They are Australia's biggest conmen whose obscene greed and lavish spending left a trail of suffering and empty wallets when their fraud caused the country's biggest corporate collapse. The high-flying swindlers from insurance giant HIH drove Ferraris and Rolls-Royces, bought palatial mansions, threw expensive parties and heaped gifts upon their friends, families and favourite staffers. The lives of luxury and privilege led by Ray Williams, Rodney Adler and Bradley Cooper were bankrolled by the investors they ultimately duped. And when the inevitable happened, as the white-collar cowboys' gluttony and gross impropriety imploded the company into a $5billion black hole, it wasn't them that suffered. It was ordinary Aussies, mum-and-dad investors whose lives were upended as their retirement savings were wiped out overnight. As married couple Peter and Anne McDonald - forced to live in a bush shed after the HIH crash - said, their heartache over investments rendered worthless was bad enough. But it was disgusting that the men who ripped others off took no responsibility. Diane Hansen, a fellow HIH victim, said: 'There are people out there who have committed suicide and I came pretty close to it myself.' The HIH crooks eventually had to swap their designer suits and silk ties for prison greens - but I can exclusively reveal they're back living the high life again. Well, mostly. At least the ones who were smart enough to squirrel away the money in trusts or their wives' names which ensured they would return to a world far removed from the hardships endured by the insurance giant's victims. (Daily Mail Australia is not suggesting any of the men's family members had any knowledge of or were involved in any wrongdoing.) A court hearing would find that just before the crash, Williams transferred millions of dollars of assets into his wife Rita's name, including mansions worth $12million in Sydney's Mosman, a $5million Lake Macquarie retreat, a Gold Coast apartment, and millions in shares and superannuation. When I caught up with con artists Williams and Adler, they still had between them a Mercedes, a Porsche and a Rolls-Royce parked at their multimillion-dollar homes. Some believed former HIH hustler Brad Cooper - the one who left school at 13 and ended up as a Ferrari-driving wide boy before was convicted of bribery - still had money stashed away. However, I discovered he did not financially recover after his five years in jail, and the opulent homes he bought are long gone. Instead Cooper, who continues to promote himself online as a 'success supercharger' and 'dynamic business adviser', is now living in a housing commission flat. And at the age of 66, he is suffering from congestive heart failure and may not have long to live. That's one silver lining, at least, for the HIH victims. Although it has been almost 25 years since the HIH scandal, the details of the extravagant spending by its executives and the inevitable catastrophe as a result of their lies, deception and corporate immorality continue to amaze. In the case of Williams, the person to whom he was most generous was himself. In 2000, in the final year before HIH crashed into a $5.3billion abyss, leaving thousands out of work and tens of thousands with their nest eggs smashed, Williams awarded himself and others $4.6million in executive bonuses. In that year, HIH's four most senior executives spent almost $30million on what was logged as 'discretionary' matters, but actually were grand corporate entertainment events, gifts and bonuses. In one three-week period, Williams spent $9,000, including $2,000 in tips, on three dinners at The Nautilus at Port Douglas, The Pier Restaurant at Rose Bay, and Buon Ricordo in Paddington. The majestic properties he bought himself and family included the clifftop 'Martinique' in Mosman overlooking Middle Harbour, plus the house next door, as well as the 26-hectare Gwanda Bay Manor with drive-in boat harbour on the shores of Lake Macquarie, where Williams installed his own private Christadelphian chapel. Three months before the crash, Williams spent $2.4million on corporate entertainment. And two months before, he spent $86,000 on gold Swiss Baume & Mercier watches for ten loyal staff for their 15 years' service. On the same day, HIH employees were ordered to stop paying insurance claims because the company was running out of money. When it all came tumbling down on March 15, 2001, it was what former Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey would describe as 'the day the sky fell in'. So big was the collapse that Mr Hockey, then the financial services minister, can remember where he was when he heard the news that evening. 'It was 6pm and I was standing in Lane Cove Plaza [the mall near his lower north shore home] and the phone rang. It was an executive from [the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority] APRA,' Mr Hockey later told The Australian newspaper. The executive told him a court had appointed a provisional liquidator to HIH, which had more than six million insurance policies in Australia. The company was one of the nation's biggest providers of car, home and contents, travel, workers' compensation and builders' liability insurance. When Hockey asked what it meant, the APRA man said he didn't know because 'we have never had an insurer collapse like this before'. The failure of HIH, which would lead to a royal commission, instantly resulted in a million people without insurance cover for their cars or homes, businesses or clubs, and with outstanding claims that could no longer be paid. Despite the Howard Government's bailout for victims with a $650million small policy holder claims assistance scheme 'to alleviate genuine hardship cases', many individuals did not recover. RAY WILLIAMS The evangelising conman's opulent life appears to continue unabated thanks to the money squirrelled away in his wife Rita's name before HIH's March 2001 collapse. While he was less devout about protecting people's money, Williams is a staunch Christadelphian. Followers believe in Jesus Christ's literal return to earth but, luckily for Ray, reject the concept of hell and eternal torment. Williams, who is about to celebrate his 89th birthday, lives with Rita in a $4million sub-penthouse in Balgowlah, northern Sydney, set among manicured gardens with absolute privacy and a view over the pool. The $526,000 1998 Rolls-Royce Silver Seraph he once drove appears be gone, but Mrs Williams still drives a white Mercedes. When she drove the Merc from the home to nearby Seaforth last week, it was to call into the massive double-fronted residence of her son Stuart's in-laws. Perhaps this was a reminder of when Ray got out of jail all those years ago, after serving just two years and nine months for his corporate chicanery. Pursued from the gates of Silverwater prison in cars and helicopters, Williams chose his property on Grandview Parade, Seaforth, over Stuart's Ponsonby Parade pile, or Rita's magnificent waterfront pad 'Fontainebleau', for friends to bring welcome-home fruit and flowers. 'Martinique', the two-property Williams estate on Mosman's salubrious 'Golden Triangle' with 180-degree views out through the Heads, had been sold the same year HIH went belly up. But now Williams appears to be back in business, having registered the name 'Business & Personnel Solutions' in March under an ABN he's held since 2019. The operation is based in Artarmon on Sydney’s lower north shore. It is here that his son Stuart runs a creative merchandise company, Betta Concepts, from a decidedly down-market industrial building. Stuart Williams twice flatly denied his father was back in business, although Williams Sr's disqualification from leading an Australian corporation has long expired. Betta Concepts' digs are a far cry from the marble executive bathroom Ray installed in his Melbourne office in 1981, complete with a spa and gold taps. Williams got a taste for luxury after co-founding an insurance underwriting agency in 1968. He'd started in insurance as a junior working in the school holidays aged 13, then left school for a full-time job at the Sydney Water Board in the 1950s. His governance of the insurance groups that would eventually become HIH Insurance took on a sharp acquisitional uptick in the 1990s when it acquired a large number of Australian and international companies. In 1998, HIH acquired FAI Insurance for $295million - a company founded by Rodney Adler's father, Larry Adler - shortly after Rodney joined the HIH board. This was later judged a massive mistake. HIH paid too much for FAI, which was itself in serious financial trouble, and its true value was significantly lower than what Ray paid Rodney. A royal commission would later find HIH's most senior executives knew the company may have been insolvent two years before the 2001 collapse, but there was no evidence that Williams or Adler told other board members. Their mismanagement included under-reserving - the failure to set aside sufficient funds to meet future claims - which had allowed HIH to boast profit and solvency levels that were overstated until the losses blew out into an irreversible tipping point. None of the company conmen was prosecuted until after the royal commission, but on April 15, 2005, Williams was sentenced to four years and six months' jail with a non-parole period of two years and nine months. He had pleaded guilty to three criminal charges: that he recklessly failed to properly exercise his powers and discharge his duties as a director of HIH; that he authorised the issue of a prospectus containing a material omission; and authorised a statement in the 1998-99 annual report he knew overstated operating profit by $92.4million. While in prison, Williams scrubbed the toilets and floors at Cessnock jail before being transferred to Silverwater after an inmate tried to extort $500,000 from him. He was stripped of his Order of Australia while behind bars, and also declared himself bankrupt as an inmate in 2007. He was released from jail in January 2008, looking relaxed and fit for his then 71 years. Williams and wife Rita bought their Balgowlah penthouse the following year. Rita was last week visiting Seaforth, but the prestigious suburb is no longer the Williams family enclave it once was. Son Stuart, who said his father was unlikely to speak with us about his current life 'because of what happened', has since moved to a $5million apartment in North Bondi. RODNEY ADLER Ray Williams' chief HIH henchman was Rodney Adler. The son of a multi-millionaire, the private schoolboy mate of the Packers was once known as 'young Rodney with the Midas touch'. And so Rodney Adler - who once rubbed shoulders with Sydney's most distinguished and revered Rich Listers, including former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull - would be considered the biggest scalp in the HIH saga. Last week at Adler's $15million Vaucluse home, which is undergoing an almost million-dollar renovation, there were few signs that this was a man who had crashed and burned, ending up in a jail cell. Rodney's vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow was parked outside the house, where a Porsche and Mercedes could also be seen in the driveway. As Rodney's wife Lyndi was seen around the home, dealing with a laundry pick-up and collecting the mail, structural engineers were taking measurements for the five-bedroom mansion's upgrade plans, which include installing an internal lift, plus a cool room and observatory. Inside the garage, Adler's collection of up to a hundred framed newspaper and magazine cartoons of his colourful business life line the walls. They include front-page posters charting his downfall with headlines like 'Risky Business', 'I Can't Get A Fair Trial' and 'My Prison Life'. Other cartoons feature Rodney's father Larry, whose own success in Australian business set up his son for life. Larry Adler was a Hungarian immigrant who had fled post-war Europe in 1949 for Australia and worked as a petrol pump attendant and taxi driver before becoming a self-made success story. He founded the insurance company FAI around the time of the birth of his only son, whom he sent to be educated with rich men's sons at Cranbrook School in Sydney. Adler was a Cranbrook classmate of One.Tel founder Jodee Rich and international finance expert Paul Brown, and was friendly with the younger ex-Cranbrook 'rat pack' members James Packer and Ben Tilley. Telco company One.Tel would collapse just after HIH did, and Rich would be sued by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) but was ultimately exonerated. In 1988, Larry Adler died and Rodney became FAI's boss at the age of 19. His father had made a fortune for FAI and himself in the 1980s as a corporate trader, acquiring shareholdings in underperforming companies likely to attract takeovers. Rodney would acquire shareholdings in companies, such as fellow HIH fraudster Bradley Cooper's security company, although that would turn out to be an ill-advised failure. But it was just one of the factors tipping HIH into its grave along with sharp practice and corporate malfeasance. ASIC sued Adler following the HIH collapse, and in 2002 he was found guilty in the NSW Supreme Court of breaching the corporations law for transferring $10million from HIH to his family company, Pacific Eagle Equities. In April 2005, Adler was sentenced to four-and-a-half years' jail after pleading guilty to four counts of making false statements about a purchase of HIH shares and lying to obtain money from HIH for a company in which he had an interest. On the day he was sentenced to prison, Adler complained that he had 'said I was sorry on many occasions' and that 'the Government of Australia is punishing me'. Supreme Court Justice John Dunford rejected the pleas of Adler's lawyers - that he was not selfish or greedy and had only made stupid errors of judgement. His Honour ruled Adler had told deliberate lies, and was guilty of corporate immorality and serious criminal behaviour. Of all the three HIH crooks sent to jail, Adler was the least willing to cop it. Assigned to Kirkconnell Correctional Centre, 30km east of Bathurst, his stay was cut short and he was hauled off to the higher-security Bathurst jail in June of the same year. Prison bosses accused him of concealing letters to manage business interests - such as a planned stock exchange float and family investments in a managed fund - in his children's jail homework sessions. He pleaded not guilty to three charges of using his children's homework during visiting hours as a ruse to pursue business activities, and had his prison file marked 'extreme caution... inmate is prone to giving false or misleading statements and is highly manipulative towards staff'. Adler served 30 months' jail and was released from St Heliers prison in Muswellbrook, in the NSW Hunter Valley, in October 2007. It was then straight back to Vaucluse, having taken a leaf out of Williams' book and transferred the mansion into Lyndi's name before his incarceration. His 20-year ban as a company director would expire in 2022. Meanwhile, he acted as a consultant, financial advisor and venture capitalist. The Adlers renovated their previous home, undertook a massive upgrade, sold it for $16million and bought their current house where they are near-neighbours to former Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke, entertainer Hamish Blake and his wife Zoë Foster Blake, and The Block presenter Scott Cam. When Adler spoke with Daily Mail Australia around the time of his company ban lift, he remembered his jail time as bad and 'violent' and especially hard for him because 'I am an eastern suburbs spoiled little cocooned brat'. 'There is absolutely a pecking order, a class system in jail. As an example, most of the NSW jails are controlled by the Lebanese,' he said. 'It's all about ethnic groups and the two largest are the Lebanese and Aboriginals, then islanders, Asians and white people. He said he found 'the first five years after I came out of jail very difficult, because it was very raw', and that he had lost friends. BRADLEY COOPER At the height of his success in the late 1990s, Bradley David Cooper drove a Ferrari, owned two waterfront properties on Balmoral Beach's swanky strip The Esplanade, and had plenty of cash to support his cocaine addiction. The cash had flowed his way from HIH ever since he'd befriended his silvertail mate Rodney Adler. Even as the insurance giant was on its last legs, crippled by financial shenanigans, it continued to line Bradley's pockets. The one-time burglar alarm and sausage salesman had come from humble origins. Fast-talking playboy Cooper always had a silver tongue - and while it eventually led to his downfall, it first lifted him out of poverty. But Daily Mail Australia has learned that Cooper is almost back to square one. He boasts a flashy LinkedIn page promoting his skills as a speaker and speech writer ('Brad will make your speech or presentation a masterpiece. Guaranteed') and claims to have been a founder, chairman, president, director or CEO of a dozen companies he developed as rivers of cash flowed to him from HIH in the insurer's dying months. But Cooper is now believed to be living in a NSW Housing Commission property south of Sydney, and has recently been treated in hospital for congestive heart disease, making it difficult for him to walk, let alone work. It would seem that after leaving school around 1972, by sheer force of personality Brad Cooper managed to attach himself to the right people in his bid to get rich quick. In the early 1990s, Cooper was selling his alarms door-to-door when he saw an FAI ad looking for companies with clever ideas seeking venture capital. Rodney Adler decided to turn Cooper into a protégé, investing an initial $600,000 and increasing that over the years to a massive $40million in investments in Cooper-related companies. Cooper would go on to become friendly with Adler's younger Cranbrook old boy crowd, including James Packer's classmate, property investor Ben Tilley. In 1998, Collingwood AFL club president Eddie Maguire brought Cooper onto the board of the club thanks to his links to the rich and powerful. Maguire promised that Cooper had all the right connections to spruik for sponsorship money in Sydney boardrooms, plus he hailed from the heart of Collingwood territory, the Melbourne suburb of Northcote. Brad was such a good spruiker that he made a second career as a motivational speaker on the same circuit as former U.S. general 'Stormin Norman' Schwarzkopf and ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, both of whom have since died. After captivating Adler when he was running FAI, that investment passed to HIH in 1998 when it acquired Adler's FAI for $295million - that sum later reckoned to be a significant overpayment. HIH royal commission investigators would later estimate that FAI invested a total of $50million in shares in Cooper's Home Security company and two associated companies, and lent them a further $50million as they expanded overseas. In September 2000, HIH paid $17.5million for a 49 per cent share in Ness Security products, Cooper's burglar alarm manufacturing subsidiary. Even as HIH was in the throes of a death rattle, it rushed through a $2.5million loan to Cooper's cash-strapped Home Security International, before doing a double backflip in fiscal skullduggery. It did this by writing off its $40million losses on investments in Cooper-related companies, and selling back its 47 per cent interest in HIS to Cooper for $1.4million. Before buying it back, Cooper borrowed $1million from a company based in the Virgin Islands by placing a second mortgage over one of his luxury Sydney homes, which he then sold, for $6million. In the immediate aftermath of the HIH collapse, Bradley Cooper was not officially under investigation by ASIC, although it had raided his office in search of evidence of the deals between HIH and his companies. But it all fell apart when former HIH executive Bill Howard turned supergrass to reveal how he had been bribed to show favour to Cooper's companies and push through millions of dollars in false claims. The bribes allowed Cooper to siphon $11million from HIH. Cooper obtained the money by faking a series of letters and invoices and bribing Howard with bags of cash and a BMW convertible. At his 2005 trial, Cooper did not give evidence. A jury found him guilty of 13 white-collar criminal charges. He continued to maintain his innocence, but in October 2005, Cooper was sentenced to a maximum eight years' jail, with a non-parole period of five years. After being processed at Silverwater, where he spent his first eight months, he was sent to Cooma Correctional Centre, and then in late 2007 to Kirkconnell, a minimum-security facility where he would spend most of his prison stretch. Unlike his mentor Adler, Cooper was a model prisoner. Cooper told prison officers he was addicted to prescription tranquillisers, and had been taking dexamphetamine for ADHD. Cooper said he had become dependent on the drug after taking it to combat his fear of flying eight years earlier. On October 31, 2010, Cooper walked from prison looking fitter and about 20kg lighter. Although his long-term girlfriend, shoe-storage business Pinklily founder Sascha Griffin, was not there to collect him, she had supported him at his trial and visited him inside. Ms Griffin would subsequently marry builder Scott Feneck. Among his properties before he went to jail had been one of the $5.5million Burran Avenue, Mosman, properties once owned by Ray Williams. But Cooper is not believed to have stashed his riches with another person, and by the time he re-emerged into the world, the property and the money were long gone. Unlike Williams and Adler, there was no comfortable existence to which he could return. And despite his motivational speaking and business skills, there was no road back to success. Cooper is believed to have spent many weeks in hospital recently being treated for his heart condition.