Kid gloves - how the law fails to punish fraudsters.
Ben Hills
Fraudsters are dealt with remarkably leniently by the courts, according to data compiled by the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions. Even in cases involving serious, serial white-collar crime, only 60 per cent go to prison, with the rest being given fines, bonds, or periodic detention. Some recent cases in which the DPP has appealed on the grounds that the sentence was inadequate are:
Barbara Giallussi, who owned a nursing home in Roseville, cheated the Commonwealth of $264,000 in bed subsidies over a five-year period up until 1999 by creating a phantom payroll. She was fined $100,000 - to which three years' periodic detention was added on appeal.
Internet gambling. How a tribe of native Canadians got a jump on the world.
Ben Hills
Today there are fewer than 10,000 of them, clinging to a 5,000-hectare foothold of forest and farm and suburbia along the south bank of the mighty St Lawrence River, a 15-minute drive from downtown Montreal. They have a cultural centre, a marina and golf courses which attract a steady stream of tourists from both sides of the border that now divides their hunting grounds.
These People of the First Nation, as they style themselves, claim sovereignty over the land under the so-called Two Row Wampum Treaty, negotiated in the early 17th century over a ceremonial pipe of tobacco and named after a traditional belt embroidered with white and purple whelk shells, symbolising the desire of the invaders, and the invaded, to coexist.
In the wake of the Port Arthur Massacre. An examination of how the gun lobby bribes political parties.
Ben Hills
Australia's $50 million-a-year firearms industry is a major undercover financier of the gun lobby which has campaigned successfully against tougher controls including a national register of firearms.
Through organisations such as the Shooters' Party and the 50,000-member Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia (SSAA), arms importers and dealers have poured tens of thousands of dollars into election campaigns, mass advertising and political lobbying.
A royal commission into the police reveals scores of criminals may have been falsely convicted on perjured evidence.
Ben Hills reports
KYM William Royall is your criminal from central casting. Lurid tattoos cover the beefy arms swinging at his sides. A lank ponytail dangles almost to his waist. His speech is fast and dangerous, bristling with underworld slang and ugly profanities. He's the heavy from Pulp Fiction, the baddie from Natural Born Killers.
His record goes back 20 years and includes convictions for assault, theft, resisting arrest and the "malicious wounding" of a taxi-driver and his taxi, for which he served his first stretch in jail. This time he's in for murder.
High-tech scam. How a Kiwi banker duded Australian investors out of $72 million (1st of 2 articles)
Ben Hills
Read the fine print that was the judge's message to three Sydney investors who have lost millions and now had $44 million in damages awarded against them.
The clock was ticking towards midnight on June 30, the last day of the 1997 financial year, and there was pandemonium in the Canberra offices of Mallesons, Stephen Jacques, one of Australia's top-gun law firms.
It was, said a Supreme Court judge, "a frantic, unsightly, and ungainly late evening that can only be described as a madhouse of frantic efforts by all who participated under the most considerable time pressure imaginable".
… A Monet takes longer. Australia’s greatest art forger in an esclusive series (1/2 stories).
Ben Hills
A Sydney antique furniture dealer has admitted to painting thousands of works of art bearing the signatures of Australian and internationally famous artists that would be worth more than $100 million if genuine.
Many of the paintings, which look like works by artists from Monet to Picasso, Arthur Streeton to Brett Whiteley, have been sold for thousands of dollars and hang undetected in dealers' and private collections in Australia, New Zealand and the US.