Mr Tilley has entered into an insolvency arrangement with creditors owed more than $20 million. He has agreed to pay creditors less than 10¢ in the dollar over three years.

The largest creditor is the property developer Mr Medich, who can expect to receive less than $1.7 million.

Other debts include $300,000 to Mr Tilley's younger brother Ben, a poker-playing friend of the late media tycoon Kerry Packer. Hotelier Damien Reed is owed $800,000. He has his own financial misfortunes since his hotel empire Icon Hospitality collapsed last month owing $60 million to Commonwealth Bank.

A catalyst for the financial woes of Adam Tilley, 47, and his wife, Sally-Anne, was their ill-fated purchase of Ron and Odetta Medich's house in Wolseley Road, Point Piper.

Having paid the fashion designer Lisa Ho and her ragtrader husband, Phillip Smouha, $7.75 million for their three-storey house in 2003, within six months the Mediches had found a better house up the street for which they paid $15.15 million.

The Mediches then sold their house to the Tilleys for $12.5 million, having earned $15,000 a day for the period they owned it.

The only problem was that the Tilleys did not have the money to buy it, so the Mediches lent them $17 million to buy 42a Wolseley Road and fund them in a joint venture. The plan was for the Mediches, Tilleys and Mr Reed, who owned the house next door to the Tilleys, to do a joint venture by consolidating three blocks in Wolseley Road. Apart from the Reeds' house at 42 and the Tilleys' at 42a, the trio bought a vacant block of land at 44 from a director of the failed Westpoint group, Norm Carey.

But things turned sour for their plans when Woollahra Council rejected the plans and the global financial crisis hit.

When the Tilleys failed to make payments to the Mediches, Mr Medich assigned the mortgage to McGurk to collect on his behalf.

Within days McGurk had placed caveats on every property Mr Tilley owned, including those in Pyrmont co-owned with his brothers Ben and Simon.

In November 2008 a firebomb was hurled at the Wolseley Road house in which Mr Tilley and his family were living. McGurk was charged over this and other firebombings. Weeks after being charged, McGurk made a secret tape recording of Mr Medich which was later investigated by the Independent Commission Against Corruption. On the tape Mr Medich says: ''F--- that Tilley because I mean he's never put a zac into anything on the whole bloody thing.''

Mr Medich initially told police he had no idea who had done the firebombing. Six months later, after falling out with McGurk, he alleged he had said: ''The Tilleys are crooks and we need to take this to another level.''

In August 2009, a month before his murder, the firebombing charges against McGurk were dropped. In that same month the Mediches took back the Tilley mortgage.

Scott Barlow and his wife, Alina, whose billionaire Russian father, David Traktovenko, owns the soccer club Sydney FC, have been acquiring the Reed/ Medich/Tilley properties. Last year they bought the vacant land for $8.8 million. Last month they emerged as the mystery buyers of the Reed house at 42, for which they paid $11.75 million.

Looking most unloved is the firebombed house at 42a, still in the Tilleys' name and bearing the scorch marks from the fire.