Underbelly 11 Read online

  Williams knew he was in trouble. He knew some of his troops were starting to waver and the so-called wall of silence was starting to crack. He started to threaten and cajole members of his team to stay staunch, working on those he thought were the most susceptible.

  But he always assumed that the Runner, the career armed robber and willing killer, was unbreakable.

  This was a man who had never co-operated with police. When forensic experts took a swab from his gums in prison after the Marshall murder they were horrified to find a ‘brown substance’ in his mouth. The substance, designed to compromise the test, was not identified. But it was definitely not breath freshener.

  The case against the Runner was compelling. Marshall’s blood was found on his pants and police had the bugged conversations and positive identifications.

  At first the Runner wanted to fight. On the advice of his lawyer the fit-looking Runner put on 30 kilograms to try to beat eyewitness descriptions, and he wanted Williams to fund a Queen’s Counsel for his case.

  But Williams knew the Runner was doomed and decided to cut him free so Williams could save himself. He wanted his loyal soldier to plead guilty and cop a life sentence. The cash flow stopped and the Runner was left to the mercy of legal aid while his boss continued to employ the best lawyers money could buy.

  Williams didn’t want to be sitting in the criminal dock with the Runner as the evidence was put to a jury. He believed he still stood a chance if he managed to get a separate trial.

  But in early 2006 Crown Prosecutor Geoff Horgan, SC, returned from his summer break to find a letter from prison. It was the Runner and he wanted to talk. The note was non-committal but the message was clear. The soldier was ready for mutiny.

  ‘To us it was unbelievable. He was seen as one of the hardest men in the system,’ Horgan said.

  Ryan, who was by then the head of Purana, went to see the Runner. ‘He didn’t need persuading, he was ready to talk. None of us imagined he would roll over.’

  The Runner was removed from prison and for nearly 30 days exposed the secrets of Melbourne’s gangland murders, sinking any hopes for Williams in the process.

  Inspector Ryan, Detective Sergeant Stuart Bateson, and senior detectives Nigel L’estrange, Mark Hatt and Michelle Kelly questioned him for weeks. A stream of Purana detectives questioned him on individual murders.

  Police guarded him, fed him and did his washing as he exposed all Williams’ dirty laundry.

  He told them about the crimes they knew he had committed but implicated himself in ones they didn’t.

  He told them he was the driver in the two-man hit team assigned to kill drug dealer and standover man Nik ‘The Bulgarian’ Radev, who was shot dead in Coburg on April 15, 2003.

  Radev was a violent gangster who desperately wanted to meet the amphetamine expert who produced drugs for Williams and another well-known dealer. But Williams knew that if Radev discovered the identity of their production expert he would abduct and torture him to persuade the self-tutored drug chemist to become an exclusive Radev employee.

  That morning Radev was told at a meeting in Brighton that he would finally meet the chemist across town in Queen Street, Coburg. According to the Runner, ‘I drove Veniamin to murder Nik Radev’.

  As five of Williams’ closest allies turned on him and became police witnesses Purana discovered more about the crimes of the Premier.

  They found that Williams had offered the contract to kill Jason Moran to others, including notorious killer, drug dealer and armed robber Victor George Peirce who was shot dead in Bay Street, Port Melbourne on May 1, 2002.

  Peirce was paid $100,000 in advance and was to pocket a further $100,000 on completion when he killed Moran. But Peirce changed sides and warned Moran.

  Another career criminal was shot after he refused to carry out a contract to kill Moran. Convicted murderer Mark Anthony Smith supposedly agreed and then refused to kill Moran. So Smith was shot in the neck in the driveway of his Keilor home on December 28, 2002. He recovered and fled to Queensland for several months.

  So was Peirce killed because he refused to kill Moran? The trouble with criminals like Victor Peirce is they always have more than one set of enemies who want to see them dead.

  His best friend was Frank Benvenuto, son of the late Godfather of Melbourne, Liborio. Peirce had worked in the fruit and vegetable market for Frank Benvenuto during a major power struggle in the business.

  Peirce was not there to lug turnips. He once arrived at work armed with a machine-gun.

  But for Frank, having Peirce on his side was not enough. On May 8, 2000, Benvenuto was shot dead outside his Beaumaris home. The shooter was Andrew Veniamin. But who paid for the hit and why?

  Veniamin knew that Peirce suspected he was the gunman. The two killers met to try to establish a truce.

  According to Victor’s widow, Wendy, ‘They met in a Port Melbourne park. He wanted to know if Victor was going to back up for Frank.’

  According to Mrs Peirce her husband assured Veniamin there would be no payback.

  Benji was not convinced.

  Police say Veniamin was the gunman who shot Peirce in Port Melbourne and while Benji worked for Williams he also did freelance work.

  So while Williams had reasons to detest Peirce for not carrying out the contract on Moran, Veniamin had his own reasons to want the target dead.

  And whoever paid Veniamin to kill Benvenuto would also have been relieved when Peirce was no longer a living threat.

  Jason Moran was a prominent mourner at Peirce’s funeral. The next year he would also be shot dead.

  Deals within deals

  FOR Purana investigators to crack the underworld code of silence they needed to offer deals that were too good to refuse. In doing so they have changed the model of plea bargaining in Victoria forever.

  Purana police previously refused to do deals with trigger men but senior police and legal strategists in the Office of Public Prosecutions decided it was more important to nail the underworld generals who ordered the killings than the soldiers who carried them out.

  From early in the investigation police had two main targets, Carl Williams and Tony Mokbel. One they knew was behind the killings and the other they suspected.

  Paid killers can expect life in prison with no chance of release. Their crimes are not based on passion or psychological problems but greed.

  But under the Purana model some of Melbourne’s worst gangsters were offered a chance of freedom if they turned on Williams and Mokbel.

  Men who had spent decades in jail and had never talked were courted. By now they were middle-aged and the thought of never being released was too much for them to contemplate.

  The Purana task force used the proven US tactic of turning alleged hitmen into star witnesses. The most notorious was Salvatore ‘Sammy the Bull’ Gravano, a former underboss of the New York Gambino family.

  The first to do a deal was the Driver. He was sentenced to eighteen years with a minimum of ten for his role in the murder of Michael Marshall and he was never charged with his involvement in the killings of Mark Moran, Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.

  It was a dream deal for a man who could have faced a life sentence but he was the domino who made the others fall.

  ‘Without him we wouldn’t have been able to move on Cross Keys (Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro),’ Horgan said.

  But it was the confessions of the Runner that finally tipped the balance – implicating Williams in six murders and exposing Mokbel’s alleged role in the underworld war.

  The Runner was moved from his prison in Victoria and is believed to be interstate. He was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years for the murders of Marshall, Jason Moran and Pasquale Moran. He will be in his early 70s when he becomes eligible for release.

  Police were confident they could make a case against Mokbel for murder. So, it would seem, was Mokbel.

  Days before he was found guilty of cocaine trafficking in March 2006 Mokbel jumped b
ail and disappeared overseas. But police say it was not the fact that he would be sentenced to a manageable term (a minimum of nine years) for drug trafficking that made him run.

  In the week before he disappeared a lawyer gave him the Runner’s secret statements and Mokbel knew he was likely to be charged with murder.

  On March 20, he fled. But the Purana task force was always confident he would surface and began to dismantle his financial empire.

  In February 2007, Mokbel was charged with Lewis Moran’s murder.

  In June he (and the bad wig he was wearing) was arrested in Greece and a few weeks later was charged with the murder of Michael Marshall. Despite his high-profile drug convictions and his decision to jump bail juries will judge his guilt or innocence on the fresh charges at a later date.

  Once the Runner made his statements Williams knew there was no chance he could beat the mounting charges. Williams was convicted of the Marshall murder and sentenced to a minimum of 21 years.

  The verdict was suppressed because he had multiple trials pending, including the murders of Mark Moran and the murders of Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.

  For months Williams was secretly trying to negotiate a deal that gave him some chance of release and in February 2007, on the eve of his trial for the murders of Jason Moran and Barbaro, he finally pleaded guilty.

  It was around August 2006 that the man who once had teams of hitmen prepared to kill for him knew he was facing the rest of his life in jail. Several of his trusted offsiders had cut deals with prosecutors leaving him increasingly isolated.

  He knew if he pleaded guilty he would be entitled to a discount. Aged 35 he wanted a chance to be out of jail by the age of 70.

  But the first tentative approaches were not encouraging. His team floated a prison sentence of around twelve years. ‘They were looking for a ridiculous bargain-basement sentence,’ said Paul Coghlan, QC.

  But as the trial date came closer so too did the negotiators. In February the two sides spent ten days talking. Then what had appeared promising collapsed.

  According to Coghlan. ‘We were very cross. We thought Williams had been fooling around and was never serious. He was wasting our time because they came up with various proposals that were absolutely laughable.’

  On Wednesday February 28 at midday the court process began before Justice King with pre-trial discussions.

  It was legal tent-boxing with a few slow punches thrown without any landing.

  First Williams’ team asked for an adjournment because of pre-trial publicity but the same argument had been tried before and failed.

  Next was a move to suggest there was judicial bias – another move doomed to fail.

  Then it was agreed the star protected witnesses could give video evidence for security reasons. By 1pm the court was adjourned for the day.

  There would be a few more pre-trial details to be cleared up and then a jury would be selected.

  On Monday, March 5, Geoff Horgan was scheduled to rise to his feet to begin his opening address to declare that Williams organised the murders of Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro, who were shot dead on June 21, 2003, while watching an Auskick junior football clinic.

  Once the jury was empanelled any chance of a deal for Williams would be over.

  It was 2.10pm on February 28 when Horgan received a call in his chambers from Williams’ barrister, David Ross, QC. The message was brief: ‘We may have a deal.’

  A message was passed to Justice King’s associate Helen Marriott and a decision made to reconvene the court that day.

  But Williams had left the court and was heading down the Princes Freeway to Barwon Prison. Then Justice King intervened and ordered the bus back.

  This was no sweetheart deal. The prosecutors agreed they would make no recommendations on a jail sentence although they acknowledge Williams should be set a minimum due to his decision to plead. ‘His sentence will be totally up to the judge,’ Horgan said.

  The charge sheet was quickly typed, documents signed and Williams led back into court.

  But the crime deal of the decade that resulted in Williams pleading guilty to three murders was teetering on the point of collapse when Justice Betty King reconvened her court after being told of his decision.

  While it took nearly seven months of secret negotiations to bring Williams to the point where he was prepared to admit his guilt the final deal was nearly derailed in the final minutes.

  The man linked to ten underworld killings had just told his relieved lawyers he would plead to the murders of Lewis Moran, Jason Moran and Mark Mallia and conspiracy to murder Mario Condello. (He did not plead over Barbaro, arguing he had not ordered his death and the victim was killed accidentally. The Mark Moran murder charge was dropped.)

  But his agreement was worth nothing. He had to say the words ‘I plead guilty’ when his presentments were read to him in the open court.

  Backroom deals don’t count.

  He had been brought up from the court cells to sign a document instructing his defence team of his intentions to enter guilty pleas.

  Outside the court members of the police Purana task force stood waiting. One nervously said, ‘I won’t believe it until I hear him say it.’

  Williams’ mother, Barbara, and father, George, were also there and were then allowed in to see their son before the hearing commenced. While George remained quiet, Barbara was animated.

  She pleaded with her son not to plead.

  George didn’t apply any pressure. Still facing drug trafficking charges, part of the deal was that Williams Senior would plead guilty but the prosecution would not demand a jail sentence.

  According to an insider Carl began to waver as his mother begged him to change his mind.

  The observer said the deal was ‘within a hair’s breadth’ of collapsing. ‘If we had lost him then maybe we would have lost him forever.’

  But the court convened in front of Justice King and three times Williams admitted his guilt.

  Then despite his mother’s concern Williams nodded his head, a decision, Coghlan said, that saved millions of dollars and sent a message to the underworld that no-one is above the law.

  Before Williams would agree to any deal he wanted to pass a message to a man on the outside. He desperately wanted him to know that no matter what, he wished him no harm. That man was Mick Gatto.

  Postscript

  THE Runner, the Lieutenant and the Driver cannot be identified by name as they have been given protected witness status. All are in jail.

  WILLIAMS’ cousin, Michael Thorneycroft, 32, also became a protected witness but he couldn’t grasp his second chance in life. He was the first to turn on Williams and tell police he was prepared to give evidence against him.

  He was arrested with three others on June 9, 2004, and charged with conspiracy to murder former lawyer and gangland identity Mario Condello.

  Soon after he turned against Williams, agreeing to plead guilty and make a prosecution statement. In return he was given’ a three-year suspended sentence.

  He was offered a new identity but decided to live with his mother in Melbourne’s east and although he was given a new name he always knew that Williams could have reached out if he wished.

  Police urged him to move and start a new life but he told them he was determined to stay in the area where he lived but maintain a low profile.

  He sought and received assurances from a relative of Williams that there would be no payback.

  Thorneycroft returned to playing suburban football under his new name but began to lose his battle with drug addiction.

  He was found dead in his Boronia home in May 2007 of a suspected drug overdose. Police say there were no suspicious circumstances.

  PHIL Swindells has been promoted to Inspector and works in the Ethical Standards Department. Andrew Allen was promoted to Superintendent and is in charge of the Geelong district. Gavan Ryan is a Detective Inspector in charge of task force 400 and in 2007 was awarded the prestigious
Australia Police Medal in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

  Stuart Bateson was promoted to work as a crime strategy expert and Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland was promoted to Deputy Commissioner.

  MEMBERS of the Purana task force, initial homicide investigators, Special Operations Group, bugging experts and surveillance police received commendation awards from Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon at a private dinner in 2006.

  Ryan sang a duet with Chief Commissioner Nixon and the police showband at the function proving beyond reasonable doubt he is a better detective than nightclub crooner.

  MICK Gatto lost 30 kilograms while in jail. On his release he put the weight back on and runs his successful crane company. He has been painted for the Archibald Prize.

  ROBERTA Williams split from Carl Williams and was seeing someone else. She says she considered converting to Islam and was dubbed for a short time Roberka. Carl Williams’ new girlfriend was in court to see him plead guilty. Wearing a new engagement ring she is called a ‘glass-widow’ – a woman who visits her partner in prison but never has to touch him, although taped prison phone calls indicate their conversations can be quite risqué.

  CHAPTER 10

  A fatal miscalculation

  ‘You are a killer, and a cowardly one who employed others to do the actual killing.’

  CARL Williams spent years successfully avoiding an assassin’s bullet only to commit legal suicide while giving evidence in the days leading to his final sentencing in the Supreme Court.

  Stubborn to the end, the baby-faced killer turned his back on a sweet legal deal by ignoring his lawyer’s advice to shut up and at least pretend to be sorry for launching a bloody vendetta that cost more than a dozen lives.

  Williams was found guilty by a jury of the murder of Michael Marshall in October 2003.

  When he finally realised that the prosecution case was overwhelming, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Jason Moran (June 2003), Mark Mallia (August 2003) and Lewis Moran (March 2004). He also pleaded guilty to the 2004 conspiracy to murder Mario Condello.