In 1984, six horse trainers tried to pull off a money-making scam by attempting a “ring-in”, a dodgy move where you enter a slow horse into a race with high odds, then swap it for a faster horse to make money.
The only problem in swapping Fine Cotton for the faster horse, Bold Personality, was the horses looked nothing alike.
Fine Cotton was dark brown with white markings on his legs, while Bold Personality was light brown with no markings.
To solve the issue, they bought boxes of hair dye from Brisbane pharmacies – only to find it had turned Bold Personality bright red – and spray-painted white marks on the horse’s legs.
Amazingly, nobody noticed anything suspicious, and Fine Cotton won the race, netting around $1.5 million.
However, just minutes later, spectators began to see spray paint running down the horse’s legs.
The horse was disqualified, and the group involved in the scam were banned from horseracing for life.
The scam leader John Gillespie was sentenced for four years jail time while the bookmaker Robbie Waterhouse lost his fielding licence for 17 years.
COP CON QUEEN
Conwoman Jody Harris started her career when she was just 14, and over the next 16 years she posed as a doctor, air hostess, lawyer and psychiatrist.
However, her favourite scam was deceiving police officers.
At 15, she conned a police officer, telling him she was 20, and dating him, before crashing his car.
At 19, she managed to convince a Brisbane police station she was a visiting interstate undercover officer by producing a police badge she had stolen and renting a Holden Commodore to look like a police car.
A few years later, Harris started dating police officer Andrew Twining.
She told him she was a flight attendant and away a lot for work, but during her time “away” she assumed at least six different identities and stole thousands of dollars.
He was none the wiser – until a journalist investigating identity theft ran a front-page story on her.
When Andrew saw her face on the front page of a newspaper, he agreed to help police catch her.
He convinced her to meet him, telling her they’d go on the run together.
When she got in his car, she was arrested by his colleagues.
In 2006, 30-year-old Harris pleaded guilty to 96 fraud-related offences and admitted to stealing more than $150,000 from her victims.
She was jailed for five years and nine months.
A year into her sentence, she wrote to Andrew, saying, “I adore you Andrew. I am changing daily to be the woman you deserve… when you can, please, please, send me some money for my shoes.”
DUMB AND DUMBER
When 19-year-old Aussies Luke Carroll and Anthony Prince robbed a bank in Colorado in 2005, it was hailed as the most inept bank robbery of all time.
Earning the title of the “Dumb and Dumber robbers”, the teens were on a working holiday when they decided they needed some extra cash.
During the robbery, they wore their nametags from the sports store they worked at, with customers and tellers all recognising their Aussie accents.
They got away with $203,000 during the heist, before trying to buy one-way tickets to Mexico with cash, then taking photographs of themselves in a public toilet posing with the stolen money.
When they were arrested at Denver airport, Prince had $6600 hidden in his shoes, and tried to flush $1200 down the toilet.
After they completed their five-year jail sentences,
Prince wrote a book called Bank Robbery For Beginners, which he dubbed “a story of criminal stupidity and its very serious consequences.”
