Underbelly 4 Read online

  A week later, the cab driver read of an appeal for anyone who had heard a girl screaming in the area. He went to the police and reported what he’d heard, but was never called to the inquest nor interviewed properly. Brennan wrote: ‘An absurd story was told by Detective Brophy about making inquiries in the neighborhood, and learning of some child that had a reputation for screaming … When Ross was condemned, Graham went to his solicitor and repeated his story. The full court heard his evidence, but it declined to allow a jury to hear it.’

  The cab-driver was a credible witness with nothing to lose or gain, and who didn’t know either the victim or the accused. But he came too late, perhaps, for his evidence to suit the fit-up that Brophy and Piggott had settled on.

  Significantly, the suggestively named Adam and Eve ‘lodging house’ where Graham heard the screams was on the corner where Alma was last seen alive. It was known to provide rooms for prostitutes and pimps.

  Which makes one of the dozens of letters Ross’s lawyers received during the trial all the more interesting. The letter, received on the eve of the execution, was addressed to Ross but posted to his solicitor.

  The anonymous letter looked genuine to Brennan, and he reprinted it as an appendix to his book. It read: ‘You have been condemned for a crime which you never committed, and are to suffer for another’s fault. Since your conviction you have, no doubt, wondered what manner of man the real murderer is who could not only encompass the girl’s death, but allow you to suffer in his stead.

  ‘My dear Ross, if it is any satisfaction for you to know it, believe me that you die but once, but he will continue to die for the rest of his life.

  ‘Honored and fawned upon by those who know him, the smile upon his lips but hides the canker eating into his soul. Day and night his life is a hell without the hope of reprieve. Gladly would he take your place on Monday next if he had himself alone to consider. His reason, then, briefly stated, is this: A devoted and loving mother is ill – a shock would be fatal. Three loving married sisters, whose whole life would be wrecked, to say nothing of brothers who have been accustomed to take him as a pattern. He cannot sacrifice these. Himself he will sacrifice when his mother passes away. He will do it by his own hand …

  ‘It is too painful for him to go into the details of the crime. It is simply a Jekyll and Hyde existence. By a freak of nature, he was not made as other men … This girl was not the first … With a procuress all things are possible … in this case there was no intention of murder – the victim unexpectedly collapsed.

  ‘May it be some satisfaction to yourself, your devoted mother, and the members of your family to know that at least one of the legion of the damned, who is the cause of your death, is suffering the pangs of hell. He may not ask your forgiveness or sympathy, but he asks your understanding.’

  Whoever wrote the letter must now be dead, and probably his secret died with him. But for Kevin Morgan the case is alive, and he believes he can identify the murderer: Melbourne’s own Jack the Ripper.

  Time will tell.

  CHAPTER 8

  Survival of the Meanest

  ‘He jumped out into the lounge room pointing a gun at everyone and going “Pow Pow!”. It’s a toy laser gun and he is running around shooting all of us with the flashing red light. We all had real guns with real bullets. We could have blown his head off’

  THE more things change the more they stay the same. In each generation since World War Two the Melbourne underworld has started undeclared civil wars resulting in a series of unsolved murders.

  In the 1960s two fruit and vegetable market identities were shot dead and another seriously injured in separate attacks. It resulted in an international inquiry into organised crime and a story that still makes headlines as the Market Murders.

  In the 1980s, after the Great Bookie Robbery, gangsters Les and Brian Kane and Raymond Patrick Bennett were murdered as part of an underworld split and a television movie was made about it.

  In the 1970s the so-called painters and dockers war ultimately led to a Royal Commission. In the 1950s it was the murder of gangster Freddie The Frog’ Harrison as he uncoupled a trailer from his car on the waterfront.

  But by the year 2000 in Melbourne nine men were killed in what appears to be a series of planned, professional hits and there has been hardly a sign of community concern.

  Three men were shot as they entered their front gardens, one in his home, two as they arrived or left work, another was followed and killed as he left his brother’s home, one ambushed in his car and another in a seedy motel.

  Two were brothers killed ten months apart and all were known associates of major criminals.

  One theory is that the underworld pecking order has been disturbed following the murder of Alphonse Gangitano, shot dead in his Templestowe home in January 1998. Another is that an Adelaide crime family has been expanding into Victoria.

  But, as far as police are concerned, they are just theories that lack evidence. What they have confirmed is that the victims were all connected through a group of violent Melbourne criminals, but they don’t know if that circle is responsible for the murders, or just attracts them.

  In the homicide squad, Crew Two was run by a veteran investigator, Rowland Legg. This team was assigned four of the murders that appear to be gangland related.

  The victims appeared to be stalked, all were shot at close range in the head with handguns and all cases remain unsolved.

  Because they were stuck with the four difficult murders members of Crew Two were to give themselves the nickname ‘The Headshot Team.’

  ‘MAD’ Charlie Hegyalji was always security conscious – those in the illegal amphetamine industry usually are.

  He filled books with the registration numbers of the vehicles he believed might be following him, was always discreet on the telephone and chose a house that he believed offered him the greatest protection.

  His comfortable brick home in Caulfield South is shielded from the traffic noises of busy Bambra Road by ten mature cypress trees that form a six-metre high hedge so thick it has been cut back to allow pedestrians access to the footpath.

  There is a 1.5 metre horizontal plank wooden fence that acts as another buffer to noise and, more importantly for Hegyalji, as a screen to stop possible police surveillance.

  Near the front door a small white surveillance camera is trained down the six-metre garden path. From inside the house anyone entering or leaving the property can be safely observed on a video screen.

  ‘Mad’ Charlie lived in the house relatively secure in the knowledge he had done all he could to protect himself and his business from the untimely interruption of police or possible competitors. But, in the end, it wasn’t enough.

  ‘Mad’ Charlie was killed by a lone gunman who used the criminal’s own security fetish against him. The killer crouched under the first tree inside the fence line and waited until Hegyalji came home just before lam on 23 November, 1998, confident he could not be seen from the street.

  Hegyalji was picked up by a business associate about 6pm and they drank at the London Tavern, in Caulfield, the Grosvenor Hotel in Balaclava and Newmarket Hotel, in St Kilda. They met up with two other men for their night of drinking.

  To an outsider it would seem like an old fashioned pub-crawl but people like Hegyalji are always on the move, conducting business in pubs and clubs, and avoiding set routines that make them easy to track.

  Charlie and one of the men went back to a unit off Inkerman Street, St Kilda, just after midnight. Hegyalji rang a Yellow Cab from his friend’s unit to take the short trip home around 12.40am.

  When the door rang Charlie got up to go, leaving half a stubbie. Instead of being dropped off outside his house he ordered the taxi to stop about a block away from home. It was another security habit Charlie had developed. The theory was that if someone was waiting for him he could sneak up unheard. It was 12.50am.

  Hegyalji opened the wooden gate and took two steps along the stone path insi
de when the killer, armed with a handgun, opened fire. One shot missed but before Charlie could react he was shot several times in the head.

  Neighbors heard the shots and called the police but Charlie’s obsession for privacy concealed his body from the police torches and the patrol car drove off.

  It would have made no difference. He died instantly and the killer, believed to be a tall man with swept-back hair, was gone in seconds, running past nearby Freeman Street.

  About seven hours later Hegyalji’s de facto wife, Ellie, was about to prepare breakfast for their two children when she glanced up at the security screen focused on the front path and saw his body.

  The security camera remained operational and should have provided the biggest clue in the case. But for all his security precautions, Charlie had grown lazy – there was no tape in the machine. The sensor light at the front of the house had also malfunctioned and Charlie had not bothered to get it fixed.

  It is almost certain the killer knew he would not be filmed or illuminated. The odds are he had been a guest in the house or had been told by someone who had.

  Either way, it was an inside job.

  WHEN Hegyalji, then aged thirteen, arrived at Station Pier as a European refugee he said to his mother in Hungarian: ‘Where is the Statue of Liberty?’ He eventually got over his disappointment at not being in New York, but never forgot the gangster dreams of his adolescence. According to his long-time friend and underworld associate, Mark Brandon Read, Charlie always wanted to be a mobster. ‘All he ever wanted to be was an American gangster in New York. Through his fantasies he ended up becoming everything he wanted to be, except it was in the wrong country,’ Read said.

  According to Read, Hegyalji flew to New York and waited outside an old nightclub reputed to be a meeting place for members of the Gambino crime family. ‘He stood in the snow for a week before he finally was able to say hello to Carlo Gambino. He pinched Charlie’s cheek and said hello back. It was the best moment of his life.’

  But he was to become more than just a tourist in the crime world. Hegyalji became a violent young standover man involved in rapes and robberies on massage parlours.

  In the 1970s he began to call himself ‘The Don’ and modelled himself on the image of the US crime figures he revered. But by the 1980s he found there was more money to be made by being involved in the amphetamine trade than robbing fellow criminals.

  In the 1980s a bright chemistry student, Paul Lester, quit university once he knew enough to produce the best amphetamines in Australia. He was a sought-after ‘speed’ cook who was more interested in tinkering with electronics as a hobby than making money from illegal drugs.

  But Charlie was the sort who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He abducted Lester at gunpoint from a Rosebud street, then drove him, blindfolded, to a Gippsland property where he forced him to produce amphetamines.

  In another cook in Carlton, the process didn’t work according to plan and Hegyalji poured the sludgy and volatile substance out on a tarpaulin, allowing the sun to evaporate the liquid and leaving the amphetamine powder. ‘He called it “sun-dried speed”,’ Read said. In fashionable inner-suburban Carlton, it went with sun-dried tomatoes. Police who dealt with Hegyalji said he was funny and, when it suited him, charming. ‘He was always jovial but he was always trying to run you. He would ask more questions than he answered,’ one said.

  According to one detective he bought a book on police informing from the US in the hope he would be able to keep the upper hand when being interviewed. ‘He was prepared to inform but only out of self interest. He would give information to expose his enemies and to keep himself out of jail.’

  There was no sign of him ever working and he saw no pressing need to collect unemployment benefits.

  But if his quick wit failed he had alternatives. When police raided a Narre Warren farmhouse in 1995 as part of an amphetamines investigation they found a hidden armoury behind a false bedroom wall.

  Inside they found nearly twenty pistols, machine guns and shotguns, six cans of mace, false drivers’ licences and silencers. They also found a computer printout from a national security firm that listed alarm systems used through Melbourne. A pink highlighter had been used to identify the systems used in police stations.

  Hegyalji’s fingerprints were found on the list.

  Read said Hegyalji was called ‘Mad’ Charlie after he bit off the nose of an enemy when he was still a teenager, but when another criminal was given the nickname ‘Machinegun Charlie’ he became jealous and tried to persuade people to give him a more glamorous title. ‘But to everyone he was still Mad Charlie,’ Read said.

  In the 1990s he was a semi-regular at the specialist Prahran bookstore ‘Kill City’, where he would pull copies of Read’s books from the shelf and demand to know from the owner if the author had made ‘a million dollars.’ All the time one of Charlie’s minders, a giant of a man, would stand in the doorway of the shop, silently watching his increasingly-eccentric boss make a nuisance of himself. In 1989 Hegyalji was shot in the stomach outside a house in South Caulfield and he later shot a man in the carpark of a St Kilda hotel as a payback. In 1997 he was involved in a gun battle with another criminal associate outside a panel beaters in Prahran. Both men were unhurt.

  Hegyalji was charged with attempted murder and kept in custody for just over a year until he was released in July, 1998. The charges were dropped because, as in so many cases involving the underworld, witnesses refused to testify.

  Charlie went back to his old patch of St Kilda and Caulfield expecting business to return to normal but, according to police, his place had been filled by others. The people who had been left to run his business were not keen to relinquish control.

  He had to flex his muscles and, when he was drinking, loved to wave his handgun around in hotels, playing up to his gangster image. But Hegyalji was forced to stop carrying his revolver with him at all times because, inconveniently, he was increasingly being stopped and searched by police.

  In the drug business it can be as dangerous to be owed money as to be in debt. Charlie was owed more than $100,000 when he was killed but the debt lapsed with his death. It is not a financial arrangement that can be listed on Probate documents. Detective Senior Sergeant Legg, prone to the sort of understatement that comes from years of dealing with underworld murders, said: ‘There was a little bit of business friction and there had been some ongoing discussions over the debt.’

  In the world ‘Mad’ Charlie inhabited all his adult life, business deals were never committed to paper and some contracts could only be enforced with a gun.

  Police do not like to use the term ‘professional hit’, believing it adds glamour to a gutter business, but Legg concedes: ‘That someone was hired to kill him remains a possibility.’ Six days before his murder Hegyalji rang Read to wish the former standover man a happy birthday. ‘I asked him how he got my number (it is a unlisted) and he said; “You know me, Chopper. I’ve got everybody’s number.” He said he had a small problem with a mutual friend but he said it was nothing he couldn’t handle.

  ‘He seemed anxious and I knew he had some sort of problem.’ Soon after Charlie’s murder Read found that his wife was expecting their first child. It was a son. He named him Charlie in honor of his murdered mate.

  VINCENZO MANNELLA was nearly everyone’s friend – outgoing, generous and funny – but sometime during his life of wheeling and dealing, he managed to make at least one serious enemy. And Mannella moved on the fringes of a world in which it doesn’t pay to rub the wrong people the wrong way.

  His last night on earth started as a pleasant summer evening. It was 9 January, 1999, with the sort of balmy weather that encourages socialising, and Vince Mannella didn’t need many excuses to get out on the town.

  He spent the evening with three friends in a coffee shop in Lygon Street, Carlton, and, later, a restaurant in Sydney Road. Even though it was nearly midnight the group decided to kick on to a wine bar in Nicholson Stree
t.

  Mannella, forty eight, and married with two children, drove his blue Ford Fairlane sedan back to his weatherboard house in Alister Street in North Fitzroy, from where he was to be picked up by one of the friends to go on to Elio’s Wine Bar.

  He parked the car in the front driveway next to his wife’s BMW and walked towards the front door. The sensor lit the front landing and a security camera pointed from the roof but this would prove to be no help as the camera had never been connected.

  He carried a plastic bag filled with leather belts he had just bought, a packet of Peter Jackson cigarettes and his car keys. It was 11.45 pm.

  A gunman, who either waited outside the house or followed Mannella’s car, walked up behind him and shot him repeatedly with a handgun. Mannella fell forward, his head resting on the welcome mat at the front landing.

  Police have established that the killer carefully planned his escape route before the night of the murder. He ran about eight hundred metres along nearby Merri Creek and then up Albert Street to an agreed pick-up point. He obviously did not want any possible witnesses to connect his getaway car with the sound of gunshots.

  But if the killer wanted to leave the scene discreetly he made an odd choice of transport. Police believe he was picked up by someone driving a terracotta-coloured Pontiac Trans Am with an eagle mural on the bonnet.

  MANNELLA was the sort of criminal who was big enough to make a good living but small enough to avoid constant police attention.

  Detectives who investigate organised crime knew of him, more because he associated with some of the biggest names in the underworld than as a result of his own activities.

  According to police, he was an associate of crime figure Alphonse Gangitano, shot in his Templestowe house almost a year before.