Globe-trotting Australian con man and serial fraudster, Peter Foster, swapped his Port Vila prison cell for a Queensland one when he was deported from Vanuatu on February 5, 2007.
His deportation foiled Fijian authorities who sought his extradition to try him for involvement in a fraud against a Micronesian bank and plots to discredit a Fiji resort developer. Although Foster eluded the clutches of Fiji’s military dictatorship from claiming his scalp he was unable to fly under the radar of Australian Federal Police who were waiting for him at Brisbane airport when his plane touched down.
He was charged with money laundering offences and returned to the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre outside Brisbane.
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Foster’s pursuit of the dollar has enmeshed an international cast of characters, some unwittingly, as he blatantly secured multi-million dollar sales for his snake oil slimming remedies. Although Foster’s devious sales techniques resulted in imprisonment in Britain, Australia and the US, there was always a plethora of gullible investors ready to inflate his bank account after he was released from prison.
His publicised dalliances with model and singer Samantha Fox, lifestyle guru Carole Caplin and Gold Coast stripper Cassandra Caita-Mandra, added to the womanising playboy persona.
Foster achieved international notoriety as the central character in the 2002 “Cheriegate” affair in which the wife of British PM, Cherie Blair, lied about her association with the conman after he acted as her advisor and negotiated the purchase of two Bristol flats. The scandal forced his eviction from Britain.
In 2005 The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission hauled Foster into Federal Court over his involvement with Chaste Corporation, a company he designed and controlled from a prison cell that marketed a phony diet pill called TRIMit. Justice Spender scathingly criticised Foster’s “sad and lengthy history of dishonesty, deception and evasion” before fining him $150 000.
The Teflon coated fraudster skated to freedom and headed to Fiji with a get-rich-quick scheme aimed at Fiji’s resort industry.
Those plans collapsed in October 2006 when Foster was charged with fabricating a Queensland police report designed to give the impression he had no criminal record in Australia. He was also charged with fraudulently obtaining loans from the Federated States of Micronesia and impersonating a rival developer to discredit a resort development in the Yasawa Islands.
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Freed on bail, Foster struck a deal with military commander and self-appointed president, Frank Bainimarama, who led a military coup ousting Fiji’s elected Government of Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase. The deal involved Foster clandestinely video-taping conversations with prominent members of Qarase’s former government in a covert operation designed to expose entrenched corruption and vote rigging.
In January 2007 Foster sneaked out of Fiji aboard a converted RAN mine-sweeping vessel. Shortly after his arrival in Vanuatu he was arrested and imprisoned awaiting deportation.
In an attempt to curry favour with authorities Foster proposed to set up the crew of Retriever 1 whom he claimed were drug smugglers. The boat’s owner, Kel Walker, is another Gold Coast conman who was imprisoned for a $380,000 Queensland Workcover fraud in the 1990s and befriended Foster in prison. But for Foster friendship is an expendable commodity in all his pursuits.
I met Peter Foster in 1997 when he became my next door neighbour. Unlike “Cheriegate” our flats were rent-free courtesy of the Queensland Department of Corrective Service. Foster was housed in the A2 Immigration Unit at Queensland’s Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre and I lived in A1 awaiting sentence with my little Pommy mate after we came unglued for the 1996 National Australia Bank robbery in Brisbane.
The Pom and I were in serious trouble. We were looking at double digits for the NAB stick-up, at least 10 years on the inside, and we were both nudging our 50s when the long arm of the law collared us. One Queensland judge had already stuck “career criminal” tags on us, so community service or probation was definitely out of the question.
I had some serious form for robbing banks and the odd payroll or two back in the 1970s and Pom had form in England that went back to the days when Ronnie and Reggie Kray were running the London underworld. By the time they let us out we’d be dinosaurs in the bank robbing game. It was time for a career change and the University of Crime gave unlimited choices. We decided to turn our sentence into a learning curve. Peter Foster became an unsuspecting tutor.
Foster was an affable type of bloke who seemed out of place in a maximum-security prison. At the time he was fighting extradition back to England after doing a runner from Sudbury prison where he was serving time. The Brits wanted Foster back at all cost and Amanda Vanstone, the minister who failed to get to the starting blocks in the Skase chase, was eager to accommodate them.
My conversations with Foster provided a thought provoking insight into the psyche of a con man.
“To be a great salesman is to be a great con man,” Foster once told me as we walked the yard. “Selling is an art. You are an actor and acting is all about conning people and making them believe what you want them to believe. I am not being unethical - in fact being a con man is one of the most prestigious professions you can pursue.”
That one stumped me. What was so ethical and prestigious about conning old ladies out of their life-savings? Foster sensed my uncertainty and continued.
“A barrister is a prime example of a con man,” he said. “He or she will defend the indefensible and make a passionate plea to a jury for the acquittal of their client notwithstanding any overwhelming evidence of his guilt.
“Doesn't a barrister pretend that the client is innocent knowing full well that he could very likely be guilty?” Foster asked. “A barrister will look a jury straight in the eye and tell them his client is innocent. He is actually conning the jury.”
Foster continued with the analogy.
“We look upon the legal profession as distinguished and noble. We have the greatest respect and admiration for barristers. They are the elite of the legal profession - the pillars of the community.
“The more successful the barrister, the more we elevate them until they become judges to oversee our court system. We trust them to protect our justice system but as the saying goes; ‘don't try and con a con’. Who better to keep the practicing con men (the barristers) in line than the former con men (the judges)?”
From a career criminal’s perspective, the analogy was right on the money.
Shortly afterwards Foster confided he wanted to write his memoirs. I arranged for him to share the computer I was using in the prison library. He worked feverishly to complete his 200-page autobiographical rough draft but unfortunately Foster was not computer literate in those days.
One day I was using the computer and discovered Foster’s rough draft saved to the hard drive. It was a DIY Conman’s Bible that described each step-by-step process - ten chapters on how to deceive and con a gullible public!
Foster described how the WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) factor played a significant role in his successful marketing of Bai Lin tea, a spurious slimming product, which earned millions in a calculated program design to con the public:
In the diet industry, our normal target market is women 25 - 55. We understand that whilst men make up 49% of the population, and they are equally as overweight as women, it is the women who will purchase the product. She will buy it for her husband, boyfriend, son - he is normally too self conscious to buy a weight-loss product. So we must direct our message to the women as she controls the purse strings.
Over the years I have signed up an extreme range of celebrities to endorse my diet products. And I have associated my products with a blend of men and women celebrities. When I was marketing Bai Lin Tea in Australia, I signed Australian Olympic legend and MP, Dawn Fraser, Playboy Playmate of the Year, Lyn Barron, and champion jockeys Ron Quinton and Lester Piggott.
Sam Fox was chosen because she was the most popular celebrity in England and we wanted to generate sales of the product by people being aware that she used the product to obtain her perfect figure. This is the most obvious reason for selecting a celebrity, to get the cash registers humming as a direct result of them using the product.
Foster was broke when he began distributing Bai Lin tea so he assembled family, friends and relatives to play roles as distributors, shopkeepers, and happy customers in a promotional video:
Because it is for private use there are so many short cuts you can take. I desperately wanted to include twenty-second footage of Lester Piggott riding the winner of the Australasian Oaks which he claimed he did at his lowest weight in years because of drinking Bai Lin Tea.
The TV station who had the footage wanted $2,500 for the rights. I was shooting the whole 20 minutes on a budget of $2,000, and I was faced with paying $2,500 for just 20 seconds.
I overcame the problem by taping an old horse race on my home video recorder from the Sunday TV Sports program and when we laid down the audio in editing I did the race call my self. I didn't alter the facts, only substituted footage and voice over of the event. It was just as effective to the viewer, they were not factually misled, I had just used "artistic licence" and until I write this page, nobody has ever been the wiser.
Foster’s penchant for subterfuge even extended to television interviews in which he continued to deliver a sophisticated persona to the general public while he continued to push his bodgie slimming products:
I was in Brisbane having a leisurely lunch (what else?) when I was diverted towards Mt Cootha to do a television interview by satellite for “A Current Affair”, but this time a debate with Jana Wendt and the Minister for Consumer Affairs.
At lunch I was unshaven, wearing a Hot Tuna t'shirt, and tennis shorts. Before I would appear on TV, I got Rick Burnett, the Channel Nine correspondent in Queensland to strip off his shirt and tie and loan me his razor blade. Whilst I went toe to toe with Channel Nine's finest, with instructions to shoot me waist high only, so they couldn't see the tennis shorts below the jacket and tie, he was standing off camera half naked.
But the Australian public saw me as I wanted to be perceived, as though I had just left my office desk, as the Minister obviously had done. Not as the champagne swilling larrikin who was out lunching with ladies.
That sophisticated persona disintegrated when Foster described in the manuscript how he was a registered police informer on two continents:
I went undercover for the Federal Police as an operative to infiltrate and crush a major international drug trafficking syndicate.
Working with the field name, “Mr Clarence” I wore listening devises and covertly
recorded meetings with the Mr Big’s of the proposed largest importation of heroin in Australia’s history.
What sounds inconceivable considering the public perception of me, is a hard fact. It is forever acknowledged in a letter from the Australian Federal Police, held on file by the Supreme Court, confirming that I had on several occasions risked my life to bring our operation to a successful conclusion.
My drug busting crusade also extended to England where I became a registered undercover informer for the British police. My task in the operation code named “Outreach” was exposing corruption within a prison run charity. Established to educate our children about the perils of drug use, the fund was being plundered by putrescent prison officers, placing at risk the lives of innocent children.
This revelation placed me in an unenviable position. Should I abide by jail yard principles that had been part of my life for over three decades of criminality and prison time? Should I out Foster as a dog (an informer), which would invariably cause him serious harm and possible death within the sub-culture of maximum security prisons, or should I ignore what I had read?
My dilemma was compounded by the fact that I was studying for my BA in journalism at that time. And I didn’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to realise the journalistic value of the memoirs Foster had left on my computer’s hard drive. It prompted my decision. I downloaded the incriminating material and cleared the hard drive. I had probably saved his life but he would never know. His secret was safe.
In return, I had the original unpublished DIY Conman’s Bible written by the king of conmen himself. By jail yard rules it was a fair swap.
It was years later, during the “Cheriegate” affair, Foster tried to hawk his unpublished memoirs to the British media for $1.2 million dollars but the deal fell over. He outed himself as police informer on two continents at the same time figuring he would never see the inside of an Australian prison again.
Unfortunately for Foster, the unpublished memoirs and his informing activities were already part of my journalism research files. And I wasn’t asking $1.2 million. The price of a schooner and a bit of freelance work is an adequate asking price for any journo.
As the Teflon coated conman sits in a Queensland prison cell pondering his fate, the prospect of 20-years behind bars must be a daunting spectre for him. His informing activities over a decade ago have placed others in similar situations. As they say on the yard “what goes around, comes around”. Prisoners have long memories.
The Teflon coated fraudster is in the middle of a delicate balancing act in which not only his freedom, but his life is also at stake. Peter Foster has managed to wiggle out of tighter spots in the past. Can he do it again? Only time will tell.