The Royal Mint is swindled of over 2000 Oz of gold bullion in the Australian west coast city of Perth in 1982.
Three brothers, Raymond, Peter and Brian Mickelberg are convicted of fraudulently conspiring to steal the golden fortune. There was precious little direct evidence, except a curious fingerprint - a print that matched that of Raymond Mickelberg, a former Vietnam commando, now a pilot and abalone diver.
But evidence had been tampered with by Crown officers...
Witnesses began dying…
Crown evidence shuffled back and forth in a pragmatic dance of deceit.
International power-games ensued in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia to protect the tattered sacred cow, "Forensic Science".
Seven years later, in 1989, $1,000,000 of gold bullion was secretly delivered by a mysterious Mr. X to a television news reporter, with a note claiming the Mickelbergs were innocent!

Investigative author Avon Lovell continues his exposition of a complex web of deceit that follows the conviction and imprisonment of three brothers over the 1982 Great Mint Swindle, and the State conspiracy to maintain the status quo. The New Scotland Yard, the O.P.P., U.S. Secret Service, the F.B.I. and the Royal Canadian Mounties all contributed to and learnt from the scrutiny of forensic evidence in the appeals that followed. 'Police Science' will never be the same…
The brothers always claimed that they were framed… Now all echelons of the judicial process are forced to review their procedures in the light of this exposé of corruption, collusion and fabrication in the interests of maintaining a conviction.
Police, prosecution and the separation of government and legal fraternity are on the stand, and the charge is conspiring to pervert the course of justice. Everybody should know why the authorities reacted when this clear-cut case of police malpractice, judicial compliance and international governmental power games was exposed.
Where 'The Mickelberg Stitch' reveals how a major fraud was executed, the corrupted proceedings in the collation of the hand-up brief, Split Image offers an insight into the depths that individuals, organisations and governments will go in order to protect the integrity of a flawed science at the root of every modern justice system.

THIS IS THE SECOND BOOK I have written about the infamous Mickelberg travesty, one of the worst abuses of police and judicial processes in Australian legal history. The implications are no less serious at an international level, as may be judged by the array of international police forces retained by the State of Western Australia at the Supreme Court appeals of the Mickelberg brothers, Raymond and Peter, in late 1987. If the fates were fair the Mickelberg brothers should have been free men years ago - a tribute to a system that enshrines objectivity and justice above personal ambition.
It is not so.

Raymond and Peter Mickelberg were imprisoned with gross sentences for a crime which involved no violence and for which there was no personal victim. The fraud involved phony cheques that a brilliant swindler smoothly used to steal $653,000 in gold bullion. Therein lay the dilemma for the State.
The gold had been taken from the Royal Mint in Perth, a Crown establishment. The amount of the theft was miniscule in comparison to the increasingly frequent computer thefts or other white-collar crime. Sentences for such theft have been minimal - a tax fraud of over $4.2m recently netted its mastermind a minimum of eight months at a prison farm. Many such frauds are covered by the victim company because of the embarrassment about their vulnerable procedures. To expose the demonstrably weak system in practice at the Royal Mint was to humiliate the State Government. The Mint was not even insured against fraud! The team of detectives assembled for the inquiry was pressure-bent on obtaining a result, a conviction.

What followed was detailed in The Mickelberg Stitch, published in 1985. Despite the passage of time and the multitudinous court appearances, my attitude to this absorbing case remains the same as when I wrote the introduction to The Stitch. "This book does not argue whether or not the Mickelberg brothers, Raymond and Peter, were a party to the swindling of the Mint. It does, however, exhibit the most profound doubt as to the presentation of the Crown case, offering material which indicates that a far more serious conspiracy was possible: A conspiracy to manufacture evidence, both forensic and confessional, in a deliberate and successful plan to convict men who might otherwise have been acquitted for lack of evidence."

Many times I have been asked by reporters or members of the public, "You must know, if anyone does: Did the Mickelbergs really do the job?" The answer remains unshaken. I don't know whether the Mickelbergs actually swindled the Mint or not. However, the method of their conviction rankles at the very core of my heart. No man in our system of justice should ever be convicted and jailed for a day, let alone two decades, on anything but the most scrupulous evidence. Freedom of the individual is too precious to sacrifice without the utmost effort at fairness.

In 1987, almost three years after the publication of The Stitch, the Mickelbergs remained in prison after the longest and most expensive criminal appeal in Western Australia. Perhaps the aberrations in the system were too firmly entrenched for ready change.
The interests of the State were served by the full Bench of the Supreme Court of Western Australia. The interests of the police and of the politicians were protected. The fabric of society was preserved. Concepts and principles of law and justice received scant respect. The extraordinary ordeal of the Mickelbergs continued...

Unlike the narrative in The Mickelberg Stitch which was confined to facts, witnesses and events uncovered in the investigative style of journalism used therein, this book is, of necessity, written in the first person. This was not done from any desire for personal aggrandizement. I was an observer in the construction of the The Stitch. In Split Image I became a participant and cannot exclude myself from the story without causing falsity or distortion.

I must explain also that there is a degree of repetition in this narrative which is ineradicable because the single incident or fact was necessarily referred to by a number of witnesses. Indeed, it was a major problem throughout this affair, that a single so-called 'fact' meant vastly different things to different people. The images were split and rift asunder; facts were as movable as chess pieces. Time also, could not be run sequentially, and it was necessary to take some circumstances out of order to attempt to make sense of a very complicated scenario.