By Chris Thomson | posted on January 18, 2018
THE insurance job that gutted the Premier Hotel was a fiasco that embroiled Albany’s police, media and business leaders in a web of deceit instigated, motivated and prolonged by licensee-cum-arsonist Graeme Roderick Cooper.
Yesterday, Cooper, 36, was sentenced to 10 years’ in prison after Supreme Court Justice Stephen Hall heard he was in tears in May 2016 when he called lifelong friend Scott Gay advising he was in financial difficulty and needed an “insurance job” done on the 1891-built hotel.
In sentencing remarks at Albany courthouse, Justice Hall said Cooper had “actively deceived” police and “very belatedly” accepted responsibility for the arson.
In the wake of the fire, Cooper had issued a media release and posed for newspaper photographs seeking public assistance to catch the culprits.
“Rather than do the honourable thing and cease the business and perhaps claim bankruptcy, … you were the instigator and motivator for what occurred,” Justice Hall told Cooper.
“You had the most to gain.”
Earlier, State Prosecutor David Davidson had said Gay recruited Christopher Lyndon Paterson, Karl Hutchinson and Aaron Mark Hasson, who on May 12 travelled from Mandurah to “do an arson job”.
After achieving a judge-only trial fearing previous media coverage would contaminate jury deliberations (Jury’s out in Premier Hotel case, The Weekender, September 14, 2017), Cooper reversed his original plea of not guilty the day before the start of the trial.
Mr Davidson said the hotel was not doing well, and Cooper’s life and business partner Rumeena Nizam stood to lose her house after using it to secure a $300,000 business loan and $50,000 overdraft.
The court was shown footage of two men, who Mr Davidson said “in a fake way [were] dragging Mr Cooper into the hotel room”.
Mr Davidson said that, from there, Cooper and Paterson “started to get the fire underway” using domestic gas-stove lighters and accelerant Cooper had provided.
Two of four residents of the hotel were asleep when the fire broke out.
After the blaze took hold in the front bar, games room and office, Paterson, Hutchison and Hasson fled in a Jeep they had parked out back.
A tyre of the Jeep blew out in Mount Barker, where the trio waited for a repair shop to open before paying for a new tyre from more than $10,000 cash Cooper had paid them at the hotel.
Only after the three had fled did Cooper alert the residents to the fire.
They escaped without injury, but the blaze caused $1.5 million damage assessors estimate will take $2.3 million to fix.
By the time fire fighters arrived at the hotel, flames were bursting from the back door through which Cooper had earlier been faux-frog marched.
In a victim impact statement, Albany businessman Barry Panizza said he and the hotel’s other co-owners had been subject to false public innuendo that they were implicated in the arson.
Outside court, Great Southern Detective Inspector Mark Twamley told The Weekender he was happy the case had been resolved and that his colleagues could now return to other important duties.
Cooper will be eligible for parole after eight years, backdated to his arrest on September 9, 2016.
He plans to undertake a university degree while in prison, and stay in touch with his two children.
Photo: ‘Nachoman-au’, Wikimedia Commons, under Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 unported licence
