Organised Crime

With special guests:

• Tom Gilling and
• Maggie Campbell.

This week we interview the author of Smack Express: How organised crime got hooked on drugs, journalist, author and father of two Tom Gilling. And we close the show with lawyer Maggie Campbell, who is an interesting variation on a theme - as a career woman she lost custody of her son in the Family Court to her husband and his new stay-at-home partner, showing just how barbaric and out-of-date the family law jurisdiction remains. Like so many men, she was incensed by what had been done to her and became a lawyer as a result.

But first up, Tom Gilling’s fascinating book Smack Express is one of the major sources for the current series of the immensely popular TV show Underbelly. The book is co-written with former Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small.

From their press  release:

Organised crime in Australia is big business and operates every day in every state of the country. In Smack Express, former NSW Assistant Police Commissioner Clive Small and journalist Tom Gilling reveal, for the first time, the raw insides of the industry. Authoritative, meticulously researched and using a wealth of new material from personal interviews to police wire taps, Smack Express fits together the pieces of a frightening and fascinating puzzle.

Important original material includes:

● New information about the attempted murder of Detective Michael Drury, including the name of the criminal who supplied the gun;

● New facts about Phuong Ngo and the assassination of John Newman MP;

● Cabramatta - the heroin trade and the corrupt cops who wanted a piece of it;

● The Calabrian Mafia (the ‘ndrangheta) - the mob that doesn’t exist (the Australian Crime Commission’s forerunner the National Crime Authority did not believe the mob existed and the ACC has done or said nothing to challenge this view).

Smack Express demonstrates the systematic nature of organised crime and looks at the alliances and rivalries that have shaped it, and shows how police and government negligence and/or corruption have allowed it to grow unchecked and colonise new areas.

The book unravels the web of criminal connections that are at the heart of the Australian drug trade. Revealed here are the stand-over merchants, the big-time drug dealers, the small-time crims, corrupt police, politicians, informants, undercover cops, contract killers, criminal gangs and lawyers and accountants operating on the edge of the law.

Tom Gilling is the author of The Sooterkin (1999) and Miles McGinty (2001), both of which were shortlisted for major awards and chosen as notable books of the year by the New York Times. They have been translated into several languages. His latest novel, Dreamland, appeared in June 2008. During his career as a journalist, Gilling worked for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Bulletin, The Guardian (UK) and the New York Times, among other publications. He has co-written two non-fiction books: Trial and Error (1991, revised 1995) about the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, and Bagman: The Final Confessions of Jack Herbert (2005), about the events that led to the Fitzgerald Commission into police corruption in Queensland.

And then we close the show with Maggie Campbell, who’s inspirational story about how she coped after losing custody of her son and the transformation that resulted in her own life, including the establishment of a new career as a lawyer, should be of help to those struggling through our appalling family law and child support systems. Children need both parents. This Labor government, following on from its left wing predecessors who established both the Family Court and the Child Support Agency, has done nothing to rein in the civil rights abuses against fathers and their children occuring daily in these shockingly mismanaged jurisdictions. The mistreatment by government institutions of separated and separating parents in this country continues.

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