The Gangland War Page 13

  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 almost 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 throughout 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.

  He once stood in a bar next to some of the biggest names in Australian television, poured a white powder on the bar, either cocaine or amphetamines, and snorted it.

  ‘He just stuck his nose in it, then punched himself in the chest and started to shadow box. We decided it was time to leave,’ one prominent television and radio identity said later.

  He made a lot of money at times, but there was no gain without pain.

  In 1989 Hegyalji was shot in the stomach outside a house in South Caulfield and he later shot a man in a St Kilda hotel carpark as a payback.

  In 1997 he was involved in a gun battle with another criminal associate outside a panel beater’s workshop 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, others had filled his place. 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 Rowland 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 unlisted) and he said, “You know me, Chopper. I’ve got everybody’s number.”’

  What Charlie didn’t know was that his own number was about to come up. He told Read 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,’ Read said.

  Soon after Charlie’s murder, Read found his then wife was expecting their first child. It was a son. He named him Charlie in honour of his murdered mate.

  8

  THE ITALIAN JOBS

  Gerry may not have known until

  the last second that his life

  was about to end but someone

  close to him did.

  VINCENZO Mannella was nearly everyone’s friend — he was outgoing, generous and funny — but some time 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 didn’t need many excuses to be out on the town.

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

  Mannella, 48, and married with two children, drove his blue Ford Fairlane sedan back to his weatherboard house in Alister Street, 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 11.45pm.

  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.

  As with so many of the Melbourne hits, police found that Mannella’s killer had carefully planned his escape route before doing the deed.

  Police are confident that the killer ran about 800 metres along nearby Merri Creek and then up Albert Street to an agreed pickup point. He obviously did not want any potential witnesses to connect his distinctive getaway car with the sound of gunshots.

  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. 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 the place 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 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 21 for carrying a dagger in his pocket and six years later was found carrying two pistols.

  In 1981 he displayed a savage temper. It happened when 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 the man 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 noone 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.

  He was heavily connected with a team who had just stolen more than $400,000 worth of food, including imported cheese. He was known to be a major broker in the lucrative black market tobacco — or chop-chop business — and in that business smoking can be deadly.

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

  Mannella had $500 in his pocket when he was murdered. The killer didn’t bother to take it. He would be paid much more by the person who ordered the hit.

  VINCE Mannella’s brother Gerardo would have known in the last few seconds of life the answers to questions homicide squad detectives are still trying to solve.

  As he left the house of his brother, Sal, in inner-suburban Melbourne on 20 October 1999, Gerardo saw two men walking out of a lane fifteen metres away. Police say he immediately yelled ‘No’ and ran, dropping a power tool and mobile phone he was carrying. 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 middle of the road, but they caught him, shooting him repeatedly in the head.

  Mannella, 31, 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.

  A third man, driving a dark Ford station wagon, picked up the killers moments after the hit.

  As in the case of his brother’s murder, the killers had done their homework. Mannella, the father of three, gave no indication when he left the house that he thought he 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.

  Gerry may not have known until the last second that his life was about to end — but someone close to him did. The person had known for days — perhaps weeks — that he was about to die but kept silent. She still does.

  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 because they are a fact of life. And death, sometimes. Early risers do make tempting targets. For Quadara, his last trip to work would take only a few 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 30 years in the fruit and vegetable industry, Quadara 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-stretched 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 to pay off his debts, but there were still at least 60 creditors when he closed his doors.

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

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

  While his customers loved him, some of his suppliers didn’t, as he had a habit of sending produce back that didn’t reach his exacting standard. And in that cut-throat industry there were some suppliers who would kill for their market share.

  By then aged 57, 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 almost 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 his problems were terminal.

  At 3am on 28 May 1999, he drove his green Commodore into the rear car park and stopped behind the Crittenden’s liquor shop. Two men, 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. A Safeway truck driver found the body about 90 minutes later.

  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 car park?

  • What was it about Joe Quadara that would drive other men to kill him?

  • And why, at his funeral a few days later, did some of Melbourne’s most notorious gangsters, including Jason Moran and Graham Kinniburgh, turn up to pay their last respects?

  • Why was a stolen car connected to a market identity found burning near the murder scene just minutes after the killing?

  Detectives were to find that many years earlier Joe had an affair with a woman who bore him a son. In a bizarre coincidence the woman is related to the Melbourne hit man known as ‘The Journeyman’ who would be a key figure in Melbourne’s underworld war.

&nbs
p; Police have now established the two killers were seen in the car park the previous day in a dark-coloured Toyota Camry station wagon. The trouble is, 32,000 cars fit that description.

  It is possible the killers believed Quadara had the keys to the safe and that 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 the safe.

  Detectives said he was a good fighter when he was younger and had a strong survival sense developed from three decades in an industry with more than its share of 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 were checking the scene the day before as part of their plan to execute Joe Quadara.

  Police believe debt is the likely motive for the murder but in the murky world of the markets they cannot be sure.

  There is another Joe Quadara, also aged in his mid-50s, 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.

  Certainly one suspect named as the person who paid for the hit on Joe Quadara was Liborio Benvenuto’s son, Frank, who was himself shot dead in remarkably similar circumstances a year later.

  Frank Benvenuto had two different gunmen work for him at different times, One was the veteran Victor Peirce and the other was an ambitious youngster named Andrew Veniamin.

  Police now believe the paid hit man who shot Quadara was Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin and that it was his first known hit. He is also the man police say killed Frank Benvenuto. He may have been a hard worker but he was not a loyal one.