Pod Insights ABC Rewind Great Aussie Cons | The Qantas Hoax About this episode It's May 1971, and Qantas flight 755 takes off from Sydney on a routine flight to Hong Kong.
Then a man calls the airline, saying he wants a half a million dollars, or else 'the plane will blow up'.
The public anxiously watch the skies above Sydney, as bomb experts are called in, and the plane's fuel runs dangerously low.
How can someone hold a plane full of passengers to ransom?
Host Richard Roxburgh takes a deep dive into the events of that fateful day.
Transcript 3,963 words · 19 speakers
0:01 Speaker 00 Hi, Richard Roxburgh here, with another episode of Great Aussie Cons.
0:08 Speaker 00 The Australian past is littered with shady characters who are a touch slippery with the facts. Charming rogues and clever liars. Larrick and lawyer Clever Green would have loved them. Very big on imagination, less so on execution. Especially in this ripping yarn, where we take to the sky.
0:33 Speaker 01 This is a very special flight, on its way toward a date with destiny.
0:39 Speaker 00 And uncover the great Qantas con.
0:44 Speaker 00 Starring one Mr Brown.
0:51 Speaker 00 Wednesday, May 26th, 1971. In Qantas's head office in Sydney CBD, the day started like any other. But around midday, a man calls.
1:07 Speaker 02 Qantas Airways? There's a bomb on the Qantas flight, it's just taken off for Hong Kong.
1:14 Speaker 03 I'm sorry sir, can you tell me who's calling?
1:17 Speaker 02 You just read the notes, and I'll telephone you later. Who are you?
1:22 Speaker 03 Call me Mr Brown.
1:24 Speaker 00 He calls himself Mr Brown.
1:42 Speaker 03 The telephone caller had convinced officials that an altitude bomb had been placed aboard.
1:51 Speaker 00 On that call, Mr Brown demands $500,000, about $3.8 million in today's money. He says he's put a bomb on a plane, on Qantas Flight 755, a Boeing 707. 133 lives are at risk.
2:13 Speaker 00 And no one's quite sure what to do.
2:20 Speaker 00 Young ABC reporter Alan Hogan is on shift that day.
2:25 Speaker 04 I was in my late twenties, it was 71. There were only a few newsmen who got a chance to sort of move that quickly to actually cover it while it was happening. And it followed a time when there'd been quite a rise in the number of hijacks of planes.
2:41 Speaker 00 Unnervingly, many of these overseas hijackings closely resemble a popular American blockbuster, a film that's only just screened in Australia.
2:52 Speaker 04 There'd been a movie called The Doomsday Flight. The plot of the story was, an altimeter-sensitive bomb had been placed on a plane, which would explode when the plane descended below a certain level.
3:05 Speaker 01 Rod Serling's epic story, The Doomsday Flight. Sit down. Anybody can fly a plane to New York, but how many crews actually wind up with a bomb?
3:19 Speaker 04 Rod Serling, the guy who wrote the script for Doomsday Flight, said after the Qantas hoax that he deeply regretted ever writing the film. He said, "I didn't know there were so many kooks could come out of the woodwork."
3:34 Speaker 00 Well, movie buff Peter MacCary, aka Mr Brown, is one of them. MacCary comes to Sydney from England in the late 1960s on a false passport. A small detail he forgets to tell his new backpacker mate William, who's joined him on a road trip north.
3:56 Speaker 04 MacCary was travelling through Queensland when, with a TV in the back, he watched The Doomsday Flight movie. And the report is that MacCary said, "That's not a bad way to make some money."
4:09 Speaker 04 William Day, he was regularly writing letters home to his mum. He said he was travelling in Queensland with a Mr Brown. Day disappeared without trace.
4:21 Speaker 04 That boy was murdered, there's no doubt about that.
4:30 Speaker 00 On the 26th of May, 1971, months after Mr. Brown and William Day part ways, QF Flight 755 is an hour into its flight from Sydney to Rome via Hong Kong when...
4:44 Speaker 04 Mr. Brown, or Macari, I guess his real name was, made his first phone call to Sydney Airport about midday, maybe somewhere between 11 and 12.
4:56 Speaker 00 He says to look in locker number 84 at Sydney Airport. The calls are recorded by Qantas, and in the mid-1980s, director Scott Hicks uses transcripts of them in a film he's making about the event.
5:13 Speaker 00 Actor Chris Hayward plays Mr. Brown.
5:18 Speaker 02 Hello? Qantas Airways. This is Mr. Brown. Can I speak to Captain Ritchie, please?
5:24 Speaker 04 When the call first came through from Mr. Brown, Captain Ritchie, who was then the general manager of Qantas, was out to lunch. So a guy called Philip Howson, who was the deputy general manager, took the call from Mr. Brown, and then they believed that as the later calls came through from Macari Brown, that Howson should take them in case he thought he was being deceived or something.
5:46 Speaker 05 Yes, Mr. Brown. Well, what can I do for you?
5:49 Speaker 02 It's all in the letter. I'm gonna ring you back at 3pm.
5:51 Speaker 05 What's that? Well, I hope, Mr. Brown, you know, there's nothing going on that would endanger the lives of any of our passengers on the aeroplane.
5:59 Speaker 02 No, they're all pretty safe right now.
6:02 Speaker 05 Well, how long for, Mr. Brown?
6:03 Speaker 02 Pardon?
6:04 Speaker 05 I say, how long are they safe for?
6:07 Speaker 02 Read the letter!
6:13 Speaker 06 My name is Jim Eames. In 1971, I was press secretary to the Minister for Civil Aviation, Senator Robert Cotton. The moment that situation started to evolve in Qantas in Sydney, Bert Ritchie, the chief executive, or in those days he was the general manager, rung the minister's office.
6:32 Speaker 00 Bert Ritchie tells civil aviation to look for a letter and a replica bomb in a locker at Sydney Airport.
6:40 Speaker 06 Mr. Brown, he rang them up and said, "I put a bomb on the plane, and just in case you think I'm pulling your leg, go to locker 84 and you'll find the kind of bomb that I put on the plane," which they did.
6:52 Speaker 00 Now, just to recap, Makari, aka Mr. Brown, has told Qantas that, just like the Hollywood movie, he's put a bomb on board Flight 755 that'll detonate when the plane descends to a certain altitude. So, Qantas decides to put that theory to the test with the replica device found in Locker 84 to see if a bomb really can detect a plane at a certain altitude and then explode.
7:37 Speaker 00 Former ABC reporter Alan Hogan.
7:40 Speaker 04 Qantas put another plane up, another 707, with the device on board, having taken the connection between the Jell-ignite and the detonators out. But just to see whether the altimeter device worked, they'd replaced the Jell-ignite with a light bulb. And when the plane went up and then it came down below 6,500 feet or something, the light bulb went off. So they said, oh, this is a device that will actually work. And sure enough, it turned out to be a workable bomb.
8:13 Speaker 07 Sydney Control to Qantas 755.
8:17 Speaker 06 Qantas 755, go ahead Sydney.
8:20 Speaker 07 We're recalling you to Brisbane to check out a threatening call. There may be a bomb aboard. Maintain your present attitude. Do not repeat, do not go below 20,000 feet.
8:30 Speaker 00 Air traffic control urgently calls the pilot on board Flight 755. By then, it's well on its way to Hong Kong, flying up the Queensland coast. Captain Bill Selwyn takes the call. He's shocked, but experienced in emergency protocol.
8:48 Speaker 08 We're told that the type of bomb on board was an altitude-controlled bomb, and we did not know what altitude it was set to go off at. We maintained 35,000 feet and diverted towards Brisbane. We were met by an RAF Phantom jet fighter, which escorted us from Ambly over the Brisbane area.
9:16 Speaker 03 The Commonwealth Police are on the way.
9:20 Speaker 09 Now, what's happening with Flight 755 at the moment?
9:22 Speaker 03 It's still circling over Brisbane.
9:24 Speaker 09 That's no good. We could be facing a major disaster. Bring it back here and put it on the holding pattern off Botany Bay. We don't want it coming down in people's backyards. And we'd better start searching the cabin.
9:34 Speaker 00 The Boeing 707 makes a U-turn back to Sydney, and the flight crew gets to work searching for... something.
9:44 Speaker 10 There was a sense of urgency. My mother was thinking, there's something more serious than than just a fault in the plane, you know?
9:53 Speaker 00 Eleven-year-old Rita Leonardi is on board Flight 755. It's her first overseas trip to see relatives in Italy.
10:03 Speaker 10 They were slitting the seats we were sitting on to see if there was anything inside the the actual seats. We weren't able to sit back on our seats because of the damage that they made. All the hand luggage was everywhere. The plane looked like it was a wreck. That I'll never forget. It was a very frightening experience.
10:23 Speaker 03 Did you tell the passengers at any stage that there was a bomb on board?
10:26 Speaker 08 We told them we're looking for an object, and we searched the aircraft thoroughly, including the passengers' baggage. I didn't mention the word "bomb" at all.
10:36 Speaker 11 I certainly remember it as if it was today.
10:39 Speaker 00 Carmel Guerra is also on the plane with her family, who, like most of the passengers, are first-generation Italian migrants.
10:48 Speaker 12 They were opening the cabins, looking for things, but we weren't sure what it meant. Then they started lifting the carpets, which was, of course, a bit strange. But then when it really hit us was when they moved me from my parents and my cousin Tonina from her parents. That's when we knew. I started crying. My mother was crying, hailing, wondering, you know, "Why are you taking my daughter away?" They grabbed my hand and said in English to my parents, "We're taking your daughter somewhere away." And Mum didn't understand, and that's when she got upset and I got upset.
11:20 Speaker 00 Carmel's cousin Tonina is 12. Their parents only speak a bit of English.
11:26 Speaker 11 Carmel, myself, and Nancy, Carmel's sister, were actually used as interpreters to explain what was going on. It was basically, "Okay, you're bilingual. You're coming with us." Yeah, my parents were very, very distressed and distraught.
11:46 Speaker 00 Hours pass. The plane makes it back to Sydney and circles above Botany Bay. Mr Brown promises to tell Qantas exactly where the bomb is located on the plane, but only once he's got the ransom money.
12:02 Speaker 00 Meanwhile, the public is oblivious to what's happening in the sky above Australia's largest city. Remember, it's 1971. There's no social media, no mobile phones, no rolling news coverage.
12:18 Speaker 04 There was fairly early in the piece a decision that they wanted to keep a lid on it. And it wasn't until, I think, the media got hint of the fact that the navy was being mobilised to go into Botany Bay. And that was when questions started to be asked.
12:36 Speaker 07 We interrupt this programme to cross live to our reporter at Meskron Airport for a newsflash.
12:40 Speaker 13 The 707 left Sydney with everything indicating just another routine flight to Hong Kong. But the 130 people on board were just settling down when first word of any trouble was heard. There's still a great deal of mystery around the whole incident.
12:54 Speaker 11 We knew something was wrong when all we saw was water. We were flying around the same area and it was maintained for what seemed, and it was, hours and hours and hours. And all we could see out the window was water.
13:12 Speaker 00 It's only a matter of time before a 707 circling above Botany Bay for hours starts raising heads and questions.
13:21 Speaker 04 The media started to get a hint of what the story was. Then there started to be coverage, at least on radio.
13:29 Speaker 07 Attention, attention, this news is happening now.
13:33 Speaker 00 It seems Qantas has miscalculated public interest and Mr Brown the hoaxer has miscalculated his numbers.
13:41 Speaker 04 In Scotty's film, there's that scene where he's on the line with Philip Howson, who was pretending to be Captain Ritchie, and saying-
13:49 Speaker 02 Let me see now, look, we're demanding fifty thousand dollars.
13:53 Speaker 04 Fifty thousand dollars? And Howson says, hang on, fifty thousand? I thought it was five hundred thousand. And Makari Brown says, oh, yes, yes.
14:02 Speaker 02 Oh, sorry, I mean, five hundred thousand dollars.
14:06 Speaker 02 Is your father unsure of yourself, Mr. Brown?
14:08 Speaker 04 I think he was bound to come unstuck because of his clumsiness.
14:12 Speaker 02 Well, I don't know much about this sort of thing.
14:14 Speaker 05 Well, how do I know that this is genuine?
14:21 Speaker 00 Jim Eames was the Minister for Civil Aviation's press secretary.
14:26 Speaker 06 In those days, we were very proud of our record. You know, civil aviation is not something you toy with. Australians have always been really highly regarded around the world as to how they handle crises in civil aviation.
14:42 Speaker 03 What does Qantas plan to do?
14:43 Speaker 09 We're treating this one for real. If we can't find the thing, it's paper chase time.
14:48 Speaker 03 I'd say it's bloody unlikely there's a bomb on board at all.
14:51 Speaker 09 They're clever enough to give us a sample bomb that works. They're clever enough to get one on the plane.
14:56 Speaker 03 All right, if they got one on the plane, and it's in a pressurized area, we can find it and disarm it.
15:00 Speaker 09 I'm not taking any chances, Jeff. Safety's a byword in this organisation. We don't trade on it, but everybody knows it.
15:07 Speaker 03 And if it's a hoax?
15:09 Speaker 09 And if it isn't?
15:18 Speaker 14 Macari made five phone calls to Qantas house on the afternoon of May the 26th.
15:24 Speaker 00 Real bomb or not, Macari Brown insists a half a million dollar ransom be paid in twenty dollar notes. Meanwhile, Qantas ground staff are searching a Boeing 707 in the hangar for places where a bomb might be hidden on board, and frantically suggesting them to the flight crew in the air above.
15:45 Speaker 15 How about the main gear inspection window? Have we checked this bulkhead? Ian, you remember that film I was telling you about? Oh, Max, we don't have time to get- No, no, no, no, no, remember. They found it in the pilot's briefcase. Right. Bill, have you checked the crew's briefcases?
15:59 Speaker 01 Yes, Ian. One of us saw the movie too. The doomsday flight with an exciting cast. Jack Lord. Edmund O'Brien.
16:08 Speaker 04 Captain Selwyn never used the word "bomb". He said, "We're looking for a little package", but I guess the passengers, after about a couple of hours of the crew going through all their luggage, all the overhead bins, you'd have to be either very innocent or asleep at the wheel if you didn't think, "Well, they're looking for something quite serious on this plane".
16:33 Speaker 00 It's now late afternoon, nearly seven hours into the flight. Some passengers still think they're on their way to Hong Kong. But the plane's in a holding pattern off Sydney, and fuel's getting low. Makari Brown's waiting for the ransom money to be put in locker 84 at Sydney Airport. But the clumsy Hoaxes made another serious miscalculation.
17:05 Speaker 02 Mr. Brown?
17:05 Speaker 05 Captain Ritchie?
17:07 Speaker 02 Yes.
17:07 Speaker 05 Do you have any idea of how much half a million dollars is in volume, Mr. Brown?
17:12 Speaker 02 No, no idea.
17:14 Speaker 02 It was about thirty-five hundred pence.
17:17 Speaker 02 Is it, honestly?
17:18 Speaker 05 Yes, it is.
17:19 Speaker 02 Probably went in the locker.
17:21 Speaker 00 He makes the demand to have the cash, an enormous amount of cash, which he must have known would be difficult to actually get together in time.
17:30 Speaker 02 Can you put it in another case?
17:32 Speaker 05 And then what? Just leave it beside the locker?
17:35 Speaker 02 Uh, no, no, look, it's, it's gonna be picked up from, well, in Sydney itself.
17:40 Speaker 05 Whereabouts in Sydney?
17:42 Speaker 00 And then he says, "I'll just deliver it to you. I'm gonna turn up in a Canary Yellow combi van outside the front door of Qantas house." Brown instructs the general manager of Qantas, Bert Ritchie, to take the ransom money outside Qantas house, alone. Then, on his signal, pass the suitcases stuffed with twenty-five thousand twenty-dollar bills through the front window of the Yellow combi.
18:12 Speaker 06 When Bert Ritchie came down in the lift to deliver the money, the, the plan was to have some police who were already with Qantas in that building come with him. But Bert took the, the, the fast lift down, which didn't stop at any stations, and they, they finished up coming down five or six floors in the stopping lift. They basically got the wrong lift.
18:38 Speaker 04 Which stopped at every floor on the way down.
18:42 Speaker 00 Bert Ritchie sees the van, but the cops are nowhere in sight. They're still stuck in the all-stops lift.
18:49 Speaker 04 And by the time they got there, Mr Brown and the yellow combi had completely disappeared.
18:56 Speaker 03 The hopes, sir, Mr Brown, collected the half a million dollars from the general manager of Qantas, Captain Ritchie. Door closed, off went the van with the half a million dollars.
19:07 Speaker 04 And it wasn't until six o'clock that Makari rang them and said, oh, by the way, there's no bomb on the plane. It can land quite safely.
19:19 Speaker 04 And so, yes, there are accounts that Selwyn said there were about six minutes of gas left in the plane when he touched down at Mascot.
19:29 Speaker 11 The plane didn't actually land, the plane just literally dropped.
19:37 Speaker 01 Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain. I'm pleased to be able to tell you that our technical difficulty has been resolved.
19:44 Speaker 11 And they didn't say we're landing back in Sydney. They didn't tell us anything until we landed in Sydney and told us where we were.
19:51 Speaker 02 And it's down, it looks like a safe landing.
19:56 Speaker 10 I recall my mother nearly kissing the floor when we arrived.
20:07 Speaker 06 Thank God, that's over.
20:10 Speaker 00 The passengers are finally allowed off the plane and immediately put in a queue for the next flight to Rome. No trauma counselling in 1970s Australia.
20:21 Speaker 11 Yes, and some of the passengers wanted to not continue and wanted to go back to Melbourne. And that was not an option. It was no, we're going. Everyone back on a plane and off we go.
20:34 Speaker 12 There was no conversation, recognition.
20:38 Speaker 10 There was no explanation given to us, neither at Sydney, neither when we were arrived at Rome.
20:44 Speaker 12 You know, that, a lot of that would have occurred because we were a bunch of Italians going back to Italy, who were probably grateful to be alive, in fact.
20:52 Speaker 00 All hijinks aside, it was hugely distressing for passengers on board flight 755. Tonina Guerra has never been able to fly again.
21:06 Speaker 03 The only bomb was the original one, found in a locker at the airport.
21:12 Speaker 00 Over the next few days, the media's drip-fed the story. The abandoned yellow van is found, but not the money or the hoaxer. Qantas is tight-lipped, it's been duped, and the culprit, Mr. Brown and his mate Raymond Pointy. Yes, turns out he had a sidekick, have got away.
21:34 Speaker 02 We did it, Ray.
21:35 Speaker 16 We'll never get away with it.
21:37 Speaker 02 We have got away with it. Now all we've got to do is lie low until things cool off. I want to go back up north.
21:42 Speaker 16 You better keep the lid on your spending.
21:55 Speaker 14 The task of finding the so-called Mr. Brown, of finding the person or persons responsible for the bomb ransom, has been given top priority by the whole of the New South Wales Police Force.
22:04 Speaker 08 The man was also wearing dark-rimmed spectacles.
22:08 Speaker 14 Police have built up an identikit picture of the man who collected the money. One picture shows him with a beard, another picture shows the man clean-shaven.
22:17 Speaker 04 They put out a $50,000 award for information leading to the arrest.
22:22 Speaker 00 In 1971, 50 grand is a huge amount of money. TV journos jump on every lead.
22:30 Speaker 04 What I actually did was a story about how hard it was going to be for Mr. Brown to get rid of $500,000 in cash in $20 notes.
22:40 Speaker 00 Including a young Alan Hogan.
22:43 Speaker 17 Seems Mr. Brown has got big problems. He can't take his money to a bank, he can't take it out of the country, and as if that wasn't enough, he's got police in six states hunting for him.
22:53 Speaker 04 The police received something like 14,500 calls.
22:57 Speaker 06 I think Macari made the fatal error when he got the money to sort of go on a spending spree.
23:04 Speaker 04 But it wasn't till Raymond Pointing arrived at a servo in a series of incredibly expensive cars.
23:12 Speaker 00 Looks like Makari's sidekick couldn't help himself. He's a regular customer who usually drives a bomb, so service station staff alert the cops.
23:22 Speaker 18 Ah yeah, one of our customers has turned up with two brand new cars in the last couple of weeks.
23:27 Speaker 04 She became very suspicious and so she rang the police and said...
23:31 Speaker 18 This was a E-Type Jag, now it's a Chevy Camaro.
23:34 Speaker 04 He's only a bomb and I can't work out where he's getting all this dough from. And so at least to the credit of the police, they followed it up.
23:42 Speaker 18 Bright yellow, yeah. Now, about this reward.
23:46 Speaker 04 It was Makari they picked up first in the flash car and they started to look at both of them and say, "What's happening here?"
23:55 Speaker 00 The cops bring Makari in for questioning, but his story starts to seriously unravel when his accomplices picked up. What's your full name? Raymond James Pointing.
24:06 Speaker 04 They arrested him and he just spilled the beans straight away. "I done it, I done it, and I did it with Peter King." Raymond Pointing never knew Makari's real name. Pointing arrives at the police station and Makari's already under arrest and says... Is this the man you know as Peter King?
24:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, it is. I put it to you that you are in fact Peter Pasquale Makari, wanted in England on various charges.
24:31 Speaker 04 Makari?
24:32 Speaker 00 I'm Peter Makari.
24:33 Speaker 04 And I'm Mr Brown.
24:36 Speaker 00 Both men are sent straight to the clink and with almost all the ransom money still missing, they don't stand a snowflake's chance of bail. And they keep their mouths shut. A few months later, they face court.
24:54 Speaker 14 The defendant's Pointing, curly blonde hair, wearing a white polo neck sweater and dark trousers. Makari, small, dark, sharp featured, and not once did anyone mention the name Mr Brown.
25:11 Speaker 00 Makari is sentenced to 15 years.
25:14 Speaker 04 It was a hoax, but in fact, if you tried to say, well, you actually threatened people's lives, he didn't. He demanded money with menaces, and that's what he went to jail for.
25:26 Speaker 00 But where's the money? I mean, a loose 500 grand doesn't just go missing. Well, six months after the hoax, an anonymous tipster tells cops that some of the ransom money's been stashed in a bricked-up chimney in Annandale. They find more buried under a house in Balmain, but half the money is still out there, somewhere.
25:52 Speaker 04 Where that missing 280,000 went is a very good question. There's some speculation that he might have put it in a waterproof safe and dumped it off Bondi Beach, but, you know.
26:03 Speaker 00 But before you go deep diving at Bondi, there's also a speculation the money may have helped make Makari's stay in prison just a little more comfortable. And his release a little earlier, perhaps? Because in 1980, completely out of the blue, after serving only nine of his 15 years' sentence, Makari is set free.
26:30 Speaker 04 And I wonder why he got off with nine. I looked at that very closely, and I can't see any reason why he would not have served out his full sentence. And I can't find any reason why he might have been given early parole.
26:45 Speaker 00 And that's where our trail seems to stop. After his release, Peter Makari is flown straight back to his native country, England. On what? Well, a Qantas jet, of course. There, he opens a fish and chip shop and goes quiet. Until, five years later, while making his film about Mister Brown's heist, director Scott Hicks gets a phone call out of the blue from Peter Makari. Reverse charges, of course. Makari's heard about the film on the grapevine and wants to know what's in it for him. Some people just don't know when to down tools.
27:39 Speaker 00 You've been listening to the Qantas Con, in our series about great Aussie cons of the past. The producer was Roz Blewett and the sound engineer Russell Stapleton. I'm Richard Roxburgh. Looking forward to your company for our next con job, about a young woman of very little means, but a very big imagination. See you then.
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