Underbelly 6 Read online

  ‘I knew Jason always carried a gun. I don’t know why he carried them, but he seemed to like guns.’

  More than three months later, police divers spent a week trying to find the gun. Police threw paper bags with weights about the size of a .32 handgun off the bridge.

  Detectives offered a bottle of malt whisky to the diver who could find the murder weapon. But tidal currents and the Yarra’s permanent silt made it impossible.

  A well-known underworld gun dealer lives in the Williamstown area. Police believe Moran made the trip to pick up a new gun after he threw the one used to kill Gangitano into the river.

  Next morning, Smith was woken by radio reports that a ‘gangland figure’ had been murdered in Templestowe. ‘I started to get nervous. I didn’t know if Jason had anything to do with it but I started to think he may have.’ When he found out the victim was Gangitano he become increasingly worried. ‘To say I was shocked was an understatement.’

  Two days later, Moran turned up at Smith’s flat at 7 am. Despite the hour they shared a bong and, according to Smith, Moran said, ‘Alphonse has been put off … don’t talk to any of the crew, especially Lou (Cozzo) and don’t tell anyone you were driving me the other night.’

  A few days later Cozzo rang and asked him if he knew anything about the murder and asked ‘If Jason was involved’.

  Smith was arrested by police more than three months after Gangitano’s murder for stealing cars. He then decided to tell them what he knew because he wanted a fresh start and was, ‘sick of always looking over my shoulder for Jason Moran’.

  His evidence may well have been compelling in any future murder trial but Smith committed suicide by hanging himself in jail – eight months to the day after Gangitano’s death.

  WITHIN 48 hours of the murder, a freshly-showered Moran arrived with his long-time lawyer, Andrew Fraser, to be interviewed by homicide squad detectives in their St Kilda Road office.

  Many would have expected a close associate of a murder victim to be visibly upset and want to help detectives. But Moran feigned indifference and refused to answer questions.

  More than two years later, on June 15, 2000, Jason’s brother, Mark Moran, was murdered in the driveway of his luxury home near Essendon. The killing remains unsolved.

  Jason Moran was eventually sentenced to 2½ years jail for the King Street brawl where Gangitano was a co-accused. In September last year, Moran was granted parole and released from prison. In an unusual move, the National Parole Board allowed him to leave Australia with his family because of fears for his life. He returned to Melbourne on November 20.

  Criminal lawyer Andrew Fraser knew many secrets. His clients believed they could tell him anything and their conversations would remain confidential.

  Fraser knew the value of silence. His first advice to his many clients was that if questioned by police, refuse to talk. He would tell them to provide their name, age and address but to respond to every further question with a standard ‘no comment’.

  Private school-educated Fraser prided himself on his ability to talk to his clients using the language of the underworld.

  In September, 1988, his private language became public knowledge when a conversation with a murder suspect was recorded in a city watch-house cell.

  He was representing Anthony Farrell, one of four men charged with, and ultimately acquitted of, the Walsh Street ambush murders of young police constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre.

  Fraser said to Farrell: ‘All you’ve got to do is f…… keep your trap shut. So say f…… nothing. And don’t consent to anything.

  ‘So just keep your trap shut, mate. This is the rest of your life here, because, don’t worry, if you go down on this you’re going to get a f…… monster, and we all know that, right?’

  Fraser’s tough-guy talk and his 24-hour-a-day availability made him popular with some of Victoria’s best-known crime families. Drug dealer and killer Dennis Allen always used Fraser and the Moran family swore by him.

  But Fraser was a braggart and a drug-addicted one. He refused to take his own advice to keep silent and by 1999 he was reduced to cocaine-fuelled rambles in his city office. In December, 2001, Fraser was sentenced to a minimum of five years’ jail for cocaine trafficking.

  A key piece of evidence was a conversation secretly recorded in his office by police on August 16, 1999, when he plotted the importation of cocaine, valued at nearly $3 million. But five days earlier, on August 11, drug squad police from Operation Regent recorded another fascinating conversation.

  Fraser, the lawyer who always told his clients to remain silent, could not shut up. He told a colleague that one of his clients, Jason Moran, was ‘crazy’.

  The colleague asked the lawyer, who always claimed to know many of the criminal secrets of Melbourne, who killed Gangitano.

  Whether Fraser really knew or was just spreading underworld gossip is not known, but he responded with one word: ‘Jason’.

  THE fact and fantasies of Gangitano’s life and death will never be separated.

  He gave the impression of wealth, but he had serious debts, he appeared unworried by constant police investigations and court appearances, yet his autopsy showed traces of the prescribed anti-anxiety drug Diazapam.

  He owed his lawyer George Defteros $100,000 and had about $2000 in a bank account. He was a paper millionaire, with assets valued at just over $1.1 million, but with debts of more than $300,000. Most of his wealth was in his late parents’ Lygon Street building, which he and his sister had inherited.

  Most crooks use dirty money to invest in legitimate business. He used good money to try and build a crime empire.

  There were more than 200 death notices for Gangitano. As has become an underworld tradition, hundreds packed the St Mary’s by the Sea church in West Melbourne for the funeral. It made the headlines and led the television news. He would have liked that.

  Gangitano referred to himself as a property developer, although the occupation listed in his Will was ‘gentleman’.

  But the myth did not die with his murder and he proved more famous dead than alive.

  The theatre continued at his inquest, four years later. Deputy Coroner Iain West heard that a musician had composed a song to Gangitano and the crime boss had wanted American actor Andy Garcia to play his role in a proposed movie.

  Kinniburgh and Moran attended the inquest but both chose not to give evidence on the grounds of self-incrimination. Kinniburgh wore casual clothes befitting a man who didn’t want to be noticed. Moran wore an expensive pinstripe suit and a flash diamond ring.

  Observers noticed a large scar running down the side of his head left there after his skull was broken when he was arrested by police a few years earlier – an action which the trial judge said was ‘remarkably heavy-handed’.

  The coroner found that Moran’s alibi was false and he was in the house when Alphonse was murdered.

  He said: ‘I do not accept Graham Kinniburgh’s version of events, as I am satisfied he was present at the time the deceased was shot.’

  He said Kinniburgh went to the convenience store to be filmed on the security camera ‘thereby attempting to establish an alibi of being absent from the premises at the critical time.’

  ‘… I am satisfied that both Graham Allan Kinniburgh and Jason Matthew Patrick Moran were implicated in the death,’ but he did not have sufficient evidence to conclude who fired the gun.