Legal researcher's book club picks

Book 1 of 3: The Lucky Laundry – Nathan Lynch

In today's ruthless world of organised crime, the best criminals aren't foolish enough to steal money out of banks. They wear tailored suits, carry briefcases, and discreetly slip money into banks. Bigwigs, oligarchs and crime syndicates running drugs, trafficking guns and people, arming terrorists and subverting government controls are desperate to put a legitimate face on their wealth.

Washing dirty money, moving it around the globe, making it look legitimate is where the action is for both criminals and the authorities chasing them. Australia is awash with dirty money. It flows through our economy, keeps banks running, powers big business, puts coffee on restaurant tables, seeps into clubs, pubs, sport, the art world and anywhere that value is moved. It infiltrates real estate, costs billions in policing, and takes a terrible toll on Australian lives. What law enforcement agencies might lack in legislation and political will, they make up for with sheer resourcefulness. When they can't get at the masterminds and bigwigs, they have honed tactics that intercept the flow of illicit cash and aim to drive a wedge between crooks and their ill-gotten wealth.

In The Lucky Laundry, financial crime expert Nathan Lynch delves deep inside this hidden world to explain how dark money has infected the lives of ordinary people - and tainted Australian democracy. He opens the curtain on the hidden world of financial intelligence, where crooks and spooks play a cat-and-mouse game inside the world's black money markets.

ISBN 9781460759912, 352 pages, NZ $38 at Whitcoulls

Book 2 of 3: The Great Post Office Scandal – Nick Wallis

On 23rd April 2021, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions of 39 former Subpostmasters and ruled their prosecutions were an affront to the public conscience. It is a scandal that has been described as one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in UK legal history.

The 39 were just a few of the 738 people who, between 2000 and 2015, had been prosecuted by the Post Office for theft, false accounting and fraud. The prosecutions were based largely on evidence drawn from Horizon, the Post Office's deeply flawed software system that threw up duplicate entries, lost transactions and made erroneous calculations. If these errors resulted in apparent losses, Subpostmasters were forced to settle the discrepancies from their own pockets, sometimes for tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Those who could not pay were sacked and taken to court. Proud pillars of their communities were stripped of their jobs and livelihoods. Many were forced into bankruptcy and or borrowed from friends and family to give the Post Office thousands they did not owe. The really unlucky ones were sent to prison.

This is the story of how these innocent people fought back to clear their names against a background of institutional arrogance and obfuscation, a fight dragged out by the Post Office's refusal to accept responsibility for its failings.

Nick Wallis, an award-winning freelance journalist and broadcaster, has been pursuing this story since 2010 when he met a taxi driver who told him his pregnant wife had been sent to prison for a crime she did not commit. Since then, he has recorded interviews with dozens of victims, insiders and experts, uncovering hundreds of documents to build up an unparalleled understanding of the story. Using these sources, Nick has been instrumental in bringing the scandal into the public eye. He broadcast his first investigation for the BBC in 2011. In the same year that he took the story to Private Eye. He has subsequently made two Panoramas, a Radio 4 series, and raised thousands of pounds to crowdfund his own court reporting for the Post Office Trial website.

Nick has now written the first definitive account of the scandal. He takes us from the ill-fated deal that brought Horizon into existence, through years of half-truths and obstruction, to the tearful scenes at the Court of Appeal this year. He exposes the secrecy and mistrust at the heart of the story, and the impact that had on the victims. He also chronicles how this story's hero, Alan Bates, started as a lone public voice of dissent but went on to beat the Post Office - against overwhelming odds - at two of the highest courts in the land and win some redress for the victims.

ISBN 9781916302389, 500 pages, NZ $81.60 at Paper Plus

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Book 3 of 3: The Psychosocial Impacts of Whistleblower Retaliation – Jacqueline Garrick and Martina Buck

This book analyses the harms related to whistleblower retaliation, its psychosocial impacts on employees, and the institutional dysfunction it creates and perpetuates.?

Stigma and biases against whistleblowers interfere with their ability to make protected disclosures when harm to others is at stake.?Retaliatory toxic tactics create an atmosphere and corporate culture that embodies fear and encourages bystander behaviour.

In this book, the authors explore psychosocial impacts across domains that include financial, legal, social, physical, and emotional well-being.?Ten of the 14 chapters specifically examine the toxic tactics of retaliation: gaslighting, mobbing, marginalising, shunning, devaluing, double-binding, career blocking, counter-accusing, bullying, and doxxing.?These toxic tactics are the building blocks of workplace traumatic stress (WTS) and can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, substance abuse, and suicide.?WTS is a term that differentiates between workplace violence or job stress, which can be components of WTS but do not fully describe the systemic hostile work environment that targets an employee.?Understanding WTS and how it disrupts identity, causes moral injury, and shatters world views are important aspects for clinicians treating clients who are victims of this kind of hostile work environment.??

The Psychosocial Impacts of Whistleblower Retaliation?is a useful resource offering a new way for social workers, mental health providers, advocates, and other support services professionals and practitioners to assist whistleblowers.?It helps clinicians understand how to view patients suffering from whistleblower retaliation and gives them a lexicon for forensic evaluations. Lawyers, especially those specialising in employment, labor, and Qui Tam cases, also could benefit from having a means to describe the psychosocial impacts of retaliation and WTS on their clients when filing for compensatory damages for pain and suffering during judicial proceedings.?Finally, the book could appeal to employees and managers, human resources professionals, victim rights advocates, elected officials, media personnel, and other professionals who are interested in learning more about whistleblower retaliation and its psychosocial and cultural implications.

ISBN 9783031190544, 250 pages, USD110 plus delivery from Amazon