Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

There was something disturbingly strange about the Victorian branch of the National Safety Council. Officially the organisation’s sole function was to rescue citizens from fires, floods and other mishaps. But behind the scenes, it was doing far more. Why, for example, was the NSC dressing selected employees in paramilitary uniforms and drilling them like elite soldiers? The NSC’s chief, John Friedrich, would have been able to answer this – and other worrying questions. But right up to the day he either committed suicide or was murdered, he offered Australia no convincing explanation for his actions. The police and the coroner knew that his name was not John Friedrich. But to this day, who he really was, and what shadowy force he might have represented, remains unknown...

  JOHN FRIEDRICH HAD CHOSEN a beautiful place to die. His body, when his friend James Bucirde discovered it, lay sprawled in long grass near the summit of a Gippsland hill which commanded spectacular views of the Great Dividing Range and its ancient forests. Far below, in the softening light, Hereford cattle, compact as beetles, grazed on horizon-brimming pastures. A broad creek wound between a scattering of distant, tiny homesteads from whose chimneys smoke coiled into the wintry air.

  It was 5.40 on the afternoon of 26 July 1991. Bucirde had spent hours searching for his employer. But now he had found him he was having difficulty believing the appalling evidence at his feet. The bloody wound behind the ear. The quaint antiquated gun resting in the palm of the man that he and hundreds of fellow-workers had so admired. His friend John, dead. By his own hand.

  Suicide. Or was that really the truth of the matter?

  Police arrived at the death scene: first a sergeant from Heyfield, then two officers from the larger station at Sale, then investigators from the Homicide Squad – promptly followed by colleagues from the Fraud Squad, which had owned the case of ‘John Friedrich’ (or whatever his name might genuinely be) from the beginning. Friedrich had been due the following Friday to face the Supreme Court on more than 100 fraud charges linked to the $265 million collapse of the National Safety Council’s Victorian branch. It was an organisation he had conducted with enormous success – but so expensively that the losses threatened to bring the state to its knees.

  Through the brightly moonlit night the homicide men laboured on the hilltop, collecting forensic evidence and keeping a wide area clear, hoping that daylight would reveal clues in the bloodied grass. The following morning a neighbour would recall a ‘male acting suspiciously’ close to the modest house occupied by Friedrich, his wife Shirley and their three children. The investigators surmised from the moment they arrived in Gippsland that the death might be murder. In the past year several attempts had been made to silence Friedrich.

  NO OFFICIAL STATEMENT regarding John Friedrich should necessarily be believed. The Federal Government’s account – published in the 24 hours following his death – suggested that a youthful Friedrich Johann Hohenberger had arrived in Melbourne on a flight from New Zealand on 20 January 1975. Recorded on his passport was the fact (or misrepresentation) that he had been born in Munich on 7 September 1950. Hohenberger reportedly obtained, from the Immigration Department, a 72-hour temporary entry visa – then disappeared. Eleven months later, a John Friedrich surfaced as the employee of a Uniting Church Aboriginal mission in South Australia. Here he married a young woman named Shirley. He stated on the marriage certificate that he had been born in Munich, West Germany.

  In 1982 ‘Friedrich’ and his bride moved to Victoria. He immediately started looking for a job. Before long (as he told the story) he noticed a newspaper advertisement that particularly attracted him. A small, underfunded body known as the National Safety Council was seeking an operations manager. He obtained an application form on which he listed several impressive German degrees and asserted that he had entered the world in ‘Mount Davis’, South Australia, on 7 September 1945. Without checking the fictitious Friedrich’s bogus birthplace and questionable qualifications, the NSC hired him.

  It thus took the first dire step toward its downfall.

  John Friedrich quickly earned the respect and admiration of all who worked with him. From his first few days as operations manager he began to turn the National Safety Council around, introducing systems that enabled rescuers to respond more swiftly and efficiently to emergencies. So outstanding was his talent (some called it genius) that in 1988, NSC directors made him chief executive officer, on an annual salary of $130,000.

  As CEO, John Friedrich made changes breathtaking in their scope. Such innovations as using helicopters to replace trundling road ambulances – and to equip them to water-bomb bushfires – became well known to the public. But the NSC’s other, more curious, activities were less widely publicised. Beyond Gippsland there was little discussion of the organisation’s deep-sea recovery vehicles, its new multimillion dollar airbase at Sale – or of its burgeoning ‘air force’, which comprised 10 fixed-wing aircraft, one of which was a jet, and 22 helicopters – among them a bullet-scarred gunship that had belonged to Idi Amin.

  The martial atmosphere that pervaded the base left many visitors feeling uneasy. The Gippsland Times was particularly concerned about what might be going on. Its reporters, along with suspicious local residents, could see little reason for rigorously trained NSC personnel being dressed in ‘paramilitary’ uniforms and red berets. Neither could they understand the thinking behind the aerial manoeuvres and multiple parachute-drops occurring over the ocean...or why the council had brought in such machinery as the centrally hinged eight-wheel-drive vehicle that could cover any terrain. The vast amounts of money that were being spent seemed inconsistent with the type of budget a civilian defence organisation might be expected to live within.

  Neither the Victorian nor Federal Government was financing this extraordinary safety organisation – officially, at least. It was rumoured that the NSC was receiving secret funds from ASIO, the CIA, the KGB and MI5, or all of the above. No outsider seemed to know much more than that the cash was coming from somewhere, and in vast amounts. Within the Safety Council itself, the picture was clearer. Millions were flowing in from loans provided by 23 financial institutions. All lenders seemed confident they had made a sound investment – and the NSC’s fledgling commercial successes seemed to vindicate their judgment.

  Not content with building an enviable safety structure within Victoria, Friedrich had boldly begun to offer the services of NSC teams to Canada and to Asian governments, including China. As police would subsequently discover, this complex man had no interest in enriching himself and never stole a dollar from anyone. He intended that everything his ‘foreign sales’ earned would go to the National Safety Council, thus increasing Australia’s export income.

  Several rich long-term contracts were on the brink of being signed when John Friedrich’s dreams disintegrated.

  During a routine audit an accountant discovered two discrepancies, each of $6500, in the National Safety Council’s books. The not-for-profit organisation’s honorary board members voted to hold a meeting, with John Friedrich present, to discuss the shortfall. They were confident that he could offer a simple explanation. It wasn’t a great amount of money, but as trustees they needed answers.

  To the board’s dismay, Friedrich declined the invitation and instead tendered his resignation. After much discussion the increasingly nervous board-members decided to alert police.

  The NSC solicitor’s call was switched through to Detective Chief Inspector Laurie Neville, head of Victoria’s Fraud Squad. ‘My clients are not asking you to take any action at this stage,’ the lawyer said. ‘They just want you to be aware they’re looking very carefully at the books and may have something more concrete to report in a few days.’

  Neville cradled the phone, walked over to one of his detectives and asked him to prepare a dossier on a John Friedrich, chief executive of the National Safety Council. It was not long before the detective began finding discrepancies.

  No one by the name of John Friedrich held a driving licence. Or a passport. Or a Medicar
e card. No John Friedrich had ever lodged a tax return. The list grew longer. The detective showed it to Laurie Neville. ‘You could start asking yourself if this bloke actually exists,’ he said.

  Until the NSC accountants had seriously checked the books, there was insufficient evidence for the squad to take action. But a few precautions would be in order. Laurie Neville sent an alert to federal police, requesting a watch on airports and other departure points. The memo ended, ‘Do not arrest or detain.’

  Not yet, anyway.

  WITHIN 24 HOURS it became clear that the National Safety Council was at least $22 million short: a figure that would grow exponentially over the days ahead. Some of the shortfalls comprised unpaid debts; other money was simply missing. An audit team found false invoices which had been used as security for loans. A swathe of institutional lenders and other businesses had provided money or services to the NSC. The largest creditor advised the Fraud Squad that its exposure was likely to run into ‘millions’. But the embattled rescue organisation not only lacked funds to pay its debts – sometimes it was unable even to afford fuel. At the height of one rescue members of a Channel 7 news crew pitched in to buy a fill-up for a grounded NSC helicopter.

  During a media conference called to answer journalists’ increasingly strident questions, Detective Chief Inspector Laurie Neville conceded, ‘This will be bigger than Texas.’ A financial columnist wrote, ‘So much is owed and missing that the NSCA will collapse like a house of cards.’ Almost before the ink dried on his copy, the prediction came true. The nine-member volunteer board resolved to wind up the National Safety Council.

  And suddenly John Friedrich was nowhere to be found. In the Supreme Court, Justice Phillips issued an order forbidding him to leave Australia. Detectives spoke to Friedrich’s distressed wife Shirley. They came away, as did all subsequent investigators, convinced she was a ‘fine woman’ who had known nothing of her husband’s aliases or of his secret activities. The federal police, and every state police force, had meanwhile placed Friedrich on their wanted list. It was an astonishing change of fortune for an honoured community leader who, only a year earlier, had been awarded an Order of Australia medal. The manhunt began.

  Friedrich spent his first night as a fugitive at a Travelodge motel in Melbourne. Fulfilling a prediction made by police he had shaved off his beard. The following morning a loyal friend who had previously worked with the NSC drove him to Albury. His first visit was to a car yard where, using the name ‘Ian Hosken’, he paid $14,500 cash for a blue Ford wagon, then drove the marathon distance to Western Australia. After abandoning the car at a caravan park in coastal Kalbarri, he wrote moving letters of farewell to Shirley and the three children. But he made the naive mistake of addressing the envelope to the house they had all shared in Seaton, Gippsland.

  Unknown to Friedrich, police had placed his family’s postal address on a national mail alert. Less than two hours after he dropped the envelope into a letterbox, WA police seized it. The pursuers were now close on his trail – but another day would pass before they found him. In what might seem odd behaviour for a man on the run, Friedrich found time to enjoy a bus tour along the beautiful Murchison River before booking a flight to Geraldton, 100 kilometres south. Meanwhile the manager of Kalbarri caravan park reported that someone had dumped a blue Ford wagon in the grounds. Wondering whether that someone might also be the man who had penned the seized letters to Mrs Friedrich, police asked questions – and eventually found a cabdriver who had driven ‘a short stocky bloke wearing jeans, a red shirt and a baseball cap’ to the airfield. When the man produced his wallet the driver noticed it contained a thick wad of $20 and $100 notes.

  From Geraldton, Friedrich hitchhiked to Perth – where, again, he behaved more like a raw amateur than a seasoned criminal. The owner of a delicatessen in semi-rural Baldivis rang police to say that a man who definitely seemed to be the missing Safety Council chief had been ‘hanging around’ the area for about half an hour. He was clean-shaven – well, he did have a five o’clock shadow – but even without the beard she recognised him. He was wearing a baseball cap, jeans and a red shirt and was ‘acting suspiciously...half-hiding behind a pine tree and walking back and forth’.

  Ten minutes later Detective-Sergeant Glenn Feeney of Rockingham CIB arrived at the delicatessen with two fellow-detectives. He was surprised to find Friedrich still there, obviously full of unease and still half-trying to conceal his presence. As soon as Feeney introduced himself, the fugitive smiled broadly and extended his hand. Plainly he was relieved to have been caught.

  When Laurie Neville and his senior Fraud Squad associates heard the news they booked the first available flight to Perth. Sitting with his interrogators in a conference room provided by WA’s Major Crime Squad, Friedrich was full of jokes, unfailingly friendly – and seemingly willing to admit, on audiotape, to much of what he had done.

  In an article for Victoria’s Herald Sun – published on 24 July 2001, almost 10 years after Friedrich’s death – senior reporter Russell Robinson revealed for the first time some of the mysterious confidence man’s taped admissions:

  ‘Getting money out of the finance institutions is easy. It’s relatively simple. It’s not exotic,’ Friedrich said of the scheme, which was essentially based on false invoices and borrowing millions on chattels that never existed.

  ‘The father-of-three detailed how he deceived auditors by showing them containers and crates supposedly crammed with high-tech search and rescue equipment, which were in fact empty. He would then take them for a helicopter ride.

  ‘If an auditor wanted to make a name for himself, all he had to do was open one of the boxes,’ Friedrich said on the secret tape. But he said selected crates did contain some equipment, just in case someone wanted to look inside. Friedrich called this ‘window-dressing’.

  ‘I’m not proud of it. I’m ashamed of it now – but at the time it was a good idea,’ Friedrich said.

  During the taping, Friedrich took a pencil and scrawled rough flow charts, demonstrating how his money-juggling had worked. But he swore that he had never benefited personally – an assertion that his modest domestic circumstances and unexceptional bank accounts would subsequently seem, on the surface, to bear out.

  Police flew John Friedrich back to Melbourne, where eventually they charged him with 103 counts of fraud. While he waited, on bail, for his trial to begin, he remained silent in the face of swirling questions and rumours:

  Did the Australian government know more about him than it was letting on?

  Why had he taken the banks’ money – and where was it now?

  Had he, while leader of Victoria’s National Safety Council, transformed it into a secret military force?

  Who had controlled him, or used him as a pawn, while he led the NSC? Was it a foreign ally (possibly the United States), or a secret group that sought to change the power balance in Australia?

  Had he stolen a dead man’s name? Or had that name been stolen for him?

  Failed Murder Attempts

  Whether the above questions were based on grains of truth, or simply on urban myths, remains unknown. But one fact is indisputable: someone badly wanted John Friedrich dead. One – amateurish – attempt on his life was made when he was asleep at a Cairns hotel. An intruder somehow accessed his room and brutally bludgeoned him about the head. Friedrich fought back, escaping with facial and scalp injuries.

  A more serious attack happened shortly before 1 am on the day he was to appear at the National Safety Council’s liquidation hearing. Shirley Friedrich woke her husband to say she had heard noises at the front of the house. In darkness he tiptoed to the door and edged it open, to see what was going on – only to be caught in a hail of bullets. He slammed the door shut and crawled to the telephone. It was dead. Police next morning found that the assailant had destroyed the exterior conduit case with an axe. The front door, inner walls and fence palings were riddled with bullets obviously intended to kill.

  Police
increased their protection to the Friedrich family.

  They gave no credence to inevitable allegations that the attack had been a hoax orchestrated by Friedrich, in the hope of winning public sympathy. They had established through long investigation that he was, for all his grievous faults, a loving family man. He would never put his wife and children at such risk.

  Even before the shooting, Friedrich had been in a fragile psychological state. Not only was he jobless, frightened and depressed about the five-year jail term lawyers were predicting, but he was incessantly assailed by new accusations. Possibly the most bizarre story had appeared in the media while he was fleeing from police.

  ‘Secret Spy Flights’

  A man introduced only as ‘Brian’ (face pixillated) appeared on TV, asserting that he was a pilot who had worked on a contract basis with the NSCA. He claimed that John Friedrich had engaged him for a total 300 hours – and that during that time they had flown covertly over high-tech defence facilities. If subsequent newspaper stories were any guide, editors across Australia seemed to be open-minded about these allegations. ‘Brian’ said that on several occasions he had secretly flown the NSC chief over such strategic US installations as Pine Gap and Omega in Darriman, Victoria. Friedrich had stipulated that:

  They travel in a private plane – not one owned by the NSC.

  No flight plan should be lodged.

  They should fly low to avoid radar detection.

  According to ‘Brian’, John Friedrich, during these flights, recorded observations on grid-paper and made many drawings. The pilot said he had always been worried about the illegality of these activities and had finally decided to make his concerns public. He was remaining anonymous because he feared for his life.

  Because he was a fugitive when these allegations were made, Friedrich was unable to rebut them. But months later he told a parliamentary inquiry that the tale was nonsense: ‘It would have been physically impossible for me to fly 300 hours around Australia in a year...given the time I spent in the company of either employees or other people.’ (Just to confuse the issue he later told a different story about the Safety Council’s secret enterprises.)