Not All Fun and Games | 13

Hey everyone, Steve Bussemi here.

We're talking about arson and children's birthday parties today on the podcast, so I thought I'd start the show with a little refresher on fire safety and party etiquette.

First of all, make sure you have a fire extinguisher in case of an emergency.

A little fire can quickly become a huge problem and ruin the party.

Second, don't take the first slice of cake that goes to the birthday child.

Come on, what's wrong with you?

Finally, no food or drink inside the inflatable castle, especially cocktails of the Molotov variety.

That's a rule I think some of the characters in today's episode would have been wise to follow.

This is Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

This episode is called Not All Fun and Games, and producer Lane Rose is here to tell us more.

In Australia, wildfires are a regular occurrence, part of a natural cycle where brush burns away so new life can grow.

But in recent years, wildfires have become more prevalent and more dangerous.

Experts say it's something about global warming.

I don't know.

But combine those record-breaking temperatures in bone-dry scrubland and one spark could set acres ablaze.

So in the summer of 2016, when arsonists began targeting businesses in the Melbourne suburbs, neighbors started paying attention.

Businesses in Tallamoraine, Werribee, Hopper's Crossing, and Caysborough were firebombed.

News reports showed surveillance videos of two masked men sneaking around in the quiet of night.

They light and lob Molotov cocktails into warehouses and storefronts.

The threat of these small fires turning into huge fires was enough to make the news.

But there was another reason it was so weird.

A pattern was beginning to emerge with each attack.

Party rental companies, specifically ones with big inflatable bounce houses, were the targets.

Knowing that there's someone like that still out there, I still keep an extinguisher in my bedroom.

This whole story starts with one man's midlife crisis.

Actually, I don't know if it was a midlife crisis, but it has all the makings of one.

Because Andrew Saliba was looking for a big change.

He's middle-aged with salt and pepper stubble and a bald head.

Saliba is the type of guy who wears gold chains with t-shirts and shorts.

By all accounts, a very normal dude.

He's a husband and father and had worked a long career in banking and finance.

Until one day, somewhere around 2010, he decides to open a party hire business.

Party hire is what Australians call party rental businesses.

Saliba named his Extreme Party Hire because the list of what his company offers is extremely long, he writes on his website.

Popcorn machines, arcade games, mechanical bowls, and of course the piece des réstance of every kid's party, bounce houses.

It's a risk for sure to quit your stable full-time job and do a hard pivot into parties, but Saliba finds success.

It becomes a family business with his wife and kids helping him run the company.

Extreme Party Hire makes a name for itself in Melbourne, and soon he's inflating castles and setting up mechanical bowls all across the suburbs.

And he's having a ball.

For the record, we reached out to Saliba, but he declined to be included in this podcast.

One day, Saliba is at home, trying to sell a trailer who doesn't need anymore.

His neighbor's brother, a man named James Balcombe, swings by to check it out.

Balcom is around the same age as Saliba.

He's got big coke bottle glasses and a scraggly mullet.

He has the look of a middle school janitor.

As it turned out, he was also looking to make a job change.

Balcombe's career so far was a string of low-paying gigs and failed side hustles, like flipping goods on eBay.

No job of his ever gave him that spark.

So when he comes over to check out the trailer, Saliba tells Balcombe about his bounce house business, about the promising potential of party rentals.

Something clicked with Balcom when he saw the party supplies at Saliba's house.

Maybe he saw dollar signs or maybe he finally found his calling.

Either way, soon after this, Balcom starts his own party rental company.

He calls it Awesome Party Hire, which is totally different from Saliba's extreme party hire.

A little friendly competition never really hurt anyone, right?

Balcombe's business offers the same products as Saliba's.

Mechanical bulls, bounce houses, popcorn machines.

He immerses himself in the industry, learning all he can to be a party expert.

Here he is demonstrating how to make cotton candy, or fairy floss as they call it in Australia.

Awesome Party Hire is a little video to show you how to use the fairy floss machines.

So once it's warmed up, just put that in there and it starts with the producing.

As Valcom's business grew, so did his staff.

Lorenzo started working for Awesome Party Hire in 2016.

Lorenzo is not his real name, although it is a cool one.

He spoke with us on the condition of anonymity.

On first impression, Balcombe didn't wow Lorenzo.

I went in for my interview, then he rocked up, didn't really say much to me at all.

He comes across a bit arrogant and a bit cocky, to be honest, like he's all that in a bag of potato chips.

Lorenzo's official title was Factory Hand.

My job was to come into the factory and basically clean any hired stuff that had come back in from the weekend and the day before.

When we cleaned the jumping castles, so we had to blow them up, sweep them out, hose them out, whatever we had to do to get them clean.

He was happy for us to have a bounce around and have a play in them while we were doing that.

It was just a good bunch of people to work with on the actual factory floor.

We all knew it was just an in-between job just to get some cash in the pocket.

But yeah, it was fairly fun.

As fun as it could be, Lorenzo started to notice some weird things about awesome party hire.

Like the fact that he was asked to do a lot of non-party related tasks, like digging holes for a new fence or helping his boss move.

And then there was how they got paid.

Each day, every employee got handed cash for their day's work under the table, essentially.

And you weren't allowed to affiliate his company or him in regards to, like, for example, if you go for a rental property or something like that, wouldn't it?

He would refuse to give you a letter stating that, yes, you were employed by him and this is where your income was coming from.

Lorenzo wasn't too concerned with how his boss handled his paperwork, as long as he got a paycheck.

But what really baffled him was how Awesome Party Hire remained in business.

A lot of his machines and stuff were faulty.

He tried to hire them out, and then when they got phone calls saying that it's not working or this or that, basically the customer looked like they're a complete idiot and didn't know what they were doing.

And when they were requesting refunds, he basically told them to go and screw themselves.

They'd get off the phone to customers, and like him and the office lady would just absolutely dog the person that they just got off the phone to.

You're getting at least five or six complaints and people saying, I'm not coming back to you, I'm not coming back to you.

And that was in a weekly period.

So, how he was number one in the party by company business, I've got no idea.

Lorenzo only worked for Balcombe for about six months.

It wasn't Balcombe's business practices or anything that drove him away.

Lorenzo just landed a proper, taxable, full-time job.

He left Awesome Party Hire on good terms with his boss.

It's just a bit of a strange dude.

That's what it comes down to.

I wasn't going to buddy, you know, sit there and tell him how to run his business.

Thank God I left that company when I did, because it only looks like it went downhill from there.

It's the early morning of December 19th, 2016, in Werribee, a suburb of Melbourne.

Surveillance footage shows two men walking up a long driveway of CRP Tarps, a PVC textile company that also happens to repair jumping castles.

The men smash two windows, and one of them pours gasoline through the opening.

They've brought their own Molotov cocktails, some juice bottles and an iced coffee bottle with an oil-soaked rag sticking at the top.

They light one, lob it through the broken windows, and hop in their getaway car, not waiting to see if the fire holds.

In their scramble to leave, they abandon a few of their homemade explosives.

Then they drive about 30 minutes to their next target, Extreme Party hire, owned and operated by Andrew Saliba.

For some reason, the arsonists decide to focus on the van parked outside the factory.

They cover the vehicle with gasoline and strike a match.

The van goes up in flames, and the attackers run back to their getaway car and flee the scene.

That was just the first of several nights of attacks.

Over the course of that summer, it seemed no inflatable castle company would be spared.

We reached out to as many affected party hires as we could, and everyone declined to speak with us.

Perhaps the memory of that summer was just too painful to talk about again.

Places like Bailey's Bouncers and Melbourne's Sumo Party Hire were hit, but luckily the Molotov cocktails didn't take.

They were only left with some broken glass and minor fire damage.

Others, however...

It was all ashes.

It was just a mess.

I thought it was the end of the world.

That's Michael Andrew, owner of ANA Jumping Castles, speaking to local news.

When his warehouse was firebombed, the whole thing went up in flames.

They lost one mechanical bowl, five jeeps built for kids, a stretch limo, and 110 bounce houses, among other valuables.

We lost 1.2 million, counting everything inside.

Everybody was worried because I was scared that they were going to be next.

All in all, that's nearly a million US dollars in damages, the biggest loss in all of the attacks by far.

And the worst part was ANA Jumping Castles was uninsured.

They couldn't recoup their loss.

Andrew Saliba's extreme party hire was firebombed three more times.

They had over $40,000 worth of damages.

Awesome Party Hire was attacked too, James Balcombe's business.

He had built a brand new warehouse just months before it went up in flames.

It was a terrifying time to run a party hire business.

The events were almost unbelievable.

It just sounds somewhat ridiculous.

That's Adam Cooper.

He's a journalist who was covering these attacks that summer.

As a court reporter, he'd covered some heavy stuff.

Murder and sexual offences and vicious assaults and tragic car crashes.

But this story.

It's obviously a very serious theme, arson.

There's just something strange to it that business owners who go and provide harmless funds, that they would become the targets in this malicious sort of firebombing attacks.

Their memories of that summer were sitting at home in the middle of the night watching a CCTV camera feed and then just being terrified when they saw two men in Bella Clavas running down near their warehouse.

You can't imagine that sort of terror that would have instilled in people.

While the business owners are trying to make sense of it all, so are the local police.

Police were sort of looking at the big picture, not just that these were a series of fires in Melbourne suburbs, but that someone was systematically targeting party hire businesses.

The police were lucky because the thing about these arsonists is they weren't very good at their jobs.

After all, a portion of the businesses didn't suffer any major fire damage.

The attackers just left unlit molt of cocktails at the scene, covered in fingerprints.

They were practically gif-wrapped for detectives to find.

The fingerprints on the bottles came back a match for two guys.

Now these guys were not professional criminals.

They were just two normal dudes who had met in high school.

One of them was a welder who had done some work for a man named James Balcombe.

Yes, that James Balcombe.

James Balcombe of Awesome Party Hire appeared to be orchestrating these attacks.

Turns out there were signs.

He wasn't just a jerk to his customers, as Lorenzo had described.

He had beef with other party hire businesses too.

like friendly rival Andrew Saliba.

Soon after he started his own business, Balcombe started sending Saliba some pretty weird emails.

The messages were kind of hostile.

One email had the word wank in it, while another called Saliba a racial slur.

Saliba had always thought Balcom had borrowed his idea to start a bounce house business, but now Balcom was saying Saliba had copied him.

And even though things seemed to be going pretty well for Balcom, he was able to build a brand new warehouse for his business, that wasn't enough.

He wanted to beat Saliba and everyone else.

He told one business owner that he was just determined to be number one and didn't care what happened to anyone else.

He was just ruthless.

There were allegations that Balcombe had undercut his rivals, trolled a competitor's website, and even waged a cyber attack on another business.

He was highly, highly competitive.

And if things didn't go his way, then he damn well made sure things did go his way.

This was clear to Lorenzo back when he worked at Awesome Party Hire.

Had to be at the top of everything, every market, every game.

And if he wasn't at the top of it, he wasn't a happy person.

He is very paranoid that he was losing business to other people.

He had a lot of trust issues, like he was constantly looking over his back or, you know, who's saying this about me?

Who's saying that about me?

Balcombe thought in order to be at the top, he'd take out his rivals.

But he wasn't going to do the dirty work himself.

That's where these hired hands came in.

Journalist Adam Cooper again.

He hired a man named Craig Anderson and Anderson intern, a subcontractor, another man named Peter Smith.

They were friends and Balcombe had said to them, I will pay you $2,000 for every job, as he phrased it.

After that first night of flames, Balcombe met up with these hired hands in a Melbourne suburb.

As the story goes, the three of them went to a restaurant called Taco Bill.

I'm not trying to say Taco Bell with an Australian accent.

The restaurant is literally called Taco Bill.

According to their website, they're the pioneers of Mexican food in Australia.

They're also the pioneers of Halloween-themed promotions.

At Taco Bill, Balcom was pissed, not because he missed the Day of the Dead margarita special, but because his hired hands had done a terrible job.

The Molotov cocktails hadn't worked on many of the targets.

Like the first business that got off mostly unscathed except for two broken windows.

And then they'd only burned the van of Extreme Party hire, not the whole warehouse.

In another instance, they typed in the wrong address for one of the Bounce House suppliers and accidentally attacked an engineering company.

It seemed attention to detail was not their strong suit.

Balcombe wanted the job done right.

He wanted more destruction.

And he was willing to pay for it.

Almost immediately, one of the guys backed out.

This was all getting a bit too much for him.

He'd only taken the job to pay some vet bills.

The other guy, though, he needed the money, so he kept setting fires for Balcombe.

The thing is, these fires were so prolific and so scary to the tight-knit Melbourne Bounce House community that someone even called Balcombe to warn him about it.

It was beginning to look like every other party rental business in Melbourne had been targeted, except Balcom's.

At that point, Balcombe was desperate to avoid or divert suspicion on him from police and investigators.

So he instructed Anderson to firebomb his own business, which would seem strange, extraordinarily strange in the circumstances.

And then following the blaze at his property on the outskirts of Melbourne, he then lodged an insurance claim and tried to claim insurance.

But three days after the fire at Balcombe's house, the police arrested the cronies thanks to those fingerprints left at the scene.

The two admitted to their crimes and flipped on their boss, Balcombe, almost immediately.

That certainly didn't help Balcom's trust issues.

Lorenzo remembers watching it all unfold on the news that summer.

I heard about them all and then I heard that his own one went up in flames too.

I thought, oh, okay, I wonder what's going on here.

And then whenever it was six months or later, they said that they were chasing him for the arson.

I kind of went, oh.

Okay, now this kind of makes a bit more sense.

I laughed.

I turned to my wife and I said, you wouldn't believe believe it.

And then I told her and she laughed as well, like, what are you doing?

And when the court dates for everyone involved finally arrived, it was all anyone could talk about.

This story generated great discussion around our office.

Journalist Adam Cooper again.

People just wanted to know more and more about it.

It was hard to fathom, really.

You can imagine the puns as well that would float around when it came to writing these stories.

You know, someone getting the jump on rivals when their crime scheme was deflated that sort of thing a jumping castle baron is facing more time in jail over a string of arson attacks to eliminate his rivals a court was today told how his obsession for success reached dangerous heights craig anderson he was the man who was involved in all the fires so he lit all 10 fires he was jailed for over a decade The second man, Peter Smith, he was jailed for about five years initially, but that was reduced on appeal to about two and a half years.

And the driver, his involvement was actually only in, I think, two of the fires.

So he drove the getaway car on both occasions.

He was jailed for four and a half years.

If these sentences sound harsh, remember these guys hadn't just put the businesses they'd burned at risk.

They'd set fire to buildings during the peak of Australia's wildfire season.

The judge chastised Balcom's hired hands for their actions.

You could have pulled back and stopped, but you did not.

It impacted the lives and the livelihoods of others.

It caused significant loss, suffering, and emotional trauma.

But the real mastermind was Balcombe.

He was indicted based on the testimony of his cronies.

But Balcombe did his best to get out of it.

First, he reportedly tried to excuse himself from one of his court appearances with a fake doctor's letter.

He claimed he was recovering from plastic surgery.

And then

there was a preliminary pretrial hearing that one day the judge looked around and said, where is the accused man?

And his lawyer said, I don't know.

And so at that point, Balcombe had done a runner.

He was on bail and absconded, bouncing out of town, that sort of thing.

James Balcombe, who was charged with arson, has been on the run since December.

It took officials a year and a half to track him down.

They eventually found him on the other side of the country, in Perth.

Bauckham had changed his name to Paul Johnson.

He had grown out a beard and started wearing wigs around town.

He was living a completely different life.

Well, for the most part.

He was eventually found amazingly running another party hire business

and then also involved in another fraudulent scam.

This other business venture was significantly less fun than the party rental business, unless you think stamps are a good time.

Turns out he was making counterfeit stamps, according to the Victoria Police.

Whenever he actually attended the postal premises, he had the big overcoat, the pulled-down hat, scarf, things like that.

He was very careful about his appearance.

So James Balcombe, or Paul Johnson, was arrested and sent back to Melbourne for his day in court.

So he pleaded guilty to 10 counts of conspiracy to commit arson.

He was jailed earlier this year for about 11 years.

The earliest Balcombe can be released is 2029.

Balcombe's fire attacks closed some of his competitors down completely.

But Extreme Party Hire, despite multiple attempts to burn the business to the ground, is still in business as of this recording.

As for Lorenzo, he doesn't dwell too much on his time at Austin Party Hire.

He's moved on, started a family, and coaches Footy on the weekend.

which I'm being told is not soccer.

Anyway, we attempted to reach Balcombe himself for comment to try to understand why he did what he did to get his side of the story, but his lawyers declined on his behalf.

Today a court was told Balcom may have been experiencing psychosis at the time of his offending.

Perhaps Balcom completely lost touch with reality, as his lawyers might have argued in court.

But something Lorenzo said got me thinking.

I couldn't understand it because he literally, six months earlier, just built that brand new shed that he burnt down.

It did not make any sense.

And you helped him move all that stuff into that shed yeah yeah 100 yep

it took us about three days to move everything

we would basically keep labor for him so he didn't have to do it himself

in my opinion helping someone move is the greatest gift you can give so psychosis or not the fact that balcon asked someone to help him move just to burn the place down

that's unforgivable

Next week on Big Time, the great disappearing act of Kevin McEever.

This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

It's hosted by me, Steve Bussemi.

This episode was reported and produced by Natalie Rovimed, Morgan Jaffe, and Lane Rose.

Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.

Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.

Our production team includes Amy Padullah, Rajiv Gola, and associate producer Dania Abdelhami.

Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.

Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations.

Production help from Lisa DeVisi.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.