The Gangland War Read online

  He had taken his children to school, shopped with his mother, and had lunch with his wife. He also picked up his high-powered white Holden ute from a local panel beater. The car had been registered in the name of one of the Moran clan’s most trusted insiders. Mark would not live to learn that the man was a police informer.

  That evening he went to the nearby Gladstone Park Shopping Centre to meet a local drug customer but the deal fell through. The reason remains in dispute. The customer told police he wanted to buy marijuana and ecstasy tablets from Moran and was ‘surprised that Mark didn’t have the smoke because when we make a meeting like this he usually had what I need.’

  But police were also told that the customer did not have the money to pay and the deal was done on credit.

  Either way, Moran arrived home around 7.45pm but told his wife he was going out for about 15 minutes shortly after 8pm.

  Williams was waiting. But how did he know of the proposed meeting when Moran rarely left home at night?

  Moran was a rarity amongst gangsters: he was no night-owl. Moran and his wife were normally in bed by 9pm and up at dawn for a daily exercise routine. Moran — who was a personal trainer before he found the drug business more lucrative — would do 100 sit-ups and then head to a local gym.

  But this night he walked out the door and down the drive to where his car was parked outside in Combermere Street. He had become lazy and sloppy and hadn’t bothered parking behind the house’s heavy metal gates or inside the double garage.

  As he went to step into the car, Williams emerged from the shadows and hit him with two shotgun blasts and at least one from a handgun.

  The force knocked him into the car, killing him instantly. Police found amphetamines and cocaine on him, and wondered if he had been lured out on the promise of a last-minute sale?

  It was no surprise when it became known that a Moran had been murdered. The surprise was that it was Mark and not his younger half-brother, Jason, then serving two years and six months over a nightclub assault in King Street.

  While Jason Moran was seen as wild, violent and erratic, Mark was calmer and tried to keep a lower profile.

  ‘Jason was out of control, Mark was the brains,’ said one policeman who has investigated the family.

  But as Jason became increasingly restrained by court action and stints in jail, Mark began to take a higher profile. After Jason had shot Williams in the stomach in a nearby park in October the previous year it had been Mark who’d urged his brother to ‘shoot him in the head.’

  Whether he started to mimic Jason’s behaviour or just learnt to play the role of the gun-toting tough guy, Mark developed that fatal gangster swagger.

  About 18 months before his death, he took offence when an associate made a disparaging comment about a female relative.

  ‘He went around to the guy’s house, stuck a gun in his mouth, took him away and seriously flogged him,’ a criminal source said.

  In 1999, he was involved in the assault of a policeman at Flemington racecourse on Oaks Day — not a good business move. Neither was the Moran brothers’ decision to shoot Williams in the guts.

  The incident was a warning, not an attempt to kill. But sometimes it can be more dangerous to goad a snake, even a fat, slow one, than to leave it alone or kill it outright, as the Morans were to find out the hard way.

  On 17 February 2000, police noticed Mark Moran driving a luxury car. When they opened the boot of the rented vehicle, they found a high-tech handgun equipped with a silencer and a laser sight.

  They also found a heap of amphetamine pills that had been stamped in a pill press to appear as ecstasy tablets.

  The day after Mark’s murder, police raided an associate’s home and seized another 5000 tablets similar to those found in the boot of the rental car.

  Months before, Mark Moran had been ejected from the County Court after he tried to use a false name to get access to the plea hearing after his half-brother was found guilty over the King Street assault. AFL footballer Wayne Carey gave character evidence for Jason Moran, which was a case of history repeating itself.

  A high-profile Carlton footballer of impeccable credentials once gave character evidence for Moran’s maternal grandfather over a stolen-property charge.

  Not surprisingly, the property had been stolen and hidden at the grandfather’s place by the teenage Moran boys and the old man was obliged to shoulder the blame for his delinquent descendants. The star who gave character evidence for him was doing the right thing.

  Police described Moran as one of a new breed of drug traffickers known as the ‘Bollinger Dealers’, who wore designer suits and associated with minor celebrities and the new rich.

  MARK was a former professional chef and a ‘gym rat’ often seen at the Underworld Health and Fitness centre beside the Yarra in the central city. But like so many of his class, he had not worked regularly for years and police say his high-income lifestyle and expensive home could only have been supported through illegal activities. He refused to speak about business on telephones and rarely spoke with associates in his house because he feared police had the place bugged.

  He was proud of his fitness and physique and was described as ‘extremely narcissistic’. He liked to be well-dressed in a gangsterchic style. When he was shot, he was wearing a huge diamond stud in his left ear.

  Mark Moran was young, good-looking, rich and fit. But in the months leading up to his murder, he was depressed and at one point was hospitalised when he told friends he was considering suicide. In the end, someone beat him to it.

  The day before Moran’s murder, police conducted a series of raids on a sophisticated amphetamines network and a number of criminals, including one known as ‘The Penguin’, were arrested.

  In the beginning there were several theories as to why he was murdered — people like Moran make many violent enemies in their business.

  But the homicide squad knew of Williams’ hatred of the family and within 24 hours was interviewing the suspect.

  Williams claimed he could not have committed the murder because he was picking up a hire car from Melbourne Airport at the time. But police say they have found a gap of nearly an hour in which Williams could have travelled to Aberfeldie for the killing.

  Years later, one of Williams’ key men we call ‘The Driver’ told police he drove Williams to a street near Moran’s home and drove him away after the shooting.

  Another witness, not connected with the underworld, has been able to corroborate much of The Driver’s story. A second criminal source also made a statement against Williams.

  The case against Williams was good, but not great. And that is why it was dropped when Williams agreed to plead guilty to the three other murders (Jason Moran, Lewis Moran and Mark Mallia, having already been found guilty of killing Michael Marshall).

  Mark’s mother, Judy Moran, has always maintained Williams should have been prosecuted over the murder.

  Within days of the murder there were reports of shots fired near a North Fitzroy home connected to the Williams syndicate.

  ‘It is not the right time to be taking sides,’ a detective said after Mark’s funeral. He was right, as the murders continued for years, with people who took sides getting killed.

  In accordance with underworld union rules, the Herald Sun was filled with death notices to a ‘lovely gentleman’ after Mark Moran’s death. There were many from former league footballers including one from a former Carlton captain who fondly remembered the Moran boys running a victory lap with the team after a premiership in the 1980s.

  There was one notice falsely placed under the nickname of a drug squad detective. Police suspect it was placed to give the appearance Moran was talking to police when he was killed.

  The funeral was the usual procession of real friends, hangers-on and crims in black suits who refused to remove their sunglasses, even though it was a cold winter’s day.

  Jason Moran was allowed day leave from prison to speak at the funeral. Mourne
rs said the brother spoke with real emotion but his death notice worried police. It read: ‘This is only the beginning, it will never be the end. REMEMBER, I WILL NEVER FORGET.’

  It was an empty boast. Within three years Jason would join his brother as an underworld victim.

  Because the funeral was going to choke local streets, a request was made for uniformed police to control traffic, but a senior policeman vetoed the plan. He didn’t want media images of police holding up traffic for a mob of Melbourne gangsters.

  While Mark Moran had a low public profile, he had a long and violent criminal history. Career criminal Raymond John Denning once told an inquest Moran was one of three men involved in an armed robbery in which a guard was shot dead.

  He said the three men involved were Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox, Moran and Santo Mercuri. The robbery was on 11 July 1988, in Barkly Square, Brunswick. Two armed guards were leaving a Coles warehouse with a cash tin when they were held up at gun-point. A struggle followed and one of the guards, Dominic Hefti, 31, was shot in the chest and the leg. He died two days later at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

  Denning said the three men planned to kill a woman whose car Mercuri had stolen for his getaway. Denning said: ‘It was decided among the three of them that they try to find her home address and knock her because she was the only one that Sam believed had identified him.’

  In a chilling postscript to the story, when the armed robbery squad later raided the Doncaster home of Russell Cox, they found that the page of the telephone book carrying the woman’s name and address had been torn out.

  Hefti’s murder sparked another spate of killings. Police wrongly believed that armed robber Graeme Jensen was responsible and he was shot during an apparently clumsy attempt to arrest him on 11 October 1988.

  The following day two young uniformed police, Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra, as a payback.

  LES Cole didn’t think lightning could strike the same place twice. He was wrong. The former painter and docker was shot dead in the same garage in which a gunman had ambushed him and seriously wounded him just two months before.

  That was on 10 November 1982, at Cole’s heavily-fortified Kyle Bay home in Sydney. It was to prove eerily similar to the death of his biological son, Mark Moran, 18 years later. Each was shot dead as he returned home. Each was living well above his legitimate means at the time. And each almost certainly knew they were in danger.

  Cole managed to live one year longer than his son would. He was shot at 37; Mark at 36.

  It was the second attempt on Cole’s life. He had been shot just two months before by a man he described as ‘a bad loser.’ But if the gunman was a bad loser then Cole was a fatally slow learner.

  He was still recovering from the first attack, and was returning from a physiotherapy appointment for treatment for his injuries, when he was killed.

  In the first shooting he had been wounded in the right foot, right knee, midriff, right shoulder and twice in the forearm.

  But the second time the gunman left nothing to chance, shooting Cole twice in the chest and once behind the right ear.

  When police interviewed him over the first shooting he said, ‘I don’t want to say anything. I will sort it out myself.’

  Police said Cole knew the Kane brothers and the senior Moran brothers, Lewis and ‘Tuppence’, and had visited Melbourne the day before his death. ‘He was not a bad little bloke, a bit of a knockabout,’ one policeman recalled.

  His widow, Jennifer Ann Cole, told the inquest into his death she had never bothered to ask her husband what he did for a living. ‘He always said what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me.’

  Cole was supposedly a security officer at Sydney’s Sea Breeze Hotel, but he failed to sniff the winds of change. He didn’t realise until too late that someone had a terminal grudge against him.

  Like the Kanes, Cole was heavily into protection and debt collecting and moved to Sydney to advance his career. Police at one stage believed he was killed by a Melbourne hit man flown in for the job, but the whisper was that a Sydney gangster called Mick Sayers pulled the trigger. Sayers was later murdered.

  Cole had installed state-of-the-art security. He had electronically operated doors, a video surveillance system, floodlights, steel bars over windows, steel mesh over the backyard and he kept two guard dogs.

  But even though he had been shot once before, he became slack and left the garage door open, allowing the gunman the perfect position to hide. It wasn’t the action of a prudent man — but if he were prudent he wouldn’t have been a career criminal.

  The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. Years later, Cole’s son Mark became slack, too, and didn’t bother to drive his car behind the iron gates and into the secure double garage. If he had been a little more cautious then, perhaps Williams, who was inexperienced with firearms, wouldn’t have been able to shoot him at point-blank range.

  11

  POP CULTURE

  ‘Mate, I’ve just watched

  Reservoir Dogs too many times.’

  TO be a top gangster you need to be ruthless, dangerous and cunning — but most of all you need to be born with a survivor’s instinct.

  Dino Dibra found out the hard way that the first three without the fourth was a fatal combination.

  Certainly Dibra was ruthless and dangerous. Take the case of when he and three of his gang kidnapped a man — punching, kicking and pistol-whipping him before throwing him into a car boot.

  According to police reports, the team grabbed the man in the Melbourne western suburb of Ardeer, on 2 August 1999.

  Dibra and his soldiers were seemingly unworried that successful abductions were usually carried out under cover of darkness. They chose to grab their man in broad daylight.

  Despite his injuries, the kidnap victim wasn’t cooperative. As they drove off he popped the boot, jumped out and ran. The gang simply chased him down and, in front of shocked witnesses, dragged him back into the boot. Even The Sopranos scriptwriters would think it was a bit rich.

  They took him to what they believed was the privacy of Dibra’s Taylors Lakes house. Sadly for the kidnappers, they might as well have taken him to the set of Big Brother.

  Police technicians had been to the house much earlier to install listening devices and a small video camera because Dibra was the main suspect in an earlier shooting outside a popular nightclub.

  The kidnap team demanded $20,000 from the victim’s brother but, being practical men, were prepared to settle for $5000.

  The listening device caught Dibra and his loyal deputy, Rocco Arico, discussing their negotiations.

  Arico: ‘Hey, if I’d have known he’s only gonna get five grand, I would have put one in when he tried to jump out of the car.’

  Dibra: ‘You’re an idiot. Listen to you.’

  Arico: ‘I would have just went fucking whack. Cop this slug for now. I would have slapped one in and I would have said “Hold on to that for a while, don’t give it to anyone and jump in the coffin”.’

  The tape was damning but there was another key piece of evidence: the kidnap victim was still in the boot when police arrived.

  There can also be no doubt that Dibra was dangerous.

  On 15 July 2000, he and Arico were driving in separate cars on their way back from a nightclub when they cut off another motorist in Taylors Lakes. It was 7am.

  The motorist spun his car 180 degrees at a roundabout and narrowly avoided a smash. Understandably enraged, he followed the two cars a few streets then, seeing three men, continued to drive on — but two of them, in one car, decided to chase him.

  When they stopped, a discussion of road etiquette followed. Arico asked the motorist: ‘So what do you want to do about it?’

  He unwisely replied: ‘Well, I wanted to put his head through the windscreen.’

  Arico pulled an automatic pistol and fired six shots — five hit the driver — before the man could even unbuckle his seatbelt
. He was struck on his forearms, abdomen, right elbow and shoulder but, against the odds, he survived.

  Police arrested Arico in the company of Carl Williams two days later at Melbourne Airport as he was about to board a flight to Perth. He was alleged to have $100,000 of cocaine in his pocket at the time. He later claimed police planted the drugs.

  He had a business class ticket and although he had no luggage he told police he was heading west for a three-week holiday.

  Later the road rage victim and his family were offered hush money to say he had incorrectly identified Arico.

  But the victim stuck to his testimony. The Arico family owned a pizza shop in the area and the victim recalled seeing young Rocco working there on the rare occasions when he was cutting pizzas rather than drugs.

  Dibra would not have to worry about the subtleties of the legal system because he would be dead before the trial.

  Dibra was well known at nightclubs and not because he liked to dance. He was a drug dealer who moved pills and powders, but he wanted more than money. He wanted respect and a reputation in the underworld.

  Before he became well-known in the drug field, Dibra ran a lucrative stolen car racket and became an expert at car ‘re-birthing’, buying damaged cars and ‘repairing’ them by stealing identical models and transferring identification details.

  But if he needed wheels in a hurry, he would intimidate night clubbers into handing over their keys and then simply drive off in their car. Dino, full of steroids and bad manners, was not a man to reason with.

  Dibra seemed to think he was above the law from a young age. As a teenager he would ride his unregistered motorcycle past police patrols, trying to goad them into a high-speed pursuit.

  When he was jailed in 1996 for 18 months, and had his licence cancelled for five years in 1996, the presiding magistrate commented Dibra had ‘one of the worst driving records I have seen’.

  When his dog was impounded for biting a woman, Dibra organised an escape plot to get the dog out. When a policeman came to the door as a result of a complaint that the dog was dangerous Dibra told him to ‘fuck off’.