When Walkley Award-winning journalist and presenter Marc Fennell looks around for a head-spinning crime story, he’s usually focused on the bigger picture.
The Mission was hung on an art heist in which 26 works were stolen from a former orphanage. But the show was less about the crime, and more about the unimaginably dark history of that woe-begotten place.
His latest docuseries, the two-part Australia’s Greatest Conman, shares some of the bones of that story.
At its heart is another crime, this time a great mystery involving an eye-watering amount of embezzled funds. Just like The Mission, this staggering story has somehow fallen out of our collective memory.
But Fennell wanted a more personal way into this one. “For me, Australia’s Greatest Conman was always about the person.”
That person was the so-called John Friedrich, a mysterious man who seemingly popped up out of nowhere in the ’80s, with no backstory to speak of, and got involved on the ground floor of the Victorian Division of the National Safety Council of Australia (NSCA).
Within a few short years, he worked his way to the very top of that organisation, transforming it into a game-changing search-and-rescue outfit.
His pioneering leadership of the NSCA has had a remarkable and lasting impact on the field worldwide. But it was all built on a lie. In fact, many lies and astonishingly complicated creative accounting. That, and some of the organisation’s experimental methods were kinda whacky – parachuting dogs and homing pigeon co-pilots, anyone?
“It’s pretty wild,” Fennell says. “Did you know that Australia basically had their own version of the Thunderbirds? We, as a team, looked at each other and went, ‘Sorry, what?’ I always think that reaction is a good starting point.”
The truly staggering details of how this astonishing organisation was built and undone prickled the journalistic spider-senses of George Negus, Kerry O’Brien and Hugh Riminton. But nothing was quite as strange as Friedrich himself.
“As you progress past the quirky initial part, it really becomes a story of the psychology of one man,” Fennell says. “We spent a lot of time trying to understand John, and I’m still conflicted by him. He’s a strong contender for Australia’s greatest conman. But most people, when they become fraudsters, they do it for personal gain.”
Not so for Friedrich. “His personal gain is very questionable here, and he did genuinely help a lot of people,” Fennell says. “That’s what makes this a really interesting quandary. It doesn’t necessarily excuse what he did wrong, or how he did it, but it does make it much more morally murky.”
Building a mystery
A lot of money was spent on the NSCA, with a raft of banks and other creditors extending loan after loan.
“John absolutely duped some of the most powerful people in the country,” Fennell says. “Bob Hawke gave him an Order of Australia. It’s wild.”
Some folks were fishy long before journalists cast their net. They included Friedrich’s WA-based business nemesis’, Bill Meeke, an aviation titan who was the then-CEO of Skywest Airlines.
“I’m mad for an East-West rivalry,” Fennell says. “Bill was a smart cookie. He called it early, and people were like, ‘You’re jealous.’ And he doesn’t deny that. He was an enthusiastic competitor.
“But he was vindicated by history. He and his team knew this thing didn’t add up, because aviation is a hard business.”
Somewhat astonishingly, Booker Prize-winning novelist Richard Flannagan also got involved. As a young and hungry writer, he was commissioned by then-publisher Louise Adler to ghostwrite Friedrich’s biography. But Flannagan was bamboozled by the absence of facts, including where the bloody hell his subject came from.
“Louise has had and will continue to have an amazing career, and one of the things I like about her is that she’s very forthright,” Fennell says.
“She’s very upfront that this was an uncomfortable chapter in her life. She was young and dealing with a very complicated guy, who poor young Richard was also trying to navigate.”
Every story
From publishers to co-workers and business rivals, everybody has a memorable story about Friedrich, Fennell notes.
“The National Safety Council did some great things, but John really intimidated people,” he says. “From what I can tell, he was not a straightforward personality to interact with at all.”
Australia’s Greatest Conman reminds viewers of the details of this story that once dominated headlines, but has since faded from memory.
“A whole bunch of people were incredibly traumatised by what happened, and they carry that with them,” Fennell says. “Being traumatised by something that the nation has forgotten is difficult.”
Fennell and his team do an incredible job peeling back the layers of mystery surrounding Friedrich, where he came from and how he was able to almost get away with it. But some secrets remain stubbornly out of reach, as do persistent rumours that Friedrich was a spy.
“When you do a story on somebody like this, you have to accept that there will always be grey areas you can’t fully know,” Fennell says.
“The series progresses the story, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth doing. But at the same time, you have to accept there’s always going to be some level of mystery. You’ll never fully understand exactly what was going on inside his head.”
As far as Fennell is concerned, it’s part and parcel of SBS’s charter to help tell the Australian story in all its glory and also the gory details.
“Sometimes you tell the story of somebody who comes to Australia and becomes our biggest conman. And I don’t think that takes anything away from the positive contributions of multicultural Australia. It’s part of the story, and that’s okay.”
'Australia's Greatest Conman?' premieres Tuesday 24 February at 8.30pm on SBS with the second and final episode airing Wednesday, 25 February at 8.30pm. The two-part series is also streaming now at SBS On Demand.
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Australia's Greatest Conman?
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See more great stories in the MARC FENNELL COLLECTION at SBS On Demand, including Secret DNA of Us, The Mission, and Tell Me What You Really Think.
Stream free On Demand
The Secret DNA of Us
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Stream free On Demand
The Mission
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Stream free On Demand
Tell Me What You Really Think
