On Thursday afternoon, lawyer for Foster, Justin Lewis apologetically declared to Chief Magistrate, Graeme Henson that he had been unable to obtain instructions from his client.
“In other words, you can’t find Mr Foster,” Mr Henson said.
“That is the case,” Mr Lewis replied.
In an amusing piece of magisterial understatement, the SM replied, “It’s not as if Mr Foster is a stranger to the criminal justice system.”
And with that Australia’s most infamous conman was on the run again, a fugitive with warrants for his arrest now being issued by Queensland Police.
Foster’s charges included 16 charges of dishonestly obtaining financial advantage by deception and publishing false or misleading material to obtain financial advantage.
Those charges were about to be dropped due to what was outlined in the court as jurisdictional difficulties and quickly replaced by the same or similar charges by Queensland Police.
One condition of his bail was that Foster not use a telephone or have access to the internet. I’d suggest that might have been more of an honour system sort of arrangement for the lifelong scammer.
Last night, I attempted to count up all of Foster’s convictions and gave up after an hour or so. It is a long list of charges, counts and convictions, complicated by the fact he has stood before a judge at one time or another in five countries. He has been convicted of offences in five countries – the UK, the US, Vanuatu, Fiji and Australia. He has been deported from the Republic of Ireland and Vanuatu.
Most of these offences lie in the general dishonesty category. The self-described “International Man of Mischief” has other convictions for assault police and resist arrest.
There is also a long rota of unflattering character assessments from judges he has appeared before.
In 2003, a UK judge advised Foster, “The sooner you go from the country the better.”
In 2016, Federal Court Justice David Yates described Foster as “beyond redemption.”
In a bail application to the NSW Supreme Court, Justice Richard Button described Foster as a “completely unacceptable risk that if I were to grant (Mr Foster) bail even on the strictest conditions, he would fail to answer those conditions.”
In sentencing the perpetual grifter to four and a half years in prison for money laundering in 2007, Queensland Supreme Court Justice James Douglas said Foster was, “No novice when it came to dishonesty who had failed to learn from experience. Old habits had died hard for (Foster) and his criminal activities spanned many years and four continents.”
Foster has been around committing outrageous crimes for as long as I can remember. His criminal career spans almost four decades. Many will remember him as the ‘slimming tea man’, making wild claims of weight loss for a cuppa of what was chemically analysed and found to be nothing more than black tea from China. The sort of stuff sold in supermarkets to be steeped in a cup of boiling water with a tea bag.
But it wasn’t just tea. Foster also spruiked dietary oral sprays and thigh slimming creams. Clearly one would have to be a mug to buy any of this stuff but that is not the point of the scams. Foster created companies and racked up millions in oversubscribed franchises in what amounted to little more than Ponzi schemes.
His latest scam for which he had his collar felt most recently was a dedicated Ponzi scheme based on sports betting. On the run again in 2014, Foster sat in a home office just outside Byron Bay where it was reported he toted up $10 million from the scam in the space of about three months.
The man who brought us Cheriegate where he inveigled himself into Cherie Blair’s life as a property adviser, and even earlier counted Muhammad Ali as a friend, has been an endless source of fascination.
When we think of sociopaths, we might turn our minds to serial killers or gangland hitmen, maybe even mob bosses. But the archetype really is the career con-artist, a person with no sense of remorse and an absence of empathy. These two factors create a dangerous set of preconditions where grifter can prey on people, part them of their hard earned, often leaving them financially devastated and psychologically broken and then shuffle off with a happy whistle to his next mark. If a person is unable to have any emotional connection to his victims, it makes it very easy to have more victims.
Intricate planning, scheming and grandiosity are the other hallmarks of the sociopath. Foster is nothing if not a schemer and his routine embraces of the media, speaks of a grand sense of self.
It would be wrong to think of Foster’s crimes as somehow victimless or perhaps where victims should have known better. The reality is most of Foster’s victims are small time investors whose lives have been ruined, life savings squandered and where the trauma of a victim’s guilt endures for years.
Foster is a master manipulator, often reducing his prison sentences by informing on his fellow inmates. This is a dangerous business of course but Foster seems to have pulled it off on numerous occasions, done easy prison time in protective custody and enjoyed the benefits of reduced time behind bars.
Most famously, Foster testified in the trial of John Chandon, 72, for the murder of the Gold Coast businessman’s wife, Novy, 34. Foster claimed Chandon had made a jailhouse confession and provided lurid details in testimony on how Chandon had murdered his wife and disposed of the body.
Foster prepared a statement relating to the confession which was deemed inadmissable. Ultimately, the jury found Chandon not guilty of murder but guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. Chandon was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2019 and died in jail in October last year.
And now he’s on the run again, and another chapter in the extraordinary life and terrible crimes of Peter Foster has to be catalogued. The conman who cannot say no to one more con, one more grift, one more Ponzi scheme. If it all sounds like it might make a blockbuster movie, forget it. Foster’s already tried that one. Twenty years ago, he was flogging his life story for a film treatment to anyone with deep pockets. And guess what? They all did their dough.
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In news that will shock absolutely no one, Peter Foster, inveterate conman, career criminal and a man who has failed to appear for court dates on too many occasions to mention, has done it again.