Everything Money Can Buy

By Parker Blyth

Synopsis of 'Everything Money Can Buy'

(Subtitled The Addiction Concerto)

The story of "Everything Money Can Buy" follows the rise and fall of corporate raiders and high-level crime hiding in plain sight and protected by people in power. Parker Blyth has written this six-part series of novellas in the 'Crime Thriller Genre'. Similar in composition to Child, Grisham, or Baldacci but with an Australian slant on the narrative.

Gerry Finney is an investigative journalist living and working in Sydney Australia. With assistance from some friends, other journalists and an old jailed secret service agent named Bill Honeychurch, he uncovers a major story of Ponzi schemes and money laundering by the financial leviathan, Helleron Corporation.

Helleron's Australian CEO, Jon Mountbanke, and his affluent directors, are living the dream of wealth, power, and privilege as they stay one step ahead of the financial regulators in Australia, America and the European Union. Meanwhile Gerry Finney is dealing with his own addictions of gambling and drinking and the chaotic life of a compulsive workaholic which have torn his and his family's life apart. Yet the deeper he digs the darker things get, and the more obsessed he becomes at exposing the corporate frauds who look so legitimate while all the time cloaked in the shadows of opulent board rooms, mansions, and luxury hotels as his life continues to fall apart though bad choices, bad associates and bad luck.

From Sydney to Washington, Mumbai to Macau and Bern to Canberra, the white-collar criminals run their empire of fraud and white-collar criminality at the highest levels, until they find themselves desperately running from prosecution and public disclosure as time itself runs out. As Gerry Finney's quest nears the end, his luck turns for the better, and the executives fall one by one. An exhausted but grateful and recovering Gerry Finney receives critical help from unexpected quarters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parker Blyth
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223500520

Parker Blyth

About the Author. John Beamish (also writing as Parker Blyth) is a self-published author who resides in Flaxton on Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland and lives and paints at the Hilltop Gallery. The first novel was Addiction Concerto.  I write under Hamish Beamish and have begun the next novel based on love and Art theft in the last great war (with time travel thrown in for seasoning). I ama member of the Flaxton Writers Group. I paint, play guitar, write poetry, and approach peace of mind by the day, by gardening, feeding the chickens, and writing. My literary influences are varied. From Balzac to Bukowski. I love Stendhal and Proust, Lee Child (James Grant) Dostoyevsky, Nabokov and Hunter S Thompson, cartoons and newspapers, Rory Sutherland and YouTube. Thank You for your time and Kind Regards Parker Blyth/ Hamish BEAMISH/John beamish The man with too many personalities

Book preview

Everything money can buy

(S ubtitled The Addiction Concerto)

Part One

The Main Characters : 

The Company      Helleron  Corporation.

Jon Mountbanke  CEO at Helleron

Gerry Finney  Investigative Journalist

Sir Simeon Mercer  Chief Counsel at Helleron

Dr.  Armstrong  Australian Federal Police

George Booth    Director Helleron

SOLOMON LANGSTEIN     C.F.O. of Helleron

Odette and Ava  CEO’s wife and daughter

Anton Kovros  Booth’s assistant

Richard Portelli    Director at Helleron

Li Lian Wu    Director Helleron

Veronika Sugarman    Young Company lawyer

Charles Besson    Mountbanke’s Personal Assistant

Inspector Steve Diakos  Investigating Detective 

Senator Ted Vine  Minister for Customs and Justice

Bill Honeychurch  Disgraced Federal Agent 

Stan Barrabas  Director of Public Prosecutions Office (DPP)

Artur Molnar    Mountbanke Affiliate

Chloe & Megan   Gerry’s Ex and daughter

Magda Jackwitz  U.S. Journalist

Audrey and Nell   Gerry’s Journalist friends

The man with a Past.

No matter who you are or where you are, generally speaking, there are times when everybody needs to stop the clock. To unwind the mental spring that is overwound.  Shut down the bullshit in the head for just a minute or two and Gerry Finney felt this more than most people for the simple reason that he never listened to his inner voice. The voice of reason. The sane voice from the lunatic asylum inside his skull. The dope enhanced alcohol fuelled rush that drove him on to greater heights, deeper depths and stupider stupidity that had pretty much seized the day.

It started out with ciggies and then some weed from a friend’s big brother. Then came mother’s tablets and a flutter with amphetamines. Then came the cocaine period followed by a reinvigorated hash and dope era. That lasted the longest, apart from the booze. Usually, booze wins out for most people. Not all. The desire to relax under any circumstance, no matter what the cost. Well, at least that was the case for Finney. He was hard on the heels of his forties, with a teenage daughter Chloe, his wife Megan, whom he had separated from a year or so ago, and an irresponsible streak a mile wide. Middling height, possibly underweight for his height, recidivist wardrobe and a mop of dark hair helped him look his age, whereas the alcohol and the cigarettes didn’t. Blue eyes that Meg had fallen for years ago at a Cold Chisel gig at the Star Hotel, and a pale Irish pallor that was in opposition with the sunburnt country of Australia he had adopted.

If nothing else, he was an original. Honest, except to himself, and unflappable. Nonchalant. Relaxed. His career as a journalist for the last not quite twenty years took the burden for most of this attitude. The need to achieve something positive before the final tolling of the bell was there, but to do it on one’s own terms. That and a struggling childhood growing up

in the housing estates of White City on the outskirts of Dublin didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt either. It did, but that’s where you grow. The pain. You learn to befriend it. If life’s getting too rosy, you’re in for a tumble for sure.  ‘If you never want to feel the pain and remorse of failure and defeat, then don’t have any goals in life lad’, his stepfather would say, and then head off to the taphouse for a pint. He rarely knew what to make of his stepfather’s wisdom. It made little sense to the young lad of seven when he and the rest of the Finney family immigrated to the steel town of Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia. It was there in that working class town that Gerry Finney got to learn about the wild colonial boys firsthand and meet his wife to be.

Holy shite! It was the late seventies, or early eighties and everyone had long hair and they were doing drugs. Flower power had faded, and powder power had taken over. Dope deals and rock bands. Beer gardens, loud music, and station wagons. The lad from White City had landed in steel city and all hell began breaking loose.  Newcastle was dead mad in those days.  Rough and ready. No cobblestone malls and potted palm cafés then. Newcastle by the Pacific Ocean with its post war fibro houses stacked on the hillsides of town like housing commission kennels. Coal and ore tankers loitering in the bay and smelters belching out the black filth that settled on everyone’s washing and vegetables and killed not a few. Feckin’ oath!

Megan was dealing with their baby daughter and stressing out about Newcastle and some of his low-brow friends and such. That was motivation enough for him to, after much fine tuning of the resume, and doing a deal with his editor for a favourable endorsement, to secure a position on the Sydney Telegraph. Just. They moved to a decrepit two storey dump on the border of Redfern and Surrey Hills. These were the days when nobody wanted to live in that part of central Sydney. But Finney loved the fact the streets were full of freaks. Freaks in the eyes of the establishment but colourful ratbags in his. Gays, Tranny’s, and