Bain trial: Who is Joe Karam?

Joe Karam with David Bain. Photo / Martin Sykes

Joe Karam is now the man of the moment after the end of a decade-long fight to clear David Bain's name.

Joe Karam was best known as a former All Black fullback who defected to rugby league in the 1970s, before joining the crusade for David Bain's freedom in 1996.

Karam has portrayed his long fight to free David Bain as him against the police and crown monolith.

He even entitled one of his three books, David and Goliath.

"Since we won leave to appeal to the Privy Council in 2006, I have been full time," Karam said during a break towards the end of David Bain's three-month retrial.

"It has been me versus 25 detectives."

He has been everywhere during the Bain trial, organising and overseeing, passing notes, even taking his turn on the defence team's coffee run to Coffeesmiths across the road from the Court House.

The Bain campaign gained traction when Karam got involved 11 years ago, but it has meant taking on a huge burden for the businessman.

That has included the successful defence of a defamation action taken against him by a police officer.

He has said that involved 2½ years of "working night and day" to prepare David Bain's defence.

He has earlier put the personal cost – in terms of actual costs, lost earnings and lost opportunities – at between $3 million and $5 million.

Joseph Francis Karam was born in Taumarunui, 21 November 1951.

He played 10 tests and another 32 games for the All Blacks, scoring 345 points in total. He was also part of the All Black squad on the tour of the United Kingdom that saw prop Keith Murdoch banished from the team after an incident with a bouncer.

He played his last test against Scotland in June 1975 and soon after turned to league.

A businessman at the end of his sporting career, by the 1990s he'd made his fortune in various business ventures including hamburger bars and country pubs and the country's first major independent vending machine company.

He had investment properties, a launch and racehorses, living on 10 acres at Clevedon.

Karam told the Herald's Geoff Cumming he joined the Bain case in 1996, when he "very naively believed all I would do was take my concerns to the authorities who would take over from there. Unbelievably, they didn't - they thought I was the enemy."

He says he's spent virtually all his money on the case over the past 13 years.

Asked why he pursued Bain's innocence with such a vigour he says: "Over time it became a little bit blurred as to why I was doing it. I wanted the fact that I was right to be proven. There was proving I wasn't the only one seeing Martians."

Karam wrote a book on the case, published in 1997, entitled 'David and Goliath: The Bain family murders'.

From then on, he was the public face for a perceived miscarriage of justice against David Bain.

In 2007, after Bain's convictions were quashed by the Privy Council, he told Victoria University's Salient magazine what had kept him going.

"What I've really been driven by is an absolute certainty that David Bain was railroaded - that he never got a fair go. That's what's kept me going really."

Asked in the same interview how he would react if Bain was found guilty he replied: "Well, I would be astonished, because I think it's impossible. I have no doubt whatsoever that that won't happen, so I've never really considered it."

Karam says he likes to get away from the case with some "amateur" cooking, wine and watching international sport on television.

He lives with partner of seven years Lisa, and has three children, Richard, Matt and Simone from a previous relationship.

- NZ HERALD STAFF, NZPA