Less than a week before Christmas, Jodi Nuske should have been at home planning the festivities with husband Dan and their two children: instead the Noosaville mum was being led out of Maroochydore District Court to begin a seven-year jail sentence after being found guilty of defrauding her former employer, Noosa’s high-end beachfront restaurant Bistro C, of more than $600,000.
The verdict, delivered after less than two hours’ deliberation, brought to an end the 10-day trial and more than three years of sensational claims and counter-claims since Nuske, now 44, was first charged with “stealing as a servant” more than $1 million in July 2019 following a two-year investigation by Noosa detectives. While the size of the fraud was chipped back as the case went through two trials, from an initial $1 million to $769,000 and finally to just under $613,000, the owners of the restaurant, the Banks family, have claimed that the amount stolen from them over more than a decade was much higher.
The length of the sentence – half the maximum 14 years – must have been a bitter blow for a mother of young children, although Nuske showed no emotion as it was handed down. The court as yet has made no decision on parole eligibility but Nuske should automatically be paroled after three-and-a-half years, unless Judge Gary Long finds otherwise.
Known to her high school friends as a smart, vibrant and fun-loving companion, and to her early employers (including over her first several at Bistro C) as honest and hard-working, Jodi Nuske took a wrong turn somewhere. How? Why?
Born Jodi Louise Cashmore in Victoria in January 1978, Jodi and her older sister grew up with a strong work ethic implanted by father John, who owned a successful plumbing business servicing Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs, and mother Ann, who had a keen eye for fashion retail. The Cashmores had family connections in Noosa and holidayed here frequently with cousins, aunts and uncles in the early ‘90s as Jodi entered her teens. During those vacations, Jodi made a network of friends through a cousin, so when the Cashmores sold the plumbing business and made a permanent move to Noosa, she was amongst friends when she enrolled at Noosa District High for the final years of her schooling. According to some of those friends, Jodi was academically smart but more interested in having fun than topping the class.
The Cashmores rented before coming to rest in the new estate of Noosa Waters where they built a comfortable family home while John bought a waterproofing business. At the start of her final year of school, Jodi was given a small car by her parents to get her to school at Cooroy, but once she started going out with a young Noosa boatbuilder, she would skip classes from time to time to drive out to his boatshed.
Jodi loved having fun and she was developing a taste for expensive clothes and other creature comforts, but her friends say that there was no indication of an obsession with money nor any evidence of her bending the rules to get it. When she finished school and took a job as receptionist at the Noosa Crest Resort, the management trusted her to move into a villa and run the place during their short absences, a piece of good fortune she willingly shared with her circle of friends.
The relationship with the boatbuilder blossomed and Jodi moved in with him, but as the boatbuilding business began to flourish the couple bought an expensive home in Noosa Waters. Friends from this period say that this was when Jodi’s extravagant tastes began to emerge. Others say that they worried that the couple were financially over-extended, which was possibly why one of them offered Jodi a part-time job helping keep the books at Noosa’s new “it” restaurant, Bistro C.
Bistro C was the latest of a string of eating places started in Noosa by the enterprising Banks family since their arrival from Sydney in 1990. A lively Lancashire lass with an accent that seems to strengthen as the years roll by, matriarch Lorraine (known as Lori to most and Loz to close friends) had arrived in Perth in 1970 and backpacked her way around Australia and Asia, often working as a waitress to keep the wolf from the door. Moving to Sydney in the late 1970s, she worked in some of the best restaurants at Balmoral Beach and in the eastern suburbs, where she befriended Di Heaney, another waitress with flare. She also met and married Ian Banks, a young entrepreneur who had made a success of an international car leasing business, and in the ‘80s they moved to the relative tranquillity of the Northern Beaches peninsula to raise three daughters.
Then Di Heaney moved to Noosa and wrote to Lori of the many opportunities in the hospitality business. Soon the Banks family was on the move too. They talked local identity Eddie the Fisherman into allowing them to run the lunch business at Eduardo’s, a humble but charming beachfront café in the European style. Soon they had bought Eddie out and taken in Heaney as the new partner, given the place a bright facelift and were cooking to packed houses. Lori’s zany front-of-house presence was matched by Di’s backroom savvy and kitchen skills, and when the Rusty Pelican restaurant closed down in the On The Beach complex a few metres along the boardwalk, the Banks team moved in, giving it a bright makeover and renaming it, well, Di-Lozo’s, offering stylish meals as opposed to Eduardo’s casual grub. Dilozo’s was a huge success, but when Heaney moved on again it was time for another reno and a rebranding, and Bistro C was born.
There have been several landmark restaurants in the history of the Hastings Street precinct, places that captured the mood of the times and created indelible memories for tourists and locals alike. Barry’s On The Beach, Café Le Monde, Palmer’s and Sails with its near monopoly on the wedding trade spring to mind. A quarter of a century ago when Jodi Cashmore started there, Bistro C was achieving that status, and today it still has it, a bustling, happy place with spectacular views over Main Beach and a fine madness still presided over by Lori, who owns the business, with a lot of help from her daughters, while former husband Ian remains the owner of the property. While being busy all the time can breed volatility in the kitchen and on the floor, one of the key reasons for Bistro C’s longevity is the familial relationship between management and staff, who tend to stay long and come back. Jodi was no exception to that.
Hayley, the eldest Banks daughter, was just a year younger than Jodi. She told Noosa Today: “I think I first met Jodi the year before she started working for us, so 1997. She’d become friendly with one of my best friends, Eleanor, our bookkeeper, so she became friendly with all of us too. She was Eleanor’s assistant for about four years until El went overseas and Jodi took over. My first impressions were that she was a nice girl and over the early years of working for us we became extremely close. As Mum said in court, she was like another daughter.”
By all accounts, Jodi liked her job and was good at it, although Lori was puzzled that most of the systems that the previous bookkeeper had put in place were being dismantled and replaced by a new veil of secrecy over the accounts department.
Meanwhile, Jodi’s relationship with the boatbuilder was breaking down. The couple split up, each taking a small profit from the sale of the heavily-mortgaged Noosa Waters house. But it wasn’t enough to explain the designer dresses, luxury holidays and expensive lunches. When Eleanor returned from her international travels she told Hayley: “Something about this just doesn’t add up.”
Next week: an extravagant wedding becomes the talking point of town, as Bistro C’s finances become harder to fathom.
