Andrew Rule (born 8 April 1957) is an Australian journalist who specialises in crime.
Andrew Rule was born in country Victoria in 1957, later attending high school in Sale. He dropped out of journalism at RMIT before completing an arts degree at Monash University.
Rule started aged 17 as a reporter for The Gippsland Times and Maffra Spectator . He subsequently worked for The Age , The Sun News-Pictorial , The Herald , Sunday Age the Herald Sun and radio station 3AW. [1]
The Murders of Margaret and Seana Tapp was a cold case that Rule has worked to bring renewed attention to in articles for both The Age and Herald Sun. [2] [3]
Rule wrote an authorised biography of Australian media proprietor and billionaire Kerry Stokes to counter bad press from an unauthorised work by Margaret Simons that included testimony from an abandoned family. [4]
He began a podcast series, Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule, in 2017. [5]
In 2021, Rule was involved in a controversy where he falsely accused the late former Labor premier Neville Wran of corruption. The reports on which his commentary and claims were based were found to be false in an ABC editorial review. [6]
Rule is married to Di Rule who ran as a Liberal Party candidate for Seymour in the 1999 state election and Burwood in the 2002 state election. [7] [8] His wife was accused by political opponents of benefiting from sinecures when she was appointed to a Victorian government board after serving as a long-time staffer for former Liberal leader and Premier Ted Baillieu. [9]
Rule has authored a number of books:
With John Silvester, he co-wrote the Underbelly series of books about crime which were subsequently adapted into a TV series. [10] [11]
Rule is an inductee in The Australian Media Hall of Fame. [1] He was also twice (1994; 2001) the recipient of the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award. In 2001, he won the Gold Walkley award for his story Geoff Clarke: Power and rape .
Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read was an Australian convicted criminal, gang member and author. Read wrote a series of semi-autobiographical fictional crime novels and children's books. The 2000 film Chopper is based on his life.
The Melbourne gangland killings were the murders of 36 underworld figures in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, between January 1998 and August 2010. The murders were retributive killings involving underworld groups. The deaths caused a power vacuum within Melbourne's criminal community, and rival factions fought for control and influence. Many of the murders remain unsolved, although detectives from the Purana Taskforce believe that Carl Williams was responsible for at least ten of them. The period culminated in the arrest of Williams, who pleaded guilty on 28 February 2007 to three of the murders.
Donald Bruce Mackay was an Australian businessman and anti-drug campaigner. He disappeared in 1977, but his body has never been found. In 1986, James Bazley was convicted on his murder.
Jason Matthew Patrick Moran was an Australian criminal from Melbourne, and one of the leaders of the Moran family, notable for their involvement in the Melbourne gangland killings.
Alphonse John Gangitano was an Australian criminal from Melbourne, Victoria. Nicknamed the "Black Prince of Lygon Street", Gangitano was the face of an underground organisation known as the Carlton Crew. He was also an associate of alleged organised crime bosses Tom Domican (Sydney) and John Kizon (Perth).
Graham Allen Kinniburgh was an Australian organised crime figure from Kew, a suburb of Melbourne. He became a victim of the Melbourne gangland killings, which were dramatised in the drama series Underbelly.
Gregory David Roberts is an Australian author best known for his novel Shantaram. He is a former heroin addict and convicted bank robber who escaped from Pentridge Prison in 1980 and fled to India, where he lived for ten years.
Nikolai-Minev Radev, nicknamed The Russian, was a Bulgarian career criminal and mobster who was involved in crime in Melbourne, Australia.
Mr Cruel is the moniker for an unidentified Australian serial child rapist who attacked three girls in the northern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is also the prime suspect in the 1991 abduction and murder of a fourth girl, Karmein Chan. His moniker came from a headline in the Melbourne newspaper The Sun.
John Silvester is an Australian journalist and crime writer. He has written for major Melbourne based newspapers such as The Age, the Herald Sun and others. Silvester has also co-written a number of bestselling books with Andrew Rule, based on crime in Melbourne. Some of their works formed the basis of the hit Australian TV series Underbelly. He also appears weekly on 3AW's breakfast program as "Sly of the Underworld".
The murder of Karmein Chan is an Australian child murder case in which a 13-year-old Chinese-Australian girl was abducted at knifepoint from her Templestowe, Victoria, home during the night of 13 April 1991. Karmein's body was discovered at Edgars Creek in the suburb of Thomastown on 9 April 1992; the prime suspect for her abduction and murder is an unidentified serial child rapist known as "Mr Cruel", who had abducted and sexually assaulted a minimum of three prepubescent and adolescent girls in circumstances markedly similar to Karmein in the years prior to her abduction.
Antonios Sajih Mokbel is an Australian criminal who has been convicted of a number of offences, most prominently commercial drug trafficking. He has spent most of his life in Melbourne, Australia. Operation Purana alleged that he is the mastermind behind the Melbourne amphetamine trade. He has been linked to Carl Williams, and charged but not convicted of two murders in the Melbourne gangland war. He disappeared from Melbourne while on trial in March 2006, and was arrested by Greek police in Athens on 5 June 2007. Since being brought back to Australia he has remained incarcerated.
The Easey Street murders refer to the knife murders of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia, an inner suburb of Melbourne, in January 1977. Described as "Victoria’s most brutal crime", the case remained unsolved despite a A$1 million reward being posted in 2017.
Underbelly is the side of something that is not normally seen. Figuratively, it means a vulnerable or weak part, similar to the term Achilles' heel, or alternatively, a hidden, illicit side of society.
The first series of Australian crime television drama series Underbelly originally aired from 13 February 2008 to 7 May 2008 on the Nine Network and is loosely based on the real events of the 1995–2004 gangland war in Melbourne. It depicts the key players in Melbourne's criminal underworld, including the Carlton Crew and their rival, Carl Williams. The series is based on the book Leadbelly: Inside Australia's Underworld, by journalists John Silvester and Andrew Rule, and borrows its name from the successful Underbelly true crime anthology book series also authored by Silvester and Rule. An alternative and significantly updated tie-in novel, Underbelly: The Gangland War, was released as their 13th book in the series. The series is produced by the Australian Film Finance Corporation, in association with Film Victoria. The executive producers are Des Monaghan and Jo Horsburgh.
Mark Anthony John Moran was an Australian organized crime figure of the infamous Moran family from Melbourne, Victoria, notable for its involvement in the illegal drug trade and the Melbourne gangland killings. Moran, aged 35, was shot dead outside his Aberfeldie home, allegedly by Carl Williams, just after 8 pm on 15 June 2000.
Underbelly is an Australian television true crime-drama series which first aired on the Nine Network between 13 February 2008 and 1 September 2013, before being revived on 3 April 2022. Each series is based on real-life events. There have been six full series, with season 7 being a miniseries. A 2014 series titled Fat Tony & Co is a sequel to the first series but is not branded under the Underbelly title.
Keith William Allan was an Australian solicitor, murdered in a contract killing. He was educated at Northcote High School and the University of Melbourne, where he completed the degree Bachelor of Laws. He practised as a solicitor at Avondale Heights, a western suburb of Melbourne located in the City of Moonee Valley. He was a cousin of Jacinta Allan, the Victorian premier since 2023. He was also a cousin of former test cricketer Graham Yallop and former Australian rules footballers Ken Turner (Collingwood), Jamie Turner (Collingwood) and Max Oppy (Richmond).
Charles Hegyalji also known as Mad Charlie was a Hungarian born gangland criminal in Melbourne, Australia.
Kylie Maria Antonia Maybury was an Australian schoolgirl from Preston, an inner-city suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Maybury was kidnapped, raped, and murdered on 6 November 1984, the date of the 1984 Melbourne Cup Day; and she was nicknamed in the Melbourne tabloid newspaper The Sun News-Pictorial as the Cup Day Girl.