Antony Funnell: And finally this week to crime on the radio to crime in real life and a contemporary perspective from one of Australia's leading crime writers and reporters, John Silvester from The Age newspaper. I caught up with him earlier this year and I asked him to recount his experiences.

John Silvester: There have been a number of crooks who, it's fair to say, haven't been fans of my work, and you keep them at arm's length. What you try and do is be fair. If somebody has done something and you write about it, well, they have to cop it. If you start accusing people of things that they haven't done, they tend to get a bit sad about it.

Antony Funnell: What about the risk of being compromised, have you ever found yourself in a situation, or do you know of other crime reporters who found themselves in situations where they've received information, or they've gleaned information that's put them in a difficult legal or moral position?

John Silvester: Well the moral thing is an interesting one. What if you find out about a police investigation into a murder which is about to make a major breakthrough? If you wrote the story, the crook may get away or a witness may be harmed. Do you sit on the story, or do you run the story? That's the dilemma.

Antony Funnell: And what's the answer in those situations?

John Silvester: Well you take it step by step, and basically most of the stories I've written I've already forgotten. I would remember a story if I turned around and a murderer got away with it. Often throughout Australia, informal deals are done between police and individual reporters.

If a reporter stumbles upon a particular story which is going to impact on a police investigation, the police more often than not will say 'Now listen, this is the reason why we'd prefer you not to run this story right now. But at a date later, when we've got the protected witnesses away, or we've got the evidence, we've got the DNA, and we're ready to charge, maybe then you can run your exclusive story.' And there would be reporters throughout the country who are sitting on Page 1 stories because of that.

Antony Funnell: It's a balancing act, isn't it? It's something I was going to bring up with you. Crime reporters don't just have relations with criminals, they also have relations with policing authorities. How do you strike that balance and still have both sides trusting you? I presume a lot of it still comes down to trust, doesn't it?

John Silvester: It certainly does, and particularly in the modern era, when we've got public relations people and there's actual attempts by police departments to break up those individual associations: individual police who are seen to be close to the media are often wrongly suggested to be leaks, and they can damage their careers. So it is a balancing act, and if you want to be a policeman, go to the Police Academy, if you want to be a journalist, you go and work for a media group.

Too often there are reporters who think by cheerleading for police they're going to ingratiate themselves but I reckon basically if you're there, the good police will say, 'OK, well that was an embarrassing episode, but it happened. It's in the press, too bad.' You don't allow police to turn around and say, 'Don't write that'. They might say, 'Please don't write that for this reason', and then the judgment remains yours.

Antony Funnell: Now you've branched out as well, because you also publish books on crime, and you've done that in conjunction with various well-known identities, like Chopper Read. Tell us about that.

John Silvester: I did a story for The Herald-Sun in about, probably 1990. It was a double-page spread and it exposed Mark Brandon Reid to be a manipulative, egotistical liar. I called him every name I could think of and had to make some up, and I was very happy with that story. And then a little while later a Christmas card arrived and it was from Mark Brandon Reid saying, 'My idea of a perfect Christmas would be to own a 1,000-room hotel and find a dead Herald-Sun reporter behind each door.'

Antony Funnell: Right. (laughing) That's what you'd want to hear.

John Silvester: Merry Christmas and Jingle Bells. So I wrote to him, and we started to write to each other and he asked me to come out and see him, and I thought that the prison authorities wouldn't let that happen, and to my absolute shock, they did. And I went out there and unlike every other crook, he didn't blame his mother or say he was innocent. He said, 'Look, everything I've done, everything you said I've done, yes, I have, and I've done a lot more.' And he started talking with that particular black humour.

And I wrote another piece, which I was pretty happy with, but the Parole Board was pretty sad, because they were about to release him, so he got another six months before he could. And we started a dialogue, and he started writing letters on prison letterhead, which were cobbled together into a little book called Chopper from the Inside, and we self-published that, because no respectable publisher would do so. And I think the first print run was about 5,000; it's now sold about 200,000.

Antony Funnell: And what about the issue of glorification of crime? You know, people would say that in a sense in doing that, you're assisting criminals to profit from their criminal activities; how would you respond to that?

John Silvester: Well Chopper Reid I think was last convicted of a crime in 1991. He's one of the few from the Melbourne underworld who survived it all. He lives in a little house with his wife and child and would appear to have given up crime. So the reality is he's a success story, and if you read Reid's books, he makes it quite clear he spent 23-and-a-half years in jail, he cut his ears off, he's now got Hepatitis-C; what a tragic waste of a man's life.

Antony Funnell: John Silvester, crime writer for The Age in Melbourne. Well that's the program for another week... the producer was Andrew Davies ... with technical production by Jim Ussher.