The Gangland War

  underbelly

  The authors

  John Silvester has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978. He worked for The Sunday Times Insight team in London in 1990, and has co-authored many crime books, including the Underbelly series, Leadbelly and The Silent War. He is currently senior crime reporter for The Age.

  Andrew Rule started in journalism in 1975 and has worked in newspapers, television and radio. He wrote Cuckoo, the inside story of the ‘Mr Stinky’ case, since re-issued in the collection Sex, Death and Betrayal, and has co-written, edited and published several other books, including the Underbelly series. He became deputy editor of The Sunday Age in 2007.

  underbelly

  THE

  GANGLAND WAR

  JOHN SILVESTER AND ANDREW RULE

  Published by Floradale Productions Pty Ltd and Sly Ink Pty Ltd

  January 2008

  Reprinted February 2008 (three times), March 2008, April 2008 (twice), May 2008, June 2008, August 2008, February 2009, December 2009

  Distributed wholesale by Gary Allen Pty Ltd

  9 Cooper Street

  Smithfield, NSW

  Telephone 02-9725 2933

  Copyright Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, 2008

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

  any form or by any means without the publishers’ permission

  Underbelly: The Gangland War

  ISBN 0 9775440 6 0

  Cover design, typesetting and layout: R.T.J. Klinkhamer

  Front cover image of Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano

  in the Channel Nine drama series Underbelly courtesy of

  Greg Noakes Photography

  www.gregnoakes.com

  Back cover image of Carl Williams being arrested courtesy of

  AngelaWylie, The Age

  ‘Here we go again,

  fasten your seatbelts.’

  CARL WILLIAMS MINUTES AFTER HIT MAN

  ANDREW VENIAMIN WAS SHOT DEAD.

  CONTENTS

  1 Gut reaction

  2 The House of Mokbel

  3 The fugitive

  4 Out of his league

  5 The first domino

  6 The mourning after

  7 Mad, bad, then sad

  8 The Italian jobs

  9 Alas mad Richard

  10 Black Mark

  11 Pop culture

  12 The deadly circle

  13 A hole in the Iron Curtain

  14 Sitting duck

  15 Inside job

  16 The tide turns

  17 Quarter to midnight

  18 Counterpunch

  19 Cool beer, cold blood

  20 The double cross

  21 Rats in the ranks

  22 Body blow

  23 Going the distance

  24 Married to the mob

  25 Playing with snakes

  26 Endplay

  27 The summing up

  ‘For the salvation of the good,

  the destruction of the

  evil-doers, and for firmly

  establishing righteousness.’

  HINDU PROVERB: PURANA

  1

  GUT REACTION

  ‘He became the most dangerous

  gangster in Australia.’

  THE bloodiest underworld war in the history of Australian crime began with both a bang and a whimper in a tiny park in the western suburb of Gladstone Park, near Melbourne Airport.

  A gunman, drug dealer and notorious hothead called Jason Moran made two decisions — one premeditated, the other off the cuff — that started the vicious vendetta which would wipe out his crime family, including himself and his closest male relatives.

  The longest journey starts with a step, and the path towards death, destruction and lifetime detention began simply enough. Moran and his half-brother, Mark, had arranged to meet amphetamines manufacturer Carl Williams to discuss their mutual business interests. Williams liked to talk in parks and public places to avoid police listening devices, and the Morans were happy to meet in an open space where they thought they would not be ambushed.

  The Williams and Moran families had trafficked drugs for years and while they were sometimes associates, they were never close.

  They did deals and begrudgingly co-operated when it suited, but they also competed with each other for a slice of the obscenely lucrative illegal pill market.

  While there were reasons for their hostility, none was pressing enough for them to go to war. Business was booming. Demand had increased ten-fold as amphetamines became a mainstream ‘party drug’. All they had to do was keep a low profile, source their pills and count the cash.

  But there were niggles. The Morans, always quick to take offence, began to stew.

  At first it was a simple domestic matter: Carl Williams’ wife, Roberta, had previously been married to Dean Stephens, a friend of the Morans, and there was lingering ill-feeling over the broken relationship.

  The next was competition: Williams was undercutting his rivals, selling his pills for $8, compared with the Morans’ $15.

  The third was business: Williams had supplied the Morans with a load of pills, but he had not used enough binding material and they were crumbling before they could be sold.

  The fourth niggle was greed: the Morans claimed ownership of a pill press and said Williams owed them $400,000. Carl disagreed.

  The problems could have been settled, but the Morans, known for short tempers and long memories, tended to use unreasonable violence to achieve what they believed were reasonable outcomes.

  All of which meant that the meeting at the Barrington Crescent park, no bigger than two suburban blocks and bordered by houses on three sides, gave the Moran brothers the perfect opportunity to remind Williams where he stood — before they shot him off his feet.

  It was 13 October 1999, Carl Williams’ birthday. He was 29.

  Williams was unlikely to have sensed danger. The mid-week meeting was to be held in the afternoon in the open — hardly the ideal place to pull a double cross. But soon after they arrived, Jason Moran pulled a gun, a .22 Derringer. A woman nearby heard a man cry out, ‘No, Jason!’ and then a single shot.

  It showed the Morans’ arrogance. It was broad daylight in suburbia, not some dark alley or an isolated spot in the bush. They simply did not believe they could be stopped.

  But this time the gunman showed uncharacteristic restraint. Mark Moran urged his half-brother to finish the job, but Jason said they needed Williams alive if they were ever to get their money. That hasty decision to shoot him — but not to kill him — would destroy the Moran clan, and many who were close to it.

  The brutal truth was that if they had killed Williams, he would have been just another dead drug dealer and the case would probably have remained unsolved. Instead, the wounded Williams turned into an underworld serial killer determined to exterminate every real or imagined rival he could find.

  From the day he was shot, Williams refused to co-operate with police. He was young but had started life in Richmond and prided himself on being an old-school crook. When detectives interviewed him in hospital, he said he had felt a pain in his stomach as he was walking, and only then realised he had been shot. It was straight out of the painters and dockers rulebook.

  Much later Williams told the author he did not see his attacker. ‘I have no idea who shot me and I’ve never asked … I don’t know who did it. Police told me who they think did it, but that’s their business.’ When the author suggested they had nominated Jason Moran, he smiled and said, ‘You’d better ask them.’

  Roberta Williams gave more away in a later conversation, but denied the shooting was drug-related. ‘Mark was yelling, “Sho
ot him in the head,” and Jason then shot him in the stomach,’ she said.

  If the Morans thought shooting Williams would frighten him off, they were wrong. The wound soon healed but the mental scar remained. The drug dealer began planning his revenge, setting off an underworld war that would catch police, the legal system and politicians unprepared.

  Williams, with his plump, pleasant face, his shorts and T-shirts, did not look like an influential crime boss who could and would order a death with a phone call. As a strategist he would appear more a draughts man than a chess player. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he flew under the police radar for many months. By the time they realised who and what he was, he had become the most dangerous gangster in Australia.

  At first, police knew he was part of his family’s drug business but they assumed the former supermarket packer was a worker — not the foreman.

  Like the Morans, police underestimated Williams and his power base. He was ruthless, cashed-up and had recruited a loyal gang of reckless young drug dealers driven by pill money, wild dreams and illegal chemicals.

  His team went from underworld try-hards to big players in a matter of months. Guns, drugs and rivers of cash can do that. At one point his family drug business was turning over $100,000 a month.

  Williams’ reputation and power grew with every hit. He began to refer to himself as ‘The Premier’ because, he smirked, ‘I run this fucking state’. But to detectives, he was just ‘The Fatboy’.

  Police say Williams was connected to ten underworld murders and would have kept killing if he had not finally been jailed. He will never face charges over many of the murders he arranged because he cut a deal with police that gives him some chance of release one day. His only hope is that he will die a free old man, rather than in jail.

  Williams’ rise from middle-ranked drug dealer to heavyweight killer should never have happened. His plans for revenge and control of a big drug syndicate should have collapsed when he was arrested in slapstick circumstances six weeks after the Morans shot him.

  For Broadmeadows police, it began as a low-level fraud investigation and ended as a $20 million drug bust. The fraud involved an enterprising local family running up credit card debts with no intention of paying, then changing their names to obtain new cards to repeat the scam.

  On the morning of 25 November 1999, police arrived at a Housing Commission house in Fir Close, Broadmeadows, to serve warrants, but no-one was home.

  Later that day, Detective Sergeant Andrew Balsillie was passing, and noticed two cars at the house. He recalled his team to issue the warrants and, after bursting in, found a pill press, 30,000 tablets (almost certainly the Moran pills that had been returned to be re-pressed) and nearly seven kilograms of speed valued at $20 million. Williams was found hiding in a bed fully dressed and his father, George, was found between a bed and the wall in another room, in which a loaded Glock semi-automatic pistol was later found.

  Local police rightly chose to run the investigation but called in the amphetamines experts from the drug squad. They were not to know that the two drug squad detectives — Malcolm Rosenes and Stephen Paton — were corrupt and would later be jailed. While there was no suggestion Rosenes and Paton interfered with the investigation, the Supreme Court later decided that several drug cases, including Williams’, should be delayed until the detectives’ prosecutions were completed.

  It was while Williams was on bail for those (and other) drug charges that he organised the underworld murders.

  If the drug cases had not been delayed, Williams would have been jailed for at least four years, unable to carry out a homicidal vendetta.

  All of which means that police corruption led, at least indirectly, to the underworld war that shocked Australia.

  WHILE in jail on remand for close to two months, Williams began to plan his first attack. First, he recruited the team he believed would kill for him.

  One of the first to join was Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin, the former kick boxer and gunman who once idolised Carlton identity Mick Gatto, who has cast a giant shadow in Melbourne’s underworld for years. Williams saw Gatto, who was loosely affiliated with the Morans but not involved in the squabble over drugs, as a potentially powerful enemy.

  Williams thought that if he killed the Moran brothers immediately, it meant established underworld figures, including Gatto, would seek revenge. He decided his best chance of survival was not to jump at shadows but to cast a bigger one, so he launched a hostile takeover.

  Initially, Williams was outnumbered and in no position to take on the Morans, let alone contemplate plans for gangland domination. Then, by a stroke of perfect timing, he was finally bailed on his drug charges on 22 January 2000. Three days later, Jason Moran was jailed for affray and sentenced to twenty months jail. That meant Mark Moran had lost his closest ally and was now dangerously exposed.

  Five months later, on 15 June, Mark Moran was killed outside his Aberfeldie home. More driven than Jason, but less erratic, Mark had managed to keep a lower profile than his half-brother — until then.

  When his death was first reported, he was referred to as a local football star rather than an underworld identity. But police immediately knew it was a gangland hit.

  They also knew Mark Moran was entrenched in crime as much as the rest of his family, who had always considered honest work a personal affront.

  Moran lived in a house valued at $1.3 million at a time when most western suburban houses were worth much less than half that. His occupations had been listed as personal trainer and unemployed pastry chef, neither of which would explain how much dough he had.

  Four months before his murder, on 17 February 2000, police noticed Moran driving a new luxury hire car. When they pulled him over and opened the boot, they found a high-tech handgun fitted with a silencer and a laser sight. They also found a heap of amphetamine pills that had been stamped through a pill press to appear as ecstasy tablets.

  His days as a battling baker were long gone.

  In the hours before his death, Mark Moran had been busy. First he had passed drugs to a dealer at the Gladstone Park shopping centre, a few hundred metres from where he and his brother had shot Williams the previous year.

  The dealer was short of cash and Moran agreed to give him credit. It was no problem. Few people were stupid enough to try to rip off the Morans.

  Moran drove home, but soon decided to leave again for another meeting. He was blasted with a shotgun as he stepped into his Commodore.

  Police later established that Williams had been waiting only ten minutes for Moran to leave the house. It smelled of an ambush based on inside information.

  Moran’s natural father, Leslie John Cole, had been shot dead in eerily similar circumstances outside his Sydney home eighteen years earlier. But Mark’s stepfather, Lewis Moran, was very much alive and drinking in a north-western suburban hotel when he first heard of the shooting.

  He immediately called a council of war at his home.

  The Moran kitchen cabinet discussed who they believed was responsible, and how they should respond. The Morans, never short of enemies, narrowed the field to three. Williams and his team were by no means the favourite. ‘We still didn’t know we were in a war,’ a Moran insider later said.

  For Williams it was the beginning, and for the Morans it was the beginning of the end.

  Much later, Lewis Moran, said to still hold the first dollar he ever stole, tried to take out a contract on Williams, first at $40,000 and later at $50,000. Lewis’s idea of a hit fee hadn’t kept up with inflation. There were no takers.

  There were seven men at the meeting at Moran’s home. Five are now dead.

  Police suspected Carl Williams from the start for Mark Moran’s murder, so much so they raided his house next day. But internal police politics terminally damaged the investigation. Members of the drug squad, who had worked on the Morans for years, deliberately concealed information from the homicide squad because they believed their long-term investiga
tion was more important than a murder probe they thought was doomed to fail in any case.

  Their prediction was self-fulfilling.

  Jason Moran was allowed special leave from prison to speak at Mark’s packed gangland funeral (one of many repeated in Melbourne in the following few years). Mourners later said he spoke with real emotion, but the death notice he placed in the Herald Sun worried police. It read: ‘This is only the beginning; it will never be the end. REMEMBER, I WILL NEVER FORGET.’

  But nor would Carl Williams.

  Police, and the underworld, expected that when Jason Moran was released he would make good his implied promise of vengeance. But by the time Moran was freed on 5 September 2001, Williams was back inside on remand, having been charged in May with trafficking 8000 ecstasy tablets.

  The parole board let Moran go overseas because of fears for his life, while Williams continued his private recruiting drive from a small area filled with potential killers — Port Phillip Prison.

  AS is customary when important business deals are sealed, the main players celebrated with a quiet drink. But when the man we will call ‘The Runner’ decided to accept Carl Williams’ offer, the drink was smuggled alcohol and the venue was the aptly-named Swallow Unit of Port Phillip Prison, Victoria’s top security jail.

  According to The Runner, it was there that Williams first asked him to kill Jason Moran. Moran — who had been spotted in London by one of the Williams’ team (‘The Lieutenant’) — had decided to return, even though he must have known his life was still in danger.

  Williams was not content with one hit team and continued to recruit inside and outside prison. While he was not a great student of history, he knew that in a war there would inevitably be casualties and prisoners. He looked to relatives, close friends and hardened gunmen whose loyalty he thought he could demand, or buy.

  Williams knew that The Runner, no pin-up boy for prisoner rehabilitation programs, was soon to be released after serving a sentence for armed robbery. He was good with guns, and ruthless.