Ken Gamble

They used to put images of Fred up on the wall.

Yeah, it was just one of those cases that, you know, I just thought outside the box.

So within no time, I was part of a 10-man surveillance team going down to Griffith, watching the Italians that were later named in the Wood Royal Commission as traffickers of drugs.

We didn't know at that time, in 1988.

we had no idea that we were watching some of the biggest drug traffickers in the world for insurance claims.

What were you surveilling them for, for insurance claims?

They would all get in a car, about six of them, and they would have an accident, deliberately staged accident, and they would all say they had a whiplash claim.

So they would put in a compensation claim saying they got whiplash, sore neck following the accident.

They realised they could extract all this money from insurance companies.

So it became a very big thing.

There were more than 50 claims came out of Griffith over a two-year period.

And our job was to go down and find out whether these people were really injured and to obtain footage of them, which we did very successfully.

And how tricky was that to do, to get footage?

I mean, did you have concealed cameras or what?

No, it was... Again, it required working in teams and it required us getting out of our vehicles and hiding in the bushes.

So the only way we could spy on these people was to...

was to infiltrate their properties.

And this is in the day before the Supreme Court ruled that we couldn't use footage on a property.

So it was legal to go in?

It was legal.