AFL Integrity Unit responsible for nude player pic sting
Victoria Police’s cyber task force didn’t uncover the pervy perpetrator who leaked nudes of past and present AFL players – instead the sting came from within.
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It’s dubbed the AFL’s FBI.
The prosaic sounding “AFL Integrity Unit” is in reality a crack squad of former police officers, undercover agents and private detectives.
And it is the AFL’s own Magnum PI who has emerged as the dikileaks saviour.
It’s a well-kept secret spoken about in hushed tones down at the league’s Docklands bunker.
But Page 13 can reveal it wasn’t Victoria Police, or its cyber task force, who uncovered the pervy perpetrator who compiled a dossier of dicks of past and present AFL Players, including five Brownlow medallists, onto a Google drive folder.
No, it was the AFL’s own secret police force who uncovered dikileaks.
The sting team is led by the Tom Selleck, or MagnumPI of the group, Tony Keane, a former Victoria Police homicide detective.
Just without the red 1984 Ferrari 308 GTS Quattrovalvole.
Keane joined the AFL’s special watchdog force in 2014 and quickly rose up the ranks.
The former detective senior constable had been a member of Victoria Police for 13 years, with a string of notches on his belt including investigating the death of baby-faced gangster Carl Williams in Barwon Prison.
Another senior investigator working under Keane is Damian Marrett, once heralded as Australia’s youngest and most lauded undercover agent.
His covert stings were responsible for some of the biggest drug busts in Australian law enforcement history.
Marrett, not shy of a bit of self publicity, went on to become a nonfiction crime writer and helped on various locally produced crime series, including the much-loved Stingers.
Now they are the pecker police. To be fair, as the country’s largest sporting code, the AFL IU have their work cut out for them.
The unit was established in 2008, with the help of the now worldwide head of the Athletics Integrity Unit of the International Association of Athletics Federations, Brett Clothier.
The crack squad is meaner and leaner than in the days when it had 24 or more staff during the Essendon drugs scandal.
The AFL watchdog keeps players and officials safe from outside threats and last week uncovered the rogue fan who reached over the fence and repeatedly touched Richmond’s Marlion Pickett.
The unit, long headed by now AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon and looking for a new replacement, has been working on the umpire betting scandal and cowardly racial vilification posts on social media.
Then there are of course the cases we don’t know about, which is exactly how they like it.