Who the Hell is Hamish? · The Australian

The Reckoning

·37 min·3 clips

Hamish convinced Mark to fund a fish import scheme, then disappeared after stealing his car and blowing his redundancy.

1. Who the Hell is Hamish? concludes with the sentencing of serial fraudster Hamish McLaren in a Sydney court, where he receives 16 years imprisonment with 12 years non-parole. 2. The episode is narrated and produced by Greg Bearup for The Australian newspaper, featuring testimony from victims, Professor Clinton Free of the University of Sydney, and recordings from the sentencing hearing. 3. The episode's core purpose is to document McLaren's reckoning: showing that decades of fraud, dismissed by the legal system for too long, finally ended in a custodial sentence that matched the scale of the offending. 4. The episode opens with a 1995 case: a woman's partner Mark used his redundancy payout on a Hamish-proposed fish-importing scheme from Tonga, losing his money when Hamish disappeared and Mark's Mercedes-Benz was found abandoned with a stack of fines. 5. A second woman, working in private equity in Sydney, describes asking to see Hamish's investment fund memorandum, finding it 'a piece of junk,' confronting him at lunch, and being dismissed by mutual friends as 'the crazy one.' 6. A third woman who did not walk away from that lunch instead gave Hamish one million dollars from her superannuation fund, lost all of it, saw her marriage disintegrate, and was too embarrassed to go to the police. 7. Professor Clinton Free, a corporate crime expert at the University of Sydney, applies the NSW Judicial Commission's five-factor sentencing benchmark to McLaren and concludes he sits at the extreme end on every factor — amount ($7.5 million), duration (multiple years), motive (pure greed), planning, and breach of trust. 8. Free states it is rare for a NSW fraud offender to receive more than 10 years, but argues McLaren's case would justify exactly that level, noting the only mitigation is his guilty plea. 9. Free also identifies McLaren's behaviour as likely sociopathic, describing it as 'replicated many, many times over a prolonged period' and 'across multiple geographies.' 10. On the day of the sentencing, victim Tracey Hall travelled by cab to court, describing waiting two years for the hearing as 'a long two years' and saying she went for a run and a swim the day before 'as a middle finger up to Hamish' because he could no longer do those things. 11. Judge Jim Charteris, on his very last day on the bench, spent two hours reviewing each victim's circumstances individually, calling out amounts from $53,270 to $1 million, with corresponding sentences of 18 months to six years and nine months per offence. 12. An independent psychiatrist's report described McLaren's actions as showing 'a callous disregard for the multiple victims,' driven by 'greed and deficient personality traits rather than any overt mental illness.' 13. McLaren's defence team raised possible autism as mitigation, but the court's psychiatrists were sceptical of this framing. 14. The judge declared McLaren 'not remorseful' and 'sorry for no one other than himself,' rejecting a letter of contrition as the words of 'a late convert.' 15. The aggregate sentence — 16 years, 12 non-parole — was higher than most victims had expected; Tracey Hall described it as 'kind of double' what she had anticipated. 16. Coal miner Glen Pickard from Mudgee, who lost more than $600,000 and his marriage and returned to working underground when he was on the verge of retirement, described feeling 'a bit emotional' and 'very, very happy' with the outcome. 17. Victim Jane, 23 at time of sentencing but 17 when Hamish began a predatory relationship with her, described sobbing in court when the judge detailed the crimes against her grandparents Lorraine and Peter Cross, calling herself 'the conduit' for Hamish infiltrating her family. 18. The episode is documentary in style — mostly interview recordings and courtroom audio — with measured narration from Bearup and occasional moments of dark wit, including the closing image of McLaren swapping 'Tom Ford suits for a prison tracksuit.' 19. This episode is best suited for listeners who have followed the full series and want to witness the legal conclusion, but many standalone scenes — particularly the sentencing speech and victim reactions — work independently. 20. Those looking for resolution on where the money went will not find it here: the judge noted that more than $5.4 million remains unaccounted for and McLaren declined to take the witness stand.

As heard by us

A measured account of Hamish McLaren that keeps its focus on betrayal, damage, and the human fallout.

The episode goes back to 1995, when a retrenched foreign exchange broker and his partner, Mark, were pulled into a business pitch about importing fish and sea cucumbers.

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Why you'd press play

You want to feel how one con keeps echoing long after the sentencing.

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