Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Epigraph

‘A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles.

To diddle is his destiny.’

Edgar Allan Poe

‘Diddling: Considered as One of the Exact Sciences’

Contents

Epigraph

Introduction

Love is Blind: The Tichborne Claimant

The Art of the Con: Ethel Livesey

All That Glitters: Boiler rooms

His Wicked, Wicked Ways: Errol Flynn

I Have Seen the Light: Religious double-crossers

Hoodwinked: Carl Synnerdahl

Keep Your Friends Close …: Community swindlers

Doomsday Flight: Peter Macari

How to Fake Your Death: Harry Gordon

Nobody’s Fuel: Fuel-saving scams

The Silver Fox: Christopher Skase

City Slickers: Insider traders

My Word is My Bond (and It’s Not Worth a Cent!): Alan Bond

The Edge: Gambling grifters

The Fraud Catcher: Ken Gamble, PI

Quackers: Health fraudsters

Codename Iago: John Friedrich

By the Book: Literary hoaxes

Think Big: Audacious con artists

International Man of Mischief: Peter Foster

References

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

A man is only as good as his word. Out in the flatlands of East Anglia in rural Norfolk, where I grew up, that is a motto for a man to live his life by. One man who certainly did was John Benns, my father, a gentle compassionate man who saw the good in everyone and the funny side in everything. He brought his son up to see the same.

As a wide-eyed cub reporter on the Great Yarmouth Mercury, I was therefore ill-equipped to deal with the realities of life. On one of my earliest assignments, I was sent to cover a creditors’ meeting in a conference room of a pub on the quayside. There I found a febrile gathering of angry businessmen. They had been conned. A flamboyant Rolls-Royce-driving property developer had promised them the world and done his dash with their money. Every one of them in the room had been the recipient of his largesse, never realising it was their money that was paying for the champagne, the parties in his big house, the hookers and the crazy nights in the seafront casino. It was a long way from the world of men who lived by their word — and I loved it!

Ever since then, in 30 years of journalism, nothing has set the blood pounding in my temples and my heart racing more than being on the scent of a con man. Working in Fleet Street I saw first-hand the fallout from the grand-scale lies and cheating of Cypriot shyster Asil Nadir, known as ‘the man from Del Monte’ because of his ad for peaches. He built up a clothing, electronics and fruit-packing empire through a series of corporate raids that saw his company listed on the FTSE 100 list. Criminal mismanagement saw the whole house of cards collapse in 1990, and Nadir fled the country in a privately chartered twin-engine plane from Compton Abbas Airfield just one step ahead of the rozzers. He eventually returned in 2010, again on a privately chartered jet, naturally, and stayed in a $50,000-a-month rented house while he faced the music at the Old Bailey court. The jury found him guilty of theft from his company Polly Peck — specimen charges representing a fraction of the $300 million plus he is believed to have taken — and he was sent to the big house for ten years. Fed up with paying for bread and water for foreign crooks, the British government transferred him to a prison in Turkey in 2016.

An even bigger crook was Robert Maxwell. He fooled the entire country. The pin-stripe-suited Czech émigré was a media mogul and Member of Parliament. Larger than life, his photograph regularly appeared in his national newspaper, the Daily Mirror, with the most saintly and loved people of the time, including Princess Diana and Mother Theresa. He commuted between his Oxfordshire estate and his luxury apartment at the top of the Mirror’s Holborn offices via helicopter — he had even installed a helipad on the newspaper building’s roof for the privilege. He spent the rest of his time out on the water in his luxury cruiser the Lady Ghislaine, named after his daughter. When he rolled off the back of the boat and died in the Atlantic, it was a shock to the nation. But by the time his corpulent body had been lowered into its grave on Mount Sinai, the banks were calling in their loans and quickly realising all was not as it seemed.

The story of every con man is intertwined with his or her victims. Their anguish as they realise that their trust has been betrayed is enormous, and having to reassess everything they had once thought is an agonising and infuriating process. This time it was much more personal, because the victims were my friends. Maxwell had plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from the Mirror Group pension funds to prop up his failing empire. Money that his employees — journalists, printers, tea ladies — had put aside throughout their entire working lives to fund their retirements. All gone.

Then there was Ernest Saunders, the Guinness boss, who when caught manipulating the booze company’s share price, suffered a tragic bout of incurable Alzheimer’s disease. Released from jail just ten months into his five-year jail term, he suddenly made a world-first complete recovery.

Surely, I thought, England had the gold standard of con artists. I believed there was nowhere on earth that could top that.

And then I moved to Australia.

What a country. Built on a firm foundation of crooks, embezzlers and cheats, it has spectacularly strived to produce some of the worst scoundrels the world has seen. People like Rocco Calabrese, aka Rocco De Gonza, who has been described by one of his victims as ‘more slippery than an eel swimming in olive oil’. He is a classic Australian con man. A charming ‘entrepreneur’, frequently seen in one of his fleet of luxury cars, big-noting himself all over the top end of town. It was all a ‘fantasy world’ according to his emotionally scarred ex-wife who said Rocco was obsessed with money and impressing people. If only he had spent all those decades working on a proper job, instead of swindling, lying, conning and cheating, he might have got somewhere. But you have to credit the boy for trying.

Between 2007 and Rocco’s last appearance before the beak in 2015, police and anti-money laundering authorities had tracked more than $12 million passing through his bank account. Nice work if you can get it. As this book went to print he was being investigated for his role in one of Australia’s biggest tax frauds, leaving taxpayers $65 million out of pocket. The scheme involved buying high-quality gold bars and relabelling them as scrap gold in order to claim a 10 per cent GST credit on their value. Rocco acted as a broker in the sale of at least $1.5 million in gold bars to an interstate precious metals syndicate. But the thing that got him into trouble was classically Australian, the raw prawn. Rocco had been using rubber cheques to buy eight pallets of prawns worth $82,000 from an aquaculture company. When the cheques bounced, the law came looking. He was also facing 60 more deception charges for a range of crimes from the theft of a Porsche to the sale of fake heritage licence plates. In a moment of beautiful irony he was caught and arrested in the middle of Melbourne when his Maserati ran out of petrol.

The court heard Rocco suffers from ‘encapsulated psychotic disorder’, a diagnosis of misplaced grandiose belief in himself that was under review. It is a diagnosis that seems to fit all of the con men and women in this book who seem to have an astonishing self-belief. None more so than Barry John Faulkner, Australia’s own answer to American serial con artist Frank Abagnale Jnr, who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can. Since the 1960s Faulkner had pretended to be a host of different people including a CIA agent, Mike Nesmith from The Monkees, a colonel in both the US Air Force and the US Marine Corps, a gynaecologist and an Olympic official. In North Queensland, he offered pregnant women $75,000 to pose for nude photographs, posing as photographer ‘Curtis Jones’— but he never came up with the money to pay them. Like Abagnale, Faulkner claimed to be a pilot with airlines including Virgin Blue, Ansett, Canadian Airlines, Lauda Air and even the Royal Flying Doctor Service. In his heyday he would make sure he caught the TV show Australia’s Most Wanted every week, listening out for whatever nom de plume he was using at the time. If pilot Billy Joe Curtis, Colonel Bob Thomas or any other of his more than 50 fake names and aliases were mentioned, he would ring the show and immediately tell them he had seen the culprit on the other side of the country.

In 2006 he turned up at Sydney Airport as ‘Barry Franks’, a bogus FedEx employee, brandishing a list of cut-price items for sale that had been seized by Customs. One couple had handed over $1900 for a Ducati motorcycle and were left standing holding Mr Franks’s clipboard and mobile while he went to retrieve their motorcycle. Standing and waiting, standing and waiting. Of course he never returned. Police eventually arrested him living across the road from one of the city’s biggest police stations. After sentencing him to a year behind bars, Judge Allan Moore said: ‘Your method of operating has not changed. You lead a life whereby you live off the misfortunes of others that you impose on them.’

Unfortunately he is not alone in that. The exploits of Rocco and Faulkner, while making the hair curl on an honest man’s head, are not even worthy of a chapter in this chronicle of lowlife skulduggery. There are far greater charlatans to put under the microscope. Bank robber and con man Carl Synnerdahl is a charming man to talk to. Some of the bank managers he has held up at gunpoint might even remember him fondly. In the course of researching this book, he shared his reminiscences with me, including one from childhood. One day, he and some mates had broken into a pottery warehouse. The manufacturers had thousands of tea cups at various stages of production all laid out on shelves. Carl and his young mates did not leave until every single one was smashed.

It is a small crime when compared with the cons in this book, which span decades and involve millions of dollars, but it is one that goes to the heart of con men and women. No one in this book has any empathy for the people they have duped and many of them, including the biggest con man of them all, Peter Foster, insist that their crimes are in fact victimless.

Amanda Gordon, president of the Australian Psychological Society, described serial con man Foster as a ‘charming psychopath’. A man who goes through life conning everyone he meets without ever actually empathising with anyone. ‘It is not just an unwillingness to do so,’ she told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, after the latest of Foster’s numerous scams had come to light. ‘It is an inability to do so. We are taught from childhood to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. People like Foster seem to have an inability to do that. The rest of us operate on the assumption that people care for the wellbeing of others. People think that even if the person they are dealing with has been nasty to others, that person will be different with them, and that they are someone special.’

Of course, we wouldn’t fall for that now, would we? In 1940, Professor David Maurer took a look into the future of confidence games. He noted that they are cyclical: they are worked on and perfected over time, rising to a shimmering peak of conning perfection, and then dropping away. But they do not vanish. ‘Sooner or later they are revived, refurbished to fit the times, and used to trim some sucker who has never heard of them,’ he wrote.

As we have seen over the last century in Australia, even with the advent of new technology and increasing levels of knowledge, policing and security, dirty rotten scoundrels continue to flourish. Professor Maurer predicted: ‘Confidence men will continue to trade upon certain weaknesses in human nature. Hence until human nature changes perceptibly there is little possibility that there will be a shortage of marks for con games. So long as there are marks with money, the law will find great difficulty in suppressing confidence games, even assuming that local enforcement officers are sincerely interested. Increased legal obstacles have, in the past, had little ultimate effect upon confidence men, except perhaps to make them more wary and to force them to develop their technique to a very high level of perception. As long as the political boss, whether he be local, state or national, fosters a machine wherein graft and bribery are looked upon as a normal phase of government, as long as juries, judges and law enforcement officers can be had for a price, the confidence man will live and thrive in our society.’

Or, as we say in Australia, welcome to Queensland.

Back in England, I would take the two-hour drive from London to Norfolk and discuss the stories I had been covering with my father over a glass of homemade strawberry wine. As honest as the day is long, he would shake his head in disbelief at the audacity of the cons, the reckless bravado of the con artists and the complicit willingness of the victims to fall for and believe the lies. And he would laugh and laugh at the scrapes that came from those devilish acts. If he were alive today, I know that he would, like the rest of us, be equally horrified, astonished and amazed at the antics of Australia’s dirty rotten scoundrels recorded in these pages. It is by no means a definitive account of Australian conning, just the cream of a very rotten crop.

Read it and weep.

Love is Blind: The Tichborne Claimant

IF you wanted to create an academy of con artists — a university of graft, if you will — you might decide to round up all the grifters in the land, put them on a boat and send them to a remote island where they could hone their skills on each other. That might not have been the plan when the British dispatched the First Fleet to what is now Australia’s shores in 1788, but it certainly was the effect. Many notable rogues have emerged from this grand experiment, but it took a butcher from Wagga Wagga to raise the profile of Australian con artists and truly elevate them onto the world stage. He sparked a sensation in Victorian England, a long-running court battle and a debate that divided a nation, and is undoubtedly one of the greatest con men in history.

* * *

On 26 July 1865, an advertisement appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. It offered ‘a handsome reward’ to anyone who could provide information on Roger Charles Tichborne. He was the eldest son of the late Sir James Tichborne, the tenth baronet of Tichborne, and was ‘heir to all his estates’. It described Roger as 32 years old, ‘of a delicate constitution, rather tall, with very light brown hair and blue eyes’. He was last seen on board a ship called La Bella when it sailed out of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 20 April 1854. The La Bella was lost at sea, but rumours had reached England that the survivors of the wreck had been picked up by a boat bound for Australia. Could Roger have been among them?

The cards never seemed to fall right for poor old Roger. As a young man, he had had a love affair with his first cousin Katherine Doughty. The affair, however, was frowned upon by her parents. The lovelorn couple still met in secret but, with no prospect of marriage in sight, Roger decided a bit of action with the military overseas might be just the thing to get her out of his system. He enlisted in a regiment of the British Army known as the Royal Dragoons. Sadly, his dreams of giving Johnny Foreigner a sound thrashing to get over his broken heart were dashed as he found the regiment was permanently stationed in Britain. So he resigned his commission and headed off to South America with his trusty servant, John Moore, in tow. The Tichborne jinx struck again when Moore became sick and had to be laid off with pay when they reached Santiago, Chile. Undaunted, Roger carried on with a hunting trip through Peru before securing a berth on board the La Bella, bound for Jamaica. The man could not take a trick — when wreckage from the ship was found off the coast of Brazil, it was assumed Roger was among the crew and passengers who had been lost. His younger brother, Alfred, became the eleventh baronet in Roger’s absence. Alfred proved a reckless heir and squandered vast sums of money before drinking himself to an early death just months before the birth of his son, Henry, who inherited the title.

The advertisement had been placed in the Sydney Morning Herald by Arthur Cubitt, owner of the Missing Friends Agency based in Sydney, on behalf of Roger’s mother, Lady Henriette Tichborne, who lived in London. She was convinced her son was out there somewhere after a clairvoyant in Paris had told her that Roger was still alive and living on an island, and she had placed similar advertisements around the world in the hope of finding him.

It was Cubitt who first contacted her with news of Roger in November 1865. He said a lawyer in Wagga Wagga, William Gibbes, had identified her son during the bankruptcy examination of a local butcher called Thomas Castro. The butcher had smoked a briar pipe with the initials RCT, talked of property in England and said he had survived a shipwreck. Initially he had been unwilling to confirm his ‘real’ name, but eventually conceded that he was indeed Roger Tichborne. It seems the clairvoyant had been right after all.

How Lady Tichborne’s heart must have leapt when, after more than ten years of searching, she finally received a letter from her son. ‘My dear mother … I deeply regret the truble an anxsity [sic] I must have caused you by not writing before,’ he wrote. ‘But they (the reasons) are known to my Attorney. And the more private details I will keep for your own Ear. Of one thing rest assured, although I have been in A humble condition of Life, I have never let any act disgrace you or my Family.’

He went on to explain how it was not ‘needful’ for him to give greater proof of his identity other than to mention a brown mark on his side and ‘the card case at Brighton’ and instead she needed to send him the money to get home. Poor Roger, she must have thought — clearly his time at sea had affected her well-educated son’s ability to spell. Despite the letter being vague about his former life, it was enough to convince her that Roger was indeed alive and well.

Cubitt asked Lady Tichborne for funds to enable her son to come home. Bereft after the death of Alfred several months before, Lady Tichborne was only too happy to oblige. But first she wanted confirmation that it was indeed Roger — especially since Roger would be inheriting his rightful title as the twelfth baronet. She arranged for Castro, the Tichborne Claimant, to head to Sydney with his wife, a housemaid called Mary Ann Bryant, who was pregnant with another man’s child when they married. If the Claimant was indeed Roger, he had clearly got over his broken heart. He had taken Mary’s child, a daughter, as his own, and they had had another girl. The Claimant, now calling himself ‘Roger’, was introduced to two former servants of the Tichborne family. Both said they recognised him — despite his 86-kilogram weight being far heavier than the slender Roger they remembered. It also did not seem to matter that he had lighter hair, detached earlobes, and an unexpected and marked cockney accent. Oh, and he had forgotten how to speak French, despite being brought up in Paris as a child. Nevertheless, the Tichborne family’s former servant Andrew Bogle remained convinced the Claimant was the real Sir Roger for the rest of his life. The Claimant had met Bogle, together with former Tichborne estate gardener Michael Guilfoyle, in Sydney. Both were convinced he was the real Sir Roger. It was Bogle who refreshed the Claimant’s memory of so many forgotten things from his past. Sceptics suggested the unflappable former valet was not really a dupe but a vengeful mastermind who in fact schooled the Claimant in Tichborne family lore.

Lady Tichborne needed no more convincing and sent the money for the family to head to England. In fact she was now positively begging him to come. ‘My dear and beloved Roger,’ she wrote:

I hope you will not refuse to come home to your poor afflicted mother. I have had the great misfortune to lose your poor dear father and lately I have lost my beloved son Alfred, I am now alone in the world of sorrow I hope you will take that in consideration and that you will come to join me as soon as possible you need not be afraid about the money as you will have all the money necessary to pay your expenses, only come to see your poor lonely mother and remember the promise you made to your dear father before going away that if God called him to Himself that you would then come back to be your Mother’s protector certainly in that melancholy case and now that your poor dear brother is dead, I have nobody to look to but you.

Our hero needed no more encouragement and quickly took to the titled life. By the time the Claimant arrived at Tilbury Docks in December 1866, he was even more unrecognisable — the good living conditions aboard the ship had added another 30 kilograms to his already ample girth.

Once the family was comfortably settled in a London hotel, the Claimant went to Lady Tichborne’s address, only to hear that she was in Paris. He then toddled on to the district of Wapping in the East End of London. There he told a local resident he was a friend of a man called Arthur Orton, who had asked the Claimant to look into the whereabouts of Orton’s family on his behalf. The neighbour told him in return that the Orton family had moved on.

The Claimant then took out his own insurance and hired a solicitor to travel with him to Paris to meet his mother. He needn’t have worried. As soon as he walked through the doors of the Hotel de Lille, Lady Tichborne accepted him as her son.

Even when Roger’s childhood tutor, Father Chatillon, unequivocally stated that the Claimant was a fraud, she remained unmoved.