For someone so completely obsessed with ‘image’, perhaps, Chris Comeskey has finally found his calling. With a failed dental supply business behind him and no chance of resurrecting his chequered legal career, the former headline-grabbing lawyer now has reinvented himself as Sydney’s answer to Tim ‘the Tool Man’ Taylor.
Introducing ’Chris Comeskey Home Renovation Services’, a $40-an-hour one-stop shop for ‘basic’ plastering, paving, brick laying and ‘picture and mirror hanging’.
In reality, though, it’s far from a pretty picture for Comiskey, who used to charge ten times as much representing the likes of Millie Elder and tagger killer Bruce Emery. But Comeskey is probably best remembered for his murky role in brokering the return of the 96 stolen Waiouru medals, a moment he later described as better than the birth of his children.
And it’s been all downhill since.
In 2010 Comeskey was suspended from practice for nine months and fined more than $70,000 for a range of professional indiscretions, including overcharging clients.
In 2014 he tried to relaunch his legal career in Australia, but was declared a person of ‘bad character’ after making false claims in his application for a practising certificate.After reinventing himself several times, Comeskey has now undergone something of a major renovation.
Well in truth, Chris Comeskey Home Renovation Services is actually just a home-handyman service with a staff of one – Chris Comeskey. It also has a vehicle fleet of one – a panel van used previously to transport elderly and disabled people. The new business is based out of one of west Sydney’s poorest and most dangerous suburbs: Merrylands, a low socio-economic community with more drive-by shootings and gun violence than anywhere in New South Wales.
But it’s not just Merrylands with the image problem. The image Comeskey is using to promote his new business venture was taken on the steps outside an Auckland courthouse nearly 10 years ago and looks nothing like the much older, slimmer and greyer character seen this week shuffling his way to work past a collection of dumped shopping trolleys with trusty toolbox in one hand, drill in the other.
