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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.
00:16Titchens, dogs, parachutes, you know.
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.
00:32There's 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.
01:33So be it.
01:38He's the prince, a champ, a swami, with his own private army, and he's fought for the rights of every
01:46man, woman and child.
01:47They took Nelson Mandela and that Martin Luther Bellar.
01:52Now they're trying to take away our jolly boy.
01:56Do it, Rich. Do it.
01:57When that story broke, we thought, why don't we just kind of grab the news story of that week, the
02:05astonishing fraud story, and see if we can write a song in a day and perform it on national TV.
02:11What a man, what a martyr, what a clever little bugger.
02:15It came as a series of astonishing revelations.
02:19This guy had been doing what? With what money? And he defrauded the Commonwealth? And where on earth was he?
02:25Free! Johnny boy, free!
02:29What's he done? Nothing!
02:32Surely, if he hadn't been caught, space would have been the next frontier for John Friedrich.
02:39In the 1980s, Australia was home to a pioneering search and rescue agency.
02:44But the man behind it was a mystery.
02:47Dynamic is the sort of word that's often been used to describe John Friedrich,
02:51as he tirelessly built the country's largest rescue organisation.
02:55It all started with a young engineer with a foreign accent turned up at a humble safety organisation in Gippsland
03:01in country Victoria.
03:04A man seemingly without a past.
03:08I feel like he just never revealed anything about himself.
03:13And I just thought that was a little odd.
03:16There was this guy running it that nobody really seemed to know beyond the day that he walked through the
03:23door of the National Safety Council.
03:25I've got to let you know.
03:27John Friedrich turned that safety council into an empire.
03:31The NSCA Victorian Division is Victorian in name only.
03:34It operates throughout Australia, Europe, the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia.
03:39It was monumental.
03:41It looked like a military establishment.
03:44At the forefront of a revolution in firefighting.
03:48This sort of attack on fires had never been done before.
03:51John was the first one in Australia to bring in aerial water bombing of fires, which now today, everybody has.
03:57There were search and rescue operations over both land and sea.
04:01Let's take pararescue, for example.
04:03There was nothing like that in the country.
04:04He had a team of guys who could fly parachutes, could drop them 10 kilometres and they would land at
04:11that table.
04:12The best, the elite.
04:14Well, I suppose when you get judged by the US Power Rescue, they came out to see how these Aussies
04:21were doing with pararescue and said that you have no peers in OpenSea Rescue.
04:27You are at the forefront of OpenSea Rescue.
04:29According to the Civil Aviation Authority, it's the most highly trained and resourced organisation of its type in Australia.
04:37It looked good and was highly visible.
04:40So bright yellow fixed-wing planes, helicopters, the famous submarine.
04:46Then there were the animals.
04:48Rescue horses, parachuting German shepherds.
04:52The councillors trained pigeons to help with search and rescue.
04:55And all this was stuff that other people in the world hadn't even seen, coming from the humble Gippsland.
05:02Yeah, it was incredible.
05:04There was nothing that came afterwards that matched what we were doing.
05:09But there's just one problem.
05:11It was a con.
05:13It was a con.
05:18We had no idea how it was being funded and that the guy running it all was a non-person.
05:28Australia's leading rescue organisation is on the brink of collapse after a financial scandal which has left it millions of
05:34dollars in the red.
05:35My wife rushed out and said, you know, National Safety Council's gone.
05:39I said, gone where?
05:41Gone.
05:42You know, financially gone.
05:43In March 1989, everything came crashing down.
05:47The National Safety Council, Victorian Division, went into liquidation.
05:51And the man at the top was now on the run.
05:56It's revealed that the state bank stands to lose $103 million in falsely secured loans to the National Safety Council.
06:03That's more than half the bank's profits of last year.
06:06This afternoon, representatives of 25 creditor banks of the NSC met privately with Ernst and Winnie.
06:12This is just the beginning of lengthy and intricate investigations into the biggest company fraud they've had enter their books.
06:19I suspect it's still the largest fraud in Australian history, probably in today's dollars, about $1.1 billion.
06:29That's an incredibly large amount of money.
06:31I was huge.
06:42The man who presumably has all the answers, Chief Executive John Friedrich, is still missing.
06:47His face was all over the television.
06:51It's thought Mr. Friedrichs has travelled from Melbourne through Canberra and north to Sydney.
06:56We had photographs of John.
06:58We had him with a beard, without a beard.
07:01We had sightings all over the world.
07:04Me, along with every other employee, were reading the newspaper, because we didn't know where the hell he was.
07:11Oh, where's John today?
07:12You know, what's the latest?
07:13There have been unconfirmed sightings of him here in Australia, and as far away as New Zealand and Fiji.
07:22We had a clairvoyant ring us and tell us he's near water.
07:28He said it could be a river, but it could be water pipes.
07:34So that didn't really narrow down the field.
07:37We didn't do much with that.
07:38What is known is that he's at the centre of probably the biggest single fraud case this country has seen.
07:44Probably one of the most frustrating stories I've ever done.
07:47Really?
07:47Yeah, because he held us at bay for so long when we knew something was up.
07:54Kerry O'Brien had spent months investigating John Friedrich, only for Friedrich to go missing before he could expose him.
08:01But what Kerry could do was explain.
08:04How did John Friedrich calm the most conservative, the most cautious and the most careful financiers in the country to
08:11the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars?
08:14Here was one of the keys to his multi-million dollar scam.
08:18There were a lot of containers on their books.
08:21And John Friedrich had this idea, creating a shipping container, filling it with emergency equipment.
08:31In containers, we can rapidly deploy it wherever it's needed.
08:35And you can imagine if there's a disaster, everyone's looking for equipment.
08:39The idea is excellent.
08:41He would go to this guy at Essendon Airport who had a business making containers.
08:46And as far as the banks and everyone else was concerned, he would fill that container with expensive rescue equipment.
08:52So out in the workshop area, he had two containers that were fully equipped with absolutely everything in them.
09:00Chockers full of all this equipment.
09:01The problem was all the other ones were empty.
09:04Empty.
09:05Empty.
09:06An empty container meant cash in a John Friedrich-controlled bank account.
09:11It's a shell game.
09:12Yes, it was.
09:13Shell game, pen symbol, you know.
09:15It's what it was.
09:16But it was startlingly simple.
09:21It may have been simple, but the scale of this scam is monumental.
09:26So what is all of this stuff?
09:29Diary entries, journal entries.
09:32Notes.
09:33This document records the assets, which would be containers and pumping units of about $33 million.
09:42And so why is this important?
09:44Like, what is this telling you that is concerning?
09:47There is no $33 million worth of equipment.
09:50Right.
09:52Terry Farnham started work as an accountant at the Safety Council back in 1986.
09:56She has never spoken publicly, but has for years kept a paper trail of Friedrich's lies and deceptions.
10:05How long did it take you to realise that something wasn't quite right about the accounts?
10:10It would have been in 1987.
10:11Your loans are building up, but you've got no assets.
10:14You're insolvent.
10:16OK, but what about the equipment itself?
10:18Like, surely somebody was asking to see this equipment, given it's on the books.
10:31And John had this big map of Australia in his office.
10:35He had all these red dots.
10:39They were actually the dots where all the containers were supposed to be.
10:44And there are stories going around that Friedrich would fly in a helicopter and point to a whole bunch of
10:48containers sitting in remote locations and say,
10:50See, that's all the stuff down there.
10:51It's fantastic stuff.
10:52And people go, oh, that's great.
10:53Thank you, John.
10:54Thanks for taking me out.
10:55I'm much more satisfied.
10:56And they were sucked in hook, line and sinker.
11:00John was very clever, wasn't he?
11:02Really?
11:03He's quite brilliant, really.
11:05And how dumb are the bankers?
11:06In the end, Friedrich didn't even bother building the containers.
11:10He just created them on paper.
11:13But that wasn't enough.
11:15So those containers had to generate an income.
11:18And so what are these numbers at the bottom?
11:19What are they telling you?
11:20These are the Zed invoices.
11:22They were invoices raised for standby charges, which didn't exist.
11:29So they're fictional invoices.
11:31Fictional invoices.
11:32And then John ran two sets of accounts.
11:35He had the standard book of invoices and then he had his own book of invoices, OK?
11:41There was $109 million of phony debtors on a hidden ledger, which beggars belief.
11:49If the banks had anything like the kind of scrutiny of those big, big loans as they would have to
11:57some poor little bugger's mortgage loan, it could not possibly have got as far as it did.
12:02So what was the reaction from the banks?
12:04That none of the banks at the time suspected anything because all the interest payments were being made.
12:12John's strategy was a little like having a number of credit cards.
12:15So I've got the credit card from the Commonwealth Bank.
12:18I max that out.
12:19I go to the ANZ Bank.
12:21I get a credit card.
12:22I get money out of that.
12:23I pay the interest on the Commonwealth Bank.
12:25So I'm not falling behind.
12:27And I looked out my window there at one stage and there was these three blokes, three or four blokes,
12:34arguing in front of this bloody helicopter.
12:36Fredo's financed the helicopter four times.
12:39And so all these blokes have got papers for the finance and ownership of that helicopter.
12:44Let me give you one bank and I won't mention the name.
12:47And this guy actually started to cry.
12:49And he said, I can't understand this.
12:51He said, we advanced you $30 million six weeks ago.
12:54He said, it's all gone.
12:56It never occurred to me, never occurred to me that this was a Ponzi scheme, that that's exactly what it
13:05was.
13:06Do you think if he hadn't had gotten caught, do you think John just would have kept on doing this?
13:11A hundred percent.
13:13Terry tried to blow the whistle, including to Corporate Affairs Victoria.
13:16But before they took any action, the National Safety Council had already collapsed.
13:22Did you ever consider going to John himself?
13:25For a very brief moment.
13:26Right.
13:27Most people that came up against John were relocated.
13:34Right.
13:35Or they left.
13:37And as a young 20-year-old, I didn't feel that confident.
13:42He was quite an imposing figure.
13:44How do you think he was able to do this for so long?
13:48Well, there is, that is the mystery, you know.
13:51The only answer I can offer is that they were all blinded by the fact that it had this cloak
13:56of respectability.
13:58It was called the National, National Safety Council, Victorian branch.
14:04The Victorian Commissioner of Police answered allegations that he was warned by NSCA President Max Ise last year about Mr.
14:12Frederick and possible links with the CIA.
14:15I pointed out to the gentleman concerned that, as President, that was a question for him and not one for
14:20me.
14:27The longer John Frederick was on the run, the wilder the speculation about his past seemed to get.
14:32There are claims that Victoria's missing National Safety Council Chief John Frederick may be hiding in the Philippines, where he
14:39has links with drug barons.
14:40He's either 34 or 39, born in either South Australia or Germany.
14:45At different times, he's given both versions.
14:48The rumours have flown about the CIA and Secret Service connections of John Frederick.
14:53What was the craziest rumour you ever heard about the Safety Council?
14:57It was all to do about Uzis and guns and running arms and drugs to Indonesia.
15:02That we were CIA funded and John was flying every month back to America.
15:07While all this is going on, of course, those secret intelligence links lie largely uninvestigated.
15:13There's nothing sort of with a bumper sticker on it saying I'm from NATO or anything like that, but I
15:18haven't detected anything.
15:20Stay tuned for the next exciting episode.
15:23The whole country had this kind of fever.
15:25Who was this guy?
15:26What was he trying to do?
15:27What was he trying to get away with?
15:28Anyone who was vaguely round-faced, vaguely slightly balding, vaguely had a beard, was being bailed up on the street.
15:38Including this tourist, arrested nine times since early yesterday.
15:42No, I'm not John Frederick.
15:44I'm a young New Zealand hitchhiker.
15:46It was kind of entertaining in one sense, but really quite sad in another.
15:53His wife, Shirley, who was a quiet woman, would never have gone near a TV camera in her life, would
15:59not have wanted to.
16:01And she made a statement to come home.
16:05John, I hope if you hear or see this, you will come forward.
16:10You must feel very tired and frightened.
16:13We're all worried about you.
16:16The kids want to know where you are.
16:19All the family will support you.
16:22Please come and help sort out this mess.
16:24Shirley was actually fairly sheltered from it all because John really didn't spend a lot of time at home.
16:29And she was not involved in this in any way, shape or form.
16:34She loved her husband.
16:35She had a family life.
16:37And that was all being destroyed in front of her eyes.
16:45It wasn't the only thing being destroyed.
16:49The company has international operations and contracts with the Australian Defence Department, the Bass Strait oil rigs and other large
16:56enterprises.
16:57All those politicians that came and got photos next to your equipment.
17:01Yep, never saw them again.
17:09As soon as the shit hit the fan, no one knew him.
17:13No one.
17:13John Fredericks never met him.
17:15And that was not the case.
17:16That was not the case.
17:17So with the money all gone, Safety Council staff must tomorrow decide if they will work without pay
17:24in the hope that its many vital operations may be saved by private bidders.
17:28We went to the State Government to help us out and they said we're not going to touch you.
17:33I don't think anybody's going to go in with the sort of money that is being discussed to continue operating
17:39the National Safety Council.
17:41NSC staff in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria have now appealed direct to Prime Minister Hawke
17:46to save the organisation from financial ruin.
17:49And they still wouldn't, wouldn't touch us.
17:52So tell me about when you realised it was really falling apart.
17:55Well, we turned up at the base and there were security guards on the gates.
18:01We were like, oh, that's a bit different.
18:03It came as no surprise today when the multi-million dollar Victorian division of the National Safety Council was officially
18:09pronounced dead.
18:11Staff have been packing away their belongings in preparation for the five o'clock deadline that marks the termination of
18:16their employment with the council.
18:18Without him, John Friedrich's National Safety Council lasted just 11 days.
18:24The 450 staff, the bases, the planes, the helicopters, even the pigeons were systematically sacked, shut down or sold off
18:33to help pay for the cost of John Friedrich's fraud.
18:36It was brutal.
18:37It was like a kick in the guts.
18:40I was feeling pretty gutted, really.
18:47And I went to my local hotel and asked if they had any work going in their bottle shop.
18:54So you went from coordinating helicopters and aircraft to looking after bottles of booze.
18:59Exactly.
19:00How did you feel about that?
19:02Well, I had married three young children, a mortgage, 17.5% interest.
19:10A job's a job.
19:14This would be the end of the National Safety Council.
19:18But not John Friedrich.
19:20His story was just getting started.
19:23West Australian police are conducting an intensive search after a sighting of the missing Victorian National Safety Council boss, John
19:30Friedrich.
19:31A Blue Falcon station wagon bought by John Friedrich in Albury, New South Wales, when he disappeared two weeks ago,
19:37was found yesterday in Calberry, 500 kilometres north of Perth.
19:41When they said he was in Western Australia, I said, oh, really, you know, Jesus.
19:45It also came as a surprise to John Friedrich's rival in Western Australia.
19:50At which time my wife got a little bit nervous as to why he'd chosen Western Australia, whether he might
19:56have a score to settle with me.
19:58I was actually a little bit scared, to be perfectly honest with you.
20:01And I think Bill was probably even a little bit more scared than I was.
20:06Friedrich may have fled west to lose himself in the outback.
20:09Today he could no longer hide in Australia's biggest state.
20:16But first, the nation's most fascinating fugitive for a long time has been caught.
20:22After weeks of wild speculation, the international manhunt for John Friedrich ended in a caravan park on the outskirts of
20:31Perth.
20:33Good evening.
20:34Two weeks after disappearing, John Friedrich has been arrested beside a West Australian highway.
20:39It was near Rockingham, 60 kilometres south of Perth, that John Friedrich came unstuck.
20:45Just as predicted, gone was the distinctive beard and the balding pate was shorn even closer.
20:52Are you sure that the man you've got is John Friedrich?
20:55Yes, quite sure.
20:57Yeah, he's sitting here with me now.
20:59He's a very pleasant type person.
21:08I interviewed John probably 50 or 60 times.
21:14The most telling interview was the first interview I undertook with him.
21:21He was helpful.
21:24Too helpful.
21:26Why too helpful?
21:28Any lawyer giving advice would tell him to say nothing, make no comment.
21:35He dismissed that and said, I'm going to tell you all about this.
21:39According to Martin, Friedrich went into extraordinary detail, explaining the containers, the Zed ledger, every dodgy lease and forged signature.
21:49It was like he was trying to get it off his chest.
21:53Ultimately, John Friedrich was charged with 98 counts of fraud and deception.
21:58Despite being Australia's most wanted man, he spent just 50 days in jail before being granted bail.
22:05At the time even, I thought that was remarkable.
22:07Here's a man who had gone on the lam for two weeks, who claimed he could easily have got out
22:11of the country if he'd wanted to do, and they put him on bail.
22:14Frederick stressed that his time on the run was not an attempt to escape overseas.
22:19He said it was a fortnight thinking about things.
22:24He was so persuasive.
22:28He also had a way of understanding what a person wanted to hear.
22:37That's a talent.
22:39Zig Zayler was the man who stood alongside John Friedrich as he took on criminal trials, Supreme Court hearings, even
22:46a government inquiry.
22:48John Friedrich was called before this parliamentary committee to give evidence about the collapse of the National Safety Council.
22:54It developed into a class struggle.
22:58John had defrauded the banks.
23:00Everybody loves banks.
23:01Everybody loves banks.
23:03So when we walked to court, we'd get cheers.
23:07Huh.
23:08Go John, give them hell, John, would be yelled.
23:11We'd get clapped.
23:20What makes John Friedrich's fraud different to most other frauds?
23:25He doesn't get the money.
23:28Was he benefiting from this personally?
23:32No.
23:32Because a paper trail is so clear, I mean, he drove a nice car and he had a decent salary,
23:38but he wasn't pulling money from the company for his own benefit.
23:44Where did the money actually go then?
23:47It simply ran the entire National Safety Council.
23:53Went all into our wages, went into all of the assets that we had.
24:01There was no foreign villas on the Mediterranean and everything was into rescue.
24:10He stood out for the fact that you could account for the money.
24:15This money stayed in Victoria.
24:19Bit of an enigma, isn't he?
24:23But for John Friedrich and his family, life was about to make a violent term.
24:29Shortly after midnight at their remote Gippsland home, Shirley Frederick woke her husband after hearing strange noises.
24:36Suddenly there were shots.
24:38Fired at him.
24:39A bullet believed to be from a .44 calibre handgun had slammed into the railing close to where John Friedrich
24:45had been standing.
24:46Police say it's not clear if the gunman was aiming to kill John Friedrich or narrowly miss him, but they're
24:51treating it as genuine.
24:53I don't know.
24:54I've always been a little bit suspicious when I staged that himself.
24:57You don't seem convinced by this at all.
24:59Because of this incident, John Friedrich did not appear today in the Victorian Supreme Court, where he was due to
25:04resume his evidence at the NSCA liquidation hearing.
25:06I don't think he calls it to him.
25:10You don't think he did it himself?
25:11To shoot up a house when you and your wife and the kids are at home, I'd be surprised.
25:21And Friedrich had other problems.
25:24He may have committed the largest fraud in the country, but the man himself was actually broke.
25:29I met him in West Melbourne in this very dark and pretty dingy terrace.
25:35There was a bodyguard sitting on the stoop with a rifle across his lap.
25:40And I thought, hmm, interesting times, Louise, for someone who's had a sheltered life.
25:44So that was my first encounter with Friedrich.
25:46And back then, Louise Adler was a hotshot publisher, approached by a celebrity agent, Harry M. Miller, with an offer
25:53for a tell-all memoir.
25:55When you get a call from Harry M. Miller, you take a deep breath and you think, how much is
26:00this going to cost me?
26:01And how much did it cost you?
26:02It cost us $100,000 minus 25% for Harry M. Miller.
26:08There was just one small catch.
26:11Well, it turned out that he was rather averse to putting anything on paper, which is a little bit of
26:16a problem if you want to write a book.
26:18So you needed a ghostwriter?
26:20I think it was John Friedrich's bodyguard who knew Richard Flanagan.
26:24And whether you like him or not is beside the point.
26:27And whether you think he's a con man or not is beside the point.
26:29The fact is he exercised this demonic hold over the public's imagination.
26:35That would be the now internationally acclaimed Booker Prize winning novelist, Richard Flanagan.
26:41Does that strike you as an unlikely pairing?
26:42Well, Richard thinks it was an unlikely pairing.
26:46And I know something of the story of how Richard was brought in.
26:50He had a young family.
26:52He had very little money.
26:54He needed the job very badly.
26:56He's told me he was confronted by the fact that this was a very strange man.
27:02John Friedrich would come to our office and he would be heavily disguised.
27:07We never knew what sort of disguise he'd come in.
27:09And it was known in the office as Project X because it was cloaked in secrecy.
27:13But there's Richard who's trying to write his biography and can't get a grasp on what's real and what's not
27:21real.
27:21How do you write about such a person who's invented almost everything about his life?
27:31Friedrich's ghostwriter wasn't the only one struggling to make sense of the enigma.
27:35But are you John Friedrich?
27:37If I say yes, I am, you say you're not.
27:40If I say I was not...
27:41No, if you said yes, you are, I'd say prove it.
27:45Well, I can't.
27:45I can't prove to you that I am or I can't... that I'm not.
27:49Negus is trying to cut to the nub so hard.
27:51But this guy's...
27:53Yeah.
27:54I don't think the council is a CIA front.
27:58But, um...
27:59Full stop.
28:02You were going to say something?
28:04No, full stop.
28:05It's not a CIA front?
28:06No, it's not.
28:06We had a team that was working on his identity.
28:12Part of that was that this might not be his real name.
28:22Did John ever admit to you who he really was?
28:25Not in so many words.
28:28His background, his identity, those things you could not talk about.
28:34But I knew that I had to get evidence elsewhere.
28:39Somewhere from deep in John Friedrich's forgotten past.
28:43Mein Gott, das ist unglaublich.
28:46Nie fotografieren lassen, ja.
28:49Der Bene.
28:58Dieses Oberbayern ist ja für mich nach wie vor die schönste, die schönste Ecke Deutschlands, ja.
29:05Und also die lebenswürdigste oder die lebenswerteste.
29:09Die Menschen, die Natur, die... alles.
29:13Das ist ein Traum, ja.
29:16Wenn John Friedrich went on the run, his face was printed all around the world,
29:21including one town, thousands of kilometres away,
29:25where a man with that same face was remembered.
29:31We have sent you some photos.
29:33Do you mind having a look at them for me?
29:37The person in those photos, do you recognise that person?
29:43Yes, I recognise him.
29:45What name do you know him by?
29:48Holmberger.
29:49Fritz Holmberger.
29:51And we call him Benny.
29:55And you are certain that it is him?
30:06This is Stelian Mokulescu.
30:09He's an Olympian, a former champion volleyball player and coach.
30:13But in the 1970s, Stelian was a refugee who'd fled communist Romania
30:18trying to make a new life in Germany.
30:31Then, he met a young German engineer
30:34by the name of Friedrich Johann Hohenberger.
30:38Or, to his friends...
30:41So, what are your memories of Hohenberger?
30:44What was he actually like?
31:03Hohenberger provided Stelian with a job, car, clothes,
31:08all paid for by faked invoices.
31:12For me, he was like a Robin Hood,
31:14because he could give us our money,
31:16because he had the hours in it.
31:17And we couldn't test it, whether he was there or not.
31:21So, and so we really earned good money.
31:25And just like John Friedrich,
31:27Hohenberger was playing with other people's money.
31:30Straßen und Derbau.
31:34Road building company.
31:36But he claimed he'd built roads.
31:40They paid him.
31:41There's no roads.
31:44Oh, that sounds familiar.
31:46Der hat den ja, dem einen Chef da, dem Günther,
31:49den wir sowieso nicht mochten,
31:52dem hat er ja Baustellen gezeigt von der Firma Riepel
31:54und von der anderen Firma als unsere Baustellen.
31:57Also, er hat ihn wirklich in das Licht geführt.
32:00Das war hohe, hohe Comedy.
32:02Hohenberger also had a mysterious past.
32:06Er war ja beim Roten Kreuz während der Olympischen Spiele.
32:09Und da sollen auch dann irgendwelche Gelder gefehlt haben, ja.
32:14Und dann hat man das gleich mit ihm in Zusammenhang gebracht,
32:16ob das so stimmt oder nicht.
32:18Das entzieht sich meiner, meiner Kenntnis.
32:21As for his engineering qualifications.
32:24All his papers was gefälscht.
32:28Ich glaube nicht, dass er einen Schulabschluss hatte.
32:34And just like in Australia, it all came crashing down.
32:39I know that was a Monday in December, 74.
32:43It was something special in the air.
32:46Stellian was there when the company boss came to confront Hohenberger
32:50about accounting irregularities.
32:53Und zuerst haben wir ja gewahrt auf den Hohenberger.
32:58Aber der kam nicht.
32:59Und dann so nach eineinhalb Stunden, zwei Stunden, sagt er zu mir,
33:05Herr Mokulescu, ich glaube, hier ist was nicht in Ordnung.
33:09Da war aber der Beni schon, schätze ich mal, über alle Berge.
33:19So he disappeared.
33:21How did he disappear?
33:23He left home and faked his disappearance, his death, in an avalanche.
33:30In an avalanche.
33:32In true John Friedrich style, Hohenberger escaped with 200,000 Deutschmark,
33:38leaving his belongings and car at the side of a ski resort avalanche in Austria.
33:45Did you believe he was dead?
33:47Nein, nein, nein, nein.
33:50Dann weiß ich, dann war mir klar,
33:52der hat ganz andere Dinge vor, als er sich umbringen soll in einer Lawine.
33:56These immigration records show a Friedrich Hohenberger
33:59flying into Melbourne in January 1975.
34:02And on paper, at least, flying out two days later.
34:07In reality, he simply got his stamp and walked out the way he came in.
34:13Later that year, a young engineer turned up in Ernabella Aboriginal Mission in Central Australia.
34:19He met and married a young nurse called Shirley.
34:22And a year later joined that sleepy but well-regarded safety organisation.
34:27That was, whoa, okay, that got my attention.
34:30Imagine his family here in Australia, in Seton, finding out,
34:34well, you're not the husband I married or you're not the father I thought that you were.
34:39You know, being wanted in Germany and then being wanted in Australia.
34:43Yeah.
34:44He was always on the run.
34:46It's a hard way to live.
34:48Yeah.
34:49Why would you travel the world, make a whole new life
34:52and then just do another fraud, another scam?
35:12He had a second chance at life.
35:15So what does he do?
35:16He becomes a con man again.
35:20There's just one problem with all of this.
35:23You see, Friedrich was having none of it.
35:26He was trying to convey he'd been made a scapegoat
35:29and that there were other forces who were in fact were driving all of this.
35:34Did he ever tell you he was a spy?
35:37Yeah, he insinuated that he was a spy.
35:40He insinuated that they were denied.
35:43So who is the they in this conversation?
35:46The CIA.
35:51Codename Iago is John Friedrich's own version of his extraordinary life.
35:56The closer police got to proving that he was Friedrich Hohenberger,
36:00the more John Friedrich ran to embrace a completely different identity.
36:05The former National Safety Council boss claims he worked for the CIA
36:08before coming to Australia in 1975.
36:12There are some pretty outlandish claims in this book
36:15that he was trained as a spook in the US,
36:18that he did covert operations in Laos, New Zealand, West Germany.
36:22Like, when you read all of this, like, what did you make of that?
36:25I happen to like spy thrillers, so I was quite titillated by that idea.
36:29It may not be the whole story or even the true story,
36:32but it's the only one told by Friedrich in his own eerie and distinctive way.
36:36You don't read memoirs for an accurate record of history.
36:39You read them because they're usually self-serving.
36:42I don't need it to be true for me to think it's interesting.
36:46This was a time when people suspected the United States and the CIA
36:51of all kinds of skullduggery.
36:53There is this moment in the interview where you ask him about his intelligence links.
36:58The CIA, for instance.
37:00Would be nice, wouldn't it?
37:02Would it? I don't know.
37:03Oh, well, then you wouldn't have to chase people to pay your bills, would you?
37:07What do you think he's trying to tell you with that answer?
37:09Nothing.
37:10I think he's just coming up with a non-answer
37:13that leaves you just a little kind of something floating in the air
37:18to suggest, well, he just might.
37:20Could there be any truth to it?
37:22Absolutely none.
37:24Okay.
37:25Are you sure?
37:26Absolutely.
37:28I don't believe that.
37:29No, no.
37:30I'm sure he's not a secret agent.
37:35And did you believe him when he said he was a spy?
37:37No.
37:38Why not?
37:38How vulnerable is a spy who's committing a billion-dollar fraud?
37:44Whatever you say about the CIO, I don't think he was an eligible spy.
37:48Jason Bourne is not.
37:50If John Friedrich was a spy,
37:52do you think he would have ever been able to prove it?
37:55Probably not.
37:56The thing is, Australia's spy agency, ASIO,
38:00did look at John Friedrich as far back as 1986.
38:04They were acting on a tip-off.
38:07Sky West have made a statement that the National Safety Council is, quote,
38:12a paramilitary organisation with vast German connections.
38:19I never said it had vast connections, German connections.
38:23That's a misquote.
38:26There were apparently insufficient grounds for further investigation.
38:31Instead, ASIO suggested that the inquiries should target
38:35the National Safety Council's finances.
38:37Anyway, they decided to drop it.
38:40Nothing to see here.
38:44Why do you think he was so determined to not be Frederick Hoenberger?
38:48I believe because, in all things,
38:52John didn't want to burst the myth.
38:58Ultimately, I spoke to John's mother.
39:04And I remember saying to her,
39:06I need you to see these photographs
39:08because that's the man that's in custody.
39:14She looked at them and said,
39:16It's my son.
39:17I know my son.
39:19She said,
39:19When you see John, give him this.
39:22And she gave me a photograph of a German shepherd dog
39:29because she said,
39:31That's the only thing John's ever loved.
39:33And the next time I saw John,
39:36I wouldn't look at him.
39:38What did you think when that happened?
39:40It's almost the loudest yes said by silence
39:46that you could ever imagine.
39:53John had a very, very strict German father.
39:57And that German father was the sort of parent
40:01who didn't think the son was good enough.
40:04It's a long, hard way to prove your dad wrong.
40:10It is.
40:11But my experience tells me
40:14people spend their whole life
40:15trying to prove their dad wrong.
40:18I guess what I'm saying is that you're a man without a past,
40:20not much present.
40:22And terribly little future.
40:23Is that what you're saying?
40:24Exactly.
40:36I was at home one night
40:42and I got a phone call.
40:44Something had happened.
40:45He'd gone missing.
40:48Now I will positively identify the deceased person
40:51and it is John Frederick.
40:53His last seat about eight o'clock yesterday morning
40:55he was found on a property
40:58with a wound to the head.
41:01Well, it's a very sad ending.
41:03He takes his own life
41:04about a kilometre from his house.
41:08And it was up in a location
41:09that was his favourite place
41:11on the property
41:12because it looked out
41:13across that part of Gippsland
41:16where it comes down off the hills
41:18and goes on to the flat plain.
41:19They are very distressed naturally
41:22as a result of what has happened
41:24and they would ask that everyone
41:26respect their grieving period.
41:28It was a very, very sad, sad day.
41:31The family loved him
41:32and that was the most important thing.
41:35And maybe he never understood that.
41:38Friends say Frederick
41:39had been depressed recently
41:41about his forthcoming trial
41:42at which he was expected
41:44to plead guilty
41:45to 103 fraud charges.
41:47I was sad.
41:48I think he could have done his time
41:50and he could have come back
41:52and he could have contributed to society.
41:56How long would he have gotten,
41:57do you reckon,
41:58if he'd been convicted?
42:00I always thought eight with five,
42:02eight years with five on the bottom.
42:03A day might have been eternity.
42:06John Frederick,
42:07the man who creates
42:08the National Safety Council
42:11to prison number 374.
42:14I think that, in my view,
42:16that became too hard for him.
42:20John Frederick was just 41 years old.
42:25This is a man who tricked
42:27and cheated banks, governments,
42:29police, the military,
42:31his friends,
42:32even his family.
42:34He built an empire of lies.
42:38But also,
42:39you cannot deny
42:40that it saved lives.
42:47How would you like this story remembered?
42:51I find the whole story
42:54of John Frederick
42:55a fascinating story.
42:57I'd like to be remembered
42:58for what the Safety Council
43:01tried to create
43:02and had to offer.
43:07I don't want it to be remembered
43:09just for the fraud.
43:12You know, the life saved
43:13and the good that was done.
43:15I think it was worth it.
43:22Well, he's been described
43:24as Robin Hood.
43:26He took some of the rich people
43:28for a ride,
43:29but he gave it to the community.
43:34He wasn't a Robin Hood.
43:36The closest you can come
43:37to letting him off the hook
43:39is to see him
43:39as a Walter Mitty character
43:40or a fantasist.
43:53I thought any fool
43:55can build a paradise
43:56if you've got unlimited funds.
43:59It was a child's playground
44:01in the end,
44:02and there was nothing there
44:04that was admirable at all.
44:06It was a hollow feeling.
44:08It made me sort of feel,
44:11oh, a lot of my experience
44:14and training that I got
44:16was on the back
44:18of financial fraud.
44:20So I had a little bit
44:23of trouble reconciling with that.
44:29They loved what they did.
44:30They saw a role for themselves
44:32in which they could make
44:34a difference in people's lives.
44:38It's a great calling.
44:40It's just that it was
44:41on non-existent money
44:43and it was a fantasy.
44:48It was so real.
44:50And for it all to be not real,
44:55it was really hard to take.
44:59Oh, there's just so many people
45:01that I think in the finish
45:02were let down.
45:04I get emotional still.
45:08But it, you know,
45:10those trenches were still there.
45:18At the coronial inquest
45:19into his death,
45:20a psychologist said
45:21that John Friedrich
45:22was either a somewhat
45:24narcissistic fantasist,
45:25or indeed he truly believed
45:27that what he was doing
45:28was for the good
45:29of the community.
45:31John calls himself
45:32occasionally a no person.
45:36What do you think
45:38he meant by that term?
45:39What he's doing
45:40is pretending to be
45:41everybody in the world
45:43apart from being himself.
45:45And that makes you know one.
45:56Before Friedrich
45:57was arrested by police
45:58in Western Australia,
46:00they intercepted these letters
46:01that he wrote
46:02to his wife and children.
46:03I think in the rawest terms,
46:05these letters,
46:06they tell you
46:07what he was about
46:08to do next.
46:09They may even tell you
46:10who he was,
46:11or at the very least,
46:12I think who he wanted to be.
46:13They're filled with regrets
46:16about working long hours,
46:18but also advice.
46:21Try not to lie, he says.
46:23The truth may be difficult
46:25to stomach,
46:25but it is definitely
46:26the better way to go.
46:28And to his youngest,
46:29he writes,
46:30if I come back,
46:32I wish to be an eagle
46:34so that I could always
46:35fly over you.
46:43them.
46:54They're all like that.
47:04God,
47:06I think he's gonna run
47:07Hang on a second.
47:13I think he's gonna find
47:42Transcription by CastingWords
47:57CastingWords
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