November 6, 2005

                           see also 1) Comparing Signatures and 2)The Aide Who Paid and 3)Editor's Note and 4) Exclusive Interview

Finalist for the 2006 Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism

Gotcha, Goldberg!   (see report here)                                

The one that got away

When Melbourne rag trade magnate Abraham Goldberg disappeared, $1.5bn went missing with him. How we tracked down Australia's biggest corporate fugitive.

EXCLUSIVE by Eric Ellis and Preston Smith

WARSAW, late October.

Sleek Mercedes and SUVs cruise cobbled streets that once carried sputtering Trabants and Tatras. Like Poland’s Stalinist yesteryear, the limos are black and their windows tinted. These days they no longer conceal communist spooks or party apparatchiks, but tycoons and their bodyguards. Poland has changed much since the Cold War.

But capitalism hasn’t changed the weather. Warsaw is as bleak as a le Carré thriller on this grey and bitter Sunday – the sort of day a Melburnian would be comfortable with. Which is what the man The Bulletin has tracked to an upscale city apartment called himself 14 years ago, before he became a fugitive from Australian justice, fleeing creditors left wondering about the $1.5bn they had invested in his companies.

Shades of le Carré again; like his secret police, we’ve staked out the Dom Wilanowski building at 2a Cypryjska Street from 7am, waiting for this man to surface; for breakfast, to pick up the papers, or to enjoy the simple pleasure of a weekend constitutional. Or even, perhaps, to vote, for it is also election day in Poland. The man we are looking for – once, and quite possibly still, one of Australia’s richest businessmen – renewed his citizenship here. The new president his fellow Poles will elect later today, Lech Kaczynski, will landslide to power promising to rid the newly democratic country of corporate crooks and corruption.

There are some Australians who say our quarry, Abraham Goldberg, is exactly that sort of man. His textile-based Linter Group was once one of Australia’s biggest companies. At his peak, Abe Goldberg could boast that his products – iconic Aussie brand names like Speedo, Kolotex, Exacto, King Gee and Stubbies – cluttered almost every wardrobe in the country. And then it all ended, suddenly, spectacularly and criminally, amid charges that millions of dollars were transferred by Goldberg’s executives to accounts and shelters around the world.

After which he simply disappeared. In a year, Goldberg went from being the world’s biggest rag trader to one of Australia’s most notorious fugitives. His business aide, Katy Boskovitz, went to jail in 1998, the only person to pay for the Linter misdeeds. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, and the Department of Public Prosecutions have searched for him, and there may be as many as 17 charges outstanding. For the best part of 15 years, no one – not journalists, nor expensive government lawyers, nor liquidators or the private investigators they hired in Australia, Israel, the United States and Poland – has been able to pin him down. He’s been rumoured to be living in Israel, Los Angeles and here in Poland, his birthland. Some reports have even pronounced him dead, unsurprising given that he’s 76. Wherever he’s been, it’s not back to Australia, where justice is yet to be tried on Abraham Goldberg.

But The Bulletin is close. The unsuspecting Wilanowski doorman confirmed the previous day that a “Mr Goldberg” lives on the third floor, that he speaks English and that he has a daughter and son-in-law with the surname Furst. As far as he knows, the doorman says, the man is called Aleksander Goldberg, and he’s 70-ish. And he has a limp.

Polish corporate documents show that the Aleksander Goldberg living on the 3rd floor at 2a Cypryjska Street is close in age to Abraham Goldberg: Aleksander was born on June 23, 1929, while Australian records show Abraham was born on January 4, 1931. The Polish documents show that Aleksander Goldberg’s main business partners in Warsaw are Deborah and Zev Furst and a Sigmund Rolat. Deborah and Zev Furst are also the names of Abraham Goldberg’s daughter and son-in-law, to whom he transferred assets years ago. And Sigmund Rolat was the name of the New York-based businessman who first hired – and later claimed to have sacked – Abraham Goldberg when he fled Australia.

Brothers perhaps? A cousin? Or is it the same man?

Then comes the clincher. The Bulletin discovers papers signed in July this year by Aleksander Goldberg. The signatures are nearly identical to the one Abraham Goldberg applied to paperwork all those years ago. Short of a person’s DNA sample or fingerprint, handwriting experts say there is little better proof of identity than a signature. The man living on Cypryjska Street is Abraham Goldberg.

So, at 9am on this chilly Warsaw Sunday, we waste no more time on the stake-out. We bid the doorman a cheery dzien dobry greeting – we’re old friends by now. He asks if we’d like to speak to Mr Goldberg, then dials and hands us the building’s intercom handpiece. A man, old of voice, clearly fluent in English but with a thick eastern European accent, answers.

The Bulletin: Mr Goldberg?

Goldberg: Yes.

B: Good morning to you and sorry to bother you, but my name is Eric Ellis, a journalist from The Bulletin magazine in Australia, which I’m sure you know, and I would like to have a chat with you.

G: I am busy right now, I have to go to the hospital at 10am and I am just getting dressed. We can talk after that if you like.

B: What is the best way to get in contact with you?

G: You can reach me on my mobile.

B: What’s the number?

G: (gives number without hesitation) ... but it might be turned off while I am at the hospital.

B: Do you have a home number?

G: Yes (gives number).

B: What about your daughter Deborah and your son-in-law Zev? Are they here? Maybe I could talk to them?

G: Deborah was here but she has gone back, but Zev is around.

B: You sure you can’t spare a few moments right now?

G: No.

B: That’s a shame, as there is a lot to talk about – your activities here over the last 10 or so years and what happened with your businesses in Australia.

G: (laughs) I have forgotten a lot about what happened in Melbourne.

Later, we call the telephone numbers Goldberg gave us. On the home number, we speak to his wife, Janette. She says she is ill with “problems with my spine”. Friendly enough but sounding frail, she picks up an Australian accent on the line and asks after its provenance; Melbourne. “I, too, am from Melbourne,” she says, and then suggests we call her husband on his mobile. He answers and agrees to meet the following day at 4pm, in the headquarters of Oxford Polska, on the 23rd floor of the Oxford Tower building that Polish corporate records show he part-owns. It is one of the tallest in Warsaw. “But no photographers,” he insists, and we reluctantly agree. It will be the first media interview Goldberg has done since leaving Australia.

After 14 years on the run, the last of Australia’s great business buccaneers and fugitives has finally been found. There’s a lot to discuss.

PERHAPS the correct way to assess the fortunate life of Abraham Goldberg is to join its various dots.

Here is a man, a survivor of the holocaust of his Polish homeland, ­arriving in 1948 to the abundant promise of post-war Australia – a penniless 19-year-old determined to rebuild the family fortunes that Hitler’s Nazis had murderously torn from them.

And he did. Phenomenally. Out of the war’s ashes came one of Australia’s genuine immigrant success stories. By 1989, with luck, guile and perhaps some of the same necessary cunning that kept him clear of the extermination camps, Abe Goldberg, with his famous brands, was regarded as the world’s biggest rag-trader. That year, his wealth was calculated to be $600m, which made him Australia’s fourth-richest man, up there with the Packers, Murdochs and Pratts. He lived in Toorak, in a sprawling faux English mansion on pukka Orrong Road, with a Rolls-Royce in its garage. He had more than earned his place in the heart of Australia’s Waspish establishment. It had been a fortunate life indeed.

But for Goldberg, like many Australian tycoons of the mad, greedy ’80s – Bond, Skase, Elliott, Connell – it wasn’t enough. He overreached – at least that’s the charitable way of putting it – by so much that by 1990, Linter had collapsed. Goldberg’s bankers, his shareholders and his 50,000-odd employees were missing around $1.5bn. Unsurprisingly, ASIC sought his arrest.

Let’s put that another way. There was a $1.5bn gap in the affairs of Abraham Goldberg, with charges flying of massive illicit cash transfers around the world. Wherever it went, the money was gone, and probably only Goldberg himself knew where it was. Or maybe his family: his wife Janette and two daughters, Deborah and Faye, and Deborah’s husband Zev Furst. Goldberg always insisted, when it suited him – usually when investigators and journalists asked difficult questions – that he had never owned Linter, that mysterious family trusts did.

And this is where Abe Goldberg was lucky again. He didn’t win the America’s Cup or preen around toney tropical resorts. Even though his travails – or were they crimes? – were bigger, more serious, than Alan Bond’s or Christopher Skase’s, he stayed under the radar of media and investigators; perhaps he was just cleverer than all of them. Then Goldberg got very fortunate. In 1989, about the time Linter was unravelling, Poles revolted. Lech Walesa’s Solidarity trade union movement threw off 44 years of Stalinism. With creditors and investigators after him, Goldberg quickly organised himself a passport in the new Poland. After 42 years in Australia, he could return home and start afresh, where few knew him and fewer would care. Naturally, because Poland had been in the Soviet orbit and Australia was a Cold War ally of Washington’s, Canberra and Warsaw had no extradition treaty (an anomaly since corrected). By late 1990 he had disappeared, the one tyro of the 1980s who seemed to get away with it. He’d always said his business style was to create chaos for others to fix. When he fled Australia, Abe Goldberg left one hell of a mess.

In 1992, the co-author of this article, Eric Ellis, went to Poland looking for Abe Goldberg. He had become one of a succession – like Bond in Britain and Switzerland and Skase in Spain – who sought sanctuary from their pursuers in Europe. The word was that Goldberg had returned to his home town of Lodz. Ellis only got as far then as his lawyer, the former Polish judge Andrzej Lewandowski, who told him Goldberg was a poor man but one who “had a lot to offer in teaching the western ways of business in Poland. He’s a man with many contacts and in great demand”.

“It is normal in business to go up and down,” Lewandowski said. “There are many people like Mr Goldberg in Poland. Maybe Mr Goldberg’s situation is interesting in Australia, but people in Poland do not care. We have more important things to consider at this moment in our history.

“He will never return to Australia.”


FAST-FORWARD to October 2005 to again connect the dots that join Abe Goldberg’s fortunate life. After a month’s investigation in Warsaw, The Bulletin learns that:

Goldberg is one of Poland’s leading property magnates, and controls at least 22 c­ompanies. These ­companies own as many as a dozen buildings in Warsaw, including several of its tallest skyscrapers, in a portfolio worth as much as $1bn.

Despite the outstanding ASIC charges against him, Goldberg remains an Australian citizen, and claims to have been recently issued with a new passport by the Australian Embassy.

Goldberg operates under as many as 10 aliases, but controls most of his holdings via the name Aleksander Goldberg.

He may have committed an offence under Polish law by having separate identity cards and passports with different names and dates of birth.

He sits at the top of an extensive network of influential corporate interests from across Europe, North America and Israel.

Goldberg has been involved in at least one property transaction with the Polish-Australian ­scientist-businessman Richard Opara, who controls the Australian-listed ­company Avantogen, the former Australian Cancer Technology.

He is in business with Polish government agencies, and influential figures from the former ruling communist party.

There would seem more than enough assets in Abe Goldberg’s life today to satisfy many of the 15-year-old claims of his creditors. He himself admits: “Now, I’m not a poor man.”

Indeed, with these revelations – which have attracted the attention of Polish officials – it’s quite possible that the good fortune in Goldberg’s life might be just about to run out. Details of his activities, provided by The Bulletin, are due to be published this week in Poland’s leading newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, by Poland’s premier investigative ­journalist Bertold Kittel, who has worked with the co-author of this article, Preston Smith, in exposing many scandals in Warsaw. The new Kaczynski government that Poles elected last month promises to inculcate world’s best practices of corporate governance into corporate Poland. Says Kittel: “They [the new government] just might be looking for a target to show they are serious.”

Apart from the confusion over Goldberg’s contradictory official papers – which was the pretext Warsaw used to hand Alan Bond’s Gdansk-based former bagman Tony Oates to Australian authorities for trial – there is little to suggest he has done anything wrong by doing business in Poland, despite it being one of Europe’s less particular venues as regards corporate governance. But as Oates knows, there is now an extradition treaty.

That’s assuming the Australian authorities in pursuit – if that’s the appropriate term to describe their actions, or lack thereof, over the years – actually do their job. Luckily for Goldberg, the corporate sleuths haven’t exactly been Slipper-of-the-Yard-like in their determination to nab him – or, for that matter, even to find him. About the best they seem to have done is track him to rooms at Warsaw’s Holiday Inn and Marriott hotels, where they quizzed his own expensive lawyers. The Marriott is barely 100m from Goldberg’s head office.

SO HOW is that The Bulletin can find a fugitive who has been on the run from Australian justice for 14 years in just two weeks on a magazine’s meagre editorial budget, when the full financial and legal force of the Australian legal and regulatory system cannot?

To those stung by Linter’s collapse, this is more than a good question, particularly in an age when the penalties for white-collar crime have been elevated almost to the level of murder and child molestation. Consider the convictions handed to the HIH felons in Australia, and those who ran Enron.

It can’t have been the cost. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1994 that “the Goldberg bankruptcy and liquidation has been one of the best resourced this country has ever seen. The liquidator and trustee in bankruptcy have a golden stash to exploit in chasing down their prey – that is, the interest on $400m in cash that is sitting on deposit with the National Australia Bank – the only major Australian bank lucky enough not to have lent to Goldberg.”

The official 14-year hunt for Abe Goldberg is a saga that covers few in glory, except perhaps Goldberg himself for having the nous to keep out of view for so long. Then again, perhaps he had good luck to have such bureaucratic bumblers and buck-passers doing the chasing.

Take the Victorian Official Receivers office. When The Bulletin contacted the Israeli lawyer Louis Garb, whom the Victorian government engaged to find Goldberg in Warsaw in the mid-’90s, he said: “I don’t know where he is; he is a will-o’-the-wisp. He could even be dead.” So did Garb return his fee? No – in fact, he asked The Bulletin for a fee for information which we already had. Garb put The Bulletin onto Kristov Malcevski, a Warsaw investigator also angling for a fee, who sought Goldberg in 1995, spending Victorian taxpayers’ money in trying – and failing – to do so. “I don’t think he exists,” Malcevski said. “He is like a ghost; you will never catch him.”

For his part, the Victorian receiver Ashley Page said: “Goldberg received a discharge from bankruptcy approximately 10 years ago and we have had no dealings with him since then.” (That was possibly one of Goldberg’s better deals: he was discharged from bankruptcy in November 1995 after his family agreed to pay $5.1m in settlement of a reported $793m debt. That’s about a couple of months’ rent on one of his better Warsaw buildings.)

Lindsay Maxsted, from accountancy firm KPMG, was appointed the Linter liquidator in 1990. He’s now the head of KPMG in Australia, enjoying a glittering career built in part on his handling of the remains of the Goldberg corporate carcass. At first, Maxsted didn’t respond to The Bulletin’s requests. “I’ve forwarded your email to Lindsay,” lamented KPMG’s media consultant Kerry Little. “Not much more I can do, I’m afraid.” Then, after The Bulletin had tracked down Goldberg, Maxsted found time to talk. (The timing, he says, was coincidence.) He said he knows nothing of Goldberg’s activities in Warsaw but admitted it was “possible” that cash may have been filched from the accounts. “These things do happen sometimes,” he said.

He also stated it wasn’t his job to pursue such investigations, but rather to sort and sell various pieces of the empire, a task that he says he had largely completed after about 18 months. Maxsted said he hasn’t spoken to Goldberg since the early 1990s “because there was no need to” – he no longer had control over Linter and associates. If anyone had responsibility for pursuing Goldberg on criminal matters, it would be ASIC and the Director of Public Prosecutions.

ASIC refuses to answer any questions about the status of the Goldberg investigation; this, about a matter that in 1996 was described “as the largest court case in Australian commercial history”. Spokesperson Angela Friend said “we are aware Mr Goldberg has been out of the country for some time, and that Mr Goldberg has been the subject of an investigation”.

The DPP says its arrest warrants are still outstanding. “Goldberg cannot be extradited from Poland because he has Polish citizenship, and Poland will not extradite its own nationals.” When told he was still an Australian, they had no comment.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade seems to have been blindsided, too. When asked what they knew of Goldberg in Poland, a diplomat with connections to the Australian Embassy in Warsaw said: “I’ve never heard of the bloke. We’ve had no instructions on him. Can you send me over some stuff on him?” DFAT’s media spokesperson, Chris Kenny, did not return The Bulletin’s phone calls or emails on the matter. And yet, Goldberg claims he got his Australian passport renewed at the embassy on Nowogrodzka Street.

Richard Opara, who bought the late Rene Rivkin’s Sydney harbourside mansion, admits that although he met him on a number of earlier occasions in Poland, he hasn’t seen him since the late ’90s: “I am definitely not Goldberg’s representative in any way or form and I don’t have any business connections or associations with him.”

Curiously, about the only person willing to talk freely about Abraham Goldberg is Goldberg himself.

IN A 35-MINUTE discussion, Goldberg is by turns unrepentant, combative, contradictory and funny. He’s lost a bit of weight since leaving Australia, and is less avuncular than the man who founded one of this country’s great business empires. At first he says he won’t come back to face the charges against him, but then he says he will.

“I really have no plans for going back,” he says. “Of course, I maybe would like to go back some time because of this and that, but I have no desire at present: I am happy here, I have made my life, and that’s it. We have bought and sold lots of different companies. I am not a writer, I have to make a living. The Australian government is not paying me old [age] pension, so of course I am doing this.

“When I’m ready I will come,” the 76-year-old says. Then: “People live to 100.” He laughs. “There’s plenty of time. I’ll come when it suits me.” After 15 years away, Goldberg seems to have selective amnesia about the events that led to the collapse of Linter. While he says he has forgotten everything, when pressed he remembers enough to launch into a sharp condemnation of two of his fellow Linter directors, Katy Boskovitz and another senior executive, for the ills that befell him.

“There were two people who were responsible who did all this without my knowledge. These were Katy Boskovitz and [the senior executive], and that’s all,” he says. “If I have to go to [Australia to] clear myself, I will clear myself and I have no doubt that I will be cleared, because whatever the charges that were done were not done with my blessing, not by me but by two people who showed that because they were highly educated – and I am not – and they [thought] they knew better.”

The Bulletin: So why didn’t you go and have your day in court?

Goldberg: Because I was advised by the Australian lawyers not to come back.

B: You were advised by your Australian lawyers not to come back?

G: Yes.

B: What were the names of the lawyers?

G: I don’t remember.

B: But sir, the Australian legal system – are you saying the Australian legal system is not going to give you a fair trial? If you’ve done nothing wrong, as you insist, then ... (interrupted)

G: When I’m ready, I will come. When I’m ready, I will come.

B: If the Australian authorities, the legal system, contacted you right now and said, “Mr Goldberg, we would like you to come to court in a month” – if they gave you a date, would you go? If they paid for your ticket?

G: I don’t need them to pay. I have money. I don’t need them to pay.

B: The question was, would you go? If they set a day? To answer the matters outstanding?

G: They can come here and ask whatever questions they want.

Incredibly, for a corporate investigation once described as not only the largest in Australian history but the best-resourced, Goldberg told The Bulletin that no ­investigator from Australia has contacted him for a very long time.

B: Did you ever talk to Mr Maxsted? Lindsay Maxsted, of KPMG? Because he was looking into the affairs of your company, Linter.

G: Look, I called them in. I called them in.

B: When was the last contact you had with him?

G: I’ve never had any contact since I left.

B: What do you miss about Australia? You lived there for 40- or 50-odd years.

G: Vlado’s Restaurant.

ABRAHAM GOLDBERG operates out of an office of the company he and Rolat own, Oxford Polska, in central Warsaw. This is the company that in 1992, Rolat, a prominent New York businessman, said employed Goldberg when he first came to Poland on a salary of about $10,000 a month. Rolat told The Sydney Morning Herald he had sacked him later that year, when he learnt of his business past. “I told him that in view of the adverse publicity, we would not be able to employ him or have any business connection with him. We did not want to have him working with us. He said that he understood that.”

Clearly, time heals all wounds. Not only did Rolat employ Goldberg, he now has him as a partner. (Rolat was not accepting calls when The Bulletin called him for this article.) Polish corporate records show that Oxford Polska is part-owned by Goldberg, Rolat, and Goldberg’s son-in-law and daughter, Zev and Deborah Furst. Rolat’s name litters the various official documents connected to Goldberg. And he is clearly a well-connected man in powerful circles, as Goldberg himself proudly points out.

During the interview, he takes The Bulletin on a tour of Rolat’s office, adjacent to his. “Now, come, I will show you the things of my partner, Mr Rolat,” he beams. “I can’t tell you what to think, that is up to you.” The wall of Rolat’s office is adorned with photographs of Rolat shaking hands and smiling with various VIPs; former Polish presidents Lech Walesa and Aleksander Kwasniewski, former Israeli PM and Nobel Peace prize-winner Shimon Peres, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, various former Polish Communist Party hacks. It’s all very impressive, except to note that none of them is any longer in formal power.

In the interview, Goldberg insists he has a clear conscience about how he managed to start a new life in his birthland. Indeed, he describes a remarkably trusting business environment for newcomers like him.

B: When you left Australia, did you have any money?

G: No. According to the newspapers, yes, I had $1.5bn so they shouldn’t wonder what I have now.

B: There are people in Australia who would join the dots, [and decide] that the money you used to develop buildings here in Warsaw, that the money you use came from the companies and trusts that you controlled [in Australia].

G: Not one cent.

B: Are you absolutely sure of that?

G: I am absolutely sure, I know better than you.

B: Well, if you didn’t have any money when you left Australia, how were you able to get credit from major banks to buy buildings?

G: Because I had people, partners who put in money. I have dozens of people, and they would come and beg me to do it.

B: You are saying that in spite of the fact that you left Australia with these kinds of headlines that you took or absconded with more than $1bn ... but you don’t have any money, and you still had people that vouched for you, and banks took your word to buy all this property in Warsaw?

G: Yes, that’s what happened.

Goldberg’s portfolio of prime Polish real estate is both impressive and extensive. His properties are fully rented, with prestigious tenants such as Citibank, one of the world’s largest banks and, ironically, one of Linter’s prime creditors in Australia.

Poland last year became a full member of the EU, entrenching the former communist stronghold in the heart of modern Europe and capping off a decade of remarkable economic growth. Coffee culture abounds, not the dank bars that spycatchers might recognise but gleaming trendy affairs chirruping with mobile phones where Boss-clad businesspeople cut deals and swap text messages.

While large parts of the Polish countryside remain poor and backward, Warsaw is as thrusting a Euro-capital as any, positioning itself as an entree to reforming economies to the east, and a promising new market for western Europe. Poland clearly has been good to the canny Goldberg, who has deftly ridden all sides of the Euro-boom.

Apart from Oxford Tower, a building constructed in 1970 as Poland’s first skyscraper of the communist era, for the state-owned telecom company Elektrim, he, his family and associates control or recently controlled:

The Blue Tower (also known as the Peugeot Building), a 12-year-old 45-storey tower in the heart of Warsaw’s financial district, Plac Bankowy, or Banker’s Square.

Norway House, a modern eight-storey office block in central Warsaw.

A residential and commercial complex at 61 Jana Pawla II Street, one of Warsaw’s most prestigious boulevards, named after the late Polish primate and pope, John Paul II.

A huge industrial park and logistics centre, Centrum Jagiellonska, situated across Warsaw’s Vistula River. Spread over about 20ha, it was formerly the main factory site of communist Poland’s state carmaker.

Park Blonie, a big commercial complex in Warsaw’s outer suburbs.

Euro Finance Real Estate, a property developer.

Metropol Holdings, a property developer.

Agencja Investycyjna, a property investment company.

JP Properties, a property holding ­company.

RNS Investment Sp. Zoo. This appears to be at the top of the pyramid of the Goldberg group. Its officers are the core of his network: Rolat and his partner, prominent New York lawyer Aaron Seligson, and Zev and Deborah Furst.

Doradztwo Handlowe, a management company controlled by Goldberg and the Furst couple.

Goldberg’s associates are extensive, unsurprising for a man known in corporate Australia as The Square Dancer for his propensity to enter the corporate fray with one partner and exit with another. His companies have teamed up with one of Israel’s biggest corporates, the Fishman Group, as well as big Dutch retail groups, often via companies based in the tax havens of the Netherlands Antilles, the British Virgin Islands and Jersey. Another close associate is the prominent Israeli businessman Zvi Ichaki, who controls the Tel Aviv-listed Profit Building Industries, and has stakes in the Goldberg-Rolat-Furst empire.

Goldberg is represented by Poland’s most influential law firm, and seems to have formed alliances with Jerzy Zalega, a prominent official of the SLD – the reconstructed Communist Party whose previous incarnation took hold of many of Poland’s state-owned companies in the frantic rush to capitalism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even the former England Test cricketer Phil Edmonds has done business with Goldberg and his network of associates, investing in the former Eastern Europe, mostly in property.

Nowhere in the Polish documents is the name Abraham Goldberg evident. Abe Goldberg uses several names in Poland, notably Aleksander Kadyks and, spread through official records, Aleksander Goldberg. It seems typical of the confusion that swirls around the man.

B: For the record, when were you born? Your date of birth?

G: Well, I have three dates of birth (laughs).

B: You were born three times, were you?

G: (laughs) No. After the war, when we left Poland, with my parents we came to Germany, and my mother had a cousin in Australia and we asked her to send a permit – for me, for my brother, and she worked out that I was born in January 1931 and she sent us the permit like this. In Germany, we had no documents whatsoever ... so we went into the office there, and changed it. And so when we came to Australia, that is what it was. But when I came back here and checked my birthday, I found that I was born on the 23rd of June, 1929.

B: So what’s the correct one?

G: 1929.

B: The one in the Polish records?

G: Of course, yes.

B: So the Australian passport is incorrect?

G: I still have Australian passport, but (inaudible) date of naturalisation … (inaudible)

B: But your citizenship hasn’t expired or been revoked? You are still an Australian citizen?

G: I have a new passport.

B: You got it here? At the embassy?

G: Yes, yes.

B: You were known in Australia as Abraham Goldberg?

G: Yes.

B: And you were born, presumably, ­Abraham Goldberg?

G: Mmm.

B: But you have called yourself here ­Aleksander Kadyks first, and then ­Aleksander Goldberg now ...

G: Yes.

B: Perhaps you could explain that unusual thing for me?

G: I have 10 other names. Some call me Abe Goldberg – some call me Abraham Goldberg – some call me Adam Goldberg, whatever it is. But when I got the Polish passport, I changed my Polish passport to Aleksander Goldberg.

B: But why Aleksander Kadyks?

G: Aleksander Kadyks is when I came here. I changed from Goldberg to Aleksander Kadyks.

B: Why?

G: Because I wanted to have a passport under a different name.

B: Why?

G: Because I wanted. I don’t know why.

B: Because you were evading the ... (interrupted)

G: No, the Polish lawyer advised me not to have the passport as Abraham Goldberg. He said: “What is your wife’s name, or maiden name.” I told him this [and] this, he said Kadyks. Maybe he felt they don’t like Jews. And maybe that was his advice ...

B: That [lawyer] was Mr Lewandowski?

G: Yes, yes, Mr Lewandowski. He said: “If you are going to get the papers” – he got me the passport – and he said, “I suggest you change the name.” Later, I changed it back because nobody called me Kadyks. Everybody, they called me Goldberg.

B: Did he realise he was giving that advice to someone who was a fugitive from the law in Australia?

G: (after long silence) Hmm, probably. But I wasn’t a fugitive at that date. This was before even. I got the passport, I don’t know, in ’91, I see, and I didn’t get a sentence [charge] until ’93 [’91] I think. I don’t remember.

AMNESIA. It so often seems to afflict our business heroes who fall on difficult times. And over the years, the very few times Abraham Goldberg has surfaced to confront his accusers, he seems to have been burdened by an acute case of it. So what does the future hold for The People versus Abraham Goldberg after these revelations? Will they make any difference at all to the inertia of those who seem to have put him into their too-hard tray? Will they make any difference to Abe Goldberg? The chefs at Vlado’s might be advised to keep Abe’s favourite T-bones away from the flame for a while yet.

B: Do you think you got away with it?

G: What did I get away with? I lost more than everybody else. What do you mean I got away with it?

B: Well, that’s what many people think.

G: I don’t care what people think ...

B: There was Bond and John Elliott and ...

G: Yes.

B: And you were part of that group ...

G: Yes.

B: And they all progressively had their day in court, some lost, some did not ...

G: Maybe they were guilty. I don’t feel guilty.

B: ... you are 76-odd years old, 75 or there­abouts ... wouldn’t you like to go to your grave knowing that in your heart of hearts you have done ­nothing wrong by anybody, in Poland or in Australia? There are a lot of people in Australia ... who are extremely angry with you.

G: Maybe they were angry before, too ... people are what they are ... I don’t care or give a damn for them.

SEE ALSO Drugie życie Goldberga