Naked City

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Victoria failed to learn the lessons from the past and arm its corruption watchdog with teeth.

‘Norm’s a bit short’: The history lessons Victoria failed to learn

In 1981, it was $20,000 cash and a beach house. Today, it’s organised crime infiltrating the CFMEU – and a toothless watchdog. It’s time to fix it. John Silvester outlines how.

  • John Silvester

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John Silvester (left) and Stuart Bateson feature in Naked City: Hit Men.

The underworld’s coldest killers … and how they were caught

From secret tapes to the detectives who stood face-to-face with hitmen, a new documentary series hosted by John Silvester goes inside Melbourne’s gangland war.

  • John Silvester
Judy Moran’s last ride from freedom in 2009. In police car with Stuart Bateson

A shooting in front of children at a footy clinic shifted everything in the notorious Underbelly war

The gangland wars between Carl Williams and the Moran family dominated Melbourne for years. Now, John Silvester talks to one of the lead police investigators about what it took to put some of them behind bars.

John Silvester’s Naked City: Market Murders, The Great Bookie Robbery, Russell Street bombing, Neighbourhood Wine, coffee with Carl Williams and the Black Prince of Lygon Street, St Mary Star of the Sea.

A bloody mafia war, a heist and a courthouse execution: The secrets bubbling below a city’s surface

Coffee with Carl Williams, sacred sites where gangsters roam free: This is the dark history of Australia’s underbelly

  • John Silvester and Pablo Barnes
Smiling assassin. Lorraine Moss with two of her children.

‘My mother poisoned my father, and I had to live with the aftermath’

Long before Erin Patterson used poisonous mushrooms to kill three family members with deadly beef Wellingtons, Lorraine Moss was lacing her husband’s food with arsenic.

  • John Silvester
Flower tributes at the footbridge where the Bondi shootings took place.

Who planted the seeds of hate?

Pound for pound, people from a Jewish background have done more to drive progress in modern Australia than any other minority.

  • John Silvester
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Tim Peck (left) graduates from the Police Academy.

At first, being part of the work-hard, play-hard club suited detective Tim Peck. Then it crushed him

Tim Peck worked on some of the country’s most notorious murder investigations. He was old-school police, rising through the ranks, until he had to face his wife after a car crash.

Phyllis Chan and her daughters Karen, 8, and Karly, 10, grieve and pray at the site in Thomastown where her daughter Karmein’s body was found in 1992, some time after being abducted from the family home. Her killed was dubbed Mr Cruel and The Age reported in 2024 detectives believed he may have killed himself, died of natural causes or moved to a country that is lax on child exploitation.

High IQ, need for control, clean: Criminal profiler John Kelly on the notorious Mr Cruel

In his Naked City podcast, veteran crime reporter John Silvester talks to criminal profiler John Kelly about Mr Cruel and why no one has caught him yet.

The golden era of England’s test cricket team is over, and analysis from Australian economists shows it wasn’t that golden to begin with.

Naked Sport: Why a crime reporter is investigating England’s Ashes fiasco

There is a precedent. After all, Richie Benaud had a stint as a crime reporter.

  • John Silvester
Was Mr Cruel responsible for the abduction and murder of 13-year-old Karmein Chan in 1991?

A young girl was abducted and police named a suspect fast. Too fast for some

The abduction of Karmein Chan in 1991 changed Melbourne forever. Veteran crime reporter John Silvester talks to the police officer who was first on the scene, and first to question the “Mr Cruel” theory.