An early experiment in corporatisation involved the Sydney Swans, the club that had emerged from the northward relocation of the declining South Melbourne team in 1981. The effort to place the Swans on a secure financial base and promote the game to a new Sydney audience flushed out the "medical entrepreneur" Geoffrey Edelsten, a name unfamiliar to most members of the public but better known to the Australian Taxation Office.

Since graduating in medicine from Melbourne University, Edelsten had enjoyed a colourful if rather chequered career as a medico, businessman and playboy. He had produced pop records, owned a nightclub, established his own flying doctor service, run health studios, set up a high-tech pathology laboratory in the United States, and offered a Family Health Plan in Sydney - which looked to police rather like a medical insurance business minus the necessary licence. He had even sponsored the Bluebirds, a troupe of dancing girls whose presence at Carlton home games was intended to add an American-style razzamatazz and sexiness.

By the mid 1980s - now grey-haired but still with an eye for female talent - he had married a professional model, Leanne, more than 20 years his junior. Edelsten was now best known for operating a chain of Sydney surgeries that, in their decor and design, had more in common with brothels than most people's image of a humble general practitioner's room. But then Edelsten was no humble GP, even if all his patients needed to do to enjoy the luxurious facilities provided by "the Hugh Hefner of medicine" was to flash their green and gold Medicare card.

"His surgeries are decked out in gold, with salmon pink velvet couches, enormous chandeliers and mink-covered examination tables," reported one journalist. "Gold-clad hostesses and a small robot offer refreshments and educational advice to patients, who are told that if they wait more than 10 minutes to be attended to they are entitled to a free Instant Lottery ticket." The surgeries also came with white baby grand pianos; a pianist was sometimes paid to entertain patients while they waited.

The glitz of the surgeries was matched by the Edelstens' private life. There was the $6 million home in Dural and luxury cars with numberplates that said "Macho", "Spunky" and "Groovy". And there were Edelsten's gifts to Leanne, which supposedly included a pink helicopter - that it was pink Edelsten always denied, but many people swear they saw it - and, The Daily Telegraph reported, "a $100,000 pink Italian sports car lined with white mink".

In late July 1985, the VFL agreed to award the licence for the Swans to Edelsten in preference to the bid of another businessman, Basil Sellers (a man "of much more conservative bearing", according to The Canberra Times). The league needed to get the Swans noticed in a tough market, and Edelsten appeared to be just the kind of showman capable of helping it out.

Indeed, the syndicate to which Edelsten belonged played up the glamour as a means of distinguishing itself from the other bidders. It promoted the Edelstens as embodying Sydney's colour, playfulness and hedonism in contrast with the sober restraint of Melbourne. Edelsten exuded flamboyance, wealth and success, and Leanne - present when her husband learned that his Swans bid had been successful and wearing, according to one report, "a sequined white jumper, red leather pants and wet-look white thigh-length boots" - was central to his image.

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Media reports said the price was $6.3 million, a figure casual observers assumed had been carved out of a much greater fortune - but it soon became clear that the deal was a rather more tangled one. Edelsten eventually handed over about $3 million, mainly other people's money. It looked increasingly as if he was really a frontman for other interests, but there was no denying his ability to attract notice.

Edelsten's association with the Swans gave his surgeries publicity that allowed him to evade the prohibition on doctors advertising their services, but it was the doctor's business interests outside football that caused him problems soon after the award of the licence. A Labor senator, George Georges, alleged under parliamentary privilege that Edelsten was the "Dr X" named in a parliamentary committee report as being investigated for medical fraud.

Edelsten took out a full-page advertisement in The Sydney Morning Herald declaring his innocence, but an exposé of his business methods in the satirical magazine Matilda, which imputed various forms of lurid criminality, added further damage and provoked a lawsuit.

Worse followed: Edelsten soon stood accused of having hired the notorious hitman Christopher Dale Flannery to assault a patient who had given him trouble. He had already stood aside as Swans chairman but still had a long way to fall. He subsequently became bankrupt, divorced, and was struck off the medical register and sent to prison. And as the 1980s passed into mythology, his and Leanne's lifestyle was seen to epitomise the era's excesses.