The real-life story that inspired the plot of The Outfit is a fascinating one. . .
“At the finish, you reconcile yourself to failure. It is not perfect. You have to make your peace with that. How? Well you sit at the board, you lay your tools, and you start again
-Leonard Burling
Al Capone knew that clothes made the mobster
Trial begins for five accused of $105 million ATO fraud conspiracy
A six-month trial has begun for five people accused of conspiring to defraud the Tax Office of $105 million, with one of them allegedly saying it “would be the biggest tax fraud in Australia’s history”, the NSW Supreme Court has heard.
Lauren Anne Cranston, 29, Adam Michael Cranston, 35, Dev Menon, 38, Jason Cornell Onley, 51, and Patrick Willmott, 35, have pleaded not guilty to conspiring to dishonestly cause a loss to the Commonwealth and conspiring to deal with $1 million or more, believing it to be proceeds of crime.
Siblings Lauren Anne Cranston and Adam Michael Cranston leave Darlinghurst Court on Tuesday. OSCAR COLMAN
Their trial, expected to run for six months, began at Darlinghurst courthouse on Tuesday afternoon before Justice Anthony Payne. Crown prosecutor Paul McGuire, SC, for the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions told the jury he anticipates his opening address will take three days.
The Crown alleges that between March 2014 and May 2017, the five accused developed a scheme through worker payroll services company Plutus Payroll to collect PAYG (pay as you go) withholding tax and GST (goods and services tax) that should have been paid to the Australian Tax Office. “Extraordinarily large amounts” were instead allegedly retained and used for their benefit and those associated with them.
The prosecutor said the charges arose from a police investigation called Operation Elbrus and “unbeknownst to the accused”, many of their conversations and telephone calls were recorded by authorities from about October 2016.
He suggested that in audio from January 2017, the jury would hear Adam Cranston had allegedly said, “If this was fully uncovered, and they knew exactly what was going on, it would be f--ing Ben Hur man, this is a big-sized company”.
McGuire expects the jury to hear evidence Dev Menon responded: “It would be the biggest tax fraud in Australia’s history. Definitely, there is no question, it would be the biggest tax fraud”.
The prosecutor said employers paid Plutus Payroll gross amounts covering their workers’ full salary, superannuation and other expenses including the PAYG component. Plutus charged and collected GST on the payroll services it provided.
Plutus was then to calculate the amount of net wages ... after taking out the PAYG, and then pay those net wages to the workers, pay the superannuation to the nominated superannuation funds, and was supposed to pay – what is sometimes called remit – to the tax office the PAYG it had retained and the GST that it had charged,” he said.
“That is what Plutus was meant to do. It’s the Crown case that those involved ... had no intention of paying all of the PAYG and GST it collected to the tax office.”
Approximately $105 million in taxes was allegedly collected which should have been paid to the ATO, he said.
McGuire expects the jury to hear evidence that another person selected the company name because “Plutus in Greek mythology was the god of abundance and wealth”.
“In circumstances of an alleged $105 million fraud, you might think that the name Plutus was a very appropriate selection indeed,” he said.
Regarding the alleged “money laundering conspiracy”, the Crown alleges the accused and others agreed to deal with the money withheld by the ATO by receiving it from clients, possessing it, concealing it, disposing of it and/or engaging in banking transactions relating to the money.
The trial continues.
Moore has said that the idea for “The Outfit” came from reading a report that the first taped evidence collected by the feds in a big organized crime case was taken from bugs planted in a Chicago tailor shop. This is not a re-creation of that episode, though the detail triggered Moore’s imagination — he co-wrote this script with Johnathan McClain — and sent the pair down a winding trail of manipulation and mind games. It also supplied them with the double-entendre of the film’s title: Here, a maker of outfits finds himself caught in the midst of a massive power struggle, as onetime Boyle allies begin to suspect one another and an off-screen gang war erupts, ordered by a shadowy underworld organization known as “the Outfit.”
Al Capone knew that clothes made the mobster. While head of the Chicago Outfit, he considered launching his own fashion line—the Al Capone Collection—but worried that hawking silks would hem in his fearsome reputation. At his 1931 trial for tax evasion, federal prosecutors tried to weaponize his dandyism, trotting out his personal tailor who testified, in a not-so-subtle dig, that Capone’s favorite colors were green and canary. Nevertheless, Capone’s tailored suits remain the mafia’s signature silhouette, and it’s under their sharp-shouldered shadow that Graham Moore sets his “The Outfit,” a tidy and self-congratulatory little thriller about a clothier who fights back against the mob.
Al Capone knew that clothes made the mobster
The Outfit: A well-tailored but stagey mob drama
We have, over the past few months, seen more new releases comprising just one shot than films set in a single interior location. Graham Moore’s modest crime thriller demonstrates both the possibilities and limitations of such an approach. The Outfit, starring Mark Rylance as a mildly mobbed-up tailor, has the focused intensity of a theatre piece. It also occasionally leans towards declaratory language that sits uncomfortably in a cinematic setting. Train a gun on a fellow and he is likely to regale you with a three-minute monologue on motivations and morality. That’s what happens when you can’t cut to a hurtling car in a distant neighbourhood.
A correction. Leonard Burling would object to being called a “tailor”. He is, strictly speaking, a “cutter”, trained on Savile Row, of fine suits for well-off gentlemen. Fleeing a vaguely defined disaster – the details are later filled in among other shocking revelations – he has set up in an implausibly seedy area of Chicago during the mid-1950s. The local hoodlums use a container at the back of his shop as a sort of dead letterbox. His cheery secretary, Mable (Zoey Deutch), dreams of life elsewhere. An awkward equilibrium is maintained until the local crime boss’s son staggers in with a bleeding belly. Leonard can no longer keep the villains at arm’s length.
Rylance has, over recent films, risked indulging a stock character: the softly spoken innocent who evades eye contact as he tries to keep within himself. There is some of that here, but the actor also manages to hint at hidden menaces throughout. Though he is hunched over his work, he remains as watchful as a hungry cat that knows the supermarket delivery is on the way. He really comes into his own during a tense duologue – again, stubbornly theatrical – with Simon Russell Beale. Who would have imagined, when those two men were trading Shakespearean soliloquies on the London stage 30 years ago, that they would end up in an American mob drama?
The script is, if anything, a little too well-made. All the narrative lines come neatly together in a series of closing convulsions that take in one twist too many. Only someone who has never seen a film before (or, more useful still, a play) will overlook allusions to a Chekhovian weapon hanging over a Chekhovian fireplace.
It remains, nonetheless, a pleasure to see a good yarn played out in such professional fashion. Just try not to think of the awful pun in the title.