When
talk turns to Australia, after the usual chestnuts regarding kangaroos being
chased down the main street of Sydney by spear-wielding Aborigines, the
consensus is one of a balmy life in a beautiful country which has the
world’s best beaches. Crime never rates a mention. However, the book
Smack Express by Clive Small and Tom Gilling (ISBN 978-1-74175-636-4,
Allen and Unwin, 2009) provides a different view. With heroin representing a
10 billion dollar industry in Australia, criminal control of drugs is
naturally very hotly contested.
The co-authors have credibility in the field, with Clive
Small who was one of New South Wales most successful detectives and an
Assistant Commissioner of Police before becoming the Independent Commission
Against Corruption (ICAC’s) chief investigator and Tom Gillings, a noted
author with acclaimed novels, The Sooterkin, Miles McGinty and
Dreamland, have all been published in Australia, as well as in London
and New York. He also co-wrote The Bagman: Final Confessions of Jack
Herbert, an infamous Queensland policeman on the take, whose evidence
led to the imprisonment of his police commissioner.
The book begins with pr้cis of the main characters, most
of whom have turned in their drug runners license, and the sheer number of
them is quite revealing. For the nice clean, well ordered nation of
Australia, the amount of graft and corruption soon puts the “clean” image
away. Flagrantly corrupt police who are protected by the system. Politicians
who are involved in crime up to their armpits and on the wrong side of the
law, and known criminals whose court cases are delayed for years while they
continue with their drug running “business”. If you said that this behavior
was part of SE Asia (all of it, and not just Thailand) then it would be
credible - but Australia? With its open, democratic and Westminster justice
system? Surely not - but it as equally surely is.
Many of the characters requires the reader to have some
knowledge of Australian politics, such as the Commissioner for Ethnic
Affairs Al Grassby, a career politician kept in the parliament house because
of his strong connections with the Calabrian Mafia.
Some ‘stars’ which are also known outside of Australia
are people such as Warren Fellows, author of the book, The Damage Done,
detailing his involvement in the illicit drug running business.
While the police force and the Australian judicial system
do not come up smelling like roses, with notably poor results in
apprehending and putting the criminals away, the drug barons themselves put
more of their own ilk away with American-style liquidations by contract
killers.
At B. 430 on the Bookazine shelves, it is not an
expensive read, but one that will change some pre-conceived notions about
the world’s largest island continent. The New York mobsters may have caught
the public imagination, but the New South Wales mobsters are just as
ruthless. The center photo plates of people no longer around reads like any
book on the Mafia, be that in Sicily, or the USA and now Australia. The
photographs of assassinated criminals only lack the pointed finger seen in
the photographs of the felons in Thailand.