Rip Off! is a panorama of Australian fraud – the fakes, the frauds, the scams, the hoaxes, the shams: the stings that get the conversation around the water cooler running hot. The stories in this book begin in the early 19th century with Australia’s first bank robbery and end with the heat going out of the climate change debate and the still simmering Australian history wars.
In 33 widely ranging chapters, Paul Taylor looks at some of Australia’s best-known rip offs:
• The Wagga Wagga butcher who hoodwinked half of England
• The clever, audacious and ultimately murderous Great Bookie Robbery
• The duplicity of Al Grassby, the politician in the pay of the Mafia
• The lies of Lawrence of Arabia that robbed the Light Horse of glory
• Rupert Murdoch’s fight to save Max Stuart from a ‘stitch up’ that had him on the steps of the scaffold.