Photo: Chartwell Enterprises director Graeme Hoy in his Rolls Royce Phantom. (Geelong Advertiser)
Fair rep Geelong’s earned down the years in the rip-off artist stakes.
Not the garden variety bookkeepers regularly cleaning out small businesses. Or the petty shonks keeping Geelong Name and Shame in a permanent state of shrieking outrage. Not even octogenarian lawyers nicking bucks from dead clients’ estates.
Strictly six-figure stuff at best. Geelong’s bigger than that.
This was the epicentre of the Pyramid collapse, after all. Insiders screaming over the counter to withdraw their bucks ahead of the doors slamming shut. Non-withdrawable shares, whatever they are, sucking in friends and family like a giant direct sales scam. Regulators asleep at the wheel. Government in free fall. Depositors marching the streets. Curse of the Farrows, headlines screamed.
And do you remember the Chartwell Enterprises Ponzi scheme? Landed mayor for the day Graeme Hoy 13 years for separating suckers from $16m of their hard-earned. Wonder where the Rolls-Royce ever got to?
Another mayor, a real one with an OAM thank-you, Frank de Stefano, did a decade behind bars for ripping off his business clients, including a quadriplegic, of $8.6m. Gambling was blamed.
You might remember Frank wanted a casino on the Geelong waterfront. Could have been smack in front of his place on Eastern Beach and saved money-laundering Crown the trouble of sending him a limo. This paper snapped a classic photo of a grinning Frank in a car with some dice hanging from the rear vision mirror pushing the cause.
How about Bob Day? Land conveyancer dodgy as a three-buck note. Swindled $6m from clients, including mates, for investment purposes and dropped it all over the shop, including in a Ponzi scheme. Landed him 11 years. Great retirement plan when you’re 65.
Delve back far as you like and you’ll keep coming up with Geelong charmers separating folks from their dough. Heck, I’ve known bankrupts, forgers and embezzlers myself who’ve wound up advising big mobs on their liabilities. I remember being invited to an airplane seat pyramid scam did the rounds in the late ’80s.
The infamous Harold Lasseter hailed from nearby Meredith. Gulled all sort of people, government, the AWU, biggest union in the country back then, into financing a fool’s errand chasing an outback gold reef he claimed he’d once seen.
Died in the process. Latest thinking is he was using an army-style map that was deliberately back the front. Except he didn’t know it.
My favourite is Joe Gray, mayor of Geelong, also Newtown-Chilwell, Southwestern Victoria MLC, president Geelong Cricket & Football Club, Geelong Racing Club, Gordon Tech, Geelong Infirmary Benevolent Society, Geelong and Western District Protestant Orphanage, Horticultural Society, Amateur Dramatic Club, Swimming Club, Dog & Poultry Society – and boss of the biggest legal firm in town, Taylor, Buckland and Gates.
Monumental CV. Monumental con artist. Bled trust funds, cleaning out the top end of town – Austin, Buckland, Rowe, Bell at al, even his own law firm – of 100,000 quid back in the 1890s. That’s about $11m these days but in truth was worth a lot, lot more.
So we have high standards to live down to.
I see Scale Facilitation’s facing a Fair Work Ombudsman inquiry over payments. NB, no charges have been laid but if such allegations are proven, it could be one of the largest grifts in Australian history.
That’d be gold. Pure blue and white, maybe even Lasseter-style, gold.
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 19 September 2023.
