BSkyB cheat is dished by Murdoch

FOR A MAN who used to rejoice in the name of "Spangles Muldoon", his vanishing act seemed a fitting finale to a short but highly lucrative criminal career.

"Spangles" - real name Chris Cary - must have thought he had cheated justice when he walked out of an open prison in Sussex in August after serving four months of a four-year sentence for fraud. After reports of a sighting in France, Cary, a cult disc-jockey in the 1960s, appeared to have vanished with his girlfriend and their two children. The police seemed less than hopeful of returning the 52-year-old to Britain.

But two days ago, with the help of private detectives, he was arrested in New Zealand and faces extradition. He may have got away with it had he chosen to con a different company. Unfortunately for Cary, the victim of his fraud was Rupert Murdoch, not known for his generosity towards rivals.

In February Cary pleaded guilty to defrauding Mr Murdoch's BSkyB satellite station of up to pounds 30m. He masterminded a scam in which he sold illegal Sky decoder cards for up to pounds 450 each. It involved cracking the smart- card codes that enable decoders to unscramble satellite television channels. In the seven years to 1993 he admitted to turning over pounds 30m and making 230,000 decoder boxes.

Kingston Crown Court heard that Cary's Dublin-based Megatek company was taking pounds 20,000 a day until he and his accomplices were arrested in June 1996 after an undercover police operation.

It was not Cary's first run-in with the authorities. After joining the Radio Caroline pirate station, he secretly made an illegal broadcast from a BBC building. After working for Radio Caroline, Radio Luxembourg and BBC radio, he moved to Dublin in 1980 and set up Radio Nova.

After Nova's closure he went on to lead a glamorous lifestyle in Surrey that included a Rolls-Royce with the registration THE 60S and a pounds 3m mansion. But his smart-card scam was his undoing.

In August, 10 days after an appeal against his sentence was refused, he told staff at Ford jail that he was going to the prison farm to get compost. Minutes later he made his escape in a white Peugeot.

Frustrated by the police's apparent inability to track down Cary, BSkyB took the law into its own hands and hired private investigators to check a tip-off that he had fled to New Zealand or Australia.

The New Zealand detectives tracked Cary, who was using the assumed name Chris Broady, to a house in Auckland. New Zealand police said he had been using a passport that was in the name of a dead British man.

The private detectives said they had found evidence that he had been buying assets and setting up businesses.

He is believed to have been living with Sybil Fennell, his girlfriend, and their two children, who left the couple's Surrey home shortly after Cary's escape.

Cary was remanded in custody and faces a charge of travelling on a false passport.

A BSkyB spokesman said: "We got help in tracking him down by employing people who were good at that sort of thing. Clearly it's very important for our business that anybody who tries to defraud us or pirate our systems knows that every effort will be made to ensure justice is done."

Cary's lawyer, Roger Chambers, said his client had not yet decided whether to fight extradition.

He said: "He is most interesting and a very likeable fellow. He feels that he had been unfairly treated in England and that's the reason he walked out of an open institution."