The Gangland War Read online

  It was a dream deal for a man who could have faced a life sentence — and for the police, because he was the domino who made the others fall.

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

  But it was The Runner’s confessions 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, Barbaro and Jason Moran. He will be in his early 70s before being eligible for release.

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

  Days before being found guilty of cocaine trafficking in March 2006 Mokbel jumped bail and disappeared. 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 Mokbel disappeared a lawyer had given him The Runner’s secret statements, tipping him off he was likely to be charged with murder.

  On 20 March, he fled. But the Purana taskforce was always confident he would surface and began to dismantle his financial empire. In February 2007 Mokbel was charged with Lewis Moran’s murder. And in June, despite being disguised with a bad wig, he was arrested in Greece and a few weeks later charged with the murder of Michael Marshall. Leaving aside his 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 secretly tried 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.

  By August 2006 the manipulator who once had teams of hit men 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 at 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,’ Paul Coghlan, QC, would recall.

  As the trial date came closer, so too did the negotiators. In February the two sides spent ten days talking. Then the apparently promising talks collapsed.

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

  It was legal tent-boxing with a few slow punches thrown and none landing.

  First, Williams’ team asked for an adjournment because of pre-trial publicity, but the same argument had been tried before and failed. Next gambit was a suggestion of judicial bias — another move doomed to fail.

  Then it was agreed the star protected witnesses could give video evidence for security reasons. There would be a few more pre-trial details to be cleared up then a jury would be selected.

  On Monday, 5 March, Geoff Horgan was scheduled to begin his opening address to declare that Williams organised the murders of Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.

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

  It was 2.10pm on 28 February 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 acknowledged 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 had taken nearly seven months of secret negotiations to get Williams to the point of being 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 the agreement was worth nothing until he said the words, ‘I plead guilty’, in open court.

  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 taskforce 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 allowed in to see their son before the hearing began. While George remained quiet, Barbara was animated. She pleaded with her son not to plead.

  George Williams didn’t apply any pressure. He was then still facing drug trafficking charges himself and part of the deal was that he would plead guilty if the prosecution would not demand a jail sentence. Carl’s hope that his 61-year-old father would get a suspended sentence persuaded him to plea to the extra three murders but the final decision was always going to be Justice King’s, as Williams senior would find out many months later.

  While the Crown honoured its end of the ‘bargain’ by not pushing for a jail sentence for George in late 2007, Justice King would reject the sweetheart deal and sentence him to a minimum twenty months prison, regardless of his heart condition.

  But that would be later. Meanwhile, it was Carl’s big day in court. According to an insider, he 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 ‘nodded’ — admitting his guilt. A decision that saved millions of dollars in trial costs and sent a message to the underworld that no-one was 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 use his second chance in life. The first to turn on Williams and tell police he was prepared to give evidence, Thorneycroft was arrested with three others on 9 June 2004 and charged with conspiracy to murder Mario Condello. He soon agreed 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 ea
st 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 and maintain a low profile.

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

  Thorneycroft returned to playing suburban football under his new name but lost 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 became officer in charge of Geelong police before transferring to Ballarat. Detective Inspector Jim O’Brien was appointed head of Purana. He masterminded the destruction of the Mokbel drug syndicate and retired shortly after Tony Mokbel was arrested. Detective Inspector Gavan Ryan was picked to head a taskforce into the Hodson murders before returning to run Purana and in 2007 was awarded the 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 taskforce, 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 Christine Nixon and the police show band 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. His portrait 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. Taped prison phone calls indicate their conversations can be quite risqué.

  * Tony Mokbel was arrested in Athens in June 2007. He was charged with drug trafficking and the murders of Lewis Moran and Michael Marshall. A Greek court ordered his extradition but he was sentenced to first serve 12 months for the local offence of entering the country on a false passport.

  2

  THE HOUSE OF MOKBEL

  Mokbel was the drug dealer

  from central casting.

  IT was just a little stumble that spilt the tin that caused the fire that led to the explosion that brought the firemen who called the police who found the amphetamine laboratory that Tony built.

  The lab, in a quiet residential street in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, had proved a virtual goldmine, pumping out speed until the day Paul Edward Howden kicked over a bucket of solvents that ignited and burnt the house down in February 1997. Police didn’t have far to look for their main suspect. They found Howden at the Alfred Hospital being treated for severe burns to 30 per cent of his body.

  Police also discovered the lab had produced at least 41.25 kilograms of pure methylamphetamine with a potential street value of $78 million. Prosecutors claimed the clandestine operation had produced enough speed for 1.3 million users. ‘It is the largest seizure of methylamphetamine in Victoria and it’s the largest detected manufacture of methylamphetamine in the state,’ the County Court was told. Even the seasoned trial judge, Graeme Crossley, seemed impressed. ‘I can’t believe how big it is,’ he declared.

  Howden’s barrister, the energetic and multi-skilled Con Heliotis QC, told the court his client was just a minor player who agreed to the plan out of loyalty to a friend — the godfather to one of his three children — identified only as, ‘Tony’. For Howden’s work in the massively profitable enterprise, Heliotis claimed, he was paid just $10,000 — and even that wasn’t cash. It was cut out in home renovations.

  Police agreed that Howden, a plumber by trade, was the stooge of the operation and Heliotis helpfully added that his client was ‘just short of stupid’. When he jailed Howden for four years, Judge Crossley took into account his minnow status: ‘You were a factory roustabout rather than the managing director.’ The managing director was Godfather Tony — who was never formally identified in court — but police needed only to look over the badly charred side fence to solve the mystery. The house next door was one of many owned by a tight-knit family with unlimited ambitions and unexplained incomes — the Mokbel clan. It was purchased for just $161,000, but the Mokbels were to be enthusiastic home improvers.

  Tony Mokbel was said to have lost millions when the lab was discovered, but he was a master at finding advantage in adversity. While the court was told Howden was the official owner of the speed lab house, the property was soon absorbed into the growing Mokbel Empire. The extended Mokbel family knocked down the burnt shell to enlarge their garden, planting a mature palm worth $15,000 to go with their sparkling new swimming pool.

  The furnishings were another matter. A policeman who raided the property described the décor as ‘Franco Cozzo on angel dust’. Long before Tony Mokbel had become the public face of drug dealing in Victoria, children in the street began to refer to the million-dollar property as ‘the drug house’.

  The $1.1 million Brunswick property would be used as bail surety for Tony Mokbel when he was charged with cocaine trafficking in 2002.

  The property was listed as being owned by Mokbel’s sister-in-law, Renate Lisa Mokbel, but police believe the house was financed through Mokbel’s prodigious drug activities.

  But Howden, the burnt patsy, would never tell detectives who funded the initial venture — and ‘Tony’ would not forget his loyalty. During Howden’s sentence, Mokbel would regularly drive to the jail to visit, even persuading prison officers to let him take his friend for an unauthorised trip to a local McDonald’s for a break from prison food.

  It would not be the only time Mokbel tried to lift the spirits of inmates with fast food.

  In June 2004, he visited a friend at the Melbourne Custody Centre who complained about his bland dinner. Mokbel — who had once owned an Italian restaurant — immediately spoke to a guard and peeled off $350 to pay for pizzas and soft drink from La Porchetta in North Melbourne.

  The obliging officer popped out to collect 40 large pizzas for all inmates and staff.

  It was typical of Mokbel, whose seemingly impetuous generosity was calculated to build long-term loyalty. Police say he would hand over $10,000 on a whim for a friend to have a bet, with a casual, ‘Pay me back if you win’.

  One associate said he was known as the ‘softest touch in town’. Any sob-story resulted in Mokbel handing over $5000, but in return he expected total support and the money repaid on demand.

  Tony’s reliance on fast food rewards for his team backfired when Howden, 36, died of heart disease in December 2001. Mokbel placed a death notice in the Herald Sun that read, in part, ‘You will always be in my prayers and I will never ever forget you. I promise to you my friend to be there for your family till the day I die.’ It was another Mokbel trademark — never forget a friend or an enemy.

  While police had known for years that Mokbel was involved in drug manufacturing, it was the Brunswick lab fire that showed the businessman on the make had become a big underworld player. And it would be another decade before they were able to trace his shadowy financial network and prove he was one of Australia’s richest — and nastiest — men.

  Of course, by the time Mokbel was finally sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison for cocaine trafficking in early 2006, he had jumped bail and become Australia’s most wanted man.

  ANTONIOS Sajih Mokbel was one of the sharper students at Coburg’s racially diverse Moreland High School in the late 1970s, b
ut he was never going to push on to tertiary study. He had no desire to spend years as a poor undergraduate, although he would later employ university chemistry students in his drug enterprises.

  The school was divided into three sub-schools and the teenage Mokbel stayed in the Zeta stream of nearly 100 students until he was old enough to leave.

  He might not have immediately embraced the school motto of Sapere Aude (‘Dare to be Wise’) but outside the classroom the apprentice wise guy was keen to excel.

  The Kuwaiti-born boy with rich Lebanese heritage and traditional Australian tastes was always in a hurry to make money. His first full-time job was as a dishwasher at a suburban nightclub before he became a waiter. Later, he worked in security — a surprising choice for a man not much bigger than a football rover. But Mokbel was smooth. He found he could often persuade people to his point of view without overt violence.

  Later, if he decided there was a need for bloodshed, he would employ others. Young and ambitious, he soon realised that to get the sort of money he wanted, he would have to be his own boss. It was in those early years, too, that Mokbel noticed that people who were partying often lost their inhibitions, and were prepared to pay for a good time.

  In 1984, aged just nineteen, he bought his first business — a struggling Rosanna milk bar. For two years he and his young partner, Carmel — whom he would marry in 1989 and with her have two children — worked long hours seven days a week battling to make a living before finally selling out for their original investment price.

  It would be the one and only time Mokbel didn’t seem to make massive profits in his business ventures, despite an early police report saying he ‘lacked financial acumen’.

  In 1987, he bought an Italian restaurant in Boronia. In those days he was content to roll the dough — years later he was rolling in it. He steadily built the business, expanding when he bought the shop next door. He sold the restaurant as a going concern in 1994, but kept ownership of the building.