Johann Friedrich Hohenberger OAM (7 September 195027 July 1991), also known as John Friedrich, was executive director of the National Safety Council of Australia (Victorian Division) during the 1980s. He was the subject of Victoria's biggest fraud case and known as "Australia's greatest conman".

Early life

Hohenberger was born on 7 September 1950 in Munich, West Germany. He was the second of two sons born to Elisabeth (née Wehner) and Johann Christian Hohenberger.

Hohenberger was a West German national. In August 1972, Hohenberger began working as an independent contractor with the German road construction company Strassen und Teerbau. Around July 1974, he forged road building orders from distant mountain towns and used them to order Strassen und Teerbau to build roads. No roads were ever built, and no earthworks or materials were ever bought. Hohenberger embezzled 300,000 DM from the company.

Hohenberger was on a skiing holiday in Italy at the time German police issued a warrant for his arrest. He never returned to Germany; having gone out onto the slopes and not returned, he was presumed to have died. Although German police were sceptical of his disappearance, believing that somebody had tipped him off to the investigation, the discovery of his bags over a year later reinforced the theory that he had either had an accident or committed suicide.

Move to Australia

On 20 January 1975, Hohenberger arrived in Melbourne on a flight from Auckland, New Zealand. According to Department of Immigration records, Hohenberger left Australia on a flight to Singapore on 22 January. It is thought he tricked Australian Customs into believing he had boarded a plane but remained in Australia.

Using the name John Friedrich and fake qualifications, Hohenberger gained a contract with construction company Codelfa Cogefar, working on part of the Melbourne underground rail loop.

Following the financial collapse of NSCA in 1989, Friedrich went into hiding. After a nationwide and international manhunt, involving all Australian police forces and Interpol, he was arrested in Perth on 6 April 1989. He was initially charged with one count of obtaining financial advantage by deception. On 1 November, he was charged on a further 91 counts of obtaining property by deception.

In subsequent investigations, it was discovered that Friedrich was not an Australian citizen, did not possess any valid birth certificate, and did not appear on any electoral roll. This caused considerable embarrassment to the Department of Defence, which had given him a security clearance and almost unlimited access to Royal Australian Air Force bases.

Autobiography

Friedrich was writing an autobiography with the assistance of Richard Flanagan at the time of his death. It was published posthumously. In it, he claimed to have been born in South Australia in 1945 to German parents, attended boarding school in West Germany and studied engineering at the Technische Hochschule. Friedrich also claimed that, while working for an American construction company, he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency and, under the codename "Iago", worked in Laos, Vietnam, Egypt, New Zealand and West Germany against far left-wing extremists before returning to Australia in 1975. A subsequent 2017 essay by Caterson likening Friedrich to Jeff Tracy is titled "John Friedrich: Australia's Most Altruistic Fraudster".

References

  • Documentary excerpt