The Gangland War Read online

  One hardboiled character dragging on a borrowed Winfield has on the compulsory dark suit, but with fawn slip-on suede loafers. He wears no socks, but it doesn’t matter much. His ankles are tattooed almost solid blue and green.

  Across the street, marooned on a traffic island, the cameras of the media contingent are trained on the crowd. Those who hold the equipment keep their distance, perhaps remembering the ugly scenes at the funeral of Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole in Sydney in the 1980s, when angry mourners attacked cameramen and journalists.

  This is the scene at St Mary’s Star of the Sea Catholic church around 1.15pm on Friday 23 January 1998, as the minutes crawl towards the start of a funeral service for a man who died a week earlier the way he had lived: violently and fast.

  His name is, or was, Alphonse John Gangitano, one of the few criminals in Australian history to be known — even by people he’d never met — simply by his first name. Like Squizzy. Like Chopper. Like Neddy. And, later, like Tony and Carl.

  Alphonse, also known as Al, was shot several times at his Templestowe home by an assassin officially unknown, though his identity is no secret, who must have been well known to his victim.

  An assassin trusted enough, it would appear, that he was let into the house unchallenged before he produced a weapon and squeezed the trigger at close range.

  Some details of the shooting are a mystery. So is the question of how a boastful schoolyard bully, who left school with nothing more useful than a bad reputation, managed to support himself and his family in relative comfort most of his adult life.

  Gangitano often claimed he was a ‘property developer’, but that was probably just another example of the mischievous sense of humour his friends and supporters claim for him, exemplified by the fulsome praise heaped on him by one of his more unusual friends, bail justice, Rowena Allsop, who addressed the packed church at the funeral.

  Allsop, who was criticised for her close association with Gangitano, was asked to speak by the dead man’s family.

  She delivered a ringing tribute in which she compared his wit with Oscar Wilde’s, gushed about his silk ties, cashmere overcoats and ‘the lingering scent’ of his Dolce & Gabbana aftershave, and noted his consuming interest in John F. Kennedy and Napoleon.

  She said her friend had been ‘like a king commanding a court, with his friends laughing at his old jokes’. She said she was touched by him turning up at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital last Christmas with a bag of toys for the children in the cancer ward.

  Others, however, detected a darker side to Gangitano’s gregarious character.

  He might well have developed properties, they say. And no doubt he sometimes arranged for holes to be dug — but not always to pour foundations.

  If the man in the coffin wasn’t a gangster, he acted like one. And he was certainly buried like one.

  A fitting exit, some might say, for the Black Prince of Lygon Street.

  MELBOURNE is Australia’s Chicago, but with a touch of London’s old East End ‘manor’ tradition about it. A tradition of almost feudal loyalty to local ‘crime lords’ going back to the solidarity of the old working class inner suburbs in John Wren’s and Squizzy Taylor’s day.

  Unlike the criminal subculture in other cities, Melbourne’s underworld has a tradition of big occasion funerals, preceded by an avalanche of newspaper death notices. Many of these are effusive and ostentatiously long, implying that money is no object. Some are ‘crocodile tears’.

  A few are downright tongue-in-cheek, and contain coded jokes and messages. Police searching for clues to gangland slayings are known to comb the death notices carefully. Indeed, some are rumoured to write the occasional contribution themselves.

  Gangitano wasn’t the only one with a mischievous sense of humour. One notice read: ‘The impression you left on me will stay eternally in my heart. Jim Pinarkos.’ Pinarkos’s headless body was found at Rye beach in July 1989. He died from an arrow through his heart. The murder was never solved.

  Whatever the reasons, Gangitano’s farewell was one of the biggest underworld funerals in Melbourne since the murder of master bank robber Raymond (Chuck) Bennett in the magistrate’s court in 1979 and of Bennett’s arch enemy, the notorious gunman Brian Kane, in a Brunswick hotel some time later.

  The ritual ran over a week, starting with 22 death notices for Gangitano in the underworld’s favourite newspaper, the Herald Sun, on the Monday after the murder.

  The number of notices more than doubled to 48 on Tuesday, led by a joint tribute from Gangitano’s widow and their daughters, and his sister, Nuccia, and including several from prominent underworld figures.

  It peaked on Wednesday, with 68 notices, including one from Charlie Wootton, a reclusive but well-known and much-respected gaming identity whose past links him with the blood-spattered history of the painters and dockers union.

  It’s a well-worn legend that as a teenager in the 1950s, Wootton reputedly disposed of the empty shotgun shells left when an ‘unknown’ gunman shot Freddy ‘The Frog’ Harrison on the wharves.

  Dozens of men saw ‘The Frog’ get croaked, the legend goes, but it was never officially solved. Like the others, young Charlie Wootton developed amnesia, a condition that still affects police investigations.

  While some of Wootton’s peers were dragged back into the spotlight during the underworld war he wisely remained in the background. Wootton survived — many didn’t.

  In the seven days before the burial the 209 death notices for Gangitano were a bonanza for Rupert Murdoch’s classified advertising coffers — and a measure of the generous underworld protocol that makes a hero of a man dismissed by some as a thug who didn’t have the brains to be a ‘Mr Big’.

  Criminal groupies who hardly knew the dead man put notices in the paper as though they were great friends. But columns of newsprint aren’t the only measure of Gangitano’s posthumous popularity. At least 800 people, and possibly 1000, turned up to the funeral, filling the church and spilling outside.

  So why the big deal?

  One reason could be that Gangitano was, in his own way, a ‘crossover’ criminal. He was from a respectable Italian family — not one, according to police sources, that automatically connected him with organised crime from birth, as with some inbred Calabrian and Sicilian peasant clans for whom kidnapping, extortion and violence are facts of life in the old country.

  Gangitano went to school with other middle-class boys, and could just as easily have become a lawyer or an accountant if he’d studied, which he didn’t. Schoolmates recall that he was always aggressive but that his father was outraged when he secretly tattooed his arms and forced him to have skin grafts to remove them.

  When forced to leave Marcellin College, he did his last year of school at Taylors’ College. Classmates there remember that even then, he was lazy, manipulative, on the make and constantly accompanied by the first member of what was to become his gang.

  The picture that emerges is of an egotistical young bully whose nature made him gravitate towards a life of crime. His charm and his looks attracted attention. So did his vanity and appetite for extreme violence, especially when the odds were in his favour.

  But whereas more traditional Italian organised crime figures kept largely to their own, the more urbane Gangitano slipped easily between the Calabrian and Sicilian crime syndicates, other ethnic crime groups, and mainstream Australian criminals connected with the painters and dockers union. In the end, this willingness to deal with all comers might have been what got him killed.

  A former associate from the boxing world — who did not attend the funeral because of a violent disagreement many years ago — recalls being present when Gangitano spoke at length to the notorious Sydney standover man Tom Domican, with whom he evidently had a warm relationship.

  Others describe Gangitano’s links with one of Perth’s heaviest criminals, the convicted heroin trafficker John Kizon, who has been named in connection with the late Laurie Connell, mill
ionaire race-fixer and the most ruthless of the ‘WA Inc’ corporate robber barons.

  Domican and Kizon were reportedly among several interstate criminals who flew to Melbourne to attend Gangitano’s funeral. They were joined, rumour has it, by an Asian contact who counted Gangitano a close-enough friend to travel to Australia for the service.

  In his private life, Gangitano was unlike the strictly-controlled members of the traditional Italian groups, where marriages are often arranged, often between distant relatives from the same region in Italy. He did not marry, but lived with his de facto wife, a private school girl who was not Italian. Her sister, a handsome and distinguished-looking woman, added a touch of class to the funeral proceedings by giving one of the readings during the service. And the sisters are school friends of a woman whose brother became a State Attorney General.

  But, for all his wide-ranging contacts, Gangitano was best-known and — at least on the surface — most admired in Melbourne’s little Italy, Lygon Street.

  All of which has a bearing on the huge turn-up at his funeral. St Mary’s Star of the Sea in West Melbourne, close to the Victoria Market, is the church of choice for Melbourne’s mafia.

  It was a case of history repeating itself. Hairstyles, hemlines and cars change, but among the older people in the congregation were some who have attended more than one big mafia funeral there.

  When one of Victoria’s earliest godfathers, Domenico ‘the Pope’ Italiano, died in 1962 he was buried from St Mary’s. So were Vincenzo Muratore and Vincenzo Agillette, killed little more than a year later in the power struggle caused by Italiano’s death.

  They were all given elaborate funerals, early proof of the potency and loyalty of the Italian organised crime groups that had taken control of Melbourne’s fruit and vegetable markets.

  But none was more elaborate than Gangitano’s. From the taped music to the singing of Ave Maria by his friend, Simon Pantano, it was a lavish production from start to end.

  Of course, not everyone present was in mourning. Apart from a core of family and close friends, the crowd comprised mostly those who felt obliged to be there, and hangers-on attracted by the publicity.

  One reason for the big crowd, joked a well-known criminal lawyer afterwards, was the number of undercover police there to execute outstanding warrants on elusive criminals drawn from cover for the occasion. Another, he said, was the number of lawyers trying to collect overdue fees for court appearances for some of the colourful identities in the congregation.

  A former detective, who first ran against the young Gangitano in nightclubs in the early 1980s, and was respected by him, injects a sombre note.

  ‘I hope a war doesn’t go on over this, because the biggest losers are their kids,’ he says. ‘I have seen the toughest men, but all their lives consist of are a series of battles with the law and with their criminal counterparts. No kid deserves to have their father taken away like this.

  ‘But it’s happened to Alphonse’s kids, and now there’s probably someone out there scheming to kill some other kids’ father.’

  He couldn’t have known how right he would be.

  7

  MAD, BAD, THEN SAD

  One shot missed, but Charlie

  had nowhere to run. He was shot

  four times in the head.

  ‘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 was shielded from the traffic noise of busy Bambra Road by ten mature cypress trees forming a six-metre high hedge so thick it has been cut back to allow pedestrians access to the footpath.

  The tall horizontal plank timber fence acted 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 was trained down the six-metre garden path. From inside the house anyone entering or leaving the property could 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.

  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, confident he could not be seen from the street, and waited until Hegyalji came home.

  It was just before 1am on 23 November 1998, and it had been a long night for Charlie. A business associate had picked him up about 6pm and they visited the London Tavern, in Caulfield, the Grosvenor Hotel, in Balaclava and the 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, avoiding set routines that would make him easy to track.

  He drank beer and brandy and cokes with his friends. But he wasn’t happy with just a night on the grog.

  At one point he disappeared with a man and when he returned, his friends thought drugs affected him. They were right. An autopsy would later show he had used cannabis and amphetamines.

  While in one of the hotels, he made a call from a pay phone. Police traced the number and found he had rung Dino Dibra, a violent drug dealing try-hard listed by police as a suspected hit man.

  As with most of the underworld hits, those who were likely to have important information refused to talk and Dibra would not share with police the contents of the phone call.

  Detectives put Dibra on a shortlist of suspects, but it is now a moot point because Dibra himself was murdered in 2000.

  Another suspect is a former policeman turned gangster well known in the area and well known to Charlie. The ex-detective can best be described as colourful, particularly in relation to his eclectic sex life.

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

  When the driver rang the doorbell, Charlie got up to go, leaving half a stubby of beer.

  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 he had developed. The theory was that if someone were 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 inside when the killer, armed with a handgun, opened fire. One shot missed, but Charlie had nowhere to run. He was shot four times in the head.

  A bullet wound was also found on his left hand — a defensive wound that was sustained as he tried to protect his head from the gunfire.

  Neighbours heard the shots and called police, but Charlie’s obsession with privacy, in the form of the hedge and the fence, concealed his body from the police torches. The patrol car drove off.

  Not that it made any difference. He had died instantly and the killer 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 camera 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 it. The sensor light at the front of the house had also stopped working 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 wa
s an inside job.

  WHEN Hegyalji, then aged thirteen, arrived at Station Pier as a European refugee he asked 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 once 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 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, and 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, 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.