Paul Bleakley – författare

With Boston to the north and New York City to the south, Connecticut’s history of organized crime is often overlooked. This is the untold story of New Haven’s illegal past.One of America’s most historic and enduring cities, New Haven has wrangled with a perpetual identity struggle, torn between worlds that occasionally converged in chaos and violence. In the 1930s, Connecticut became a region where Mafia families like the Genoveses, Gambinos, Colombos, and Patriarcas shared turf—working together with enough profits to go around or descending into open war to rival that experienced in any major city. Central to this conflict were three men who were, at different times, cautious allies or sworn nemeses. Representing the Genoveses, Midge Renault reigned supreme thanks to his reputation for wanton violence. Meanwhile, Colombo capo Ralph “Whitey” Tropiano maintained a lower profile, which belied his reputation as a vicious killer. But it was his lieutenant, Billy “The Wild Guy” Grasso, who ultimately rose to the top after joining the New England Patriarca Family, enjoying a short rule that ended with a murder plot that left him on the wrong end of a bullet.

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 Task Force Argos, a branch of the Queensland Police Service created in part as a response to criticisms of police shortcomings in this area.The book uses archival material as a foundation to trace the shifting approach to policing child sexual abuse (CSA) from the 1960s, when juvenile justice first became a central focus of policing in Queensland, to the 2010s, at which point Task Force Argos made international headlines for its primary role in bringing major international CSA offenders like Shannon McCoole, Benjamin "Warhead" Faulkner and Richard Huckle to justice. Examining archival material to pinpoint the reasons that CSA was not dealt with effectively in the past, the book shows that often these reasons were political, unrelated to the policing of CSA at all. Policing Child Sexual Abuse stands as a testament to the victims of CSA who have been failed by the system in the past. In addition, the book 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. Though nominally focused on policing in one Australian state, the implications are global, with Task Force Argos’s work naturally impacting on the CSA investigations of all of its partner agencies, both in Australia and internationally.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, this book will be of great interest to scholars of policing, historical criminology, and child sexual abuse.

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 Task Force Argos, a branch of the Queensland Police Service created in part as a response to criticisms of police shortcomings in this area.The book uses archival material as a foundation to trace the shifting approach to policing child sexual abuse (CSA) from the 1960s, when juvenile justice first became a central focus of policing in Queensland, to the 2010s, at which point Task Force Argos made international headlines for its primary role in bringing major international CSA offenders like Shannon McCoole, Benjamin "Warhead" Faulkner and Richard Huckle to justice. Examining archival material to pinpoint the reasons that CSA was not dealt with effectively in the past, the book shows that often these reasons were political, unrelated to the policing of CSA at all. Policing Child Sexual Abuse stands as a testament to the victims of CSA who have been failed by the system in the past. In addition, the book 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. Though nominally focused on policing in one Australian state, the implications are global, with Task Force Argos’s work naturally impacting on the CSA investigations of all of its partner agencies, both in Australia and internationally.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, this book will be of great interest to scholars of policing, historical criminology, and child sexual abuse.

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.