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He was one of Australia’s greatest fraudsters, now a documentary is uncovering his extraordinary story
February 14, 2026
Chances are, you might not have heard of John Friedrich, the visionary head of the Victorian division of the National Safety Council of Australia in the 1970s and 1980s who built an elite search and rescue operation while defrauding investors and banks of almost $300 million.
Marc Fennell hadn’t either, despite his obsession with forgotten chapters of Australian history (Stuff the British Stole, the No One Saw it Coming podcast). When the Mastermind host – along with director Corrin Grant, his collaborator on art heist series Framed and The Mission – stumbled across Friedrich’s extraordinary story, they were all in.
“We looked at each other blankly and went, ‘Sorry, there was a guy that ran his own Thunderbirds out of country Victoria?’” says Fennell. “That’s actually not a terrible starting point … It’s one thing making documentaries about things everybody’s talking about … But if we aren’t going to tell these stories, who the hell is? If this happened in America or Britain, there’d be 14 films about it by now.”
Grant was as astonished to learn of Friedrich: “I was like, ‘Why have I never heard of this guy before?’ The story got so big so quickly. And sometimes that happens in news cycles. And then it’s gone. Marc’s always saying Australians are never particularly good at telling their own stories. And this is an incredible story.”
Featured in the two-part series Australia’s Greatest Conman? are three journalists who have never forgotten Friedrich: Hugh Riminton, Kerry O’Brien and Richard Fidler, a former member of the Doug Anthony All-Stars comedy group who lampooned the manhunt for Friedrich.
“Kerry O’Brien said the strangest thing to me,” says Fennell. “He said, ‘This is the most frustrating story I’ve ever worked on.’ Think about the years of work that man has done and his legacy as a journalist. That is an interesting admission.”
Finding former National Safety Council employees from the time in question willing to speak proved difficult. Many went on to work in emergency services and didn’t want to compromise their careers. Some were too traumatised, unable to trust anyone ever since. Others remained fiercely loyal to Friedrich.
“I would ask, ‘If John walked into this room right now saying I’m getting the band back together, would you follow him?’” says Fennell. “And a surprisingly large number of people were like, ‘Yep! In a heartbeat.’ There’s a million conman stories out there, but here you have a guy who didn’t do it to make himself rich.”
The interviews are mostly shot inside sheds or pubs.
“I wanted it to feel like you’re overhearing a conversation,” says Grant. “It’s like, ‘Here’s a story that’s so great you can barely believe it. Stay with me, because this is real.’”
A pub rock soundtrack accompanies archival footage of National Safety Council training exercises that are pure James Bond. Along with para-rescue involving dogs and even pigeons, the group pioneered aerial firefighting.
“People that came across the National Safety Council will say, ‘Oh, they had a lot of toys. They had a lot of equipment,’” says Grant. “And it feels, especially towards the end when the spending gets out of control, [Friedrich] was almost just collecting them. And so I thought that there was that playground that he created … Not the people that were involved. They were doing incredible work.”
For Fennell, the most fascinating part of Friedrich’s story is the deception.
“Anyone who’s ever lied about anything knows that those lies do weigh on you,” he says. “It’s a cumulative effect. I look at footage of [Friedrich] towards the end and I swear you can see it – the weight of the lies. You watch these interviews with him with Kerry O’Brien and [the late] George Negus, and he’s playing cat and mouse, but I can see the pain of him trying to keep his balls up in the air. You could argue that the lesson is about the weight of that on him.”
Australia’s Greatest Conman? premieres at 8.30pm on February 24, on SBS and SBS On Demand.
