The anatomy of a conman

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: