Cash Advance to Visiting Executive

As the US manager of a small office of a large Australian media company in New York in 1981 I had about five seconds to decide what side I was on. I was told one morning by Pat, the personal aide to Kerry Packer, the president of the company (and major shareholder) who was visiting from Sydney, to get $10,000 in cash from the bank account in hundred-dollar bills and take them to his hotel suite a couple of blocks away from our office at Madison and 49th.

I knew from company chatter over the years that he liked to indulge in expensive women—“escorts”—on trips without his wife and that he also gambled on his visits to New York, going to Atlantic City casinos. But it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d be asked to facilitate these activities.

He was a very astute businessman in the best sense and a good chief executive who had been perfectly professional in my few dealings with him over fourteen years with the group. He was wealthy and owned about half the stock in the company. I’d assumed he used his own money for personal indulgences.

When Pat asked me that morning for that big bunch of $100s I agreed. But in those seconds, as I was agreeing, I realised what I was getting into, and I quickly added the proviso that I’d need some kind of receipt when I turned over the money, and I also asked Pat: “How am I expected to account for this money in our monthly financial report to Sydney?”

She replied, “George did not need receipts.”

George McGann was my predecessor in the job, an amiable American, a smallish man who drove a huge car and lived somewhere out on Long Island. He had been retired at about seventy-five, opening the job to me.

Pat added: “Mr Packer expects you to report the money under petty cash withdrawals, the way George has always done.”

I had only seconds to decide whether I was on the dark side indulging a thieving president. I tried to compromise. Flat refusal would lose me my job in New York, which I loved, only six months or so after it started.

I said: “Look, I’m not interested in what has happened here in the past or in what George did or didn’t do. I’m happy to get Mr Packer his cash. I’m going to the bank to get it and will bring it to the hotel.”

But I continued: “Two things: first, I will need some kind of receipt, even initials on a piece of paper on which I’ll write $10,000 and will simply keep in the safe. Second, I will not report this as petty cash. $10,000 is not petty cash. I’m going to report it as ‘Cash advance to visiting executive’ or something like that. Let me know if that is satisfactory with Mr Packer, and I’ll be right over with the money.”

I never heard back. I suppose he used an American Express card instead or got money wired from Sydney. 

If Packer had asked for $500 cash or even $1000 I probably would have gone along; maybe $2000. He probably could have got me in with smaller requests to start with. But I suppose he knew what he was doing asking for ten grand. He was inviting me to join an inner circle that lived high off the shareholders.

During the few critical seconds of conversation with Pat (I’ve forgotten her last name) I realised that without some kind of receipts they had my predecessor George—excuse an old Australian vulgarism—“by the balls”.

Packer visited New York two or three times a year and others in the inner circle now and then. If they were in the habit of getting cash advances from the New York office bank account without George having any evidence he’d turned the money over to them, they could turn him in to the police and charge him with stealing the money. And he’d be defenceless. He was a slave to them.

I didn’t come to America to be a slave. Besides, what they were doing was thievery. Pat told me, “Mr Packer owns the company, it’s his money,” when she’d sensed I disapproved.

I told her: “No, Pat, he owns about half the stock. Other people own the other half …”

She knew it was wrong too. She’d worked for him so long she had no alternative but to go along with it. I did have alternatives. I was well known and in fact had an offer of a job from a rival publisher down at the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch. I’d known him from his days as a reporter himself for a small Adelaide newspaper. I was with a much more prestigious national weekly news magazine.

I knew what the law says you should do in such a case—go to the cops, report the crime to the authorities. Except I’d averted the crime by demanding the receipt and refusing to fudge the books.

So it was clear that the only way they could get Packer for the thievery he obviously engaged in was by entrapment. They could wire me up so that if he asked me again for cash I’d agree and they’d get all the evidence with a tape recorder and perhaps video when the money was handed over.

I rejected the idea. The whole thing would be very damaging to the company, which had been good to me and had many good people doing good work, which I had no wish to hurt. Besides, the cops might screw it up, and not even manage to jail the big thief.

Trouble was, I’d become a threat to Packer’s thievery by getting such clear evidence of it. And I knew my job was in jeopardy for refusing to play along. I got word that I’d got “offside with Kerry” for reasons unstated. Nothing happened for a while except that when Packer visited New York he made no contact at all with our (“his”) office. That was ominous.

Life and work went on without change. I wrote a weekly America column for the news magazine and looked after the office with a bit of light management. They were women reporters, smart self-starters who didn’t need my ideas on stories; but they sometimes quarrelled. I was supposed to keep the peace and supervise their expenses claims. Journalists traditionally live out of expenses, take friends to meals and drinks and travel on the company. You go along with a bit of that, and try to curb the excesses.

No real problems there. And I loved New York.

But about a year later Sydney sent word that there was to be a “New York reorganisation”, one part of which was the elimination of my position. The New York reporters who had reported to me would report directly to editors in Sydney. And they’d negotiated a service from Newsweek.

It wasn’t unreasonable for the company. But I was out of a job in three months. I inquired gently whether there was a job for me back in Australia and got no real answer. Anyway I wanted to stay here, and moved to Washington to work from there for Rupert’s growing empire for six years—as editor.