The Gangland War Read online

  But his absence meant he could not control his network from the ground up. The head of Purana, Detective Inspector Jim O’Brien, (the fourth appointed boss since its inception), used the same methods that had brought Carl Williams down: he would destroy the syndicate from the ground up.

  He knew that Mokbel’s power was based on his money. Tony demanded loyalty and was prepared to pay handsomely for it. Stop the flow of money and drugs and, O’Brien predicted, the hired help would jump ship. But police had to work out the extent of the empire before they could bring it down.

  When Mokbel was arrested as the master mind behind a massive drug chemical importation in 2001, police seized $6 million in assets. Later they estimated his wealth at $20 million.

  The Purana taskforce was staffed with dedicated investigators, committed analysts and support staff. But because of a special grant from the state government it was also able to employ lawyers and forensic accountants. The man who led the asset identification team was Detective Sergeant Jim Coghlan, who had worked on Mokbel for more than four years.

  Their findings were staggering. They estimated Mokbel had turned over $400 million through his criminal enterprises while other senior members had grossed $350 million.

  The task of following the money trail was made all the more difficult because there rarely was one. They found that Mokbel spent $10,000 a week just as pocket money. The rest was punted, invested, laundered or ploughed back into the drug business.

  Tony Mokbel ran his vast enterprises through the carrot and stick approach, exploiting greed and fear. There was no great paper trail — no contracts and no agreements — just a river of black cash. Mokbel would use drug money to set up companies and then put in an associate as the front man. Mokbel would tell his puppet he would be expected to hand over the company when instructed, and in return he could share in the profits along the way.

  There wasn’t much risk the front man would refuse to hand over the asset when he received the order. The subordinate would be paid well but when Tony wanted it sold it was immediately liquidated — or else the ‘front’ risked the same fate.

  One of the first places Purana went to examine Mokbel’s incomings and outgoings was the race track. They found that despite being banned from owning horses since 1999 and being banned from the Crown Casino and racecourses after his arrest, Mokbel had spent $80 million in gambling.

  With the help of the Australian Crime Commission, Purana detectives examined his links to major racing identities.

  Years earlier, Mokbel had led the notorious ‘Tracksuit Gang’ that regularly plunged money at race meetings up and down the east coast. With the benefit of hindsight it is obvious that Mokbel’s minions were laundering millions with massive cash bets.

  In the days of mobile phones and electronic money transfers, big punters rarely lay large cash bets. But it would appear that Tony was a leopard that wouldn’t change his spots.

  One Melbourne bookie started to become embarrassed when one serious punter kept displaying the $5000 cash he was about to wager.

  The bookie eventually quietly advised the punter to discreetly place the cash in a bag before handing it over so track regulars who pass on gossip and tips with equal relish would not observe the transactions. If the bookie ever doubted who was behind the bets, he soon learned when the front man handed over the cash and whispered, ‘Tony wants to do this.’

  Few people achieve such fame or infamy that they are instantly recognized by their first name. Mokbel was one of the few.

  He was one of the few punters, leaving aside the late Kerry Packer, bookies knew could lose millions and still come back for more (or less).

  No wonder they were happy to receive fat envelopes of cash from Mokbel’s runners. For some of them, Fat Tony was the closest thing to Santa they would ever find.

  As part of the Purana/Australian Crime Commission investigation, two jockeys, two trainers and three bookmakers were subpoenaed to appear at secret hearings.

  Purana used the commission because it can compel witnesses to answer questions under oath and demand financial and legal documents connected with investigations into organised crime.

  Those given an offer too good to refuse by the crime commission included bookmakers Alan Eskander, Frank Hudson and Simon Beasley, jockeys Danny Nikolic and Jim Cassidy and trainers Jim Conlan and Brendan McCarthy. They were not suspects, but investigators wanted them to provide an insight into Australia’s most wanted man.

  The inquiry established that Mokbel set up betting accounts under the names of front men so he could place massive bets he hoped would never be discovered.

  At least one bookmaker told the commission he knowingly accepted large bets from Mokbel more than a year after he was charged with importing $2 billion worth of drug chemicals and importing two kilograms of cocaine.

  One bookie admitted opening a ‘ghost’ betting account to enable Mokbel to punt under another man’s name. In just one week during the 2002 spring racing carnival, records show the account turned over $445,000. To Tony it was just pocket money. The bets were made just weeks after Mokbel was finally granted $1 million bail on the serious drugs charges.

  The name on the ghost betting account was Emido Navarolli, a close friend of Mokbel’s. But the bookie has admitted it was Mokbel and one of his associates who placed the bets and never the mysterious Navarolli.

  Just two weeks after the drug trafficker disappeared, Navarolli returned a $500,000 Mercedes once used by Mokbel to a car yard, as it was surplus to requirements.

  On 17 August 2005, Mokbel gave evidence before the Australian Crime Commission that his gambling winnings were paid into a bank account at the South Yarra branch of the ANZ bank under Navarolli’s name.

  Two days later, the Office of Public Prosecutions took out a restraining order to freeze the funds under assets-of-crime laws.

  Mokbel liked to give the impression he had inside information but his betting was wildly erratic. One rails bookmaker claims to have won nearly $6 million from the drug dealer over several years.

  Another said Mokbel once invited him to a Port Melbourne coffee shop, within walking distance of the drug dealer’s bayside penthouse, to collect $80,000. He recalled they walked to Mokbel’s car, where the trafficker opened the glove box. ‘There was at least $300,000 there,’ said the bookmaker, who is used to judging the worth of large bundles of cash. Mokbel handed over the required notes to square the ledger.

  The big punter did not mind the occasional big loss. He was trying to launder drug money into semi-respectable gambling revenue that could not be seized as assets of crime.

  While Mokbel appeared to have almost unlimited funds to bet, some bookmakers were not prepared to allow him credit. One claims Mokbel refused to pay a $1.8 million debt run up on credit bets. Another was owed $60,000 — Mokbel rang and declared he had placed a $10,000 winning bet on a six-to-one shot on the last race in Adelaide. The bet was non-existent but the bookie realised it was pointless to argue. He wrote off the debt rather than risk being written off himself.

  But the man who liked to describe himself as a professional punter did have strong ties with some of the biggest names in the business — who either didn’t know or didn’t care where their rich friend made his millions.

  In the months before Mokbel’s arrest in August 2001, police telephone taps showed the drug dealer had regular conversations with key players in the racing world. Up to seven racing identities, including three top jockeys, were recorded talking to Mokbel on the police tapes.

  In 2006, shortly after Mokbel disappeared, top jockey Jim Cassidy said he considered him a friend. ‘I’ve got nothing but respect for him,’ he told the Herald Sun in a frank moment.

  Not everyone was as charitable as Gentleman Jim.

  In 1998, racing officials started an inquiry into the Mokbel family’s ownership of horses. They found Tony and his then wife, Carmel, owned a string of gallopers. They also found the Mokbels tried to ‘give’ a horse to the
wife of a leading jockey.

  In the same year, racing officials gave police a confidential report suggesting the Mokbels were dangerous, corrupt and out of control. One senior official was shocked when he was confronted by one of the Mokbel family and threatened just weeks after the information was passed to police. The official still believes the information had been leaked to the drug dealer.

  It was part of a pattern where Mokbel seemed to know about investigations into him only days after they had begun.

  In 1999, the Mokbels were banned from owning racehorses. It wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. Tony still had a string of horses — he just kept them under the names of subordinates and associates. Sort of Trojan racehorses.

  Again it was his standard business practice. Place your assets under your mates’ names and collect later. Even after Tony’s eventual arrest in Greece in 2007, his brother, Horty, was named in a public controversy over the ownership of three-quarters of a brilliant young galloper called Pillar of Hercules, which was banned from racing then auctioned by order of the stewards as a way of guaranteeing it was not controlled by a silent partner in the Mokbel camp.

  The colt, which had cost $475,000 as a yearling, was auctioned for $1.8 million just days before the 2007 Melbourne Cup carnival. This was a lucky break for one Irene Meletsis, a woman reputedly with little knowledge of racing, whose name had appeared in the racebook as three-quarter owner of the colt. In an embarrassing twist for the trainer, Peter Moody, police had taped telephone conversations of him discussing the purchase and naming of the colt with Horty Mokbel. It wasn’t really Moody’s business who paid the bills, as he pointed out.

  In 2004, Tony Mokbel bragged he won nearly $400,000 on the Melbourne Cup and was seen punting heavily on Oaks Day two days later.

  The public display infuriated senior police and racing officials to the extent that laws were changed to ban suspected crime figures from Crown Casino and Victorian racetracks. Mokbel was one of the first to be blacklisted.

  The ACC investigation was not the first time racing figures were questioned over their alleged links to major crime figures.

  Cassidy and fellow jockeys, Gavin Eades and Kevin Moses, were suspended in Sydney in 1995 for race tipping, after their conversations were recorded during a major Australian Federal Police drug investigation code-named Caribou.

  And in 1981, several racing identities, including jockeys and callers, were recorded on illegal NSW police tapes giving inside information to notorious drug dealer, Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole.

  They don’t call them colourful racing identities for nothing.

  WHILE the crime commission was busy on the racing side, Jim O’Brien continued the dual strategy of attacking Mokbel’s resource base while turning trusted insiders into prosecution witnesses.

  If Tony had been in Australia, even in jail, he may have been able to control his team but, with him overseas, the fabric began to fray.

  Police began to target Mokbel’s closest family and friends. They discovered the syndicate, code named ‘The Company’, had set up seemingly legitimate industrial businesses to buy massive amounts of chemicals used to make perfume. They then redirected the precursor chemicals to be used in the production of amphetamines and ecstasy. While it was inconceivable that the massive amount of chemicals they bought could be used for a small perfume production run, no one within the industry queried the purchases. For the Mokbels it was a licence to print money.

  But slowly Purana put their hooks into the company.

  In September 2006, they (literally) unearthed $350,000 in cash, eighteen watches, 61 items of jewellery and 33 jewellery boxes concealed in PVC pipes hidden on behalf of the Mokbel family in a Parkdale backyard.

  They jailed Renate Mokbel, Tony’s sister-in-law, after she failed to honour a $1 million surety she offered as part of Mokbel’s bail conditions.

  The Brunswick property used as surety was seized. It was the place Mokbel had run a speed lab in 1997 and, after a fire, had been rebuilt. Some close to Mokbel became disillusioned that he remained free when Renate was jailed.

  His brothers were also arrested and charged. Milad Mokbel was charged after police discovered an alleged drug factory near a primary school in a shop that was supposedly being fitted out as a juice bar. Horse-loving brother Horty was also arrested on drug-related charges. Sister-in-Law Zaharoula Mokbel was charged over an alleged $2.3 million fraud.

  A Mokbel financial adviser was arrested and his luxury car seized. When he saw reporters, the adviser loudly advised that they should get ‘real jobs.’ He may have had many assets but a sense of irony was not one of them.

  Police needed the time that Mokbel was in hiding to build their case. Nearly one year after Mokbel had jumped bail, O’Brien was confident they now had enough information to charge him with two murders, Lewis Moran at the Brunswick Club and Michael Marshall in South Yarra. He was convinced they could finally charge Mokbel over being the head of a massive drug syndicate — although a jury will ultimately make that decision. Police had statements from two hit men, his alleged amphetamines cook and others close to the camp.

  In February 2007 Mokbel was charged in his absence with Lewis Moran’s murder. It was a strategy to show his followers he was now facing life in prison and so not a man to slavishly follow.

  Having stripped Mokbel of his key advisers, police started phase two — Operation Magnum — the identification of Mokbel’s hideaway and his ultimate arrest.

  In April they announced a million-dollar reward for his capture. Mokbel had always used money to control his underlings and now police were using the same incentive to get them to betray him.

  Deputy Commissioner Simon Overland intensified the pressure when he said: ‘We’ve got no doubt there are people out there who know where he is, who are probably in regular contact with him. Every time he now contacts those individuals, there are going to be huge seeds of doubt in his mind: is this the person who’s going to sell me out?’

  It would be no coincidence that in the same month an insider code-numbered 3030 approached police, saying he could provide information on Mokbel and four of his top men. The informer was a trusted insider but his own brother had died of a drug overdose and he saw this as the moment he could exact the maximum in revenge.

  While police were ready for the long haul the breakthrough came within weeks. By following the electronic transfer of about $400,000 to Athens they deduced that Tony was in Greece. But where exactly?

  By using 3030 and introducing two police undercover agents they managed to get close.

  The informer was the one who had been assigned to provide a passport and mobile phones for Mokbel. At least one of those phones was bugged by police before it was provided for the number one target.

  The passport was later altered for Mokbel to the alias of a supposed Sydney businessman, ‘Stephen Papas’. Why use that name?

  It was rumoured that when a local football team supported by Mokbel used a ring-in player they always used the one alias — Stephen Papas. Dishonest habits die hard.

  Thanks to the bugged phone, police could soon hear that Mokbel was still running his business, long distance. He would advise his staff when there was a problem with drug production and organise chemical deliveries.

  And they continued to send him money — if not truckloads — at least bootloads.

  On 5 May police watched as a Mokbel courier collected $440,000 hidden in Collingwood storage facility and then was given another $60,000 by a trusted insider.

  But if detectives grabbed the cash courier it would alert Mokbel that Purana was getting close. Instead they used uniformed police to intercept the man — making it look as though they had accidentally discovered the money during a routine car check.

  A marked unit slipped in behind the courier’s car near Box Hill. The courier became nervous when he saw the police car and kept checking his mirror, which is why he didn’t see the red light he ran on the Maroondah Highway. It gave polic
e the perfect opportunity to pull him over and search the car. They found the package of $499,950 in cash. At the man’s home they seized a further $8950.

  One of the team rang Mokbel to tell him the cash instalment was gone. Tony, sunning himself in Athens, told the subordinate not to worry. He would ensure the same amount would be in his hands within six days. Put it down to a business expense, he said. He might not have been so casual had he known the truth: the police net was closing.

  On 15 May the investigators narrowed the location to the prestigious Athens suburb of Glyfada, where Mokbel rented an upmarket home. They also found he was living with Danielle McGuire and their six-month-old girl, Renate. It is not known whether his sister-in-law, Renate, left in jail when he jumped bail, was chuffed that the baby was named after her.

  According to Jim O’Brien: ‘He was living in a double-storey apartment there with a rental of EUR2000 ($A3237) a month, living fairly high with a lavish lifestyle.’

  In late May, Purana Detective Senior Sergeant Jim Coghlan, who had spent years unravelling the Mokbel empire and had previously holidayed in the area, flew to Athens with a federal investigator to work with Greek police to find the fugitive.

  Mokbel spoke on the bugged phone of having ‘coffee at Starbucks’ — there were only two of the chain in the area. They were close, but not there yet.

  In early June they thought they were. Danielle McGuire had given birth to Tony’s baby and the doting dad was always there during infant swimming lessons. Police arrived at the pool just minutes after the family had left.

  Three days later they were tipped off he would visit a small seaside restaurant for a financial meeting and would be carrying a folder with paperwork. They arrived at the crowded restaurant but could not spot the balding head of the fugitive. The local police then carried out what was to appear to be a routine identity check. When a well-tanned man with long dark hair opened a folder to produce a passport with the name Stephen Papas, Coghlan realised it was Mokbel in a wig.