Gary Kilpatrick, master hypnotist, winds up in jail after the spell broke and his empire fell into ruins.
Ben Hills
Gary Kilpatrick lit up a last Benson & Hedges, then slowly stripped off his valuables: the fancy mobile phone with the inbuilt camera, the fraternity ring embossed with a sapphire, the gold chain and the leather thong with a crystal pendant, the wallet from his back pocket.
He handed them to his sister, Abha, who was standing beside him on the balcony of the courthouse that muggy grey December morning last year. Then he hugged his 74-year-old mother, Ruth, who was no longer able to hold back the tears. "It looks like the Big House," he said, in the quaint, swaggering gangster-speak he picked up from some best-forgotten B-movie.
The National Crime Authority. Incompetent plods, or dangerous destroyers of civil liberty. 2nd of 2 stories turn our secretive supercops inside out.
Ben Hills investigates
TWO months ago, in an obscure courtroom in the ivy-covered building in Melbourne's Little Bourke St that houses the Federal Court, a judgment was handed down that attracted little attention beyond the small coterie of lawyers involved.
The 51 pages of Justice Ronald Merkel's verdict in the case of "A1 and anor. v Betty King QC and ors." is crammed with turgid legalese and rated not a mention in any newspaper or TV bulletin. But it is dynamite for Australia's premier crime-buster, the National Crime Authority.
The two litigants - identified only as A1 and A2 - are bikies the NCA sought to haul in for interrogation under its "coercive powers", a process likened by some to a Star Chamber in which witnesses are placed under a spotlight in a darkened room in the NCA's offices and forced to answer questions on pain of imprisonment. Ms King was until recently the authority's chief inquisitor.
The National Crime Authority. Incompetent plods, or dangerous destroyers of civil liberty. 1st of 2 stories turn our secretive supercops inside out.
Ben Hills
AS winter's shutters came down on the city of Adelaide last year, an extraordinary farce was being played out on the heavily guarded 12th floor of the glass and concrete tower that houses the local branch of Australia's most secret law enforcement agency.
Gerard Dempsey, a Sydney barrister and the newly appointed South Australian branch chief of the National Crime Authority, was demanding - with his voice rising to a shriek, according to one witness - to know who had leaked to the media some tidbit about the authority's latest investigation.
Synroc was supposed to be the answer to nuclear waste disposal - instead it made one man very rich.
Ben Hills
With additional reporting by Craig Nelson in Moscow. Whatever happened to Synroc, the Australian invention that was to solve the problem of storing nuclear waste? Ben Hills investigates how a colourful Perth promoter cost investors millions and Australia the chance to earn billions from the revolutionary technology.
DOUG Treharne is better known to the residents of Adelaide's pleasant seaside suburb of Christie's Beach as their friendly local vet, rather than as an international financier of cutting-edge nuclear technology.
Treharne runs the Beach Road Veterinary Hospital, and on a typical day he can be found with his sleeves rolled up doing his best for Felix or Fido.
The man who dudded supermodel Elle McPherson.
Ben Hills explains
MOORED at Sandringham Yacht Club, bobbing gently on the choppy grey waves of Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay, is one of the fanciest pleasure boats in Australia - the sleek navy blue hull and twin masts of the 62-foot schooner Anitra May.
Worth a cool $600,000 and luxuriously appointed - the state-room even has a king-sized bed - the boat is a symbol of the lavish lifestyles of the rich and famous, and a reminder of the part its three owners played in some of the most notorious corporate scandals of the past decade.
Ken Jarrett, the first to buy into the Anitra May back in 1986, is the best-known of the three pals. He is the former head of Elders Finance, jailed for six months in 1994 after pleading guilty to his part in a bogus $66 million foreign exchange transaction.
The Hilton bombing. Two decades after Australia’s first act of terrorism the finger still points at a whacky religious cult, Ananda Marga.
Ben Hills
THE Crosslands Youth and Convention Centre, on a swathe of bushland near the outer Sydney suburb of Galston, is an unlikely starting-point for Australia's first act of international terrorism - and what, to some, is still its greatest unsolved crime.
Anyone who managed to get past the guards into the camp that sweltering January week in 1978 would assume they had stumbled over another harmless if slightly dotty New-Age cult: meditating monks in orange and white robes and turbans, lots of dancing and chanting, steaming cauldrons of rice and vegetables.