The mugshots that tell a colourful history of crime and corruption in Sydney. Picture: James Horan

But if you could travel a century back in time, a picture of a much darker place would emerge — one befitting the nickname “City of Sin”.

In a nation born of jailers and convicts, the apple had not fallen far from the tree.

To crack down on crime, colonial governments established institutions like the Water Police Station and Court at Circular Quay. Constructed in the 1850s, this grand old sandstone building was one of the busiest legal precincts in the Colony of NSW until it was closed in the late 1970s.

Today it operates as the Justice and Police Museum. Intimate and highly detailed, the walls of this little museum practically heave with stories of crooks and cops, serial killers and petty criminals, the guilty, the innocent and the poor families who stood by them come hell or high water.

The Justice and Police Museum is filled with photographs of Sydney’s colourful characters. This one was from a police photo book from the 1920s, simply marked ‘magsmen’.Source:Supplied

The museum still has the old police holding cells open for public view. Picture: James HoranSource:Supplied

CON ARTISTS AND CRACKSMEN

Haunting the history steeped walls of the museum are iconic characters like mob boss Kate Leigh, whose 1920s battle with Kings Cross madame Tilly Devine was dramaticised in Underbelly: Razor.

Of lesser fame but equal repute is Louisa Collins. After her husband accused her of sleeping with a border, she poisoned him with arsenic and collected his life insurance. When she got tired of the border, she poisoned him too.

Louisa Collins’ prison card, including her execution date.Source:Supplied

Hung at Darlinghurst Gaol in 1889, Collins was both the first and last woman executed in the state of NSW. However Last Woman Hanged, a new book by Caroline Overington, argues much of the evidence against Collins was circumstantial. Why, after all, was she tried four times for the same crime?

Even more puzzling is the story of Caroline Grills, a kindly old grandmother who woke up one day and started poisoning her family and friends. Grills killed four people and poisoned four more in the post-war years, soothing her victim’s brows while feeding them with rat poison disguised as candy or elixirs.

Murdering grandmother Caroline Grills (left), who killed four people with rat poison in the 1950s.Source:News Corp Australia

“Mrs Grills was a practised, habitual poisoner who got a psychological thrill and enjoyment from watching the effects on her victims,” reads a statement by the Crown Prosecutor dated October 15, 1953.

The disfiguring impact cut-throats had on their victims is revealed in City of Shadows, a haunting exhibition of vintage mug shots and forensic photographs. Among them is a 1923 portrait taken at Sydney’s Long Bay Jail of Frank ‘Scarface’ Green, a notorious standover man with a deep scar stretching from cheek to lips.

The image was recently discovered among 130,000 historical documents held in the climate-controlled room above the museum known as ‘the vault’.

Many of the pictures come with little information, just the subject’s name scratched in.Source:Supplied

Another new exhibition, ‘Breakers: The Dying Art of Safe Breaking’, details the battle of wits that played out between engineers attempting to create unbreakable metal safes, cracksmen hellbent on breaking into them and the police who worked tirelessly to foil their crimes.

The exhibition includes an array of safe-breaking tools found at the scenes of early 20th century safe breaks: metal bars, wrenches, oxyacetylene torches and a special fingerprint-wiping cloth from Italy.

The latter was used in 1926 by undercover constable Frank Fahy AKA ‘the Shadow’ to bust a group of Italian migrants who led the biggest safecracking spree Sydney had ever seen.

Fahy disguised himself as a vagrant to spy on the group while they made safecracking tools in their workshop. He eventually caught them cutting a whole in the floor of an office they’d rented on top of a bank.

Fahy’s escapades were never made public, allowing to slip back into an undercover role to help keep law and order in a city now rated by The Economist’s Safe Cities Index 2015 among the world’s 10 safest.

Weapons and mugshots on display at the Justice and Police Museum. Picture: James HoranSource:Supplied

The Justice & Police Museum is on the corner of Albert and Philip Streets, Sydney. Open 10am-5pm weekends.