It was ironic that Bango’s tale of woe (see my previous entry) coincided with the arrest of Mark Standen, a deputy commissioner of the NSW Crime Commission and one of Australia’s leading crime fighters, for allegedly trying to import $120 million worth of drugs into Australia.

Standen’s double life had been the subject of discussion in prison exercise yards for the past decade. Stories of corruption by men who suffered from Standen’s manipulation of the law and the secretive star chamber practices of the NSW Crime Commission were dismissed as the unfounded allegations of embittered prisoners. Those stories never reached the media, and if they ever reached the courts they were dismissed as jailyard rumors designed to denigrate one of Australia’s greatest crime fighters.

Now with Standen’s arrest, damage control has been set in motion to make sure those stories never surface. Immediately following Standen’s arrest, the media was inundated with news leaks – I suppose cynics from this side of the wall could claim ‘sympathetic’ news leaks – claiming that he had a million-dollar gambling habit.

That information was not leaked to the media by Standen’s lawyer. It was not leaked to the media by Standen’s family, or his bookie, and Standen certainly didn’t hold a press conference following his arrest. Whoever dangled that bit of sympathetic information to the media feeding frenzy had hoped in some way to downplay Standen’s criminality – and possibly divert prying eyes from what Standen had done to others in the name of justice.

People like Bango, the flotsam and jetsam of the NSW prison system, never receive similar sympathetic news leaks. People like Bango and Standen are worlds apart. Prisons are filled with Bangos, while people like Standen operate in secrecy and manipulate the law to put them there.

Secrecy and lack of transparency are solid building blocks in the foundation for gross abuses of power. Alexander Solzhenitsyn described how the Russian KGB used these things effectively to imprison Russian political dissidents alongside criminals in his Nobel prize-winning books, ‘Cancer Ward’, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ and ‘A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic’. Mark Standen and the NSW Crime Commission were, in my opinion, Australia’s very own Quasi-KGB secret police force with unlimited power, finances and resources that was not accountable to anybody.

There are tales on the yard of how Standen used his powers and that of the Crime Commission to recruit informers, allow them to continue multi-million dollar drug importations, and hand up others to take a fall and go to prison so the status quo would remain intact. There are stories of the crime commission trapping people (inducing would be a more appropriate description) to commit crime and then arresting them amid a blaze of publicity (prematurely leaked to the media) to bolster the commission’s role as a foremost crime fighter and legitimize their actions.

If crime creation is a facet of law enforcement, it makes any citizen a target – not just those with criminal records. If criminal informers are given the green light to continue their criminality provided they give up a designated number of names to be arrested by people like Standen – irrespective of innocence or guilt – then something is wrong with the concept of law enforcement.

Whatever happened to the Sherlock Holmes style of policing? I am an old villain who was nicked in the Sherlock Holmes era of policing. But I am a dinosaur to criminality these days, a dying breed, and so is the era of Sherlock Holmes policing.