Underbelly 6 Page 17

  Another young man was virtually adopted by Kath. It was a bad move for Gregory Vivian Pasche, who was stabbed to death and whose body was dumped in Olinda in 1983. Police believe Dennis Allen killed him over a drug dispute.

  Kath Pettingill was the most influential woman in Melbourne’s underworld for years. She released her own book, appropriately titled, The Matriarchy written by former ace Truth journalist Adrian Tame.

  The day after Victor was murdered she spoke of the loss of her son: ‘I’m not asking for public sympathy – we’ll shed our own tears. I’m going to bury him in peace.’

  She said that although retired from crime, she would be checking with old contacts to see who killed Peirce. ‘There is an old saying: You can run, but you can’t hide.’

  Kath Pettingill said her son had given up crime and had worked on the docks for four years to support his family.

  ‘If this had happened to Dennis (his late elder brother) – well, fair enough, but not Victor. If I had been there I would have taken a bullet for him. He’s got kids and grandkids.’

  Following Walsh Street, Peirce became the man police loved to hate.

  After the Supreme Court acquittal of Peirce and his associates the police communications centre, D24, broadcast a message: ‘All units are warned, keep yourself in control.’

  On many station noticeboards was a cartoon. It showed a policeman, face down, being kicked by a group of so-called enemies, including the Government, media and judges. One of the kickers was labelled ‘Victor Peirce’.

  Despite Kath Pettingill’s prediction after the acquittal that Victor would be killed by police, she now accepts he was murdered by fellow gangsters.

  One of the key witnesses against the Walsh Street Four was Victor’s wife, Wendy, who was to give key evidence against her husband. But before the trial, she changed sides and refused to implicate Peirce.

  She was later jailed for perjury.

  The Peirces were reunited after he was acquitted. The youngest of their four children, Vinnie, was named after the Walsh Street trial judge, Justice Frank Vincent. (Had the colourful businessman John Dorman Elliott had a son instead of a daughter around the time of his legal troubles with the National Crime Authority, he might also have named the child after Justice Vincent, but that is another story.)

  Vinnie was born in prison while his mother was still serving her perjury sentence.

  The couple had an interesting marriage. Dennis Allen once offered to shoot Wendy in the leg to assist Victor in a bail application on compassionate grounds.

  ‘If I wasn’t pregnant it would have been all right. Dennis would have known how to do it without doing too much damage,’ she explained later.

  When Victor was arrested for drug trafficking in 1985, he wanted bail. Wendy, heavily pregnant at the time, calmly urinated while in court and announced to the stunned judge that her waters had broken and she was having a baby. Bail was granted.

  At one point Victor and one of his brothers ran a profitable drug syndicate providing prisoners with drugs. Victor was the outside man while the brother was inside the prison.

  When Peirce was released from prison in 1998 after serving six years for drug trafficking, Wendy said she was confident he had finally reformed.

  ‘He is not a monster. When he gets out we just want to be left alone. The public have the wrong idea of Victor. He is a family man with family values.

  ‘He is one of the best fathers you could see. No one has anything to fear from us,’ she said.

  ‘He has had six years to think about it. He has a job lined up. I know that he is finished with crime. He just wants to live quietly with his family.’

  ‘We are going to make a new start. We are going to grow old together and live happily ever after.’

  Her fairytale hopes ended in Bay Street.

  Pierce, 43, was shot in the chest and left to die in his 1993 maroon Commodore about 9.15pm.

  There are several reasons police believe the murder was planned and executed by an experienced shooting team of two hitmen.

  Although the killing was carried out in a busy street, the pair did it quickly without drawing attention to themselves.

  The gunman appeared confident and calm. He stepped from the passenger side door of a light-coloured mid-80s model Commodore and fired several shots into Peirce. He then calmly got back into the car and the driver drove off towards Beaconsfield Parade, staying within the speed limit and obeying all road rules.

  Police say the car was stolen and almost certainly picked because it was plain and unremarkable. No fat tyres, hot motors or garish stripes – nothing a witness could remember. The suspect car was later found burnt out in St Albans.

  Peirce had earlier had a coffee with his wife, Wendy, and their teenage daughter. The two walked home just before Peirce was shot.

  Port Melbourne was once the toughest suburb in Melbourne, the centre of activities for the notorious Painters and Dockers Union, but in recent years has become a trendy location favoured by the new rich: lawyers, stockbrokers and sports journalists.

  Peirce, his wife and children, moved from a drab house in a plain street in Rowville to a more upmarket home in Port Melbourne.

  He had a job as a crane operator on the docks and wanted to be closer to work, where he often started on the pre-dawn shift. But the area has also become a favourite spot for big-league drug dealers.

  One was renting a bay-view apartment for $800 a week. Two others moved into the area in the previous 16 months.

  In 2001 a group of police, football and media figures had a long lunch at a small hotel in the area with a reputation for top quality food and an impressive wine list. Some of them were surprised to see Peirce also enjoying the best the hotel had to offer.

  Victor Peirce always remained close to crime. He became a bodyguard for Italian crime figure and market identity Frank Benvenuto, who was shot dead in 2000.

  Police have been told that Peirce took a contract to kill a man connected to the Melbourne cocaine industry. The man has alleged that Peirce fire-bombed his car.

  He was also alleged to have been behind a car bombing at the docks.

  He had vast gangland contacts included Mark Militano, Frank Valastro, Jedd Houghton, Graeme Jensen and Gary Abdallah, all of whom were killed by police.

  Detectives believe Peirce had moved into the pill and powder market – amphetamines, cocaine and ecstasy.

  The drug squad had seized a pill press used to make amphetamine-based fake ecstasy. They had been told it was owned by Victor Peirce.

  Shortly before he died, Peirce claimed a man connected to the drug scene owed him $75,000. He left a message on the man’s mobile phone – ‘Ring the man with the glasses.’ The man refused and was later spotted in a Melbourne strip club by two of Peirce’s associates, who tried to abduct him.

  They were about to stuff him in the boot of their car but they released him when they realised they had been spotted.

  One theory police are investigating is that Peirce was in Bay Street to collect money from a cocaine deal and was killed in an underworld rip-off.

  While police claim Peirce was active in crime, financial checks completed after his death did not show him as being wealthy. Homicide squad detectives suggested to Wendy ‘The Witch’ Peirce that she could apply for up to $50,000 in crimes compensation for her children following the murder of her husband.

  Retired standover man turned author and celebrity, Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read expressed little surprise at Peirce’s death.

  ‘I knew him since he was 14. I had nothing against him but he thought selling drugs was a legal occupation. These blokes have never worked out that there is no place for middle-aged gangsters.

  ‘That’s why I got out of it and got into the book caper. As we all know the pen is mightier than the sword.’

  Former undercover policeman Lachlan McCulloch, who infiltrated the Pettingill-Peirce clan, said the family was dangerous and unpredictable.

  In an
operation code-named ‘Earthquake’, McCulloch bought amphetamines, cannabis and heroin worth more $130,000 from the group.

  As a result, 15 people were arrested including Trevor and Kath Pettingill.

  ‘They were not smart people. Victor was a real low-life.’

  McCulloch was also to arrest Victor Peirce for one of his smallest crimes – shoplifting a jar of instant coffee valued at $1.66.

  ‘It was at an Asian grocer’s in North Melbourne. When we got there we found 10 Asians sitting on top of him. He wasn’t going anywhere. I found him to be a dill. If he was organised crime, Melbourne’s pretty safe.’

  One detective close to the Walsh Street case said of Peirce’s sudden death: ‘What goes around, comes around.’

  The killers of Victor Peirce specially selected a light-coloured Holden Commodore for the job – the same type of vehicle used lure Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre to Walsh Street. Peirce was rushed to the Alfred Hospital, where desperate surgeons could do nothing to save him – just as they could not help Constable Tynan when he was taken to the same emergency room almost 14 years earlier.

  In what has become a Melbourne tradition, the Herald Sun death notices are flooded with messages when a gangster is murdered. Some are sincere, others fake. In the days after Peirce’s murder the columns were filled with notices from killers, clean-skins and armed robbers. Many referred to him as a ‘gentleman’. One went as far as claiming he was a ‘scholar’.

  One, placed under the name of ‘Chopper Read’, joked about keeping ‘an eye out for Kath’ – a none-too-subtle reference to her having lost an eye when she was shot years earlier. Read said he did not place the notice as he does not do bad jokes in print. At least, not that bad.

  Another death notice was from Vicki Brooks, Peirce’s sister, who gave evidence against him in the Walsh Street trial. Even Kath’s fellow bingo players at Venus Bay put in their condolences.

  In her notice, Kath said, ‘You made me proud to be your mother. You were the perfect son.’

  One death notice was supposedly placed by the police surveillance branch – known as ‘the dogs’. The notice read: ‘Victor. We were behind you day and night. All that are left are the photos to make us laugh. The K9 Boys.’

  THERE were no jokes at Peirce’s funeral, held a week after his death. In life he had been called a gangster, a drug dealer, gunman and cop-killer. But when he was buried, he was just someone’s father, someone’s son. The grief of those who loved him was as real as anybody else’s, a sobering thought for the most hardened observer.

  There were plenty of those at St Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church in South Melbourne, where mourners mingled with plainclothes police, even plainer clothed reporters and at least one known gunman – Jason Moran – the prime suspect in underworld murder of Alphonse Gangitano.

  At least Moran went to this funeral as a free man. Nearly two years earlier he was given compassionate leave from prison to attend the funeral of his brother, Mark, another gangland murder victim.

  For Mark Moran’s funeral, police had to stop the traffic and almost 1000 people jammed St Mary’s by the Sea Church in West Melbourne for Gangitano’s, but for Peirce it was a quieter affair. Just under 300 attended.

  Whereas Gangitano – a ‘celebrity’ gangster known by his first name – cultivated a Hollywood image, Peirce lived and died on a smaller stage.

  Gangitano was a middle-class private schoolboy who turned his back on respectability to become the black prince of Lygon Street.

  Peirce, by contrast, wasn’t so much working class as underclass, condemned from birth to a sordid lifecycle of crime and violence. The wonder was not that he died violently, but that he survived as long as he did.

  His mother, Kath Pettingill, dubbed ‘Granny Evil’, had seven children by several fathers. She has buried three of them and must wonder how many more family funerals she will attend.

  The crowd gathered well before the service, under a sky the colour of lead, which was appropriate, as the man in the coffin had died from the swiftest and most deadly form of lead poisoning. Most of the mourners looked as sullen as the weather. The men tended to mullets or close-cropped hair, the women were mostly bleached blondes, tattoos half-hidden under dark stockings. Sunglasses and cigarettes were compulsory for both sexes; chewing gum and earrings optional.

  One cynic on the fringe of the congregation observed how fashions had changed: the men now wear the flashy gold jewellery and the woman the tattoos.

  In the church, many shied away from the pews, preferring to stand together at the back of the church, as deadpan as the inmates of a prison exercise yard.

  Father Bob Maguire, whose inner-city flock has included many a black sheep, conducted a service, as he called it, ‘designed by the family’. Instead of hymns, popular songs were played. Instead of a formal eulogy, the dead man’s children and friends read out personal tributes that were clapped, like speeches at a birthday party.

  Katie Peirce said her father was a ‘strong, kind, family man’ who had hired a double-decker bus for her 16th birthday and taken her out to get her drunk as a treat. His pet name for her was ‘Pooh Bum’.

  His youngest son, Vinnie, the lad named after the highly-respected and much-loved Justice Frank Vincent, said he would miss his dad picking him up from school, buying him lollies and driving around.

  ‘I remember when he used to go fast in the car with me,’ he said.

  The first line of the opening song (Soldier of Love) began with the words ‘Lay down your arms’. The song chosen for the exit music was When I Die, by No Mercy. It sounded like a portent of funerals to come.

  Under a tree in the churchyard, a homicide detective watched, wondering if the killer was in the crowd. He was the same man who had stood watching when they gathered to farewell Mark Moran.

  Outside, it had begun to rain. A guard of honour for Victor Peirce stretched across the street nearly 30 metres. More than 13 years earlier, the honour guard for murdered policeman Steven Tynan stretched nearly three kilometres.

  CHAPTER 13

  A sashimi deal

  The language barrier blocked their attempts to explain they were not necessarily party to a conspiracy, but victims of one.

  MOST people in jail look as if they belong there. Chika Honda isn’t one of them. A tiny, polite woman in her mid-40s, she looks out of place not just because of her race – Japanese are almost unknown in Australian prisons – but in her demeanour. She has none of the streetwise edge prisoners usually have. No scars, tattoos, or tattered ear lobes. And, bar the charge on which she was convicted, no criminal history.

  Which is one reason why, after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence, Honda will be paroled on November 17. As such, she has nothing to gain by insisting that she is as innocent as she looks. She has been warned that attempting to publicise her case might jeopardise her release.

  She sits in the contact visit room of the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, a prison on Melbourne’s western outskirts. Her face lights up as she explains, in the broken English she has learnt in jail, that she came to Australia to see kangaroos and koalas 10 years ago, but has not seen any yet. She talks of her conversion to Christianity and says her faith has sustained her through illness and despair that took her to the brink of suicide.

  ‘I did not understand anything and it was like a dream,’ she wrote in 1999, in a moving appeal translated by a supporter. ‘I wanted to quickly wake up from the dream so many times that I tried to pinch my cheek and hit myself. But it was of no avail.

  ‘It was not a dream … My heart has been hurt as if it has been stabbed with a knife.’

  Her piece is headed The Clear Voice of Miss Chika Honda, which is presumably an attempt to label her honest and uncensored thoughts – but who could be sure? This ambiguity shows, even in a few words, how much is lost in translation from Japanese to English.

  In a trial where millions of words are spoken, how many mistakes would be made?

  Honda feels stronge
r now than she has in the past. But she cannot hide a sense of injustice. She believes that she and four Japanese travelling companions are victims of a miscarriage of justice – that they were wrongfully convicted of smuggling heroin in 1992.

  Honda has no grievance against the Victorian prison system – only against the investigation and trial that put her inside it. And, of course, against the Malaysian crime syndicate she believes set up her and the others as expendable ‘patsies’.

  Long after there is any advantage in lying, and too late for the truth to mend her shattered life, she wants their story told.

  It starts in Japan in early 1992. Yoshio Katsuno, then 35, a former low-level member of the Japanese racketeer group the Yakuza, told friends and relatives he had been offered a cheap group holiday in Australia. A gesture, he said, from a Malaysian Chinese known as ‘Charlie’ who was embarrassed that Yoshio had been hurt in a car accident while visiting him on business. Yoshio bought seven discount return air tickets from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur; Charlie paid for air tickets from Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne.

  Why Charlie subsidised the group is unclear, but the fact he did so was not unusual.

  It is common in Asia for business associates to give and receive substantial gifts.

  Yoshio invited, among others, his two older brothers, Mitsuo and Masaharu. They knew he had arranged a bargain holiday through business contacts and, because he had travelled before, he was willing to lead the group. Travelling in groups with a leader is another common Japanese practice.

  Mitsuo, then 36, had a thriving business clearing building sites. His brother Masaharu, then 42, was a retired police officer. Yoshio had once done prison time for street offences and possession of marijuana, which explained why the former policeman was estranged from him. Mitsuo, the middle brother, hoped the holiday would heal the rift.

  Mitsuo invited his long-term girlfriend but when her work prevented her from going, he asked a mutual female friend, Chika Honda, to use the spare ticket.