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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
This episode of Swindled contains descriptions of sexual assault and sexual misconduct. Listener discretion is advised.
The reason we've asked you to come to this media conference is to put out a public appeal to try and assist the police in locating Nobi Chardin, 34-year-old lady from Upper Coomera. Mrs Chardin hasn't been seen nor heard of since last Wednesday evening and none of her friends or family have heard from her since that time. Her vehicle also hasn't been recovered.
On February 6th, 2013, Novi Chardin disappeared. The Indonesian-born mother of two was last seen in surveillance footage from earlier that night pumping gas into her midnight blue Volvo at a service station near her home in Upper Coomera, Queensland, Australia. She was by herself. Her children and husband were asleep at home. Two days passed and Novi Chardin had not returned.
None of her friends nor beauty clients had heard from the missing woman. Neither had John, Novi's husband, who had left the country on a planned business trip to Indonesia with the couple's two young kids in tow. John Chardon owned an industrial lubricant company. He was 65 years old, a self-made multi-millionaire, and the prime suspect in his fifth wife's disappearance.
John and Novi Chardon were on the brink of divorce. In fact, the couple had been separated for over a year. Novi even had a new boyfriend already. And despite 11 years of marriage, John claimed he was supportive of Novi's new relationship and remained living under the same roof with his soon-to-be ex-wife for the sake of the children, he said. John also told the media that Novi was crazy and that she had done these kinds of disappearing acts before, but not for such a long period of time.
She should get her stupid bloody arse home, he added, clearly concerned about the mother of his children's well-being. Mr. Chardon said he was willing to speak with the police in person just as soon as he returned to Australia, a date which had yet to be determined.
To Novi's friends and family, the dismissive tone of John Chardon's response to his wife's absence came as no surprise. Novi had shared with them details of the abuse she had suffered from John's hands over the years, and at times she had feared for her life. During one of those fights, they claimed John Chardon almost smothered to death his heavily pregnant wife with a pillow, only stopping to the cries of their two-year-old daughter.
John Chardon returned to Upper Coomera from Indonesia on February 25th, 2013. His wife Novi had been missing for almost 20 days. Detectives had found Novi's abandoned car near a railway station a week earlier, but that remained the only significant breakthrough in the case so far. In hopes to glean more information from the last person that saw Novi alive, John Chardon was taken to the police station where he was interviewed for several hours.
I said to her, "What's that?" She just looked at me. She turned around and looked at me and said, and I can't remember exactly whether she said, "I've got to go away or I'm going away." What about the kids? And she said, "Don't go or take them with you," and just walked off. You can't talk to her. That's all I know. I don't know a bloody thing. I don't know where she is. I don't know what's happened to her. All I know is I didn't do anything to her.
The search continued. Authorities explored John's offices. They dug up people's backyards, and they offered a $250,000 reward for information, but there was no sign of her. Novi's phone records confirmed that she had not talked to anyone, nor had she touched her bank accounts. Novi Chardon most likely had been killed, authorities reported, just weeks before her 35th birthday, but that was hard to prove without a body.
However, on June 17th, 2016, more than three years after Novi Chardon's disappearance, after an extensive investigation that included 1,000 lines of inquiry, John Chardon was arrested.
Even without Novi's body or a smoking gun, the evidence against John Chardon revealed plenty about his character.
during the three-week trial that took place in August 2019. The jury heard how John rented a steam cleaner the day after Novi disappeared to wash the carpet in her bedroom. John's cleaning efforts had been interrupted by one of Novi's concerned friends who visited the house after Novi failed to show up for a coffee date. John reportedly boasted about his cleaning efforts and sexual prowess before propositioning Novi's friend for sex.
when the prosecutor added that Novi's friend had been plainly offended by the advance. Mr. Chardon replied, quote, "You could have fooled me. That friend left the house and told the police what had happened and what she had witnessed inside." The police then analyzed the carpet that John had cleaned and found urine stains deep inside the pile, as if something so terrifying had happened to Novi that she had lost control, but no blood or any evidence of violence had been found.
However, investigators did find Novi's passport and stacks of cash and credit cards in her room, things that a normal person would not simply forget to take if they were starting a new life elsewhere. Detectives believed that John Chardon had made a mistake and simply overlooked the items during his clumsy cover-up because some of Novi's other belongings like an iPad and a cell phone were missing. The court also heard that on the night of Novi's disappearance, John Chardon had driven to his office and spent only 80 seconds inside.
Detectives assumed he was there to pick up a gun, which he had put in a box along with handcuffs after the deed was done, and then instructed his adult daughter from a different marriage to dispose of it. But killing Novi himself wasn't always John's plan. According to Marshall Aguilar, a Filipino con artist who testified at the trial, John had offered him $20,000 to recruit a hitman. "My wife is a mean, callous, selfish, greedy bitch," John Chardon wrote in an email to Aguilar.
He wanted someone to kill Novi while she was in Thailand getting plastic surgery, the con man testified. John Chardon denied the sensational allegations. He denied that the $20,000 he had sent was for the purpose of hiring a hitman or buying a gun. No, that $20,000 was philanthropic. Chardon claimed he had been sponsoring students in the Philippines for years.
He's told a Supreme Court trial in Brisbane he's a philanthropist who puts students in the Philippines through university and helps poor mothers feed their kids. But prosecutors attacked his character, alleging he expected sexual favours in return, where possible, from virgins. But today he said the sex was not conditional and it was only with the odd one that he liked. "I would help repair their house, give them milk, food and medicine for their children. I'd knock a lot of sex back because I'm not Superman."
Those affairs, prosecutors alleged, are what drove Novi crazy, as John Chardon so gaslightingly described her.
Those affairs ruined their marriage. And as soon as Novi Chardon began taking steps to create a life of her own, John Chardon took it from her. Good afternoon, Amber. The jury has just delivered its verdict and John Chardon has been found not guilty of his wife Novi's murder, but he has been found guilty of her manslaughter. So the jury has determined that he did kill his wife Novi in 2013, but that he did so unintentionally. There were...
At his sentencing hearing, Justice Ann Lyons told John Chardon, "Your ability to weave a calculated web of lies is a great concern, particularly your ability to denigrate and demean your wife to others at every turn, and to paint yourself as a captain of industry and a great philanthropist. Novy was entitled to plan a life without you." We will never know what happened to Novy that night. You do. You will have to live with that knowledge
that you killed the mother of your two young children. On September 11th, 2019, John Chardon, at 72 years old, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. This verdict brings more questions than answers. We still don't know exactly how Novi was killed in February 2013 or exactly where either. Or do we?
John Chardon was actually arrested six weeks after Novi's disappearance back in 2013. Before he had been charged with her murder, John had been indicted on historical charges of raping a teenager and for the indecent treatment of a seven-year-old girl. And it was while sitting in jail for those charges that John Chardon reportedly confessed to his cellmate that he had murdered his ex-wife.
Chardon's cellmate told the court during a committal hearing that the businessman broke down one night in March 2015 while watching an episode of MASH in their jail cell. John said he killed Novi because he did not want to give her half of his money during the divorce. "I've worked 25 years or more to build the business up," Chardon reportedly said. "Why am I going to give half of that to that whore?"
John Chardon then described using a plastic 1 liter soda bottle as a makeshift silencer on the gun that he used to shoot Novy in the back of the head. Quote, "A .38 would have blood splatter everywhere, whereas a .22 may not exit the head. It would roll around like jelly." Chardon also shared that he had worn disposable overalls during the act and used ammonia and water to wash away any forensic evidence he'd left behind.
He says Chardon then admitted dumping Novi in the Gold Coast seaway at the spit on the outgoing tide, describing her as fish food. John said, "I weighted her with moderate weights so she would go under. I punctured her stomach so gases wouldn't fill up and make her float."
Listening devices were installed in Chardon's cell the day after the confession, so none of it had been caught on tape. In fact, only one day's worth of conversations between the cellmates was recorded for some reason, even though the two men had lived together for over six weeks. And evidently nothing of evidentiary value was captured on audio, so the rest of the evidence brought forward by the cellmate was excluded from being heard at all.
The evidence from that cellmate was excluded because that cellmate was a man named Peter Foster, a legendary liar and career con artist whose words were worthless.
Though Peter claimed there was nothing in it for him, financially or otherwise, to testify against John Chardon, the court could not be satisfied that the confession had ever occurred. And after hearing about Peter Foster's history of weight loss scams and financial frauds that have featured luminaries such as Muhammad Ali and a prime minister's wife, it's hard to blame them. A self-proclaimed international man of mischief exports schemes and headlines all across the globe on this episode of Swindled.
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Among them: Scum, Conman, Parasite, Gangster, Fight Fixer, and not to mention a liar and a thief. Paul misunderstood Peter Foster? You forgot Handsome? Peter Foster has earned plenty of nicknames over the years. As a child, people on the Gold Coast referred to him as the Milkshake Tycoon because he was frequently seen selling sweets on Main Beach.
As a teenager, Peter Foster was given a new title, World's Youngest Boxing Promoter, although he did not make a very good one. Three years into his career, in 1984, Peter was fined $40,000 after making a fraudulent insurance claim on a cancelled fight. His boxing business went bankrupt shortly after, when Peter failed to pay advertising costs for a Muhammad Ali fight that never happened.
But that experience had taught Peter Foster a lot about promotion, and in 1988 he found his true calling. After being introduced to black tea by Veronica Ali, Muhammad's third wife, Foster began promoting and selling the rather ordinary drink in Australia. He called it Bai Lin tea, an ancient Chinese diet secret that worked wonders for weight loss.
That business too eventually went bankrupt when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission began investigating the product's outrageous dietary claims. So Peter Foster and his tea relocated to the United Kingdom where he was soon crowned with the moniker of the most envied man in Europe. Touch me! Touch me! Touch me!
That is Samantha Fox, the British model and pop star and Peter Foster's new girlfriend, whom he had hired to promote his weight loss tea. Peter claims he was able to woo Miss Fox by ignoring her at a party, although the millions of dollars in his bank account certainly did not hurt his chances. The couple became the talk of the British tabloids.
Why would Samantha Fox, the glamorous page three model, hang out with Peter Foster, a square-headed Aussie nobody that was clearly, to borrow a boxing term, punching above his weight? The answer was obvious. Peter Foster was a smooth-talking con artist. Sam and I had a great time. I mean, as we worked out the other day when we were sitting around, knocked off the best part of a million dollars in a year. We had a great time doing it. Just spending a million dollars? Yeah.
Samantha Fox would eventually distance herself from Peter Foster after the UK government, which is almost certainly comprised entirely of tea drinkers, discovered that the Australian man's by-Lin tea was a scam. Samantha Fox reflected on that past life in a 2002 interview with The Guardian. Quote,
Aw, don't worry Samantha. Everybody has one of those. The United Kingdom fined Peter Foster's company £5,000 in 1988 for misleading consumers.
instead of paying the fine and to avoid possible future prosecution. Peter Foster fled England for the United States where he launched the same diet tea scheme. Foster took out advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post that claimed drinking what was now known as Chao Li tea would lower cholesterol levels with no other changes in diet.
That fraudulent claim landed Peter Foster in a Los Angeles prison for four months, but no lessons were learned. I'm a white-collar criminal. I'm not a gangster. I'm not violent. I'm not a rapist, a murderer, a drug dealer. I sell diet products.
Upon his release, Peter Foster continued to sell diet products. There was the anti-aging jelly, the thigh reduction cream, the slimming pills, the stomach-filling granules. Each item was over-promised and ineffective. Each item caught the attention of national departments of consumer affairs, who levied against him tens of thousands of dollars in fines. "Every day crackled with excitement as I made millions, models, and mayhem," Foster wrote in the manuscript of his autobiography.
Being a con man is one of the most prestigious and respectable professions you can pursue. All I am is just trying to make a living. I'm just trying to make a quid. Don't want to hurt anybody along the way. Money back guarantee. By 1996, Peter Foster had returned to England. By 1996, Peter Foster had been arrested again. This time for conspiring to provide a product with a false description. Peter Foster was sentenced to two years behind bars.
However, nine months into that two-year sentence, Foster caught a flight to Australia using a fake passport while on day release from a Liverpool prison. What annoys me about this whole thing is, you know, there's 50 thigh creams on the market today. If we went into a major department store, and the women out there know this, there are...
Back in Brisbane, Peter Foster was almost immediately jailed for another five months for fraudulent marketing and for withholding information from the Securities and Investments Commission. He was arrested again in February 1998 on a British warrant for his earlier escape.
For over 18 months, Peter Foster fought his extradition. He claimed that he would be murdered upon his return to Britain because he had served as an informant against corrupt prison guards. Against his wishes, Foster was transported back to the UK in 2000, barred from operating a business in the country for five years, and promptly released for having served time on remand. The sooner you go from the country, the better, a British judge told him.
We're all con men. Politicians are con men. Exit polls showed 54% of the people who elected President Clinton for a second term did not believe he was an honest man. We're all con men.
After a brief return to Australia, Peter Foster landed in the Republic of Fiji, the small island nation about 1700 nautical miles east of Brisbane that at that time was dealing with the immediate fallout of a coup d'etat that saw Prime Minister Mahendra Chaudhry and his Labour Party overthrown by Nationalists.
Being no stranger to exploiting vulnerabilities, Peter Foster inserted himself into local politics by investing over 1 million Fijian dollars into the New Labor Unity Party. Foster's generous donation lended him the position of campaign manager for Tupinibaba, a man Foster described as the Nelson Mandela of the South Pacific. But as it turns out, Tupinibaba was more like the Al Gore of the South Pacific. Both men lost their respective elections that November.
Though he would return to Fiji at a later date, Peter Foster left the island soon after the failed campaign. Peter returned to England where a new scam, a new woman, and unprecedented access awaited him. The human headline, as he once referred to himself, wouldn't stop until he had everything he had ever wanted. When you want something really bad and you can't have it, sometimes you do things you shouldn't. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money.
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I want to make it clear that I've never hidden my past from anybody. It is a past I naturally regret, but as everybody who knows me is fully aware, I have paid for my dues and I've moved on having learned from those past mistakes. I would like to point out, however, that no matter what those sins were, I have never been accused or charged with stealing money. My offences were trading standards related.
So maybe after all I'm not such a fraudster. In 2001, fresh out of Fijian politics, Peter Foster returned to his roots. He began selling slimming pills in the UK called Renewal, spelled like Rue Nuelle with one U, two L's and three E's, as if it had been announced by a young suburban mother at a gender reveal party or something.
Foster reportedly conned people into investing up to £150,000 each into this new venture. Of course, those investors never received a return on their investments. Investors like Paul Walsh, a former professional footballer. On November the 27th, I received an email from Paul Walsh, a fellow shareholder in a company called Renewal.
He was demanding £75,000 or he threatened he would reveal that I had been party to the flat negotiations. Whose flat negotiations would that be, you ask? Why, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie, of course. Peter Foster's new girlfriend, Carol Kaplan, was Cherie Blair's friend and lifestyle guru.
As the story goes, Cherie asked Carol to check out some properties in Bristol on the family's behalf. That's where their oldest son would be attending university. Carol agreed and brought along Peter Foster, a convicted fraudster, who then negotiated a price discount on two flats and even found a lender for the mortgage.
Foster claimed investor Paul Walsh was privy to the details of this exchange and threatened to release information to the media knowing that any association with the con man and his dubious past would hurt the Prime Minister. At the time, unbeknownst to the Blairs apparently, Peter Foster was under investigation from the UK Department of Trade and Industry for the renewal scheme. Foster wasn't even supposed to be operating a business in the country. His deportation was imminent.
And although Paul Walsh denies the accusations of blackmail, those flat negotiations soon became public knowledge. In response, Cherie Blair released a public statement assuring that Peter Foster was not involved in the purchases. But the Daily Mail soon provided evidence to the contrary. There were emails. Emails from Cherie Blair to Peter Foster calling him a star after he delivered the news of the price reduction.
"We are on the same wavelength, Peter," Cherie Blair wrote. "Obviously, if I had known the full details of Mr. Foster's past, I would not have allowed myself to get into this situation."
This affair, commonly referred to as "Sheri-gate", led to Cherie Blair delivering a dramatic 10-minute public apology after it emerged that she had reassured her friend Carol Kaplan that nothing untowards was happening in regards to the immigration proceedings against her boyfriend, Peter Foster.
Cherie Blair told the sympathetic audience that she was not aware of the full details of Mr. Foster's past and apologized for any embarrassment she may have caused. I apologize to Tony and Cherie.
Peter Foster also apologised and claimed he had been the target of a most extraordinary character assassination from the media, adding, quote,
According to ABC Radio in Australia, Peter Foster would later claim that Sheree Gate was nothing more than the result of him trying to impress his girlfriend. He also claimed that the flat negotiation was the most legitimate business deal he had ever done. Does your son deserve the title Australia's greatest con man? Well, first of all, who's given him the title? I read in a newspaper not long ago, is he a con man or is he a genius? Now, I'm not here to defend him.
In 2003, Peter Foster deported himself from the United Kingdom and traveled to the Republic of Ireland where his mother Louise was living at the time. Louise Foster Poletti had always remained in her son's corner ever since his days as an unscrupulous teenage boxing promoter.
Louise even admitted to helping develop some of Peter's schemes after she had retired from being the Gold Coast's first female real estate agent. There's a reason Peter Foster had always been an unapologetic mama's boy. However, the mother-son bonding time in Ireland would be cut short. Peter was kicked out of the country later that year as a result of his 1996 conviction in the UK, but not before he had helped relaunch his slimming pills business in the form of a product named Trimit.
Foster's involvement in the business was kept hidden from the public and regulators, thanks to his lawyer and business partner. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission did eventually catch on to the scheme, but not before Foster and associates had bilked more than $1 million from 70 people who had purchased rights to distribute the pills.
Peter Foster received a fine for his role in the Trim It scam and he was banned for five years from being involved in any cosmetic, health industry related or weight loss business in Australia. So with nothing else to do and nowhere else to turn, Peter Foster went back to Fiji and once again he began to meddle in the local politics.
In a secret recording obtained by the Fijian military, the electoral strategist of the prior ruling party admitted to Peter Foster that the 2006 elections had been rigged. The prior ruling party denied those claims and suggested that the recording had been spliced or staged. It was then discovered that Peter Foster had gained entry to Fiji illegally by using a forged police clearance certificate to conceal his criminal record.
A warrant was issued for his arrest on October 25th, 2006. Peter Foster suggested leaving the country on his own merit, but Fijian police rejected his offer. So Peter Foster went on the run. He was spotted three weeks later by police traveling in a vehicle near the river. Foster reportedly bailed out of the car after realizing he was being tailed, stripped off his clothes down to his underwear, and jumped off a bridge into the water to make an aquatic getaway.
but the Fijian police eventually caught up to him by boat. So Peter Foster attempted to dive under the boat and swim away, but was struck in the head by the boat's propeller. He was taken to the hospital, where he received 28 stitches for the wound, which Foster claimed he had suffered when the police beat him over the head with an oar. Peter embarked on a hunger strike in jail to protest the brutality of his arrest. The doctor confirmed the injury was consistent with a propeller cut.
Peter Foster pleaded not guilty to forging the clearance certificate, posted bail, and was placed on house arrest in a hotel room until his trial. But Peter Foster never showed up to his trial. He had been smuggled by boat to the island of Vanuatu. He was seen wading ashore on January 8th, 2007, carrying his belongings in a plastic bag.
Once on land, Foster was offered shelter by an Australian couple that were living on the island. He was apprehended by the police a week later and charged with illegal entry to the country. The men who helped get Foster into the country were charged with aiding and abetting, possession of firearms, and possession of pornography. Don't leave home without it. Peter Foster was fined the equivalent of 1400 Australian dollars and was sentenced to six weeks in jail.
although he was released after only serving three weeks on February 4th, 2007 because the Vanuatu government agreed to send him back to Australia where there were more charges waiting for him. After his release, Peter Foster told the media, quote, I go from one catastrophe to another. I don't know how I'd do it. I'm going to have to learn eventually, I suppose.
I did a lot of wrong, but at the end of the day, my crimes were victimless. I didn't hurt anybody and I never stole money. I'm not a thief and I've never been accused of stealing money. I've never been charged with stealing money. I've never been convicted of stealing money. And with respect, I did pretty hard time. Now, I did nearly four years all up and I did every day of it in maximum security. I'm not bitching about that. I accepted my punishment.
What I'm basically saying is, well, maybe enough's enough, OK? I made mistakes. I'll cop it on the chin. That's what Australians do. And now it's time for me to move on.
45-year-old Foster pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering and was promptly sentenced to four and a half years in jail. The Supreme Court in Brisbane heard he'd forged documents to obtain $300,000 US from the Bank of Federated States of Micronesia. Peter Foster was immediately arrested when he landed back in Australia.
While in Fiji, Foster had forged documents to obtain a $300,000 loan from a bank in Micronesia. He claimed the money would fund the development of a tourist resort he planned to build near Suva City. Foster had submitted photographs of a different work site to the bank and claimed it as his own. He also provided false documents to justify withdrawals for construction costs. In reality, Peter was sending that money back to Australia to pay his girlfriend's rent and credit card debts.
Foster's defense lawyer claimed that it was never his client's intention to defraud the Bank of Federated States of Micronesia. He said Peter Foster truly believed the resort to be a legitimate business venture. It had always been his dream, which might explain why Peter spent time and money trying to sabotage a rival resort developer. Allegedly, Foster had created fake websites accusing the development at Champaign Beach of being, quote, a heavenly haven for homosexuals.
He also spread rumors that the resort would offer sexual encounters with Fijian boys as young as you want them to be. Quote, "For $100, a Fijian boy will do anything and tell nobody. The Fijians are very simple people. Stupid people, really." Peter Foster was sentenced to four and a half years in jail on one count of money laundering. He was released on parole in May 2009 after only 18 months in prison.
A little more than two years later, Peter Foster was in trouble again. "Notorious con man Peter Foster is fighting to clear his name after being caught up in another weight loss scam." Sensaslim was the hottest, newest weight loss product on the market. It was an oral spray that worked by suppressing the user's appetite. Sensaslim was advertised as a dieter's dream that had undergone a worldwide clinical trial which proved its effectiveness.
In fact, a horse jockey even sued the company for lost wages because the diet spray made him lose too much weight, which disqualified him from a race. It was brilliant marketing. The future of the diet industry is right here, right now. No longer are we using pills for diet, triades. It is now an intraoral spray.
Senseslim was distributed through franchisees much like a multi-level marketing company. For the low cost of $59,950, you too could be self-employed as a Senseslim area manager, where only you will have the right, the privilege, to sell products that absolutely nobody wants.
Sons of Slim reportedly earned $6.4 million from the sale of these franchises. But the booming business came to an end when an adjunct lecturer in public health, Dr. Ken Harvey, lodged complaints against the company, alleging that the worldwide clinical trial never happened. On November 18th, 2011, Peter Foster was arrested at his mother's hospital bedside. Louise, now 81 years old, had suffered a recent stroke.
Before police were able to corner him, Peter managed to stash his cell phone under his mother's pillow. And according to the courier mail, he is believed to have been chased through the hospital while Louise screamed at the officers from her room. Since the slum was banned from sale in December 2011,
Peter Foster was charged for breaching the Trade Practices Act with misleading and deceptive conduct, not to mention the contempt of court regarding his continued involvement in the weight loss industry after being banned for five years back in 2005. Even though Peter Foster was an exceptional flight risk, a judge agreed to release him from custody less than a month later on $125,000 bail so that he could look after his dying mother.
I did break the law. There's no doubt about that. That's why I went to jail. I could defend my actions from the point of view of saying that's marketing. There are many lies told in marketing every day. No one believes that the girl running along the beach in the bikini eats this particular brand of cereal. But that's a weak excuse.
It was a deception. The judge himself conceded that if people used the product they would lose weight. But a lie was told. Yes. And I was punished for that. It was a mistake I made. I would never make it again. Peter Foster returned to court in September 2012 when it was discovered that his house was used as the setting of a Censusland promotional video. More proof that Peter Foster had ignored the 2005 ban.
The ACCC also alleged that Foster had been using false identities to operate since the Slim.
Sometimes he would even refer to himself in company documents as I-MOM, an acronym for International Man of Mischief. I think it shows absolute total transparency. If there was anything to hide, it wouldn't have been done at my house. Total transparency. Nothing to hide and nothing to run from and that's why I'm here today. Foster, who referred to himself as the International Man of Mischief, looked nervous in the dock, looking around when questions were being asked and at one time knocked into his glass of water.
In 2013, Peter Foster was found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to three years in prison. However, Peter Foster did not appear for his sentencing hearing. He told the media to tell a judge to, quote, stick a sentence up his jacksy. Foster also taunted Australian authorities by sending photographs of himself wearing a tropical shirt while holding a Fijian newspaper with a bottle of Fiji brand water sitting beside him.
Obviously, Peter Foster was not in Fiji as he wanted everyone to believe. He was in Byron Bay, south of Brisbane and Gold Coast, in New South Wales. He was found and filmed by Justin Armsden of Channel 9's A Current Affair program in 2014 after 18 months on the run.
When Queensland police approached Foster's five-bedroom mansion hideout, the international man of mischief, who now looked more like an aging bloated hippie, took off running through his neighbor's yard, but was eventually tackled into some bushes. Peter wrestled with the cops until his pants fell down. He also attempted to grab one of their guns.
Peter Foster, you're under arrest. He's got a water gun. Has he? I've got it, I've got it. Let go of the gun. Let go of the gun. It takes a while to find you people, we got there in the end. 12 months we've been looking for you at a current affair.
Peter Foster pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer and for resisting arrest and was extradited to Queensland where he was jailed for 12 months on the outstanding warrant for contempt of court. However, he was granted early release for reasons that were not made public. Many, including Foster's former lawyers, assume he had served as a prison informant as he was wont to do.
Peter Foster called the judge courageous and compassionate for letting him out six months early. He told the media that he would celebrate by going home to his mom, holding her hand, and apologizing for the past 12 months over a cup of tea, but only because it was, quote, a bit too early for lap dance. Two months later, Australian police were investigating allegations that Peter Foster had tried to hire a hitman to kill a man named Ken Gamble, the private investigator that helped Channel 9 track him down in Byron Bay.
Ken Gamble was back on Foster's case because, instead of quote "living like a monk" while on the run as his lawyer had claimed, Peter Foster was operating a new scam called the Sports Trading Club. The Sports Trading Club was basically an investment fund that used investor money to gamble on sports, instead of trading stocks and bonds. Not only a terrible idea, but also an elaborate scam perpetrated by Peter Foster to line his pockets.
To conceal Peter Foster's involvement, the sports trading club was technically owned by a company in Hong Kong that was registered under the name of Peter's Niece. According to the Gold Coast Bulletin, by late 2014, the Queensland Office of Fair Trading had received almost 400 complaints about the company during its eight months of operation, including one from a Western Australian man who had lost more than $1.5 million.
Foster had apparently used that man's money to purchase a yacht that he called the Next Adventure. His plan was to milk the Sports Trading Club for all that it was worth and then set sail out into the open seas. But that plan unraveled when a partner at the company used Peter Foster's real name in a text message to an investor who then shared it with the police. Peter was back in jail on February 10th, 2017 on fraud charges related to Sports Trading Club.
He was sharing a cell with soon-to-be convicted murderer or manslaughterer John Chardon, and for once Peter was refused bail for posing an unacceptable flight risk, most likely due to the fact that the police had found what they referred to as an escape kit buried in Peter's backyard that included a fake Irish passport and a Medicare card.
thanks to a $660,000 fine levied against him in 2016 for his involvement with Censuslim, among more recent fines. Peter Foster was declared bankrupt by the time he got out of prison in 2018. He claimed that he was living on his mother's charity, but that wouldn't last forever. Louise Foster Poletti died on May 6, 2020, at 88 years old.
Peter claimed she passed away in his arms, lying next to the puppy he had gifted her a few months earlier. She didn't die in a sterile hospital, Peter told the Daily Mail. She died in her bed, surrounded by music and flowers and love. I'm grateful for that. Foster, who cared for his mother during the final 18 months of her life, called the experience the most satisfying and fulfilling thing he had ever done. Quote, Mom was my best friend, my most loyal ally. She defended me to the hilt.
One of my great regrets is the shame I brought to her name. There would be more shame to follow." We learn more today about the alleged scam by the accused conman Peter Foster, which saw him extradited from Queensland. It's claimed Foster swindled a man in Hong Kong out of nearly two million dollars as part of a sports betting racket.
Three months after his mother's death, on August 20th, 2020, Peter Foster was arrested on a beach in Port Douglas while walking his dogs at 9:00 a.m. The dramatic arrest was captured from multiple angles by the local media and by Ken Gamble's international investigation firm IFW Global, who had tracked down the con man again. In the footage, two plainclothes police officers are seen jogging along the beach before tackling Peter Foster from behind.
He had been under surveillance for over a month while he operated another bogus sports betting investment fund called Sports Predictions. Why are we doing it like this? Why are we doing it in a civilized manner? You know why. No, I don't. Well, you've got a history of running away, Peter, so the police have got to just do their job, you know? Peter Foster was extradited to New South Wales, where he is currently awaiting trial.
Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka Deformer, aka the International Man of Music.
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