Alec

 Alec was my first experience of a charlatan. In the late 90s my fiancé got a job working for a "shrimp hatchery" in North Queensland. I came along for the ride and got a job as the office manager. We lived in Bingil Bay, a short walk to the beach covered with the most gorgeous, tiny crabs you ever did see  and with Dunk Island visible across the sea.

Alec had been engaged by a family of investors to set up a shrimp hatchery (where prawn larvae would be cultivated) to onsell to prawn farmers to grow out for the seafood market.

He was the classic, stereotypical loud American. At the time there was an ad running on TV which reminded me of him, it was for insurance and it featured a loud, know-it-all man, telling a younger man "I know boats" and then he stepped off the jetty and his very large body broke straight through the base of the boat.

Alec was dodgy as. It wasn't just the loud, look-at-me personality that gave it away. He drove a large racing green Nissan four wheel drive to work with a Saint Bernard dog in the rear that barely fitted in the area and whose head hung out the side drooling all over the window and down the chassis. He had a Filipino wife and two young children. 

He was mentoring one of the operators in aquaculture. Mentoring meant inviting this 18 year old around to drink whisky while Alec wrote all of the assignments for this illiterate kid.

It was hands down his behaviour at work that confirmed his dodginess. He would arrive at work mid-morning, sign in, do a quick tour of the premises, talk to some of the operators and maybe to me and then sign out and head home. Sometimes, he would be on the phone telling desperate prawn farmers he had plenty of prawn larvae to sell them but they just had to wait. What he was doing was killing the prawn larvae in chlorinated water and every day instead of their being 1000s of thriving microscopic animals the boys were scraping dead PL off the base of the indoor tanks and counting and noting down the small handful of survivors. Alec did nothing really and he was paid a fortune to manage it. Later that sign-in, sign-out book and the book where the boys wrote down how many "morts" (mortalities) and the count of the survivors would be his undoing when I bought a fax machine, set it up at home and faxed photocopies of how little time he spent "in the business" to the investors.

It transpired later that Alec had hooked up with another businessman in town and they had selected the block of land for the hatchery with an intentional motive of it failing. It was part of inlet aand not the ideal place to build a shrimp hatchery.  It was too far down the inlet to the point where the water was brackish and needed to go through a series of settlement ponds and for god's sake, chlorination, to be suitable for prawn larvae to grow in.

The idea was that the shrimp hatchery would fail and this businessman would then be able to buy the land and the building for a song and convert it into a backpackers which would supply the prawn farm up the road with a steady flow of workers.