Drugs, Guns & Lies: My life as an undercover cop

‘Banks has told his story in a raw and honest autobiography. It is the best true crime book published in Australia in a decade.’ -John Silvester, Crime Reporter for The Age

‘These are the best first person true crime books of that era in Queensland that I have read.’ - Matthew Condon

Undercover was like guerrilla warfare; to understand your enemy, you had to walk amongst them, to become them. The trick was to keep an eye on that important line between who you were and who you were pretending to be.

This is the true story of Keith Banks, one of Queensland’s most decorated police officers, and his journey into the world of drugs as an undercover operative in the 1980s. In an era of corruption, often alone and with no backup, he and other undercover cops quickly learned to blend into the drug scene, smoking dope and drinking with targets, buying drugs and then having dealers arrested. Very quickly, the lines between his identity as a police officer and the life he pretended to be part of became blurred.

This is a raw and confronting story of undercover cops who all became casualties of that era, some more than others, when not everyone with a badge could be trusted.