Underbelly 4 Read online

  He also came to attention as a possible source of amphetamine chemicals during the drug squad operation, code-named Phalanx, into Australia’s speed king, John William Higgs.

  When Gangitano opened an up-market illegal casino above a restaurant in Carlton in 1987 he invited many of Melbourne’s major crime figures for the launch. When police raided at 1.30am they found Mannella, Higgs and another major amphetamines dealer in the crowd. When asked by police why he was there Mannella said ‘I come here to eat’ while Higgs said he was ‘Having a feed.’

  Police say Mannella was a middle level crime entrepreneur, the sort who was always looking to turn a profit, and wasn’t too bothered what product he had to move – or steal – in order to make one.

  In late 1998 he became involved in a gang that specialised in stealing huge quantities of foodstuff. Police believe the gang hit two regional targets and Mannella was the man with the contacts to sell the produce.

  Detectives have found he was a heavy gambler, and had owned or part owned nightclubs and coffee shops.

  While he was well liked in his own circle and, for a man who didn’t work or receive unemployment benefits, extremely generous, there was an element of violence in his nature.

  He was arrested when he was twenty-one for carrying a dagger in his pocket and six years later was found carrying two pistols. In 1981 he had a savage temper.

  The owner of a small coffee shop in Nicholson Street, North Fitzroy, told Mannella that he was no longer welcome to play cards there because, ‘He was acting tough, carried a loaded pistol and drove a Mercedes even though he didn’t work.’

  Mannella drove to the coffee shop on 20 February, 1981, and three times called the owner outside to try and persuade him to change his mind but he wouldn’t budge.

  Mannella then pulled out a pistol and from a distance of less than a metre opened fire.

  The wounded man ran down Nicholson Street while Mannella shot him a total of seven times.

  Miraculously, he survived, having told hospital staff in Italian that if they didn’t save his life he would come back and haunt them.

  Mannella was later sentenced to nine years with a minimum of seven over the shooting. Like ‘Mad’ Charlie Hegyalji, Mannella went back to what he knew when he was released from prison and, like Charlie, he was owed a six-figure amount when he was murdered.

  One of the difficulties police face in an investigation into the murder of a man like Mannella is that ‘friends’ can be enemies and that business deals are never documented.

  Arrangements are confirmed with a nod, plans are hatched in the back rooms of coffee shops and interested partners tell no-one of their schemes for fear they will be leaked to the police – or, worse, competing criminals.

  Mannella was definitely owed money and may have, in turn, owed others big amounts. For a man who drifted in and out of the lives of some of Australia’s most dangerous criminals either situation could have cost him his life.

  ‘We are exploring possible motives including his criminal associations and debt matters but nothing has been discounted,’ says Legg.

  Mannella had $500 in his pocket when he was murdered. The killer didn’t even bother to take it.

  RISING early was no problem to Joe Quadara – after all, he had been getting up before the sun for as long as he could remember.

  Horse trainers, newsagents and people in the fruit and vegetable industry don’t bother grumbling about early starts as they are a fact of life.

  At least for Quadara, his trip to work would take only minutes on the empty streets from his unit in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s most expensive suburbs, to the Safeway supermarket in nearby Malvern Road.

  After more than thirty years in the fruit and vegetable industry he had gone from being a millionaire to a bankrupt. He had once owned a string of big fruit shops and was a popular and generous patron of the Collingwood and Frankston Football clubs, but interest rates and an over-committed line of credit brought him crashing down.

  He had to sell his shops in Frankston and Mornington, his lavish Mt Eliza house and virtually everything he owned to try and pay off his debts, but there were still at least sixty creditors when he closed his doors.

  He owed businesses from $2000 to $50,000 although all of his creditors would admit he hadn’t run away from his debts and had battled to try and make good.

  Even though his business reputation may have been in tatters, he was still acknowledged to be a perfectionist in fruit and vegetables, only presenting the best produce and providing the warm personality that makes customers want to come back.

  By then aged fifty seven, he had become the produce manager at the Toorak supermarket and when it was taken over by Safeway he kept the job.

  He had worked at the wholesale market and in shops nearly all his adult life and was known for his boundless energy and enthusiasm.

  But recently he had not been feeling well and had yet another doctor’s appointment for later that day. He had already been told he might need surgery for cancer. What he didn’t know was that it was almost certainly terminal.

  That morning he drove his green Commodore into the rear carpark and stopped behind the Crittenden’s liquor shop.

  It was 3am on 28 May, 1999.

  Two men, both armed with handguns, ambushed him and shot him repeatedly before he could get out of the car. People heard screaming and yelling before the shots.

  His body was found ninety minutes later by a Safeway truck driver.

  It was seemingly a murder without motive and police are yet to find the answer to a series of basic questions such as:

  Why would two men execute a seemingly harmless fruiterer in a deserted Toorak carpark?

  What is it about Joe Quadara that would drive other men to kill? And why, at his funeral a few days later, did three of Melbourne’s most notorious gangsters, including the main suspect on the shooting Alphonse Gangitano, the man who was at Alphonse’s house when the murder was committed and Gangitano’s former right-hand man, all turn up to pay their last respects?

  Police have now established the two killers were seen in the car park the previous day in a dark, medium-sized station wagon. It is possible they believed Quadara had the keys to the safe and the yelling seconds before he was shot was part of a failed robbery bid.

  But Joe Quadara wasn’t even the purchasing officer at the supermarket so he didn’t carry company funds or have access to it.

  Detectives said he was a good fighter when he was younger and had developed a strong survival sense developed from three decades in an industry often connected with seemingly unexplained murders.

  If someone had put the squeeze on him the pressure would have been put on gradually and he wouldn’t have been parking in a dark carpark at work,’ one detective said. If robbery was not the motive then the killers checked the scene the day before as part of their plan to execute Joe Quadara.

  But was it the right Joe Quadara?

  There is another Joe Quadara, also aged in his mid fifties, also with connections in the fruit and vegetable industry – and with a more colourful past.

  This man was named in an inquest as having prior knowledge of the murder of Alfonso Muratore, who was shot dead in 1992. He denied the allegations.

  Muratore was the son-in-law of Liborio Benvenuto, the godfather of Melbourne who died in 1988. If it was a payback, it seems the wrong man paid the debt.

  GERARDO MANNELLA would have known in the last few seconds of life the answers to questions homicide squad detectives are still trying to find.

  As he left the house of his brother, Sal, in inner-suburban Melbourne on 20 October, 1999, he saw two men walking out of a lane fifteen metres away.

  Police say he immediately yelled ‘No’ and ran about fifty metres, dropping a power tool and mobile phone he was carrying.

  Detectives say it was likely Mannella recognised the men or saw the guns and knew they had come to kill him.

  He ran from the footpath out to the midd
le of the road when they caught him, shooting him repeatedly in the head.

  Mannella, thirty one, had been to work as a crane supervisor at the City Square project and to a union meeting before going to his brother’s home in the middle of the afternoon. He had not been in trouble with the police for years and his last problem had been for carrying a pistol seven years earlier.

  Police don’t know if he was followed to the house or the killers had been tipped off, but they were waiting when he left to go to his Avondale Heights house about 8pm.

  The killers were picked up by a third man driving a dark Ford station wagon. Mannella, the father of three, gave no indication when he left the house that he thought was in danger, but one career criminal with a history of providing solid information said Gerardo had repeatedly said he intended to find and kill the men who shot his brother, Vince.

  ‘It is most unwise to speak openly about these matters because if people take you seriously they will be forced to get in first.’ Dead men can’t hurt anybody.

  THE Esquire is a good magazine but a bad motel. It has about forty rooms and most nights nearly all of them are occupied by people who want cheap accommodation close to Fitzroy Street in the busy heart of St Kilda, Melbourne’s equivalent of Sydney’s King’s Cross.

  The increasingly fashionable suburb, where millionaires and professionals now rub shoulders with the street people, still has a few hangovers of its seedier past – and the Esquire is one of them, a 1970s building in Acland Street that has packed a lot of low life into its three decades.

  Drifters, backpackers, runaways, prostitutes and drug dealers can all get rooms. Some just stay the night; others stay for as long as they can afford the tariff, never having the security nor the confidence to look for something more permanent.

  Late in 1999 a man moved into room eighteen and made himself at home. He showed no sign of wanting anything better. For him the location was perfect – and at $50 a night the price was right.

  He was a drug dealer and he turned the room into a 24-hour a day business address. There was no need to advertise. Word of mouth in the street is all a pusher needs.

  Local police say that for six months he worked ‘red-hot’ and built a strong customer base.

  The dealer had visitors at all times of day and night. One of them was Richard Mladenich. The fact that it was 3.30am, that one man was asleep on the floor, a woman asleep in a bed and a third person was also in bed would not have fazed the man who loved to talk.

  When the door of room eighteen swung open a little later to reveal an armed man, it was one of the few times in his life that the standover man and serial pest was caught short for words.

  The assassin didn’t need to break down the door – underworld murders are seldom that dramatic. The door was unlocked and all he had to do was turn the handle slowly enough not to forewarn the victim. Before he walked in he yelled the name of the resident drug dealer – almost as a greeting – to show that he was no threat.

  By the time Mladenich realised he was in danger it was too late. When he stood to face the young man in the dark glasses and hood, he saw a small-calibre handgun pointing directly at him.

  His experience of more than twenty years of violence would have told him that only luck could save him. It didn’t.

  Before he could speak the gun barked and the man holding it was gone, leaving Mladenich fighting a losing battle for life.

  Many people would have wanted Richard Mladenich dead but, ironically, the man who pulled the trigger might not have been one of them. At least, that’s the theory put up by those investigating the shooting.

  Rather than the killing being an organised underworld hit, some police say, it was more likely to have been a botched job, in that Mladenich was not the gunman’s intended target.

  If the theory’s right it adds a black postscript to the recurring theme of his short, brutal and wasted life: that is, he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  MLADENICH was a drug dealer, a standover man and a loudmouth. He was also funny, outrageous, a showman and a jailhouse poet with a sense of theatre. If Mladenich, thirty seven, was hunted down by a hitman on 16 May, 2000, then detectives have a big problem. It will not be trying to find suspects who wanted him dead, but to eliminate potential enemies from the long list of possible gunmen.

  If he was followed then the killer did a professional job, as Mladenich had visited several other rooms at the Esquire before he reached room eighteen just before 3am.

  According to former standover man, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, Mladenich was ‘a total comedy of errors’ and ‘without a doubt the loudest and most troublesome inmate in any jail in Australia.’

  In 1988 Read and Mladenich were both inmates in the maximum security H Division of Pentridge Prison during the so-called Overcoat War between prisoner factions.

  ‘Poor Richard fell over and hit his head on a garden spade but he told the police nothing and dismissed as foul gossip and rumor suggestions that I had hit him with it.’ Read was never charged with the attack but Mladenich carried permanent reminders of it in the form of scars on his forehead.

  One night in jail Mladenich grabbed his plastic chair and banged it against his cell bars from 8.30pm until 4.20am – not as part of a jail protest, but simply because he thought it was funny.

  ‘He was never short of a word. He went to Joe the Boss’s place and stood outside yelling threats. This was not wise and a short time later he was shot in the leg in what was an obvious misunderstanding. He kept yelling abuse before he limped off. He could be flogged to the ground and then he would say, “Now let that be a lesson to you”.’

  Mladenich was fourteen when he was charged with stealing a car in Footscray. He was to end with a criminal record of more than nine pages and twenty-four aliases, including Richard Mantello and John Mancini.

  But while he considered himself a smart criminal his arrest record is filled with offences involving street violence. He was no master gangster.

  His lengthy police file included a large number of warnings, including that he had ‘violent rages that can be triggered off at any time … he will attempt to kill a (police) member or members.’

  One entry read: ‘According to prison officers with years of experience they stated (Mladenich) was one of the craziest and most violent offenders they have seen. (He) is a mountain of a man who has a very violent and unpredictable nature. He must be approached with caution and extreme care. A tough cookie.’

  Read said Mladenich had a fierce heroin habit from the mid 1980s. ‘He would come into jail looking like a wet greyhound and then he would pump iron and build up while inside.’

  Nearly ten years ago Read predicted that Mladenich would die young. ‘The drugs will kill Richard and it’s sad to see.’

  Read, now a best-selling author living in Tasmania, says many of his old friends and enemies were being murdered because they refused to accept they were too old to dominate the underworld.

  ‘The barman has called last drinks but these people won’t go home and they just hang around to be killed. I have found that the writing of books is a far better way for your middle-aged crim to spend his winter nights, well away from excitable types with firearms.’

  Former drug squad and St Kilda detective, Lachlan McCulloch, said Mladenich was one of the more bizarre criminal identities he had investigated in sixteen years.

  McCulloch said that during a drug raid in Albert Park armed police were searching a house when ‘There was this amazing scream and Mladenich jumped out into the lounge room pointing a gun at everyone and going “Pow Pow!”. He has this toy laser gun and he was running around shooting all of us with the flashing red light. The trouble was we all had real guns with real bullets. We could have blown his head off.’

  McCulloch said that while Mladenich was eccentric and violent (‘He was as crazy as they came’) he lacked the planning skills to be successful in the underworld.

  The former detective said Mladenic
h, who liked to be known as ‘King Richard’ but was also known by others as ‘Spade Brain’ and ‘Mad Richard’, had ambitions to run a protection racket. He stood over prostitutes and drug dealers but wanted to broaden his horizons. ‘He wore this black gangster’s coat and a black hat and walked into a pub in South Melbourne. He said he wanted $1000 a week for protection money and he would be back the next day.’

  When he came back twenty-four hours later he didn’t seem to notice a group of detectives sitting at a nearby table, sipping beers. He was arrested at his first attempt at the shakedown.

  Read said one detective tired of dealing with Mladenich through the courts. He said the detective walked him at gunpoint to the end of the St Kilda Pier, made him jump in and swim back. ‘Would have done him good too,’ Read said.

  As a criminal he was a good poet, reciting his verse to a judge who was about to jail him. He once was waiting in a Chinese restaurant for a takeaway meal when he started a friendly conversation with the man next to him, complimenting him on a ring he was wearing.

  When the man left the restaurant, Mladenich was waiting outside to rob him of the ring. ‘He nearly pulled the finger off with it,’ a detective said.

  He had a long and volatile relationship with many Melbourne barristers and judges. He was known to have stalked a prosecutor, Carolyn Douglas (later appointed a County Court Judge), to have disrupted Supreme Court trials and abuse lawyers who have appeared against him. He once chested a respected barrister, Raymond Lopez, in the foyer of Owen Dixon Chambers. ‘It is the only time I have felt under physical pressure in that way. I thought he was as high as a kite,’ the barrister was to recall.

  ‘He calmed down but he struck me as the type who could turn quickly.’

  He walked into one of his old lawyers’ offices, locked the door and asked for money. At the same time he noticed the barrister’s overcoat on the back of the door and started to go through the pockets. It was a stunning turnaround to have a client fleece his barrister, and earned Mladenich an enduring reputation in legal and police circles.