What is cheaper and more effective: guns or heroin?

How does Detective Inspector Frank Ironman Bourke find out who set up the international robbery and heroin smuggling operation? And what is the role and motivation of the officers of the Russian and American consulates?

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There is a series of unsolved jewellery robberies in Sydney. It ends when a well-known cat-burglar Rudy Valentik falls off a second storey balcony during a robbery. Before he dies, he confesses hes the burglar the police are looking for. His last words are, he gives the tips, he pays, but he doesnt name any names.

Media attacks on the police stop for a while until newspaper magnate Crawford Forests house is burgled and jewels are taken away in circumstances similar to the previous robberies.

Forests newspapers start a daily campaign against the inefficient police and personally against the minister and the commissioner. Commissioner Jack Warren orders the head of the Break and Enter squad, Patrick OMalley, his brother-in-law, to organise a task force.

The commissioner orders OMalley to make Sydneys best detective, Inspector Frank Ironman Bourke head of the day-to-day work of the task force. OMalley tries to stop giving Bourke a leading role because there has been long standing animosity between Bourke and his boss, OMalley, Bourke having fought for years against the corrupt methods of OMalley and his cronies (stealing money, drugs and pornographic films found during house searches, etc.)

The results of a widespread investigation are fed into a central computer and it points to a Double Bay jeweller, Maurice Rainier, whose secretary Joy Kearney travels to overseas fashion shows to model jewellery approximately two weeks after every robbery. All stolen jewels contain large gemstones and none of them are offered for sale in Australia. Bourke suspects that Rainier gets the goldsmith working for him to remove the precious stones and smuggle them out of the country.

Commissioner Warren uses a ruse to blackmail Joy Kearneys occasional lover, Stewart Kendall, to follow Joy on her next overseas trip and orders Bourke to covertly follow the couple and act as a bodyguard for Kendall.

Two weeks after the latest jewel robbery the three people fly to Bangkok separately where Kendall is to have a holiday with Joy. She is supposed to model imitation jewellery for customers who can order the chosen items to be made up for them in real gold and gemstones by the Rainier firm.

In Bangkok everything happens in a flash: Thai gangsters attack Joy and steal her case with the gemstones set in gold coloured base metal. Joy visits the gang boss to ask for his help and while she is there Kendall and Huey a cooperative Thai detective steal back the case and get Joy out of the house.

Next day Joy takes the case to Ralph Rainier, a jeweller cousin and partner in crime of the Sydney jeweller. She is paid in heroin which she takes to the Russian Embassy to exchange it for alexandrites, rare semi-precious stones, as she has been trusted to do on previous occasions.

In front of the embassy, Lok Lie, a Thai gang boss man tries to grab the heroin-filled case from Joy in a motorcycle attack but the Russian guards prevent this and take Joy, the gangster and the heroin-filled case into the embassy.

Kendall, Bourke and Huey fight the guards in vain to save Joy and the case but have to retreat when threatened with guns.

On the basis of Bourkes report, the Sydney and Bangkok police make coordinated raids on the premises of the Rainier cousins in Sydney and Bangkok where they find dismantled stolen jewellery, large amounts of alexandrites and heroin. Maurice Rainiers goldsmith confesses to melting down stolen jeweller