Yesterday was a bad day for grifters, conmen and bullshit artists.
As they traipsed into court across two states, we ticked them off in the amateur psychology checklist. Histrionic personality disorder, chronic narcissism, sociopathy.
First off, there was Nelly Yoa, a serial pest and fantasist who falsely claimed he had been assaulted by a knife-wielding woman. Yoa, who last week pulled up outside the Melbourne Magistrates Court in a Rolls Royce surrounded by hired guards, had pleaded guilty to perjury and lying to police. Staring down the barrel of a prison term, he was slightly less visible yesterday, attending court in a dinner jacket and bow tie. He was sentenced to five months imprisonment and an 18-month community corrections order.
Yoa was on the verge of being bundled into a prison van when he appealed his sentence. He was granted bail until his challenge will be heard on August 12.
Over at the Federal Court, cancer faker, Belinda Gibson, erupted in tears and claimed she could not pay a $410,000 fine “at the moment”. The fine had been imposed for breaches of Victorian consumer laws.
To be clear it is not an offence for a person to falsely claim they have a serious illness, but it becomes one when a person seeks to obtain financial advantage on the back of the fakery. Why Gibson has not been charged with criminal offences remains a mystery to me.
I wonder if the stress of it all will bring about a recurrence of her fake cancer. Better get on the kale smoothies and quinoa and walnut salads, pronto.
The only member of this dodgy triumvirate to be banged up in stir was Hamish McLaren nèe Watson who was sentenced to a maximum term of imprisonment of 16 years for stealing $7.6 million from 15 victims. It was an entirely appropriate sentence. Too often, fraudsters who leave victims emotionally bereft and financially ruined receive laughably short jail sentences.
The Who the Hell is Hamish? podcast hosted by The Australian, featuring the investigative work of Greg Bearup, tells the tales of the chameleon and thief, McLaren. But it also asks the question: why were this man’s crimes allowed to go on for so long?
According to the Australian Crime Commission, money obtained by deception accounts for the largest supply of black money into the economy outside illicit drug distribution.
Fraud often goes unreported due to a victim’s sense of shame, a reluctance to go to authorities to make a detailed complaint in the knowledge that not just police but family and friends will find out.
The investigation of fraud is necessarily complex. It is a crime wrapped in deceit. Nothing is at it seems. The con artist establishes facade after facade, multiple identities and aliases. It is an especially onerous duty for skilled police. Investigations can take years before a brief of evidence is delivered to prosecutors.
Recovery is fraught. Stolen cash will not be found in a shoebox under the fraudster’s bed. In the case of McLaren, victims believe he has secreted the money away in untraceable bank accounts in tax havens.
Sentences for fraudsters are often light as there is a belief that money fraudulently obtained is lower on the scale of seriousness than money stolen at gun point although victims of sophisticated fraud face similar trauma and enduring periods of recovery to those who have been subject to the horrors of armed robbery.
While police around the country would never admit it, a case of fraud involving the loss of a relatively small amount of money, say, under $10,000 will not be subject to a serious investigation. There are simply not enough resources to justify police action.
Exploiting the weaknesses in the system, con artists will commit crimes incrementally and across multiple jurisdictions, allowing them to remain at liberty. If they get pulled up, they will face jail for a small portion of the offences they have committed.
I have just finished co-writing a book, The Fine Cotton Fiasco. The book will be in stores to coincide with the anniversary of the Second Commerce Novice Handicap at Eagle Farm on August 18, 1984.
Many will know the story to a point. The painted pony, Bold Personality, adorned to a vivid tangerine in Clairol hair dye — a product successfully used by human beings to good effect but in horses not so much — was switched over for nine-year-old picnic racing try-hard, Fine Cotton. Bold Cotton or Fine Personality saluted at the ledger but the ring in was rumbled leaving punters, including a large number of the Queensland constabulary, out of pocket while the conspirators fled, tyres screeching out of the car park.
It might be seen as a tale of a bunch of buffoons staggering drunkenly through a mine field, but it was far more dangerous than that.
On one side there was a bent police force driven by a state government so corrupt it could no longer be ignored. Meanwhile down south, Sydney’s gang wars were set to erupt, a battle between the established order and the challengers cashed up and armed to the bicuspids with the proceeds of drug trafficking.
When the cordite and smoke cleared, there was a bounty of dead of gangsters lying around, airconditioned and in the deepest repose who conveniently became patsies for a whole raft of other crimes including murder and the ring-in itself.
The senior architect of the Fine Cotton ring-in was John Gillespie. He was a man of conviction. By 1984, he had amassed over 200 of them, mostly for dishonesty offences. He manipulated other less willing participants and kept the ring-in on track despite a rolling series of disasters that should have led any sane man to turn and run away.
Aside from what amounts to a relentless act of self-promotion, I mention this story because the interesting thing was that the only people Gillespie couldn’t scam were criminals, violent men who had been in and out of prison and knew every trick in the book. Everyone else was fruit for the sideboard.
Innocence comes at a price and often the cost is gullibility and misplaced trust.
No doubt some people think they are beyond the reach of scammers and flim-flam men but are they really? A good con artist, by nature a person with sociopathic tendencies, has many weapons in his or her armoury, the most powerful being the inability to feel remorse or empathy. Once you shelve those basic human traits, anything becomes possible.
They walk among us. Well, there’s one less walking the streets today. See you later, Hamish. See you in 16 years. Twelve if you don’t play up.
This column was first published in The Australian on 21 June 2019.