Fraudster makes easy buck in jail

BRITAIN: Pretending to drown in a canoe accident in March 2002, John Darwin faked his own death and used the insurance money to fund a life of luxury in Panama with his wife, Anne.

In November 2007, John and Anne returned to Britain with John claiming he was a missing person with amnesia.

His story fell apart when a photograph of the couple in the central American country appeared on the internet.

Darwin, a former prison officer, conned financial institutions out of around GBP250,000 (NZD611,000 approx). He was convicted of fraud and sentenced to six years in prison in July 2008.

He is still in prison yet that has not stopped John from making an easy buck having managed to write and smuggle his memoirs out of jail.

Darwin now intends to publish his story.

He has even titled the memoirs The Canoe Man, Panama & Back and designed a cover for the book, a crude drawing of a man paddling towards a tropical island in a red canoe.

Darwin vanished while paddling his canoe in the North Sea near his home in Seaton Carew, Hartlepool.

According to The Sun he got the book out of prison by passing it to his "lawyer."

Prison Rule 39 means guards are not allowed to read correspondence between prisoners and their legal representatives.

But Darwin's lawyer was Alan Caramanica, a former inmate Darwin befriended while on remand at Durham.

Caramanica, according to the newspaper, set up a bogus law firm upon his release.

In his memoir, Darwin, 59, reveals how, overwhelmed by mounting debts, he initially contemplated suicide but realised it would not solve his financial woes and feared the effect it would have on his wife.

"The thought of losing everything was more than I could bear," he wrote. "Not only would I think I was a failure in the eyes of Anne but also in the eyes of my two sons, as I would have lost the family home, lost absolutely everything that Anne and I had worked for."

He described the "eureka moment" when he hit upon the idea of staging his own death. "If we couldn't die, then my crazed brain reasoned, I could pretend to die. After all, I wouldn't be the first man to kill himself because of financial pressures. The only difference in this case was that it would look like an accident. A suicide would be useless n the insurance company wouldn't pay out."

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: "Prisons have established processes in place for dealing with Rule 39, which ensures that the confidential legal relationships between solicitors and their clients are maintained, while also ensuring security is not compromised.

"We take any allegations that this rule is being breached very seriously and will investigate them. It is wrong for convicted criminals to profit from their crimes, whether directly from the proceeds of the crime itself or indirectly through cashing in on the story of their crime."

Anne Darwin was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for fraud.

- THE INDEPENDENT, NZ HERALD STAFF