Underbelly 2 Page 6

  CHAPTER 4

  Friday

  Trick or treat in a dead-end street?

  Like many 40-year-olds with children, he still required a mortgage.

  BIG Al was happy. He was going home to his new house in Templestowe after a day in court, and for the first time in four years he could see past the annoying charges that had helped erode his standing as a feared crime figure.

  His lawyers had told him that the first day of his committal at the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on charges of affray and assault had gone well, and that made him relaxed. He was now confident of a good result, and the court proceedings themselves held no fears for him. After all, he had been in and out of courts since he was a teenager and had an astonishing record of beating charges ranging from illegal possession of a firearm to murder.

  This, he hoped, would soon fade into just another inconvenience. He would soon be free to go back on the city streets he treated as his fiefdom.

  Bail conditions had stopped him being out after 9pm, making it hard to do what he did best – cutting an intimidating figure around nightclubs.

  To the man known to the system as Alphonse John Gangitano, sitting in the dock listening to police and witnesses describe him as an organised crime figure and a violent gangster was an occupational hazard. In fact, he had come to enjoy the notoriety.

  Not that he was pleased with his constant legal problems. Only a day earlier he had confided to his friend, Bail Justice Rowena Allsop, that he wanted the committal to be over as quickly as possible because he was worried about mounting legal bills. Legal Aid rarely defends clients in Zegna suits.

  Gangitano was dropped home by his long-time driver, Santo, on that Friday afternoon, 16 January, 1998. Walking down the sloping drive to the front door of the house in Glen Orchard Close that he’d bought six months earlier, he could see three of the four security cameras he’d installed as soon as he moved in.

  The system was set up to cover the front of the house, the back, the drive and the street. In the front garden were the foundations for the big brick fence he had ordered built to deter prying eyes. It would have been the only front fence on his side of the road. A security intercom had also been put in.

  Gangitano’s home was not the best of the twenty-seven houses in the dead-end street, but it suited his purposes best. On the low side of the street, on a sweeping left-hand bend, it was perfectly placed for a man who wished to know who was coming and going in the neighbourhood.

  The double-storey brick, thirty-square home was built on a sloping block, and so the downstairs rooms and the front door could not be watched from any distance. But the upstairs windows faced the street, giving the householder a perfect view of the road to the corner – and of anyone entering the area.

  The houses were built in the 1980s in what real estate agents describe as a ‘highly sought-after cul-de-sac’. Lawns, bulbs, silver birches, small shrubs and open gardens are the style of the street.

  There were few places where unwelcome observers, or a gunman, could hide.

  Gangitano, who bought the property in late 1997, wanted a secure house in a no-through road to foil police raids and surveillance. He had been the subject of much interest from the National Crime Authority, the Federal Police and the organised crime, drug, racing, gaming and vice squads of the Victoria Police. That was why he wanted a house that could protect him from police. Ironically, however, the greatest threat probably came from someone close. From someone he trusted, on his own side of the law.

  There were other ironies. Such as the fact he’d bought the house, not from the proceeds of organised crime, but from the sale of his deceased parents’ Eaglemont home. Like most 40-year-olds with children, he still required a mortgage.

  The house was comfortable without being opulent. But upstairs in the walk-in robe were up to thirty suits, leather jackets and expensive fashion accessories. If he was having money troubles, it didn’t show in his clothes.

  One of Gangitano’s favourite rooms was the study. Books on the shelves included one on A1 Capone. On the walls were pictures from his days as an influential figure in the fight game – one of Melbourne boxer Lester Ellis, a framed poster of the ‘Raging Bull’, Jake La Motta, and a famous photo of the most famous of them all, Muhammad Ali, standing over the prone body of Sonny Liston.

  If Gangitano had studied the Ali-Liston photograph carefully he might have learned a valuable lesson. Liston was the biggest and baddest of his time, seemingly unbeatable. But when his powers waned he was manipulated by others and finally died in sordid circumstances probably linked to organised crime.

  WHEN Gangitano came home he was alone. His de facto wife, Virginia, and their children, had gone to her sister’s St Kilda home about 1pm that afternoon.

  He removed his expensive, imported grey suit and draped it over the banister before going upstairs for a sleep. Even though he was on a court-designated curfew, he maintained his nocturnal habits of sleeping during the day.

  The sort of business that Gangitano specialised in required night work. For more than a decade he was regularly sighted in gambling dens and the nightspots of Lygon and King streets.

  From the early 1980s he had stood over some nightclubs and had needed to be seen to maintain a brooding, violent presence to encourage prompt payments.

  But after twenty two years in the crime world, Gangitano was under pressure. The impulsive, charismatic and violent gangster was a police magnet. His high public profile made him a target and he was having trouble distinguishing friends from enemies, a weakness that can be deadlier than most diseases.

  Police views on Gangitano varied greatly. Some saw him as a big organised crime figure. Others saw him as a self-inflated street thug and a parody of a gangster. All agreed he was a pain in the neck.

  Predictably, perhaps, Gangitano’s relatives were – and still are – furious at the media picture of him as a violent crime figure with probable drug connections. They claim he was anti-drugs and ‘would go ballistic’ at the thought of anyone close to his family becoming involved.

  They acknowledge he was a criminal. Illegal gambler? Yes. Standover man? Yes. Killer? Perhaps. But drug dealer? Certainly not. It is, of course, a common refrain among criminals and their supporters, who like to flatter themselves and persuade others that what they do is excusable. Or, at least, not as bad as what others do.

  In the 1990s, Victoria moved from the wowser state to embracing gambling, from small-time slot machines to ‘high roller’ rooms in the massive Crown Casino complex. For decades politicians had failed to give police strong laws to let them to seize illegal poker machines and close known gambling dens, but when the Government decided it wanted a slice of the gaming action it suddenly found the spine to introduce new laws that wiped out large sections of the illegal industry almost overnight.

  The Government’s move to take over traditional racketeer territory eroded Gangitano’s financial base. At the same time, police investigations also began to cut into his protection business. He described himself as a ‘property developer’ in court documents and in his will as a ‘gentleman’. His only legitimate income came from renting a Lygon Street property that had been owned by his parents and was now shared with his sister.

  Certainly Gangitano was under huge financial pressure. He was paying lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He even flew one lawyer overseas to take a statement from a potentially damaging witness.

  In a sense, he was trapped by his carefully-crafted image as a mobster. He saw no choice other than to act in the same violent way he had all his adult life.

  Gangitano’s murder of Gregory John Workman after a drunken argument at a party in 1995 brought him under the greatest pressure of his life. If he believed he was above the law he was to learn otherwise the hard way. He had to pay to have two star witnesses move overseas and, meanwhile, many of his associates moved to distance themselves from the loose cannon of Lygon Street.

  He was, by the New Year of 19
98, dangerously exposed and running out of friends. But he wasn’t losing any sleep over it on the Friday afternoon. Just after 3.30pm he headed upstairs to the main bedroom. It was a pleasant day outside, with the temperature about 23 degrees. But upstairs it was warm enough that he turned on the fan near the bed before dozing off.

  SIX hours later Gangitano woke and went downstairs. The telephone rang. It was Tony, an old friend from Brunswick, who wanted to know how his case was going. ‘He said he was confident … he was in good spirits and was joking,’ Tony was to say later.

  As they chatted, the telephone beeped to indicate a second call coming through. It was Virginia, saying she would be home in around an hour.

  He took two more calls, one from a Victorian criminal and one from a well-known criminal associate in Perth.

  If anything was worrying Alphonse he didn’t let on over the telephone. But, according to associates, he rarely spoke at length, believing the line and his house were bugged by police. He would always go outside if he wanted to say anything he wanted to remain confidential.

  Few of his criminal associates were welcome at Alphonse’s home. One of his closest criminal lieutenants was to claim he didn’t even know where Gangitano lived, and it was made clear that business and family were to remain separate worlds.

  ‘He always tried to insulate Virginia and the children,’ an associate said.

  Virginia knew he was a criminal but he never spoke to her of how he made his money. She was given weekly housekeeping and the job of caring for the children and the home. Difficult questions weren’t encouraged.

  Those who knew Virginia say she was anything but a gangster’s moll. She had met Alphonse twenty-three years earlier when she was only sixteen and he was a big teenager who was quick with his fists. She had seen him grow from a loud schoolboy lout into a handsome and recognised gangster. They had lived together for fifteen years.

  Fair-haired, attractive and devoted to her children, the well-educated product of Genazzano Catholic College, whose friends included at least one policeman’s wife, had long ago decided to stick with the man she had loved from schooldays.

  Despite her man’s desire to keep business and family apart, at least one old friend felt free to visit late at night, apparently without invitation.

  Graham Allen Kinniburgh, a trusted confidant of Gangitano, had excited police curiosity for at least three decades. To them, the older, experienced Kinniburgh and the younger, more excitable Gangitano made an odd couple.

  Kinniburgh, then 56, stayed in the shadows while Gangitano enjoyed the limelight. The older man dressed in staid, middle-of-the-road casual clothes while the younger preferred designer suits.

  Gangitano had a reputation as a hothead who could become violent at the wrong times, often leaving his lawyers to try to clean up the mess. Kinniburgh was far more controlled, although as a younger man he could flare up, and had once broken a policeman’s nose. But he had matured into a man who saw that no-one profited from pub brawls and fist fights.

  Kinniburgh lives in a prestigious part of Kew and has clearly been successful at his chosen occupation. What that occupation is remains a mystery. Why he was dubbed The Munster’ is also unknown.

  Like many successful people, Kinniburgh is admirably security conscious. His double-storey house is protected by video cameras and his privacy ensured with a high brick fence.

  But on the Friday night in question Kinniburgh tore himself away from the considerable comforts of his own home. He had a few drinks with an associate – and fellow friend of Gangitano’s – called Lou Cozzo, at the Laurel Hotel in Mt Alexander Road, Moonee Ponds. Some time after 10pm he left the hotel and, instead of driving home, he went further east, to Templestowe, to visit his friend.

  Kinniburgh said later that when he arrived, around 10.50pm, Gangitano told him he was about to meet someone and asked the older man to make himself scarce for a while.

  Kinniburgh decided to go off to the local shop to get a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. The Quix convenience store in Blackburn Road is 800m from Gangitano’s home, less than two minutes’ drive away, yet Kinniburgh was to claim he was gone for thirty.

  ALPHONSE Gangitano sat at the small, round kitchen table facing the hallway. It was a sensible spot for a man expecting visitors, whether enemies or friends.

  By moving his head slightly to the left he could look down to the front entrance. In summer he would keep the front door open but the security mesh door locked. The mesh was sensibly designed so you could see out but not into the house.

  Alphonse had been out of bed for more than an hour, but with the temperature around eighteen degrees at 11pm he hadn’t bothered to get dressed and remained in his blue underpants.

  Whoever arrived at the house late that night must have been well-known to Alphonse. He would have seen him and opened the door of his own accord. And, whoever it was, the host was relaxed enough to stay in his underpants when his guest arrived. Alphonse sat back at the kitchen table.

  What happened next is a matter of some conjecture. But one certainty is that the visitor suddenly pulled a gun.

  One theory is the killer, a trusted friend of the victim, went to the house with a plan to murder him as part of a cold-blooded gangland execution devised with the blessing of others.

  But there is a strong suggestion that the killer was a subordinate of the crime figure, a soldier Gangitano felt had ambitions to be a general, and that they had a fatal argument.

  Observers had noticed a cooling in the two men’s once close relationship, even though they had been seen shaking hands earlier that day. Like Gangitano, the visitor, aged about 40, was known as a hot head who, when pushed, would pull a gun and use it without heeding the consequences. In which case there were two loose cannons in the kitchen, but only one had a gun.

  Alphonse realised too late that he’d lost control. He jumped up and ran a few metres towards the laundry as the gunman fired. He could not get a gun – repeated police raids meant he would not risk hiding a firearm at his home. His only chance was to escape through the laundry door, but there was a slight problem. It was blocked by the family clothes horse.

  It was just what the gunman needed. His first shot missed, but the second wounded his victim. It was easy to finish him off. He showed the same measure of mercy that Gangitano had shown his own victims for twenty years.

  ABOUT one minute before Kinniburgh walked into the Quix store, Gangitano’s partner Virginia happened to walk into the same shop to buy ice creams for the children. Two security cameras, the size of cigarette packets, sat blinking in the shop. One faced the counter, the second pointed towards the door.

  Security tapes from the cameras confirmed that Virginia and Kinniburgh were in the store making their separate purchases.

  Police believe the two may well have driven past each other. It is not known if Kinniburgh recognised the Gangitano family’s burgundy Telstra sedan as they passed in the night.

  As Virginia turned into Glen Orchard Close and neared home she saw a car with square headlights complete a U-turn and cruise slowly away.

  As she swung into the driveway and opened the remote-controlled double garage door, she noticed the front sensor light was on, indicating someone, or something, had passed within the previous forty seconds.

  The children raced to the front door, but the heavy mesh security door was locked. They rang the bell, waiting for their father to let them in.

  Virginia opened the door with her keys. She found her children’s father lying face down. She saw the blood and the wounds and realised he had been shot, but because his body was still warm she had a desperate hope that he could be revived.

  She ran to the phone and called the emergency number to get an ambulance. Just then, Kinniburgh arrived from his thirty-minute trip to fetch cigarettes.

  He tried to roll the big man over to administer first aid, failing at first because of his bulk, but finally shifting him. Virginia remained calm, passing on instructions fr
om the operator to Kinniburgh to clear the patient’s airway while an ambulance was despatched.

  Ambulance tapes clearly record the anguished mother trying to keep her children away from the horrible sight of their father in the laundry while relaying the first-aid instructions.

  But the best surgeons in the world could not have saved him. He had bled to death.

  MANY of the men police hoped could shed some light on what happened on that warm night in Templestowe have remained silent.

  A close friend who has told anyone who will listen that he misses ‘Big Al’ and that he would love to know what happened, turned up at the homicide squad, freshly showered and with a top criminal lawyer in tow.

  He refused to answer any questions.

  Graham Kinniburgh also refused to answer police questions, adopting a code of silence he must have learned when he associated with painters and dockers long before he moved to leafy Kew.

  Hundreds of people, many with colourful criminal histories, have been interviewed by police, Many have expressed anger, grief and sorrow for the death of their old friend. Few have provided facts.

  Some tried to suggest police may have murdered Gangitano, but there is no evidence to back the theory. As a criminal figure Gangitano was on the way out, and he went out … feet first. Forty-year-old street thugs are a dying breed. Alphonse proved it.

  Gangitano would never have opened the door to police unless they had a search warrant, and none had been drawn. Any policeman contemplating turning killer would have known the house may have been bugged or under surveillance by another law enforcement body.

  Pages and pages of death notices appeared in the Herald Sun, newspaper of choice for the criminal classes, who supply many of the lucrative massage parlor advertisements that once belonged to Truth newspaper. Many were placed by the vaguest of associates and vicarious hangers-on who wanted to be connected, no matter how tenuously, to a Melbourne crime event.