Underbelly 11 Read online

  There were seven men at the meeting at Moran’s home. Five are now dead.

  In the case of Mark’s death, police suspected Williams from the start, so much so that his house was raided the next day. But internal police politics terminally damaged the investigation. Members of the drug squad, who had worked on the Morans for years, deliberately concealed information from the homicide squad because they believed their investigation was more important than a murder probe they thought would fail.

  Their prediction was self-fulfilling.

  At the packed gangland funeral (an event Melbourne would see repeatedly for several years) Jason Moran was allowed day leave from prison to speak at the funeral. Mourners 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.’

  Nor would Carl Williams.

  Police and the underworld expected that when Jason Moran was released he would make good his implied promise. Williams. But when he was freed on September 5, 2001, Williams was back inside on remand, having been charged in May with trafficking 8000 ecstasy tablets.

  The parole board let Moran go overseas because of fears for his life, while Williams continued to recruit from a small area filled with potential killers – Port Phillip Prison.

  The runner

  AS is customary when important business deals are sealed, when the man we will call the Runner decided to accept Carl Williams’s offer they decided to celebrate with a quiet drink. What made it unusual was it was inside Swallow Unit of Port Phillip Prison and they were drinking smuggled alcohol in the top-security jail.

  According to the Runner, it was there that Williams first asked him to kill Jason Moran. Moran had been spotted in London by one of the Williams team (the ‘Lieutenant’) and, unwisely, decided to return, even though he must have known his life was still in danger.

  Williams was not content with one hit team and continued to recruit inside and out of prison. While he was not a great student of history he knew that in a war there would inevitably be casualties and prisoners. He looked to relatives, close friends and hardened gunmen whose loyalty he thought he could demand, or at least buy.

  Williams knew that the Runner, no pin-up boy for prisoner rehabilitation programs, was soon to be released after serving his sentence for armed robbery. He was good with guns, and ruthless.

  In March 1990 the Runner had escaped from Northfield Jail in South Australia, where he was serving a long sentence for armed robberies. The following month he was arrested in Melbourne and questioned over four stick-ups. As he was being driven to the city watchhouse the detective next to him fell asleep.

  When the unmarked police car slowed in traffic the Runner jumped from it and bolted. He was arrested in Queensland in January 1991.

  Police claim the Runner carried out 40 armed robberies in Victoria, SA and WA over seven years. In 1999 he was again arrested after he tried to rob a Carlton bank.

  Why the Runner? His trademark was to run into a bank, pull a gun, demand large denomination notes and then run up to 500 metres to his getaway car. His gun-and-run method meant that to police and criminals he was known as a long-distance runner.

  Williams believed this running talent would prove useful in ambushes that would probably have to be carried out on foot.

  When Williams popped the question the Runner did not hesitate. ‘I said yes to show him my loyalty. I was aware of Carl’s hatred of the Moran family. Carl told me about an incident in 1999 where Carl was shot by Jason Moran.’

  On July 17, 2002, Williams was bailed, despite having twice been arrested on serious drug charges. But the courts had no choice; Williams’ case (and those involving six others) was indefinitely delayed while prosecutions against corrupt drug squad detectives were finalised.

  Five months later the Runner was released and within week she was going out with Roberta Williams’ sister, Michelle. He may not have been blood family but he was the next best thing.

  The Runner and Carl Williams met daily, and Williams asked his new right-hand man to find Moran. He said Moran was aware he was being hunted and had gone to ground.

  ‘Carl told me that he still wanted Jason dead and that he wanted me to locate Jason so he could kill him. We did not discuss money at this point but I was to start surveillance on Jason Moran.’

  Williams’ ambitions and his desire for revenge were growing. No longer did he just want to kill Jason. ‘Carl developed a deep-seated hatred of the Moran family … there is no doubt it was an obsession with him. Carl told me on numerous occasions that he wanted everyone connected with the Moran family dead.’

  The Runner began to track Moran. With every report Williams would peel off between $500 and $1000 for the information. His former prison buddy was also paid to deliver drugs and collect money, and set up in a Southgate apartment that Williams sometimes used as a secret bachelor pad.

  He may have been prepared to wage war in the underworld but he was still frightened of Roberta.

  The Runner would tell police that he was not the only one spying on Moran. Williams also received information from convicted millionaire drug trafficker Tony Mokbel, and soon-to-be-deceased crime middleweight Willie Thompson. But more of them later.

  Williams and the Runner regularly swapped cars, from a black Ford, silver Vectra, grey Magna and Roberta Williams’ Pajero.

  But finding Moran was one thing. Killing him quite another. They began to discuss how they would kill their target – the schemes ranged from the imaginative to the innovative and the simply idiotic.

  One was to hide in the boot of Moran’s silver BMW, remove the lock and spring out to kill him. A simpler version involved lying beneath shrubs outside the house where Moran was believed to be staying. Williams considered hiding in the rubbish bin next to Moran’s car, then popping out to shoot him.

  It would have had to be a big bin.

  Another plan was to lure him to a park and the Runner, dressed as a woman and pushing a pram, would walk past and shoot him. He and Williams bought a shoulder-length brown wig before abandoning the plan. Just as well. The Runner didn’t have the legs to carry it off.

  Killer? Yes. Drag queen? No.

  But finding Moran proved more difficult than first believed. Moran was an expert in counter-surveillance and teamed with a man who appeared to be a bodyguard. He ditched his flamboyant lifestyle, rented a modest house in Moonee Ponds and kept on the move.

  Also, the Runner had never met Moran and Williams did not provide him with a picture. Once the Runner saw a man matching the description leaving Moran’s brother-in-law’s home in Gladstone Park. ‘I am pretty sure (it) was Jason.’

  They finally spotted him in late February at a Red Rooster outlet in Gladstone Park. Williams was not armed. They followed him and an unidentified female who was driving a small black sedan.

  As a surveillance operative Carl made a good drug dealer. He grabbed a tyre lever and a screwdriver from inside his car and followed at a distance of only twenty metres. According to the Runner, ‘about 40 or 50 metres down this road (Johnson Street) the rear of the hatch of the car opened up and Jason shot several shots at us from the back of the car.’

  Williams lost interest, saying, ‘We will get him another time’.

  Williams and the Runner went to pubs and clubs where they might find Moran. They may have ended up full but they came back empty. They thought about a hit at the Docks where Moran was said to occasionally work, but terrorist fears had resulted in a massive security upgrade that made it impossible.

  Williams started to get desperate. If he couldn’t get to Jason he would kill those close to him. He told the Runner to start surveillance on Moran’s oldest family friend, Graham Kinniburgh, and another associate Steve (Fat Albert) Collins.

  Kinniburgh was a legendary, semi-retired gangster, one of those rare, successful criminals hardly known outside police and underworld circles. But he was a close friend of Jaso
n’s father, Lewis Moran.

  Williams then figured that even an erratic man like Moran must have a routine that centred on his family. He and Moran were linked by more than greed, drugs and hatred; their children went to the same private school in the Essendon area.

  Williams finally put a bounty on Moran’s head in April 2003. Veniamin and the Runner would get $100,000 each. The pair, armed and masked, hid in the back seat of a rented car outside the school expecting Jason to drop his children off. But he did not show. Later, Roberta Williams picked a fight with Jason’s wife Trish outside the school in the hope she would call her husband to come to support her. Still no Jason.

  Williams wanted Veniamin (who was still associating with Gatto and the Carlton Crew) to set up Moran for an ambush but Benji was frightened Big Mick would realise he was working for Williams.

  ‘Carl was becoming wary of Andrew and told me that he was concerned that Andrew was more in the Moran camp than in ours,’ the Runner later told police.

  In fact, Williams believed Moran was trying to persuade Veniamin to become a double agent and kill Carl.

  When Benji failed to deliver Moran to a planned ambush at the Spencer Street taxi rank near The Age building, Williams started to doubt his number one killer.

  ‘From then on Carl would only meet Andrew on his own terms. That way Carl could be sure of his own safety. He did not trust Andrew any more,’ the Runner said.

  Certainly Williams was jumpy. An interstate AFL spy wanted to check out the Essendon team at Windy Hill but as it was a locked training session he drove to one end of the ground where he hoped to use his set of binoculars to learn about the opposition’s game plan.

  He lost interest in sport when Williams, whose mother lived nearby, fronted him, believing the spy was trying to follow him.

  The spy waved a Football Record at him telling him his only interest in sharp-shooters was to judge the fitness of Essendon’s star full-forward, Matthew Lloyd. The Williams team learned that Moran took his children to Auskick training every Saturday morning in Essendon North, near the Cross Keys Hotel. Williams had eased Veniamin out of the hit team and replaced him with the getaway driver from the Mark Moran murder.

  The Runner and his new partner, the ‘Driver’, inspected the football oval and planned an ambush. On June 14,2003, armed and ready, they watched the football clinic but did not see Jason. They agreed to try again the next week.

  Williams had another plan. He wanted not only to kill Moran, but also to make a statement that no-one could mistake. He told the Runner he wanted Jason ambushed on June 15, the anniversary of Mark’s murder at the grave-site at the Fawkner Cemetery.

  ‘Carl decided though that if we were not able to kill Jason on Sunday (June 15) then we would try again at Auskick next week.’

  It was too late to do the necessary homework and on the assigned day it took the hit team more than an hour to find the grave. By then the window of opportunity had shut. When they arrived they found a card signed by Jason. They had missed their mark, but only just. As they left they saw a car fly through a red light. It was probably Moran.

  During the following week the team repeatedly went to the Cross Keys ground to fine-tune their planned hit. The Runner would be dropped at the hotel car park where Moran would be parked; he would run up, shoot Moran in the head and then run over a footbridge to the getaway van.

  At the precise moment of the hit Williams was committed to spilling blood but in an environment far more sterile than the grubby murder scene. He organised a blood test for that morning, giving him an alibi he would need for the police.

  On the Saturday morning they collected guns from the Pascoe Vale house of Andrew Krakouer (brother to former footballers Jimmy and Phil), which Williams used as a safe house, and placed stolen plates on the white van that would be used in the getaway.

  Williams’ lieutenant, a man who could source chemicals for amphetamines and who cannot be named, then advised the Runner to ‘get Jason good and get him in the head’.

  The Lieutenant later disputed this when he became a police witness. He claimed he told the Driver to do the killing away from the kids at the Auskick – ‘Hey, I’m no monster.’

  They sat near the park when the Runner spotted a man he believed was the target. ‘I thought it might have been Jason because people were coming up to him, shaking his hand and generally paying attention to him. His behaviour was typical of a gangster.’

  Williams and the Lieutenant drove past and nodded to confirm they had seen the target then headed off for their blood tests – proving you can get blood from a stone killer.

  As the clinic was about to wind up the hit team watched Moran head back to the hotel car park to hop in a blue van. Williams’ men drove to the rear of the car park. ‘I then put on my balaclava and gloves and jumped out from the van, carrying the shotgun in my right hand. I had the two revolvers in a belt around my waist. I ran to the driver’s side window of the blue van, aimed the shotgun at Jason Moran and fired through the closed window.

  Moran slumped forward and the Runner fired again. He dropped the shotgun, grabbed his long-barrelled revolver and fired at least another three shots. He then took off, running over the footbridge to the waiting van.

  The other man in the blue van with Jason was Pasquale Barbaro, a small-time crook who worked for Moran. The Runner later said he didn’t see Barbaro let alone intend to kill him. ‘I did not even know that I had shot Pasquale Barbaro until later … I regret that happening.’

  Williams received news of the hit with the message that ‘the horse … had been scratched’.

  Later, Williams and the Lieutenant congratulated the Runner on a ‘job well done’ and gave him $2500 cash. He was promised a unit in Frankston as payment but it failed to eventuate. The killer was short-changed and in business terms it would prove a short-sighted decision. But if it worried the hired gunman it didn’t show; hours after killing two men and scrubbing off gunshot residue he attended a birthday party at a North Melbourne restaurant.

  Murder, it would seem, can sharpen the appetite.

  Another person was clearly pleased with the news of Moran’s death. Roberta Williams was picked up on a bug shortly after the murders saying: ‘I’ll be partying tonight.’

  First breakthrough

  EVEN though Williams was the obvious suspect his blood test alibi was standing up. The shotgun found at the scene had not been traced and those around the Williams camp said nothing.

  There had been eleven underworld murders since 2000 and all remained unsolved. Police initially treated each crime individually, despite it being obvious that some (but not all) of the murders were connected.

  Senior homicide investigator Phil Swindells was frustrated by the lack of results and began lobbying for a task force. He reported that Andrew Veniamin was suspected of three murders and a task force was necessary to target his group. Senior police finally acted and the Rimer task group (later renamed Purana) was established in May 2003, with Detective Senior Sergeant Swindells in charge.

  Many believed it was doomed to fail. ‘We had no intelligence and we didn’t know anything about many of the major players,’ Swindells recalled. Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland would later admit that police ‘dropped the ball’.

  Swindells knew there would be no early arrests and there might be more murders. He also knew police had to go back to the start and build up dossiers on all the players. Only then would they be able to try to isolate the weak links.

  Politicians, self-proclaimed media experts and cynical old detectives thought Purana would self-destruct. A lack of success would result in bitter infighting and no results. The underworld code of silence would never be broken, they said.

  To keep up morale during the years of investigation the task force called on Essendon coach and long-time AFL survivor Kevin Sheedy to motivate Purana investigators. Believe in yourselves and your team-mates and don’t worry about the scoreboard, he said. Do the planning and the results w
ill come.

  In October 2003 the task force was enlarged to 53 staff, including nine investigative groups, with Detective Inspector Andrew Allen in charge. From the start no-one really doubted that Williams was behind the killing but there was no hard evidence. Several names were nominated as the shooter, including the Runner, but names without facts were of little use.

  The initial homicide squad team was convinced the Runner was the gunman and had identified others who would later be shown to be part of Williams’ hit squad.

  The initial work of the homicide squad cannot be underestimated. But it was the better-resourced Purana team that was able to make a series of breakthroughs.

  It was months before the first strong lead emerged from the double murder. Near the Cross Keys Hotel in Moreland Road is a public telephone and detectives eventually checked the calls made at the time of the murder.

  On a long list a series of numbers stood out. On Friday, June 20, the day before the double murder, someone rang Williams’ mobile phone from the telephone box. Roberta Williams’ mobile had also been called, and then the Runner’s. It was clear to police that one of the hit team was checking out the layout for the ambush planned for the following day.

  But the next call on the list was not a known suspect. When police tracked down the man who received the call he told them he had been rung that day by a mate. That friend was the Driver. It did not take long to find out that the Driver was a thief, drug dealer and close friend of Williams. He sold speed and had a lucrative sideline in stolen Viagra. He was still selling the remains of 10,175 sample packs he stole from a Cheltenham warehouse in April 2000.

  Detectives drove to the Driver’s house. Sitting in the driveway was a white van, the same type as the one captured on closed circuit video depositing a masked gunman in the car park moments before Moran and Barbaro were killed.

  It was a breakthrough – but not the breakthrough. It would take police fourteen months before they could lay charges. Meanwhile, the murders continued.