Captain Calder Hoax beats themall
The recent Joanne Harrison fraud case related to her ripping off the Ministry of Transport to the tune of over $700,000 had the potential of being disastrously embarrassing to our Government.
Why else would all the bully boys run so scared and try to keep the State Service’s report on the sorry saga so secret. The only saving grace was the forced resignation of the Auditor General and former Transport Ministry boss Martin Matthews, who should have gone a long time ago when this all first surfaced.
But in terms of sheer manipulation and gall, no fraud in this country ever conned a government more than the ‘Captain Calder Hoax’. Few Kiwis know much about the series of events that played out over much of 1942, because just like the Ministry of Transport case, it was entirely shut down, such was the huge embarrassment it caused the government of the day.
It all started when its perpetrator and well known conman Sydney Gordon Ross was released from Waikeria Prison in late March 1942.
Only aged 33 at the time, he wasted no time getting to Wellington, later that very same day turning up at Parliament saying he had an matter of grave national urgency to discuss with Prime Minister Peter Fraser and Minister Robert Semple.
Amazingly, the jailbird was allowed an audience, and although the PMand Semple were relatively unimpressed with the slick-talking man, they passed the matter onto Major K. Foulkes, a British army officer who had been posted to New Zealand specially to take over our country’s wartime security.
It was the darkest days of WWII, and we still accepted that Britain knew best. While he was in prison, Ross claimed he had been approached by German agents who had heard of his skill with explosives and asked him to join their efforts to disrupt the national war effort and eventually invade the country.
Specifics included blowing up the Arapuni Dam and nothing less than the imminent assignation of both Fraser and Semple. Ross was now offering his services as a counter espionage agent to foil the enemy’s plans.
‘‘In spite of my record, I ama loyal British subject,’’ Ross told Foulkes, ‘‘and I’m sure I could be of service to this country if I went along with the enemy and unknown, to them, acted as an undercover agent for you.’’
With truly amazing gall, the only condition Ross put on his service to the country was that no word of his offer or anything he had revealed be shared with the police. The reality was that while in prison, Ross had become good jail buddies with a much older arch-confidence trickster named Charles Remmers. It was later said Ross’s elaborate lies all had the hallmarks of Remmers’ meticulous and plausible planning. Ross had perfected his art learning from the master.
Foulkes was completely taken in by Ross, immediately inducting the jailbird as a special agent whose powers exceeded that of even his Security Intelligence Bureau’s top staff. When asked where he wanted to base his undercover operation, Ross picked Rotorua, a place he said the enemy agents were based.
In reality it was his favourite town where he and his criminal colleagues had based many of their criminal activities.
Within days of getting out of prison, Ross was in residence at the government’s expense at the Grand Hotel in Rotorua. What’s more, he was given a hugely generous expense account and a big Buick car to drive around in with unlimited petrol, at a time when fuel was being severely rationed to ordinary New Zealanders. His top secret identity was allocated as ‘Captain Calder’, a past hero of the Merchant Navy.
Every day started like a holiday with a sumptuous and leisurely breakfast. Then he would cruise the countryside in his big American car, supposedly meeting enemy agents.
Actually though he was going around picking up his crooked mates and taking them out for lunch, often entertaining them with booze well into the evenings. How they must have laughed as together they began cooking up more and more elaborate stories about what the enemy were doing.
Ross’s best delivery came three months into the game, when ‘Captain Calder’ came up with some startling new information.
The assassination attempt had been called off, but now a full scale invasion was planned. He came up with a list of beaches they intended to land, and each day added tantalising new details. Each week more and more money got thrown at him to get more information.
The comings and goings of a senior security officer from Wellington to Rotorua to meet with so called ‘Captain Calder’ did not go unnoticed by Rotorua locals.
Rumours flew around that Ross calling himself Calder was the confidence trickster and swindling magsman they all knew. Magsman is English slang for a man who runs a pitch and toss coin game with weighted coins called ‘mags’, something Ross was well known for in pubs and clubs around the country. Every Criminal Investigation Branch in the country knew him as an active criminal.
It was not long before CIB detectives began calling on Ross, asking him some serious questions about how he was funding his plush lifestyle. Each time they got promptly warned off by men from the Security Intelligence Bureau: ‘‘Hands off – Prime Minister’s Dept.’’
The prospect of invasion became so heightened with the intelligence coming from Calder that Prime Minister Fraser began daily consulting with his Chiefs of Staff. Under our national defense set up, this involves letting the police in on everything. And they were not at all impressed.
Police quickly went through the several volumes of intelligence reports which ‘Calder’ had submitted, then sent a team of detectives led by Superintendent James Cummings to.interview Ross at the Grand Hotel in Rotorua.
It took the team less than two days to announce there was no substance at all in anything Ross had so called ‘‘unearthed’’, and that they were ‘‘all just products of the former jailbird’s fertile mind hell bent of making easy money without working for it.’’ The rent alone at the hotel had come to over £4000.
Two days later in Parliament, Grey Lynn MP John A. Lee asked the Prime Minister whether a newspaper report was true that the Security Intelligence Bureau had been putting up a known confidence trickster in Rotorua at the taxpayer’s expense. But the Prime Minister would only reply that the matter was under investigation.
Amazingly, Ross was never brought to trial for his wartime escapade that bordered on traitorous. He simply was kicked out of the Grand Hotel, and resumed using his real name.
Within a few months, he was convicted of false pretences and was sent to jail where he stayed until January 1946 when he got released to go to hospital in Auckland suffering from a chest ailment which ended up killing him a few months later. Our most successful conman was only 36.
Attorney General Rex Mason eventually put out a report, largely concluding that our Security Intelligence Bureau had been truly unfortunate in coming up against such brilliant criminal masterminds as Ross and Remmers.
The whole sorry waste of money and manpower did have the effect though of radically updating our intelligence service.
The disgraced Major Foulkes was quickly recalled back to Britain and the newly formed Police Special Branch took over our security until the NZ Security Service (later SIS) was formed in 1956.
Never again would our national security be trusted to another country, even England.