The Gangland War (30 page)

The Runner knew Marshall's movements. He knew he had a shop in Hoddle Street, picked up his rolls on Friday and Saturday afternoons and had a hot dog stand outside Motel nightclub.

He knew because Carl Williams told him. And he knew the information was right because it came from Tony Mokbel who, it is alleged, ordered the hit.

But police would not learn who was to die until it was too late.

According to The Runner, ‘(The Driver) mentioned to me that he had found what he thought was a tracker in the car. I dismissed the thought because my mind was focussed on doing the job…I decided to keep going without the clean car. In hindsight, it was sheer stupidity that I didn't take notice of the locating of a tracking device, but my mind was elsewhere and I was feeling the pressure of the job and that we had already wasted enough time'.

That night Williams backed The Runner and told them to push on.

At the last minute, The Driver decided to use his own silver Vectra, once owned by Williams. That car was already bugged by Purana.

So while police knew a crime was about to happen, they did not know
what
it was. All they could do was wait.

Four months before this surveillance exercise, on 21 June 2003, the same hit team had shot dead Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.

On the day of the murders, detectives were tipped off that one of the men subsequently monitored in South Yarra was the likely gunman. Any chance of police having the advantage of surprise was lost when a television reporter rang the Moran family and nominated the suspect.

Now there would be a breakthrough — but it would come at a price.

The first job of police is to deter rather than apprehend. If detectives know a crime is to be committed, they have a duty to try to prevent it. But intercepting a major criminal and his sidekick because they appear to be driving suspiciously looks more like harassment than deterrence.

Police had not enough evidence to lay charges, and pulling the suspects over would only alert them to the electronic surveillance. There was no real choice but to let them run.

The then head of the Purana Taskforce, Detective Inspector Andrew Allen, was at work on the evening of Saturday 25 October, when he got the call from police monitoring the listening post. The suspects were on the move, but their intent was still unclear.

Then police started to get calls from the public. There had been a shooting in South Yarra. At gangland taskforce headquarters, investigators had a database of victims, suspects, potential targets and associates. They had established a core of around 100 and a second ring of about the same number. The man who was killed was not on the police list of possible targets — but he was on someone's list.

In underworld terms, Michael Ronald Marshall, 38, was a nobody with a minor criminal record — a former kickboxer turned self-employed hot dog vendor, selling mainly around nightclubs.

The fast-food business can be lucrative, but Marshall appeared to be flying. He lived in a big, double-storey house on the corner of Williams Road and Joy Street in South Yarra. He and his de facto wife had bought it from a Melbourne surgeon in December 1991, paying off their ANZ mortgage in just three years.

A three-metre-high brick fence and an electronic security camera at the gate on Williams Road protected the house. But it wasn't enough.

The men who had come for Marshall had done their homework. The getaway car was parked in the next road, Howitt Street, facing Williams Road.

Marshall had been to a local bakery with his five-year-old son to buy rolls for his busiest night, Saturday.

Joy Street is a narrow road filled with blocks of flats and townhouses. Marshall parked his four-wheel-drive halfway down the short street, behind his hot dog van.

Although his house had a double garage, he preferred to park in the street. His second security camera, looking down on Joy Street, was not working.

As Marshall stepped from the car, at about 6.30pm, and before he could open the back door to help his son from his harness, The Runner jogged up and shot him at least four times in the head.

But it was no clinical hit.

Just as in the Moran-Barbaro case, The Runner had no qualms about shooting a man in front of his children. And, as in the earlier case, the gunman had his escape route planned.

The killer ran down a partially hidden 50-metre path through a block of flats to Howitt Street. The Driver had the motor going
and took off in the classic getaway style, making sure there was no need to cross traffic flows, turning left into Williams Road and left again into the next main street.

‘I was jogging along the footpath towards Marshall's driver's side door as he hadn't got out yet. Just before I got to his car I pulled the balaclava down over my face. I was about three metres away from the driver's door, standing in the middle of the road when Marshall started to get out of the car.

‘I had the gun in my right hand and Marshall was out of the car and noticed me. We looked at each other briefly and I started to raise the gun as he went to lunge at me. As he lunged, I fired a shot but I am unsure if this hit him. As the gun fired, the kickback, along with the combination of me taking a step backwards from Marshall's lunge, caused me to fall over. I also think the ground may have been a bit wet. I quickly got up again and was face to face with Marshall. He was a large person, over six feet tall and I was aware he was a former kickboxer.

‘I was concerned that he might overpower me, so I just began firing shots at him at close range to the head area. I am not sure how many shots I fired; I think it may have been three or four. Marshall started to fall to the ground and I think I fired one more shot into his head as he was going down towards my feet. At no stage during the altercation did I see or realise that Marshall's son was still with him.' The young boy got out of the car and ran home to tell his mother his father had been shot. But, he later told police; he first looked right, then left and right again to make sure there was no traffic — exactly as his parents had taught him.

Later The Runner rang Williams to tell him, again, ‘That horse has just been scratched'. It was the same code he'd used when he shot Jason Moran.

Again they were stupid. The Driver had found a police listening device in his house but did not want to alert police he had
discovered it — working on the basis that he would avoid making incriminating statements within its range.

Unfortunately for that theory, the ‘scratched' comment was made around 5pm — after the last race of the day. Williams just grunted when told — but it was enough.

Within hours, police arrested the pair near the Elsternwick Hotel. They were in a white Toyota Hiace van. Marshall was still alive in the Alfred Hospital but died about three hours later.

Williams was also grabbed and finally taken off the streets. It was the beginning of the end for him — but not the end of the killings.

MICHAEL Marshall had an interesting circle of friends and business associates. He trained at the same gym as Willie Thompson, another kickboxer connected to the nightclub business.

Thompson sold lollipops for vending machines at nightspots — although police suspected he was also involved in selling more lucrative products to clubbers. He had been shot dead in Chadstone three months earlier, on 21 July 2003.

The lives and deaths of Marshall and Thompson were remarkably similar. They were opportunists on the fringes of the nightclub industry — men who appeared to live well beyond their ostensible means and who paid with their lives when they finally alienated more powerful criminals.

Willie Thompson was shot dead as he sat at the wheel of his $81,000 Honda S-2000 sports car in Waverley Road, Chadstone about 9.30pm. He was ambushed by two gunmen who approached him from either side of the car, as he was about to pull out from his parking spot.

Thompson, 39, of Port Melbourne, had just left a martial arts class at the Extreme Jujitsu and Grappling gym when he was gunned down. The killers used their stolen car to block the sports car's possible escape route with a T-Bone manoeuvre.

Police found a bullet lodged in the wall of a bookshop in Waverley Road, two metres from Thompson's car. The killers were lucky not to have shot each other as they fired from opposite sides of the vehicle.

The two gunmen who ambushed Thompson's Honda had waited at a Red Rooster restaurant directly across the road for their target to leave the gym.

The gunmen's stolen Ford sedan was later found burnt out in Port Melbourne — two streets from where underworld figure Victor Peirce was murdered on 1 May 2002.

It was clear the killers knew Thompson's movements and while the job wasn't as ‘clean' as some, it still showed the prerequisite planning.

Certainly this is one job where Veniamin had a rock solid alibi. But two other men close to Carl Williams did not. So was Carl behind the killing? Certainly some close to him believed he ordered the hit.

Thompson was another victim of the underworld war without a big reputation, although he had big enemies.

Drug dealer Nik Radev had firebombed Thompson's car about 18 months earlier. So in hindsight, replacing the destroyed car with a convertible was probably not one of Willie's better moves.

But it was clear Radev didn't kill Willie — because he himself was already dead.

Thompson was a familiar face at some of Melbourne's biggest nightclubs and a well-known bouncer for more than ten years.

Through his nightclub contacts he became involved in the film industry as a bit actor with roles in films partially financed by the owners of a city strip club.

He appeared in
The Nightclubber
, an alternative film shot at the Tunnel Nightclub and the Men's Gallery. It is a motion picture
unlikely to be mentioned in dispatches at Cannes or even Cairns.

But none of these side interests could maintain Thompson's lifestyle.

Colourful Melbourne identity, Mick Gatto, placed a death notice in the
Herald Sun
for Thompson — a sure sign the dead man was connected to the underworld.

Friends said he was a ‘gentleman' and well-liked. But, apparently, not by everyone. Like many who were gunned down in Melbourne's gangland feud, he lived like a drug dealer and ultimately died as one.

According to The Runner in a statement to police still to be tested in court, the hit on Marshall was mistakenly ordered by Tony Mokbel as a payback for the murder of Willie Thompson.

According to The Runner, Mokbel offered a massive bounty for Marshall's murder because he blamed the hot dog vendor for killing Thompson.

‘Tony confirmed that he believed Michael Marshall was responsible for Willie's death and he wanted him dead. Tony offered Carl and I $300,000 to kill Marshall. When I shook hands with Tony he passed a piece of paper to me, which had the details of Marshall's address.'

‘I was surprised, because I knew that Carl was behind Thompson's murder but it appeared that Tony had no idea of that.'

The Runner, who later pleaded guilty to the hit, told police he was paid $50,000 in advance and had three meetings with Mokbel where the murder was discussed. The Driver pleaded guilty and a Supreme Court jury found Carl as guilty as sin.

ANOTHER man who used his nightclub connections as a front for his drug activities was George Germanos.

George was a crowd controller with a reputation for losing self-control. While the venues varied, the story was always the same. The victims of his wrath were invariably smaller and helplessly intoxicated patrons.

There were complaints, and the former champion power lifter would be quietly moved on, but there were still enough Melbourne nightclubs keen to employ the big man with the bad attitude.

Even though the former national title-holder had retired from competition, had slimmed down and was now aged 41, he remained a menacing sight and continued to involve himself in violent clashes with paying customers.

One of those was on 21 October 2000 when a loud, drunk young man was taken outside a St Kilda nightclub, led around the back and flogged by Germanos.

The reports of the injuries suffered by the victim vary. According to some, the young man was left unconscious and badly hurt. Others say he recovered from the beating with few ill-effects.

But what is known is that the young man was the son of an influential member of the underworld — and the serious criminal was left seriously unhappy.

The man does not have a criminal record involving violence, but some of his friends do. His associates include well-known gangsters and one equally well-known former detective. He also has many friends in the outlaw motorcycle world.

For decades, the father has been successful in criminal endeavours and has influence in a world where anything can be done for a price. Of course, this might have had nothing to do with what happened to Germanos, who was involved in plenty of other things that could prove bad for his health.

For whatever reason, Germanos was in the cross hairs, and in the months following the beating he seemed to sense that time
was running out. But, despite knowing he was a target and taking precautions, he was eventually set up.

And as in many of the Melbourne gangland murders, the victim was so busy trying to outflank his enemies he didn't see that a so-called friend would betray him.

After the beating, a man well-known to police became a friend of Germanos.

The friend is a major drug dealer and much older than the former power lifter. Despite the difference in ages and backgrounds, the two became inseparable and spoke almost daily.

The older man was later interviewed by police and has told them that while he would love to help, he has no idea why his new best friend was murdered.

Police remain unconvinced.

Germanos was more than a power-lifter on the wrong side of 40. He was ambitious, ruthless and determined to make money. But his best efforts to legitimately acquire wealth had routinely ended in tears — for his creditors.