A decade since its opening, by 2007 Sails restaurant, fronting the Main Beach boardwalk at its intersection with Park Road and offering stunning ocean views from the First Point surf break right in front to the beaches of Teewah across the bay, had not only become a rival to the funkier Bistro C for event beachfront dining, but had begun to dominate the wedding trade, offering an extravagantly perfect reception after a couple had been wed with Noosa sand between their toes.
Sails weddings had been featured in national magazines and lifestyle TV programs, and the rich and famous were knocking each other out to get a booking for Junior’s post-nuptial blowout, but the wedding of part-time bookkeeper Jodi Cashmore and carpenter Dan Nuske in 2007 raised the bar for opulence, even by Sails’ standards, according to several attendees. And tout Noosa turned out for the show.
Bistro C owner Lori Banks remembers walking in and saying to her then partner, “Blimey, I wonder who’s paying for all of this!”
The partner said: “I bet you are.”
It was a quip made partly in jest, but already questions were being asked about Jodi’s freewheeling approach to money among her widening circle of friends, and 15 years later Maroochydore District Court would hear from Nuske herself that she had “taken” but not “stolen” money from the business since around that time.
The distinction seemed to imply that these transactions were authorised, but that was not supported by the Banks’ family nor the business’s accountant, nor ultimately by a jury who last month found her guilty of defrauding Bistro C of more than $600,000 between 2013 and 2016, with Judge Gary Long sentencing the mother of two to seven years behind bars.
While the case for the Crown in this trial and a civil matter that preceded it was based only on forensic accounting of transactions over a three-year period, Ms Banks and her family have always maintained that money had been mysteriously leaking from the business for more than a decade.
Friends of the Nuskes from that period have told Noosa Today they had expressed concern about Jodi’s extravagant lifestyle and where the money was coming from, but were assured that the family share portfolio was performing extremely well.
However, Lori Banks’ eldest daughter Hayley, who had become one of Jodi’s closest friends, began to suspect quite early that something was going on.
She says: “Her engagement ring was huge and when other friends got married she’d think nothing of giving them a Carla Zampatti dress worth thousands. We used to have girls’ weekends away and money was never an issue. She’d book a luxury apartment and then go downstairs and drop five grand on a designer handbag, or we’d go to the hairdresser and she’d pay for us all to get a blow dry before we went to the races. Things like that happened often, but my very first suspicion was that she was paying for their home utility bills out of the company accounts.”
While all three Banks girls, Hayley, Cassie and Chloe, worked for the family business for some part of Jodi Nuske’s 18-year tenure as bookkeeper, they also developed careers elsewhere, which explains why taking your suspicions about a loved and trusted senior employee to your mother was never going to be easy, even after they became aware that Lori had given Nuske enduring power of attorney over her will prior to mother and three daughters flying to England to see an ailing grandmother.
After working at Bistro C following school, Hayley had managed shops in the surf retail sector before striking out on her own with a homewares business in 2008, but she remained close to the restaurant’s financials through a shared accountant in Paulette Clark.
She says: “When things were going poorly with my homewares shop I’d talk to Paulette every day for advice.
“At this stage Bistro C was firing and should have been raking in the money, but Paulette said things were running a bit tight but she couldn’t tell why because she’d been locked out of BankLink! Jodi had told her that Mum didn’t want her to see the accounts.”
Hayley says she first went to her mother with concerns about Jodi in 2012 and had been howled down, but four years later she knew she had to do something, so she developed a plan.
She recalls: “By this time Jodi had to know we were onto her. I went to my friend Ashleigh (Goodman) who was Jodi’s assistant, and I told her I knew Jodi was stealing from us.
“My sister Chloe and I took her to dinner to make sure she understood that she had to tell us everything she knew and she wouldn’t get into trouble.
“Ash said, ‘I’m not saying that she’s stealing but this is what she does with the cash.’ And she went through it step by step.
“I told Ash I needed to get into the bank accounts and she said, ‘Good luck with that. Jodi doesn’t let anyone near them.’
“So then I went to Mum’s banker and told him I knew that Jodi was stealing and that I needed 24-hour access to the accounts. He reluctantly agreed and gave me an access number. I logged in and nearly fell off my chair.
“I was expecting to find that she’d been paying things like her amenities bills at home, but as I scrolled down I found school fees, lounge suites, payments on an Amex bill when I knew Mum didn’t have Amex.
“I printed the pages out and showed them to Chloe and insisted that she come with me to Mum’s house to support me. When we got there, I laid out the pages and directed her to the payments Mum would understand immediately couldn’t be anything to do with her, like private school fees at a school none of her grandkids went to.”
The penny finally dropped.
Lori Banks says: “I phoned my banker right away and told him we needed to act. Then I went to my solicitor and told him we needed a forensic accountant.
“When we had a pretty good idea of the size of the theft, I told Jodi we knew what she’d been doing and I gave her three months’ grace.
“I told her I wouldn’t go to the police and that no one would know about it as long as she paid me back in full.
“On the last day of the three months she sent my solicitor a letter saying, see you in court.”
After more than two years of a police investigation and forensic examination of Bistro C, Nuske and related third party accounts, Jodi Nuske was arrested on 19 July 2019 and charged with stealing as a servant.
A subsequent civil matter was discontinued after Nuske filed for bankruptcy, but she finally had her day in court – in fact 10 of them – last month.
After a solid and comprehensive case had been presented by crown prosecutor Alex Stark and a string of witnesses, Nuske’s defence barrister Scott Casey claimed in his closing remarks to the jury that five of the witnesses for the prosecution – Lorraine Banks, her daughter Hayley, Nuske’s former assistant Ashleigh Goodman, Bistro C staff member Deb Scotney and Lori Banks’ accountant Paulette Clarke – had “thrown [Nuske] under the bus” because she “knew too much” about Bistro C committing tax fraud.
It was dramatic, yes, but it was also the last card in the pack, and the jury wasn’t wearing it, taking less than two hours to deliver a guilty verdict.
In mitigation of his client, Mr Casey also said that while he agreed it was a “significant” amount of money taken, Bistro C had not suffered financial hardship due to Nuske’s offending.
But in sentencing, Judge Gary Long said Nuske had used the funds to maintain an “affluent standard of living” by treating Ms Banks’ resources as her own.
Still reeling from what she saw as an outrageous counter-attack on the integrity of the Bistro C family of employees, Lori Banks told Noosa Today: “Jodi’s lawyer said that no harm had come to us as a result of this, but after the trial I had to go to bed for a week because I was a cot case!
“Over the whole six years since the investigation began I started to lose my hair from the stress, and of course it’s split up many friendships.
“I gave Jodi the opportunity to do the right thing and she refused, so there’s no possibility of forgiveness now.
“But has any good come out of this? Yes, it’s made our family and our business even stronger.”
