TRUE CRIME AUSTRALIA‘The Shadow’ was Francis (Frank) Maurice Fahy (1897-1978) one of Sydney’s first and most successful undercover police officers. He operated from the 1920s until his retirement thirty years later.
It was a Sergeant McKay who came up with the idea of using undercover police operatives, as civilian informants were so unreliable. Probationer Fahy was chosen because he was quick witted, and his slight figure was the antithesis of the burly policeman.
Sometimes he would park a modified motorbike and hide in a box built into the sidecar. It was disguised as a mobile scissor and knife sharpening business. He would watch and photograph his targets through peep holes.
On one occasion Frank had to pretend to be a cleaner, polishing the private mail boxes at the Sydney GPO repeatedly until his quarry (involved in a fur trade fraud) arrived to open one.
Another alter-ego for Frank was ‘Jimmy Perkins’, a city vagrant. Frank would venture out unshaven and ragged, loitering around known criminals. They would consider him harmless and speak about planned crimes in his presence. The only problem was that fellow police officers had no idea Jimmy Perkins was really one of their own, and would move him on or even arrest him. Jimmy’s most famous case was the attempted robbery at the Union Bank;
After a series of raids on banks in 1926, Frank Fahy, disguised as a vagrant, hung around a near-city factory complex and watched three Italian suspects hand-making tools he believed were for safe-breaking. None of the trio suspected the disheveled ‘vagrant’ wandering in and out of the factories was in fact a police officer, and one day Fahy heard them mention renting an office above the Union Bank in Castlereagh Street.
Frank quickly informed his seniors, and when police raided that office several nights later, they found a hole cut in the floor – and the gang working on the safe in the bank below. They had climbed down via a rope ladder. All were arrested.
First published 1954, 1955 reprint.
- x, 204 p., [15] p. of plates: ill., ports. ; 23 cm. #060724
- (Wear to dustjacket, name on fep,, foxing.)
- SCARCE
- Fahy, Francis Maurice