When French firefighters found a distressed Carew, intoxicated and injured on the side of a Paris street, they offered assistance. He was in no state to argue and, as is protocol, they searched his carry bag for identification.

What happened next put Carew in the middle of a world-wide money laundering investigation and triggered a series of events which now has the Melbourne-born real estate agent behind bars on remand and estranged from family and friends.

The pompiers found a lot more than a passport that fateful night. Inside Carew’s bag was almost 200,000 in euro notes. According to police, he was extremely evasive during questioning and was detained. Soon one of France’s most powerful law enforcement units, Junalco, was looking over every facet of his life.

This included a police raid on the Airbnb he was staying at in the north of Paris, where a further 160,000 in euros was found. Later more than 4m euros in questionable transactions was discovered by Junalco’s crack organised crime investigators.

He was charged with aggravated money laundering and conspiracy to commit an offence punishable by 10 years or more in jail.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

After being released on bail, or “judicial control” as it is called in France, and slapped with an ankle bracelet, Carew, 43, allegedly plunged into another alcohol-fuelled downward spiral, resulting in him being charged with the attempted murder of his Russian wife in April this year.

But before the sliding doors moment on that Parisian street in late 2021, Carew seemed to have it all. A flashy career doing real estate deals in the exclusive enclave of the Principality of Monaco and a seemingly Instagram-perfect life with his gorgeous Russian bride in a villa on the French Riviera.

He craved the luxury lifestyle but now as Carew languishes in a Nice jail awaiting trial, the Herald Sun can reveal the full story of how the boy from St Kevin’s College, Toorak, came unstuck on the millionaire’s playground of France’s Cote d’Azur.

IT’S not the most expensive, or prestigious private school in Melbourne like nearby rival Scotch College, or its Catholic school competitor Xavier.

But yearly fees at St Kevin’s College still top $22,000 and the campus, nestled on a Toorak bend of the Yarra River, has pumped out captains of industry and more than its fair share of top level AFL players.

Melbourne’s private schools and incestuous social networking quickly carves out the haves and the have mores. Growing up Carew’s parents were not your over-the-top wealthy types. They were well off, rubbing shoulders at the Kooyong Tennis Club and mixing with the “right people”.

But with that grew the lust and lure for more.

Old school friends and colleagues remember Damien Carew as fun, good looking and popular.

But then always comes the pause.

Words like “thirsty” and “socially and financially ambitious” are bandied about.

“He liked to date rich girls from Lauriston,” said one.

Times were different when Carew graduated in 1997, long before students were staring into their mobile devices and conversing via social media.

He was a popular drama student, earning an award, “half colours” for his appearance on stage in Power Corrupts, a collection of Shakespeare extracts.

He also participated in performances of another kind, where boys from rival schools gathered in the streets of Toorak to sledge one another.

Carew summered in the shifting sands down the Mornington Peninsula coastal town of the rich and famous, Portsea. The family’s modest beach home, nestled down an agapantha-lined dead-end road, overlooks the backyards of compounds owned by some of Melbourne’s most powerful household names.

Like many of his private school alumni, Carew used his finely honed social network to carve out a career in real estate.

Always searching, he quickly found himself relocating to the bright lights of Sydney.

He quickly latched on to the fast talkers of Emerald City, including high-flying agent to the stars Alexander Phillips, who is reportedly responsible for more than $1bn in sales a year.

By 2004, he was a licensed real estate agent in NSW but he was always looking for more and the growing global expat scene in Dubai was his next stop.

A mass of gleaming towers thrusting out of the desert on the shores of the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates city was booming in the mid-2000s, with real estate prices sky-rocketing and lots of fast cash to be made.

In 2007 he was quoted in a travel piece about a typical Dubai folly, an indoor ski field, as an “expatriate Australian real estate ace”, telling the readers: “If you are in real estate, this is the place to be.”

Sources say he stuck it out in the Gulf petrostate following the 2008 global financial crisis, which pricked the Dubai real estate bubble and saw hordes of highly geared expats flee the Emirates, leaving their supercars to collect dust in the airport carpark rather than face jail in a country where failing to repay your debts is a serious crime.

“He was always trying to do some new project, whether it be selling diamonds or whatever,” one friend from his Melbourne days said.

It was around this time Carew met his Russian bride, Anna Polianskaya on a beach while holidaying in Greece.

Carew’s next frontier was Monaco where his wife, the daughter of wealthy Russians, had grown up.

Anna attended the International School of Monaco, where students learn in French and English.

Until 2011 Anna’s family owned a two-storey villa, complete with manicured lawns and pool and a stone’s throw from where their daughter got married in nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where real estate is almost as expensive as inside the principality.

Famed novelist Somerset Maugham describes the luxury playground for the rich and famous as a “sunny spot for shady people” and Carew was quickly living an extravagant lifestyle and, like the hubris doomed Greek god Icarus, drifting too close to the sun.

Dressed in a white tux with his trademark long brown locks swept back in a ponytail, Carew was marrying his wealthy Russia-born bride at the Italian Renaissance inspired palazzo Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild on a perfect day in 2013.

All the “right people” from Melbourne society had been invited. Some guests were surprised they had been invited, given they hardly knew the couple. His brother Justin, or Juzzy, was best man and Clark Kirby, who is now Village Roadshow’s CEO, was a groomsman.

Guests would later recover from the swish, spare-no-expense nuptials at La Paloma restaurant on the Cote d’Azur.

It was the same venue where Australia’s once richest man, James Packer, also recovered from his wedding to bride number two Erica Baxter.

The newlywed Carews rented a smart 160 sqm four-bedroom house, Chateau Villa Flore, in La Turbie, a village just across the Monaco border in France that nestles in the lush green Laghet Valley amid the heart of the rolling Nice hinterland.

They lived among rich retirees in their 50s and 60s and were at first viewed fondly by their neighbours for their public displays of affection and penchant for entertaining friends with parties going into the early hours.

Because he had no record of work or French bank statements, the owners initially rejected Carew’s offer of renting the newly-renovated €2,500 a month home - so he stumped up a year’s rent, €28,000, to gain their trust.

“I didn’t want to accept his offer to rent our home, we live quietly here, he was young and energetic, and I didn’t trust his work record, he had been living in Dubai, in France, it’s near impossible to get rid of bad tenants,” one of the owners said.

“But when he offered a year’s rent we decided to take a chance on them for a year and reassess then.”

“When they first came, they were completely in love, they were always going for walks with the three dogs while holding hands and kissing in the street.

“They were the young couple in the area, we liked them, they had just married, he was crazy for her. He was always buying her presents, shoes and designer clothes.”

While living here, Carew ran a string of businesses registered in Monaco, the UK and Latvia.

The Monaco company, BCR International, was set up in 2017 to buy and sell real estate in the tiny territory.

BCR’s official address was a tiny fifth floor studio apartment within a serviced apartment block on Avenue l’Annonciade, near the Monaco Port with its gleaming yachts and cruise ships, where businessmen strike multi million dollar deals in exclusive restaurants.

The building’s security guard, Mohammed Ddouksne recalled a friendly, “loud” Australian who would greet him each time with a boisterous “morning mate”.

“He was a nice chatty friendly guy but didn’t speak a word of French, he struggled to make himself understood, he was always loud, you’d hear him before you saw him.

“I was shocked to hear he had fights with his wife and is now in prison. There was no indication of marriage troubles, he always appeared happy.”

Another source on the building’s security team said Carew “was a bizarre man who would come to work in his tennis shorts, long hair, and did not speak any French.

“He could never look you in the eye . . . mostly though he would entertain businessmen in suits in the studio flat and discuss property deals over drinks.

“When he was drunk and it was too late to drive home to La Turbie, he slept at the studio.”

It’s not clear that much came of any of Carew’s business dreams, with the companies he ran while living in the south of France all defunct by 2021.

Things really started to fall apart after his arrest in Paris, which Anna attempted to hide from their neighbours.

She told them her husband had moved back to the French capital for work.

“She would always be late jumping in the car to Nice airport, pointing at her watch saying she was late to catch her flight to spend the weekend in Paris with him,” said one local.

“She said he had relocated there for a year for work and would be coming back.

“We now know she was visiting him in prison.”

He was released after a year and returned to the villa, showing off his ankle tag around the village.

By this time Carew had lost contact with friends in Australia who were also unaware of his jail stint.

“I’d hear from him every couple of months,” an old Australian friend said. “Then he just disappeared off the face of the earth.”

With his life spiralling out of control, French police will allege Carew exploded into violence in April hurting his wife so badly she spent weeks in hospital recovering in an induced coma.

He was arrested and thrown in a Nice jail where he waits on remand.

The couple’s home is still a crime scene, sealed by red French police tape, with Carew’s white Porsche SUV and Anna Polianaskaya-Carew’s BMW X5 parked in the driveway. Its landlords are furious that they can’t get back in.

“Police say we’re not allowed to enter until the case is resolved - that could take years in France,” one of the owners said.

“Police tape is normally removed after a month in France, why won’t they let us go into our own home?”

French sources say it could be years before the Australian even gets before a judge due the country’s swamped and bureaucratic justice system.

Time is now the only thing Damien Carew has a lot of as he contemplates his predicament and the chance discovery on the Paris street which caused his once picture perfect life to come crashing down.