Defrauding Banks and Making a Famous Rescue Organisation? | Australian Crime Stories

by the time this interview goes to air you'll be to all intents and purposes locked away volatile yes australia's greatest con man john friedrich took the banks for hundreds of millions of dollars it was the biggest fraud that we'd ever had in the fast cash time of the 80s he got 104 million dollars from the state savings bank that he didn't even ask for as he turned the national safety council of australia from a non-profit into the biggest search and rescue organization in the world he didn't see problems he saw opportunities but when his criminal master plan unraveled he was just a straight out thief an even greater deception was laid bare we don't know in fact whether you're john friedrich investigative reporter adam shand sets out to discover the real john friedrich he must have felt like he was on borrowed time he stole 293 million dollars from the banks but where did all the money go was no great demonstration of wealth [Music] i was a financial journalist back in the 1980s it was an exciting time in australian corporate history that is until a lot of people lost their money lending limits were coming off the dollar was floated and suddenly there was massive competition between the banks to lend all they needed was a good story we remember names like bond and scace but there was another empire builder who also came unstuck at this time john friedrich was just as bold and audacious as any of his fellow entrepreneurs we're driving into sail in victoria's gippsland region because this is where john friedrich worked his massive con let me tell you it's an extraordinary tale during the 1980s west sale airport was the thriving base of operations for the victorian branch of the national safety council of australia led by john friedrich one man who knew him from the start was barry whitehead he rose to become senior operations officer plenty of activity back in the day but uh we're all very quiet now barry how do you feel coming back here it's quite strange obviously it brings back a lot of memories but it it's all in a positive sense because uh the feeling of success and achievement uh despite what ultimately happened so barry how did you meet john frederick uh well john back in 1978 started as a safety consultant advisor on emergency response fire protection at your lawn power station and i was working for the victoria state emergency service we had several conversations over a period of time and it led to him offering me a position with the national safety council he rose to the ranks very quickly why did that happen part charm part achievement he was actually achieving things and i guess any employee who uh achieves like that is is ultimately rewarded but you know there was a certain amount of jf charm in there as well and he certainly knew how to i guess stroke the egos and and please the right people at the right time as friedrich's ambitions grew so did the national safety council from a minnow to a whale all of it based on lies told by john friedrich well in order to keep the company going you had to present a view of what you were doing or what it was all about which was effectively lying to everybody and you were the person perpetrating that lie i was the person maintaining that life in 1991 george negus was the only reporter to interview friedrich after his cover had been blown and his massive fraud had been captioning not exposed that we've heard so much about why was it so easy at the time it was a period of aggressive lending so you'd go to a bank or a financial institution no they came to us they thought they were lending money on full containers but they are empty and you knew they were empty i certainly didn't know they were mts and nobody said to you at any stage do you have the assets to justify these borrowings well they may have asked the question would have persuaded them i would persuade them that they have we have so that was that was the big lie that was a period of time when he could get a loan of 12 million dollars on a handshake without paperwork [Music] you and i might spend months arguing over a hundred thousand he could literally have bankers ring him up and ask him do you need any money and that involved the state bank and the bank of south australia i may never get a loan again but one of his great stories is that if you knew how to use your silverware in the dining room at the top of the bank building where all the bankers dined on their prawns from queensland and i'm quoting him then you'd be able to get a loan of any amount of money he got 104 million dollars from the state savings bank that he didn't even ask for they came up to see him and uh and offered him 104 million dollars [Music] kel you had a lot to do with john friedrich tell us your memories of him i knew him well i was in gippsland i was stationed at mall oh there you go and uh he was only starting off in war when i went there in 1979 and he was acquiring an organisation and getting himself organized he bought a helicopter and various other items of equipment actually had a ride in his helicopter not long after i got there if i looked over the area offered me a ride why not right because this is before the days of paul air and the search and rescue squads and the westpac helicopter and all those types of things i think we had one helicopter at that stage in vic paul the first first helicopter but yes it was handy to have his organisation there from time to time so if he could have achieved anything he set his mind to if he if he had been prepared to take the time and build it step by step but he was impatient he clearly impressed you didn't he oh very much so he saw great potential or parachuting in general to play a role in his organization yes what kind of plans did he have back then the original idea for john came from a pilot that went down in bass straight basically at that time if you went down and bass straight no one could get to you he came up with the idea that if they had large helicopters or fixturing aircraft that could travel that far you could parachute someone down to the stricken person you could save lives you also saw john at his most vulnerable there at ten thousand feet parachutes trapped on his back we were the biggest training organization in the southern hemisphere i believe and we had been training quite a few of their people and i guess at some stage john decided that if he was asking other people to jump out of airplanes maybe he should do one himself he looks scared and he he should have been parachuting for the first time is a scary thing if you're not scared uh you probably shouldn't be up there looking at the photographs now to the 2020 vision of hindsight he does look a little bit dark you had no idea what was going on in his mind absolutely not and i don't think anybody did in just a few years friedrich transformed the national safety council into a world leader in rescue techniques employing 450 people the nsc with its fleet of choppers and fixed-wing aircraft a 42-metre ship and a [ __ ] submarine secured contracts across australia including the federal police and the department of defense in 1988 friedrich was appointed a member of the order of australia in recognition of his outstanding achievements and service i've had paused to think about this over the years and knowing that he was a con man and a great con man he may have started it off thinking i can do some good for myself out of this but i think he found a con that was worthwhile and what he achieved in the few years he was operating was astonishing he ended up really believing in what he was doing after that who is just the most amazing con man in the history because no one that i knew saw anything other than a man committed to the national safety council this was a great thing it was going wonderfully and then the world fell in on him the auditors were the first to suspect that john friedrich was cooking the books but through sheer force of personality he kept them at bay until 1989. that's when kel glare who'd risen by then to become the chief commissioner of victoria police received a visit i had the then uh chairman i think max isa come to me and uh told me that he thought there was a problem and i said well they're your books he said oh he won't give us the books i said max you're the boss you have every right to demand the books but until you do and come to me and say yes there's every possibility of defense i can't launch an investigation you know it's up to you to establish that there's something for us to investigate because they're your books when the board of the safety council sought answers friedrich immediately resigned then the banks moved in appointed a liquidator and demanded their own meeting with friedrich i got a phone call from the state savings bank and one of the senior managers there said he was very concerned about the money that had been advanced and they'd arranged an interview with frederick the next day the hierarchy of the bank the senior manager that i was dealing with rang me and told me that he hadn't turned up for the interview and that's when he went into the land of the missing when we return there's a massive manhunt as friedrich becomes a fugitive from justice it was almost a frenzy with everyone trying to find out where is he and he disappeared when friedrichs giant corporate swindle was exposed he vanished sparking a worldwide manhunt azio and the federal police have now joined the international hunt for nsc founder john friedrich we don't know where the money has gone we're only able to say that there is uh an accounting irregularity did you have a role in the search as well well coordinated yeah i contacted the federal police to have the passenger lists checked at airports and i sent out a general broadcast message for other police to be on the outlook for him and i briefed my superiors and just sat back and waited then and see what pops up meanwhile the hunt continues for nsc boss john friedrich back in the day when you're a journalist you're a eager young reporter with channel 10 the whole national safety council story was breaking what was your part in that story my role was to try and find out who was john friedrich and where was the money and it became the hot pursuit to try and beat the six o'clock deadline to lead the news it was almost a frenzy with everyone trying to find out where is he and he disappeared after a 16-day nationwide search police received a tip-off that friedrich had been seen outside perth he gone to a motel and it stayed there and people became suspicious and contacted the police and the local police went around and brought him in that's when they they found out who he really was and they rang us i got my team together in melbourne we hopped on a plane and went to perth and went into the cib building at perth and that's when i first met him how did he strike you in that first meeting very intelligent man well educated and not the usual type of crook that you you would expected but it seemed friedrich had masterminded one of the biggest frauds in australian history most crimes in australia only revolve around a couple of thousand dollars if you're lucky every now and again you get a massive one but not very often if it's a bank they sort of in and out pretty well straight away and it's just a bag full of money but this fellow had taken millions quite one of the detectives if it was bigger than texas well i was talking to the reporters at that time and it was the biggest fraud that we'd ever had in court today magistrate ken moore granted the victoria police an extradition how long was it before he admitted to what he'd done he owned up to what he'd been up to very early in the piece and it was it was not a hard nut to crack i've been told about con men that they always want to tell somebody in the end because nobody knows no one can know how clever they were yeah i think that's quite right friedrich was extradited back to melbourne and sent to pentridge one of the most notorious jails in australia [Music] i remember him well i guess because he was not the normal run-of-the-mill prisoner that was housed in d division at pentridge and so i was able to call him out of the yards and down to the hospital and in d division where i used to work and go over his life with him and it became more and more intriguing it was almost a mission for me to try and understand what this guy was on about because the charges that were leveled against him were pretty heavy the evidence continued to stack up friedrichs scam against the banks had risen to 293 million dollars it was being described as the largest fraud in australian corporate history the media was all over it and frank maguire a young ambitious tv reporter was about to drop a bombshell friedrich turned out to be this man of mystery what i was able to establish in a very short period of time in this critical time frame was that where he said he had come from was false [Music] and john friedrich was not his actual name it's the kind of story you take to your chief of staff and they'd go nah couldn't be true was there a sense of incredulity about this there was next we reveal the german connection it's the same man the eyes and the smile yeah i see him and i know john friedrich had defrauded the banks to the tune of 293 million dollars but that wasn't the end of his deception we don't know in fact whether you're john friedrich well george if i say if i say i am john friedrich you don't believe it if i say i'm not john freddie you don't believe me but nobody really knows for what you are where you came from what you did before you got here despite the best efforts of george negus friedrich couldn't be drawn on questions about his identity and despite the preceding years the complete story is still a mystery there's at least two or three john fredericks that i know of the first one who purports to be the head of a safety and rescue unit in victoria and the other who probably originated in munich in 1950 and his name was john hohenberger his first job in germany was with a company called strassen [Applause] they were enlisted to build roads in mountainous villages friedrich hohenberger was a junior engineer and he was accustomed to ordering roads to be built in these remote little hamlets it was then discovered that there were no truckloads of bitumen going up into these hamlets there were no construction vehicles up in these villages in fact no roads had been built at all old friends in germany recognized him straight away as the man who embezzled a quarter of a million dollars from the road construction company he worked for he's the same man the eyes and the smile this is the same it's yeah i see him and i know him having embezzled the equivalent of quarter of a million dollars australian he faked his own death at an italian ski resort in the alps and i think he left germany in 1974. it was thought that he must have gone down a crevasse or something [Music] months later a bunch of his clothes and luggage was found up in the ski slopes so hornberger he was presumed dead [Music] he was more or less free to go wherever he wanted to in the world his cv said he spoke some vietnamese he may have spent some time in south east asia end up in new zealand and then just wandered across the ditch to australia your accent what is it an accent a bit of german in there and a bit of south african george i'm not a linguist in order to be able to explain how accents develop so but you recognize that you've got one oh yeah it's pretty obvious isn't it yeah but is it reasonable for me to say if you've got that accent that you weren't born in australia george we'll leave that alone [Music] on the records that exist hohenberger came into melbourne on the 20th of january 1975 and went to singapore on the 22nd of january some weeks later a gentleman going by the name of john friedrich applied for a job with cadell for the construction company building the underground rail link in melbourne what i've always wondered is hoenberger comes in yep hohenberger leaves yeah john friedrich stays who was in the seat well at that stage and the airports compared with what it is today security there on the individuals and then on on their luggage would have been quite slack well he could have got a boarding pass yeah given it to somebody else yeah and there wouldn't have been any checking would there no they wouldn't they didn't match him back you would think he'd gone because the evidence was there with the boarding pass and the plane leaving but you couldn't be sure you couldn't challenge it anyway which brings us to a dusty outback corner of south australia called ernabella where a young man calling himself john friedrich arrived in 1975 and met a young nurse who later became his wife you met on an aboriginal station yes i'd been working there for 12 months when i met john can you tell me what he was like in those days very enthusiastic and caring uh he didn't tell me a lot about his past he told me a little about his childhood did he tell you where he was born yes in west germany he he also told me he had a fairly unhappy childhood and he didn't really like to talk about it she didn't know anything she'd know anything and she told me poignantly that he never understood as people with john's issues don't that all his wife and children ever wanted was him they didn't need the glory they didn't need him to be famous they didn't need him to be rich they just enjoyed him and when he was home when i was at his house numerous times you could see the difference even in the body language once he got inside his house he was a husband and a father at that time when george neagas interviewed john friedrich in 1991 his fraud trial was fast approaching would you have shot through before this had it not been for your family i've got three kids yes you've met him you've met my wife you've met my kids you met some of my friends and uh you know would you walk away from me but had they not been here well you wouldn't have gone through with this would they not be here i don't think it would be sitting opposite you which was the real john friedrich do you think well the real job friedrich is is all of that the one i suspect when he was most happy was when he was home um not having to pretend once he got outside the house the body language would change and he'd be that a plus personality in charge of a large organisation did you lose hope of ever having a normal life again no in some ways i i thought it was more possible once all of this was over because we'd spent more time together and i think that john had probably come to a wider realisation of how important family was a realization that he didn't have before yes how difficult was it to confirm to you his real identity um i will look this is going back a long way but there was a great discomfort that i perceived in him when we were talking about germany he wasn't prepared to relive his childhood which was unhappy as understanding and relationship with his father was difficult we talked about some of that his father didn't see him as a person who had worth or had value and he was out to prove his father wrong it's again so the myth goes was he prepared to reclaim his original identity no not not publicly the idea of opening all that up to the public when he was a man who was cheered and clapped in the community he was in would have been very difficult for him to deal with [Music] you want to stop in the middle and tie off take it around yourself friedrich's stubborn refusal to reveal his true identity was also related to his fear of being sent back to germany for the earlier fraud one of your team at martin grinsburg went over to germany yep and discovered that the german authorities weren't really weren't chasing him no they weren't looking for him they had initially years ago but they got a story that he had died in the snow he'd run off and they'd followed a trail and they assumed he had just died there and accepted that they accepted that yeah so it could be said that he was running from his own shadow yes he was still to come he took the banks for millions but where did all the money go john wasn't building a bank account john was building an icon welcome back unraveling the financial affairs of the national safety council is just one of the pieces in this rather extraordinary puzzle the rescue organization as peter wilkinson reports may have been a front for something a little more sinister masterminded by john frederick the victorian branch of the national safety council got up to some strange practices what was a safety organization doing providing surveillance of protesters at places like pine gap and the amiga satellite station in victoria both sites heavily involved in the u.s defense network how much did he confide in you um he had um stories about um being flown to the american base where most of us would never be allowed all of us just about buying gap that's the one um and we had a little bit of proof that he was there that was credible it was credible that was credible because there's a if there's a photo and there's a place and there's a large plane that looks something like it's american you think that might be credible um and i could understand why because he'd had some dealings with the american either air force or army about approaches to do with safety and that's the sort of people that he did approach how did you feel or how do you feel even now when you hear people saying the things that are said about the council that there was more to it than meets the eyes people suggesting that it was paramilitary that it had intelligence connections here and overseas that it was a cia front well i don't think the council is a cia front but um full stop you were going to say something no full stuff it's not a cia front no he had a passport in his name and john friedrich but he had other passports how many passports did he have i have no idea but there would be two or three two or three oh yeah in different names oh yes uh yeah he would show me the passport so that was the thing and he his idea was that the different names on the different passports would allow him access to various institutions or bases throughout australia that otherwise you can't get in so we had a high level security clearance yes yeah and he was proud of it because he was proud of what he'd set up at sale the state president of the nsca claimed he had asked police if they knew of a connection between friedrich and the cia a matter the police weren't interested in it was not a matter for the victoria police then or now it's still not a matter it's not my concern as to what is or isn't involved in the cia interestingly ian joblin the forensic psychiatrist from pentridge of the day said he showed him several passports in different names i wasn't aware of that but um i knew that he had i think once he entered papua guinea allegedly um it was rumored he did without going through the formalities let's put it that way there is uh no substance in the allegations about the intelligence connections that's what i've been informed there were american service personnel seen here at west sale airport uh what were they doing here did you see them in order to develop our pararescue capability there was a if you like a consultancy a collaboration with them to improve the emergency response activities with the national safety council and i think that it's all a um a conspiracy theory and that's that's it so no cia no mercenaries no private army none whatsoever the best of my knowledge that i observed [Music] a lot of people want to speculate oh they were speculating that he was a spy whether he he come from different other countries and what he was up to here but you saw behind the veil and there was none of that no there was no it was just a straight out thief [Music] the period before his trial for fraud were dark and difficult days for john friedrich he was out on bail so he was home with his family here but he must have felt like he was on borrowed time he was preoccupied with what was going to happen we know he was thinking about suicide but he was also talking up another possibility you wrote that he had confided in you that he feared he might be murdered yes in the year before his death police were called to john friedrich's house with a report of shots fired john frederick's wife heard a disturbance and the former national safety council boss went out the front to investigate he told police someone opened fire when questioned by police about the shooting john friedrich told them he was at a loss as to who would want to hurt him it's wondrous to think at that time he wanted to relieve one last story that this couldn't have been a suicide but it was some conspiracy and plot to silence him before he went to jail and perhaps that was the case perhaps that was the case [Music] do you think he was murdered no he shot himself absolutely confident of that someone knocked him off close the page with the words the end just days before his death john friedrich recorded his final interview with george negus by the time this interview goes to air you'll be to all intents and purposes locked away volatile yes john friedrich was in danger of going back to jail or worse still being sent back to germany to face justice there he may have been flashing around evidence of passports but to the australian government he was an illegal immigrant headed straight for a jail cell and that must have terrified him so it was here he came on july 26 1991 the last day of his life it's reported he left home at 10 am crossed the road into a neighbouring property and was last seen walking up the steepest hill in the district [Music] now or positively identify the deceased person than it is to john frederick he's found dead at his property at sail with a bullet hole behind his ear suicide or murder i think he was a bit of a shakespearean character and that's why i think ultimately because of his belief in himself because of this character he'd created i think he felt the only dignified shakespearean way out of this thing was to kill himself do you think he was murdered no he shot himself absolutely confident of that i believe the inquiry has found that john died by his own hand i have no further comment to make and would appreciate the media respect for our privacy thank you did he strike you with someone who would commit suicide that's a very interesting question with uh john friedrich because at no point did i consider that he was that depressed that he would shoot himself and and yet that seems to have been what happened had i considered that he was depressed and in danger of harming himself it would have obviously taken other action there's nothing in his profile certainly nothing in his behavior leading up to his death which indicate to me that he had intended to kill himself nothing what do you think happened on that day someone knocked him off someone put a nice line through the whole chapter of john friedrich and crossed the t's and dotted the eyes and closed the page with the words the end you've mentioned suicide several times i don't think you mentioned the word suicide too i don't think you mentioned the word suicide what you did say to me on one occasion was that the roof of the realtor looked attractive which i yeah that's how how low you were feeling or was that just a melodramatic comment no no that's certainly a consideration what do you think his prospects of success were in his trial well this is one of my sadnesses i genuinely believe he was probably only going to do five years jail now i say that as a criminal lawyer other people might go five years that's a lot from my perspective that's actually a modest sentence i believed he would have had the strength to get through it and perhaps create some sort of personality in jail which allowed him to survive um but he didn't he chose not to [Music] did it surprise you when you learned that he'd killed himself yeah i was very surprised that that happened yeah i thought he was a proud individual um capable of many things but i don't believe he was a spy but he knew he'd go to jail and he'd go for a long time and the fact is that he killed himself uh shot himself in the head and that was that why do you believe that your husband took his life i think it was probably because he thought it would save us some of the trauma that was to come as a sacrifice for you yes [Music] next following the paper trail what happened to friedrichs millions he wasn't feathering his own nest he was not into opulence and ostentation i remember late 1980s as a time of exuberance a time of dreams and ambitions john friedrich wanted to transform a local not-for-profit organization into a very profitable global one he was a kind of shape-shifter he could be anything his bankers wanted him to be that is until the scam at the heart of it all was discovered [Music] what would you say about somebody running from his past comes to australia and creates this amazing story a mega empire another lex luthor brilliant able to engage people manipulate you know he had an extraordinary business didn't he [Music] that period of time was a unique time where people like bond people like skates could bring stories to banks who were desperate to lend who were desperate to get involved in this expanding economy and they were willing to believe these stories friedrich was another version of this i think they're all great salesmen and great salesmen believe in the product even if it's delusionally not the case people like bond alan started his career as a sign writer but he was always a salesman and i said to him you know you've made millions in your 20s most of us just take the money and run why didn't you and he said you know tim it was never about the money it was the deal and with friedrich i'm sure the same process was in play people believed in him look at what he's created [Music] to start fresh in australia back in the mid 70s would have been a godsend to him he could have done whatever he wanted to do he um [Music] filled in the gaps in his cv and he morals took every single job that came along his way and as he succeeded it built up momentum until finally he was in charge of probably the best equipped and best resourced and best staff rescue firm in australia from the world the whole thing was wonderful to us we were jumping out of our own airplanes not particularly fancy or big airplanes and all of a sudden through the national safety council we had big helicopters big aeroplanes which we got to play with basically while we were training his guys so there was always that feeling of this is something special people have said that he thought he was jeff tracy of international rescue he did seem a very very capable person to use a modern phrase he didn't see problems he saw opportunities and and he lived that [Music] the fact that he had deceived everybody his wife so many people did he have remorse did he have shame over it i don't think so i think he thought he was doing a good job he said to me australia didn't have a rescue system and so he supplied one but at the end of the day 293 million dollars was unaccounted for where did all the money go you had a chance to look through his personal finances i think he had a rolex watch yeah he had a property there inside no great demonstration of wealth yeah so it had all gone back into all going back into the into the operation he lived modestly he never profited from it he was not into opulence and ostentation he wasn't feathering his own nest unlike the bonds and the skaters of this world very little money went into his own bank account but john wasn't building a bank account john was building an image john was building an icon in terms of search and rescue he was being used by other countries other agencies to do things that no one else in the country could do that's better than having money in the bank that's a legacy unlike his life john friedrich's farewell was low-key and simple around 300 friends and former colleagues who paid tribute to the man they saw as an achiever who created one of the country's elite rescue organizations do you miss your old boss i had an enormous amount of respect for him there are some things that he did and some of the way that he went about achieving his goals i didn't necessarily agree with but overall what the organization was trying to achieve and what we were doing for the australian population we all believed in that people were given opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have and for that we're very grateful we even had a get-together at a local hall and it was not about condemning or being angry about what had happened but saying okay well it's over but let's celebrate all the good things that we did and i recall that being a really great night for employees and their families so what's out here on the site now it's a tafe college um but the tafe college they are about to pack up and relocate so there's not a great deal of activity here nowadays just me and the ghosts [Music] following his death john friedrich's remains were cremated and his family took the ashes away there was no headstone no memorial the official records didn't even record his date of birth the only enduring reminder of his existence is this old map of australia in his office at the west sale airport it's a quaint relic evidence of the vaulting ambition that died with him [Music] of all the entrepreneurs i saw come and go i think i'd like to have dinner with john friedrich i would have to i'd have loved to have had dinner with him and i wouldn't have minded which character he was in i would have had a good chat [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Australian Crime

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Keywords: Australia, Australian Crime, Australian crime documentary, Australian crime series, Gangs & Mobs, Psychology of Crime, Stalkers, child crime, con artists, crime, crime documentary, crime series, disappearances, family crime, murder, police, serial killer, true crime, true crime documentary, true crime series, True crime, Documentary, Crime series, Theft, Crime, John Frierich, Flying, Finance, Financial, Bank theft, heist, hiest, Runaways, Bank, Australia bank, crime stories, conman

Id: 501YlkYw6zc

Length: 43min 18sec (2598 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 30 2022