The Australian Gamble explores Jack Rooklyn’s role as a thread that connects some of the best-recognized characters, and most pivotal events, in Australian criminal history. It is a story that begins overseas, with the origins of the Bally poker machine company — a scandal-prone business with a name that was fated to be forever linked with Rooklyn’s. From humble origins in Al Capone’s Chicago, Bally rode the amusement game wave to become one of the biggest players in the gaming industry worldwide … a status that made it an attractive target for takeover by America’s Italian Mafia. Run out of Cuba on the heels of Castro’s communist revolution, ‘The Families’ were looking for new opportunities to expand their gaming ambitions, both in the desert mecca Las Vegas and (more quietly) through clandestinely sinking their hooks into a financially struggling Bally.

Policing Child Sexual Abuse provides a historical overview of the evolution of policing child sexual abuse in Queensland, tracing a legacy of failure (even corruption) in the decades leading up to the foundation of Taskforce Argos, a branch of the Queensland Police Service created in part as a response to criticisms of police shortcomings in this area. -uses a combination of archival and open-source material to trace the shifting approach to policing child sexual abuse -acts as a case study of how a police force with such a negative track record in policing this area was able to correct its path and reform its practices, to the point that it could emerge as a world-leader in policing CSA Demonstrating how, even in contexts where police responses to CSA have been met with significant criticism, an opportunity still exists to reject historical failures in favour of a renewed commitment to proactive policing of CSA, this book will be of great interest to scholars of policing, historical criminology and child sexual abuse.

Why do police officers turn against the people they are hired to protect? This question seems all the more urgent in the wake of recent global protests against police brutality. Historical criminologist Paul Bleakley addresses this by examining a series of intersecting cases of police corruption in Queensland, Australia. The protection and extortion of illegal gambling operators and sex workers were only the most visible features of a decades-long, pervasive culture of corruption in the state's law enforcement agency. Even more dangerous-and far harder to prosecute-was the corrupt bargain between the police and the state's conservative government, which gave law enforcement free rein to profit from criminalized vice in return for supporting the government's repression and persecution of its political enemies, from punk music fans to gay men to left-wing protestors. While intimidating members of the political opposition, the police also protected friends and allies from criminal prosecution, even for offenses as serious as child sex abuse. When journalists and investigators revealed this corrupt bargain in 1987, the premier was forced from office and the police commissioner went to prison. But untangling politics from policing proved-and continues to prove-far more difficult in societies around the world. This true crime story goes beyond the everyday violations of law and ethics to underscore how central honest, equitable policing is to a truly democratic society.