Free Twiggy by Andrew Burrell Page B

Melbourne-based head of corporate, Ross Dobinson, once arm-wrestled a huge red-bearded local miner in the front bar of the Leonora Hotel; somehow, he won. Another time, the well-lubricated Jacksons boys drovea fire engine down the main street of Mount Magnet (a donation to the local brigade the following year was intended as an apology for that indiscretion). And on the bus trips between Kalgoorlie and Perth, the brokers would challenge themselves to drink more litres of Emu Export beer than the vehicle used in fuel. The most sober one on the bus would be responsible for keeping a tally.
    Themoney really started pouring in at Jacksons in 1987, allowing Forrest to buy a gleaming new Jaguar. Perhaps he was simply trying to keep up with his colleagues, who also enjoyed spending their newfound wealth on fast cars. One day in the Jacksons office, Dave Rigoll asked Simon Lill to drive him to a car yard so he could pick up the new Ferrari he had ordered. But by the time the pair arrived, Rigollhad managed to convince Lill to buy one for himself as well. Lill immediately wrote out a cheque and the two brokers headed back to the CBD to parade their new toys.
    This sort of madness could not last, of course. The bull market that had been fuelled by cheap cash and greed ended abruptly in Australia on 20 October 1987, when the sharemarket lost one-quarter of its value in a single dayof panicked selling. Most of the stocks Forrest had been spruiking to clients were now pretty much worthless. He has since told colleagues that he personally lost $3.5 million in the crash. It wasn’t money he had in the bank, but the paper profits he’d built up as the market surged.
    Forrest had to endure plenty of angry clients calling to ask what had happened to their money. But one ofhis more highly valued clients, Rodney Adler, was particularly unhappy to discover that he had lost several hundred thousand dollars on a stock he had never wanted in the first place. Adler was then the investment manager for his family insurance company, FAI, and he had been impressed with Forrest’s zeal for stockbroking. But the value of Adler’s investments had plummeted in the crash.
    Despite Forrest’s financial worries at the time, he was never downbeat. A day after the crash, the Australian Financial Review asked several Perth stockbrokers whether they thought the market could recover anytime soon from the biggest collapse in its history. All of them – apart from one – were bearish about the outlook. The sole optimist was Forrest, who blamed the fall on the herd mentalityof Australian investors and predicted the punters would come rushing back into the market to buy undervalued stocks. “There are some excellent situations offering value now and we are recommending buys,” said Forrest. Unfortunately for Forrest and the cheap stocks he was flogging, the Australian stockmarket continued to fall for several months and would not return to its pre-crash peak for anothersix and a half years.
    With the Perth market virtually blown away overnight, there wasn’t much more Forrest could achieve in the wild west. It was time to move to Sydney. If truth be told, Bob Pfafflin and his fellow directors at Jacksons had already grown slightly uncomfortable with the “cowboy” reputation of the Perth office, so transferring Forrest to Sydney was a way of keeping a closereye on him. But the directors had another motive: Forrest had made plenty of money for Jacksons in the boom and they hoped his talents might help lift the firm out of its post-crash despair.

5.
SIN CITY
    Any normal, sane person wouldn’t have done it. But with Andrew, it’s no risk, no reward.
    —ALBERT WONG, Forrest’s former business partner
     
    Within minutes of first meeting his Jacksons colleagues in Sydney, Forrest had left a lasting impression. It was 1986 and the big-talking hotshot from Perth was in Sydney to work from the firm’s head officefor a few days. The seventy brokers had just