Bruce McWilliam’s wife in legal fight with father’s fraudster EA

It’s been over a year since Bruce McWilliam, long-term consigliere to Seven’s ageing emperor Kerry Stokes, infamous writer of inflammatory emails and collector of prized eastern suburbs trophy homes, departed the network.

McWilliam, a confidant to the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Kerry Packer and a close friend of Malcolm Turnbull, departed during a tumultuous time for Seven, following former chief executive James Warburton out the door, right after the network was reeling from the whole “allegedly paying for Bruce Lehrmann’s cocaine and sex workers’ scandal”.

With Bruce retired from the game but still moving prestige property, his wife, Sydney lawyer Nicky McWilliam, has been at the centre of a most eastern suburbs legal squabble involving the estate of her late father, a long-simmering family feud and a $1.3 million fraud.

McWilliam’s father, property developer Tom Breuer, died in 2022, leaving behind a sizeable estate. Months before Breuer’s death, his former executive assistant, Cheree Curran, was charged with dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage by deception after the developer’s children discovered $1.28 million had been paid out of his accounts to her.

McWilliam would take the stand in a trial that revealed years of tension and estrangement between Breuer’s children. Curran’s defence argued that Breuer was a “virile man” who had given her the money to pay off women from his past.

Last month, a jury found Curran guilty of five counts of obtaining a financial advantage by deception. She is on bail ahead of a sentencing hearing next month. Meanwhile, the legal wrangling is ongoing, with McWilliam and brother Antony Breuer, as executors of their father’s estate, starting civil proceedings against Curran in the NSW Supreme Court, with a directions hearing held last week.

More, as they say, to come.

Mushroom Opus

The Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial content factory chugs on – and on.

As we reported, The Mushroom Murders, published by Allen & Unwin and written by true crime writer Greg Haddrick, has been yanked forward to publish on October 14. Recipe for Murder, by true-crime writer and former police detective Duncan McNab, is out via Hachette on the same date.

This is not forgetting The Mushroom Tapes, to be published in November by Text, featuring Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein gasbagging about the case on the long drive from Melbourne to the Supreme Court in Morwell.

And we are still waiting on Simon Patterson’s podcast.

They have all been beaten by Recipe for Death, by little-known author Rusty Le Grande, which is available on sites including Booktopia and Amazon. The book, we should emphasise, is self-published. Say no more.

It has been getting polarising reviews on websites, many focusing on its inaccuracies.

CBD counted 10 errors on the first page alone, including Patterson’s middle name, her maiden name, year of birth, number of siblings, name of her father, name of her mother, mother’s occupation, Patterson’s high school, how she met Simon Patterson and his parents’ occupation.

Le Grande, 65, told CBD he was an ex-school principal and his family was heavily involved in the intelligence community.

“Rusty has been my nickname for about 50 years, Le Grande was the first street that I lived in. ”

Le Grande himself is the author of a previous book, Razor-Wire Secrets: The Hidden War, about how he went undercover following the 9/11 bombings and the 2002 Bali bombings to gather critical intelligence that helped prevent attacks on home soil.

“As I say to people, I have lived five lives,” Le Grande said.

The Gippsland resident’s previous jobs include working for the AFL, state and federal governments and in the education and training sector. He knows Simon Patterson and the Patterson family and went ahead with their permission. “They were comfortable about it,” he says.

But a spokeswoman for the family said it hadn’t granted any such permission.

“If I have made some mistakes, so be it. There’s no financial reward in it. I will be lucky to make $20,” Le Grande explained.

One shopper was so incensed that they threatened to report the book to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. In response, Amazon changed the listing for the “true crime” category to the “crime thrillers” category.

“I’m not into defending myself,” Le Grande continued. “If the postie stopped at every dog that was barking at him as he tried to deliver the mail, he would never deliver the mail.”

Great northern

Hours after pulling off a thrilling grand final heist, a few dusty members of the Brisbane Broncos’ squad were surprised by the king of the north.

By that, we mean veteran MP Bob Katter, who gatecrashed the Broncos’ arrival at Brisbane airport on Monday morning, because of course he did. Katter’s Far North Queensland electorate of Kennedy may fall in deep Cowboys territory, but the Father of the House appeared thrilled by the Broncos’ triumph, snapped on the socials making small talk with victorious captain Adam Reynolds, still wearing his grand final jersey and nonchalantly fingering the Provan-Summons Trophy, who was looking admirably fresh for a bloke who’d just spent the last several hours sucking Milton Mangoes (XXXX Gold) out of a toilet bowl.