The Gangland War (3 page)

The Runner and his new partner, ‘The Driver', inspected the football oval and planned an ambush. On 14 June 2003, armed and ready, they watched the football clinic but did not see Jason. They agreed to try again the next week.

Williams had another plan. He wanted not only to kill Moran, but to make a statement no-one could mistake. He told The Runner he wanted Jason ambushed on 15 June, the anniversary of Mark's murder, at Mark's grave at Fawkner Cemetery.

It was too late to do the necessary homework and on the assigned day it took the hit team more than an hour to find the grave. By then the window of opportunity had shut. When they arrived, they found a card signed by Jason. They had missed their mark, but only just. As they left, they saw a car fly through a red light. It was probably Moran.

During the following week, the team repeatedly went to the Cross Keys ground to fine tune their planned hit. The Runner would be dropped at the hotel car park where Moran would be parked; he would run up, shoot Moran in the head then run over a footbridge to the getaway van.

At the precise moment of the hit, Williams was committed to spilling blood but in an environment far more sterile than the grubby murder scene. He had organised a blood-test for that morning, giving him an alibi.

On the Saturday morning they collected guns stashed at a
safe house, and fitted stolen number plates on the white van to be used in the getaway.

Williams' lieutenant, a man who could source chemicals for amphetamines and who cannot be named, then advised The Runner to, ‘Get Jason good and get him in the head'.

The Lieutenant later disputed this when he became a police witness. He claimed he told The Driver to do the killing away from the kids at Auskick — ‘Hey, I'm no monster.'

As they sat near the park, The Runner spotted a man he thought was Moran. Williams and The Lieutenant drove past and nodded to confirm the target's identity, then headed off to set up their alibi at the medical clinic.

As the football clinic ended, the hit team watched Moran walk to a blue van. Williams' men drove to the rear of the car park for The Runner to get out before the driver headed around the block to wait for him.

The Runner put on a balaclava. He had a shotgun and two revolvers. He ran to the driver's side of the blue van, aimed the shotgun at Moran and fired through the glass.

He dropped the shotgun and fired at least three shots with a revolver, then ran off.

The man sitting with Jason was Pasquale Barbaro, a smalltime crook who often worked for Moran. The Runner later said he didn't see Barbaro, let alone intend to kill him.

Williams received news of the hit with the message that ‘the horse…had been scratched'.

Later, Williams and The Lieutenant congratulated The Runner on a ‘job well done' and gave him $2500 cash. At first he was promised $100,000, and then a unit in Frankston as payment, but neither happened. The killer was short-changed and it would prove a short-sighted decision. But if it worried the hired gunman it didn't show — hours after killing two men and scrubbing
off gunshot residue, he attended a birthday party at a North Melbourne restaurant.

Murder, it would seem, can sharpen the appetite.

Another person was clearly pleased with the news of Moran's death. Roberta Williams was picked up on a bug shortly after the murders saying, ‘I'll be partying tonight.'

EVEN though Williams was the obvious suspect, his blood-test alibi was standing up. The shotgun found at the scene had not been traced and those around the Williams camp said nothing.

There had been eleven underworld murders since 2000 and all remained unsolved. Police initially treated each crime individually, despite it being obvious that some (but not all) of the murders were connected.

Senior homicide investigator, Phil Swindells, was frustrated by the lack of results and began lobbying for a taskforce. He reported that Andrew Veniamin was suspected of three murders and a taskforce was necessary to target his group. Senior police finally acted and the Rimer task group (later renamed Purana) was established in May 2003, with Detective Senior Sergeant Swindells in charge.

Many believed it was doomed to fail. ‘We had no intelligence and we didn't know anything about many of the major players,' Swindells would recall. Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland would later admit that police ‘dropped the ball'.

Swindells knew there would be no early arrests and there might be more murders. He also knew police had to go back to the start and build up dossiers on all the players. Only then would they be able to try to isolate the weak links.

Politicians, self-proclaimed media experts and cynical old detectives thought Purana would self-destruct. A lack of success would result in bitter infighting and no results. The underworld code of silence would never be broken, they said.

To keep up morale during the years of investigation, the taskforce called on Essendon coach and long-time AFL survivor Kevin Sheedy to motivate Purana investigators. Believe in yourselves and your team mates and don't worry about the scoreboard, he said. Do the planning and the results will come.

In October 2003 the taskforce was enlarged to 53 staff, including nine investigative groups, with Detective Inspector Andrew Allen in charge.

From the start no-one really doubted that Williams was behind the killing, but there was no hard evidence. Several names were nominated as the shooter, including The Runner, but names without facts were little use.

The initial homicide squad team was convinced The Runner was the gunman and had identified others who would later be shown to be part of Williams' hit squad.

The initial work of the homicide squad cannot be underestimated. But the better-resourced Purana team was able to make vital breakthroughs — eventually.

It was months before the first strong lead emerged from the double murder. Near the Cross Keys Hotel in Moreland Road is a public telephone and detectives eventually checked the calls made from there around the time of the murder.

On a long list, a series of numbers stood out. On Friday 20 June, the day before the double murder, someone rang Williams' mobile phone from the telephone box. Roberta Williams' mobile had also been called, and then The Runner's. It was clear to police that one of the hit team was checking out the layout for the ambush planned for the following day.

But the next call on the list was not a known suspect. When police tracked down the man who received the call he told them he had been rung that day by a mate. That friend was The Driver. It did not take long to find out that The Driver was a thief, drug dealer and close friend of Williams. He sold speed and had a
lucrative sideline in stolen Viagra. He was still selling the remains of 10,175 sample packs lifted from a Cheltenham warehouse in April 2000.

Detectives went to The Driver's house. Sitting in the driveway was a white van, the same type as one captured on closed-circuit video depositing a masked gunman in the car park just before Moran and Barbaro were killed.

It was a breakthrough — but not
the
breakthrough. It would take police fourteen months before they could lay charges. Meanwhile, the murders kept happening.

PURANA detectives knew the Williams team would eventually make a mistake, but wondered how many would die before they found the weak link.

In October 2003 police learned that The Driver, Williams' trusted associate, had sourced an abandoned sedan rebuilt by a backyard mechanic — a perfect getaway vehicle.

Police placed a listening device in the car and waited. But The Driver, having collected the car and driven it a short distance, noticed the brake light was on. He checked it and found the bug, which he ripped out.

He immediately told The Runner, ‘we're hot' and wanted to cancel the job. But The Runner had lost his sense of risk and insisted they push on, a decision he later admitted was ‘sheer stupidity' caused by the pressure on him to get the job done.

That night they met Williams separately in Flemington for new instructions but Williams' growing sense of invincibility lulled him into making a massive misjudgement. The one-time suburban drug dealer with gangster boss dreams ordered his hit team to carry on regardless.

Inexplicably, The Driver decided to use his own car (a silver Holden Vectra sedan once owned by Williams) to drive to the
scene. But it, too, was bugged with recording and tracking devices.

Police knew that The Runner and The Driver planned a major crime in a square kilometre block of South Yarra but did not know what it would be.

For a week, the pair repeatedly drove around the same streets. Police suspected they were planning an armed robbery and guessed potential targets could be the TAB at the Bush Inn Hotel or two luxury car dealerships.

A week later, on Saturday 25 October, the Purana chief, Detective Inspector Andrew Allen, was catching up on paperwork when he got the call from police monitoring the car.

The suspects had been talking about guns, getaways and something ‘going down'. But the tracker failed (they drop out in the same manner as mobile phones) so police could not identify the car's location. Detectives could only sit back and listen, as they still did not know the men's intended target. They could hear muffled gunshots and the suspects driving off. It wasn't until police received calls that a man was lying in Joy Street, South Yarra, that they knew what had happened. Michael Ronald Marshall, 38, drug dealer and nightclub hotdog salesman, was dead.

Marshall had just got out of his four-wheel drive, his five-year-old son still in the vehicle. The Runner later told police that he shot the drug dealer four times in the street before escaping.

Later The Runner rang Williams to give him the usual crudely coded message: the job was done.

Williams understood — but so did the listening police. Within hours, The Runner and The Driver were arrested. The walls were starting to close in on ‘The Premier'.

Police knew who had killed Marshall and who ordered the hit, but it would be more than two years before they learned why.

THREE days before Christmas 2003, Carl Williams and Andrew Veniamin met Mick Gatto at the Crown Casino to have what were supposed to be peace talks. It was only days after Gatto's close friend, Graham Kinniburgh, had been gunned down outside his Kew home.

Kinniburgh was an old-time gangster who had made his name as Australia's best safebreaker. For three decades he had been connected with some of Australia's biggest crimes. He was known to be the mastermind behind the magnetic drill gang, which had pulled some huge jobs. Kinniburgh had put his children through private school and was semi-retired, but he was a friend of Jason Moran's father, Lewis, and therefore Williams saw him as an enemy. In what would prove to be Kinniburgh's final few months he had become downright morose. A shrewd punter and expert numbers man, he knew the odds were that his would come up. He told a friend, ‘My card has been marked' and began to carry a gun. He was shot dead on 13 December 2003, carrying groceries from his car to his house.

Next day, Williams told one of the authors he was not involved.

NINE days after Kinniburgh's murder three edgy men met at Crown Casino. They were Carl Williams, Andrew Veniamin and Mick Gatto. It was an open secret that Gatto was on Williams' death list and this was a last chance to stop the killings.

‘It's not my war,' Gatto warned the two upstarts from the western suburbs. His words, later deciphered by a lip reader from security footage, were carefully chosen but the meaning was clear: if anything happened to Gatto or his crew, retribution would be swift. ‘I believe you, you believe me, now we're even. That's a warning,' the big man said.

For perhaps the first time Williams wavered. Later, he went to see The Lieutenant for a second opinion. Should he trust Gatto and declare a truce?

The Lieutenant advised him to ask Veniamin because he knew Gatto better. Veniamin had no doubts. ‘Kill him,' he said, thereby effectively passing his own death sentence.

Gatto would shoot Veniamin dead in a Carlton restaurant just three months later, on 23 March 2004, and subsequently be acquitted on grounds of self-defence.

And eight days after Veniamin died, Williams hit back.

LEWIS Moran was shattered by the death of his stepson, Mark, and his natural son, Jason. But it was the death of his best friend, Kinniburgh, that destroyed his will to live.

Lewis, a former skilled pickpocket, tried carrying a gun after Mark and Jason were murdered, but arthritis meant he couldn't handle it properly. Moran had little formal education but, as an experienced SP bookmaker, he could calculate odds in a flash. After Kinniburgh was killed he knew his own survival was a long shot.

Williams denied the existence of a death list and told the author: ‘I've only met Lewis once. I haven't got a problem with Lewis. If he thinks he has a problem with me I can say he can sleep peacefully.' Not only was Williams a murderer but he was also, it would seem, a terrible fibber.

Police knew Moran was a sitting duck and they successfully applied to have a court-ordered bail curfew altered so his movements would not be easily anticipated by would-be hit men.

Detective Senior Sergeant Swindells gave evidence at the bail hearing in the forlorn hope he could save Moran's life.

He said Moran's ‘vulnerability relates to a perception by the
taskforce that if the curfew remains between 8pm and 8am … it is possible for any person to be lying in wait for Mr Moran to return to his home address'.

But Lewis no longer cared. He knew that if he stuck to a routine he was more vulnerable but he continued to drink at the Brunswick Club — where he was shot dead by two contract killers on 31 March 2004. The killers were allegedly paid $140,000 cash. They were supposed to be paid $150,000 but were short-changed.

As a friend said, ‘Lewis died because he loved cheap beer.'

POLICE knew they needed a circuit breaker and that the best way to do it would be to jail Williams. It was the self-styled ‘Premier' himself, always so cautious about phones, who handed them the damning evidence. He told his wife in one call that if Purana Detective Sergeant Stuart Bateson raided their house she should ‘grab the gun from under the mattress and shoot them in the head'.