John Silvester lifts the lid on Australia’s criminal underworld in Naked City, an exclusive newsletter for subscribers sent every Thursday. You’re reading an excerpt – sign up to get the whole newsletter in your inbox.

For a person who rarely speaks publicly, Victoria’s former director of public prosecutions, Kerri Judd, KC, became a magnet for controversy. I once made a polite request to her office for an interview. The response was polite but a firm no.

The Office of Public Prosecutions was set up more than 40 years ago to avoid controversy − to make sure decisions to prosecute in serious cases were taken out of the hands of individual police and government-appointed officials and given to an independent authority, with the director given the status of a Supreme Court judge.

Victoria’s former director of public prosecutions, Kerri Judd, KC, who has been appointed a Supreme Court judge.Credit: Paul Jeffers

Victoria was the first state to set up an OPP, with the first director, the rock-solid John Phillips, later becoming chief justice of the Supreme Court. Of the Victorian OPP’s eight directors, seven have been elevated to the bench. Judd is the latest.

It........

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