Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

by Matthew Benns

  Foster explained that his sister had been a drug addict, and this had provoked a lifelong hatred of drugs and the damage they did to families. At the time, his money and success attracted a vibrant social circle. He became aware that some racing identities moving in his orbit were trading in heroin. He went to the authorities and agreed to be wired up — taping conversations that led to the eventual arrest and jailing of a number of extremely dangerous people. ‘I believed Mr Foster placed his life in danger whilst acting as my informant and in the gathering of the information,’ AFP officer Ian Eriksson wrote in an affidavit. Only the cynical would suggest that it always helps to be owed a few favours by the law just in case you might need it. And Peter Foster would certainly need it.

  The king of reinvention next washed up in Suva after the 2000 Fijian coup. He invested in the breakaway New Labour Unity Party and became the campaign manager for Tupeni Baba, who Foster billed as the ‘Nelson Mandela of the South Pacific’. It was a minor dabble in politics, but the real game was just around the corner in the UK. Back in the Old Dart, Foster was fighting on a couple of fronts. Business partners had accused him of conning them into putting £150,000 into a slimming pill venture called Renuelle. At the same time, he was fighting extradition proceedings back to Australia for another weight-loss con. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, he managed to embroil himself in another scandal that involved the wife of the most powerful man in the UK.

  It all began with his girlfriend, who was a former topless model turned lifestyle guru called Carole Caplin. She just happened to be a close friend and advisor to Cherie Blair, wife of then British prime minister Tony Blair. What followed became known in the British tabloids as ‘Cheriegate’.

  Cherie Blair had been looking at buying a flat in Bristol for her son Euan when he went there for university. She asked her old friend Carole Caplin to pop in and have a look at some potential properties for her. At the time, Caplin was pregnant with Foster’s child and he became involved in the purchase. He was soon emailing the prime minister’s wife with detailed information. Emails Foster released after the scandal broke showed the warmth of their relationship, as he moved swiftly from addressing her as Ms Booth (her maiden name) to calling her Cherie. She once wrote back: ‘You are a star … I cannot thank you enough for taking over these negotiations for me.’

  Later Foster played up his role to the ABC. ‘I advised them not to use a tax haven to avoid paying income tax; I also advised them not to, when they purchased the flats, try and avoid stamp duty by minimising the value of the flat under the threshold by purchasing the garage separately. So I think I gave sound advice at the time and in fact William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of the Sunday Times and one of the most respected reporters in England, he said what does that say about the state of the prime ministership when I’m likely to believe the word of a three-times-convicted con man over our own PM? So maybe it takes a con man to see a con man.’

  The story of Foster and Cherie Blair’s dealings came to light through three business partners Foster had dudded on the Renuelle venture, one of whom was former England footballer Paul Walsh. They approached infamous British media fixer and PR man Max Clifford with the story, and he went to the papers. When Foster learnt of the possible exposure, rather than being upset about the development, he called Clifford and began negotiations on his own behalf. When the story finally broke in the Mail on Sunday at the end of 2002, Foster revelled in the notoriety. He wrote to a Brisbane gossip columnist: ‘Carole Caplin is the best friend of both Tony and Cherie Blair. She is a lifestyle guru to the Blairs and the rich and famous … She is regarded as one of their closest confidantes. They spend holidays and weekends together and she goes in and out of Downing Street as though she owns it.’

  For good measure, he added in a little plug for himself: ‘The Blairs are good people who believe in the Christian ethic … Cherie believes I am a reformed character.’ Although probably not for long after Foster released details of their emails and claimed he had visited the Blairs in Downing Street and at their country house Chequers for Christmas and his 40th birthday celebration.

  Within days, the scandal had forced the prime minister’s wife to issue a statement admitting Foster was involved in the purchase, but stressing that it was a private matter, he was not her financial advisor and he had never met the prime minister. But Blair’s political rivals, scenting blood in the water, stuck at the issue, questioning why the Downing Street press office had become involved and forcing the Blairs to admit a blind trust was used to buy the flats.

  Foster then threw another hand grenade onto the situation, claiming Cherie had become involved in his deportation proceedings, and had taken part in a conference call ‘to reassure’ his girlfriend, Caplin. By now, the scandal was dominating British political life and Prime Minister Blair had to respond to questions from Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith in the house. ‘At no point did Mrs Blair interfere in the immigration case proceedings. Nor would she,’ he said.

  In the following days, Cherie was forced to make a full and public statement admitting that she had made mistakes and apologising for any embarrassment caused. She insisted she had had no knowledge of Peter Foster’s past. Blair also spoke out, describing his pride for his wife, and giving credence to the Downing Street press office assertion of a deliberate character assassination campaign against Cherie by describing the media stories as ‘a mountain of distortion and half truth’.

  The tide was turning against Foster. Allegations published in The Scotsman newspaper suggesting that Cherie had been more involved in the extradition case than she claimed were shot down by, of all people, Foster’s girlfriend. Caplin denied that the PM’s wife had ever looked at a fax of details on the case. Then The Sun delivered the knockout blow, publishing a series of transcripts from phone calls between Foster, his brother and his mother, showing Foster had tried to cash in by selling the story and was heard coaching his mother on what to say about a visit to Downing Street that had never happened. Surprise, surprise, it turned out he had not actually spent his 40th birthday or Christmas with the Blair family at all. In fact, according to Mike Carroll, a former director of slimming pill company Renuelle, Foster had deliberately used Caplin to target the Blairs as part of a much wider slimming scam. No one can ever accuse the dodgy Wizard of Oz of not thinking big.

  He had wanted to roll out his slimming product TRIMit on a national tour of schools as a solution to the obesity crisis. In the months leading up to the scandal, he wrote to footballer Walsh about his role in promoting the campaign. One email said: ‘Carole spoke to Cherie Blair on Wednesday and told her exactly what we want Tony to do with you and the children education program. She thinks it’s great. (Cherie has a lot of influence over him.)’ Mike Carroll told the Sunday Mirror: ‘It was a game plan that the Blairs were targeted from the start in June. Cherie was targeted from the very first day as his overall aim. He used Carole Caplin to get to Cherie Blair. Then he would use her to get to Tony Blair. He was doing a £6-million scam with the Blairs all around him.’

  Foster never stopped spinning the story. After he was deported from the UK, he spoke widely about his connections with the Blairs to create attention for a book on his exploits. He told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope that the baby Carole Caplin had miscarried, the baby he had believed was his, had actually been fathered by Tony Blair. Downing Street dismissed the claim out of hand, as did his former lover. ‘This is just a new way for Peter to get attention. He is just a fantasist and these absurd stories shouldn’t be given any credibility,’ she said. After all, she pointed out, he did have a book to sell and a reputation to uphold, as his CV attested: ‘Peter Foster — International Man of Mischief’.

  Few people could top that for mischief and notoriety, but Peter Foster is not your run-of-the-mill con man. In fact, he reckons he is not a con man at all. He has said, ‘I am not a thief and I’ve never been accused of stealing money … At the end of the day my clients were victimless. I d
idn’t hurt anybody.’ Try telling that to the thousands of people who have lost their life savings on Peter Foster’s scams.

  So intent was he at the time to clear his name and rebuild his reputation that he made a number of complaints to the Australian Press Council about the way newspapers referred to him, with some success — despite his convictions, The Courier-Mail told its reporters to stop referring to him as a ‘convicted con man’. The Press Council, however, dismissed his complaint against the Sydney Morning Herald, saying its use of the word ‘fraudster’ was perfectly accurate.

  After his adventures in London, Foster took his mischief-making talents to Ireland and relaunched his TRIMit diet pills, asking investors (none of whom have been hurt, remember) to fork out €200,000 for the franchise rights. Once the Australian authorities took moves to freeze his assets, the Irish authorities swooped and he was deported because of his 1996 UK conviction. Back in Oz, he spruiked TRIMit behind the front of his business partner and barrister Sean Cousins. The ads claimed the pills were a mere 700 per cent more successful than any others on the market. Why 700 per cent? Why not 1000 per cent more successful? Surely the golden rule of the con is to lie big? Either way, 70 people were unfortunate enough to pay $42,000 each for the TRIMit distribution rights. That little adventure saw Cousins struck off and Foster fined and banned for five years from having anything to do with the weight-loss industry.

  Clearly it was time to try something new, and our irrepressible anti-hero once again turned his sights on the unsuspecting palm-fringed tropical paradise of Fiji.

  Of course, there was the minor problem of his criminal record — a blip really, easily overcome by the production of some false documents. And then it was on with the next big plan — the development of a 45-hectare waterfront wilderness called Yasawa-i-Rara. ‘I’m going to build homes for 50 of the world’s most successful people … that’s my dream. For me, that would be as good as it gets,’ he told the Sydney Morning Herald, having apparently forgiven the paper for calling him a fraudster. His plan to take $1.5 million from Australian investors and build twenty luxury units on beautiful Champagne Beach had one small flaw — New Zealander Evan Williams also had plans for the area. Foster allegedly began a vicious misinformation campaign with a website claiming that the New Zealander’s resort would be a haven for paedophiles. Nasty.

  Despite his attempts to ingratiate himself with the government with advice on the forthcoming elections, Foster could not escape the police’s investigation of his arrival in the country on false documents. In a desperate bid to dodge the law, he offered to accept immediate deportation if the Fijian police agreed to drop the charges. They declined and, when they went to arrest him, Foster panicked, dived into a river and struck his head on the propeller of a boat. Naturally, he said the police had hit him on the scone with an oar and, to court media attention, went on hunger strike to protest the brutal treatment. As the case dragged on, he attempted to vary his bail conditions to allow him to move out of the Suva hotel he was staying in to his home on Denarau Island. When he failed to appear in court for a second time, it became clear he had already done a bunk. He was next seen wading ashore in Vanuatu, where he was promptly arrested. ‘I go from one catastrophe to another, I don’t know how I do it … I’m going to have to learn eventually, I suppose,’ he said.

  But, of course, he didn’t learn. After a short spell behind bars in Vanuatu, the old dog went back to Australia and immediately got up to his same old tricks. This time it was an oral slimming spray called Sensaslim, in breach of the court order banning him from any involvement in the weight-loss industry. He was jailed for contempt, but the court had to pass the sentence in absentia because he was on the run again.

  He had already scammed $6 million from 90 investors in the slimming spray, so had plenty of ready cash to cushion his life on the run. He sent Australian newspapers photographs of himself holding the front page of that day’s edition of the Fijian national newspaper to prove he was there. ‘Hope this photo is our [sic] some use to you … it is me reading the Fiji Sunday Times yesterday drinking kava,’ he wrote to one publication.

  A lot of people were looking for him, but nobody could find him. In early 2014, Channel Nine’s A Current Affair hired fraud catcher Ken Gamble to investigate claims that Foster was behind a Ponzi scheme called Sports Trading Club Partnership (STC). The TV show had been given a voice recording of a man called Mark Hughes, national sales manager of STC, speaking to one of the investors. During the discussion, Hughes was heard saying he had worked for many years at Barclays Bank and was a devoted Christian. It was unmistakably the voice of Peter Foster.

  Gamble was on the case. ‘I spent several weeks in Queensland and around Byron Bay following up a lot of leads, including one solid lead from a local Byron Bay drug dealer who claimed that he’d definitely seen Peter Foster, sporting long hair and a beard, sitting in a car outside a cafe one day.’

  Gamble tracked Foster to some high-end Byron Bay properties, which had been rented in the name of his girlfriend, Liana Emberg. Gamble also found out that the mobile phone used by ‘Mark Hughes’ was registered in the name of Beau Barret, Liana Emberg’s son.

  It took Gamble only three weeks to track down Foster, who by then was the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant. Once Foster was identified on video footage, wandering around the back of a rural property in a quiet cul-de-sac near Byron, Gamble tipped off police.

  By that time, Foster was living in a $1400-a-week mansion in Ewingsdale. He had put on weight and grown his grey hair long, with a matching straggly beard, to blend in with the local hippy population. When the police went in the front door, Foster bolted for the back. He was crash-tackled to the ground, losing his trousers and dignity in the process. He grabbed a policeman’s gun and feigned chest pains before finally being subdued and taken into custody. Filming it all was Ken Gamble.

  In court, Foster’s defence lawyer, Terry Fisher, told the magistrate that Foster had been ‘living like a monk’ and had just wanted to see his elderly mother. ‘He is a bit shell shocked at the moment, but his main concern is that he gets reunited with his mother because he’s been looking after his mother for the last eleven months,’ said Mr Fisher outside court. The truth was of course far less altruistic. Foster had been running a multi-million-dollar sports-betting scam from the luxury five-bedroom property.

  Hundreds of investors had pumped between $50,000 and $250,000 into STC, which was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme. One investor had allegedly handed over $1 million, which Foster used to buy a motor yacht called the Next Adventure. The money was channelled through Hong Kong, where his niece Arabella Foster allegedly controlled bank accounts containing almost $7 million. STC claimed it would have a 1350 per cent profit in eight months, by using savants to predict the outcome of sporting events, and it used a fake report from international accounting firm KPMG to legitimise its predictions of astronomical profits. Even after Foster’s arrest, investors received an email purporting to be from motor racing legend and Channel 10 commentator Alan Jones to say business was booming. ‘Hello everyone, Alan here once more,’ it read. ‘Cricket is beginning to hot up, and we have our ace in the hole, the young Indian mathematician we’ve been working with to not just select winners, but to also find value in outsiders.’

  Jones was one of twelve defendants, also including Foster’s niece Arabella Foster, who were sued for the money in a class action put together on Gamble’s evidence. Gamble had tracked the money and worked with authorities to have it frozen in overseas accounts in Vanuatu, Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands.

  Federal Court Judge Justice John Logan sentenced Foster to jail, and was told in no uncertain terms by Foster to ‘stick his sentence up his jacksie’. But then, astonishingly, the same judge, after receiving secret submissions from Foster, released him early. ‘It’s a bit early for a lap dance,’ Foster said on the steps of the Queensland Federal Court, ‘so I think I’ll just go home to my mum, make a cup of tea, hold her hand
and tell her I’m sorry for the last twelve months.’

  Just weeks later, his rented home on the Gold Coast’s Sovereign Islands and the mansion outside Byron Bay were raided by police and computers seized.

  At the time of writing, this matter is still working its way through the courts, but you can rest assured that this is not the last we have heard from the International Man of Mischief.

  He would love to write his own epitaph, a rewriting of history, that would go along the lines of his closing statement to Andrew Denton: ‘Whatever you think of Foster, the bottom line is he didn’t get away with anything. He didn’t shoot off to Spain and live in the sun, he didn’t go off and sit in a prison farm in Western Australia, he went to jail. He did every day in maximum security. He’s done his time.’ But that would not do justice to the hundreds or even thousands of people he has scammed, fleeced and duped in his lifetime of conning. We know he done them wrong and a little bit more time would surely not go amiss.

  References

  Introduction

  ‘more slippery than an eel swimming in olive oil’: Chris Vedelago and Cameron Houston, ‘Conman Rocco Calabrese reeled in for stealing prawns’, The Age, 14 December 2014