Amanda Larkins and her husband Tony claim any money the family had was “reinvested” and that’s why “we’re all left with nothing”.

READ MORE: WHO IS CHRISTOPHER SKASE?

“He wasn’t of that criminal mind, he just tried to get through it honestly to his own detriment, he never put anything aside bought blocks of flats or apartments or houses for children,” she said.

“It was all reinvested, there was nothing squirrelled and that’s why we’re all left with nothing. It’s not like his kids were all left with houses, we’re all bankrupt.”

Amanda and Tony now live in a downstairs apartment of a rented Seaford home, forced to find furniture in hard rubbish collections.

“I call it drive through Bunnings,” Amanda said.

Tony, who sold his house in Sydney to spend a decade defending Skase in Spain, remains angry at Australian authorities pursuit.

“They killed him,” he said.

There were claims that Skase had siphoned off millions to fund his Spanish lifestyle in exile in Majorca.

But Amanda says the Spanish mansion they lived in was really a rundown ruin.

“A lot of people came from Australia and invested in what we were doing, a lot of it didn’t come to fruition but it was genuine, we worked like dogs there to try and get something happening and he had bad luck a couple of times,” she said.

“He just somehow kept it rolling, I just don’t know how. I don’t know how we lived there, we lived very frugally, it looked to people very grandly because it was a very big property and a big house but it was old.

“Tony and I lived in the converted chicken coop. It had dirt floors and chicken boxes in it when we moved in. It stank of chicken poop. It looked really grand but it was old.”

But Skase’s bankruptcy trustee, Max Donnelly, has disputed claims that the fallen tycoon was broke in Spain, estimating he may have tucked away at least $15 million.

“When you are living the life of a fugitive it costs a lot of money, you’ve got to pay off people left right and centre,” he said last week.

“I think Skase was scared of going to jail in Australia, that’s why he fled. Alan Bond had just got four years.”

Amanda denies the claim Skase had hidden money away in Spain and have given the Sunday Herald Sun access to Skase’s secret book which he penned in prison in Majorca, to give Skase a chance at redemption.

“We’ve converted many a person over the years from haters to lovers, once they understood what was really going on,” she told the Sunday Herald Sun at her home in Melbourne’s southern bayside suburbs.

Amanda said her dad was a product of the 1980s.

“It was the ‘80s, it was huge or nothing. It was only if you had a shot that you could fall, so who else was going to fall, we’ll never have an era like it again. It was a time of taking huge chances in business and making huge money.”

Skase details his rollercoaster ride, from his extraordinary life in the fast line to his loneliness in solitary confinement in a prison hospital while on remand fighting extradition to Australia.

Now the Sunday Herald Sun publishes exclusive extracts from the book in which Skase boasts of his night with drinking champagne and eating hamburgers with Hollywood superstar Raquel Welch, says he has no regrets about losing $320 million in the collapse of his company Qintex and claims Paul Keating hunted him like it was a “blood sport.”

Skase spent a decade fleeing Australian authorities and at his peak symbolised the corporate excess of the 1980s.

Skase’s book, Postcard from Majorca — Nightmare in Paradise, was written on yellow legal note pads from his prison cell in 1994, and was a closely guarded secret for decades.

Publishers refused to sell it because they were too scared that those criticised by Skase would sue for his skewering of them.

Skase has been described as a “scoundrel, thief, a liar and a coward.”

The 351-page manifesto explains his views on the collapse of Qintex, the company he controlled that owned Channel 7 and the glitzy Mirage resorts chain.

He blamed the failure on high interest rates in the late 1980s and a pilot’s strike that crippled tourism in 1989.

He also claims:

* He had no regrets about his business failing, saying it was the “territory of being an entrepreneur. You win and you lose.”

* He told Whitney Houston people thought he was gay when she complained about rumours she was a lesbian, and counted John Farnham as a friend

* Offered his advice to would be investors, including “listen to women, they really do have that instinctive, nurturing, sensory edge.”

* Boasts of how his staff would let off steam at parties with a record of “seven bottles of Johnny Walker between six executives.”

* Compares media coverage of his case to the treatment of OJ Simpson, who at the time was charged with murdering his wife and her friend.

• He regaled his prison guards with tales of his travel and lavish lifestyle and read Tom Clancy’s book Without Remorse while inside.

Skase also details how he turned a $15,000 investment in 1975 into a $3.3 billion company that owned the Seven Network, a string of resorts in the Gold Coast and Port Douglas under the Mirage banner and the then Brisbane Bears AFL team, which later merged to become the Brisbane Lions.

He was a big deal in the 1980s, rubbing shoulders with media mogul Kerry Packer, but ended up more like convicted fraud and former Channel 9 owner Alan Bond.

But his bid to buy Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) for $1.5 billion brought about the collapse of his company when he failed to make a $25 million down payment in 1989, forcing him to file chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States.

Skase fled to Majorca, a Spanish island in the Mediterranean that was a holiday spot for rich Germans, in 1990 before fraud charges were laid.

The MGM failure started a run on the bank and soon he had gone broke in Australia, declaring bankruptcy in 1991.

From Spain, Skase he fought a decade-long battle against the Australian government’s bid to extradite him to face the charges.

The “chase for Skase” became a national obsession, with television personality Andrew Denton fundraising more than $250,000 to send a bounty hunter to Spain to bring him home.

Skase fought the extradition, claiming he was too sick to come home because of respiratory illness, often turning up to court on a ventilator.

Skase took aim at former attorney-general Michael Lavarch in his book, saying that he was the “least qualified person in history to hold the highest law office in the land”.

But Mr Lavarch rejected Skase’s claims last week, saying he had no regrets.

“I think with the passage of time that is quite laughable and reflects on the delusions that were going through his mind at the time,” he said.

“This was one of the biggest corporate scandals in Australian history that affected literally thousands of people from shareholders, right down to subcontractors who lost money.”

Skase was released from his prison jail in December 1994 after almost a year on remand, much of which was spent in the prison’s hospital.

The Australian Government continued to pursue him, cancelling his passport in 1998 but Skase then became a citizen of Dominica, effectively a trump card.

But he fell ill with lung disease, which he had been complaining of for a decade, and died in 2001, aged 52.

Skase enjoyed his moment of freedom when released from his Spanish hospital jail.

He wrote of his excitement when he returned home and his wife Pixie played Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s talking at me, and recounted the words of the song.

“I don’t hear a word they’re saying. Only the echoes of my mind …. I’m going where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain, going where the weather suits my clothes,” he wrote on the final page of the book.

stephen.drill@news.com.au

SCROLL ON FOR CHRISTOPHER SKASE IN HIS OWN WORDS

CHRISTOPHER SKASE IN HIS OWN WORDS

Extract from his book Postcard for Mallorca — Nightmare in Paradise

(Scrawled on while he spent a year on remand)

So why am I in this prison?

In less than two hundred and fifty words, here is the story so far, or at least the guts of what happened.

After stints in stock broking and financial journalism, I scrounged together $15,000 and became a business entrepreneur.

Fifteen years later, I had built the Qintex empire with assets of $3,300,000,000.

$3.3 billion — that’s a lot of money.

In Australian vernacular, which was our base, it was called “having a go”.

We created five star deluxe resorts under the Mirage banner, assembled the Channel 7 television network, the largest in the western Pacific and bid for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Hollywood film studio.

Then we went bust.

The cause? A credit crunch and interest rates of more than 20%.

Why? Because I owned 55% of the shares and provided personal guarantees for company loans.

I was bankrupt — wiped out.

So I came to Mallorca and the Mediterranean to chill out. And to prepare to return to go.

But, business haters in Government and the envious in the public service, had a different agenda. The economy was a shambles and some people had to wear the blame. Not the politicians, or functionaries, but the entrepreneurs. It was all our fault.

Their plan for me was simple. Propaganda, extradition, public humiliation, jail, no parole and no return to go.

There would only be one winner. Right now I was second, in a two horse race.

I was the hunted.

So who was the hunter?

The hunter was the bespectacled, Michael Lavarch, the Australian Attorney-General, who lead (sic) a public lynching part. Lavarch had mysteriously risen from working class obscurity, to be the least qualified person in history to hold the highest law office in the land.

Immediately prior, he was conveyancing cheap timber cottages in rural Queensland. He was charged with naked ambition — ambition to become the next Labor Prime Minister.

He had written the script. Keating to President. Lavarch to Prime Minister.

It was ambition not matched by ability, or performance.

So he had to do something dramatic, something outrageously brilliant. In the mood of the day, there was nothing more brilliant than to catch and jail an entrepreneur.

It was the number one blood sport, and I was the number one unbagged entrepreneur.

Lavarch put himself in the saddle of the front horse and charged in my direction. His agenda was capture, jail, extradite, humiliate with a public flogging called a trial, jail again and terminate.

In forty six years, I had never been to prison, not even to visit. I didn’t know anyone who had been to prison. My only experience was to watch Tim Robbins in the Shawshank Redemption three times. I had stepped into a new world totally unprepared.

I looked again at the nervous young man who shook and shook and kept moving his blood drained lips without making a sound.

Finally, he spoke.

“Noventa y ocho dias mas.” He then repeated over and over “98 days to go, 98 days to go.” This was all he said. At least he knew his calendar. One more day here, or one more year? I did not know. What I did know, I was looking at seven years in prison in Australia.

THE PRISON

At dawn the prisoner in the third cell was moved into the shed, He was a drug addict with pneumonia. His name was Jorge. He was physically wasting, he could not sit still — always on the move. Ducking and weaving like a featherweight fighter. For three months he had been isolated in the third cell.

He introduced himself, gave me a caramel and climbed into bed.

Pneumonia followed by full blown AIDS A predictable end for drug addicts. The pneumonia had passed, or so it seemed and he had a day in the shed before the return to prison. He spoke seaman’s English, learnt working on the slow old Mediterranean ferries sailing between Mallorca and Barcelona. This was the moment to find out about the big prison. “Stay here”, was his rapid response. “The prison was designed for two hundred. They got eight hundred. Somos como sardinas”, he smiled. “There is no room to spit”, he added.

THE PRISON HOSPITAL

The phobia of solitary confinement came next. I was in my most extended period of solitary confinement in the prison. I had always enjoyed my own company but I had passed the limit of that enjoyment. The guards knew it.

Prisoners are normally kept in the hospital for a few days, or a maximum of two weeks. I was in sight of one hundred days. Whatever novelty existed, had long since worn off. I experienced claustrophobia ever hour. It was increasingly difficult to step outside my mind. I revisited subjects twenty times. My effectiveness for my defence was blunt. The guards and nurses sensed I was in for a long haul and had reached a critical period in my mental control.

The guards were watching me more closely and were making every effort to keep my focused. They had no axe to grind. As far as they were concerned, I had not broken any laws in Spain and the alleged offences in Australia were commercial matters.

Compared with drug dealers, armed robbers and murderers, that they are dealing with everyday, I presented an agreeable alternative. And so we made a deal. I told them about Australia, its geography and people and they told me all about Spain, its history, places, customs and food. Blue Eyes, the Jeweller and the Morro took me on imaginary tours around Spain.

FREEDOM

Amanda (Skase’s stepdaughter) burst through the cell door with the Doberman and Delgado (guards) flanking her. It was just after three on Friday the sixteenth of December.

I was sitting in the cell plugged into the respirator and oxygen. The small mobile table was angled across the bed and I was writing. I had not seen Amanda since Tony’s (Skase’s son-in-law) accident the previous Sunday. Pixie said that she was distressed and concerned that Tony may have permanent damage arising from the accident. He had a motorbike accident fifteen years previous and some of the breakage was a repetition of old wounds. I said nothing.

Amanda, in pink jumper and black Levis, was shaking uncontrollably. Up and down and side to side all in the one motion. My first thought was that she had lost the plot. Maybe she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown.

“Yes that’s it. She’s had lunch with some friends and something has snapped,” I thought.

I looked at Doberman and Delgado who would never let anyone into the cell other than on visiting day. This was not a visiting day. The Doberman was hooking his head toward the door, motioning for Amanda to leave. I held her tight and said nothing.

“We’ve f***ing won,” she blurted.

They led her out of the cell.

I paced around the room. Nothing made sense. No Pixie and no lawyers.

There was nothingness. One hour, two, three, four, more than five hours passed. Dinner was put in the cell by the nurses. Nothing was said.

Just before nine the Doberman placed a square of cardboard over the small glass panel in the door that separated the mini prison from the public end of the hospital.

Thirty minutes later the cell door opened and Pixie ran in. She was crying. Behind her came Amanda repeating. “We’ve won, we’ve f***ing won,” as she started to take down Charlotte’s (Skase’s granddaughter’s) drawings from the wall.

Then, in marched El Mago waving the release papers. It was over.