Underbelly 6 Read online

  CHAPTER 14

  The last laugh

  The fans loved Kahu Mahanga. So much that one of them, it seems, decided to become him …

  FOR a fighting man, Kahu Mahanga has always had a sense of humour. But it has taken him a while to see the funny side of being told he is dead.

  In the ring, the one-time TV Ringside cult figure had a knockout punch that made strong men go weak at the knees. Out of the ring, the killer Kiwi looked more Maori matinee idol than meatworker.

  He always had a wink for the girls and a joke for the blokes. Even his opponents and little old ladies liked him.

  In fact, Channel Seven’s ratings went up on nights when Mahanga was on the fight card at Festival Hall, then known to one and all in the fight game as the House of Stoush.

  No wonder the late Ron Casey loved him: every time the bell went to start Mahanga’s fights it was like a cash register ringing.

  Mahanga fought in some 400 bouts from the age of eight, more than 50 of them as a pro, and he always came up smiling.

  But he wasn’t happy when he got news of his demise, just before Christmas of 2001.

  It’s unsettling to read your own obituary – even if, as Mark Twain famously noted after a similar experience, reports of his death had been exaggerated.

  It all began on November 18 with a paragraph in Melbourne’s Sunday Herald Sun that stated: ‘Victorian boxing fans are mourning the death of 1970s TV Ringside star middleweight Keith Edward (Kahu) Mahanga’, who had reportedly died in hospital at Epping a week before.

  New Zealand newspapers picked up the item and ran big obituaries for the local hero. This came as rather a surprise to Mahanga – alive, well and working as a cleaner in Darwin – when worried friends and relatives started to call to inquire about his demise.

  ‘I was fuming a bit,’ the affable 55-year-old was to tell the authors about his peculiar experience. He did not sound particularly upset but tried to talk up the fight, presumably from force of habit left over from his days as an entertainer. ‘Especially when some of those newspapers wouldn’t retract the story that I was dead,’ he added, almost indignantly.

  What he didn’t understand then, he says, was how the mistake had arisen. Therein lies a strange story.

  First, some background. Mahanga came to Melbourne from New Zealand to fight in 1967, after carving out a reputation as a middleweight who threw bombs with each hand. He came from a country district called Tokoroa in the North Island, the youngest son of a tough Maori shearer who survived fighting in the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli and went home, married a Scottish-born girl and sired 13 children between 1920 and 1946.

  Mahanga was a brave, walk-up fighter, known in the trade as a crowd-pleaser. He was always a chance, even against superior boxers, because he would keep throwing big punches, and there was always the possibility one would connect.

  It got that way that his fights out-rated Graham Kennedy’s In Melbourne Tonight on the other channel. Melbourne, circa late 1960s, could offer no greater accolade.

  Mahanga’s greatest win was in 1969, over Sydney’s young champion, the fast and talented Tony Mundine, father of the formerly brilliant rugby league player, Anthony Mundine, and a genuine world-class boxer.

  Mahanga was never given a rating in Australia, because he wasn’t a resident, but he visited his homeland long enough to relieve Fred Taupola of the New Zealand middleweight title in 1971 and to lose it later to Battling Lauvassa.

  The record books show him only as a journeyman slugger, but that sells him short as a character of the game.

  The fans loved Mahanga. So much that one of them, it seems, decided to be him, assuming a false name and living a lie for more than 20 years … until he died at Epping on November 11, 2001.

  That’s when the trouble started – especially for the dead man’s devastated partner and daughter. The name on the dead man’s birth certificate was Edward Keith Tehira. No one knows when or why Tehira became Keith Mahunga. Or, if he really did deliberately use the boxer’s name, why he spelled it with one letter different.

  Keith Tehira was once an Auckland glazier. About the time Mahanga started boxing in Melbourne, Tehira left his wife and went to Australia, where he played rugby league with his brother in country NSW before drifting south.

  By the time he met a young widow on a blind date at a Collingwood pub in 1980, he was calling himself ‘Keith Mahunga’.

  They began what became a 20-year relationship. In 1983, their daughter was born. She took the surname Mahunga, and grew up believing her father was a famous fighter.

  When the widow first met Keith, people asked if she knew he was ‘Kahu Mahunga, the famous boxer’. She asked him about it, and he said he was, but didn’t elaborate. Curiously, he had no scrap books, trophies or pictures and avoided the fight crowd. This would seem a tad unusual for a former professional who had been idolised by fans.

  Soon after they met, Keith got a job at Peter MacCallum hospital. He called himself an ‘electrical engineer’ but, in fact, he was a trades assistant.

  Workmates recall ‘a nice-enough bloke’ who, in 1999, developed gout and heart trouble and was often admitted to hospital.

  On one hospital stay, he befriended a patient visited by retired boxer Adrian Charter. On being told ‘Kahu Mahunga’ was there, Charter introduced himself. Keith chatted easily about boxing, and pretended to remember Charter, who later told former Australian champion John McCubbin about finding ‘Kahu’.

  When McCubbin telephoned him in hospital, Keith called him by his nickname, ‘Long John’, and reminisced about sparring at the legendary Ambrose Palmer’s gym, where Johnny Famechon had learned the moves that made him a world champion.

  Meanwhile, at home in Epping, the two women who had shared Keith Mahunga’s life for 20 years knew his passport carried a different name, but didn’t worry about it. Boxing, like acting, is full of stage names, and they had always just assumed that explained it.

  The secret would have died with Tehira but for another coincidence. Adrian Charter saw the death notice for ‘Keith Mahunga’ and dutifully went to the funeral, expecting to see other boxing people. There weren’t any, and the eulogy barely mentioned boxing.

  Charter went to a fight night the next day and told ring announcer, the colourful Howard Leigh, that he had been to ‘Kahu’s funeral’.

  As usual when one of the punch-for-pay fraternity goes to the big boxing gym in the sky, Leigh whipped out a fulsome tribute and announced it to the crowd from centre-ring.

  No one could be blamed for the mistake – except, of course, the late ‘Keith Mahunga’. Months later, when the authors brought it to light, his shattered partner was still trying to make sense of his deception.

  Did he do it because he dreamed of being the boxing hero then let the dream take over reality? Or was it for some financial rort, such as tax evasion, and he just never got around to dropping the con?

  What starts out as a joke can easily assume a life of its own, with passing time making it more and more difficult to reveal the truth.

  Many a hoaxer or fantasist has been trapped the same way, not least the Darwin news reader who let people think for years that he had competed in the Olympics.

  Then there was the politician who somehow got a reputation for having ‘played at Wimbledon’, and the prominent Melbourne real estate agent who once ‘rucked for Hawthorn’. Every pub has a barfly who played a ‘few games’ of league football, or fought ‘10-rounders’ at Festival Hall, though records seem not to bear their stories out.

  RSL clubs are constantly discovering ‘veterans’ who have never been closer to Vietnam than eating rice noodles in Richmond or Cabramatta.

  Keith’s brother, Pat Tehira, guesses at a long-forgotten money motive to do with working at the same time as drawing some form of social service payments.

  He also recalls his family has relatives called Muhunga, which might explain the choice of an assumed name which, in a sports-mad city, took on a life of its own.r />
  The man who knew isn’t telling. His ashes are in New Zealand … in an urn bearing the name Edward Keith Tehira.

  CHAPTER 15

  The final chapter

  God defend me from my friends; from my enemies I can defend myself. – 17th Century proverb.

  IT WAS just after midnight when the two men in the green hire car cruised over the almost deserted Westgate bridge, heading away from Melbourne’s city skyline.

  The driver took little notice as his passenger casually picked up a McDonalds paper bag containing the remnants of their late-night snack and casually threw it out the window.

  It was only later the driver would wonder why the bag wasn’t sucked behind the fast moving car and, instead of fluttering onto the roadway, flew straight over the railing into the Yarra, 54 metres below.

  And it would be months before police would conclude the weight in the bag thrown so easily from the bridge equalled that of a .32 handgun – the one used to kill one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters less than an hour earlier.

  Alphonse John Gangitano was still lying dead in the laundry of his home with two bullet wounds in his head and one in the back when the two men cleared the bridge, but it would take four years before the events of that night would be publicly exposed.

  GANGITANO was not Melbourne’s best gangster but he was the best known. Glamorous, well-dressed, charming and violent, he played the role of an underworld identity as if he had learned it from a Hollywood script.

  The sycophants would call him the Robert De Niro of Lygon Street. His enemies – and there were many – called him the ‘Plastic Godfather’.

  In a business where attention can be fatal, Gangitano was a publicity magnet, first as a boxing manager, photographed with world champions such as Lester Ellis, and then as a crime figure whose court appearances were routinely followed by an ‘increasingly fixated media.

  Some gangsters are born into the underworld, driven there by a cycle of crushing poverty, lack of legitimate opportunities and family values that embrace violence and dishonesty.

  But that was not Gangitano’s background. He came from a hard-working and successful family. His father had run a profitable travel agency and invested astutely in real estate.

  Young Alphonse was given a private school education – De la Salle, Marcellin and Taylor’s College – and struggled. He was remembered as a big kid with attitude, but not much ability and no application.

  He was quick with his fists but not with his wits, though he was cunning enough to fight on his terms, usually king-hitting his opponents. He was charged with offensive behaviour when he was 19 and, over the next five years he graduated from street crimes to serious violence.

  Along the way he started to gather a group who for two decades were known as the ‘Carlton Crew’.

  Many young men eventually grow out of being fascinated with violence. Gangitano wasn’t one of them. He was 24 when police first found him with a gun.

  A confidential police report warned of Gangitano and his team. ‘They approach (police) members and assault them for no apparent reason. They are all extremely anti-police and are known to be ex-boxers. They often frequent in a group numbering approximately 15. They single out up to three off-duty police and assault them, generally by punching and kicking them. On most occasions in the past, members have been hospitalised due to injuries received from these persons.’ Gangitano was described as ‘extremely violent and dangerous.’

  In the early 1980s, Gangitano worked as a low-level standover man using an old tactic. He would walk into a club with a small group and announce to the owners that he expected protection money or he would begin bashing patrons. Many paid.

  He was making more than $1000 a week. Not huge money but enough for a young man on the make.

  He was charged with hindering police, assault by kicking, assaulting police (three counts), resisting arrest, and other crimes of violence. Each time, the charges were thrown out.

  But the fact he was able to beat the charges helped build his reputation. Some suggested he had influence inside the police force.

  Before long, he started to take on the trappings of a crime boss – wearing expensive clothes, reading biographies on Al Capone as if they were DIY manuals and watching videos such as The Godfather. He didn’t seem to grasp that in Hollywood, the good guys almost always win.

  BEFORE poker machines and government-sanctioned casinos, the illegal gaming business was the underworld’s most consistent money maker. Gangitano might have been bored at school but he was a quick learner on the street. He bought into a profitable baccarat school in Lygon Street and, some say, either part-owned or ran protection on Victoria’s then lucrative two-up school.

  Police intelligence reports listed him as a big punter and suspected of being a race-fixer in Victoria and Western Australia. He was alleged to have regularly sold guns inside an old Brunswick nightclub.

  In the early 1990s, many police were confused about Gangitano. They all agreed he was a public pain in the neck but they were not sure whether he was just another try-hard bash-artist or a man building a serious criminal network. Their informer network reported he was a major player in the underworld yet several investigations found he was more style than substance.

  If the aim of crime was to make money, Gangitano was still an apprentice. Financial checks showed he was no Don, just smallgoods.

  But still the rumours continued that he was The Godfather of Melbourne.

  He was seen with experienced and respected criminals. In the underworld you can never have too many contacts. One of his new friends was Australia’s best safe-breaker. He also grew close to three brothers who controlled much of Lygon Street.

  It perplexed police. Why did the big names of crime tolerate the dangerous and unpredictable new boy?

  Gangitano brought publicity and headlines made senior police demand reports from their organised crime experts. It was not good for business. In the underworld, fame rarely brings fortune.

  Most major crooks need a semi-legitimate veneer. Like the American gangsters that he mimicked, Gangitano chose boxing and aligned himself with the Lester Ellis camp. But Gangitano could not grasp the fundamentals of lawful business – even if it was only a front. He bashed and bit Barry Michael, a professional rival to Ellis, in a city nightclub in 1987. More headlines followed.

  Around the same time, Gangitano went into partnership to build a casino in Fitzroy with a well-known Lygon Street identity, investing $300,000 in the project. Unfortunately for the entrepreneurs, police raided and closed the club two days after it opened.

  Gangitano was handsome, often charming, and liked to think he was well-read. He could quote Oscar Wilde, John F. Kennedy and Adolf Hitler. Or, at least, he got away with it. In his crowd, no one would check if the quotes were accurate. And even if they did, they would be too tactful to mention it.

  An off-duty detective was dining in Lygon Street with a woman other than his wife. He heard a group of men at a table behind him swearing and laughing. He turned and curtly told them to improve their manners – before he realised the head of the table was Gangitano.

  The policeman expected trouble. Instead the group finished their meal and filed out. The waiter came to the detective’s table with an expensive bottle of wine and an apology – from Gangitano.

  Yet Gangitano could also be short-tempered, irrationally violent and tactically naive. He often needed associates or his expensive team of lawyers to help clean up the messes he made.

  A group of criminals, headed by Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read, once planned to use land mines to kill Gangitano at his eastern suburbs house but scrapped the plot because of the likelihood of others being killed.

  Shortly before Read was released from prison in 1991, an associate of Gangitano went to Pentridge with a peace offer. But police say Gangitano had a back-up plan. He had placed a $30,000 contract on Read’s head.

  When Read was released, Gangitano produced yet another plan
… he took his family to Italy and did not return until January, 1993, after Read was back in custody on another shooting charge.

  On February 6, 1995, Gangitano was at a party in Wando Grove, East St Kilda. It was a fundraiser for a man charged with armed robbery who needed bail money.

  Gangitano and another Melbourne crime identity, Gregory John Workman, had earlier been to a wake at a Richmond hotel before they went to the St Kilda unit.

  Gangitano was seen arguing with a gaming identity and had to be physically restrained. At 4.40am, Workman and the agitated Gangitano went outside. Workman was shot seven times in the back and once in the chest. It was considered unlikely to be accidental.

  A woman later told police she saw Gangitano standing near the body holding a small silver pistol and he was led away by another man.

  Two sisters at the wake made statements implicating Gangitano. They went into witness protection and were sent away from Gangitano’s influence, or so the theory went.

  It was a huge breakthrough. The man who had become the public face of organised crime in Victoria was in deep trouble. His lawyer contacted homicide squad detectives and said his client was prepared to be interviewed.

  Police said they were in no hurry. They were calling the shots.

  But they made the mistake of not protecting what they had. They took their star witnesses for granted.

  One was not allowed to visit her doctor for arthritis medication. They spent days in Carlton and were driven down Lygon Street several times, despite it being the area where Gangitano spent most of his time.

  They were not allowed to collect clothes on layby at a department store and were forced to live on take-away food. They complained to investigators that they were being treated as the criminals – ‘not him’.

  They were shunted into a cabin in a Warrnambool caravan park with a promise that their protectors were only a phone call away.

  They tried to contact their police protectors three times but the supposed 24-hour number rang out.