Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

by Matthew Benns

  Gamble was in Australia, where he had just met and fallen in love with a woman called Rhiannon, who would go on to become his wife and mother of his three sons. ‘We don’t care who she is,’ his office told him. ‘Get over here and set up an armed executive protection detail for Mr Tober.’

  Gamble landed in Manila in the middle of one of the fraught country’s seemingly never-ending rounds of bombings and politically driven terror campaigns. The situation was tense — not ideal conditions to be moving Tober around Manila with a team of four SWAT guys and three former military operatives, including one former SAS soldier and a CIA agent. ‘We were with him 24 hours a day, seven days a week,’ said Gamble. ‘He was a prisoner in his own home; even the barber would come and cut his hair at home.’ When Tober drove to the office, his team of guards would escort him in vans in front of and behind his car, with every man packing an MP5 machine gun.

  Tober had not taken the bullying lightly and had pressed charges against Suplico. ‘We got intelligence that Suplico had put out a contract on Tober and paid assassins $10,000 to get him,’ said Gamble.

  One morning, on Tober’s way to work, his team spotted motorbikes and taxis trailing them, building up a picture of Tober’s movements. The same morning, Tober’s office received an unusual call asking when Mr Tober would be in. Gamble had had caller ID installed on the phone as a counter-surveillance measure, which captured the would-be killer’s number. The US Embassy and the Philippine Police were called in and the mobile phone number was tracked — only to find that it was a disposable phone that wasn’t registered to anyone.

  ‘Ken, let’s call the number,’ said Tober.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Gamble, ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  Gamble called his 65-year-old mother, Dorothy, at her neat suburban home in Port Stephens on the New South Wales mid-north coast.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘I need you to make a call and spin a bit of a story.’

  Fully briefed and being taped by one of her son’s operatives in Australia, Dorothy Gamble nervously made the call. A man answered.

  ‘Hello,’ she said before forging on quickly with her story. ‘I’m Dorothy Spicer, calling from Australia. My neighbours here gave me this number and said you might be able to help. My son has gone missing and I need someone over there to help find him.’

  The man on the other end of the phone mumbled that he could not help and hung up.

  Dorothy waited a moment and called again. ‘I really need your help, my son is missing. I can send money via Western Union to help you look for him. My neighbour Grace Valdez gave me this number and said you would be able to help.’

  The mention of money had his attention. He told her his name was Arthur and to call back tomorrow for details of where to send the cash.

  The next morning, Dorothy was on the phone again. This time, someone else answered.

  ‘Can I speak to Arthur, please?’ she asked, only to be told he was not there. Quick as a flash, she said: ‘Look, I need to send him some money but I didn’t get the spelling of his last name.’ The man on the other end spelt it out — Lascanas. Bingo.

  Arthur Lascanas was a serving cop with the National Bureau of Investigation who was already suspected of being involved in a couple of murders. Gamble’s team put together a report and asked for more information from the Philippine authorities. What they were told was chilling. Lascanas was linked to the notorious Davao Death Squads, the vigilante groups that carried out summary executions on drug dealers and petty criminals in Davao City. As soon as the American bosses at Kimberly-Clark received that information, they ordered Tober’s immediate evacuation.

  The mansion was packed up quickly as Gamble’s armed team stood at the windows. ‘We need to get you out of the country fast,’ Gamble told Tober, as he bustled him into the waiting van packed with armed Philippine cops. They went off at speed, taking the back streets to avoid their known routes.

  Tober was terrified. ‘Ken, this is not the way to the airport,’ he said.

  Gamble laughed. ‘Relax, Bob, we’re going the long way.’

  Tober returned safely to America, Suplico continued his political career and Lascanas was one of five cops who appeared before the Philippine Department of Justice in September 2015 over their involvement in the Davao Death Squad abductions, torture and killings.

  * * *

  Angelo Dela Cruz, the general manager of Kawasaki in the Philippines, was not so lucky. The 46-year-old boss of the Japanese motorcycle firm was travelling with his bodyguard, Larry Clarito, in his Isuzu pick-up along a street in the City of Las Piñas at 6.15 am. As they approached a motor tricycle, two gunmen opened fire with .45 automatic handguns. The pick-up swerved and stopped under the fusillade of bullets. The gunmen then walked up to the smoking vehicle and looked inside to check that Dela Cruz was dead. He was. The bodyguard was injured, but alive. He was spared a coup de grace.

  The gunmen threw a note towards the car before speeding off. It was a pretty heavy clue. They identified themselves as members of the Sparrow Squad of the notorious Alex Boncayao Brigade — a hit squad in Las Piñas. It said Dela Cruz had been executed for crimes against the revolution and union busting. He had been receiving death threats after sacking union boss Ramir Rivera. Gamble was brought in to gather evidence that eventually lead to Rivera being pulled in by the police.

  * * *

  By 2007, Gamble had returned to Australia. That year he was hired by an event management company to track down $600,000 in missing ticket money for the 2003 Rugby World Cup. A British con artist called John Killick had come over for the Cup, taken the money for the tickets and then failed to come up with the goods. He had fled the country with the loot, and Gamble was put on the case to try to get it back.

  Gamble followed the con man to Spain, where his last known address showed he had lived with a woman in Seville. When he got there, Gamble found the woman, but Killick had gone. He had left the girlfriend in much the same way he had left the rugby fans — high and dry. She happily told Gamble he was in Paris and gave him Killick’s email address.

  ‘I set up an embedded tracker on his email and when he opened the spoof email I captured his IP address in Paris,’ said Gamble, who was delighted to find it gave the exact location of a serviced office on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées.

  By now, Gamble’s digging had shown that Killick was linked to a series of websites selling fake tickets to unsuspecting punters. The scam was simple — they would buy 100 real tickets to an event, which the first 100 people in the door would receive. The next 900 people, who had purchased their tickets secure in the knowledge that others before them had received genuine ones, would be told the supplier was having problems, but their tickets would follow in the post. Of course, they never did.

  A former policeman in Spain had already unknowingly bought into the syndicate, and was out of pocket to the tune of $430,000. He pointed Gamble towards the real mastermind, a British scammer called Terry Shepherd, who was at the time working on a similar scam for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

  Gamble went to Paris and set up a French surveillance team to watch the office. Then he walked into the building and started knocking on doors, asking about tickets. On the third attempt, he opened a door and found a group of men sitting around a conference table. Killick was among them — with his red shirt, he was easy to spot. They told Gamble to clear off.

  Three hours later, when Killick left the building, Gamble’s team were on his tail. They followed Killick to a bar in a luxury hotel, where he led them straight to Shepherd. Killick and Shepherd got the shock of their lives when Gamble walked in and served papers.

  Hundreds of Australians were among the 5000 victims worldwide who had bought tickets to the 2008 Olympic Games from Shepherd’s website, only to find tickets were completely invalid. Also duped were Brits Steve and Kay Adlington, the parents of two-time Olympic swimming champion Rebecca Adlington. Steve and Kay had paid $2200 for fake tickets, which meant they missed seein
g their daughter secure her first gold medal in the 400-metre freestyle.

  In 2011, Shepherd was sentenced in Southwark Crown Court in London to an eight-year jail term. His co-conspirator, Alan Scott, was sentenced to seven years. Shepherd and Scott had made $9 million before their company collapsed on the eve of the Games, owing $15 million. Judge Martin Beddoe said: ‘It was a massive, cynical and an entirely dishonest trick, motivated solely by greed and executed as cynically as can be imagined.’ For good measure, he added: ‘You, Terence Shepherd, clearly received the lion’s share. What you then got your hands on was blown on a catalogue of excess — luxury cars, foreign trips and the extraordinary expenditure of your wife.’

  His wife, Margaret Canty-Shepherd, was charged with money laundering but acquitted. Together they had lived in a $6-million six-bedroom mansion in Blackheath in south-east London; driven a Porsche, a Bentley and a Mercedes; and sent their three daughters to expensive private schools. They splashed out on fine dining and $500,000 worth of luxury travel, while Canty-Shepherd splurged $450,000 on designer jewellery and clothes.

  ‘Never underestimate a total scumbag’s desire to blow other people’s money on excesses that they simply don’t deserve,’ said Gamble.

  Killick was never charged. He went on to run his own ticketing scam called Worldticketing.com which Gamble closed down. Gamble got a judgement against him in the New South Wales Supreme Court but he disappeared without ever paying the $600,000 awarded against him.

  * * *

  Aussie Home Loans boss John Symonds was another who benefitted from Gamble’s expertise. Entrepreneur Robert McNeice had persuaded the mortgage millionaire and his nephew James Symonds to lend him $190,000 for his CBD wristwatch business in 2004. But when it came to repayment time, he would not cough up. Weeping, he confessed to them: ‘I’ve been living above my means, I have been lying to you and don’t have any money.’ Eventually he wrote a cheque to repay the debt, but it bounced — buying him just enough time to skip the country.

  John Symonds contacted Gamble and told him the whole sorry story over cocktails in swanky Double Bay. ‘John told me when McNeice had flown out of the country and I started from there,’ said Gamble.

  Immigration records in Jakarta showed that McNeice had flown in to Indonesia, and a call to police contacts there revealed the fraudster had moved on to Banda Aceh. Further digging revealed that McNeice had put together a sales presentation at a coffee conference, spruiking a deal for a coffee chain in the US.

  ‘I hired people on the ground and they tracked him to a local hotel,’ said Gamble. They took a photo of McNeice and wired it over to Gamble, who presented it to Symonds.

  ‘Holy shit, how did you do that?’ he exclaimed when shown the shot.

  The Australian Federal Police were alerted and McNeice arrested in Banda Aceh in Indonesia. For him, that was just the beginning of the nightmare — he spent twenty months in a squalid jail cell where he was forced to sleep on a tiled floor and share a communal toilet with 80 other men.

  He had been beaten twice by fellow prisoners, and lived in constant fear for his life. He had also contracted dengue fever and malaria, before finally being extradited back to Sydney. He pleaded guilty to two counts of obtaining money by deception and received the maximum sentence of four years in jail. The sentence was overturned on appeal, and he was released on eleven months’ parole. He then accused Symonds of spite when the mortgage maestro began civil proceedings to get his money back. Symonds was forthright in explaining his motives: he did not want McNeice to ‘continue ripping off other people’, said Gamble.

  * * *

  But Gamble was yet to encounter the most audacious con man in his career.

  In 2007, Gamble was in Egypt, working with Channel Nine’s A Current Affair on the Levana Okba kidnapping case. The five-year-old had been abducted by her father, Mohammed Okba, and taken to Egypt. Her heartbroken mother, Samantha Cambridge, wanted to find her and contacted the TV station for help. Channel Nine hired Ken Gamble.

  That case did not end well. Mohammed emailed the show to say: ‘I’ve abducted our daughter because Samantha refused to be a Muslim. Our daughter is staying in Egypt with me.’

  But while Gamble was in Egypt, he encountered one of the most extraordinary con men of his career. Gamble had set up an investigations office with a team of local lawyers that he had also trained in the art of surveillance. One morning, his office manager, Khaled Khater, walked in and said: ‘Ken, we have a fantastic opportunity to meet a prince from Dubai who needs legal help with a billion-dollar contract in Mali.’

  ‘Khaled was really excited,’ said Gamble. ‘So my Scottish business partner Alan Watson and I headed over to the Hilton hotel with him to meet the prince.’ They walked through the hotel and at the back encountered a full Bedouin tent. Inside was a sheikh in full robes with heavily muscled black-clad bodyguards covering the entrances and exits.

  ‘Just for a fleeting moment, I thought that it was odd that a prince from Dubai would have security guards who were clearly Eastern European, and then I thought nothing more of it,’ said Gamble.

  They approached the low table and were invited to sit down before the prince, who was introduced as His Highness Prince Jamal Al Noaimi.

  They were offered bitter black coffee and made obligatory polite small talk for some time until the prince brought the conversation to what he required. His company, Crown Enterprises, had established a relationship with the government in Mali, he explained. He was going to rebuild the third world nation’s infrastructure — roads, government buildings and hospitals. The prince explained he needed 7000 skilled Egyptian workers and needed a law firm to write all the contracts and bring on board a recruitment company.

  In fact, he said, he would consider going into a partnership with the right law firm to make all this happen.

  ‘Wow, this is amazing,’ thought Gamble, as he looked at Khaled’s excited face. ‘It’s almost too good to be true.’

  That is when the alarm bells sounded in the seasoned investigator’s head. How often had he spoken to victims of fraud who had jumped on to what they thought was a sure thing? Still, it was worth exploring.

  ‘Come up to my room and let us talk about this in private,’ said the prince. Upstairs, outside the Hilton’s penthouse, they were met by more muscled guards standing by the door. ‘It was certainly impressive,’ said Gamble. Inside, the prince quizzed him about his contacts in Egypt. He appeared satisfied at the list of judges, security officials and army generals Gamble reeled off from his other dealings in the country. They would bring enormous credibility to any enterprise.

  Another meeting was arranged for the next day, this time with potential business partners from Spain and the local media on hand to cover the latest instalment in the high-profile project.

  ‘My friend,’ said the prince at the second meeting, laying his hand on Gamble’s arm and drawing him to one side, ‘can you get a website together for our enterprise? Do you have web developers? We need people to be able to apply through the law firm.’

  Gamble assured him that he could get a website up and running.

  ‘Naturally,’ continued the prince, ‘they would need to pay a small fee to go through the recruitment process, to cover background checks and medical certificates. Say around $700.’

  Again, Gamble felt that old familiar prickle of hairs rising on the back of his neck. It was an odd way to do business. But his business partner and office manager were enthusiastic, the prince looked the part, and he was even going to be interviewed by the media about the project. Again, Gamble laid his suspicions to one side.

  Gamble and the prince talked further. ‘My friend,’ said the prince oilily, ‘you will need to pay for the website and the legal contracts for our company to be drawn up.’

  Gamble looked at him quizzically and asked why he would be footing the bill for this initial set-up.

  ‘This is a very lucrative thing I am offering you, why do you question me now?’
he replied.

  The penny dropped. Billionaire princes do not ask tiny backstreet lawyers or Aussie investigators to pay a few hundred dollars to set up a website. ‘I decided to find out who he really was,’ said Gamble.

  Gamble jumped on a plane to Dubai and went to the address the prince had given as his headquarters. There was a big sign on the door: ‘Closed’. Neighbours told him the place was unoccupied.

  Gamble then traced the prince’s company back to an office in Belgium, where he found his former secretary. Shifting uneasily and with a sheen of sweat coating his forehead, the secretary told Gamble that His Highness was not really a prince from Dubai, but an Egyptian trader who had bought a diplomatic passport for $10,000 from the Ivory Coast to create his fake royal identity.

  Gamble immediately got on the phone to his office in Cairo and told Khaled that the prince was a phoney. The Egyptian police were informed and a formal complaint made. His Highness Prince Jamal Al Noaimi was pulled in for a few hours of uncomfortable questioning and then told to leave the country the next day. His diplomatic passport guaranteed him immunity – even though the authorities later confirmed Gamble’s tip that it was fake.

  While Gamble had been tracking down his real identity, the ‘prince’ had already set up the website asking would-be workers to pay advance fees of US$300 each. It would have netted him US$210,000 and left Gamble, whose company he had listed as the holding company, to deal with repaying the angry workers out of his own pocket. ‘He is the con man who tried to con the man who catches con men,’ said Gamble, shaking his head. ‘He has since tried to do a $50-million Bahrain hotel deal that involved him getting money up front.’ He pocketed the advance fees and moved on to his next scam.