Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

by Matthew Benns

  The prince stays ahead of the game by paying an online search-engine optimiser to push anything negative about him off the web. Look for him on Google and you will not find a criticism. However, it is hard to push the printed word from a page.

  * * *

  Referring to someone as a ‘fox’ implies that they are sly, cunning and hard to catch. Every cop and private investigator has a fox in his career — someone so good they can never be caught or brought to justice. Gamble’s Fox was undoubtedly his toughest and biggest case, but not a word of it has ever been written until now. It is an astonishing story, and one that does not come with a traditional happy ending.

  Gamble was in Manila, about to let himself into his hotel room, when his mobile phone buzzed in his pocket. ‘You are treading on people’s toes. Leave the country or you’re on a death wish,’ the text message read.

  What worried him even more than the threat itself was the fact that it had been sent to his Australian mobile number, and not the one he had been using under a pseudonym while in the Philippines. His cover was blown. Gamble knew immediately that the Filipino hooker in the pink leopard-print dress had talked.

  A quick call to the hotel reception revealed two men had been looking for him. A letter had also been sent to his office, telling him that the fix was in: if he didn’t comply, he would be charged with raping a sixteen-year-old girl. ‘Gamble. Consider this your final warning,’ the letter said.

  Being arrested by crooked cops and put into jail for such a crime in the Philippines was the equivalent of a death sentence, especially as a westerner. ‘I was pretty freaked out and immediately located to another hotel,’ said Gamble. And he is not a man who rattles easily. This was not the first death threat this man had received, nor would it be the last. He had been shot at and attacked, but more than ever he knew this time these boys meant business.

  It all began with an email from a prospective client. The wealthy architect from Mosman, on Sydney’s affluent north shore, had been referred to Gamble by detectives in North Sydney. They could not help him, but felt Gamble could.

  The architect, who does not want to be named, had been cold-called by a well-spoken British man called David Turner. He told the architect about a financial advisory firm in Chicago called Smith and Olsson. The company offered bespoke share-market advice to a range of high-profile clients. But there was no need to rush in, said Turner, and he encouraged the architect to take a look at the literature he would send him. What the architect did not know was that his details had been bought from a stolen investors list that had been sold on the black market.

  The architect had millions tucked away in superannuation, and was keen to make it work for him. But he was no fool — when the glossy brochures arrived, he read them thoroughly and then did some checks himself online. Smith and Olsson came up with a gleaming report card. He decided to dabble his toes in the water, opening an account with Smith and Olsson’s office in Canary Wharf in London and buying $10,000 in El Dorado gold shares. They tripled in value.

  He was referred to a pompous man named Benjamin Dickson, Smith and Olsson’s London-based vice president of institutional trading, who convinced him to invest more. By now, the architect was in to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, but things were starting to trouble him. How had they got his contact details in the first place? Why did the company’s London big-shot keep dealing with him in Australia with all the difficulties of time zones and markets that this entailed? Why was there no Australian office? There were also glitches in the paperwork, amateur mistakes a company of this size should not be making. Not one big thing but a lot of tiny niggles started to nag away at him.

  He communicated his concerns to Dickson, who found him a referee to talk to — a client from Melbourne called Robert Green, who had just arrived in Bali on holiday. Green happily spoke to him from his hotel and told him that he had been investing with Smith and Olsson for years. ‘Look,’ he confided, ‘I don’t think much of Turner, but Dickson has offered me nothing but first class advice for years.’ Heartened by this glowing review, the architect handed over more money — bringing his stake to $1.8 million — and watched as his investments grew.

  A few months later, the architect received his tax bill and decided to cash in some of his money with Smith and Olsson to clear the debt. But when he requested his money — an amount that was a fraction of what they were holding for him — the financiers gave him excuse after excuse as to why they could not send him his money. The architect decided to fly to their head office in Chicago and talk to them face to face. ‘I look forward to meeting you,’ emailed Dickson, who promised he would be there from London at the time and was happy to meet him halfway.

  Over Christmas 2011, contact with Dickson became increasingly erratic. He purported to be away on sick leave, and eventually he stopped responding altogether.

  In January 2012, the architect got on the plane to Chicago. Things looked bad straight away — despite being told otherwise, there was no one at the airport to greet him.

  The next day, the architect headed straight out to Smith and Olsson’s office on North Wacker Drive. ‘The building and suite existed, but the tenants were not Smith and Olsson,’ he later told police in America.

  The architect got in touch with the building’s director of security, who told him that he had recently been interviewed by an FBI agent who was investigating a fraud by a company called Alexander Capital Management. Those jokers had the same office address as Smith and Olsson. A quick Google search also showed the two companies had extremely similar websites. It was the confirmation the architect had dreaded. The director of security told the architect that he believed both frauds had been done by the same people.

  It was a long lonely flight back to Australia, and after the architect landed he began the frustrating struggle to try to get the authorities involved in a case that was outside their jurisdiction That was when he was put in touch with Ken Gamble.

  ‘The first thing I told him was to re-establish contact with the criminals,’ said Gamble.

  The architect emailed Dickson an apology, explaining his American trip had been cancelled at short notice because of a family medical emergency. The Smith and Olsson con men took the bait. Gamble followed their emails via an encrypted tracker he embedded into the architect’s emails. It produced an IP address in Makati, the financial district of Manila in the Philippines. That was good news — Gamble had excellent contacts in the Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group. Gamble alerted police in the Philippines and got on a plane to Manila.

  Gamble had received leads that a gang of boiler-room Brits were operating in Makati. Once he arrived in the city, he put some old-fashioned shoe leather on the ground, and began asking around. He talked to cops, hookers, bartenders, barbers, anyone and everyone who might have had contact with them.

  The group of British men were notorious in Makati for making dodgy stock-market deals. They drove Lamborghinis and drank in the red-light district, often at a bar appropriately named Rogues. Gamble’s cop contacts warned him that the men had criminal records back in their home country and were very, very dangerous. They were also well connected to the local police.

  Gamble was unperturbed. ‘I went to Rogues, sat at the bar and started talking to the hookers,’ he said. ‘I asked them if they ever had any groups of British guys coming in.’

  One girl, young, pretty and in a pink leopard-print dress, told him that she had dated a British guy who worked in the financial markets, but she’d broken things off with him when she had leased an apartment for him and he had never repaid her money. ‘I told her I could help her get her money back,’ said Gamble. The prospect of recovering her lost dollars opened the door. She took him back to the apartment and produced an old photo of the shifty Brit, plus the rental application he had given her to apply for the lease. Gold. Alexander ‘Scotty’ McInnis had put the lot on there — date of birth, phone number, email address and previous residential address:
the Oxford Suites Hotel. Sure enough, McInnis had returned to the hotel when his girlfriend had kicked him out.

  From that moment on, McInnis did not make a move without Gamble’s Filipino undercover team following him — mostly in and out of bars. ‘He was an alcoholic, drunk every night of the week,’ said Gamble. He did not seem to be the head of the operation, but Gamble hoped he would lead him to bigger fish.

  One night, Gamble followed McInnis into a local night club, propped himself up at the bar next to him and struck up a conversation.

  ‘I’ve just split from my wife,’ confided Gamble. ‘We sold the house and I was pretty happy with that, I’ve got $800,000 in my pocket and some time here now to sort my life out.’ And then he delivered the kicker. ‘I’m looking for some good investments.’ McInnis could not believe his luck.

  They drank for hours, moved on to another club, played pool. By the end of the night, McInnis was confident enough to begin the sting. ‘Look, I really want you to meet my father, Scot McInnis Senior,’ he said. ‘He lives in Florida, but has interests in gold mines in Colombia.’

  The next day they met in a cafe, slightly hung over and keen to talk more. McInnis pulled out his laptop and introduced Gamble — who was using a fake name — to his father over Skype. ‘He was an older, smoother version of McInnis,’ said Gamble. ‘He told me about a gold mine that was for sale. It had already found gold and McInnis Senior was putting together a group of investors to buy it. They were just $500,000 short. It was a great story.’

  They emailed Gamble the documents and, as McInnis left, Gamble’s undercover team picked up his tail. They followed him straight into the lift of the high-security Pacific Star building, 500 metres from the Oxford Suites Hotel, and up to the fourteenth floor. They watched as he walked into an office with no name on the door. ‘I was so excited that I had found the syndicate,’ said Gamble. He briefed the Anti-Cybercrime Group and, by a stroke of luck, one of those officers knew the head of security at the building.

  Breaking all the rules, the head of security produced the passes for every person working in the anonymous office. Now Gamble had the photos, fingerprints, phone numbers, eye colours and next of kin of eighteen members of the British boiler room. He also recognised the boss of the syndicate from police intelligence. ‘It was the biggest syndicate in Manila,’ said Gamble. But it was the wrong one. These were not the men responsible for the Smith and Olsson fraud.

  Despondent, he returned to his hotel room, which was when he received the death threats from the British boiler-room team. McInnis’s ex-girlfriend must have got in touch with him, and McInnis had put the pieces together through contacts of his own. But Gamble wasn’t going to quit: ‘I passed on the information I had gathered to the FBI to run them down and started the hunt again from scratch.’

  This time, he decided to follow the money.

  Gamble went back to the original account into which his client, the architect in Mosman, had made his first payment of $10,000. He then contacted a banking source in London, who gave him the details of the signatory on the account. The name was Jack Ebert from Mango Communications, but the bank had closed the account several months previously because of suspicious activity.

  Gamble traced another account, into which the architect had deposited $1 million of his hard-earned cash. It was the Hong Kong account of Main Crown Enterprises, the holding account of Crown Group Services. The signatory was a Belgian called Jacob Senderowicz.

  Gamble dug into the background of the Hong Kong company and found it was owned by a Canadian company, which in turn was owned by a Panamanian company. When he went to the listed address in Panama, he found there was no office, not even a door. He had literally hit a brick wall.

  For a private eye, there are leads, dead ends, more leads and more dead ends. But you still need that little bit of luck. ‘[Main Crown Enterprises] had been involved in diamond mining and investments in the Gaza Strip in Israel. It still had $80,000 in its account in Hong Kong, so we froze the cash,’ said Gamble. ‘That’s when we got our lucky break. The bank did something we never expected — they contacted Jacob Senderowicz and told him his cash had been frozen.’

  Senderowicz hired a team of Hong Kong lawyers to fight for his money, claiming he had been duped into letting someone from Israel use his account. ‘That was bullshit; he was a diamond dealer and convicted money launderer,’ said Gamble, who sensed he was finally on the right track.

  Through other accounts linked to the Hong Kong account, he tracked three more Israelis living in the UK, and went and knocked on their doors. For good measure, he also knocked on the door of Jack Ebert, the original account holder in London. ‘What I found was an old Israeli guy who was absolutely terrified that I had turned up on his doorstep,’ said Gamble. Things got worse for Ebert when Gamble told him: ‘I am investigating you for fraud and money laundering.’ Ebert broke down in tears.

  He was innocent, he insisted; all he had done was allow his account to be used by an Israeli friend of his called ‘Luke’, who was selling air time for a telecoms company. Luke’s company dodged the Israeli taxes, and Ebert got a five per cent commission on every dollar that passed through his account. It was such a wickedly simple wheeze that Ebert had put all of his friends onto it. He pulled out his paperwork and showed Gamble the invoices he regularly sent to a property company in the Philippines.

  ‘Bingo, all the threads came together: the Israeli accounts in Hong Kong and the Philippines where the boiler-room syndicate was based,’ said Gamble. As with all good scams, Ebert had been sucked in for what he thought was a little dishonest profiteering, helping people avoid property taxes. In fact he was being used to launder money generated from The Fox’s sales of inflated or nonexistent stocks and shares in publicly listed companies. Once Ebert had moved the stolen money overseas, it was not traceable back to the scammers, who could cash it at their leisure. Shaken and visibly upset, Ebert called Luke and told him that he needed help to make the investigator go away. Luke promised to think about it and Gamble left Ebert chewing his nails.

  Weeks later, Gamble was at a counter-terrorism summit in San Diego when he received an email from Luke. ‘I know who fucked your client,’ it said. ‘Leave the Israelis alone, they are not involved in fraud, and I will give you the head of the syndicate.’ He had been the original link – putting The Fox on to his friend Ebert to help him launder the money. Faced with a choice between his friend and the con man he opted to save his friend. Gamble and Luke met in Thailand, where Luke gave Gamble the name of the mastermind behind the Smith and Olsson con, who had managed to elude Gamble for two years. Gamble had tracked down The Fox.

  ‘He was a British guy, late thirties, from a good family who had lived in Asia for seven years. His brother was a Cambridge professor,’ said Gamble. He put the case together with police in the Philippines; it took nine months to assemble and ran to 1000 pages.

  In September 2014, Makati City Hall issued a warrant for The Fox’s arrest. ‘We were just preparing to issue a red notice with Interpol [effectively an international arrest warrant] when he flew into Manila,’ said Gamble. ‘It was our second piece of really good luck.’

  They tracked him to his hotel and watched him for six days until he got into a taxi with his suitcase and headed for the airport. Gamble was wary of tipping him off and allowing The Fox to slip through his fingers. Through his police contacts he had The Fox’s flight details and decided the simplest thing was simply to allow The Fox to walk into his arms at the airport. As The Fox walked into the departures hall, he was confronted by Gamble and surrounded by twelve Filipino police officers in full uniform. ‘You are under arrest for fraud and money laundering,’ Gamble told the shocked con man as an officer snapped cuffs onto his wrists.

  Police in the Philippines do things a little bit differently than in Australia. On the way down to the police station, the officers stopped off for dinner at a Japanese restaurant. In a private booth at the back, The Fox, still handcuffed, sat do
wn with Gamble and his other captors for a meal. It was the classic Philippine Police modus operandi for blackmail.

  ‘I represent the architect you ripped off in Sydney, Australia,’ Gamble told him.

  The Fox eyed him dubiously and said nothing.

  ‘Give me the $1.8 million back that you stole from my client, and we could make this go away.’

  ‘Is this a shakedown?’ asked The Fox.

  ‘No. I am simply informing you that you can repay the money you owe or spend a long time in a Filipino jail.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said The Fox and clammed up.

  ‘The problem I faced was that I had no way of proving [it] was my client’s money,’ Gamble later explained. ‘If I pressed the charges, The Fox would go to jail, but the money would be confiscated and my client would end up with nothing.’

  At police headquarters, The Fox was fingerprinted, photographed and put in a dingy cell. His suitcase was searched and his laptop and mobile phones confiscated. His files revealed that The Fox was on his way back to England to buy a house with his ill-gotten gains. Gamble froze his accounts in Hong Kong, and went to see him in his cell. The Fox was defiant, refusing to co-operate. The police turned off his air conditioning and fan; the heat blazed and the mosquitoes swarmed. But still The Fox wouldn’t budge.

  Gamble went back and spoke to him day after day, to no avail. Then on day five, The Fox asked: ‘What do I have to do to get out of here?’

  ‘Sign over the frozen $2.2 million you have in your bank account in Hong Kong to my client,’ Gamble told him. The price had gone up to cover Gamble’s fees.

  The Fox shook his head in disbelief, and agreed to the deal.