You can’t keep a good man down. Malcolm Edwards loses $1 billion, then bounces back for more.
Ben Hills
He was one of corporate Australia's highest flyers, until he crashed to earth with debts of more than $1 billion. Less than a decade later, Malcolm Edwards is on the comeback trail.
AMONG the gum trees on the banks of a beautiful backwater of the Murray River stand what look like the overgrown ruins of a small village ravaged by warfare the skeletons of buildings without windows or roofs, rusting girders, weed-strewn piles of rubble.
"The locals call it Beirut," chuckles Colin Joss, a builder from Albury, 70 kilometres to the east. "If you saw a donkey or a camel wandering through, it would not look out of place."
Whistle-blowers - we need them, but do we like them?
Ben Hills
WHAT kind of people would meet furtively on a Saturday morning hundreds of kilometres from home, charter a houseboat, and motor to a secluded cove where, under cover of darkness, they make plans to change the course of public administration in Australia?
The Cold War may be over, James Bond may have hung up his Walther PPK, but espionage of a different sort is alive if unwell - the business of spying on the bureaucracy from within, and revealing its secrets. And the nine people who set sail on the good ship Luxury Sirius on Lake Macquarie the other weekend were well aware of the extreme prejudice that can result.
How ASIC, our corporate watchdog, did nothing while a con-man robbed investors of $20 million on bonds in a banktupt railway.
Ben Hills
A LIFE OF BRIAN
Name: Brian William Ivey (left)
Born: January 6, 1944, Fremantle, WA.
Abode: Kardinya, Perth and (since May 2000) the Langham Hilton Hotel, London.
Early career: selling agricultural chemicals, crop-spraying, tyre dealer at Mukinbudin, WA.
Corporate history: 1990-2000 forms 40 companies in WA and Britain, 20 now deregistered.
Investment schemes 1989-2000: colour photocopying, selling bonds, promoting nuclear waste-storage technology, meat-drying machinery. All failed.
Not another agricultural con ! This time it’s black truffles.
Ben Hills investigates
IN THE biting chill of a winter's morning in north-west Tasmania, a man with a dog stalks slowly through a grove of bare, black hazelnut trees. Every now and then the dog sniffs the ground, and the man bends down and scratches at the earth.
He is hoping against hope that this will be his lucky day, and that a few centimetres down, attached to the roots of the tree, he will find a small dark brown knob like a warty golf-ball, which is rarer than gold and almost as valuable. This is tuber melanosporum, the black truffle, worshipped by European epicures since Roman times.
The saga of Ludwig Gertsch. A body in the mountains, missing millions, contested wills, gay lovers - it became a book (and should be a movie)
Ben Hills with Deborah Cornwall
TO MY most adored Edoardo ... "
The lawyer pauses, and looks around the elegant Paddington salon, with its priceless Aubusson tapestry, Persian carpets, its brass Buddha statues, Tiffany lamps and Donald Friend paintings.
How are they going to take this, he wonders? The camera pans across the sad faces of the friends and lovers of Roger Claude Teyssedre gathered around the gleaming mahogany table for the reading of the will.
The Rife machine. A fake cancer cure that kills kids.
Ben Hills
Cancer sufferers have died after putting their faith in a device with electrical parts worth just $15.
THE doctor said he might not see Christmas. It was the winter of 1996 and David Carpenter, a 69-year-old retired railway worker, had inoperable cancer of the prostate gland. He had been sent home to die in the village of Geurie, on the western plains of NSW, in the fibro cottage where he lived with his wife of nearly half a century, Madge, and his son, Des. As the disease inexorably advanced, he took to his bed.
Flicking through Nexus, an alternative magazine published from Mapleton, Queensland, which features articles on UFOs, miracle cures and conspiracy theories, Des saw an advertisement headlined "Rife Technology".