Underbelly 11 Page 16

  On the silk’s advice, Vorchheimer studied Acts, statutes and police regulations and concluded that as a police officer, the driver had failed his sworn duty to uphold the law and could be held to account for it. But when he pressed the point with Deputy Commissioner Kieran Walshe the meeting ended abruptly with Walshe insisting that Moore would not be suspended.

  It seemed clear that given the festering issue of police working second jobs outside the force, the Government and police command would have preferred to sidestep a showdown with the pugnacious police union over Senior Constable Moore being punished for his alleged lapses as driver of the mini-bus. The other reason to avoid a brawl, perhaps, was that the Government and the police union were making a secret sweetheart deal – for better pay and new handguns – just as the Vorchheimer story broke, a few weeks before the Victorian state election.

  Vorchheimer was bemused by the backroom politics and red tape tangled around the case: St Kilda detectives took over the inquiry from their uniform colleagues, the Ethical Standards Division re-investigated the entire affair to ensure the police ‘brotherhood’ was not looking after its own, and the Office of Police Integrity looked over everyone’s shoulder for the same reason. Even the Premier’s office had quietly bought into it.

  An hour after the tenacious Vorchheimer ambushed Premier Steve Bracks on the eve of the November election, handing him a police statement outlining the assault, he got a soothing call from one Ari Suss – a former Bracks adviser now with the transport king turned developer, Lindsay Fox, but seconded back to the Premier’s staff for the campaign. Fox can afford to be a generous man when he wants to be.

  Vorchheimer was polite but unmoved (‘Ari Suss is a good Jewish boy – but a politician’) by all the promises that everyone was doing their best to see justice done. He vowed to push until he gets a result. And that is exactly what he has done.

  Why? It’s not about money or revenge, but manners and respect. And about the effect on his children.

  His son revealed violent fantasies – of using a laser to shoot the people on the bus and of suffocating the driver. His daughter said they shouldn’t go to the synagogue any more because they might get hurt.

  But the thing that hit him hardest was finding out that it was his son who picked up his hat and pushed it back into shape. ‘He wanted to help his Dad and that’s all he could do,’ he says. And for the first time in hours of talking, his voice chokes with emotion.

  FOR someone who would once have been happy to settle for a sincere apology, Menachem Vorchheimer soon hardened in his resolve to see justice done because, he said, he felt as if he had not been taken seriously enough in the beginning. He reckoned insult had been added to injury and he wanted satisfaction. Because of his dogged persistence, and media coverage, the police force and the Victorian Government had to be seen to act.

  It was politic to get results, and results soon came. The police’s internal investigators, the Ethical Standards Department, oversaw the investigation of the assault, with a senior ESD officer with lengthy homicide squad experience going to Ocean Grove to re-interview the football club witnesses.

  Meanwhile, the Office of Police Integrity, attached to the Ombudsman’s Office, attempted to ensure that the police force investigated the involvement of one of its own: the bus driver Constable Terry Moore – a far more ticklish political problem for both the force and the State Government because of the touchy industrial relationship with the aggressive police union leadership.

  The police were keen to nail the footballers for assault. The inference, perhaps, was that this might satisfy the aggrieved victim. If anyone assumed this, they had misjudged Vorchheimer. He wanted the bus-driving policeman’s head as well.

  Not surprisingly, determined police investigators came up with a better result than the football club office bearers when it came to finding the main offender. Early in 2007, following publicity about the case, they charged three footballers with ‘various charges.

  Simon Christian, 21, son of former Baptist missionaries who had served in Africa, was fined $1000 in April after pleading guilty to using insulting words (‘Go Nazis’ was one phrase) in a public place.

  Despite a request from the prosecutor for a diversion order that the shamefaced youngster tour the Jewish Holocaust museum to acquaint himself with the Nazis’ handiwork, the Magistrate left it up to Christian to decide whether he would show his remorse by going to the museum with Vorchheimer.

  But Christian was never the main police target. James Dalton, 28, a club captain, was charged with theft of Vorchheimer’s hat and yarmulka. And, after some keen detective work, Matthew Cuthbert, 23, was charged on three counts of assault and using insulting language. Meanwhile, the Office of Police Integrity found that Senior Constable Terry Moore could have prevented the attack.

  When Dalton appeared in court in June, his lawyer requested a suppression order to hide his family name and address … on the grounds that the family was the target of race hate mail. The request was refused.

  At the time of writing, Dalton and Cuthbert still have to face committal proceedings in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. If a magistrate finds there is a case against them, they will face trial.

  IN MID-2007 Menachem Vorchheimer took his family to live for a year in New York, where he has relatives and friends and was able to land a job. He thought at the time that it would push the incident into the distance, and allow his children to forget the trauma of seeing him attacked. But he is amazed that in New York and in Europe, people he meets – many of them Jewish – recognise him as the Melbourne orthodox man who was punched and abused. There is no getting away from what happened.

  But that is not the only reason that going to New York has not turned out to be a wild success. The truth is, the way he describes it in the first few months, they were all feeling a little homesick. His wife misses family and friends in Melbourne. And Menachem and his older boy want to go to the cricket and footy back home. Aussie rules, after all.

  Down the street from the family’s house in Caulfield is the synagogue where a volunteer called Michael Granek has done security duty for several years. Each year it has become more common for people to yell abuse from cars. But he has noticed a strange thing in the months since the Vorchheimer case: the abuse has dropped away. Sometimes it pays to fight back.

  CHAPTER 9

  Boys with toys

  ‘He became the most dangerous gangster in Australia.’

  MELBOURNE’S bloodiest underworld war began with both a bang and a whimper in a tiny park in the outer-western suburb of Gladstone Park near Melbourne Airport.

  Gunman, drug dealer and notorious hothead Jason Moran made two decisions – one premeditated and the other off the cuff – that started the war that would wipe out his crime family.

  Moran and his half-brother Mark had arranged to meet amphetamine manufacturer Carl Williams to discuss their mutual business interests. Williams liked to talk in parks and public places to avoid police listening devices, and the Morans were happy to meet in an open space where they believed they could not be ambushed.

  The Williams and Moran families had trafficked drugs for years and while they were sometimes associates, they were never friends. They often did deals and begrudgingly co-operated when it suited, but they were also competitors for a slice of the incredibly lucrative illegal pill market.

  While there were many reasons for their hostility, none was big enough to go to war – business was booming. Demand had increased tenfold as amphetamines became a mainstream leisure activity. All dealers had to do was keep a low profile, source their pills and count the cash.

  But the niggles remained and the Morans, always quick to take offence, began to stew. At first it was a simple domestic matter: Carl Williams’ wife Roberta had previously been married to Dean Stephens, a friend of the Morans.

  The next was competition. Williams was undercutting his rivals, selling his pills for $8 compared with the Morans’ $15.

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sp; The third was business. Williams had supplied the Morans with a load of pills. But he had not used enough binding material and they were crumbling before they could be sold.

  The fourth niggle was greed. The Morans claimed ownership of a pill press and said Williams owed them $400,000. Carl disagreed.

  The problems could have been settled but the Morans, notorious for their short tempers and long memories, often relied on unreasonable violence to achieve what they believed were reasonable outcomes.

  The meeting at the Barrington Crescent park, no bigger than two suburban blocks and surrounded by brick veneer homes on three sides, provided the Moran brothers with the perfect opportunity to remind Williams where he stood – before they shot him off his feet.

  It was October 13,1999, Carl Williams’ birthday. He had just turned 29.

  Williams was unlikely to have felt in danger – the mid-week meeting was to be held in the afternoon in the open – hardly the ideal place to pull a double-cross. But soon after they arrived Jason Moran pulled a gun, a .22 Derringer. A woman near by heard a man cry out, ‘No Jason’ and then a single shot.

  It showed the typical arrogance of the Morans. It was daylight in middle Melbourne. Not a dark alley or an isolated spot in the bush. They simply did not believe they could be stopped.

  But this time the gunman showed uncustomary restraint. Mark Moran urged his half-brother to finish the job but Jason replied they needed the big man alive if they were ever to get their money. That decision would destroy the Moran clan, and many who were close to them.

  If they had killed Williams he would have been just another dead drug dealer and the case would almost certainly have remained unsolved. Instead, Williams became an underworld serial killer determined to exterminate every real or imagined rival he could find.

  Williams, who prided himself on being an old-school crook, refused to co-operate with police after he was ambushed. When detectives interviewed him in hospital, Williams said he had felt a pain in his stomach as he was walking, and only then realised he had been shot.

  Much later Williams told the author he did not see his attacker. ‘I have no idea who shot me and I’ve never asked … I don’t know who did it. Police told me who they think did it but that’s their business.’ When the author suggested they had nominated Jason he smiled and said, ‘You better ask them.’

  Roberta Williams gave more away in a later conversation but denied the shooting was drug related. ‘Mark was yelling “shoot him in the head”, and Jason then shot him in the stomach,’ she said.

  If the Morans thought that shooting Williams would frighten him, they were horribly wrong. The wound soon healed but the mental scar remained.

  The drug dealer began planning his revenge, setting off a very public underworld war that would leave police, the legal system and politicians struggling to cope.

  Williams, with his plump, pleasant face, his shorts and T-shirts, did not look like an influential crime boss who could order a death with a phone call.

  As a strategist he would appear more a draughts man than a chess man.

  Perhaps that is one of the reasons he flew just under the police radar – until he became the most dangerous gangster in Australia.

  Police knew he was part of his family’s drug business but they assumed the former supermarket packer was a worker and not the foreman.

  Like the Morans, police underestimated Williams and his power base. He was ruthless, cashed-up and had recruited a loyal gang of reckless young drug dealers driven by pill money, wild dreams and illegal chemicals.

  His team seemed to move from underworld try-hards to big players in a matter of months. Guns, drugs and rivers of cash can do that.

  Williams’ reputation and power grew with every hit. He began to refer to himself as ‘The Premier’ because ‘I run this fucking state’. But to detectives, he was still ‘The Fatboy’.

  Police say Williams was certainly connected to ten underworld murders and would have kept killing if he had not finally been jailed.

  He will never face charges over many of the murders he arranged after cutting a deal with police that gives him some chance of release one day. His only remaining hope is that he will die a free old man.

  Williams’ rise from middle-ranked drug dealer to heavyweight killer should never have happened. His plans for revenge and controlling a major drug syndicate should have collapsed when he was arrested in slapstick circumstances six weeks after the Morans shot him.

  For Broadmeadows police it began as a low-level fraud investigation and ended as a $20 million drug bust. The fraud involved a local family accruing credit card debts with no intention of repaying, then changing their names to obtain new cards to repeat the scam.

  On the morning of November 25, 1999, police arrived at a housing commission home in Fir Close to serve arrest warrants, but no-one was home.

  Later that day Detective Sergeant Andrew Balsillie was passing, and noticed two cars at the house. He recalled his team to issue the warrants and, after bursting in, found a pill press, 30,000 tablets (almost certainly the Moran pills that had been returned to be re-pressed) and almost seven kilograms of speed valued at $20 million.

  Williams was found hiding in a bed upstairs (his bed attire suggested he was not having a quick snooze – he was wearing a loud, red Mambo shirt).

  His father George was found hiding between a bed and the wall in another room, in which a loaded Glock semi-automatic pistol was later found.

  Local police rightly chose to run the investigation but called in the amphetamine experts from the drug squad. They were not to know that the two detectives, Malcolm Rosenes and Stephen Paton, were corrupt and would later be jailed.

  While there was no suggestion they interfered with the investigation, the Supreme Court later decided that several drug cases, including Williams’, should be delayed until the detectives’ prosecutions were completed.

  It was while Williams was on bail for those (and other) drug charges that he organised the underworld murders.

  If the drug cases had not been delayed, Williams would have been jailed for at least four years, unable to carry out a homicidal vendetta.

  The war begins

  WHILE inside jail for almost two months on remand, Williams began to plan his first attack, and recruit the team of men he believed would kill for him.

  One of the first to join was Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin, the former kickboxer and gunman who once idolised Carlton identity Mick Gatto, a man who for decades has cast one of the biggest shadows in Melbourne’s underworld. Williams saw Gatto, who was affiliated with the Morans but not involved in the squabble over drugs, as a potentially powerful enemy.

  Williams thought that if he killed the Moran brothers, established underworld figures, including Gatto, would seek revenge. He decided his best chance of survival was not to jump at shadows but cast a bigger one, so he launched a hostile takeover.

  Initially, Williams was outnumbered and in no position to take on the Moran brothers, let alone contemplate plans for gangland domination.

  Then in a stroke of perfect timing Williams was finally bailed on his drug charges on January 22,2000. Three days later Jason Moran was jailed for affray and sentenced to twenty months jail. Mark Moran had lost his closest ally and was now hopelessly exposed.

  Five months later, on June 15, Mark Moran was killed outside his Aberfeldie home. More driven than Jason and less erratic, he had managed to keep a lower profile.

  Until then.

  When his death was reported he was referred to as a local football star rather than underworld identity. But police immediately knew it was a gangland hit.

  They also knew Mark Moran was entrenched in crime every bit as much as the rest of his family who considered honest work a personal affront. Moran lived in a house valued at $1.3 million. His occupations had been listed as personal trainer and unemployed pastry chef.

  Four months before his murder, on February 17,2000, police noticed him driving a n
ew luxury car. When they opened the boot of the rented vehicle, they found a hi-tech handgun equipped with a silencer and a laser sight. They also found a large number of amphetamine pills that had been stamped through a pill press to appear as ecstasy tablets.

  His days as a battling baker were long gone.

  In the hours before his death, Mark Moran had been busy. First he had given drugs to a dealer at the Gladstone Park Shopping Centre, 800 metres from where he and his brother had shot Williams the previous year.

  The dealer was short of cash and Moran agreed to give him credit. It was not a difficult decision. Few people were stupid enough to try to rip off the Morans.

  Moran drove home, received a phone call and left for a second meeting. On returning he was blasted with a shotgun as he stepped out of his Commodore. Williams was the gunman and his getaway driver would later be implicated in another three murders.

  Police later established that Williams had only been waiting ten minutes when Moran returned. It smelled of an ambush.

  Moran’s natural father, Leslie John Cole, was shot dead in similar circumstances in Sydney – ambushed outside his home eighteen years earlier.

  But Mark’s stepfather, Lewis Moran, was very much alive and drinking in a north-western suburban hotel when he first heard of the shooting.

  Immediately he called for a council of war at his home.

  The Moran kitchen cabinet discussed who they believed was responsible, and how they should respond. The Morans, never short of enemies, narrowed the field to three. Williams and his team were by no means the favourite. ‘We still didn’t know we were in a war,’ a Moran insider later said.

  For Williams it was the beginning, and for the Morans it was the beginning of the end.

  Much later Lewis Moran, said to still hold the first dollar he ever stole, tried to take out a contract on Williams but he would offer only $40,000. There were no takers.