Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

by Matthew Benns

  It wasn’t.

  Suleman and his mother, Najiba, arrived in Australia from Iraq in 1976 to live with his uncle. Suleman was fifteen years old. His father had died piloting a plane for the Iraqi Air Force at an air show in 1963 when Najiba was just nineteen. After finishing school, Suleman worked as a storeman and packer until a back injury laid him up and paid him out — $90,000. He used the cash in 1989 to buy a two-storey townhouse in Hinchinbrook near Fairfield in Sydney’s western suburbs, where he lived with his wife, Vivian, and their two children. The property provided the security for first one, then two 7-Eleven stores.

  By the late 1990s, he was collecting shopping trolleys and telling family members what a great business it was. Several of them jumped on to invest in Karl Suleman Enterprises (KSE), largely based on his promise that the money invested would earn them 190 per cent interest. And, astonishingly, it did. At least at the start. As the word spread like wildfire through the 20,000-strong Assyrian community in Sydney, people raced each other to invest, mortgaging homes and taking out loans in fake names to get rich quick with the local boy made good. From 1999 to 2001, a total of 2062 investors pumped $130.7 million into KSE. A total of $45 million of that went back to some of the lucky early investors, who couldn’t wait to tell others about the amazing returns they were getting. At one stage, people were dropping off thousands of dollars to Suleman’s office in plastic shopping bags. They were so happy to trust him, they did not even ask for a receipt.

  Suleman dyed his hair blond, surrounded himself with acolytes known as the ‘Men in Black’ because of their clothing, and went shopping. He picked up two planes, some racehorses, a couple of Ferrari Modena sports cars, a Ferrari Spider and a $3.3-million luxury yacht. He gave his Mercedes 280SL to one of his acolytes simply because he asked him for it. No problem; he still had the Lamborghini. There was money everywhere. One person who was tossed the keys to the Ferrari and told to take it for a spin opened the compartment next to the driver’s seat and was astonished to see $50,000 in cash casually laying there. Suleman paid $150,000 for the privilege of sitting next to former US president Bill Clinton at a children’s hospital charity fundraising dinner, and then entertained Clinton on his yacht and jetted him around the country. He also paid a pretty penny to sit next to former president George Bush Snr at a Melbourne Cup lunch.

  Channel Seven’s Wheel of Fortune hostess Adriana Xenides was hired to be the face of Froggy. She told the Sydney Morning Herald’s Nikki Barrowclough that she had seen him give thousands of dollars to people in the Assyrian community in Fairfield. ‘He’d say to me, “You know, Adri, that man has been looking for work for eight months.” He was very kind-hearted.’ Outside a coffee shop in Liverpool, she saw several of his Men in Black giving him cheques to sign — they were all blank.

  ‘Karl, do you know what you’re doing, signing cheques when you don’t know what they’re for?’ said Xenides. ‘He looked at me in a very bemused way and said, “These people are my brothers.”’

  Suleman, who had once been a drummer in a band, also loved the show-business connections that other people’s money bought. He started talks with Jewish property developer Nati Stoliar to go into partnership to produce the fourth film of the Godfather series, which was estimated would cost US$80 million. California-based Linda George was flown to Sydney three times by Froggy Music to work on her first English language album and video. She was taken to a couturier and bought designer clothes. For her last trip, she was put up at the Sheraton on the Park hotel for three months and believed she would be promoting the album on television. But by then things had started to go very badly wrong in the Froggy empire. The Ponzi scheme was collapsing. ‘For six months I lost loads of money, tours in Europe and Canada, and I am going to be suffering for what happened to me,’ she told me from her home in America. ‘He has sabotaged my career … for me it was a dream they killed.’ While the women in Suleman’s entourage swanned around in BMWs and went shopping for luxury labels, she became trapped in her hotel room and was left begging for living expenses. Suleman’s Men in Black started calling her at night with lewd suggestions. ‘A lot of things that were said to me are so disgusting I cannot tell my family about them,’ she said.

  Rumours began, and investigators from ASIC started to look into his affairs. Despite the talk that was swirling around town, when ASIC investigators swooped on his office and found he did not have an investment advisor’s licence, there was still money arriving from would-be investors. ASIC froze his assets, and creditors, who were owed $65 million, appointed liquidators Paul Weston and Neil Cussen from Horwath Chartered Accountants to try to get back their money. Suleman was declared bankrupt in 2002.

  Weston and Cussen were staggered to find there was hardly any paperwork recording the dealings of the businesses at all. The Men in Black disappeared overseas. Suleman stayed and blamed them for their bad advice. ‘I know I was a fool,’ Suleman told reporter Barrowclough. ‘But let’s wait and see who comes out clean at the end. If I had wanted to rip people off, I could have taken off with the money.’

  Brave words but hollow — he did not come out clean in the end.

  He came unstuck with the discovery that he had faked documents in order to get loans to buy his yacht and sports cars. He showed car dealer Rick Damelian an artfully forged bank statement showing a balance of $14 million when he applied for a $355,000 loan to buy his Ferrari Spider. He put down a $1-million deposit for the $3.3-million motor yacht and told the finance broker he had $18 million in the bank, when he really only had $1.5 million.

  He was jailed for 21 months for the frauds in 2004 by District Court Judge Peter Berman, who said he was ‘an entrepreneur whose light burnt magnesium bright for a short time’. The chain-smoking con man had to be put into protective custody, because there were death threats against him.

  But it did not end there. The creditors wanted their money or they wanted justice, which they did not feel had been served by the 21-month sentence. In 2007, he was jailed for a minimum of five and a half years on 26 fraud charges relating to his trolley-collection business. ASIC investigators found he had used false statements to get more than $3 million out of fifteen investors. Only two of them ever got their money back.

  It is unlikely that any of his investors shed a tear when he was found dead at home from a heart attack in 2013, aged just 52. However, cooler heads in the Assyrian community believed the investors needed to take some responsibility for their part in their own downfall. ‘How could anyone believe in Karl?’ said one Assyrian businessman, who had warned friends and neighbours to hang on to their money. ‘He once asked someone how to spell “nil”. Everyone knew Karl was uneducated. Some of the people around him were uneducated. For heaven’s sake, why give your money to people like that?’

  Doomsday Flight: Peter Macari

  CARL Synnerdahl inspired a movie; Peter Pasquale Macari, on the other hand, was inspired by one. In 1970, Macari was sitting in the back of his black-and-cream Commer van on a trip to Queensland watching an old black-and-white television. It was showing the 1966 movie Doomsday Flight, starring Hawaii Five-0’s Jack Lord. The terrorist was making the crucial phone call to the airline to tell them there was a bomb on the plane. ‘It’s an aneroid bomb and it’s incredibly, appallingly efficient,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that any major airline that can afford to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a fleet of 707s could certainly afford to divest itself of a few hundred thousand dollars, especially to save one of those shiny aeroplanes.’

  ‘That would be a good way to make money,’ said Macari.

  The 36-year-old English migrant had fallen foul of the law once before. He had been arrested in England on homosexuality charges and had absconded to Australia where he had briefly run a fibreglass factory at Brookvale, on Sydney’s northern beaches, and driven a taxi. Those who knew him under the alias ‘Peter King’ at the Bondi gymnasium where he regularly worked out described him variously as sly, witty, restless and generous.r />
  Macari wasted no time. He bought gelignite in Mount Isa and an altimeter in Sydney and recruited 28-year-old Sydney barman Raymond Poynting to join him in the plot, helping him type out the extortion letters.

  At 12.20 pm on 26 May 1971, Macari, using the alias ‘Mr Brown’, called police officers at Sydney Airport to say there was an altitude bomb hidden on the Qantas Boeing 707 that had just left for Hong Kong. Qantas Flight 755 had 127 passengers and crew on board. Mr Brown told police that if the plane dropped below 6500 metres, the bomb would automatically detonate. He guided police to a locker at the airport, in which they found a vinyl bag containing a sample bomb and three letters. The first letter explained how the bomb in the bag, once in the air and triggered, would detonate if it went below a certain altitude, and the second that another bomb was on the Hong Kong flight. The third, addressed to Qantas chief executive Captain Robert Ritchie, demanded $500,000 in used notes before 4 pm that day. Mr Brown promised to tell Qantas how to find and defuse the bomb on the plane once he had the money. While police confirmed the bomb found in the locker would work as promised, Captain Ritchie ordered the Hong Kong flight into a holding pattern above 6500 metres, and the crew methodically searched the plane for the bomb, ripping up seats and tearing out panels. Passengers were told there was a technical fault.

  Captain Ritchie faced the most awful of dilemmas. The man who had been a major player in bringing Qantas into the jet age now faced losing one of those planes in the most horrific circumstances. The police did not want him to deal with an extortionist who had effectively hijacked the Qantas jet by remote control. But he did not want to risk losing the lives of 127 passengers and crew. He hedged his bets and called Qantas finance director Bill Harding, who went to the Reserve Bank and returned with ten bundles of twenty-dollar notes.

  Meanwhile, up in the sky, the plane was running out of fuel and would have to land by 7 pm.

  The cash was packed into two suitcases and Captain Ritchie, following Mr Brown’s instructions, personally took it downstairs to the street outside the Qantas building in the heart of Sydney where Mr Brown — a heavily disguised Macari — was sitting in a yellow Volkswagen Kombi van. As Captain Ritchie was photographed pushing the bags through the open passenger window, frustrated police officers found themselves trapped in a lift that stopped at every floor of the building. By the time they got out onto the pavement, Macari had calmly driven away.

  Once clear, Macari called Qantas and told them there was no bomb on the plane. It was an elaborate and expensive hoax. The pilot of Qantas Flight 755, World War II veteran Captain William Selwyn, received the call on the flight deck: ‘We have been advised there is nil — repeat nil — bomb on board. Please advise your cabin altitude and aircraft altitude.’

  Captain Selwyn replied with a ‘roger’ and started his descent from 22,000 feet. ‘It was the most frightening thing,’ he said afterwards. ‘We came below 20,000 feet and no bomb went off!’ On the tarmac the engineers checked to find the wings had fuel left for just 16 minutes of flying time.

  The plane had landed safely, but where was Qantas’s half-a-million dollars?

  Macari and Poynting went on a spending spree. Macari bought a 1967 white E-type Jaguar with black leather upholstery for $5000. Then he added to his collection with a Mini Cooper for $1900, a Morris Cooper ERW 306 for $800 and a Ford Transit van for $1800. He paid $41,000 for a three-bedroom top-floor unit in Bondi with panoramic ocean views, and flew to the Gold Coast to get a sample of carpet he had seen in a motel there. He put down a deposit on a former butcher’s shop and residence in Annandale, in Sydney, worth $14,750 and used it to stash some of the ransom money. Macari then sold the E-type to Poynting, who had already spent $4300 on a tangerine Ford Falcon GT, and instead bought himself a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro. Ron Phillips, owner of the Five Dock car yard where Macari bought the car, told the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘It was what we call a pose car. A young bloke who wants to be noticed might buy it. As it drove past, you’d turn and look, that’s for sure!’ Mr Phillips said Macari haggled the price of the car down by $500 to $5500. The Camaro was hard to miss. It was iridescent blue with bone-white upholstery, and had red wall tyres on its US magnesium-alloy wire wheels.

  On 4 August, less than three months after the Qantas hoax, an anonymous tipster called police again to say how a man had been spotted spending a lot of money and was now driving around Bondi Junction in a blue Camaro. The caller wondered if it was Mr Brown. Detective Ross Bradley and Detective Sergeant Mervyn Brazel did not find the car difficult to locate and tailed the Camaro to St Vincent’s Hospital where they spoke to Macari, who claimed he was Raymond Poynting because he was using Poynting’s licence. Macari was a promising suspect. After a preliminary interrogation at the Criminal Investigation Branch, Brazel told the head of the Consorting Squad, Detective Sergeant Jack O’Neill: ‘He’s English, hasn’t worked for about eighteen months, and for mine he’s Mr Brown from Qantas.’

  Even before police stopped Macari in his flash American car, the police investigation was already closing in on him. Officers were looking for him under one of the many aliases he had used, they had his fingerprints from England, and inquiries into gelignite and typewriters were starting to provide new leads. Macari maintained there was a mastermind behind the bomb hoax, known only to him as Ken, who had taken all but $125,000 of the ransom money. It was Ken who had been inspired by the movie Doomsday Flight and had told him what to do.

  ‘He threatened me personally and spoke of what some of his mates would do to me,’ Macari told police.

  After Captain Ritchie had handed over the money, Macari claimed he took it straight to Ken, who was waiting in a white Valiant. ‘The agreement was $125,000, and he gave me or he took out of the bag approximately that amount. Seven bundles, I think. Removed the suitcases to the boot in the car.’ Macari said they then drove off.

  The police officers did not believe him for a minute. Macari was a proven liar. When the police had asked for his date of birth, he had said: ‘I don’t know. I’ve told people that many things about my birthday, I can’t remember the right one.’

  At his court hearing, Macari pleaded guilty to extortion and was deported to England after serving nine of his fifteen-year sentence. Poynting served four of his seven years. Police recovered $138,240 of the ransom money stuffed behind the fireplace of the former butcher’s shop in Annandale and managed to recoup some of the stolen cash from the sale of the cars and properties Macari and Poynting had bought. But almost half — $239,000, to be exact — of Qantas’s money was still missing. Evidence showed Macari and Poynting had taken a skin-diving course and purchased two corrosion-proof safes, which led police to believe that they had put the money in the safes and sunk them in the sea — probably within sight of Macari’s ocean-view flat. The money has never been recovered.

  The bomb hoax became known as Australia’s most audacious crime. It inspired a movie of its own and a copycat crime by a seventeen-year-old in 1997, which was quickly revealed as not serious by security checks. Meanwhile, the film that inspired the original hoax, Doomsday Flight, was taken off the air for several years.

  Macari was later linked to the possible murder of Billy Day, a 24-year-old man from England, who went missing after taking a trip to Queensland in a camper van with a ‘Peter Brown’ in 1970. English Detective Chief Inspector Andrew Ravassio interviewed Macari about the mystery on his return to England. ‘When I suggested he knew what happened to Day, he said, “You prove it”,’ said Ravassio.

  How to Fake Your Death: Harry Gordon

  THE 1970s provided us with one of the great television sitcoms of all time: The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, starring Leonard Rossiter and based on the books of David Nobbs. It featured a man, Reginald Perrin, trapped in his own existential crisis, and was populated with catchphrases from his boss, CJ, who would always begin his lectures with the phrase ‘I didn’t get where I am today by …’ and would finish his sentence with something akin to ‘we
aring underpants decorated with Beethoven’ or some other ridiculous analogy. The show began its opening credits with Perrin stripping off on the beach and running naked into the water to fake his own death and escape his drab existence. No more telling his secretary: ‘Morning, Joan, fifteen minutes late, escaped panther at Bridgend.’ Here was a man who was off the hamster wheel and living the dream. His gravestone read: ‘Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. He didn’t know the names of the trees and the flowers, but he knew the rhubarb crumble sales figures for Schlewsig-Holstein.’

  Thirty years later, in 2000, Australia got its own real-life Reginald Perrin.

  Harry Gordon was in a lot of trouble. Greed and ego had pushed the 50-year-old businessman into a get-rich-quick scheme with people who turned out to have links to the Russian mafia. ‘It was pure vanity. I was invited into business dealings with people I thought were legitimate. I didn’t really take the time to research them. They turned out to be bad eggs. They tried to extort money from me with violence and death threats,’ he said.

  Then Josaphine, his illegitimate daughter from a teenage love affair, appeared and sent his wife, Sheila, incandescent with rage. The marriage was already struggling and this seemed to be the final straw. There were myriad other problems too, including issues regarding an unpleasant workers’ compensation case and the matter of twenty tonnes of asbestos that had not been handled quite by the book. There was also the get-rich-quick scheme with a Ukrainian gangster that had gone south, leaving the gangster angry and promising violence.

  Gordon frantically looked for a way out. ‘What I should have done was just left a note, run off with a floozy, gone fishing, anything. But in that last week, I came up with the rather stupid idea that I’d fake my own death,’ he said later. Just four days after having that incredible and desperate thought, on a cold June evening, Gordon found himself in a rubber dinghy on the Karuah estuary in the Hunter, to the north of Sydney, puttering away from his speedboat, which he had purposefully crashed into a navigation buoy. Rolling around the deck of the abandoned speedboat were some empty champagne bottles, his wallet and his mobile phone. It seemed like Gordon had gone over the side drunk, and drowned.