Pod Insights ABC Rewind Great Aussie Cons | The Flying Forger About this episode One of Australia’s craftiest counterfeiters forges two million dollars in his suburban basement in the 1950s. Richard Roxburgh, renowned for playing shady characters on screen, tells the story of Robert Baudin and his brazen ability to make fake money.
Transcript 4,608 words · 13 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more.
0:07 Speaker 01 Hello, I'm Geraldine Doog.
0:08 Speaker 02 And I'm Hamish McDonald. Together, we host Radio National's Global Roaming. And each week, I think we try and attempt to make sense of this crazy world. Is that what we do?
0:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think we make it a watercooler conversation because I think it's in our interest to have it thus, you know? From Gaza to Greenland, from coups to climate, we dissect big international stories with people who've had a hand in shaping them.
0:29 Speaker 02 I promise you, Geraldine does hold me to task.
0:32 Speaker 01 Global Roaming. Search for Global Roaming, hear it now on the ABC Listen app.
0:42 Speaker 03 Australian history's littered with shady characters who are a touch slippery with the facts and smart. Hi, Richard Roxburgh here. You may know me better as Cleaver Green, the roguish criminal lawyer turned politician I played in the ABC TV series, Rake. Cleaver's take on the law was, let's say, highly creative, which makes him perfect company for the bunch of grifters, scammers and swindlers in this new podcast series, Great Aussie Cons.
1:21 Speaker 03 In this first episode, let's meet one of Australia's most notorious counterfeiters, Robert Bowden, whose brazen scheme was dreamt up on a suburban street in inner-city Sydney.
1:34 Speaker 04 Fresh from the press, they look like money straight from a bank. But I didn't want a single one to circulate before I was ready to release a torrent.
1:44 Speaker 03 A $2 million torrent. Robert Bowden tells his story in his autobiography called, of course, Fake.
1:54 Speaker 03 He was born in 1918 in the US and leads a pretty colourful life there before he washes up in Sydney, just after the Second World War.
2:05 Speaker 05 He was actually the son of very respectable, middle-class, educated people. His father was a professor of French and little Robert, from a very young age, was always going to be the black sheep of the family. I'm Sunil Bodami, I'm a writer, academic and enthusiastic local historian for the Balmain Peninsula. He says that at around the age of nine or 10, he was seduced by a maid, a much older maid. It kind of set him on this road from the age of about 11 or 12, forging cheques so that he could skip school and go to brothels to have sex with older women. Whatever his parents tried to do to kind of discipline him or get him back into line didn't work.
2:49 Speaker 05 And so, the age of about 14 or 15, he kind of hit the road. And like a hobo, rode the rails.
2:57 Speaker 04 All that first year, I was on the move, never spending more than three or four days in one place and learning countless tricks for survival.
3:06 Speaker 03 Like how to spin a hard luck story about losing his wallet with lashings of beguiling charm.
3:13 Speaker 05 Buying cheap worthless jewellery and then kind of passing it off as much more expensive jewellery. Even working as a male prostitute around San Francisco and having no qualms about sleeping with anybody who would pay him the money.
3:28 Speaker 03 But it all starts to catch up with young Bodan. So he runs away to Shanghai, which in the 1930s was a seductive mix of glamour and sin.
3:41 Speaker 05 Shanghai was the big port. Lots of people from all over the world turned up there and it had a thriving nightlife. So Robert Bodan, by then, living by his wits and with the brassest neck of anyone I've ever met or encountered, this guy who had committed all these crimes in America managed to become a member of the Shanghai Constabulary.
4:08 Speaker 03 Bodan doesn't last long on the right side of the law. And he inevitably moves on, scamming and seducing his way right across the Far East, from Hong Kong to Delhi. But as war approaches, Bodan heads back to Los Angeles, dodging the draft by pleading insanity and surviving in the seedy underbelly of the black market.
4:37 Speaker 03 As well as women, Bodan has two other grand passions: photography and flying. He becomes a pilot and even buys himself a light plane. So when he's busted for printing fake petrol ration tickets and the cops ask how someone like him could afford a plane, he flippantly answers that:
4:58 Speaker 04 Aircraft were sometimes owned by people who had not made counterfeit tickets.
5:03 Speaker 03 Oh dear, Robert, that was a bit of a giveaway. Robert talks his way into the prison psych ward so he doesn't have to toil in the fields with the other prisoners. When he's released, he somehow gets a passport. And by the time his next parole meeting rolls around...
5:21 Speaker 04 My probation papers had been tossed into the sea and I was a week out of San Francisco, bound for Sydney.
5:30 Speaker 05 Bodan arrived in Australia towards the end of the 1940s, after the war. And he actually came over as an assisted migrant. Australia paid for him to come over. He was a very attractive, magnetic, sexually voracious man. So he immediately fell into the kind of underworld of Sydney, mainly a bit of sly grogging and SP bookies. And it talks about how he got involved with a woman until she discovered that he was cheating. And I think a number of the women that he was involved with discovered that he was cheating.
6:07 Speaker 03 But he eventually met a young country girl by the name of Betty Bale, who happened to own a house in Mort Street in Balmain.
6:16 Speaker 06 Bob was charming. He was older than me and he knew so much about the world. I really fell for his unconventional ways.
6:25 Speaker 06 I thought his story about forging petrol ration tickets in Los Angeles was funny and clever. He took me flying a few times and he was always talking about his dream of setting up his own aerial photography business.
6:36 Speaker 03 But where's Bob gonna get the money to buy a plane?
6:42 Speaker 07 Lost in the helpful Sydney crowd, Bob Bowden, a quiet, rather pixelated man of 56 with wild hair and eyebrows.
6:50 Speaker 03 Well, he was never gonna make the money legally. So as Bowden told British documentary maker Alan Wicker in the 1970s, he came up with a cunning plan to make his own.
7:02 Speaker 08 The idea occurred that having done one bit of forgering, why not progress to something a little bit more ambitious?
7:11 Speaker 03 But he doesn't go off half-cocked. Bowden does his research and he discovers that printing Australian money in Australia is illegal, but printing American money in Australia isn't. And those greenbacks could be spent anywhere in the world. So he starts creating a fake $20 bill.
7:32 Speaker 04 Working on the tracing material was sheer joy and since President Jackson's portrait seemed the hardest part, I tackled it first. I had a little trouble with his nose and eyes. I indulged in a few departures from government engraving to bring him back to normal.
7:50 Speaker 03 And Betty's nondescript house in Mort Street, Balmain, seems like the perfect place to hide a printing press and make money. But local historian Sunil Badami is not exactly sure which house it was. Oh, hi. Is that Mavis?
8:04 Speaker 09 Yes, speaking.
8:05 Speaker 03 Hi, Mavis. I'm Sunil. We're kind of doing a little bit of a story about Robert Bowden, you know, who was married to Betty.
8:13 Speaker 09 Yeah, Betty lived in 97, and then there's 99, and then there's the pub on the corner.
8:19 Speaker 03 So it must have been these two houses here. Two million American dollars comes out of that basement. That's about 31 million Australian dollars in today's money.
8:31 Speaker 07 Now, what you worried about your curious Australian neighbour saying, "What's going on?"
8:36 Speaker 08 You use the radio turned up to a reasonable volume. Not so loud as to annoy the neighbours, but possibly the volume that a person slightly hard of hearing might use.
8:46 Speaker 07 And what about your wife? Didn't she say, "What's going on?"
8:50 Speaker 08 I just, I gave her a bit of cock and bull story. Explained the machine as an acquisition for the purpose of producing a bit of pornography.
9:02 Speaker 03 Making pornography? Which seems like an excuse I don't know many wives would accept, but she seemed to.
9:11 Speaker 07 But even so, when they come out, they're virgin. So how do you age them?
9:14 Speaker 08 Well, I found that the best way was a mixture of glycerine and water. I was using an old-fashioned plungia-type washing machine. The same way you'd wash a bunch of dirty socks.
9:25 Speaker 07 Yes.
9:26 Speaker 08 You know, just give them hell. Well, by the time they come out, they look like notes that could have... They could have been anywhere. They could have been in a seaman's shoe when he's nicked the shore. They could have been any place. Dirty, worn notes.
9:39 Speaker 03 Boden's only printing American dollars. But then this crooked airline executive he knows puts in an order for a hundred thousand Australian ten-pound notes. Reckons he'll send them straight offshore to Hong Kong. So Robert gets busy making the plates and printing the Aussie notes. The watermark on the Queen's head proves bloody tricky. But he does it. And then, the Hong Kong deal falls through. And he's left with all these dangerous Australian notes. He burns most of them in the backyard one afternoon.
10:14 Speaker 06 I came home from work to find the backyard covered in ashes. And half the plants ruined.
10:21 Speaker 06 Bob had no idea what had happened.
10:23 Speaker 03 Poor Betty. Bob decides to keep a few of the Aussie notes, so he stashes them in a metal tin under a mate's place. Along with some of the American dollars. He's biding his time with those. Finally, the chance comes to exchange some of those counterfeit greenbacks. But not here, in Europe.
10:46 Speaker 03 So he jumps on a plane and heads off to make his fortune.
10:51 Speaker 04 I soon learn that around hotels, airline offices and travel agencies, there lurk people anxious to buy foreign money.
11:00 Speaker 03 From Rome to Paris to Grenada, Bob Bowden works his magic with his glossy greenbacks. He only has one scare when an English customs officer in Dover spots the lazy hundred grand sitting in the bottom of his carry-on.
11:16 Speaker 04 While I was furiously thinking of my denials, the customs inspector calmly remarked that I would be safer to carry travelers' checks. I promised to bank it when I reached London.
11:28 Speaker 03 And then he ups his game and heads over to America.
11:32 Speaker 05 It's one thing to pass counterfeit notes in a foreign country. You know, people won't necessarily be as expert in determining whether the note is a fake or not. They'll just be happy to get the foreign exchange. So returning to the United States was definitely something that was very daring and possibly quite foolish because he was still on the lam from having breached his parole conditions at the end of the war. But Bowden obviously liked to take risks.
12:02 Speaker 03 Bowden starts the tedious job of passing off the money in drugstores, jewellery stores, newsagents, right across the US. He explains his method to journalist Alan Wickard.
12:14 Speaker 08 At fifty dollars a time, I found that if you make a purchase of somewhere around the ten-dollar mark, you've got a forty-dollar profit. In the course of a day, you can get through an awful lot of fifties.
12:27 Speaker 07 And you get an awful lot of ten-dollar things you don't want.
12:29 Speaker 08 Oh, you throw those away. Look, you just drop them, cheap watches and things like that. You finish up, you know, leaving them in washrooms, handing them to bums on the street if one of them approaches you or anything like that.
12:42 Speaker 05 It's really exhausting because you have to go to so many shops and buy so much junk and carry that junk around and find a place to stash it or a place to put it. In fact, he bought so much stuff, he could barely fit it into the bins. And he would often just leave cars that he'd hired filled with all this stuff. But you're on tenterhooks all the time because you think somebody's going to grab you.
13:06 Speaker 08 Well, you're working, yes, you're working under strain.
13:09 Speaker 05 One of the things he used to do was that he would turn up at a shop at around two or three o'clock in the afternoon. It was just enough time to get the money or the change from the shop owner, but not enough time for the shop owner to be able to get to the bank in time. So by the time that the shop owner went to the bank the next day or the day after with the takings, it would only be then that they discovered that the hundred dollar note, the crisp hundred dollar note that they'd been given, was actually a fake.
13:37 Speaker 03 Boden's making about two grand a day on these tiny deals and figures that if he does a hundred days like that, he'll be set for life. But with two people, he'll be twice as fast. So he looks up an old girlfriend, Terry, who's very good at passing fake cheques. They make a great team, crisscrossing the States before heading over to Europe together and posing as a rich American couple.
14:08 Speaker 04 With the money changer, my reluctance to change more than four fifties was Terry's cue to come in with the strident American wife role, wanting spending money of her own. I looked annoyed and said that she could spend her own money for once. From her bag there and then came a roll of notes as big as mine and four fifties went into the changer's eager hand.
14:36 Speaker 05 There's a really funny story where basically at one point they ran out of money, Bourdain and Terry. So he booked her on a flight back to Sydney to pick up some more money. And she entered the country with a pillow slip under her dress to look as if she was pregnant, so that she could pick up all this money and put it back into the pillow slip and continue to look pregnant. Nobody asked any questions about the fact that she arrived on one day and was gone the next morning. And I keep thinking about his dear old credulous wife Betty back in Mort Street, totally happy with the fact that he's printing pornography through all the hours of the day and night, and then going on a round-the-world trip with an ex-girlfriend, no questions asked.
15:23 Speaker 07 There's no doubt that, I mean, people try to hold up banks at enormous risk to themselves to get just a fraction of what you earned in the comfort of your own house.
15:34 Speaker 08 Well, these are a different type of people altogether. See, the man that holds up a bank is the one that's desperate.
15:41 Speaker 07 Whereas you...
15:42 Speaker 08 Well, I put a lot of thought, you put a lot of thought into this type of project. You know, see that, decide, well, it is an acceptable risk or it isn't. Whereas a bank robbery, obviously, is not an acceptable risk, not to me.
15:58 Speaker 03 Next, it's on to Mexico City where things go a bit awry in a bar. Buying a bottle of Scotch, Bob and Terry hand over a fake fifty, which is promptly taken out the back, while they kept waiting a long time for their change.
16:15 Speaker 04 As time passed, with no reappearance of man or money, Terry and I began to exchange worried glances.
16:23 Speaker 03 Eventually Terry makes a run for it, and a few minutes later, Robert also bolts, security goons hot on his tail.
16:31 Speaker 04 Pounding of feet and loud shouts came from somewhere behind, but I was too busy making for the nearest corner to look back.
16:39 Speaker 03 He shakes off his pursuers, but not before he sees the flashing light of a police car pull up outside the bar. They high-tail it to the airport, where there's a flight to Chicago via San Antonio in ten minutes. Oh, those were the days. Last-minute tickets, no long lines at airport security.
16:57 Speaker 04 Long before daylight, a tired customs inspector at San Antonio Airport cleared us. The ashes of our last four fifties continued on to Chicago in one of the airplane's toilets.
17:10 Speaker 03 And the days when you could light up in the airplane toilet. The law finally catches up with Robert and Terry in a shop in San Francisco, but they buy their way out of getting arrested by paying off the cops with the eight grand of real money that they have in their wallets. Later that night, with jangled nerves, Robert flies to London, where he picks up a light plane to fly to Sydney. Yes, all that way, in a tiny plane. It's gonna take him weeks. Only he doesn't quite make it.
17:45 Speaker 05 Bourdain flew back from Europe via Asia in an old, kinda decommissioned WWII plane, in which, as it happens, the doors and the frame were all stuffed with counterfeit notes. And he kinda managed to make it overland, passing off a few notes here and there as he went, while he stopped to refuel, until he crashed somewhere over Singapore. Although there was a chance of him possibly being discovered with all the notes flying out of the, um, the doors and the wings, he managed to get rid of them as the plane was coming down.
18:22 Speaker 07 But of course, at a time when you were liable to lose your own life, I suppose a lot of the money wasn't too important.
18:27 Speaker 08 Eighty thousand in fake money was of no value whatsoever. I was just quite busy trying to think of, how am I gonna land an airplane in the dark on water? I won't be able to see where the water is. I won't be able to flare out and lose a bit of speed, and I've gotta try to keep the wing straight. And I was very busy with other things. Money was of the least interest at that time.
18:48 Speaker 03 What, Robert? No travel insurance? He loses everything in the Singapore crash. His photographic gear, his fake money, even his wallet with real money in it.
19:02 Speaker 03 But on the plus side, he makes a splash on the front page of the local newspaper. And always the con man leverages this newfound celebrity status to do a few more shady deals.
19:16 Speaker 05 And when he landed, then managed to convince people that he was the CEO or the founder of this aerial photography company. And he was selling shares in this company.
19:30 Speaker 03 He makes so much money hoodwinking investors that he buys two more planes. And then he takes off back to Sydney.
19:37 Speaker 05 So of course he got this big share register with all these share certificates, took all their money. And then through the share book, he reckons somewhere over the T more C.
19:47 Speaker 03 Meanwhile, back in Balmain, Robert's wife Betty still has no idea about his counterfeiting.
19:54 Speaker 06 I was just so happy to have him back, setting up his aerial photography business. I didn't ask where the money came from.
20:02 Speaker 03 Fast forward 10 years. It's 1968 and Robert's done with forging. He's been running a legit aerial photography business funded by those Singaporean investors. When three detectives come knocking.
20:18 Speaker 05 Bodan was found with over $265,000 in American bills.
20:23 Speaker 03 What he's doing with a box of counterfeit money, he never really explains. But he thinks he's legally safe because he hasn't broken any Australian laws by spending the American money here. And the statute of limitations has passed in the United States. He can't be prosecuted there. So when they ask, he shows the wide eyed detectives the box of greenbacks and fesses up to having printed them. But he's forgotten that at the very bottom of that box.
20:53 Speaker 04 A horrifying discovery was made. In full view, lay four of those old Australian notes along with printing plates bearing Australian images. They'd somehow all escaped being burned in my long ago orgy of destruction.
21:09 Speaker 03 Bodan claims he only forged the Australian notes as an intellectual exercise to impress his wife Betty. And Betty, well, she stands by her man.
21:24 Speaker 06 When he was arrested, he was so dazed because he hadn't given it a thought for years. The only Australian currency Bob ever made was four ten-pound notes. But I was told they were so near perfect that even a man at the Reserve Bank couldn't pick them without careful examination. It's also typical of him that he absentmindedly left the evidence of his forging lying around. Anybody else would have got rid of it or destroyed it.
21:48 Speaker 03 But strangely, at his trial, Bob's only accused of forging 165,000 American dollars. It's 100 grand short of what the detectives found. And a few years later, some of those counterfeit notes turn up where they shouldn't. And two detectives are... permitted to resign over the missing money. And who gave Bodan up? Remember that box of fake money buried under the friend's house? Well, that guy's son found it. And he gave some to his mates, who went on a spending spree. And when they were fingered, they gave up Bodan. For such a major crime, remarkably, Bodan's granted bail.
22:33 Speaker 03 He always did know how to turn on the charm.
22:36 Speaker 07 You see, you're such a gentle and agreeable man that it's easy to forget that you've committed what society regards as a most reprehensible crime. And I found myself laughing when I'm talking to you, but I suppose I ought to be indignant about it, didn't I?
22:51 Speaker 08 Well, I don't know. All, I suppose, I really was doing was making a very minute contribution to the... and slightly watering down the total note issue of a major country. Now, however many hundreds of billions of dollars that note issue may be, my puny little 2 million, you know, it'd be like an extra drop of water in the ocean.
23:17 Speaker 06 Bob's a highly strung person, and waiting for 12 months on bail was a nightmare. He was terrified of a long prison sentence because his business would collapse, and he'd be too old to fly when he came out. All this played on his mind days before the hearing. He would sit up all night and smoke endless cigarettes and worry himself to distraction.
23:37 Speaker 03 10 or 20 years in the slammer is what Robert's facing. He's desperate to get out of it. So back in Balmain, he comes up with a crazy idea.
23:52 Speaker 03 On the morning of his sentencing, Robert takes to the air.
23:56 Speaker 10 Romeo Charlie Alpha, Roger. The airspace is completely yours. There are no other aircraft around.
24:06 Speaker 11 Flight over Sydney which took place eight years ago, a flight few people will forget. Good evening and welcome to TDT. The pilot of Romeo Charlie Alpha achieved his aim on that day in February 1969.
24:18 Speaker 03 For four and a half hours, the city stops as people on the streets, balconies, rooftops, and on the Harbour Bridge look up, not knowing what the crazed pilot's gonna do next.
24:30 Speaker 11 His aim, drawing attention to his situation on a number of forgery charges. For several hours, he terrorised the city, the police, civil aviation and emergency services with his threat to fly out to sea and crash the plane unless the charges against him were dropped.
24:43 Speaker 04 I figured the masses would be sympathetic to someone who was fighting the law on the sky above their biggest city, rather than in a courtroom.
24:51 Speaker 05 He managed to get the then Commissioner of Police, Norm Allen, on the phone. And he said all he wanted was to be able to finalise his affairs and to be able to leave the country, and he'd land the plane.
25:05 Speaker 03 And if he doesn't get his request?
25:08 Speaker 04 My only way out would be to point the airplane straight down and bore into the harbour.
25:13 Speaker 03 His wife Betty is beside herself.
25:16 Speaker 06 I was terribly frightened. I wasn't too sure that he wouldn't do what he was threatening. He isn't crazy, but the whole thing had been weighing on him for so long and he was so depressed.
25:26 Speaker 04 Then twenty minutes before my fuel was due to run out, came...
25:30 Speaker 12 Romeo Charlie Alpha, we relay the following message. Your conditions are agreed to and you may land.
25:36 Speaker 04 Struggling to maintain a steady voice, I confirmed that I was on track, heading toward Bankstown Airport.
25:48 Speaker 11 Did you actually achieve your aim?
25:49 Speaker 08 Well, I achieved about ninety percent of it. I did think that they were going to let me off completely when they gave me an undertaking over the air, but then I suppose the authorities had to save face. They didn't want to publicly give in to the demands of a lawbreaker, so...
26:04 Speaker 11 Would you have really gone ahead with that and flown out to sea if you hadn't been able to make a deal?
26:09 Speaker 08 Rather than face up to twenty years, I would have, yeah. From ten to twenty.
26:12 Speaker 11 In fact, you served how long?
26:13 Speaker 08 Fifteen months.
26:15 Speaker 11 You must count yourself fairly lucky to get off that lightly, in fact.
26:17 Speaker 08 Well, yeah, I did, yes.
26:19 Speaker 07 During his time in jail, Bodan was put to work, would you believe, in the present printing shop. On release after a year, he resumed his aerial photography, working for the Australian government and taking pictures of the Queen when she opened that opera house.
26:34 Speaker 03 The car approaches, and the Queen has arrived. Royal protocol says nobody's allowed to fly over the head of the sovereign. Well, at the opening of the opera house in October 1973, guess who films it from the sky, flying right over the Queen? Yep, it's good old Robert Bodan. Still on parole, so technically still serving a sentence under Her Majesty's law. And you might think that's the end of it, but there's more. Bodan sets to work writing his autobiography. He calls it "Fake", but his American publishers want to call it something else: "Confessions of a Promiscuous Counterfeiter". Bob hates it,
27:19 Speaker 03 and so he resorts to his old tricks.
27:22 Speaker 05 In the same way that he had once buzzed around Sydney, he now buzzed over the United Nations in New York.
27:28 Speaker 03 Four thousand people are evacuated from UN headquarters. Everyone staring up at the crazy pilot.
27:36 Speaker 05 To think that in 1980, around two decades before, the most famous incident in which a plane was flown into a building. He could ring newspaper reporters and editors and the police and say, "Oh, well, if my book doesn't get changed, I'm going to fly it into a building", and everyone went, "Ah, yeah, no, you won't", but that's exactly what he did.
27:55 Speaker 03 When Robert's eventually arrested at LaGuardia Airport, he's mobbed by the media like some kind of celebrity. And yet again, he manages to get off. He serves no time at all.
28:08 Speaker 11 As the flamboyant rogue that you now like to be described, do you ever get itchy fingers and feel like trying the same sort of thing again?
28:17 Speaker 08 Well, I don't intend to try the same sort of thing, but there again, you know, often one is tempted to look back toward one's younger days and sort of, I must admit, there have been times when I miss it.
28:29 Speaker 03 The Flying Forger was produced by Claudia Taranto. The sound engineer was Simon Branthwaite. I'm Richard Roxburgh. I'll catch you next time on Great Aussie Cons on ABC Rewind for the story of a butcher from Wagga Wagga. Could he really be the son of an English baronet?
28:55 Speaker 00 You've been listening to an ABC podcast. You can discover more ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listener.
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