Scientist planned multi-trillion fraud

A brilliant but flawed forensic scientist was jailed for six years today for plotting a multi-trillion dollar fraud.

Graham Halksworth, 69, planned to pull off the greatest fraud in criminal history - swindling the US government out of $2.5 trillion (£1,548,676,518,922).

His remarkably ingenuous and audacious scheme involved US Treasury bonds packed into 22 cases stamped with the crest of the American golden eagle.

He was betrayed by bad spelling and a faulty grasp of history.

Jailing him today, Judge William Birtles said: "Your motivation could only have been one of greed." He described Halksworth as "an incompetent conspirator" but added "the lack of sophistication does not reduce the seriousness of the offence. The potential loss to a financial institution was enormous."

The grammar school boy from Oldham had developed a brilliant career in specialist printing and had become a member of the Forensic Science Society.

He was seconded to the Home Office and in 1967 played a major role in inventing a new fingerprinting system for Scotland Yard and joined a small company providing forensic science equipment to police forces around the world.

But he never got the recognition he felt he deserved for his work.

This snub rankled so deeply that he turned his genius for authenticating historical documents bonds to dishonestly make his fortune.

His scheme involved the daring claim that the bonds had been secretly issued by the US government to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kaishek in 1934 in exchange for 125,000 tons of Chinese gold but the plane carrying the IOUs had crashed in the Philippines and had stayed hidden for 60 years until recently surfacing.

The idea was to get credit by offering the bonds to financial institutions together with authentication and using the story that they were backed by gold held by the US government.

A member of the Saudi royal family, the grandson of Haile Sellasie and a Native American Indian chief all approached Halksworth to redeem the bonds.

But when two men, a Korean and a Canadian, tried to cash £15 million of the bonds at a Toronto bank the notes came under intense scrutiny, with the US secret service, FBI, Canadian Mounties and City of London police investigating.

The trail soon led to Halksworth. To his embarrassment, the great forensic scientist was found to have committed a catalogue of elementary mistakes. The bonds were printed with the word "dollar" not "dollars", the cases were made of plastic and the 1934 documents carried postal zipcodes which were not introduced until 1963, and they were printed on an eighties inkjet printer. What is more, how could the bonds represent the credit value of 125,000 tons of gold when investigations revealed that the total amount of gold mined in the world by 1950 was only 63,500 tons?

In the end Halksworth made only £69,000 out of his crooked endeavours before his arrest, Snaresbrook Crown Court was told, and last month a jury convicted him of conspiracy to defraud, although they found him not guilty of knowingly inducing a third party to accept the bonds.

His co-defendant Michael Slamaj, 52, a former Yugoslav secret agent, was also jailed for six years.

Slamaj was arrested after trying to sell $50 million of the bonds.

He was caught trying to board a plane at Heathrow in March last year.

He was bailed and unwittingly led police to a safety deposit box in Belgravia which was found to contain documents with a face value of $150 billion.