A better question: any you haven’t?

Presumably Sheehan is pretty comfortable that Kirby was a friend and confidant of Marsden and also he that he will give the eulogy. If that’s the case then clearly Kirby and Marsden are either peas in a pod, or Kirby is simply a shocking judge of character. Any conclusion I might have missed, given the general agreement about Marsden’s character here?

http://www.ssonet.com.au/display.asp?ArticleID=5381

No, I don’t have a “dossier”, or similar. In making the above claims, I rely on media reports of what could (and usually is) dismissed as a “few bad apples”, combined with the following two observations.

First, the mom’n'pop-owner phenomenon. In a world where even milk bars have gone “corporate”, this is significant. (Note: brothel licensing regimes generally impose per-premises ownership limits, but I’m sure that (say) Macquarie Bank’s lawyers could draft a way around these, so as to consolidate the brothel industry into a (legal) oligopoly of large corporates (that is to say, the norm in any other, legal Australian industry).)

Second, brothel licensing regimes are weird (at least if one regards keeping organised crime out of the industry as a priority). On one hand, there is a detached, paper-shuffling bureaucracy (that issues the license, and that’s pretty much it), and at the other extreme, physical regulation of brothels is a matter of local council planning and enforcement - as in the same people who tell you which colours you can use to paint your house.

Dare I say it, but I reckon that a crack vice-squad, one that gets its hands (if not other body parts also) dirty, would be the only effective way of keeping the brothel industry “clean”.

Do you have any basis (other than “a person would have to be pretty dumb”) for your assertion that organised crime dominates the brothel industry? There’s certainly lots of research and intelligence indicating that organised crime syndicates control the international trafficking of women for prostitution, and there have been well publicised specific examples of brothel owners (official or off-the-record) having organised crime connections. But that’s a long way from justifying a general conclusion that the various state licensing regimes are completely ineffective at excluding organised crime from controlling brothels.

I’m not arguing that you’re necessarily wrong. I just don’t have any personal knowledge of it and I’m interested in what evidence you’re relying on for such a confident assertion. It’s certainly an area that was traditionally controlled by organised crime back when prostitution was illegal, so I suppose it’s not unlikely that they would attempt to maintain their dominance given that the industry is a nice little earner. But do you have any basis beyond that sort of commonsense suspicion/intuition?

Of course, In the second part I used the word ‘moral’, not ‘legal’, but no matter.

Jason, a person would have to be pretty dumb to not know that. But even with licenses/probity-checks/whatever, organised crime currently dominates the brothel industry - and a person would have to be pretty naive to not acknowledge *that*.

You’re also way out of date on the ASX-listed brothel (I assume you are referring to The Daily Planet Ltd, which listed in 2003, and only ever owned brothel real estate, never the business also).

Anyway, listed Daily Planet got out of even the real estate side of the brothel business in 2004, after less than a year; see: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/21/1082530231373.html?from=storyrhs While the story doesn’t say this explicitly, my strong suspicion is that, given a listed company’s extra constraints on going with the criminal “flow”, The Daily Planet found itself at an acute competitive disadvantage in its industry.

Most brothels are, at least on the surface, mom’n'pop-owned operations, which makes it all the stranger, of course, that a modern, large corporate wouldn’t have an actual competitive *advantage*. This disconnect can only be explained by the mom’n'pop-owners being flimsy fronts for organised crime.

I don’t know of many (indeed any) other practising lawyers of whatever gender or sexuality who have employed convicted rapist/murderers to intimidate potential witneses against them. I certainly don’t know of any who have enjoyed flattering eulogies from prominent politicians etc despite such conduct.

I certainly wouldn’t deny that there are quite a few lawyers who are every bit as rapacious and self-promoting as Marsden was. But I don’t know of any others who boast openly about their sexual promiscuity and multiple illicit drug use, and yet continue to be feted by assorted senior politicians, judges etc. Marsden was just a shonky lawyer who parlayed his contacts for all they were worth (and then some), but whom karma eventually caught up with.

If they are only there because they are forced to be (and I don’t count economic considerations ‘forcing’, except obviously bond-slavery) then frankly a good many of the legal elements of rape are made out, to my mind at least.

All the elements of personal moral culpability are made out, to my mind.

An interesting post, if only because until one reads your two (to date) supplementary “comments”, it makes little objective sense.

Re the post itself, call me a jaundiced Melburnian, but to damn just one particular Sydney lawyer on the simple basis of his “sleaze” is laughable.

Plainly, you have issues to do with types of sub-sleaze, not the legal fraternity’s sleaziness (which I’d define as about 80% corruption, and 10% other fiscal crimes, such as tax avoidance) in general.

And voila, your comments then show this:

“[I]t seems unlikely that Marsden would have garnered so many high profile sympathisers had he not traded so blatantly on his sexuality to seek and obtain professional preferment as some sort of bizarre proof that the NSW establishment wasn’t homophobic”.

Let’s leave aside a logical alternative explanation (and one that Sheehan actually implies, to boot), that Marsden’s (undoubted) career success was due to his being an aggressively- driven professional. That is, let’s admit he played the gay-minority card shamelessly. If so, the same accusation can surely be fairly made against 100% of the female lawyers in Marsden’s generation who have done well in their careers. After all, *they* also were in a minority back in the 70s and 80s, at a time when affirmative action etc was being generally trumpeted as a good thing. You do the math.

In other words, Ken, I suggest that you retract this specific allegation about Marsden. If you don’t, then please explain why those boomer female lawyers who have had similarly stellar careers to Marsden don’t deserve to be similarly dismissed as a pack of conniving sluts.

“Personally I have little doubt that Marsden on occasion preyed on under-age boys, or at least made no attempt to differentiate on the basis of age . . . Marsden was an aggressive sexual predator who didn’t care what he did or who he hurt”.

Not even Sheehan states that Marsden may ever have raped an adult (although he does imply it, by mischievous use of the word “sodomised”). As far as under-age boys in general go, there is ample evidence that Marsden was trusted, and with no subsequent regrets, in the company of boys and young men who were sons of Marsden’s friends. Re “rent boys” ‒ male prostitutes younger than 16 (?) ‒ who knows?

One thing I do know, though, is that the heterosexual prostitution industry is dominated by organised crime, meaning that a high proportion of female prostitutes are sex-slaves and/or under-age girls.

So feel free to speculatively sledge Marsden, re “rent boys”, Ken. But again, unless you are a hypocrite, you must make the same, lowest-of the-low, accusation against any man who has ever visited a female prostitute. Unless, that is, any such man can prove that, at the brothel, they attempted to differentiate on the basis of age or enslavement.

See also:

http://paulwatson.blogspot.com/2006/05/here-we-go-again-sydneys-gutter-press.html

Personally I have little doubt that Marsden on occasion preyed on under-age boys, or at least made no attempt to differentiate on the basis of age. The fact that he was prepared to do whatever it took to discredit adverse witnesses (including employing the services of one of the Cobby killers to intimidate a potential witness) meant that the court was unable to conclude on a legal onus that he did so. However, if you actually followed the case (as I did, although not as closely as some, and I certainly didn’t closely read the entire judgment) you wouldn’t be in any real doubt about what occurred. Marsden was an aggressive sexual predator who didn’t care what he did or who he hurt, and who thought he was smart and well connected enough to be able to flout the law with impunity.

So presumably he picked up some gay hookers who were younger than him, just as some ‘respectable’ straight men go to brothels and hire 18 year old escorts. And because they didn’t go below the age of consent, they can’t be called pedophiles (notice that Sheehan himself writes further below how Marsden boasted of picking up gay ‘men’). So what of it? What’s the point of saying Marsden could have been a pederast if he’d done something else? And Marsden could’ve been Canadian if he was born in Canada.

I’ve never had a high opinion of Sheehan’s sneering, mean spirited columns and this doesn’t raise it one bit.

However, it seems unlikely that Marsden would have garnered so many high profile sympathisers had he not traded so blatantly on his sexuality to seek and obtain professional preferment as some sort of bizarre proof that the NSW establishment wasn’t homophobic.