Sales And Drive Build Property Empires. Egos Lose Them.

Australia. Age 25. No money, no connections, no fallback, no plan B—just a suitcase, unbridled ambition and the kind of hunger that only comes from having nothing to lose. My wife and I set up our first home in Australia in a caravan park in a western Sydney suburb called "Prospect" — perhaps the name of the suburb was a good omen. I took a job with a property marketing company. Two years in, I wasn't satisfied working for someone else, so I went out on my own.

I'm not going to soften this part. It's been in every newspaper that covers Australian property, and the subject of TV programs besides, so pretending otherwise would be disingenuous and pointless.

In 2023, I was charged—and convicted—of providing my banks with false and misleading documents. I pleaded guilty to bank fraud.

I don't remember most of what the judge said that day. I only heard two words, clearly, cutting through everything else: "four years." The rest was noise. I remember thinking: this can't be about me, this is not part of the story of my life. And then realising it was as I was escorted away in handcuffs. The fall was complete but the nightmare of prison was only beginning.

My business, the one I'd spent three decades building, collapsed into administration. I went bankrupt.

Thousands of apartments and commercial property worth billions of dollars delivered. Resorts owned and new ones built. And then, a tiny prison cell.

There's no excuse for what I did. My ego and hubris were out of control. I had won so often, for so long, that I no longer believed I could lose. Some of these projects needed billions of dollars in funding—and looking back now, I have to ask myself what I was thinking. I simply thought, or convinced myself, that I was bulletproof. Maybe I sensed disaster, but instead of listening to it, I kept pushing it down and pushing forward. I ignored every one of those signs. I was on a runaway train, and I couldn't stop it—or maybe some part of me didn't want to. I always believed I would pull through, and pull everyone else through, as I had so many times before.

Unlike some who've found themselves in my position, when disaster struck I didn't run. I didn't try to pretend I was innocent, blame someone else, or flee the country. I stayed, faced the charge, pleaded guilty and served two years and four months in hell.

Prison is an alien, dangerous environment, full of violent men who have committed horrific crimes; hard drugs are rampant. My first night was spent in a filthy cell with an inmate who was obviously on drugs. He spent the night pacing the cell, screaming and violently kicking the cell door. I'm not ashamed to say I was very scared.

It's hard to comprehend the things I've witnessed: men walking around like dangerous unpredictable zombies because they'd just received their injection of buprenorphine, "bupe", along with daily doses of methadone. Both are administered by the prison authorities. Often these men would be surrounded by other inmates, and the bupe would be squeezed out of the injection site on their bodies and shared around. I'll spare you the gory details of how some inmates extracted the methadone from their stomachs and sold it to others. Mentally, it strips you down to nothing. The cell smelled like a toilet because it more or less was one: one sink with only icy cold water, no shower, freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer. I was woken more than once by rats running across the floor—or worse, across me.

During my imprisonment I had a bad case of shingles which meant I was isolated and locked in a tiny cell for a week, rolling around in pain, no shower, just baby wipes that I had to beg for, inadequate medical attention, food left on the floor outside my cell door for hours before I could retrieve it.

There were occasions when the cell door was unlocked so I could retrieve my food from the floor outside—only to discover the meat from my meal had been stolen. The prison was so old it didn't even have meal hatches in the cell doors. I became a vegetarian after that. There are two currencies in prison: drugs and food. There were times when I thought, yes, this makes sense - this is what I deserve.

One night I heard a man in the cell across the corridor screaming because he was being violently beaten by his cellmate, which wasn't unusual in prison. He was injured so badly he was carried out on a stretcher and taken away in an ambulance. The next day, a particularly vindictive prison guard unlocked my cell door. With a smug grin on his face, and the inmate who had just carried out that beating standing behind him, the guard informed me this violent inmate would be coming into my cell. I protested, and eventually the guard moved the inmate to another cell. That inmate bashed his new cellmate the following day. Lying there in the dark, I thought: that could be me. How did I get here? Will I get out alive?

I learned to survive it. I'm not looking for sympathy, I don't deserve it—prison isn't supposed to be a picnic, I get that. But you never get used to it.

I know the difference between winning and losing.

I'll make sure you win.

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