He pulled off a heist in Brisbane and was back in Hong Kong when, once again, a woman tripped him up. She called police and told them where he was. Synnerdahl was put on Interpol’s ‘ten most wanted’ list, caught and brought back to New South Wales.
It was while on remand back at Parramatta Jail that he decided he needed to do something to break out of the prison system. At this point, some people consider going on the straight and narrow. Synnerdahl came up with one of the most elaborate scams ever foisted on the unwitting New South Wales prison system.
Carl Synnerdahl decided it was time he went blind.
‘From that day on I started rubbing my eyes, making them red, blinking and bumping into things,’ he said. People started leading him around by the arm and he even taught himself to read Braille.
The prison officials were suspicious. They called in legendary Australian eye specialist Fred Hollows to investigate. He peered into Synnerdahl’s eyes, performed his tests and declared, yes, poor Carl really was blind. Of course, today more sophisticated testing equipment would have shown that he was not blind. But Professor Hollows and the other specialists who checked Synnerdahl out were not well-equipped to deal with a con man, having never before come across someone who was actually trying to be blind.
Years later, in the movie Hoodwink, actor John Hargreaves would learn Synnerdahl’s trick for feigning blindness: his focus would remain fixed on a remote object, no matter what was waved, waggled or placed in his line of vision. Practising the ruse himself gave Hargreaves an appreciation of just how good Synnerdahl was at pulling it off, particularly considering Hargreaves only had to pretend to be blind while he was on set, while Synnerdahl had to keep up the scam for months.
‘He’s no common trickster. He has to work hard at this deception. One mistake and he’s gone,’ said Hargreaves in an interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly.
The whole point of this elaborate charade was to get Synnerdahl out of a conviction. It didn’t work.
‘I’ve always wondered what sort of a judge would send a blind man to prison for six years,’ he said ruefully, still surprised years later that his scam had not elicited more sympathy from the beak.
It certainly prompted sympathy from an outraged public and plunged the New South Wales prison system into chaos as it struggled to adapt to its first ‘blind’ prisoner. The governor of Cessnock Jail decided Synnerdahl could be given more leeway because of his disability, and Synnerdahl was granted day leave from jail, at least on a weekly basis. After all, how far could a blind man get?
He would be met by one of the married women he was having an affair with, fold up his cane, take off his glasses and hop behind the steering wheel. He was a regular at events in Newcastle and in the beds of his married lovers. Unfortunately that unravelled after he fell in love. He’d spend his leave days in bed with the wife of a local Seventh Day Adventist minister.
Eventually a day was not enough and he went on the lam, getting caught and busted for his charade in one fell swoop. Back behind bars, again in Parramatta, he spent the years in incarceration writing his book Hoodwink. ‘This is the true story of one of Australia’s most notorious bank robbers,’ ran the blurb. ‘Faced with the prospect of years in gaol, he set out to make an ass of the law — and succeeded.’
Synnerdahl had fallen in love with a doctor while still inside and they married as soon as he was released. They set up a couple of medical practices in Willoughby, in Sydney’s north, and had two children. However, his notoriety followed them relentlessly. They sought obscurity in Tasmania’s remote Savage River mining community where locals still remember him turning up in his Porsche. Clearly, he did not mind the notoriety too much.
As the medical practices boomed, Synnerdahl spent up big, also buying himself a gold Rolls Royce. When the marriage failed, Synnerdahl kept the Rolls and the children, but was locked out of the businesses. He was forced to sign on for the dole and used to park the Roller at the back of the Centrelink office before strolling in the front to collect his government handout.
Struggling for cash, he discovered cannabis plants on the property he rented at Wyee, north of Sydney, and decided he would try to cultivate and sell them. In 1995, he was busted for drug possession and given a three-month sentence. By this stage he had a new partner and they were married before he went inside to serve his sentence.
‘I was a really evil bastard for many, many years,’ he said in 2001. ’You just don’t walk into banks and then turn into a nice guy. You take a lot of time for reflection and take stake of yourself and where you want to go,’ he said.
At the time of writing, Synnerdahl had written a book called Code Black about his robberies, cons and the crooks he had known, and was recovering from illness. He was living a much quieter life with his wife and granddaughter in the South Australian countryside. ‘This is where I want to die in peace, without guns blazing through doors. I have had enough of all that kind of stuff,’ he said.
Keep Your Friends Close …: Community swindlers
WE met in a coffee shop in the Westfield shopping mall in Chatswood, on Sydney’s north shore, in January 2014. Eloise Varoujan was sitting at a white Formica-topped table at the back. She looked much older than the glamorous, elegant woman I had seen standing by her husband’s side in photographs. She looked tired, like the weight of the world was on her shoulders.
Beside her sat a tense, protective young man with a shock of black hair. He was vibrating with anger, glowering at me while his mother spoke.
‘I want to know where he is too. I haven’t had contact for the last four years,’ Eloise said, twisting a tissue in her hands.
Her husband, John Varoujan, chairman of the Armenian Chamber of Commerce in Sydney and pillar of the local community, had fled the country four years previously. When he ran, Varoujan had taken with him over $40 million of his investors’ hard-earned life savings. His investors were friends, colleagues, family members and people from the Armenian community in Sydney — almost 70 people, who all trusted him. John Varoujan had robbed the lot of them, and left his wife and sons behind to face the music. They were his biggest victims.
Eloise was desperate for the Daily Telegraph to not run the story on her husband’s dirty dealings. ‘Think of my boys,’ she implored. ‘They have friends who have no idea what John has done. It will ruin us.’ Weighed against that were the interests of the many investors who had put money into Varoujan’s Gold Hedge Royalty Corporation, and wanted the story out there in the hopes it would warn others to watch out for him and possibly flush out fresh clues as to his whereabouts.
‘The investors have contacted me, but I don’t have anything to tell them,’ she said.
What she did not know was that the investors had also contacted me and had told me that they suspected her of not only being in touch with her husband, but meeting him in Paris, where he had been spotted paying for lunches from a wad of money that also had crisp US$100 notes. It was her word against theirs. Who do you believe? An aggrieved victim or an allegedly duped wife?
I asked her how she could have lived with him for so long and not known what was going on. She claimed she had not seen any of the excesses that he had flamboyantly paraded overseas, and thought he was just doing well at work. If ‘doing well at work’ means ripping off anyone who ever believed in you, then, yes, he was doing very well indeed.
Throughout the interview, Varoujan’s son radiated hostility. It was understandable; this man who he loved and idolised had betrayed him, and left him to protect his mother and younger sibling. Apparently, Varoujan had kept in contact with his sons too, but, again, they denied this.
At the end of our interview, they were shattered. Eloise was clearly distraught and her son had his arm around her, comforting her. As I left, I told them the Daily Telegraph was running the story, because the world needed to know what their husband and father had done. It was awful, because they were victims too. But their pain was his responsibility — there are milli
ons of other fathers who go to work, take care of their families, volunteer in the community and generally do the right thing. Those fathers don’t get shamed in the newspaper.
‘It was all just a big con, none of it was real,’ retired architect Brian Mazlin said. He was one of the many investors to be taken in by the glossy brochures and slick sales pitch of Varoujan’s Gold Hedge Royalty Corporation. The prospectus promised to invest in gold mines and bullion — literally the gold standard of financial security — and carried on the cover the legend: ‘In gold we trust’. It was filled with the names of genuine people who had never consented to be part of the corporation, and it also had detailed business and background briefings on real gold mines to which Varoujan had no links.
‘I met him when he was an investment banker with a respectable company. When he went out on his own, I placed investments with him, but I never received any paperwork,’ said Mazlin. It did not matter, because Varoujan, whose real name was Varoujan Yaghldjian, was good. Convincing. As chairman of the Armenian Chamber of Commerce, the flamboyant, cigar-smoking con man had the trust of the community and had even had his photograph taken with former federal treasurer Joe Hockey. The Armenian honorary consul was one of his victims.
It couldn’t last. Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) investigators swooped as soon as they were alerted to the con in 2014. They cancelled his financial services licence and took down his website. The financial regulator warned investors that Varoujan’s business memorandum ‘included an array of false claims including misrepresenting that various law firms, auditors, and investments banks act for Gold Hedge Royalty’.
But the oily fraudster had already snaked his way overseas. He set up an office in the Moscow Hotel in Dubai, an expensive and notorious pick-up spot for Eastern European prostitutes, and told investors back in Australia he was doing gold deals with the royal family in the United Arab Emirates. He sent them pictures of his luxury cruiser with a Jacuzzi on the timber deck, and told them they would be invited out for champagne and a cruise. Of course, it never eventuated.
One investor, who did not want to be named, described running into John in Europe: ‘Once, I got to see him in the South of France and he was with a representative of a Saudi royal family. They were renting several suites in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes where John was their guest. John explained to me that he was now money manager for this royal family.’ Clearly impressed, she sank $700,000 of her family’s money into Gold Hedge. After that, the paperwork and feedback from Varoujan dried up. She tracked him to the Emirates Palace hotel in Abu Dhabi and made contact with a representative of the royal family. ‘He was amazed that John was saying that he was working with them and told me that they had him along “just for fun”,’ she said.
Adelaide dentist Jamie Harris pumped $1.5 million into Varoujan’s company and met him in Dubai to discuss their investment. ‘We met in a very expensive hotel and he bought a bottle of Moët and dinner,’ said Harris. ‘It was all promises and nothing came of it. The sad thing is that his investment ideas were spot on, it’s just that he kept the money for himself.’ Ironically, it was Harris who ended up paying for the Moët and dinner when he had to cover Varoujan’s $30,000 hotel bill after the smooth-talking fraudster spun him a story and conned him into paying again.
Every time Varoujan moved, he covered his tracks. Australian investment advisor Evan Stevens invested $250,000 with Varoujan and has been attempting to follow the money trail ever since. ‘He registered Gold Hedge Royalty in the Cook Islands and then Singapore, where he had $9 million transferred in from a group in Mexico,’ said Stevens. But he is suspicious about the origins of the money, because the building in Mexico is empty and the people who allegedly transferred the money cannot be traced.
Another of Varoujan’s stings in Cyprus pulled in over $1 million from British investors. One of those was Police Inspector Stephen Ellis, who lost $25,000. ‘I am keen to support any efforts to bring this man Varoujan to justice,’ he said.
In fact, Varoujan once came very close to capture. He had pulled off his usual charm offensive on an Arab sheikh when he met him on the deck of the sheikh’s yacht in the United Arab Emirates in 2009. The sheikh’s right-hand man, George Thomas, vice president of the Al-Bassam Group in Dubai, said: ‘This man presented a very convincing prospectus for his Gold Hedge Royalty company to our principal on his yacht and he invested $US500,000.’ Again, Varoujan disappeared with the cash, and Thomas realised Varoujan was a scam artist.
When he later found out Varoujan was back in Abu Dhabi on a visit, he decided to arrange a trap for him. ‘One of my team posed on the telephone as an investor and insisted on a face-to-face meeting to hand him the cash for the investment,’ he said. ‘Before my guy could get to the meeting, Varoujan decided to leave his hotel where the meeting was supposed to take place. We do not know why — maybe he was tipped off or just got cold feet or even perhaps it seemed too good to be true that someone wanted to hand over cash.’
Despite getting wind of the set-up, Varoujan was not quick enough. As he was leaving the hotel, the police swooped, arrested the Aussie fraudster and put him behind bars.
After four days, diplomats from the Australian embassy pushed for him to be either charged or released. Because the original funds had been transferred from Saudi Arabia, the UAE police decided no crime had been committed in their country and they let the con man go. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed it ‘provided consular assistance to an Australian man in Dubai’ in 2009, but would not comment further.
Thomas said the sheikh was outraged, and that getting the money back had become a point of principle for him — even if the cost of doing so was greater than the $US500,000 lost in the con. Thomas alerted Interpol, who put Varoujan on their most wanted list. He also set teams of private detectives on his trail. ‘We understand through sources here that some individuals were scammed for many millions of US dollars. Also through our research we discovered that the City of London Police financial crimes unit believe this man has accumulated at least US$45 million through his nefarious schemes,’ he said.
Despite this, Varoujan remains on the loose. It is hard to believe that years ago he was a respected investment banker and family man. Though there were those who knew him who had thought there was something shifty about him. One former colleague posted on the Daily Telegraph comments section after exclusive news about the notorious fraudster: ‘I actually worked with John at a respected investment firm. I moved on and so too many of his colleagues who are my friends, we always thought he was a touch slippery, a lot more than we know it seems. I hope he gets caught.’
He is not alone. Eloise says Varoujan has ruined her and her children’s lives. After another newspaper article appeared about him, she called me in 2014 and said: ‘We are divorced. We detest everything he has done and we want no part of it. I have done nothing wrong in my life and we have lost everything because of him. I have worked damn hard to try and provide a life for my children after what he did. We have moved on. Last year I got a call from ASIC saying he had come to Australia. I went to them and offered to help but no one has come back to me. No one seems to care …’
* * *
What Varoujan did to his family and the Armenian community is mirrored by the incredible Ponzi scheme that Karl Suleman created to rip off Sydney’s Assyrian community. The whole multi-million-dollar scam was built around — of all things — a shopping trolley collection business.
Ponzi schemes were named after the Italian con man Charles Ponzi, who made a success of the rip-off in the US in 1920. He set up a business buying postage reply coupons in Italy, where the economy was depressed after World War I, and then exchanging those coupons for stamps in the country of origin, the US, where the value of the stamps was so much more than the original cost. Ponizi promised customers that he would double their money in 90 days. Red tape meant that the business model did not work out as he had planned, but so many people believed in
it, Ponzi was able to pay the original investors with money from incoming investors. Once those first investors doubled their money, word spread like wildfire and more investors flooded in.
Ponzi schemes work as long as people keep coming in at the bottom to fund the fake high profits to the original investors at the other end. However, the hollowed-out scheme is ultimately doomed to fail. The Queensland Police Service summed up the Ponzi scheme to the Queensland Organised Crime Commission of Inquiry in relation to Brisbane fraudster James Lovell, who used the scheme to con investors in his securities business out of $11 million over six years. ‘It is often very hard to distinguish between schemes that are entirely fraudulent from the start versus those types of schemes that may have begun in good faith, but fail due to poor business management of investment structures or are operated by under-skilled individuals,’ it said.
A charitable interpretation would be that Suleman seems to fit into the latter category of ‘under-skilled individuals’. This was a man who drove a tractor to gather up missing shopping trolleys and somehow turned that into a multi-million-dollar business. It really is amazing what cash struck punters can talk themselves into. In the early 2000s in Sydney, every summer weekend the skies would be filled with planes sky-writing the immortal slogan ‘Froggy.com’. It worked — soon Froggy was the success story on everybody’s lips, and the man behind it, Karl Suleman, became known as ‘Mr Froggy’. The name had been suggested by Bishop Joseph Mar Meelis Zaia, leader of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East, because it was catchy. He was a big supporter of Suleman and gave him great character references when those in his flock were thinking of investing in Suleman’s businesses. The company Froggy was in fact a couple of tiny internet service providers that Suleman had bought and tagged up with a music company and mobile phone reseller. It looked like a high-tech empire.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Page 6