kerry Packer. Well, you can't of course, he's dead, but you could ask the politicians who were pleasured at his private bordello. If you knew who they were. You probably won't find out who they were, either, of course, until after they're dead.

This story discusses new information in the updated and rather extraordinary Paul Barry biography, The Rise And Rise Of Kerry Packer. One particular, and integral, story from Packer's life that was kept out earlier editions of the book concerns the media magnate's mistress, Carol Lopes. One of Packer's many mistresses.

Lopes' tale is a tragic one. She told her friends she was a SONAP. She was there for Sex Only, with No Appearances in Public. No doubt, Lopes lived a life of luxury, but there was enough sadness to drive her to thoughts of suicide. She tried to end her life at least three times during their years together. When Kerry Packer finally abandoned her, and locked her completely out of his life, she killed herself :

Packer put (Lopes) up in lavish apartments in Bellevue Hill, near his family residence, and she enjoyed brief public fame as a late-night B-grade movie hostess on Packer's Nine television network.

After their affair ended in the early 1980s Lopes began organising for Packer private bordellos each summer in expensive and secluded rented houses in Palm Beach.

Lopes travelled to New York, London and South America to find intelligent, well-educated and beautiful women who were paid about $10,000 a week at the bordello, the biography says.

Barry writes: "Carol confided to friends that Kerry ran this private bordello to thank men who had done him a good turn." He says politicians and business people attended the bordellos, but does not name any.

Packer supported Lopes financially until the late 1980s. When he cut off, she tried to kill herself three times. In 1991, she managed to carry through with her threat to take her own life.

She left a 16 page suicide note to Packer. Apparently it's still on file with the NSW coroner's office, but its contents have never been released.

But another letter Lopes left has been made public :

"Kerry Packer is the only family I know [Lopes had been raised by foster parents]. He has taken care of me for 12 years. I have been denied access to this man. For what reason, I don't understand. He is not aware of how distressed I am … I have no alternative but to end my life."

Barry's book reveals Kerry Packer spent a fortune on Lopes and a long stream of mistresses, while penny-pinching from his staff at Channel Nine and the employees of his racks of magazines. Staff were told to buy cheaper coffee for the canteen, while the mistresses got apartments and Packer blew tens of millions of dollars in Las Vegas casinos.

While his tabloid magazines raged and hissed over the slightest indiscretion by Australian actors and rock stars, and regularly sent photographers to destroy the lives of any who dared to have an affair (all the while generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for his empire), the details of Kerry Packer's stable of mistresses and his bordello for politicians and business leaders were kept under wraps until after his death. And any journalist, like Paul Barry, who even appeared to be digging too deep were threatened with legal action.

Most Australians were unaware that Packer even had one mistress, let alone many, and Packer's Hooker Palace was one of the best kept secrets of Australia's media, politics and business elite for more than a decade. Many of them knew about it of course, many of them frequented the bordello(s), but they never talked about. At least, they didn't talk about it outside of their own insulated little circles.

All the while Packer kept his bordello, and his stable of mistresses, his media empire gently portrayed him as a pillar of society and politicians lined up to praise him. The outpouring of emotion from the upper ranks of Australian politics and business at Packer's funeral can now be viewed as a mix of genuine grief and utter relief. Many secrets died with Packer, and once in the ground, Kerry Packer at least would never be able to tell tales on those who frequented his menagerie of whores.

How could such incredible secrets stay secret for so long? It certainly makes you wonder what sort of information, or images, were collected in that bordello to keep so many politicians and power brokers firmly in line and consistently under Kerry Packer's control.

Paul Barry's The Rise And Rise Of Kerry Packer is a remarkable book, if only for how much you can learn about the business and social worlds that Packer moved through, and the scandals he kept hidden by his power and money for so long.

Along with Neil Chenoweth's Packer's Lunch, you can discover some of the details of the very private worlds in which Australia's media, business and political elite existed through the 1980s and 1990s. No doubt, some of the same players in the books are still living lives not altogether different from those days, but with Kerry Packer dead, the lifestyle are presumably far more subdued.

Of course, as Rene Rivkin died knowing, the full story was/is even more debauched and shocking than either these two books will tell you. But they come close. As close as we're allowed to get to knowing what goes on behind the headlines, inside the boardrooms and beneath the sheets of the bordellos frequented by Australia's mega-rich and ultra-powerful.

Don't worry, they're not laughing at you.

They don't even know you exist.