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Australia’S Greatest Conman - Season 1 Episode 1 - The Friedrich Factor
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00:02What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say the name John Friedrich?
00:06A story of overweening, astonishing ambition.
00:10What John Friedrich did was build a fantasy for himself with the best toys money could buy.
00:16Tigeons, dogs, parachutes, you name it.
00:21It was like the Thunderbirds. We've been sort of making the Thunderbirds happen in real life.
00:26The Safety Council was everything good about the military without the crap.
00:30Behind the question mark was another question mark.
00:33You were never quite sure whether he was on the side of being a madman or a genius.
00:37He was quite brilliant.
00:38How clever was he to make all this stuff happen?
00:41He was a crook.
00:42I think he remains the biggest perpetrator of a fraud in this country's history.
00:49Played a big game, talked a big game and must have been completely persuasive.
00:54You talk about Ned Kelly, you also talk about John Friedrich.
00:58Everything that he did was for the good of everyone.
01:02Rumours continue about the shadowy background of its chief, John Friedrich, missing along with millions of dollars.
01:09What do you mean? Like, he's Australia's most wanted man.
01:13John, I hope if you hear or see this, you will come forward.
01:17You must feel very tired and frightened.
01:20So who is the they in this conversation?
01:22The CIA.
01:24That's when we started to hear the stories of who he really was, what his real name was.
01:28If I say I am John Friedrich, you don't believe it.
01:30If I say I am not John Friedrich, you don't believe it.
01:33Oh, so be it.
01:50This is West Sale Airport in country Victoria, and it's a bit of a ghost town these days.
01:56But it is also home to one of the wildest stories in Australian modern history.
02:01See, this used to be the headquarters of the most advanced civilian search and rescue operation this country has ever
02:08seen.
02:08It was the playground of a mystery man known as John Friedrich.
02:13He built an empire to save lives, all on a web of lies.
02:29Dynamic is the sort of word that's often been used to describe John Friedrich, as he tirelessly built the country's
02:35largest rescue organisation.
02:37I mean, er, Craig?
02:39Freddo, Mr. Friedrich, John. He was an interesting character.
02:44Freddo made the council. If he wasn't there, it wouldn't have happened.
02:49John is a very powerful, intelligent guy, and is, I suppose, on a mission.
02:56You know, John wanted it to be the best search and rescue organisation maybe in the world.
03:02It certainly was in the southern hemisphere anyway.
03:04He could fly helicopters, he could parachute, he could fly planes.
03:08You know, he could do all those things, and he would do them.
03:12I just couldn't believe the stuff that he'd come up with.
03:14Ask National Safety Council staff about their jobs, and they'll tell you there's no better place to work.
03:20For adventurous young men, the Safety Council has it all.
03:24All this was stuff that other people in the world hadn't even seen.
03:28Coming from the humble Gippsland, yeah, it was incredible.
03:33This is the Latrobe Valley, part of Gippsland in southeastern Victoria, Australia.
03:4178,000 people live here, many of them dependent on the large brown coal power stations that dominate the skyline.
03:48In one of those power stations in the 1970s, a young engineer with an unusual accent started to grab people's
03:55attention.
03:56He was working for a well-regarded but kind of sleepy organisation, the National Safety Council.
04:02We were, if you like, the town fire brigade rescue and first aid service.
04:09This is Barry Whitehead. He started at the Victorian Division of the National Safety Council just a year after John
04:16Friedrich.
04:17How would you go about describing John Friedrich?
04:20All of us have a level of charisma. For some people, it's only two out of ten.
04:26His was nine out of ten, probably nine and a half out of ten.
04:30He was always pushing boundaries and always, you know, seeking new and innovative ways to do things.
04:36And how it all started was he went into the National Safety Council when it was basically what I call
04:43a safety boots and poster organisation.
04:45The council had actually been around since 1927.
04:49It had a division in every state, promoting safety and accident prevention in the home and the workplace.
04:54He saw an opportunity. He saw a nucleus of something he could build on.
04:58In just five years, Friedrich went from safety officer to executive director.
05:04And the organisation he led went from making nice posters to, well, something a bit more high-octane.
05:17The Victorian Division was the one that created an emergency services organisation.
05:22And then we took that into all of these other states.
05:26And that in itself is a whole new story.
05:35The aerial ambulance was a fairly new concept.
05:39This is a helicopter ambulance.
05:42Operated by the Victorian Division of the National Safety Council of Australia.
05:48And then the next step from that was the rescue aspect, aerial rescue operations.
05:56Suddenly we were operating one helicopter, then two, then three, and then fixed-wing aircraft.
06:02Seemingly out of thin air, John Friedrich created an entire aviation and sea rescue agency.
06:10And he was recruiting.
06:13I was 17, I'd just finished year 12.
06:16The very first day, me and the other cadet who got the job, they took us out to the airport
06:23and took us to the helicopters.
06:25I'd never been off the ground in my life.
06:27We were told to stand on the skids of the helicopter and we were given a tap on the shoulder
06:32and time to jump.
06:34And that was our first day at the National Safety Council.
06:37Thrown in the deep end right from the start.
06:39And so when you started at the Council, what was your job?
06:42What were you supposed to be doing?
06:43Well, I don't know if we had titles, but it was like go to John Friedrich's office
06:47and basically introduce yourself and he'd sort of look you up and down.
06:51That was the interview process.
06:54And it seems once you had that job, every day was a literal adventure.
07:00The NSCA provides its services where government or industry cannot justify owning and manning expensive equipment.
07:06It could mean everything from helicopter escape training to rescuing injured divers in hyperbaric chambers.
07:12I think we'd better get this girl under the chamber pretty quickly.
07:15What was the end game for John? Like what was he building all of this into?
07:18In part, there was a hole there. There was a hole to be filled.
07:23Nobody's doing it. So, you know, let's see what we can do and let's do it the best we possibly
07:30can.
07:30But it was in the heat of the summer that the National Safety Council really came into its own.
07:36I mean, the thing that always amazed me was the firefighting. I mean, that was fantastic.
07:51Traditionally, fire has been met on the ground. Add a new dimension, aerial firefighting.
07:58We're the first to bring in aerial water bombing of fires, which now today, everybody has.
08:04So we were the first to do that.
08:07The firebombing, when I first got there, they did firebombing in the little Hughes 500 helicopters with little Bambi buckets.
08:15So you used to have to hover over and obviously very dangerous with, you know, trees or things like that.
08:20So, John then acquired a fleet of Bell 205 helicopters and he had them fitted out with belly tanks.
08:28This sort of attack on fires had never been done before and he's brought this technology into the country probably
08:34years before its time.
08:41But what John Friedrich helped build in Victoria was now about to reach a global stage.
08:48And I said to him, look, why don't we take these helicopters overseas into Europe for the European firefighting season?
08:56And he said, oh, that sounds a good idea. When can you go?
09:00Soon, John Friedrich's brainchild was exporting pioneering firefighting technology to Spain,
09:06to Portugal, France, even Canada.
09:09We were doing that in the 80s, mate.
09:12There was nothing that came afterwards that matched what we were doing.
09:16But what the Safety Council did next?
09:19Well, that was a genuine leap into the unknown.
09:28What was a PJ?
09:30It was a peri-jump.
09:31I'm tired of a city life
09:34The summer's on the run
09:38That was a man from outer space almost.
09:43They were incredible.
09:45The sheer physical requirements of being a para-rescue officer was quite incredible.
09:54I was reading a copy of what was then the Sunday Sun, and there were all these glossy pictures of
09:59guys in yellow wetsuits,
10:00sitting in helicopters, jumping out of planes, and it got my attention straight away.
10:05Down at the bottom was recruiting.
10:07Do you want a job?
10:11I always thought that, yeah, it would be alright to jump out of an aeroplane, but then when I got
10:16paid to do it, I, you know, took up the chance.
10:23You know, we were all 20-year-olds, and we were all bulletproof in those days.
10:28So, yeah, we were all confident that we could pull off only.
10:34I did more stuff in three years than most people do in their whole lives.
10:44The concept of the PJ started in that once you get out past a certain distance, you know, 150 miles
10:50or something like that, it's too long for a helicopter.
10:52John Frederick had a vision to parachute experienced rescue officers anywhere and into any situation.
10:59When we left that aircraft, we had 82-odd kilos of equipment.
11:04You knew that you may well be on your own with your mate who's jumped with you for up to
11:08seven days.
11:09It was well beyond anything Australia had even considered.
11:13That para-rescue program took the Safety Council's training and recruitment to a whole new level.
11:19It was go, go, go from the start.
11:23A lot of physical training.
11:27Diving.
11:30Parachuting.
11:32Rappelling.
11:34You're now going to do a survival course on the island.
11:37We caught a penguin and ate it.
11:39Don't eat penguin.
11:40It tastes like fish mixed with shit.
11:42It's awful.
11:43The phobia testing they would do.
11:44The military do this sort of stuff all the time if you want a scary job.
11:47They assess you.
11:49They'd put you down a 50-metre pipe.
11:51It's half full of water and the other half's full of smoke.
11:53You can ask someone, are you scared of heights?
11:55You can ask someone, are you scared of small spaces?
11:58And if people want a job, they're probably going to lie.
12:01It was meant to break you.
12:02Simple as that.
12:03On my course, there was 2,000-odd people applied.
12:0650 got interviewed, 14 got into the course and 7 passed.
12:09John bought a yacht that had sailed in the Sydney to Hobart.
12:14And the idea on that was that that was going to replicate a situation out in the ocean
12:19where people would have to be rescued.
12:22So you've then got a parachute in front of the yacht, ditch your parachute,
12:26then start swinging towards where the yacht is.
12:28And if you miss, if you miss, you're gone.
12:32Ben Thorpe couldn't catch it.
12:33It was like a day in James Bond, really.
12:36And John's on the radio.
12:38Not good enough, guys. Come back in and do it again.
12:42Hard taskmaster.
12:43He was a hard taskmaster.
12:46He built up this team of people that were all professionals,
12:50whether they were doctors, nurses, truck drivers, pilots.
12:54And he trained them to the max.
12:57So there was a loyalty to him, I think, from that point of view.
13:00What was John Frederick like as a boss?
13:02To get on with John, you had to believe in the dream and the vision
13:07and be committed 100%.
13:10If you were, opportunities would arise.
13:14And you would do well.
13:16I had a love-hate relationship with him.
13:18Obviously a huge ego.
13:20But I wasn't owned by John.
13:22And I never was.
13:23Where there were staff members that were.
13:26I mean, I don't mind people with egos.
13:28If you aren't confident about your ability,
13:30I will move on.
13:32What would happen if you didn't get on board with John's vision?
13:36I don't think it would be a good outcome.
13:38You know, he could be sort of mean, if you like, in that respect.
13:42It was always, don't get on the wrong side of Fredo.
13:45You didn't piss in your pocket, basically.
13:47But I had a lot of respect for him and what he was trying to do.
13:57There was something else about John Frederick.
14:00It seems beyond his career at the National Safety Council,
14:02no one knew anything about him.
14:05Obviously there was something that was always kind of just not quite right
14:11in terms of who John was.
14:14I mean, nobody knew where he'd come from, what he'd done before.
14:17He never really talked about his past in detail
14:21or revealed anything of detail from his past.
14:24And it's kind of not the question you'd ask of Fredo.
14:28Officially, well, on his Safety Council CV at least,
14:32John Frederick was born in South Australia.
14:34In the very early stages at Loyang, he gave me a leadership book.
14:40The only problem was it was in German.
14:43How'd you go with that?
14:44Not real flash.
14:46I mean, he had the accent.
14:47It hasn't changed as long as I've been within the organisation.
14:50I thought he was South African,
14:52because he had a very sort of South African accent.
14:55Oh, we knew it was German.
14:57I won't do the accent.
14:58Oh, everyone had a crack at it over the years.
15:01Nora, you know I've got a lot of time for you.
15:03Possibly too much.
15:05Something like that, yes.
15:07His call sign, we had radio call signs.
15:08He was West Sale 4-5.
15:10He always used to say, uh, uh, 4-5.
15:13Yeah, 4-5.
15:14And 4-5 this, 4-5 that.
15:16It was always a bit of an in-joke,
15:18but you never wanted him to catch it, do you know?
15:21He sounds mysterious.
15:23I'm like, I'm just going to be honest with you.
15:24Like, in all the time we've spent looking at this,
15:26he sounds mysterious.
15:28We thought it a bit strange, but that was John.
15:33By the mid-1980s,
15:35John Friedrich's National Safety Council,
15:37it was a colossus.
15:39It was operating in nearly every state and territory
15:41around the country,
15:42alongside police, firefighters, even the military.
15:46The military was, you know, a significant step.
15:48The concept of an F-18 ditching
15:52and the pilots, um, having to be retrieved,
15:56there was no-one else in Australia that could do that.
15:59The Safety Council won a multi-million dollar contract
16:02to provide search and rescue, or SAR,
16:04at Williamstown RAAF base in New South Wales.
16:07And he convinced them that a private contractor
16:10could provide you with a better service.
16:13And so suddenly we had SAR capabilities
16:16at, uh, Catherine Darwin Townsville, Wollongong, East Sale.
16:22More and more, it was obvious,
16:23this was no ordinary agency.
16:26That modest little Safety Council was fast becoming a national force.
16:31And I think in Victoria there was, for a period there,
16:33a sense of pride that,
16:35we've got the National Safety Council.
16:37You know, look how cool those guys are.
16:38It wasn't the police force.
16:40It wasn't fire and rescue.
16:41So it had this strange status that sat outside it.
16:45It didn't have any other equivalents anywhere else in the nation.
16:50So it was the National Safety Council of Victoria.
16:58Everybody was asking everybody else,
17:01who are these guys?
17:04Is it government supporter?
17:07So everybody was confused.
17:11If John Friedrich had a nemesis,
17:13his name would be Bill Meek.
17:16No, I would say an enthusiastic competitor.
17:20Bill Meek was the CEO of the West Australian airline SkyWest.
17:25The third largest aviation business in Australia,
17:29behind TAA as it was then, now Qantas,
17:33and the ANSED organisation.
17:35In the mid-1980s, Bill started to hear rumours
17:38about a growing presence in the aviation industry.
17:42But it didn't take much research to find out
17:44that it wasn't government at all
17:46and that it was growing like Topsy.
17:49And it seemed to be able to do so
17:51without any financial constraints.
17:54I saw them grow in almost every form
17:59of what we know as special missions.
18:01The special missions are things you do with aeroplanes
18:04where the primary purpose is not to carry passengers.
18:08So mapping, coastal surveillance, air ambulance, thermal imaging,
18:16which happened to be an area that we were also focused on in SkyWest.
18:24Bill is a tenacious individual and if he is ever looking at this footage,
18:28I'll put that forward as an absolute compliment to him.
18:31He's not one to take threats lightly
18:33and he wasn't going to let go of the National Safety Council.
18:40Hugh Davin was Bill Meek's right-hand man at SkyWest.
18:44I think people have difficulty understanding the true cost of aviation.
18:53It's highly competitive.
18:56It requires large amounts of capital
18:59and it generates very small returns.
19:03You're treated every day that the business was still liquid as a bonus,
19:08to be perfectly honest with you.
19:10The interesting part was that they had the fleet to die for.
19:18What was the quality of the facilities and the equipment like available to you guys at the time?
19:24The best. It was state-of-the-art.
19:26There might have only been one in the world and we had it.
19:29The Safety Council has it all. State-of-the-art equipment, superb training and plenty of live action.
19:36In the fire seasons we would have the 17 water bombers sitting on the tarmac.
19:41We just looked in awe. We couldn't have afforded one of their aeroplanes, let alone the fleet that they had.
19:47It looked good and was highly visible.
19:49So bright yellow fixed-wing planes, helicopters, the famous submarine.
19:55A submarine?
19:56We ended up being a submarine pilot.
19:58We could never have ever dreamed of that.
20:00As Freda would say, it's not a submarine, it's a submersible,
20:04with a work package which has got manipulators on it
20:06and we use it to recover items which got either damaged or destroyed.
20:12He planned to do submarine rescue for the Australian Navy.
20:15That was his intention.
20:17Australia has only ever lost two submarines.
20:20They were both in the First World War, so it wasn't a peak demand kind of service.
20:27In all of these different ideas about search and rescue, different technologies, where was that coming from?
20:32Who was driving that?
20:33John.
20:34I don't know whether it was a boyhood dream or he was a Thunderbirds fan, I don't know.
20:39We were just waiting for the palm trees to fold down and for a rocket to come out and off
20:43we'd go.
20:44How are these guys doing this?
20:46Where's the money coming from?
20:48But it wasn't just the equipment that caught their eye.
20:51I remember our managers calling us into the office and saying,
20:56we've got a new project that we've got to learn about.
20:58And he said, so we're using pigeons for search and rescue.
21:04Oh, OK.
21:05All right.
21:08It sounds like a far-fetched idea.
21:10Maybe it is, maybe it wasn't.
21:12It had been recognised by some genius at some point somewhere that pigeons have extremely good eyesight.
21:21The sharpest eyes ever to search the vastness of the ocean, the bush or the desert.
21:25When the pigeon would see something bright, which its eyes would pick up quite easily.
21:31The birds will tap a button, which lights a direction indicator for the pilot.
21:35For its trouble, the bird is rewarded with its favourite food, delivered by an automatically opening tray.
21:41Maybe it had potential, I don't know.
21:43It never really developed anywhere.
21:45But he wasn't scared to innovate and to give those sorts of things a go.
21:51John had a passion for horses, German blue bloods.
21:55Alfredo turned that into buying all the farms around Sale.
21:58Built the biggest indoor equestrian centre in the Southern Hemisphere.
22:01Well, I ended up talking to John about whether I could shift down and join the horse crew.
22:10And he said, no, no, we've got enough people for that.
22:13And he goes, what about a dog?
22:20You had dogs coming out of helicopters.
22:23This is part of the reason why we don't talk about the National Safety Council to people that weren't there.
22:28It's a difficult one to explain.
22:30Police use dogs for tracking criminals.
22:33We were using dogs to track people who had gone missing in the bush.
22:39The jump master will give you a tap on the leg to go.
22:44And you then just dive out the door with the dog.
22:49As soon as the canopy opened, I remember my dog, Nikita.
22:53Her ears just pricked up and she's just looking around as if to go, how the hell did I get
22:57here?
22:59Once you land, you know, and you release the dog out of the harness, it was as if they had
23:04an adrenaline rush
23:05because, you know, she was just bouncing around like a little puppy again.
23:10I'm not 100% sure that they were ever used.
23:14No, it never got used.
23:16John used to argue that, of course, this was very important for search and rescue,
23:19but it was also very important for John's ego, I think, as well.
23:27Was there ever the question of how is this all being paid for?
23:31Personally, I didn't.
23:33And I grew up over 10 years with a developing organisation.
23:38It just didn't enter my head.
23:40I was having a great day at work and I was getting paid well for it.
23:45I think most of us thought that the Safety Council was making money.
23:50If you can ever have a sure thing, we thought it was a sure thing.
23:54Oh, no, I think, I think the few of us were saying that this is, you know,
23:58John was starting to get, I think, out of his depth a little bit.
24:02Wow, this is not really, you know, how is this, how are they funding all this?
24:06Where's the money coming from?
24:07The amount of money we're spending on training every day all around Australia.
24:11This is, this is crazy. How is this, how is this making money?
24:15We built a, an Excel spreadsheet model. And at the time, and I'm talking here at about 1987, our calculations
24:25were that the NSCA was probably losing $33 million a year.
24:34And then the too good to be true cloud started to build like a thunder cloud. Where was the money
24:44coming from?
24:45I think people probably started to believe that it was funded by an intelligent service.
24:55I've come to the Turalgon Racecourse in regional Victoria.
25:00Dozens of former National Safety Council workers have gathered here to try and untangle the strange history of their former
25:07organisation.
25:08Hi there.
25:09Hey.
25:10How are you?
25:10I'm well.
25:11What are you doing here?
25:12So we've got 60 folios and 22,000 negatives to work through, so...
25:20Ian Hewitt was the 12th employee of John Friedrich's Safety Council, an organisation that would swell to 450 staff at
25:28its peak.
25:29By the late 80s, it expanded from its Gippsland headquarters to nearly every state and territory, even overseas.
25:36And nearly everywhere the Safety Council went, its dedicated audio-visual unit followed.
25:43I think the photo record is important because it shows you what we had and what we did and what
25:49we could do.
25:50And I think that's rare. I think that's very rare.
25:53We're very privileged to get a machine called a Bell 212.
25:58It arrived with bullet holes in it because it was owned by a gentleman by the name of Edie Armin.
26:03Bullet holes.
26:04That was the folklore stories.
26:06That's wild.
26:08Wes Lloyd, or the big dud, was one of the PJs or para-jumpers who was trained to jump his
26:13way into any situation on land or sea.
26:16My kids aren't interested in a lot of things I've done, but my kids are really interested in this.
26:20But in all of these thousands of memories and photos, the rarest are the ones of the man that made
26:27it all possible.
26:31That's Fredo.
26:32Oh, have a look at him, mate.
26:35Have a look at him.
26:37There was very few photographs of John.
26:40Very few photographs of John.
26:42I feel like he just never revealed anything about himself.
26:47I just thought that was a little odd.
26:50Did you ever wonder where John came from?
26:52Oh, we all did.
26:53A few of us got chatting about it and we thought, well, he never goes overseas.
26:58And why is that?
26:59John, come and meet these people.
27:01Come and get a photograph.
27:02Come overseas.
27:02Oh, no, no, no.
27:03And that sort of didn't gel.
27:07I don't think he wanted anybody to know the real John.
27:12You know, he always liked being that interesting person, I think.
27:20Were there any suspicions you ever had that John wasn't quite who he said he was?
27:25I don't know whether this guy's still alive.
27:27He was CEO chair at SkyWest.
27:30He said, oh, look, you know, there's no way when you look at the assets and the supposedly
27:36income they're derived, they've got to be financed by the CIA.
27:42Friedrich would often use the terms, we have nothing to hide.
27:47So I contacted him and said, well, then we'd like to come and have a look.
27:53And so I went together with Hugh Davin.
27:58We travelled with him in his car and he never got off the two way radio, barking instructions
28:05at people.
28:07And he turned up.
28:08I'll never forget this.
28:09All of a sudden, coming the other way, fire trucks, you know, buses, command centres.
28:16We said, what are these guys doing?
28:19He said, oh, they're off to an exercise.
28:20I really can't talk about it.
28:22What we saw was overwhelming.
28:25There were aeroplanes everywhere.
28:27There were a lot of people.
28:31And the organisation just smacked of money.
28:36Lots and lots of money.
28:38And so we were more confused than ever.
28:46He left the office on several occasions to go and deal with whatever he was dealing with.
28:52So Bill and I took a look at each other and I said, you keep an eye out and I'll
28:56go and
28:56open the door and have a look into this hangar.
29:00And Hugh quickly closed the door with a look of disbelief on his face.
29:06There was a hangar full of people in military uniforms, berets on the whole lot, marching,
29:13standing to attention, taking orders from the drill sergeant.
29:17It was like Anzac Day.
29:18To say that we came back needing an increase in our blood pressure medication would be an
29:22understatement.
29:25Just smacked of a paramilitary operation.
29:28Certainly the CIA was brought up that we were funded by the CIA.
29:32Were you?
29:33Well, I don't know.
29:34I honestly don't know.
29:36You know?
29:36Frankly, I didn't care.
29:39You know, you started to think, well, maybe there's something in all of this.
29:42I mean, the likes of people such as Bill Meek, you sort of think, well, is that really
29:48what's happening or is it just sour grapes?
29:51You know, because we're doing so well and he can't get the work.
29:54I wouldn't say sour grapes.
29:56I would say that I was jealously protecting our turf.
30:00I just think it became a bit of a mission for Bill to unwrap the National Safety Council.
30:08And so I decided to pursue that particular thread with people who should know.
30:17Initially, I approached Kim Beasley, who at the time was the Minister for Defence.
30:23And I queried whether or not Friedrich had any security clearance.
30:29And their inquiries came back blank.
30:31And I think at that point, Kim Beasley was probably fairly dismissive of it.
30:37The problem with talking to people about the non-entity John Friedrich was the fact
30:46that he had so much credibility with government departments.
30:51I think he was pretty well connected.
30:53Federal and state politicians, John flew them everywhere, did this, did that.
30:58We did fly some VIPs, yeah.
31:00There was one day when I looked over from the cockpit into the cabin,
31:04and rotors were turning and there was lots of noise and he yelled out,
31:07Bob Hawke.
31:08And as if I didn't know who Bob Hawke was.
31:10And I turned around and shook his hand and said, Dave Ellison.
31:15There was the speculation, cloak and dagger stuff.
31:18They were sort of fuelled by some presence he had at Pine Gap.
31:22Why was the NSCA involved with a federal police security operation
31:26at the Pine Gap intelligence gathering base?
31:28It was there for aerial observation to support the Australian police
31:36when protesters came to Pine Gap.
31:39The US forces give the nod.
31:45It's a setback for your country.
31:51I was actually involved in that.
31:53There was apparently a group of ladies
31:56that were protesting against the installation,
31:59so they needed to have security there,
32:03basically to patrol the borders around the Pine Gap facility.
32:07So I spent about ten days up there with the Australian Federal Police.
32:12It was full on.
32:13Did it feel weird to be hovering around a secret US military base?
32:19It wasn't unusual for unusual things to happen
32:23at the National Safety Council.
32:28I mean, the guy had been given an order of Australia.
32:32Recommended by no less than the Victorian Commissioner for Police.
32:36So you might imagine I was pushing it uphill a bit.
32:41I don't think I ever gave up on that,
32:44but I certainly did believe no-one was listening.
32:48But there were some people beginning to listen
32:50and ask their own questions.
32:52Good morning, Kerry O'Brien, Ten Network.
32:55Good night, how are you?
32:56All right.
32:57Thank you for doing this.
32:59That's all right.
33:00It's been a long time.
33:01It's half my life again.
33:02Who are you, who are you?
33:03Did you see Kerry?
33:04Mr Friedrich.
33:07This is John Friedrich.
33:09He's either 34 or 39.
33:12What we do know is that Friedrich presided
33:14over the extraordinary expansion of this complex,
33:17the Victorian branch of the National Safety Council,
33:20apparently driven by the desire
33:22to turn it into the best air-sea rescue service in the world.
33:26In 1989, Kerry O'Brien
33:28was the lead political correspondent for Channel 10,
33:30when a colleague brought him a story
33:32about this rescue agency and its elusive leader.
33:37A journalist named Barbara Fee,
33:39she'd heard some stories and some rumours around the place
33:42that something was not quite right.
33:47This guy Friedrich, a mysterious man,
33:50comes along in Victoria,
33:51is suddenly buying up equipment,
33:53a massive spending program of its own,
33:55and he was turning it into a whole other thing.
33:58And so we started what became a long, slow dig.
34:04So the outside appearance of the National Safety Council
34:07was that it was quasi-government.
34:10It was almost...
34:11It was militaristic, in a sense.
34:13Almost to a person thought
34:16the National Safety Council was a government-owned body.
34:19Oh, yeah, they're the government.
34:20Yeah.
34:21Well, they weren't.
34:22They were not at all.
34:23The NSCA were, in fact, a private, not-for-profit company.
34:27That meant they were not required to pay tax
34:30or make accounts public.
34:33John Friedrich answered to a board of eight other directors
34:36and a state council of 38 prominent citizens
34:39from private enterprise and government.
34:41I think that there was this fact
34:44that the board members had no liability,
34:47if anything went wrong in the place.
34:49One guinea, from memory.
34:50One guinea.
34:52One guinea.
34:53Which obviously went back a very long way.
34:55The board then was a fairly honorary board.
34:58The president, the chairman at the time, Max Eyes,
35:01he was loving it.
35:02You know, it was a bit of a nice little gravy train, I think.
35:06I mean, that suited John perfectly
35:07because he had them under his thumb
35:10and he could talk to them
35:12and whatever he wanted, he got.
35:15John had a wonderful way
35:17about if any of the board members
35:19started to raise questions.
35:21Yes.
35:22Well, the first boat that I worked on
35:24was called the Max Isis.
35:27And then there was the Dorothy Hobson,
35:30was another one.
35:31And then later on there was one also named...
35:34Bill Jenkins, first of its class,
35:36operates in any weather conditions at 45 knots.
35:40Oh, shit, that's really good.
35:43Right.
35:44Right.
35:45But as we got to know some of the figures
35:47and it just kept building the evidence
35:50that things did not stack up,
35:51how do you... where are you getting your money from?
35:54Did anyone ever ask how it was all being paid for?
35:57Often.
35:59Often.
35:59That was often the question.
36:01And we were...
36:03We had a standard response to that.
36:06You know, he just said
36:06that it's being funded through the banks.
36:08You know, we're just lending money from the banks.
36:12It seems banks across Australia
36:14view John Friedrich as a very important customer.
36:18Every banker wanted Fredo's business.
36:21This was at a time also
36:22when banks were giving ridiculous sums of money around.
36:26The Hawke government came in in 83.
36:28The country was opened up to foreign banks.
36:32Lots of regulations were loosened.
36:35And money was flowing.
36:36A good bloke could be trusted to be a good bloke
36:38and was therefore creditworthy.
36:40That idea went after the 80s.
36:43But how was John Friedrich able to get so much money?
36:47He was a very charismatic leader.
36:50He was very convincing, obviously.
36:54He never asked the banks to come here.
36:56The banks wanted to come and talk to him.
37:00He would put people in helicopters
37:02and these bankers
37:04and fly them around the country
37:06and look at our base here
37:08and look at this here.
37:09And all the time getting fed booze and food
37:11and the whole thing.
37:12And they'll sign a check for anything you want.
37:15We knew there was something fishy.
37:17There were things that did not add up.
37:20We did not know when we went in
37:21whether we'd get anything at all from it.
37:24What's your first impression of the base and the man?
37:29You're driving through the base
37:31and you've got these containers
37:32and you've got warehouses
37:33and you've got shiny helicopters
37:35and men running around in uniforms.
37:39But the guy running it was a man in a suit.
37:41I remember about half way through
37:44he challenged me
37:45and he offered for his chief parachutist
37:47who I think was quite close to him
37:49to take me up
37:50and do a double jump together
37:52where I would be looking up at him
37:53as we plummeted to earth.
37:58And there was no way I was going to do that.
38:01How much debt does the company carry?
38:03I think it's pass.
38:07Yes, sorry?
38:08Pass.
38:09You might as well have said,
38:11I'm challenging you Kerry,
38:12I know you're kind of half on to me
38:14and you know I know,
38:17how about you do this?
38:18How have you financed your expansion?
38:20Well you go like everybody else does
38:22to the bank and borrow the funds
38:23which are required to do so.
38:25How do you repay it?
38:27Like everybody else repays it.
38:30Simply from your earnings?
38:32Oh sure.
38:32Yeah.
38:33So he was playing cat and mouse with us
38:35and he knew it.
38:36And we knew it.
38:38We just could not work out
38:40what it was he was hiding.
38:42Was there a breakthrough moment for you?
38:45We got this list of invoices.
38:47There was this recurring series of things
38:50referring to the then Department of Administrative Services.
38:53And they were really substantial debts,
38:55I mean in the millions.
38:57And I got the answer back from the department
39:00that those invoices did not exist.
39:03That was probably our biggest single breakthrough
39:07that what Friedrich was claiming was real money
39:11was in fact bullshit.
39:15Basically he was lying.
39:17It was costing more than a million dollars a week
39:19to keep the operation afloat.
39:21But the Safety Council was earning less than a fifth of that.
39:24He was building an edifice to hide a con.
39:27And it was a bloody big edifice.
39:29And it was a bloody big con.
39:35Meanwhile, on the other side of Australia,
39:38rival Bill Meek was determined to find out
39:40who John Friedrich really was.
39:43Yeah, I started to think outside the square a bit.
39:46And it occurred to me that the best way would be
39:49to do a headhunting exercise.
39:51Bill organised for a recruiting agency
39:54to invite Friedrich to apply
39:55for a fictitious senior management position.
39:58He was only too forthcoming
40:00with all of the information
40:02that he wanted to feed to the headhunters,
40:05which we subsequently undertook to verify.
40:10There you go.
40:12Morgan and Banks.
40:14Yeah, Morgan and Banks reported to us
40:17that he was certainly not born in South Australia.
40:21He wasn't registered to vote.
40:24He didn't have a driver's licence.
40:28And we were unable to find any kind of information
40:32about a person called John Friedrich.
40:35There was no such person.
40:46In 1989, the walls were closing in on John Friedrich.
40:50Kerry O'Brien was preparing his financial expose.
40:53Bill Meek was telling anybody who'd listened
40:56that John Friedrich was not who he said he was.
40:59But most importantly, the Safety Council board
41:02were finally starting to ask questions.
41:08The board was trying to get John to come into a board meeting
41:12because I think there have been certain things,
41:14obviously, that had happened.
41:16I saw Freddo waiting to catch a plane to Melbourne.
41:20I said, good luck with the board, John.
41:23And his comments to me were, he says,
41:25that's if I go there.
41:27That's if I go to it.
41:28That's what his words were.
41:30And he just smiled.
41:31And he had this smile that I hadn't seen before.
41:34And I went, holy shit, this could be over.
41:41In 1989, John Friedrich vanished.
41:46Australia's leading rescue organisation is on the brink of collapse
41:49after a financial scandal
41:50which has left it millions of dollars in the red.
41:53The National Safety Council scam
41:55looks more like the work of a brilliant fiction writer.
41:58The fraud squad say they're anxious to speak to John Friedrich.
42:00Who vanished after receiving a please explain
42:03over apparent accounting irregularities.
42:05It's shaping as one of Australia's
42:07most devastating corporate scandals.
42:09There's a large sum of money missing.
42:11Police believe Friedrich is a desperate man
42:13who will try to leave the state any way he can.
42:16The council says it has no idea where he is.
42:25I remember distinctly it was Friday.
42:28There is someone that's effectively a fugitive.
42:32He failed to appear at a board meeting.
42:37And we have to find this man.
42:40His passport has been suspended
42:42and a watch kept at airports around the country.
42:44One thing for sure, I didn't think I'd be talking about it 35 years later.
42:50Every hour of every day, we were told this is big and getting bigger.
42:56To quote one of the detectives, it was bigger than Texas.
43:00We have no indication as to where money has gone
43:02other than to say the operations of the council have most likely been trading at a loss for many years.
43:10Initially we were told it was $40 million.
43:12It ended up being a bit more than $40 million though, didn't it?
43:15An elaborate scheme to cover up losses totalling at least $158 million.
43:21Ode a total of $230 million.
43:24The latest figures put estimated creditors' claims at $377 million.
43:30It was a child's playground in the end.
43:33I think he remains the biggest perpetrator of a fraud in this country's history.
43:41This could pose serious embarrassment for politicians, police, defence and other emergency services,
43:47overseas governments and some 25 lending institutions
43:50who have for years faithfully undertaken business with Mr Friedrich.
43:56It's been described as the biggest sting in the state's history.
44:00The man who presumably has all the answers, Chief Executive John Friedrich, is still missing.
44:04The pursuit of John, it was just, it was surreal.
44:10John Friedrich is gone and so it seems has his beard.
44:13There's still no sign of Friedrich, despite a nationwide police hunt.
44:17What is it like when you find out your boss is Australia's most wanted?
44:20Yes, yeah, that was, um, that was weird as well.
44:25So he disappeared off the face of the earth.
44:28We were like, what do you mean? Like, he's Australia's most wanted man.
44:32My God, we were, we were right. This thing never did stack up and now it's falling apart.
44:38This was the moment when he went on the run.
44:41That it went from being a, gee, there's a bit of a mystery, down to a dead set.
44:48This guy is a shock.
44:50There are claims that Victoria's missing National Safety Council Chief John Friedrich
44:54may be hiding in the Philippines, where he has links with drug barons.
44:59We had sightings all over the world.
45:02We only read what was in the newspaper.
45:04And then you say, where the fuck is he now, you know?
45:07John, I hope if you hear or see this, you will come forward.
45:12You must feel very tired and frightened.
45:14It got really rough, you know, the people put bullets into a house.
45:18Suddenly there were shots fired at him.
45:21There was a bodyguard sitting on the stoop with a rifle across his lap.
45:25There are now suggestions that the National Safety Council
45:28may have been involved with foreign intelligence agencies.
45:32Did John ever tell you he was a spy?
45:34Yeah, he insinuated that he was a spy.
45:38He insinuated that at the end of the day they'd get him.
45:42Behind the question mark was another question mark.
45:45Was another question mark.
45:46He had no history.
45:47He was a man without a past.
46:04We tell you when we're rolling.
46:07Nice to see you.
46:10We have sent you some photos.
46:11Do you mind having a look at them for me?
46:22The person in those photos, do you recognise that person?
46:27Yes, I recognise him.
46:29What name do you know him by?
46:33Holmberger.
46:34Fritz Holmberger.
46:36And we call him Penny.
47:04And we call him Penny.
47:17The person in his face.
47:24Our español is a chemical practice.
47:25Hearent.
47:25The person in those photos.
47:25He's also here to defend us.
47:25He's a man who told you about it all.
47:25And that's an ol' time.
47:29Can't even see you a man.
47:29A man.
47:31The person in the back.
47:32The person in the back.
47:33The person in the back.
47:33We've got the ability to find out.
47:33The person in the back.
47:34We've got the eyes.
47:35The person in the back.
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