The Gangland War Page 5

  It would remain his long-term strategy — to invest in bricks and mortar, among many other things. It was a sound investment strategy, but it was also a simple way to transform fresh drug money into seemingly solid assets.

  In 1996, he bought a bar and restaurant in Swanston Street, Carlton, but sold it a year later to a property developer for a substantial profit.

  In 1997, he bought several adjoining properties in Sydney Road, Brunswick, and opened T Jays Restaurant. It was around this time he started being noticed as an ambitious developer with an appetite for consuming businesses. Police should also have been aware of the man on the make. T Jays was opposite Brunswick Police Station.

  By 2000, the former struggling milk bar proprietor bragged to friends he owned or controlled 38 different companies. In the same year, he began his most ambitious development — an $18 million, ten-storey ‘winged keel’ apartment tower over Sydney Road. The plan was to build 120 apartments and townhouses, offices, restaurants, gym with pool and a four-storey car park on the old Whelan the Wrecker site. No-one seemed to wonder how he could generate that sort of money. Much later, police financial experts would find that he needed at least $2 million from drug money every year to fund the so-called ‘legitimate’ arm of his business.

  Moreland development services manager Michael Smit was quoted as saying of the Mokbel monolith: ‘It has the potential to be a strong landmark in the sense of buildings like the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe — which the architects have used as inspiration — and change people’s perceptions of Sydney Road.’

  Perhaps Mr Smit should get out more.

  At the same time as Mokbel was planning to turn Sydney Road into a tourist attraction for visiting architects, he was also developing ten units in Templestowe that he intended to sell for $300,000 each. In 2000, he owned the Brunswick market site and claimed to make $500,000 a year in rent money.

  His business portfolio was as wide as it was impressive, with interests in shops, cafes, fashions, fragrances, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs and land in regional Victoria. He and his companies owned two white vans, two Commodores, a red Audi, a 2000 silver Mercedes, a Nissan Skyline and a red Ferrari Roadster that he bought in September 1999. He even managed to give his wife a pub in the town of Kilmore as part of the family businesses. Intriguingly, the pub was granted a gaming licence to run lucrative poker machines after the owners passed the highest probity checks — even though Tony Mokbel was a convicted criminal and prolific drug dealer.

  One of his fashion houses was appropriately named LSD — ostensibly an abbreviation for Love of Style and Design. It was apparently the drug dealer’s idea of a private joke. He also opened a café near his old school — Moreland High. He owned fourteen properties in Brunswick, three in Boronia, two at Kilmore and one each in Coburg, Pascoe Vale and Templestowe.

  Just about everyone seemed to know that Tony was a big-time crook — that is, except some of the bankers from the top end of town.

  The National Australia Bank loaned Mokbel nearly $6 million, apparently unaware their cashed-up client was a drug dealer. He had nineteen accounts and an A-Grade credit rating with the NAB between 1985 and 2001. Clearly, credit officers were not prepared to ask too many questions of the ‘property developer’ with the flash clothes and the big dreams.

  Mokbel was the drug dealer from central casting. He bought a top-of-the-range jet ski and was a regular at marquees at the Grand Prix. He once managed to get not one but two personally signed Ferrari caps from champion driver Michael Schumacher. The speed producer loved fast cars, fast horses and life in the fast lane.

  He left his wife and in late 2000 began an affair with Danielle McGuire, who ran a Mokbel-owned South Yarra beauty shop. But she was not the only woman in his life — he apparently believed monogamy was a board game for bored people.

  He’d been living with McGuire when he was found to have disappeared on 20 March 2006 — days before his cocaine trial was due to finish. Oddly, McGuire was unable to assist police in their enquiries about the whereabouts of her once-constant companion. But in the last days before he flew the coop, the lovebirds were not living in sin. Mokbel’s divorce from Carmel had finally come through. His long-suffering ex-wife was either extraordinarily naïve or born with no sense of curiosity. In court documents she swore she had no idea of her husband’s prodigious criminal activity during their married life. In other words, Carmel claimed she was a Patsy.

  McGuire was no stranger to police investigations — she was the ex-girlfriend of Mark Moran, the drug-dealing standover man murdered on 15 June 2000. She was truly unlucky in love. But with Mokbel she had the million-dollar lifestyle, living in a massive city apartment and dining at the best restaurants.

  When Mokbel was arrested, he was living in a Port Melbourne bayside penthouse he rented for $1250 a week. He told friends he planned to buy the property. He would never have the chance. Not that his lifestyle suffered. He moved into the four-bedroom apartment in Southbank with panoramic views of Port Phillip Bay, which was a world away from his previous address — a onebed cell in Port Phillip Prison.

  But Tony, the former suburban pizza shop proprietor, never lost his common touch and loved nothing better than to snack on a Capricciosa.

  He was a well-known customer and generous tipper at the city’s up-market pizzeria — Sopranos, naturally.

  Sopranos manager Frank Sarkis was quoted as saying: ‘He came for breakfast, lunch and dinner and his favourite meal was medium-rare eye fillet steak topped with prawns and smoked salmon — about $50.’

  When Tony wanted to snack in the privacy of his own home the restaurant would send over platters of pasta and pizza to the penthouse.

  ‘My staff described it (Mokbel’s penthouse) as something so beautiful they had only seen anything like it in movies,’ the restaurant man said. ‘And money was no object. He’d regularly spend $200 a night on pizza and pasta. The staff cried (when Mokbel absconded) — he was a big tipper, $100 bills.’

  IT was not through drug dealing or shady business dealings that Mokbel first started to develop a questionable public profile, but through one of his other great passions — gambling. In later years, with nearly $20 million of his assets frozen, he took to describing himself as a professional punter, even though he was banned from racetracks and casinos as an undesirable person.

  For years, Mokbel was the type of heavyweight punter who used inside information to tip the odds his way. He was the leader of the notorious ‘tracksuit gang’ — a group responsible for a series of suspicious late plunges on racetracks in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

  His team once won $500,000 and demanded to be paid in green $100 bills, after lodging the bets with the older grey notes, in what was clearly a money-laundering exercise.

  Some bookies refused to take credit bets for Mokbel because he was often forgetful on collection day. One claimed he lost more than $1 million from the non-payer.

  Bookies soon learned it was best to write off the debts from the dealer with the long pockets and even longer memory.

  In 1998, racing officials launched an investigation into the ownership of nine horses linked to Tony and Carmel Mokbel. The following year, the Victoria Racing Club banned them from racing horses.

  But racing experts say Mokbel continued to own horses although they were officially under the names of friends and associates. He used the same strategy in ‘legitimate’ business, hiding his interests under the names of friends and family.

  During the 2001 police investigation into Mokbel, police found the prolific drug dealer had strong links to seven jockeys and trainers. Phone taps picked up his regular conversations with three leading jockeys, but racing authorities were powerless to act, as the phone taps could not be released for a non-criminal investigation.

  While under surveillance in the Flemington young members’ enclosure on Derby Day 2000, Mokbel was seen to be unusually popular. Some of his ‘friends’ that day were household names — television identiti
es and members of the ‘A List’ crowd endlessly photographed for the covers of glamour magazines and newspaper social columns. Police said he brazenly handed out small ‘gifts’ of cocaine to the partying punters.

  Years later, he was still a regular at the races even though he was on $1 million bail for serious drug charges.

  In 2004, despite having his assets frozen, Mokbel told friends he had won nearly $400,000 on the Melbourne Cup. He was also seen punting heavily at the Oaks two days later, backing three winners in a row, including the appropriately named Hollow Bullet.

  The public display so angered senior police they moved with racing clubs to ban him from the Melbourne casino and Victorian racetracks.

  He was also banned from entering licensed premises in the South Yarra and Prahran areas, meaning he could not walk into some nightspots he owned.

  SO HOW did Tony Mokbel graduate from dishwasher to unknown amphetamine dealer and then to the Hollywood crime cliché of the millionaire, Ferrari-driving drug baron with the blonde girlfriend and the celebrity lifestyle?

  It began modestly. In the early days, he was more bumbling crook than master criminal. In 1992, Mokbel was convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice, after a clumsy bid two years earlier to bribe a County Court judge was undone in a police sting. He was trying to shop for a ‘bent judge’ who would give an associate a suspended sentence for drug trafficking. Typically, he wanted to pay the bribe in a mixture of cash and drugs.

  Why he would imagine a judge would be interested in drugs is anybody’s guess, although it was rumoured that he had provided some court staff with drugs in the hope they would be useful contacts some day. It was his version of networking.

  Mokbel and two others were arrested as he handed over $2000 as the first payment of $53,000 that was supposed to have gone to the supposedly corrupt judge. Part of the ‘agreed’ payment was to be made in cocaine.

  In 1998, he was convicted over amphetamine manufacturing but beat the charge on appeal. His lawyers successfully argued he should not have been charged with amphetamine trafficking when the drug he was handling was pseudoephedrine — a drug that could be used to make amphetamines.

  People who had known him in prison remembered Mokbel as ‘cunning and a fast learner’. The main lesson he learned was to ensure he insulated himself from hands-on drug dealing and use only middlemen he could trust.

  Even in prison he craved the good life, bribing catering staff for extra food and a steady supply of alcohol. He also had access to smuggled mobile phones to maintain hands-on control of his business interests.

  Police say he was one of the first of the major drug dealers to move into the designer pill industry, pressing tablets for the nightclub crowd.

  According to the United Nations, Australia has the highest use of ecstasy per capita in the world and the second highest amphetamines use. Mokbel could cater for both markets, manufacturing speed in Australia and importing ecstasy from Europe. And for his top-shelf clients, he smuggled cocaine from Mexico.

  He had pill presses hidden in Coburg and Brooklyn. A consummate networker, he developed his own team, which included an industrial chemist, rogue police, a locksmith, dock-workers, jockeys, trainers, a pill press repairer, distributors and cargo bonds officials. He had used two brothers as local speed lab cooks to make amphetamines, but also sourced drugs from Sydney.

  His profits jumped from large to massive. Convinced he was born lucky, Mokbel started to spend $20,000 a week on Tattslotto. It was more than a Saturday night interest. First division wins and big plunges on the track helped launder drug money into punter’s dividends. (Some of his laundering efforts were less successful. It was rumoured he left millions hidden in a large washing machine but that the cash mysteriously disappeared after an unwelcome late-night visit.)

  No drug trafficker, no matter how powerful, can work alone and Mokbel was to develop an extensive underworld network, although his contact list has shrunk somewhat due to the gangland war. Among his associates were Nik Radev (killed in April 2003), Willie Thompson (July 2003), Michael Marshall (October 2003), Andrew Veniamin (March 2004), Lewis Moran (March 2004), and Mario Condello (February 2006).

  He grew close to Veniamin after the sawn-off gunman took him to hospital after he was bashed in Carlton in November 2002. It was rumoured that Condello persuaded Mokbel to attend the crime conference that resulted in him being bashed on Radev’s instructions.

  When Veniamin was shot dead in a Carlton restaurant, Mokbel placed a death notice in the Herald Sun that read: ‘To a friend I haven’t known for very long, you were a true friend … will be sadly missed.’

  At the funeral, Mokbel was the first to kiss the body lying in an open coffin. Members of the Victoria Police Purana taskforce suspected Mokbel was involved in some of the killings, employing paid hit men to fire the bullets. While some say he was the puppet-master, police lacked evidence of his involvement, at least initially. As Mokbel’s wealth and profile grew, so did the interest of drug squad detectives. Two police investigations into him failed, but a third, Operation Kayak, set up in 2000, began to track the activities of the massive drug dealer.

  It would be a trusted insider who worked as a police informer who would destroy him. The informer, (who would flee the country only to be arrested, much later, in Amsterdam in late 2007) became an ethical standards department source and helped expose corruption within the drug squad.

  The extremely persuasive informer was a born con man turned gifted double agent. He was a businessman who thought nothing of spending $5000 on a night out. A police profile showed he spent $80,000 in twelve months on hire cars, and $150,000 on air fares. He had 30 aliases, and was one of the biggest drug movers in Melbourne. After he was arrested with two kilograms of cocaine in August 2000, he agreed to turn informer and became an enthusiastic double agent.

  The man knew most of Melbourne’s major drug dealers but also had high-profile associates, including Channel 7’s Naomi Robson, then the glamorous host of the Today Tonight current affairs program.

  The informer bragged to police and crooks about his relationship with Robson, claiming she was his girlfriend, but at no time during the protracted investigation was she observed or recorded with the man and there were no suggestions she was involved in drugs.

  Robson explained on air shortly after Mokbel fled Australia: ‘I caught up with him (the informer), usually in the company of others on a handful of occasions over a couple of months and I decided I didn’t want to take it any further.’

  Once the informer took police inside the secret world of Tony Mokbel, they were able to establish the unprecedented size of the empire.

  First there was his fake, or pseudo, ecstasy business. Using locally produced amphetamines mixed with other available drugs, he pressed millions of tablets. He told his friends he made them for $3 a pill and sold them for $12 to $14. You didn’t need an MBA from Harvard to know that it was a massive profit margin while it lasted.

  He imported hundreds of thousands of MDMA ecstasy tablets from Europe, paying $4 and selling for $17 in minimum 1000 lots. Still not satisfied at quadrupling his money, he would sometimes crush the pills and re-press them at half-strength to double his profits.

  In late 2000, the informer said, Mokbel was part of a team importing 500,000 ecstasy tablets although he said his normal shipments were around 75,000 tablets. The load arrived in a container ship and cleared Melbourne docks just before Christmas.

  Around the same time, Mokbel wanted to open a licensed restaurant under his own name but his criminal record was a slight problem. He tried to use high profile referees. For one of them, it was a ticking time bomb that would blow up seven years later.

  In March 2007 Kelvin Thomson, the Labor Federal member for Wills, resigned as Shadow Attorney General after it was revealed he had given Mokbel a generous reference in 2000 — long after Tony had first been convicted of drug trafficking.

  He said he was unaware of Mokbel’s background when h
e gave him the reference for a liquor licence.

  It read in part, ‘Mr Mokbel is making a significant contribution to the community and employing a substantial number of people … I urge you to take into account Mr Mokbel’s last year of unblemished conduct, his commitment to family and his successful establishment as a local businessman in making your decision concerning his application.’

  The application failed. Kelvin Thomson said he could not recall meeting Mokbel.

  Another referee for the application was former drug squad detective Ray Dole, who was then the liquor licensing sergeant for Brunswick. Dole wrote that Mokbel was ‘of reformed habits and is making a worthwhile contribution to society.’ This must have come as a surprise to the drug squad, which was investigating Mokbel for trafficking.

  After the application failed, Mokbel put his licensed premises and gaming facilities in other people’s names and got back to concentrating on his core business. He planned a three million pill importation worth more than $50 million in March or April 2001. It is not known if it landed.

  Always keen to explore new drug markets, Mokbel bought 80,000 LSD tablets for $5 a tablet, later being told by a colleague he had been ripped off.

  Over an eight-month period in 2000, he made fifteen deposits in just one bank account, ranging from $10,200 to $125,000 for a total of $600,000.

  For Mokbel, it was a glorified Christmas club account.

  He would lend associates large sums of money knowing that he could call it back with no records ever being kept.

  In August 2001, Mokbel was finally arrested over importing barrels of the chemical ephedrine to make an estimated 40 million amphetamine-based pseudo-ecstasy tablets. Police estimated the 550 kilograms of the chemical, once turned into pills, would have had a street value of $2 billion.

  The battler from Moreland High had turned himself into the equal of a multi-national corporation.

  But while Mokbel’s arrest over the ephedrine importation made headlines, the charges didn’t stick and were later dropped by lawyers from the Director of Public Prosecution’s office. The case against Mokbel and several other major drug investigations, were compromised when a small group of drug squad detectives were found to be corrupt. The men whose word would have to be believed by juries were themselves facing charges or had already been convicted.