Operation Jungle

Description

A gripping blend of memoir, true crime and corruption in the tropics. In the late 1970s, criminal mastermind John Milligan and his associates conspired to import heroin into Far North Queensland via a remote mountain top airdrop. In a story that is stranger than fiction, it took them three trips through dense jungle to locate the heroin, but they only recovered one of the two packages. When narcotics agent John Shobbrook took on the investigation of this audacious crime, codenamed 'Operation Jungle', his career was on the rise within the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. What he discovered unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that not only destroyed his own career, but led to the disbanding of the Narcotics Bureau. Operation Jungle is a gripping true story about the high cost of truth and the far-reaching tentacles of greed and corruption that cross state borders and legal jurisdictions.

John Shobbrook was born in Brisbane in 1948. He joined the law-enforcement wing of the Department of Customs and Excise in Brisbane in 1969, and in 1972 he was promoted into the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, where he eventually became second-in-command of the Northern Region of the Narcotics Bureau encompassing Queensland and the Northern Territory. His final investigation for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was 'Operation Jungle', which brought him to the attention of the Australian Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drugs. The evidence that he provided to that commission led to his dismissal from the Australian Federal Police. In 1994 John moved to Coonabarabran in north-western New South Wales to commence a career in astronomy, which included working for two years as a Planetarium Director in California. He and his wife returned to live in Brisbane in 2013.