The Gangland War (19 page)

It was seemingly a murder without motive and police are yet to find the answer to a series of basic questions such as:

• Why would two men execute a seemingly harmless fruiterer in a deserted Toorak car park?

• What was it about Joe Quadara that would drive other men to kill him?

• And why, at his funeral a few days later, did some of Melbourne's most notorious gangsters, including Jason Moran and Graham Kinniburgh, turn up to pay their last respects?

• Why was a stolen car connected to a market identity found burning near the murder scene just minutes after the killing?

Detectives were to find that many years earlier Joe had an affair with a woman who bore him a son. In a bizarre coincidence the woman is related to the Melbourne hit man known as ‘The Journeyman' who would be a key figure in Melbourne's underworld war.

Police have now established the two killers were seen in the car park the previous day in a dark-coloured Toyota Camry station wagon. The trouble is, 32,000 cars fit that description.

It is possible the killers believed Quadara had the keys to the safe and that the yelling seconds before he was shot was part of a failed robbery bid.

But Joe Quadara wasn't even the purchasing officer at the supermarket, so he didn't carry company funds or have access to the safe.

Detectives said he was a good fighter when he was younger and had a strong survival sense developed from three decades in an industry with more than its share of seemingly unexplained murders.

‘If someone had put the squeeze on him the pressure would have been put on gradually and he wouldn't have been parking in a dark carpark at work,' one detective said. If robbery was not the motive, then the killers were checking the scene the day before as part of their plan to execute Joe Quadara.

Police believe debt is the likely motive for the murder but in the murky world of the markets they cannot be sure.

There is another Joe Quadara, also aged in his mid-50s, also with connections in the fruit and vegetable industry — and with a more colourful past.

This man was named in an inquest as having prior knowledge of the murder of Alfonso Muratore, who was shot dead in 1992. He denied the allegations.

Muratore was the son-in-law of Liborio Benvenuto, the godfather of Melbourne who died in 1988.

Certainly one suspect named as the person who paid for the hit on Joe Quadara was Liborio Benvenuto's son, Frank, who was himself shot dead in remarkably similar circumstances a year later.

Frank Benvenuto had two different gunmen work for him at different times, One was the veteran Victor Peirce and the other was an ambitious youngster named Andrew Veniamin.

Police now believe the paid hit man who shot Quadara was Andrew ‘Benji' Veniamin and that it was his first known hit. He is also the man police say killed Frank Benvenuto. He may have been a hard worker but he was not a loyal one.

About two weeks before
Mad Richard was killed
he squared off against another
drug dealer on the make
Carl Williams.

 

THE Esquire Motel had about 40 rooms and most nights almost all were occupied by people wanting cheap accommodation close to Fitzroy Street in the busy heart of St Kilda.

The fashionable suburb, where millionaires and professionals now rub shoulders with street people, still has a few hangovers of its seedier past — and the Esquire is one of them. The 1970s building in Acland Street has packed a lot of low life into its three decades.

Drifters, backpackers, runaways, prostitutes and drug dealers could all get rooms. Some just stayed the night; others stayed for as long as they could afford the tariff, not having what it takes to look for something more permanent.

Late in 1999 a man moved in to room 18 and made himself at home. He showed no sign of wanting anything better. For him the location was perfect — and at $50 a night the price was right.

And it was positively roomy compared with the prison cell he had vacated only a month earlier. He was a drug dealer and he turned the room into a 24-hour-a-day business address. There was no need to advertise. Word-of-mouth in the street is all a pusher needs.

Local police say that for six months he worked ‘red-hot' and built a strong customer base. The dealer had visitors at all times of day and night. One of them was Richard Mladenich, standover man and serial pest. The fact that it was 3.30am, that one man was asleep on the floor, a woman was asleep in a bed and a third person was also in bed, would not have fazed the man, who loved nothing better than an early morning chat.

When the door of room 18 swung open a little later to reveal an armed man, it was one of the few times in his life that Mladenich was caught short for words.

The assassin didn't need to break down the door — underworld murders are seldom that dramatic. The door was unlocked and all he had to do was turn the handle slowly enough not to forewarn the victim. Before he walked in, he yelled the name of the resident drug dealer — almost as a greeting — to show that he was no threat.

By the time Mladenich realised he was in danger, it was too late. When he stood to face the young man in the dark glasses and hood, he saw a small-calibre handgun pointing directly at him.

His experience of more than twenty years of violence would have told him that only luck could save him. It didn't. Before he could speak, the gun barked and the man holding it was gone, leaving Mladenich fighting a losing battle for life.

MLADENICH was a drug dealer, a standover man and a loudmouth. He was also funny, outrageous, a showman and a jailhouse
poet with a sense of theatre. When the 37-year-old was hunted down by a hit man that night, on 16 May 2000, detectives had a big problem. It was not to find suspects who wanted him dead, but to eliminate potential enemies from a long list of possibilities.

If the killer had been trailing Mladenich then he did a professional job, as his quarry had visited several other rooms at the Esquire before he reached room 18 just before 3am.

But after an extensive investigation, police believed the killer knew Mladenich's movements because he was close to him. He was either someone who made money in the same business as Mladenich and decided to eliminate him or, more likely, he was working for somebody who wanted him out of the way. In the underworld it is almost always associates, rather than strangers, who finally pull the trigger. The rivals just provide the bullets.

There was more than one reason why Mladenich's days were numbered. As well as being a prolific drug dealer, he had another gig. The big man with the bigger mouth was a minder for drug dealer Mark Moran. Moran was murdered outside his luxury home in June 2000 — a month after Mad Richard.

About two weeks before Mad Richard was killed he squared off against another drug dealer on the make — Carl Williams. The two crooks with dreams of being major players had argued heatedly in the underworld's then nightclub of choice, Heat, at Crown Casino.

No guns were drawn but lines were crossed.

When the two had been in jail, the bigger and stronger Mladenich was an inmate to be feared and respected. Williams told him that when they were released he wanted them to work together — he planned to recruit Mad Richard as a bodyguard and possible hit man.

But on his release Mladenich sided with the Morans, dreaming of becoming a key figure in their established network. He told
Williams he didn't need him and abused his former prison mate in the process.

Mad Richard could not have known that Williams was already committed to destroying the Morans, starting with Mark. The confrontation convinced Williams he had to get rid of Mladenich before he moved on Mark Moran. Police believe Williams recruited a hit man from a small violent western suburbs crew that included Dino Dibra, also killed later that year.

One of Dibra's best mates was fellow gunman Rocco Arico. Police have been told that Arico accepted the contract to kill Mad Richard and Williams acted as the getaway driver.

Arico was later jailed for seven years after he shot a driver five times during a road rage attack in Taylors Lakes in 2000. The victim survived and gave evidence in court despite an attempt to buy him off.

Arico was with Dibra (who was driving the car at the time of the shooting) and when Arico was later arrested at Melbourne Airport he was with Williams. The car involved in the road rage shooting was later found at Carl's house.

Homicide detectives later failed in an application for a court order to remove Arico from jail to interview him over Mladenich's murder. But he won't be in jail forever.

It would seem that Mad Richard's short, brutal and wasted life ended simply because he backed the wrong side.

According to former standover man Mark ‘Chopper' Read, Mladenich was ‘a total comedy of errors' and ‘without a doubt the loudest and most troublesome inmate in any jail in Australia'.

In 1988 Read and a then young Mladenich were both inmates in the maximum security H Division of Pentridge Prison during the so-called ‘Overcoat War' between prisoner factions.

‘Poor Richard fell over and hit his head on a garden spade, but he told the police nothing and dismissed as foul gossip and
rumour suggestions that I had hit him with it.' Read was never charged with the attack, but Mladenich carried permanent reminders of it in the form of scars on his forehead.

Rumours that prison officers, who were tired of Mladenich's dangerous ways, stood by when Read allegedly attacked him were never substantiated.

But there is no doubt that he made enemies wherever he went. One night in jail Mladenich grabbed his plastic chair and banged it against his cell bars from 8.30pm until 4.20am — not as part of a jail protest, but simply because he thought it was funny.

‘He was never short of a word,' Read explains. ‘Once, he went to Joe the Boss's place and stood outside yelling threats. This was not wise and a short time later he was shot in the leg in what was an obvious misunderstanding. He kept yelling abuse before he limped off. He could be flogged to the ground and then he would say, “Now let that be a lesson to you”.'

Mladenich was 14 when he was charged with stealing a car in Footscray. He was to end with a criminal record of more than nine pages and 24 aliases, including Richard Mantello and John Mancini.

But while he considered himself a smart criminal, his arrest record is filled with offences involving street violence. He was no master gangster.

His lengthy police file included a large number of warnings, including one that he had ‘violent rages that can be triggered off at any time … he will attempt to kill a (police) member or members'.

One entry read: ‘According to prison officers with years of experience they stated (Mladenich) was one of the craziest and most violent offenders they have seen. (He) is a mountain of a man who has a very violent and unpredictable nature. He must be approached with caution and extreme care. A tough cookie.'

Read said Mladenich had a fierce heroin habit from the mid-1980s. ‘He would come into jail looking like a wet greyhound and then he would pump iron and build up while inside.'

Read always predicted that Mladenich would die young. ‘The drugs will kill Richard and it's sad to see.'

Read, now a best-selling author and artist, says many of his old friends and enemies were being murdered because they refused to accept they were too old to dominate the underworld.

‘The barman has called last drinks, but these people won't go home and they just hang around to be killed. I have found that the writing of books is a far better way for your middle-aged crim to spend his winter nights, well away from excitable types with firearms.'

Former drug squad and St Kilda detective, Lachlan McCulloch, said Mladenich was one of the more bizarre criminal identities he had investigated in his years in the job.

McCulloch said that during a drug raid in Albert Park armed police were searching a house when there was an amazing scream. ‘Mladenich jumped out into the lounge room pointing a gun at everyone and going, “Pow! Pow!”. He had this toy laser gun and was running around shooting all of us with the flashing red light. The trouble was we all had real guns with real bullets. We could have blown his head off.'

McCulloch said that while Mladenich was eccentric and violent (‘He was as crazy as they came') he lacked the planning skills to be successful in the underworld.

The former detective said Mladenich, who liked to be known as ‘King Richard' but was also known by others as ‘Spade Brain' and ‘Mad Richard', had ambitions to run a protection racket. He stood over prostitutes and drug dealers, but wanted to broaden his horizons. ‘He wore this black gangster's coat and a black hat and walked into a pub in South Melbourne. He said he wanted
$1000 a week for protection money and he would be back the next day.'

When he came back 24 hours later he didn't seem to notice a group of detectives sitting at a nearby table, sipping beers. He was arrested at his first attempt at a shakedown.

Read said one detective tired of dealing with Mladenich through the courts. He said the detective walked him at gunpoint to the end of the St Kilda Pier, made him jump in and swim back. ‘Would have done him good, too,' Read said.

As a criminal he was a good poet, reciting his own verse to a judge who was about to jail him. He once was waiting in a Chinese restaurant for a takeaway meal when he started a friendly conversation with the man next to him, complimenting him on a ring he was wearing.

When the man left the restaurant, Mladenich was waiting outside to rob him of the ring. ‘He nearly pulled the finger off with it,' a detective said.

He had a long and volatile relationship with many Melbourne barristers and judges. He was known to have stalked a prosecutor, Carolyn Douglas (later appointed a County Court Judge), to disrupt Supreme Court trials and to abuse lawyers who had appeared against him.

He once chested a respected barrister, Raymond Lopez, in the foyer of Owen Dixon Chambers. ‘It is the only time I have felt under physical pressure in that way. I thought he was as high as a kite,' Lopez recalled. ‘He calmed down but he struck me as the type who could turn quickly.'