The Gangland War (21 page)

In accordance with underworld union rules, the
Herald Sun
was filled with death notices to a ‘lovely gentleman' after Mark Moran's death. There were many from former league footballers including one from a former Carlton captain who fondly remembered the Moran boys running a victory lap with the team after a premiership in the 1980s.

There was one notice falsely placed under the nickname of a drug squad detective. Police suspect it was placed to give the appearance Moran was talking to police when he was killed.

The funeral was the usual procession of real friends, hangers-on and crims in black suits who refused to remove their sunglasses, even though it was a cold winter's day.

Jason Moran was allowed day leave from prison to speak at the funeral. Mourners said the brother spoke with real emotion but his death notice worried police. It read: ‘This is only the beginning, it will never be the end. REMEMBER, I WILL NEVER FORGET.'

It was an empty boast. Within three years Jason would join his brother as an underworld victim.

Because the funeral was going to choke local streets, a request was made for uniformed police to control traffic, but a senior policeman vetoed the plan. He didn't want media images of police holding up traffic for a mob of Melbourne gangsters.

While Mark Moran had a low public profile, he had a long and violent criminal history. Career criminal Raymond John Denning once told an inquest Moran was one of three men involved in an armed robbery in which a guard was shot dead.

He said the three men involved were Russell ‘Mad Dog' Cox, Moran and Santo Mercuri. The robbery was on 11 July 1988, in Barkly Square, Brunswick. Two armed guards were leaving a Coles warehouse with a cash tin when they were held up at gun-point. A struggle followed and one of the guards, Dominic Hefti, 31, was shot in the chest and the leg. He died two days later at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Denning said the three men planned to kill a woman whose car Mercuri had stolen for his getaway. Denning said: ‘It was decided among the three of them that they try to find her home address and knock her because she was the only one that Sam believed had identified him.'

In a chilling postscript to the story, when the armed robbery squad later raided the Doncaster home of Russell Cox, they found that the page of the telephone book carrying the woman's name and address had been torn out.

Hefti's murder sparked another spate of killings. Police wrongly believed that armed robber Graeme Jensen was responsible
and he was shot during an apparently clumsy attempt to arrest him on 11 October 1988.

The following day two young uniformed police, Constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra, as a payback.

LES Cole didn't think lightning could strike the same place twice. He was wrong. The former painter and docker was shot dead in the same garage in which a gunman had ambushed him and seriously wounded him just two months before.

That was on 10 November 1982, at Cole's heavily-fortified Kyle Bay home in Sydney. It was to prove eerily similar to the death of his biological son, Mark Moran, 18 years later. Each was shot dead as he returned home. Each was living well above his legitimate means at the time. And each almost certainly knew they were in danger.

Cole managed to live one year longer than his son would. He was shot at 37; Mark at 36.

It was the second attempt on Cole's life. He had been shot just two months before by a man he described as ‘a bad loser.' But if the gunman was a bad loser then Cole was a fatally slow learner.

He was still recovering from the first attack, and was returning from a physiotherapy appointment for treatment for his injuries, when he was killed.

In the first shooting he had been wounded in the right foot, right knee, midriff, right shoulder and twice in the forearm.

But the second time the gunman left nothing to chance, shooting Cole twice in the chest and once behind the right ear.

When police interviewed him over the first shooting he said, ‘I don't want to say anything. I will sort it out myself.'

Police said Cole knew the Kane brothers and the senior Moran brothers, Lewis and ‘Tuppence', and had visited Melbourne
the day before his death. ‘He was not a bad little bloke, a bit of a knockabout,' one policeman recalled.

His widow, Jennifer Ann Cole, told the inquest into his death she had never bothered to ask her husband what he did for a living. ‘He always said what I didn't know wouldn't hurt me.'

Cole was supposedly a security officer at Sydney's Sea Breeze Hotel, but he failed to sniff the winds of change. He didn't realise until too late that someone had a terminal grudge against him.

Like the Kanes, Cole was heavily into protection and debt collecting and moved to Sydney to advance his career. Police at one stage believed he was killed by a Melbourne hit man flown in for the job, but the whisper was that a Sydney gangster called Mick Sayers pulled the trigger. Sayers was later murdered.

Cole had installed state-of-the-art security. He had electronically operated doors, a video surveillance system, floodlights, steel bars over windows, steel mesh over the backyard and he kept two guard dogs.

But even though he had been shot once before, he became slack and left the garage door open, allowing the gunman the perfect position to hide. It wasn't the action of a prudent man — but if he were prudent he wouldn't have been a career criminal.

The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree. Years later, Cole's son Mark became slack, too, and didn't bother to drive his car behind the iron gates and into the secure double garage. If he had been a little more cautious then, perhaps Williams, who was inexperienced with firearms, wouldn't have been able to shoot him at point-blank range.

‘Mate, I've just watched
Reservoir Dogs too many times.'

 

TO be a top gangster you need to be ruthless, dangerous and cunning — but most of all you need to be born with a survivor's instinct.

Dino Dibra found out the hard way that the first three without the fourth was a fatal combination.

Certainly Dibra was ruthless and dangerous. Take the case of when he and three of his gang kidnapped a man — punching, kicking and pistol-whipping him before throwing him into a car boot.

According to police reports, the team grabbed the man in the Melbourne western suburb of Ardeer, on 2 August 1999.

Dibra and his soldiers were seemingly unworried that successful abductions were usually carried out under cover of darkness. They chose to grab their man in broad daylight.

Despite his injuries, the kidnap victim wasn't cooperative. As they drove off he popped the boot, jumped out and ran. The
gang simply chased him down and, in front of shocked witnesses, dragged him back into the boot. Even
The Sopranos
scriptwriters would think it was a bit rich.

They took him to what they believed was the privacy of Dibra's Taylors Lakes house. Sadly for the kidnappers, they might as well have taken him to the set of
Big Brother
.

Police technicians had been to the house much earlier to install listening devices and a small video camera because Dibra was the main suspect in an earlier shooting outside a popular nightclub.

The kidnap team demanded $20,000 from the victim's brother but, being practical men, were prepared to settle for $5000.

The listening device caught Dibra and his loyal deputy, Rocco Arico, discussing their negotiations.

Arico: ‘Hey, if I'd have known he's only gonna get five grand, I would have put one in when he tried to jump out of the car.'

Dibra: ‘You're an idiot. Listen to you.'

Arico: ‘I would have just went fucking whack. Cop this slug for now. I would have slapped one in and I would have said “Hold on to that for a while, don't give it to anyone and jump in the coffin”.'

The tape was damning but there was another key piece of evidence: the kidnap victim was still in the boot when police arrived.

There can also be no doubt that Dibra was dangerous.

On 15 July 2000, he and Arico were driving in separate cars on their way back from a nightclub when they cut off another motorist in Taylors Lakes. It was 7am.

The motorist spun his car 180 degrees at a roundabout and narrowly avoided a smash. Understandably enraged, he followed the two cars a few streets then, seeing three men, continued to drive on — but two of them, in one car, decided to chase him.

When they stopped, a discussion of road etiquette followed. Arico asked the motorist: ‘So what do you want to do about it?'

He unwisely replied: ‘Well, I wanted to put his head through the windscreen.'

Arico pulled an automatic pistol and fired six shots — five hit the driver — before the man could even unbuckle his seatbelt. He was struck on his forearms, abdomen, right elbow and shoulder but, against the odds, he survived.

Police arrested Arico in the company of Carl Williams two days later at Melbourne Airport as he was about to board a flight to Perth. He was alleged to have $100,000 of cocaine in his pocket at the time. He later claimed police planted the drugs.

He had a business class ticket and although he had no luggage he told police he was heading west for a three-week holiday.

Later the road rage victim and his family were offered hush money to say he had incorrectly identified Arico.

But the victim stuck to his testimony. The Arico family owned a pizza shop in the area and the victim recalled seeing young Rocco working there on the rare occasions when he was cutting pizzas rather than drugs.

Dibra would not have to worry about the subtleties of the legal system because he would be dead before the trial.

Dibra was well known at nightclubs and not because he liked to dance. He was a drug dealer who moved pills and powders, but he wanted more than money. He wanted respect and a reputation in the underworld.

Before he became well-known in the drug field, Dibra ran a lucrative stolen car racket and became an expert at car ‘re-birthing', buying damaged cars and ‘repairing' them by stealing identical models and transferring identification details.

But if he needed wheels in a hurry, he would intimidate night clubbers into handing over their keys and then simply drive off in
their car. Dino, full of steroids and bad manners, was not a man to reason with.

Dibra seemed to think he was above the law from a young age. As a teenager he would ride his unregistered motorcycle past police patrols, trying to goad them into a high-speed pursuit.

When he was jailed in 1996 for 18 months, and had his licence cancelled for five years in 1996, the presiding magistrate commented Dibra had ‘one of the worst driving records I have seen'.

When his dog was impounded for biting a woman, Dibra organised an escape plot to get the dog out. When a policeman came to the door as a result of a complaint that the dog was dangerous Dibra told him to ‘fuck off'.

Sometimes he did his own dirty work, but as he rose up the criminal pyramid he found others eager to please.

He stood by and watched as some of his team shot two bouncers outside the Dome nightclub in 1998.

He was also an associate of ‘Mad Charlie' Hegyalji, who was shot dead outside his Caulfield South home on 23 November 1998.

Police had Dibra on the top of a very short list of suspects for Mad Charlie's murder. They found that hours before the death Mad Charlie contacted Dibra from a hotel pay phone. Dibra refused to tell police the content of their conversation, but it was unlikely to have been about stamp collecting.

He was also an associate of Mark Moran and several other gangsters who were murdered during the gangland war.

Dibra was living his fantasy. On the walls of his house were framed posters from Hollywood gangster films —
Pulp Fiction
,
Scarface
and
Goodfellas
.

In August 2000, he told a
Herald Sun
reporter outside the Melbourne Magistrates Court during one of the many days he had to attend court: ‘Mate, I've just watched
Reservoir Dogs
too many times.'

He probably thought the title of Quentin Tarantino's ultra-violent signature film referred to the northern Melbourne suburb of Reservoir, near Preston, and that it involved pit bull terriers and police informers.

He would have been better off studying the classics. Then he might have learned the wisdom of the saying that ‘he who lives by the sword dies by the sword'. For, just as the young gunman filled with steroids was getting the gangster reputation he craved, he got himself shot.

On Saturday 14 October 2000, Dibra, then 25, was shot dead outside a house in Krambruk Street, Sunshine.

And as would happen so often in the underworld war it was those close to the victim who would set up the killing. The western suburbs crew had been tight and a key member was Andrew ‘Benji' Veniamin.

In Hollywood gangster style, Dibra was shot with two guns. The trigger men were fellow drug dealers, Paul Kallipolitis and Veniamin.

They would both later see the other end of an assassin's gun. But there was a third man present when Dino became DOA. He was another so-called friend and he is very much alive.

Detective Inspector Andrew Allen, of the Purana taskforce, said much later: ‘The homicide investigators have established that three people are involved in this execution murder and someone out there holds the key to solving this violent crime.'

A $100,000 reward has been offered in connection with the murder. Dibra may have lived like a millionaire but court documents listed his only asset as a half share in a block of land. His estate was valued at $60,000.

Which made it official … Dino Dibra was worth more dead than alive.

In police circles no name
is more detested than that of
Victor Peirce. Many openly
rejoiced when he was
finally shot.