Revelations first aired by the ABC’s Four Corners about the Perth Mint in recent weeks have been startling to many, including that it sold “doped” gold to China that didn’t meet the Shanghai Gold Exchange’s strict standards and sold bullion to a notorious former bikie without any apparent background checks.
But it’s not the first time the mint has found itself embroiled in a scandal.
And there are few bigger scandals in WA history than the 1982 Perth Mint swindle.
Its cast of memorable characters included a trio of larrikin brothers, a corrupt detective who was ultimately murdered in a bikie revenge car bombing and tangentially, the infamous businessman Alan Bond.
How the mint was duped
The story began with the audacious theft from the mint of 68 kilograms of gold in June 1982 in a manner that seems incredible by today’s security standards.
On June 22, the mint received phone calls from three men who ordered the gold – one who identified himself as “Bob Fryer”, another as "Mr York" and the third a “Mr Blackwood”.
Worth $653,000 at the time – and an eye-watering $6.4 million today – the gold, in the form of 49 bars, was collected from the mint by three guards who turned up in separate armoured vehicles.
Each presented a building society cheque to the mint for the precious metal, which were accepted and the bullion was duly handed over.
It wasn’t until the following day that it was discovered the cheques had been stolen and the money didn’t exist.
With few apparent leads and public pressure mounting, police began to get desperate as the days and then weeks elapsed without an arrest.
A 'confession' to the mint swindle
And then, out of the blue, a stunning confession from a young Perth abalone diver, who also implicated two of his brothers in the crime.
Police celebrated and it’s a fairly safe bet sighs of relief were heard all the way down Hay Street from State Parliament to the elegant sandstone buildings of the mint itself.
The only problem was, the Mickelberg brothers – Brian, Raymond and Peter – had been framed.
Arrested by detectives on July 26, 22-year-old Peter Mickelberg had been taken to Belmont police station, in Perth’s eastern suburbs, where feared cop Don Hancock was waiting for him with his colleague Anthony Lewandowski.
The young man would later testify Hancock beat him and made him strip naked, but despite that, he refused to sign a confession to a crime he didn’t commit.
It didn’t matter.
Although unsigned, the so-called confession went on to form a major part of the prosecution’s case when Peter, Ray and Brian went on trial in the Supreme Court the following year for defrauding the mint.
The incriminating fingerprint
The other key plank supposedly proving the brothers’ guilt was the presence of Raymond Mickelberg’s fingerprint on one of the cheques presented to the mint.
By this time the police had conducted highly publicised raids on the Ray Mickelberg’s home – that they allowed TV cameras to film – which uncovered quantities of gold and silver hidden under the floorboards.
Never mind that the gold was not the stolen bullion, and that the brothers had receipts to prove they were the rightful owners.
Never mind that the gold was still missing and police had no idea where it was.
Never mind that Peter’s confession was in fact written by Don Hancock and fellow detective Anthony Lewandowski, and that Raymond’s fingerprint was planted by police.
There was to be no leniency from the presiding judge once the guilty verdicts were read out, with Justice Des Heenan singling out the fact that the trio had “refused” to give up the location of the missing gold.
Ray Mickelberg got an astonishing 20-year sentence – one of the harshest on record in Australia for property offences – while Peter was given 16 years and Brian 12 years.
Alan Bond's scam gold nugget
And police held another ace up their sleeve.
During their investigation they’d found a series of incriminating photographs at the home of Brian Pozzi, a friend of Ray Mickelberg’s, showing the brothers were connected to another gold scandal – the Yellow Rose of Texas scam.
In 1980 a huge nugget weighing more than 11 kilograms had supposedly been found near Kalgoorlie by an elderly prospecting couple.
In what turned out to be a publicity stunt, TV crews were called to Jandakot Airport where a light plane piloted by Brian Mickelberg landed, apparently from the Goldfields, and the woman who with her husband supposedly found the nugget, emerged carrying the huge rock.
The nugget was subsequently assessed by the Perth Mint as containing 94 per cent gold and valued at more than $200,000.
Named the Yellow Rose of Texas, the giant bauble was sold to Alan Bond for $350,000 – but in an ironic twist, the man who would go on to defraud investors to the tune of tens of millions was himself duped by the sale.
The nugget turned out to have been manufactured by Ray and Brian — reportedly to promote an adventure tourism and prospecting business they planned to start – and was valued at less than half of what Bond paid.
Not only Ray and Brian, but Peter, Brian and the brothers’ mother Peggy Mickelberg (who played the part of the elderly prospector emerging from the plane with the nugget) were all jailed for their role in this caper, though it had little impact on the sentences of those already behind bars.
Over the years the Mickelberg brothers launched multiple appeals against their Perth Mint swindle convictions, and Brian Mickelberg was partially successful, having his sentence cut to eight months.
He was released in 1984.
But in a tragic and what some labelled as a suspicious twist of fate, Brian was killed in a plane crash in 1986.
Gold sent to TV reporter
While Ray and Peter continued to languish in jail, the gold stolen in such a brazen fashion from the mint years earlier, remained missing.
That is, until 1989 when in a bombshell development, one of the missing gold bars was sent to television reporter Alison Fan with a note that read: “The Mickelbergs are innocent and rotting in jail".
Three months later, most of the rest of the missing bullion was delivered to the offices of Channel Seven in Perth in pelletised form, also with a note suggesting the Mickelbergs had been framed.
The mint confirmed it was indeed the missing gold, but the Mickelberg’s convictions over the swindle stood.
The mafia-style car bombing
That is until the story took another dramatic twist following the 2001 mafia-style assassination of Don Hancock, the detective who led the investigation into the mint swindle and took the incriminating statement from Peter Mickelberg.
Hancock and his bookie mate Lou Lewis died in a fiery explosion as they sat in a car in the crooked cop’s driveway and the bomb that had been planted underneath it exploded.
The following year, Hancock’s detective offsider Anthony Lewandowski made the stunning confession that he and Hancock had in fact fabricated Peter Mickelberg’s “confession” and had continued to lie and fabricate evidence related to the case over the following years.
Finally, the brothers had the smoking gun evidence of the innocence they had so long protested, with Lewandowski’s revelation ultimately seeing their convictions overturned in 2004.
Raymond and Peter Mickelberg went on to be awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars for their wrongful convictions and won an apology from the police in 2007.
But in 2016 — 34 years after the infamous Perth Mint swindle — they faced another legal battle when Legal Aid threatened to try to recover the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost to defend them.
Unlike their fight to clear their names, the matter was quickly resolved when Legal Aid withdrew its action.
Who was behind the Perth Mint swindle remains a mystery to this day.
The brothers' three decade saga to clear their names and obtain — then retain — some form of compensation for their ordeal has taken up a large portion of their lives and gone down in the annals of regrettable West Australian history.
The Perth Mint will be hoping its current woes don't lead it to suffer the same long-running, headline-grabbing fate.
