The great pretender

JOEL Barlow stole $16 million of public money to bankroll his "royal" lifestyle. How did he pull the wool over everyone's eyes?

Truth is, if you knew him well and swallowed that Tahitian prince horseshit you were either brain dead, bombed on Krug or believed it because you wanted to. You abandoned natural suspicion, swept it to the back of your mind as you reached across the prince's continentalstyle gilt wood table with serpentine marble top and poured yourself another Martell cognac.

An acquaintance of Joel Barlow's once googled the words "Tahitian prince" well before his decline and fall. She discovered the last king of Tahiti died of alcoholism in 1891. Google those words today and the search engine digs up roughly 550 stories about Joel Barlow, aka Joseph Morehu-Barlow, aka Hohepa Hikairo Morehu-Barlow, the Queensland Health finance officer who executed the single largest theft in the history of the state's public sector, the man who defrauded $16.6 million to fund a Louis Vuitton-meets-Louis XVI lifestyle that he justified to friends by claiming to be a Tahitian prince. The acquaintance didn't make a fuss about her search. She didn't blow open Barlow's charade because she wasn't going to be the one to end the four-year Moet party; the one to ruin Castle Barlow, to topple the House of Joel.

The high-end department store and fashion house retailers didn't buy it either. They're sharp. They smell bullshit like mothballs. One fashion house manager in Barlow's favourite shopping precinct recalls him regularly floating into her store throughout his taxpayerfunded spending spree on an air of counterfeit privilege. "It was the air of a lord," she says. He spoke little - less chat, less chance of shattering the charade. He would pace around the store, brushing his hands along top-shelf stock, making polite, softly spoken requests: "I'm taking my nephew skiing, do you have this in a junior?" Often a friend, an assistant, would speak on his behalf. At the counter, the store manager would make the transaction, presenting a pen for the Tahitian prince to sign with. But he would baulk at this, holding up his right palm silently as he reached into his jacket pocket for his own $1000 Mont Blanc fountain pen. He would only use his own pen. That's what Tahitian princes do. The store manager would smile but when she looked at him she knew for all money he was Maori. He wasn't Tahitian at all. He was from across the bloody ditch. But the cheques cleared, the money was good. She gets paid to make the sale.

Some store managers thought he was really the beneficiary of a vast inheritance and the Tahitian prince fantasy - all those strange little things he did like embossing "HRH" on his wallet and his iPod was a quaint indulgence they were willing to work through. Others thought he was a drug dealer. But what is one to do? What is one to tell the fuzz? That there's a well-dressed, kinda quiet and shy mid-30s guy in here being polite and easy with his cash? The cheques clear, his credit's good, move on.

You know when people lie and you know when people tell the truth. You believe the close friend of Joel Barlow's who looks you in the eye and says: "If anyone tells you they believed he was a Tahitian prince they're not telling you the truth." In the end, his friends and associates had 16 million reasons to swallow it. Money buys happiness. Money buys belief. Money buys a life-size black stallion living room lamp draped with a Hermes saddle and an accompanying whip and La Dolfina Polo hat.

A rainy day in Brisbane, March 6. Joel Barlow is not wearing his favourite Louis Vuitton jacket today. He's not wearing his John Galliano jeans. He's wearing a brown prison tracksuit inside the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre in Wacol on Brisbane's outer west because in late December 2011 his fantasy world reached apocalypse at the hands of police, who arrested him at his $5.6 million luxury New Farm apartment. He's being housed safely in the prison's detention wing because fellow inmates are making threats, dropping unsubtle hints about giving the prince a welcome that most certainly won't involve a red carpet. He awaits his March 19 sentencing at which he has flagged he will plead guilty to five charges of fraud. "He'll take it like a man should," says his New Zealand aunt, Josie Boldy. "He'll do what he thinks is right and nature will take its course." "Life hung him out to dry," says an uncle, Peter Hikairo. "I feel sorry for the poor bugger." "He was very creative," is all his younger brother Michael Barlow offers.

He's no Tahitian prince. His mother Andre is no queen. In 2010, Andre Barlow was convicted in the Wellington District Court of stealing $25,000 from her lesbian partner's inheritance. His father, Rufus, is no king. He was a hard-drinking driver of 18-wheel trucks from rural working class Thames on New Zealand's North Island. Barlow's childhood home was no palace. It was a cramped, weatherboard home with fibro walls that often, Barlow says, reverberated with violent clashes between his father and mother. There was nothing royal about his upbringing. It was tragic and sad. There were times when Andre Barlow was beaten so badly she was forced to flee the home for days, leaving big brother Joel - then known as Hohepa - to find and fix dinner for his five younger brothers and sisters.

Joel Barlow was an AO8 (top level) pay grade public servant on an annual salary of $105,000, in charge of administering Queensland Health grants to charity groups and home services for the elderly and disabled. One of these groups was Healthy Initiatives and Choices - a wonderful, life-affirming organisation, one would have thought, had it not existed only as a figment of Barlow's imagination. Queensland Health's senior management missed the brief line in the department's 2008-09 annual report showing Healthy Initiatives and Choices received $180,000 in funding. It also skipped over the line in the 200910 report showing payments to the fictional group of $1,375,924, and the 2010-11 report showing payments of $2,576,596. It's listed in Appendix 9.7, between Health Workforce Queensland ($45,455) and Hear and Say Centre ($2.796 million).

At 6.05pm on December 8, 2011, Detective Senior Sergeant Jason Gough from Queensland Police's Fraud and Corporate Crime Unit was called to Barlow's Charlotte Street workplace in Brisbane's CBD. He was met by Queensland Health's deputy director general of finance, Neil Castles. The men discussed a payment of $11 million made on November 17, 2011, from Queensland Health accounts to a Commonwealth Bank business account registered to Healthy Initiatives and Choices. Castles told Gough that such a payment could only be approved with his signature. Castles then produced a document dated November 14, 2011, bearing two signatures, Barlow's and Castles'. It might have been Barlow's genuine signature but it sure as hell wasn't Castles'.

When police arrested Barlow at his home he was unconscious on his bed, being revived by paramedics. Police found methamphetamine bags, scales and smoking pipes. His four-year party had climaxed with a drug-fuelled shot at ending his own life.

Hard rain falls outside Woolloongabba's Antique and Fine Art Auctions house as auctioneers busily catalogue Barlow's seized possessions. Auctioneer John D'Agata has flown up from Melbourne to oversee the auction on behalf of Queensland's Public Trustee. He considers the auction the biggest his company, Leonard Joel, has ever undertaken.

D'Agata and his team have spent two weeks shifting the collection into the auction house and a further three weeks cataloguing it, laboriously pricing 98 business shirts, 58 pairs of size 10 shoes, 59 jackets, one $25,000 case of Hennessy XO Cognac in a limited edition crocodile clasp case, a collection of Louis Vuitton and Bally ladies dresses, three pairs of size 41 ladies shoes and a $95,000 Bang & Olufsen television. The auction house has been transformed into a museum of eccentricity; an odditorium of ostentation. A Louis Vuitton surfboard, Dolce & Gabbana snow boots, a Marie Antoinette candle bust, antique opera glasses, a tortoiseshell casket, a 19th-century American naval officer's hat in metal case, Hermes garden tools, a jet black cuckoo clock, a chrome set of deer antlers, a Chairman Mao statue. A fox fur skin with hollow eye holes rests on a black leather office chair. There are endless boxes of grooming products, man-scaping creams and Parisian soaps. There are half-used bottles of Palmolive shampoo; Nivea moisturising wipes; a tube of Bepanthen nappy rash cream. There are 22 sets of rosary beads. An 1880s Bible. There is a glass cabinet of watches and crucifix necklaces and bracelets and brooches. And resting atop this cabinet is a crown fit for a prince, a gaudy metal one he could call his own. But it's awkward and cumbersome, a heavy burden worn for too long.

Rick Hipwood is an accountant who has been doing freelance work for the auction house. He stands by a table of 15 different Louis Vuitton bags. "He couldn't stop, could he," he says. Barlow was a VIP customer at Louis Vuitton. The store, located in Brisbane's upmarket Queens Plaza, would close its doors so he could do his shopping in private. He would leave his Queensland Health office in Charlotte Street - waving goodbye to suburban mum and dad colleagues, two-thirds of whom were on an annual salary of $77,000 - and walk down to Queens Plaza, and somewhere along that journey would be the schism, the separation between public servant and prince, the transformation from mediocrity to magnificence.

At work he had to dodge all those tricky questions: "If you're really a Tahitian prince, why are you working for the state government?" Simple - his Tahitian elders wanted him to experience what it's like to be a real working man before he dive-bombed into the rest of his inheritance. At work he had to busily excise all those pesky traces to his fraudulence, shift roles to monitor accounts, search for genuine funding programs upon which he could piggyback his majestic misappropriations. But when he opened that wide glass door to Louis Vuitton he could leave the public servant behind, leave behind the kid from Thames, abandon the reliable big bro Hohepa from the lean and violent'80s, the boy roaming the streets at night looking for food. In those plush, warmly lit fashion stores he was free. He was home.

In four years, Barlow purchased $636,740 worth of Louis Vuitton products alone. He was loose with his credit card. He'd sometimes enter a store, hand over his card to a manager and simply let them create a shopping list. He was known to email multiple parties his credit card security details. No holds barred. Money is no object. Go for broke. If you get that nagging sensation of guilt in your belly, just drink through it, party through it, shop through it. You'll feel better soon in a pair of silver sparkle Louis Vuitton leather lace-ups.

Among the sprawling auction house collection, tucked inside a box of personal items, rests issue 813 of free glossy colour lifestyle magazine Brisbane News, dated December 8, 2010. When his possessions were seized, Barlow had the magazine open at the social pages showing him standing in a sharp black suit with his close friend, Brisbane lawyer Nick Smart.

In August 2009, Smart and his friend Jason Carlton launched a Parisian-inspired fragrance store, Libertine Parfumerie, in New Farm. Ahead of the store's launch Barlow was touting himself to Brisbane media as a co-owner of the store. "He has one of the most enviable jobs in the world but Libertine Parfumerie co-owner Joel Morehu-Barlow, who cuts the ribbon on his second Brisbane store tonight, admits there are a few downsides to his fragrant profession," read a piece in The Courier-Mail's gossip page. "An expert in scent, Morehu-Barlow travels the world in search of hard-to-find and exclusive fragrances and regularly attends fairs in Europe, Asia and beyond."

In a statement to police filed in the Brisbane Supreme Court, Barlow's sister, Kelly-Ann, said she thought the money he spent flying her and her son on holidays to Hong Kong and Paris - where he organised a private tour of the original Louis Vuitton family home and workshop - was largely from his successes with the Libertine Parfumerie. But he never co-owned the store, says a frustrated Nick Smart today. He was never a director. He was never on the title. He was never on the lease. He was never on the guarantee for the mortgage or the stock. He was nothing more than a loyal and generous customer.

Barlow was the richest public servant social butterfly dandy ever to flutter into a Hermes store to buy a saddle for a fake horse. He welcomed the highend stores and they welcomed his largesse. At the 2010 Brisbane launch of a Hermes fashion house, The Courier-Mail reported: "A stamp of approval was given by those assembled for the launch, including Libertine Parfumerie director Joel Morehu-Barlow. 'I think Brisbane has come of age and there's a definite need for high-end boutiques,' Mr Morehu-Barlow said. 'Hermes for me has always been a great place to find gifts for weddings and birthdays. They always have the right gift and you know you're purchasing quality. It might be at a high price but usually when you give them as a gift the orange Hermes box, as with the blue Tiffany box, prompts a lot of excitement.'"

The last time casting director and Brisbane man-about-town Damien Anthony Rossi saw Barlow was at the launch of a Queens Plaza Chanel store on November 10, 2011, a week before Barlow made his doomed November 17 $11 million funds transfer. "That was one of the golden ticket invites of the year," says Anthony Rossi. "Quite often, Joel was the 'plus one' [guest] of people who really were in those A-list circles when it came to events and parties. He certainly rode in on the coat-tails of other people. Then, eventually, he was a good look. He had the clothing. He had all the accessories of somebody that people liked to invite to events. He certainly enjoyed that. He loved that whole A-list party lifestyle."

Of course, Barlow could repay the A-list invitee he accompanied with a brand new Louis Vuitton handbag, a thank-you bottle of Krug, a dazzling helicopter flight to the Gold Coast. Friends and work colleagues speak of his generous nature, his willingness to make people happy. In the wake of his arrest, Queensland Health director-general Tony O'Connell sent a mass email ordering staff to declare gifts received by Barlow: "It has now become clear that Mr Barlow has given gifts or other benefits to a larger number of staff than first thought ... "

More than 100 staff declared and returned gifts: high-end jewellery, crystal boxes, ornaments, Louis Vuitton dresses, handbags, flights to New York and Paris, one man's honeymoon bill. One Queensland Health worker recalls being driven home to Brisbane's outer suburbs late one rainy night in Barlow's Mercedes. He was charming. The perfect listener. He was thoughtful with colleagues, remembered birthdays, loved an anniversary.

If you were lucky, you landed an invite to his $130,000 Cloudland nightclub birthday party in 2010. He was no prince in Cloudland. He was a king, known to hand staff $1000 tips. On the night of his birthday he had Cloudland's tropical-oasis-meetsDuran-Duran-video interior heaving with delirious bodies pumping before a birthday cake comprising five tiers of iced Louis Vuitton trunk sponge cakes. Beside the cake was a plastic figurine of a Tahitian prince - ripped abs, gold crown bathing in a glass of champagne. Those were the days. Long after his arrest, Cloudland would send out Twitter posts: "Live it up like a Tahitian prince in one of Cloudland's booths this Friday!"

"He drank everywhere," says Linda, a genial trannie selling raffle tickets on a Friday night in Brisbane's famed gay bar, the Sportsman Hotel in Spring Hill. Barlow was well known in Brisbane's gay scene as well as Auckland's, where website GayNZ says he "was a regular at former gay haunts G.A.Y and Flesh". A geek chic young man named Sean introduces himself at the Sportsman bar. "Hi, my name is Lord Remington," he says. "Serious, I'm from British aristocracy." He laughs, swigs a scotch and coke with a shot of tequila. "I think his friends didn't get Google on their computers. F..king retards."

"Can I be honest with you?" asks one Sportsman regular. "He had a bit of a reputation. The Brisbane gay scene is one that's very guarded and very secretive in regards to somebody with a prominent position or a celebrity or something like that who steps into the circle. You keep it quiet. People don't talk. But the second he was busted everybody started to talk: 'Oh yeah, I know him. I did this.' It's like all guns were drawn."

After an A-list event Barlow could invite guests back to one of two homes, a party pad in inner-city Teneriffe or, later, the sprawling three-level New Farm apartment with dance party spaces decked out like nightclub interiors. There was always a bottle of something fine and French on hand: a $4300'96 Krug Clos d'Ambonnay; a $9500'02 Louis Roederer Cristal. He could guide guests to his art collection: screen prints by Brett Whiteley, Louis Vuitton maps created in silk twill, and his two most impressive pieces: Jeffrey Smart's Study for The Terrace, Variations on a Theme and Tim Storrier's 3m by 1.5m epic landscape, Starlight and the Plain.

"He bought them from me just before he was arrested," says esteemed Brisbane gallery owner Philip Bacon. "He came to look at the pictures out of hours. He was sort of using agents for various things. Like runners, I suppose. I think somebody would have said, 'Look, you need some good pictures, you should go and look at Philip Bacon'."

It's a thought echoed by several high-end store owners who liaised regularly with Barlow. Many felt he didn't have a taste of his own. He was merely guided by an inner circle of interior designers and stylists. If they said an object, an item, another frivolous thing should be bought, he bought it, resulting in an apartment with no apparent theme apart from multi-coloured excess.

When Bacon first heard that a Tahitian prince wanted to purchase one of his paintings, he immediately thought of the narcissistic personality disorder known as "grandiosity", where often penniless people convince themselves they hold positions of wealth and superiority. "I've experienced it twice before," Bacon says. "People who are mentally disturbed go off shopping and they write cheques and buy more and more and more and they have no money at all. In fact, they believe they are the heir to a fortune. That's exactly what I thought it was. I didn't think it was fraud.

"An agent type person who I knew vaguely rang up and said, 'There's this very rich young royal.' I said, 'What do you mean royal?' 'You know, Tahitian royal, and he's obviously inherited a lot of money and he's buying a lot of things everywhere and I know the pictures he's been installing in his place are not very good, in fact they're terrible, and he should buy something good and I sent him into your place, but nobody spoke to him.'"

Bacon was furious at this last piece of information. He prides himself on running a business where "nobody judges a book by its cover". Later, interrogating his staff, he discovered all attempts were made to engage the apparent Tahitian prince. "They did remember him and he was very clear that he did not want to be spoken to and just sort of wandered around and looked at things and sat on one of our benches and stared off into the distance and then left."

For all his flamboyant possessions, Barlow was a shy man. Quiet, gentle, polite and reserved. On occasion he would fire off a heated email to a store owner who might have delayed a shipment or messed up an order. The email would preach about values, decency, expectation, ways of treating people - the ways of a prince. But often in person it was far easier for him to leave the talk to a series of willing representatives.

"Joel Barlow was crashing high society in Brisbane and succeeded for many years," says Damien Anthony Rossi. "It's a very glamorous and exciting world and some people absolutely only want to exist in that world. I think to a certain degree that's what he always set his sights on, and to bankroll that world he had to create a persona for himself.

"He wasn't outgoing. He wasn't the life of the party. The times I ran into him I actually found him quite reserved. Physically, he was a standout because he was tall and well-dressed. But certainly, personality wise, not a standout at all. Just very, very reserved. You might even say introverted. He had to have the material things to make a name for himself because he was lacking the personality to do that."

To Bacon's surprise, the Tahitian prince's payment cleared. "The agent came back with some numbers written down on a scrap of paper with his credit card details. We put it through and they went through and the pictures were delivered to his big new apartment. He bought that big grand Tim Storrier for his big grand apartment. I was told they had to get scaffolding to hang it in his apartment. It was there for two weeks or so and all hell broke loose."

A warm day in Brisbane, Sunday, March 10. Patchy rain. Some 5000 people spill into the cafe precinct surrounding Woolloongabba's Antique and Fine Art Auctions house, whispering and gasping as auctioneers shout increasingly inflated bid prices for Barlow's belongings. Dr Vern Madden has driven two hours from Toowoomba in Queensland's Darling Downs to be here. He's baffled by the collection. "I mean, let's face it, you and I would have kept our mouths shut," he says. "Squirreled away $10 million and disappeared to Brazil to live happily ever after."

People have travelled from Perth to be at the auction, from New Zealand. Across Brisbane, people are hosting Joel Barlow auction parties, swilling champagne and tracking bid prices on home computers. Joel Barlow's dreams may just be coming true: thousands are marvelling at his possessions. They're all searching for Citizen Kane's Rosebud, the piece that defines the man. It might well be Matthew Cheyne's Rumour, a 2m-wide oil painting showing a group of people wearing hats made of newspapers and gossiping behind a woman's back.

Barlow sought this painting out. He went to uncharacteristic lengths to acquire it, flying to Melbourne's Libby Edwards Galleries with an entourage to purchase it and fly it back to Brisbane. "He had two guys with him," recalls gallery manager Katie Edwards. "Assistants who would hand him this beautiful gold pen. And he would sign the cheque. Quite an eccentric character. Immaculately dressed, just like he'd walked off a catwalk. He arrived in this chauffeur-driven car. He was very introspective. Didn't say a lot. His assistant was more talkative. But you could see he knew exactly what he wanted and he'd done a lot of research.

"He's just a very smooth character. He had these purple suede lace-up shoes that were amazing. But the whole image, the whole package, felt constructed. He played that part very well... We were taken aback after he left. Like we'd been part of some staged event. It was just surreal. It felt like we were on Candid Camera. The lead up to it, everything, was so elaborate."

Matthew Cheyne painted Rumour in 2009. It's a work inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Golden Age poet's epic collection of tales of transformation. The painting draws from a passage in Book 12 of Metamorphoses, entitled The House of Rumour, describing a place where truth mingles randomly with fiction. "Here is Credulity," writes Ovid. "Here is rash Error, empty Delight and alarming Fear ... "

"It's just too perfect that a guy like that ends up with this painting," Cheyne says.

Barlow's transformation tale, his metamorphosis, began in New Zealand, where Thames High School mates recall him walking around with a regal staff, professing connections to the rich and famous. Dr Robert Clark is a Brisbane chiropractor who went to the same Thames primary school as Barlow. He says Thames was never going to suit a boy with an ambition and wanderlust such as Barlow's.

"This is redneck country culture you're talking about," he says. "Growing up as a kid, you were really just watching the grass grow. Nothing, nothing, nothing happened in Thames. It's such a small, boring country town. It's like Australian country kids fleeing their home towns, Thames was very much a place like that. If you didn't want to let your life pass you by, you had to get out and a lot of us did that. Either with family, or on your own." The world or bust.

In 1999, Barlow was convicted of stealing $55,356 from the New Zealand Inland Revenue, where he worked for two years in his early 20s. His one-year jail sentence was suspended for 18 months on condition of good behaviour. In 2005, he walked into a job at Queensland Health and with a jaw-dropping absence of thorough background checks rose quickly through pay grades on a false claim of possessing a law degree from Victoria University of Wellington. He beavered away through two major Queensland Health scandals - the infamous Dr Jayant Patel saga and the department's payroll debacle - at a time when his department was in such disarray that taxi drivers were claiming Osama bin Laden was hiding out as a janitor at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital.

In 2007, Barlow's world took a seismic shift with the suicide of his younger brother Trevor, or T-Rev as the family the whanau - called him. It was this moment that Legal Aid barrister David Shepherd would later say led Barlow racked with guilt over not being there for his brother - on a compulsive downward spiral of self-destruction. He always knew he would be caught. But he kept going. Bigger, bolder, brassier, leaving behind a remarkable number of glaring signposts to his crimes, not the least of which was channelling funds to a company under his name so that anyone who took the time to research the company's ABN on a free government website would connect the transfer of $16.6 million of public money to Joel Morehu-Barlow. And that's exactly what a middlelevel Queensland Health staffer did one breezy day in the summer of 2011, single-handedly ending the prince's colourful reign.

Tuesday, March 19, courtroom 25, Brisbane District Court. There stands Kelly-Ann Barlow's older brother, Hohepa. Short crew cut. Black suit and white business shirt. He turns to his younger sister. He has a soft smile, a handsome face. He looks relieved more than anything. In the public gallery a cousin whispers in Kelly-Ann's ear: "Whatever happens, I don't want to see you cry."

Joel Barlow has no friends here. No former colleagues. No representatives from Louis Vuitton. No members of the Cloudland bar staff. He only has family. His whanau. Barlow leans into a microphone in the prisoner's box, flanked by two security guards. "Guilty," he says.Then he sits and listens for two hours and 20 minutes as the details of his metamorphosis are measured, weighed against the past. Barlow's cousin nervously peels a warning sticker off his cigarette lighter as he waits to hear the judge's sentencing.

Barlow, 38, nods his head when Judge Kerry O'Brien looks him in the eye and tells him he broke the public's trust for "little more, it seems, than the enjoyment of an extravagant lifestyle". Most of the time he keeps his face to the ground, head still. His box is directly in front of the crowded public gallery. He looks like Rumour in Matthew Cheyne's painting, sitting solo as a crowd of people whisper about him behind his back.

"There is a place at the centre of the world, between the zones of earth, sea, and sky," wrote Ovid in The House of Rumour. "From here, whatever exists is seen ... There is no peace within: no silence anywhere. Yet there is no clamour, only the subdued murmur of voices, like the waves of the sea..."

Barlow stands and Judge O'Brien tells him he is sentenced to 14 years in prison. Hohepa Hikairo Morehu-Barlow simply nods his head. His cousin with the cigarette lighter reacts immediately. "Faaaaark," he says.