Australia’s Most Mysterious Conman: John Friedrich

Summary

Australian True Crime | “Australia’s Most Mysterious Conman: John Friedrich” (Feb 22, 2026)
Host: Michelle Laurie | Guest: Mark Fennell (documentary filmmaker)

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the remarkable, enigmatic life and downfall of John Friedrich—by most measures, Australia’s greatest conman, but one whose fraud powered a visionary, lifesaving search-and-rescue operation rather than personal gain. Host Michelle Laurie speaks with Mark Fennell whose recent SBS documentary unpacks how Friedrich crafted the illusion of a heroic organization, why his elaborate scam captivated the nation in the early ‘90s, and examines the lingering questions around Friedrich’s true motives, secret identity, and ultimate tragic end.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

John Friedrich: The Man and the Mystery

• Not a Typical Conman:
  • Unlike most fraudsters, Friedrich did not embezzle for personal luxury.
  • Quote: “What he did with [the money] flies in the face of what normal con people do, right? It’s not for personal gain. So it’s like—okay, so why?” (Mark Fennell, 00:00, 27:17)
• Cultural Phenomenon:
  • Friedrich's exploits were so notorious the Doug Anthony All Stars created a satirical song during his manhunt.
  • Michelle’s memory: “It was a moment where the entire country was fixated on this man.” (Michelle Laurie, 03:48)

The National Safety Council: Visionary or Delusional?

• Transformation of a Dull Entity:
  • Friedrich took the sleepy National Safety Council (NSC) and built it into a “Thunderbirds”-esque elite rescue force complete with planes, helicopters, and even a "submersible."
  • Quote: “He took this very sleepy organization and turned it into something that this country had never seen before and have not really seen since.” (Mark Fennell, 06:09)
• Innovations & Oddities:
  • Pioneered water-bombing aircraft for bushfires, advanced rescue technology, and out-there ideas like parachuting sniffer dogs and even using pigeons for aerial searches.
  • Memorable Moment:
    • “If you strapped a pigeon to the underside of a plane... pigeons have better eyesight and if they saw something, they would eat a piece of food and you’d know what direction.” (Mark Fennell, 12:25)
• Real Impact:
  • Training and ops were not fraudulent—NSC alumni went on to become leading emergency responders.

The Fraud: How Did He Fund the Dream?

• Deceptive Financing:
  • Friedrich scammed banks out of close to $1 billion by selling the same equipment multiple times, creating false invoices, and leveraging appearances with prominent politicians for legitimacy.
  • Quote: “He would go to another bank and get them to pay for the same helicopter and then another bank… It just kept going.” (Mark Fennell, 15:50)
  • “The containers that existed were empty. Some of the containers weren’t there at all… He'd take them up in the helicopter and say, ‘Oh, you can see it’s right there, can’t possibly land.’” (Mark Fennell, 17:00)
• Victim Profile & Aftermath:
  • The primary financial losers: banks, which fueled his folk-hero status. But NSC’s collapse left hundreds jobless and a region economically devastated.

Layers of Deception: The Disguised Identity

• Friedrich’s Background:
  • Claimed South Australian roots, but in reality was German, fleeing prior frauds in Europe. Used identity gaps and the pre-digital era’s lax security to reinvent himself.
  • Quote: “Officially, he'd left the country, even though he never actually got on the plane.” (Michelle Laurie, 20:36)
• Suspicion and Theories:
  • Colleagues noticed oddities—strange accent, never travelled overseas, evasive about his past. When under media scrutiny, he fed rumors of espionage and CIA involvement to muddy the waters.
  • Quote: “He starts sprinkling alternative theories… that actually the National Safety Council is a front for the CIA… He leans hard into it to muddy the waters.” (Mark Fennell, 24:40)

The Unraveling and Tragic End

• Inevitable Collapse:
  • House-of-cards fraud led to the organization’s sudden implosion. The board was allegedly charmed into complacency via gifts and manipulative charisma.
  • “He had this board eating out of the palm of his hand…” (Mark Fennell, 23:40)
• On the Run:
  • National manhunt ensued; the public was obsessed, partly cheering for the anti-establishment conman whose main victims were financial institutions.
  • Desi Freeman Parallel: Similar collective attention to the idea of a fugitive “hiding” in Australia.
• Suicide & Aftermath: [See also: trigger warning for suicide at 01:12 & 31:06]
  • Facing limited prison time, Friedrich took his own life in the bush, devastating his family and reverberating through the local community.
  • Quote: “The one thing everybody is consistent with is that man loved his family, loved his kids, loved his wife. They are innocents...” (Mark Fennell, 29:45)
  • The community and colleagues largely shielded the family afterward, reconciling their pride with the shame of how NSC ended.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If [Friedrich] walked in the room today and said, ‘I’m getting the band back together,’ they’d follow him… His vision was something that people wanted to follow.” (Mark Fennell, 08:48)
• “At its peak, 450 people worked [at NSC]. The remnants are there in what can, I think, only be described as a ghost town now.” (Mark Fennell, 09:45)
• [On the pigeons] “The footage is the funniest… It demonstrates a degree of creativity, I guess that’s the word.” (Mark Fennell, 13:13)
• “Is he a spy? Why does this guy not have a background? If this had happened in any other country, there’d be 14 films about it.” (Mark Fennell, 02:44)
• “He is all gray area all the time… He’s both a hero in one regard and a villain in other regards and an absolute con another way.” (Mark Fennell, 38:34)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00–02:44 – Introduction to Friedrich’s mystery, scale of con and cultural footprint
• 04:42–06:39 – NSC’s transformation and vision
• 12:16–13:22 – Unorthodox rescue ideas (pigeons, parachuting dogs)
• 14:40–19:06 – Funding the operation, layers of the con
• 19:25–21:44 – Friedrich’s real identity, hints of fraud
• 22:43–25:07 – House-of-cards finance, board manipulation, spy rumors
• 26:08–27:17 – Media’s struggle to unravel Friedrich, his evasiveness
• 28:18–31:47 – Personal motivations, unraveling, and family impact
• 32:01–34:03 – Manhunt, discovery, public’s reaction, lasting damage
• 35:21–36:44 – Community aftermath, protection of Friedrich’s family, hero/villain legacy
• 38:34–41:27 – Grappling with Friedrich as ‘gray area’, discussion of ambition/forgiveness in leadership
• 41:27–42:33 – 1980s context: “The Cliff,” why this fraud couldn’t happen now

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Themes & Reflections

• Ambitious Innovation or Deliberate Delusion?
  • Friedrich is a paradox: idealist, fraudster, possible fantasist, and reluctant folk hero.
• Australian Identity & Era:
  • The ‘80s served as a unique ecosystem for such a fraud—optimistic, pre-digital, less connected.
• Victims & Legacy:
  • Beyond the financial chaos, the largest losses were communal: livelihoods, pride, and collective memory muddied by scandal.
• Persistent Mysteries:
  • Was Friedrich’s end inevitable? Was he, at core, seeking redemption, running from his past, or simply a visionary without scruples?

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Episode Tone

• Conversational, investigative, and nostalgic for the “wild” Australia of the 1980s
• Mark and Michelle balance dark tragedy with wry humor and curiosity, especially regarding Friedrich’s bizarre but effective rescue innovations.

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Closing

Mark Fennell’s SBS documentary, “Australia’s Most Mysterious Conman,” offers the definitive account of John Friedrich—his audacious fraud, national impact, and lasting enigma. Both the episode and documentary shine as a case study in how vision, deception, and absence of oversight can combine to momentarily build—and then destroy—something extraordinary.

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If you need support after listening, contact Lifeline (13 11 14), 1800-Respect, or (for Indigenous listeners) 13 Yarn.

Transcript

[Mark Fennell]

For me, the biggest mystery is the man himself. He is, in sheer numbers, Australia's greatest con man, right? But what he did with it is flies in the face of what normal con people do, right? It's not for personal gain. So it's like, ok, so why?

[Michelle Laurie]

This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie and this week, documentary maker and all round terrific guy Mark Fennell joins us to talk about his latest production on sbs. It's about a case that looms large in my memory, but is apparently largely forgot by most Australians. It's the story of John Friedrich, a maverick whose obsession with public safety saw him lauded by prime ministers. But shortly after, he became the most hunted fugitive in the country. To be fair, the reason I remember it is because the comedy group the Doug Anthony All Stars did a song about it that I rewatched hundreds of times because I was such a big fan.

[Doug Anthony All Stars (voice excerpt)]

He's a prince, a champaswami with his own private army and he's fought for the rights of every man, woman and child well, he took the cash and did the dash but no one knows where he's hid the stash Friedrich made a dime on the inside.

[Michelle Laurie]

The fact that they wrote the song reflects how massive a cultural moment John Friedrich was back in 1991. But who was he really? Was he a fraudster? Was he a spy? Mark Fennell joins us on the show to talk about it. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains discussions around suicide.

[Mark Fennell]

When I started looking at it with the team, we were all sort of like, why don't, why don't. We looked at each other as a group because we have a documentaries team at SBS and we kind of looked at each other and went, why didn't we know about this? That there was this, like, hectic Thunderbirds R Us of Australia that imploded spectacularly. Like, how did we not know this?

[Michelle Laurie]

And also from, from. Okay, well, this is kind of like the Desi Freeman, because a lot of people, I will say, though mostly men, are obsessed with Desi Freeman. I've got men, strangers, stopping me in the street, asking me, where's Desi? Literally? And I'm like, I don't know, like. But they're just really into it. They want to know. This idea of someone being on the run in Australia somewhere, a fugitive, is really captivating. And this story, though, of John Friedrich had so many other elements. It was like Thunderbirds. It was like a movie. So much more to it. I can't believe we don't talk about it more often.

[Mark Fennell]

It's one of those things where I think when you actually put all the pieces of it out, right, like, you know, the scale of the fraud, you know, close to a billion, conservatively around a billion dollars worth of fraud, then what he did with it, which is basically build Australia's version of the Thunderbirds. And then the fact that the guy himself was an absolute object of mystery, had a fake identity. And there are all these rumours, right, of them being, you know, of the organization being for things like the CIA. Is he a spy? Why does this guy not have a background? It has all of these incredible elements and you lay them out on a table and you're just like, what is like how if this had happened in any other country, there'd be like 14 films about it. And we laid it out and just went, this is just an absolutely incredible piece of our story as a nation that is just like disappeared. And I was like, well, we have to kind of lay it out. And it's when you actually go and talk to people that worked with John, that worked at the National Safety Council, what is intriguing is like, they don't talk about it with people because they say half the time, if we tell people today what we actually got up to at the National Safety Council, people wouldn't believe us. They'd think we were crazy.

[Michelle Laurie]

There's jumping out of planes with dogs, for one thing. We'll get to all of that. There's skydiving dogs. But that is just an example of so much that I didn't know. Yes, I remember it as part of the zeitgeist. I remember this moment where the entire country was fixated on this man. But the details I had no idea of. And I realised before I started watching your show, I thought, actually, I don't know. I don't know what happened, even though I thought I did. So that's what's great about this as well. It's a great piece of investigation for those who don't remember, for the many of our listeners who were not born, which is hard for me to accept. Let's start with the Thunderbirds esque organization that he began because for a long time he was a hero. He was a man, a visionary who invented something that was world first.

[Mark Fennell]

So the interesting thing is the National Safety Council is the most boringly named organization in the country, right? And it's Actually been around for decades. I think it goes back to the like the 1920s and 30s and it's all as an organization. Its main job for most of its existence was, as far as I can tell, mostly poster based. The sort of people that put up like, oh and s posters around the office going, you know, watch your back and do a safety course. It was very, that it was very like low key, kind, kind of boring. But then this young guy with a weird accent that nobody can quite pinpoint rocks up and he starts quite low in the rungs and then he ends up being the head of the Victorian division. So there's different divisions around the, around the country, but he just runs the Victorian division. And in a very short period of time he ends up acquiring all of this equipment, recruiting staff. Every young man in the Gibson region seems to get a job there. Right. And he starts building up and you know, we joked about it earlier, but it is Thunderbirds. They had planes, helicopters, submarines, boats.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yes.

[Mark Fennell]

They had dogs that they would strap to, para jumpers jumping out, all of this essentially to be an elite search and rescue unit.

[Michelle Laurie]

And it was though, right? I mean, and the other thing, I mean, he innovated in things like firefighting. I mean they were the first organisation to use planes to dump water and you know, whatever fire retardants on bushfires. They did innovate. They were real. Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

And not only were they doing it in Australia, they were actually, when the bushfire season ended here, they went overseas with those planes and they started fighting fires in places like Canada and Europe. It was quite literally an international operation based out of Gippsland in Victoria. And so he took this very sleepy organization and turned it into something that this country had never seen before and have not really seen since. Right. The question I guess becomes where is it all coming from and what's the goal?

[Michelle Laurie]

Right.

[Mark Fennell]

Like what's he building towards? And that is something that we wouldn't know for much later. But the, you know, I went around and we spoke to people that work there and a lot of them are still in the area. A lot of them went on to work in things like ambulances and pilots and whatnot. So there's like a generation of essentially like people saving us that have come from this one organization because there was

[Michelle Laurie]

nothing fraudulent about the training, about the work that they were doing. And they had hangers full of aircraft, helicopters, like the latest technology, as you mentioned. The submarine I loved, which he apparently called a submersible, he didn't like to call it.

[Mark Fennell]

You weren't allowed to call it the submarine, apparently, but he's very particular on language.

[Michelle Laurie]

It was designed to. To, well, to rescue people from submarine accidents. Right. But like there hadn't been any since World War I, so. Yeah, but just really covering all the bases.

[Mark Fennell]

Well, it kind of gives you a little bit of an indication of perhaps where he maybe went wrong, which is he's, he's acquired. He had an incredible vision, but he's acquiring equipment, training people up for stuff that in some regards we didn't need. Right. Like the number of submarine accidents, as you point out, there hasn't been one since World one. So, like, there was a lot of that, that, you know, very expansive vision. Right.

[Michelle Laurie]

Ambitious. He was an incredibly ambitious man, which I have to say, in Australia, Certainly in the 80s, there were a lot of ambitious guys around at that time. We're talking. This is the era of the Bonds and the Scaces. It was an ambitious, expansive time in Australia and we were really embracing these guys.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah. And I mean, he ended up with an order of Australia. There are all of these pictures of him with, you know, the most famous people. They're ferrying Bob Hawke around, you know, like one of the pilots I spoke to, you know, he was a young guy, was flying planes and he's hops in his aircraft, turns around and there's this guy going, g', day, I'm Bob. He was like, yeah, I know, you're the Prime Minister.

[Michelle Laurie]

The Prime Minister. And it really suited that era of politics. Bob Hawke and Paul Keating again, ambitious, expansive. They're talking about, no, a new, Australia's new. We're different. We're going to go in a different direction and it's going to be big.

[Mark Fennell]

I think it's emblematic of that mentality, which is big ambition, go big, go home. And, you know, I think he. Even when you talk to people now, that worked for him. And I think this is probably one of the most surprising things for me. All of these people who, you know, were really young guns at the time, they all say, and we'll get to how it all went horribly wrong, but all of them say, like if. If he walked in the room today and said, I'm getting the band back together, they'd follow him. And not because he was like, particularly charming or like they were afraid of him. He was not necessarily like a fun, happy, go lucky guy, but he had a certain. He had a certain Riz about him that people wanted to follow. And his vision was something that people wanted to follow. His idea of what Search and rescue in Australia could be. Was huge. And, you know, if you go to the place where it was, where their headquarters were at its peak, 450 people worked. You can still see the airport, you can still see the hangar, you can still see the massive pool where they basically would train people how to escape from a crashed helicopter underwater. Like it. The stuff that they were doing was wild. And the remnants are there in what can, I think, can only really be described as a ghost town now.

[Michelle Laurie]

Wow.

[Mark Fennell]

It's a very strange piece of history.

[Michelle Laurie]

It was also emblematic of Australia's isolation. I think that he was. It felt like he was really addressing things like, you know, we are an island in the middle of the ocean with desert, with all of these things. We need extreme equipment and training to be able to rescue people. We need to be able to rescue people from Mount. We need to be able to rescue people from far out in the ocean. What were they called? The. I'm thinking paratroopers, but I know that's not the right word.

[Mark Fennell]

Oh, they call them PJs.

[Michelle Laurie]

PJs? Para jumpers. So he's training them to be able to jump out of airplanes way out to sea, much further than helicopters could go. And they're jumping in with like a couple of hundred kilos of gear in their backpack so they could rescue people and survive out there for a couple of days. And again, look, it doesn't come up often, but it comes up that we need to rescue people out there. So it seemed that he was sort of the only guy who was being realistic in a way about our needs.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah, I mean, the. The one that I think I always come back to, and you alluded to it earlier, quite rightly, which is bushfires. Right. Like the scale of what we face as a nation is. Is unlike what a lot of nations face. And he had a plan and he acquired the equipment to. To do it. And a lot of the stuff that he pioneered you mentioned earlier, it's stuff we do now. And the National Safety Council under John were the first people really to do it at scale, and they were doing it all around the country. Now, what's weird is like the National Safety Council brackets, Victoria Division, but actually they were operating all around the country and indeed all around the world. And that's just like, when you think about that, it's just in the context of being the 80s in Australia being quite a, you know, remote place to punch above our. And we do love it when we punch above our weight.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yes, he did.

[Mark Fennell]

And the National Safety Council did punch well and truly above their weight.

[Michelle Laurie]

And I should say, as much as I. It sounds hilarious to be jumping in a way to be jumping out of planes with dogs. I mean, the point of that was he's talking about, well, what if they. We could parachute sniffer dogs into remote locations to help us find people Again, it's ingenious. It makes sense.

[Mark Fennell]

Not as good as the, the pigeons, though. The pigeons, though, as desperately.

[Michelle Laurie]

The pigeons. Tell us about the pig. That was a little bit for me, like.

[Mark Fennell]

So in addition to the dogs and the horses, they also had horses. There was this idea. If you strapped a pigeon to the underside of a plane while you're doing search and rescue. Pigeons have better eyesight and if they saw something in the distance, they would eat a piece of food and you'd know what direction in a particular direction and you'd know which direction. And then basically you got to imagine like a little bubble sitting underneath the plane or a helicopter with a pigeon sitting in there, just like eating pellets in a different direction. The era before, like proper satellites, things like that. I know it's brilliant, but the footage is the funniest. I can't. Every time I see it, I just laugh. And not because it's silly per se, but because it's. It demonstrates a degree of creativity, I

[Michelle Laurie]

guess that's the word.

[Mark Fennell]

As far as I can tell, they were never really used. But there's certainly footage of it and it's certainly. And everybody, everybody that works there remembers it, the pigeons.

[Michelle Laurie]

It reminds me of when you see photos of someone's. What do they call them? Mental health, pet or whatever on an airplane and it's like a duck and it's sitting on a plane looking out the window. If you'd like to talk to someone about abuse that's taken place in your life, no matter how long ago it happened, your GP is always a good place to start. If that's not going to work for you, you can contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or via their website, 1-800-Respect.org au or you can call Lifeline's 24 hour phone counselling service on 13, 11, 14. So, yes, the pigeons were amazing. But as I'm watching it, and again, because I couldn't really remember what really happened, even I start thinking, how are they paying for this, though? Like, I got really. In the first episode, I got really absorbed in the dream, in the expansiveness of it, in the wonder of it. And I'm thinking, how Are they paying for all these helicopters and all these people on this? Excellent training. And of course, that is the point.

[Mark Fennell]

Well, this is actually why I think John Friedrich's story is so interesting. Right. Because there are plenty of con men in the history of this land. This is a con man that actually funneled all of the money into doing something that basically saved people's lives.

[Michelle Laurie]

Incredible.

[Mark Fennell]

It's not accruing money for themselves, it's accruing money for a service that quite literally saved people's lives.

[Michelle Laurie]

No houses in Majorca, no yachts.

[Mark Fennell]

So he. The simplified version of it is he would go round to different banks and get them to invest money in this thing, basically saying, well, we've got contracts with the government, we're working with police working overseas. The problem is none of those organizations were willing to pay what this thing really cost. Right. So he would take in extra money from. From banks. The part where it becomes a con, and this would take years for people to work it out after the fact is that he would go to a banker. Well, we need to buy a new helicopter. We need X amount of money. And they'd be like, you know, I've seen pictures of you standing next to the Prime Minister. You have an order of Australia. Yes, you're legit. Also, remember the National Safety Council kind of already sounds like a government organization.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yeah, I thought it was.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah. I think a lot of people did and I think existing in that space helped them a lot. So the banks are like, this is absolutely a good. Good publicity, good branding. Plus, we can see you've got contracts with. We can see you already working with governments. You can pay this off, it'd be fine. But then you go to another bank and get them to pay for the same helicopter and then another bank and get them to pay the same helicopter and then another bank. And the kind of. The peak of it is that he had this plan that he was going to have massive containers filled with safety equipment dotted around the country. And they would, you know, be strategically placed. So if somebody gets lost in, you know, the Daintree, there was one there. Or if somebody gets lost in the. In the Blue Mountains, in the city, they'd be there. If somebody gets lost in bastrate, there'd be one on the coast like that was. And he had this map in his office of where all of these containers would be strategically placed so that if something happened, they could just go pick it up again.

[Michelle Laurie]

Brilliant.

[Mark Fennell]

And he had one of the containers at the headquarters there. And he did show people, you Know, like this inside here. This is what we got.

[Michelle Laurie]

Full of gear, full of equipment, expensive equipment, big stuff, little stuff, so that, you know, you could cut down on response times, right? If someone's there, we don't have to take all this stuff there. We just go there, crack open the container, and start saving.

[Mark Fennell]

Except the containers that existed were empty. Some of the containers weren't there at all. He had one kind of on show, and that's what he would show people when they'd come visit and see the hard work. But actually the. A lot of the containers weren't there. And when people, you know, like a bank or somebody like that would ask, ask to go see it, he'd take them up in the helicopter. He'd point it out, oh, we can't possibly land, but you can see it's right there. And he started building and. And after a certain point, he didn't even bother building. The. The tankers, the tanks just ended up existing on a secret set of ledges that he paid for. And the con becomes more and more elaborate as it goes on. And one of the weird it is that it's actually all very well documented. He kept these incredible documents secret for himself. They were later discovered. And one of the. I guess the interesting things is we. We. I sat down and spoke to one of these accountants. She was a very young account at the time. It took forever for us to kind of talk her into going on camera because she was like, she's very private. She doesn't like to talk. But she's kept everything. She's kept all the receipts. She was young at the time. She didn't know. She's actually a real hero of the story, right? She's one of a handful of people that actually worked out what was going on and tried to get people to pay attention. And people really did not pay attention at the time. And so this is, you know, really her first opportunity to lay it out and be like, he is creating fake invoices for fake equipment. It's all a. It's all a fiction. And he's got. Basically got multiple organizations funneling conservatively just under a billion dollars into this thing to keep it, to keep it running. So he's not, you know, he's driving around, you know, an okay car and living in an okay house. He's not living it up, right. The money is going into keeping this whole thing alive. And he creates layer upon layer of lie to keep it going. All the while he's, you know, he's appearing with the prime Minister, and he's got an Order of Australia. And he's. He's becoming more and more famous and more and more respected by association, which is helping him get away with it all the.

[Michelle Laurie]

When you say he was becoming famous, though he was also, you know, didn't like to be photographed too much. He, in retrospect, we can see was a man who perhaps didn't want to be recognised. Didn't, as in didn't maybe want his image out there too much. Tell us about this guy's background. Who was this guy?

[Mark Fennell]

Well, this is the thing. At the time, everybody that worked for him were kind of like, he's got a weird accent. We don't know where he's from. He'd always maintain he was just from. From South Australia. Now, don't get me wrong, my lovely friends from Adelaide, you do have a weird accent. But it's not that it was more than saying Castle.

[Michelle Laurie]

It was more than that.

[Mark Fennell]

It's just a little bit better educated than the rest of the nation.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

But he had an unusual accent and no one, A lot of people couldn't quite pin it down. Some people like, is it South African, Is it Austrian, is it German? And it was very hard to identify and. But he'd only ever maintained that he was born in South Australia. As it turns out, he was not. And it took years for this to come out. But he basically, he was originally from Germany and he pulled. We actually, you know, the story for. In the. In the film goes to Germany and he pulled a similar con there and then needed to essentially escape. He comes into Australia and theoretically leaves. You know, he leaves, but actually he doesn't leave. He basically walks into the airport with a ticket and then walks straight back out again.

[Michelle Laurie]

That's right. I mean, again, we forget. It's so recent, but security and things like records and all that, these are the days when criminals from Melbourne could still go and disappear in Perth. You know, like, it was just. Nothing was connected. And so he could. So officially, he'd left the country, even though he never actually got on the plane.

[Mark Fennell]

No. So he. Then. The next appearance we kind of get of him is in a remote Aboriginal community where he's working, I think, as an engineer and his story emerges and that's really the first time the name John Friedrich actually starts to appear.

[Michelle Laurie]

So that's when he changed the name, like. So he supposedly left the country under his real name.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah. So, I mean, there's a few things about that that I. So you know how I mentioned that the National Safety Council was doing all of this stuff overseas where they were, you know, they were fighting fires in Europe and Canada. I spoke to one of the co workers of John at the time and he did think it was weird that every time they wanted to send the equipment overseas and do something, John was not the one that went. John always stayed in Australia, which you'd

[Michelle Laurie]

think would be a perk of a job for a bloke like him. That's what I took from. And I thought most blokes who are CEOs of a company that's going international, that's a perk I get to go.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah. And I think they worked out and I think it started to twig like this guy doesn't have a passport, he can't leave. Right. So he's faking if his identity got him so far. But things like that. So there. I think even within the organization at the time, there's. People aren't stupid. There were little things that didn't quite add up. He didn't like being in photos, as you said before, he never left the country. Like little things like that that just. And every time they'd ask him about his background, he was evasive. So there were certainly questions. But at the same time it was so successful and so respected and yeah, as you, as you mentioned before, you know, people assumed, a lot of people just assumed it was a government organization. Right. Because of all of that. It kind of got away with it for a very long time. But bit by bit the pieces started to fall apart.

[Michelle Laurie]

Well, they're always going to, aren't they? Cause it's essentially like a Ponzi scheme. He's taking money from one person and then I guess he was paying back some loans, but with someone else's money, the other bank's money and things like that. So it's a house of cards.

[Mark Fennell]

Absolutely. I think one of the curious parts is how he managed the board. So there is a board in an organization like this and he's who theoretically he is accountable to. And they should have been asking questions because, you know, pretty soon people started kind of filtering through the board like there's stuff going on here. You guys are in charge, need to pay attention to this. Well, you're liable, you're liable. And the board. He had the meaning out of the palm of his hand.

[Michelle Laurie]

Well, we named boats after them. Mark.

[Mark Fennell]

Exactly.

[Michelle Laurie]

If I named a rescue vessel the Mark Funnell, I'm sure you would look upon me very favourably.

[Mark Fennell]

And you know what?

[Michelle Laurie]

The.

[Mark Fennell]

The night is still young. Michelle, I'm keen for you to do that. I would accept a ski do evenly.

[Michelle Laurie]

I'll bear that in mind. Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

He had this board eating out of the palm of his hand and it was, it was breathtaking to see the sheer force of his personality through the eyes of people that knew him. Right. Because this is the thing he. One should never agree to do a documentary about a person that was not keen on being filmed. Is my hot take. Much better for podcasts. But, you know, he is not a stunning. There's not a stunningly large amount of footage of him around, but the, the, the footage that's. There is really when people do start to ask questions and, and there are news cameras starting to rock up. And watching him really squirm under the pressure is a really intriguing thing to watch unfold because he's, he's evasive, but I also think he's playful and, you know, under pressure he has this grin where he thinks he can obfuscate his way. God, I should never, ever say that word. I'm so bad. He thinks he can obfuscate his way around it. And one of the ways he does that is he starts sprinkling alternative theories in the. He starts sprinkling what we now can recognize as essentially fake news, which. So that's where this idea starts to emerge that actually the National Safety Council is a front for the CIA. There had been theories around because how else would you afford to pay for it all if it wasn't a front? So that idea starts to percolate, which he doesn't really. He doesn't really do much to stand in the way of. Right. Then there's this idea about he himself might actually be a spy.

[Michelle Laurie]

Especially when the identity stuff starts to come out when we start to go, hang on, I don't think that's his real name. Then they start to. And it's the Cold War, by the way, at the time. So there is constant conversation around espionage. Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

And he leans hard into it because I think it helps muddy the waters for him. You know, his lawyer is a, you know, a very well trafficked criminal lawyer in Melbourne. Has a lot of colorful, colorful clients. He even, he would say, and he's like, the guy knew what he was doing in the sense. Like he knew he was spitting out stuff that would make. It would kind of permanently place him in a shroud of mystery that we would never really know if he was a spy.

[Michelle Laurie]

Do you think he always knew it was temporary what he was doing. It almost feels like he was sort of in a race against time to see how far he could take it.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah.

[Michelle Laurie]

And then that grin. I know what you mean. That playful expression is like, it's like, I'm not surprised this is happening. I knew this would happen. And he is sort of enjoying it.

[Mark Fennell]

There's this footage of him being grilled by George Negus. And Negus, God bless him, is so frustrated. So he's like, he cannot pin him down. And actually frustration is the word. Cause you talk to anybody like, like Kerry o' Brien's in the film, Hugh Remington's in the film, like these are, you know, really excellent journos. And even they, like Kerry reckons it's his most frustrating his story he's ever worked on. Like if Carrie o' Brien thinks this is the most frustrating story he's ever worked on, that really should tell you something.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

Because no one at the, at least at the time could quite pin down what he was trying to do. And it would take years to kind of finally piece the enormity of it together. And really that's what our, in large part that's what our film is, is actually just laying out this, that now we can finally tell the whole thing as we, as it can be told.

[Michelle Laurie]

You're making me feel better about my 16 year old self not quite getting it if Terry O' Brien couldn't get it. Yeah, you're making me feel better because your documentary really does just lay it out. It feels like it's John Friedrich for Dummies and I am the dummy because I needed it.

[Mark Fennell]

Well, I think it's such a labyrinth of a story. Right. Because on the one hand it's the scale of the con. But I always think that. And this was actually something that emerged when we were filming it. Right. So for me, the biggest mystery is the man himself. What is he? Why is he doing it? What's motivating him? Because he is in sheer numbers, Australia's greatest con man. Right. But what he did with it is flies in the face of what normal con people do. Right. It's not for personal gain. So it's like, okay, so why. And I think the closest we really get to that is, is kind of his origin point, which is back in Germany and what's motivating him there. And you know, I think, I mean, some of it is in the film, but I think ultimately for me, the thing that I will, will always stay with me and the thing that like lives rent free in my head is like, this is an extraordinary, complex and stressful Web of lies to keep up in the air for something where you're not actually gaining from it.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

Like, I think it's one thing to kind of have this elaborate, you know, mixture of, of lies and falsehoods if you know that there's a Cayman island you can escape to at the end.

[Michelle Laurie]

Absolutely, yeah. And that's gotta be part of the plan. Usually is like, when this all goes to shit, I know what I'm gonna, my escape plan. But this guy, it was never about that.

[Mark Fennell]

Well, I, I'll bet he wished he had one. I think it unspooled in a way that even he was not prepared for. You know, there were things that happened, like when it, when it all does start to unravel, somebody finds bullets into their house, right? Now there's all of these, the speculation that he himself is behind the bullets firing into the house to kind of create the illusion that, you know, he is a spy and that his handlers are coming to end it before he gives up all their secrets. And, but at the same time, you know, his family was in that house. Would you, would you take that risk as a so called false flag shooting? Would you like. And the one thing everybody, everybody is consistent with is that man loved his family, loved his kids, loved his wife. They are innocents that have done, you know, that that family has been through hell. They don't love that this story exists, as you might imagine, because on a

[Michelle Laurie]

personal level, they didn't know, they didn't know that their husband and dad, the hero, who they were obviously so proud of, wasn't what he was presenting himself as. And I mean, I can't imagine on a personal level how traumatic this is.

[Mark Fennell]

The community, like, it's interesting, all the staff of the National Safety Council, a lot of them still live in the area, right. And they have like reunions and they get together and they don't talk about publicly what really happened at the, at the National Safety Council with a lot of people, in part because most people wouldn't believe what it is, the stuff they got up to. Right?

[Michelle Laurie]

Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

But they all absolutely, like form a protective coven around John's wife and kids because at least that's what they kind of conveyed to me because I think they all believe that what John did is what John did, but those people had nothing to do with it. And they should be somewhat shielded.

[Michelle Laurie]

And ultimately the story ends in tragedy for their family, not for anybody else. There's financial losses for a lot of people. I remember seeing that at one point, four creditors rolled up to collect their helicopter, the same helicopter that four blokes thought they owned. So there's lots of financial tragedy, but when it comes to real family tragedy, there's actually only one family affected.

[Mark Fennell]

Right.

[Michelle Laurie]

How does this all end, John?

[Mark Fennell]

And I suppose I should probably put a warning here, because John does end up taking his own life, which is. It's horrific. It's. It's horrific for a bunch of reasons. I think partially because any. Anybody taking their own life is always horrific. But I also think his. His lawyer said realistically, he was only looking at five to 10 years in prison, which. Okay, it's. We can sit there and go, that's not very much. But I think if we were faced with five to 10 years in prison, we would be like, this isn't great, but I think. But it's not life. It's not like your life ends. He could potentially have built something else out the other side of that.

[Michelle Laurie]

And for this incredibly adventurous, crazy guy, it seems like, dude, like, you're so much larger than life. It's really shocking to me that he did that.

[Mark Fennell]

It's an awful end to his story. And there is this moment where. So he goes on the run, and he's eventually found.

[Michelle Laurie]

This is the Desi Freeman sort of tie in. Is that. Yeah. For how. I think. Was it a week or something? It wasn't too long. But the whole nation is looking for him because they're going, he could be anywhere. So people are at, you know, at the shops going, is that John Freemany bald bloke with a beard? Is that him?

[Mark Fennell]

There was this one poor New Zealand backpacker that looked a bit like John, who was, I think, picked up by like a dozen, don't quote me knows, but I think he was. The cops stopped him like, a dozen times, and he's like, I'm just from New Zealand, man. So, you know, the entire nation is wrapped up in this manhunt, eventually kind of starts tumbling out. And, you know, I think it didn't have to end the way that it did. This is my feeling on it now. It didn't end, but he. He has these. He has these letters that he writes when he's on the run to his family. And that actually, the letters is how he's found because they traced the mail back, essentially, although they'd had a sense of where he was. And the letters really, I think, give away probably who he either was or maybe perhaps who he most wanted to be. And he writes particularly to his youngest. Like, I'm paraphrasing. Here, but don't lie. You know, it is. The truth is hard, but it's definitely the better way to go. And I think that kind of reveals that he knows at that point that it's all come horribly crashing down. And the idea of spending I think even a day in jail would have been too much for him is what I think his lawyer ends up reflecting on. And to me, it's tragic for the family. But then there's also the collapse of the Safety Council itself. At its Peak, about 450 people worked for the National Safety Council. It's a huge employer in the area. And. And in a very short period of time, all those people, all that community, all that training, gone. Yeah, right. And it destroyed, you know, it really destroyed a lot of lives.

[Michelle Laurie]

They had that horrible period, didn't they, where they were like, are we getting paid for this week? Like, it really came down. It was that sudden for so many families.

[Mark Fennell]

And we took the old operations manager, who's really kind of the godfather of the alumni, left, and we took him back to the. What used to be the headquarters. And it is, Michelle, it's a ghost town. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. You're driving through, like, you know. You know what Gippsland's like. It's beautiful. Dairy country is beautiful. And then you come across what looks like a sort of semi. Like, it looks like it was a sort of a base of operations and it's just sort of ghostly. And we took him back there. And I think one of the reasons why that community of alumni still kind of connect with each other, there's like Facebook groups and stuff like that, is because it's just a forgotten. It's a forgotten and somewhat reviled piece of history. And it. It shouldn't be for them. They did nothing wrong. In fact, they did really great things. And a lot of them went on to be ambos and pilots and stuff like that. You know, a generation of emergency services came from that. Right. So not just what the work they did at the National Safety Council, but the work they did afterwards, they can kind of connect back to John, but their story, their hard work, their valiant efforts, is sort of forever tarnished by the way John funded it and the way John ended it.

[Michelle Laurie]

He took his life in the bush, didn't he?

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah. Went to his favourite hill.

[Michelle Laurie]

Oh, even that seems right in a way, like, horrible. But he was a man who was so connected to the Australian bush in so many ways. You know, it's part of the enigma of this man that when I remember when I heard that or saw it in the news, I thought, oh yeah, I get it. I get why he would do that in a way.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah.

[Michelle Laurie]

Oh, it's so. I'm sad. This is part of it too. There are lots of people around Australia who are willing on Desi Freeman, by the way, who are cheering for Desi. There was a lot of Australia cheering for John, wasn't there? There was a lot of. That's my memory of it. Whether it be the Doug Anthony All Stars song or just the general vibes. I think my parents vibes at the time were good on him in a way, like Go go John.

[Mark Fennell]

Well, the, his, his lawyer reckons that when he walked into court, the, the few court appearances he did towards the end when it was all sort of coming to a head, his lawyer reckons people were cheering him as he walked in. Now, I will confess I can't find footage to support that idea. We did look, but it also, you know, at that point, really, the biggest victims were banks.

[Michelle Laurie]

Right.

[Mark Fennell]

And I think it's, you know, I, I think it's feasible that maybe people were like, oh, yeah, not much of a victim there.

[Michelle Laurie]

Boo hoo.

[Mark Fennell]

Yeah. And so there was a sort of a folk hero thing about him. And. Yeah. So the Doug Anthony all stars did a song that was basically reframing him as a sort of Ned Kelly character. And they wrote it in a day and Richard Fiedler's in the film and they wrote it in a day and it caught imagination in a really intriguing way.

[Michelle Laurie]

And they had the audience singing Free Johnny Boy Friedman and, and placards and. Yeah, that was the pinnacle of the moment to me anyway.

[Doug Anthony All Stars (voice excerpt)]

He's a prince, a champaswami with his own private army and he's fought for the rights of every man, woman and child well, he took the cash and did the dash but no one knows where he's head the stash. Friedrich made a dime on the inside. What a man, what a martyr what a clever little bugger. But they always take away your pride and joy.

[Mark Fennell]

It's not worth it. Yeah, you get slightly more complicated feelings from people that knew him because he was quite threatening, I think in person and quite intimidating. So I mean that's again, this all part of the intrigue of him because he's not. He is never one thing. And this is like my, the part of my job I love most is I'm all about the gray areas. Whether I'm making this or stuff the British stole or any of the Other things I work on. What I'm most interested in is the gray areas. And he is all gray area all the time. Like, he's never ever one thing. He's both a hero in one regard and a villain in other regards and an absolute con another way. He's. He's absolutely a fraudster. But at the same time funneling it into something that saves lives, like, it's. It's grappling with that, that I think kind of tells you a little bit about the complexity of this particular true crime, which is that it, It. It refuses to be categorized as one thing.

[Michelle Laurie]

And so does he. You cannot categorize this man. Cause I don't know about you, but I feel like I've had a number of bosses who would come across like him in his capacity as boss. Like visionary, but difficult. Like, we kind of. We give that a pass, don't we? When someone's doing something visionary, something innovative, we go, yeah, he's a bit nuts. But of course, they all are. And that, you know, that kind of. Of way this. He's a special man. And special men are often difficult.

[Mark Fennell]

It's true. And I think you and I are kind of coming up through the media, for example, like, it's filled. It's filled with people that we, that we forgive because they do. They're creative and they're brilliant. I think there's less. I think there's less forgiveness for it now. And maybe, maybe that's a good thing because we do get, like, we do let brilliant people get away with not like things that are actually in any other workplace. Not. Okay.

[Michelle Laurie]

Yeah.

[Mark Fennell]

And I think it's probably good for there to be a bit of a recalibration on that. I think we're all like, any. All of us that are a bit creative and in my case, a bit ADHD sometimes can be like a bit wild. But I think the scale of what was what he was able to get away with at the time because of what they were building, because how respected it was. I'm not sure anything of its scale could be done.

[Michelle Laurie]

Well, the banks. The banks would never, you know, I don't think they'd ever get caught in a trap like this again. And that's another great part of your doco is the time capsule that it is. I mean, you know, I still think the 80s were the greatest time to be alive. Part of that is. Cause I was a teenager. But part of it is also this kind of wild optimism, enthusiasm, just throw shit against the wall, see what sticks. Kind of vibe, you know, and this is a really great time capsule for that. No Internet, no social media, no connectedness. So you could still be a bit of a. There were still some Ned Kelly's around the place. It's a very Australian story in a way.

[Mark Fennell]

We've done three documentaries about the 80s as part of the SBS docs team that I work with. We did one about an art heist in WA in the 80s and then another one about an art heist at the NGV also in the 80s. And I don't know what it is about us because none. Like I was born in 1985, a lot of this stuff happened when I

[Michelle Laurie]

was like, it was the best man. You're tapping into it.

[Mark Fennell]

But the team, Corin, the director and I, we were. Sometimes we look at it and just. It's hard not to think like there's a certain group of crimes, heists and whatnot that are just. You could never have even, like even five years into the 90s, by the time you had that proliferation of security cameras and, and the way finances started working with credit cards and things like that, you just could not have gotten away with. So there's a particular window in the 80s where it's the kind of. Yes, it's also the. There is an excitement about Australia. You know, you buy Centenary and da da da.

[Michelle Laurie]

Crocodile Dundee.

[Mark Fennell]

Exactly. Australia's kind of big and proud and you know, it's got a different kind of personality. I can see that. But there's also a curious component to it which is it's actually like the last period where a lot of crimes could happen of a certain nature. And I think because of that we tend to gravitate to crimes of the 80s because it, it has a big personality. There's a big personality about the era, but it's also technologically sort of a cliff. And very soon after that, with the rise of the Internet, security cameras and a few other things, certain kinds of crimes would never be the same.

[Michelle Laurie]

I love that description. A cliff. That is such a great description, such a great visual of what the 80s were. They were the top of this cliff and then all of a sudden civilization kind of dropped off. And I don't mean to be, you know, dramatic or say that it got terribly worse suddenly, but it just changed, it just was a cliff into a completely new existence for us, you know, and technology changed everything so quickly. So this is on sbs and is it available right now? All of it? Cause I know I got a screener. But is it available?

[Mark Fennell]

I think from the 24th of February. It'll be available nationwide on SBS and it's two episodes and they're running night after night, so first episode on Tuesday, the second episode on Wednesday. So it's an event. But you will be able to stream both episodes from the Tuesday, the 24th

[Michelle Laurie]

of February, and it's genuinely worth event status. I think I've seen both episodes and, and it's, you know, I think you can tell by this conversation that I absolutely love it for all the reasons and congratulations to you, my old friend. You do such great work and I'm always thrilled to see it.

[Mark Fennell]

Oh, thank you. And I. And I love that we finally got to do this. I. I love everything you've built with this podcast is so incredible. So thank you for having me on.

[Michelle Laurie]

Thank you to our guest, Mark Fennell. If you're listening to this podcast, you can watch it now on YouTube and you can also watch next Monday's episode next Monday when it is released. And that is a conversation with the one and only Hedley Thomas. If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org AU. Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 139276 or 13yarn.org AU.

[Mark Fennell]

The producers of this podcast recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded.

[Doug Anthony All Stars (voice excerpt)]

They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders

[Mark Fennell]

past, present and those emerging.