The Gangland War (44 page)

‘I have not asked for the charges to be dropped. I want them dealt with in open court.'

The former lawyer said that after he was exonerated in court, he would call for a judicial inquiry into the use of informers rewarded for giving prosecution evidence.

The conversation with the author was terminated with handshakes, compliments and expressions of mutual respect. Condello was pushed for time as he wished to talk further with his lawyers.

He agreed to conduct a full and frank interview two days later. But when contacted as agreed, he said his lawyers had persuaded him that this was not a good idea, but that as soon as his trial was over he would sit down for a long chat.

Through circumstances beyond his control, he was not able to make it.

Carl Williams had wanted Condello dead and was prepared to pay up to $140,000 for the contract. But when Mario was murdered, Williams was yesterday's man — without the pull, money or connections to organise another hit.

But he was not the only man in town who liked to pay cash for killings. On 14 March 2007, Purana detectives failed in a court bid to take Tony Mokbel's brother, Mlad, from jail to interview him over Condello's murder.

They claimed he told a friend he should ‘make himself scarce,' because Condello was about to be shot. Forty-five minutes later Mario was gunned down.

Lucky guess?

MARIO Condello should have known better. His partner in crime — one tough enough to give evidence against him later, and survive — was busy cutting premium Lebanese hashish into something less pure and more profitable at an empty Carlton factory when Condello arrived with a stranger.

This was no ordinary stranger. He was a federal politician, his face known even to a dope-running, gun-toting knuckleman,
schooled on the street and more wary than Condello, then a young bent lawyer.

‘Mario lifted the roller door and there was the senator sitting in the car! I said, “What the fuck did you bring him for?”' The answer — Condello was showing off. A consummate middle man, he wanted to introduce the tough guy to the politician, aiming to impress both and make himself look good. It wasn't such a smart move.

The tough guy was furious that Condello would risk exposing their racket to someone who could attract so much trouble. He soon found out why Condello was so cocky. The politician, then comparatively young, was ‘a smoker'. Condello supplied him with the best ‘buddha sticks' — potent ‘heads' picked from the middle of every ‘brick' of 100 sticks they smuggled through the docks then steamed apart to sell.

That was Condello. Vain and manipulative, he had a knack for finding the politician, policeman or parking officer, perhaps even university lecturer, who could be charmed — and compromised. Around him was the hint of blackmail and violence, the implied threat to health or reputation. In the early years, says the associate, he was also ‘a dickhead who made illogical decisions under pressure.' The politician is a long way from Carlton now, but he must have felt a guilty pang of relief when news filtered through to him that his old university dope contact had done his last deal. While Condello was alive, there was always the chance he would try to call in favours if he was desperate enough. In fact, anyone who knew Condello would imagine he might have already tried, at some point.

Times changed but Mario Condello was trapped in the gangster life he'd deliberately chosen ahead of a legitimate profession, even if he did have rosary beads in his pocket when the end came. Right up until a gunman shot him dead in early 2006, he battled
the dangerous delusion that he was the smartest guy in the room. He was a fan of drama — from Shakespeare to
The Sopranos
— but until it was too late he seemed to miss the point: that a fatal character flaw is exactly that. It can kill you.

Condello could plead neither ignorance nor circumstances. He was blessed with qualities that should have made his family the classic migrant success story. He was intelligent, good-looking, charming and well-educated — in fact, he had exploited every opportunity that his parents and many others wanted for their children when they came to Australia.

His father, Guerino, a painter and decorator from a Calabrian hill town called Anoia, was captured in Libya early in World War 2 and sent to a farm near Warrnambool to work. Like many prisoners of war, he flourished in Australia, and after the war he went home, married and returned.

Mario was born in April 1952 and his sister Frances soon after. Their mother Marina then took the children to Italy, where Enzo was born. By the time they returned five years later to live in the family house in North Fitzroy, the children spoke fluent Italian. (Mario would keep up the Calabrian connection all his life, as police would discover in the 1980s, when he tried to pull off a huge international fraud by having over-insured art prints torched in a Naples bond store.) The brothers went to the local state school and then Fitzroy High. A retired teacher recalls them as handsome children, above average in all ways.

Mario got into law at the University of Melbourne. The class of 1971 included at least one future judge and several who became prominent barristers. There is no reason why young Condello could not have become a legitimate figure in law, business or politics. No reason, that is, except the dark angels of his nature.

Some are condemned from birth to a cycle of deprivation, abuse and crime, but he wasn't. His crooked life and its violent end came because he chose to lie, cheat, steal and intimidate to
make fast money. He organised marijuana crops, laundered drug money for less-sophisticated criminals, dealt heroin and would order violence — by thugs he considered as expendable as his victims — against anyone who got in his way. He preyed on vulnerable old Italians who trusted him, secretly mortgaging their homes to fund his loan shark racket, drug buys and an increasingly opulent lifestyle.

Even if — and there is no proof of this — Condello's father had unavoidable hometown links with the ‘Honoured Society' that transplanted Italian organised crime into Australia, there was no reason why the Australian-raised son could not leave old hill-bandit ways behind, the way many did. He could have stayed clean and ended up in Mahogany Row; instead he wanted to cut a dash and splash cash in the Mahogany Room.

His brother Enzo became a writer, artist and teacher. Enzo's play
Shakespeare and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets
was staged in Melbourne the year before Mario's murder and was on the VCE drama list. Enzo Condello told a reporter then that Mario ‘loves drama', especially
Julius Caesar, Macbeth
and Dante. It showed. A fellow law student, now a Queen's Counsel, recalls the young Condello as a charismatic figure who always wore a long coat, drank expensive wine and schmoozed relentlessly.

‘If Mario visited your house, he would bring your mother flowers,' he recalls. ‘But even at uni, he had acolytes — people who followed him around. Later on, the Calabrian attitude obviously sunk deeply into his psyche. When he went to jail (a decade later) I realised Mario lived another life I didn't understand. But I said a prayer for him today.' When the budding QC went to Condello's 21st birthday party at the family Fitzroy home, he was struck by the time and culture warp.

‘It was like a scene from
The Godfather
,' he says. Another QC who knew Condello said he delighted in quoting sinister lines from the mafia film, like ‘Leave the gun — bring the cannoli' and
‘Pauly — you won't see him no more'. He would sweep into rooms in his camel hair coat, acting the mafia don.

For someone who couldn't fight or shoot and didn't like blood, especially his own, he had some bad habits. ‘Mario had a lot of front if he met you, but he was windy (frightened),' says a policeman who investigated him in 1982. Big but not tough, he compensated by being ruthless and often reckless, hiring ‘heavies' prone to gratuitous violence. His criminality was exposed when police linked him to a marijuana crop on a farm near Ararat. A secret taskforce, Operation Zulu, uncovered a web of arsons, bashings, frauds, standover and loansharking, for which he served six years jail.

At his funeral, Condello's daughter Vanessa said her ‘scary' father had prayed for forgiveness for actions that had hurt their family. Perhaps he should have prayed for other families who had suffered to keep his own in ostentatious luxury.

Such as the family of Richard Noel Jones. Jones, 36 and a father of three, was asleep with his wife in their Box Hill house in 1982 when two gunmen burst into their bedroom and shot him in the stomach with a shotgun. He would have died then, but was saved because feathers from their doona plugged the huge wound and slowed the bleeding. His wife was so traumatised she developed rheumatoid arthritis and could hardly walk. It destroyed their lives.

Jones' ‘crime'? He had legally registered a lapsed business name, annoying the business owner, who ran a printing supplies firm. Instead of negotiating, the businessman called Condello, the wannabe standover man, who stupidly sent the armed thugs, who stupidly shot the man instead of getting the desired result by frightening him. A literature-loving, rosary-carrying lawyer should have known better. Condello beat the rap for the shooting, but wasn't so lucky on several other charges. In court, he hissed ‘you're dead!' in Italian to an Italian detective.

In prison, he met more violent crooks. After one was released, detectives raided his house and found a high-powered rifle, documents with the surnames of two detectives who had investigated Condello, and a coded hit list. The policemen's families were put into protection.

Since Condello's death, more secrets have been revealed. One is about a current judge who, as a prosecutor in the 1980s, needed police protection after Condello's ‘soldiers' visited his house at night to intimidate him. And then there was the old businessman, a returned soldier, who in the mid-1990s borrowed $600,000 from Condello to shore up his failing business.

He repaid most of the loan and put his Bulleen house on the market to meet the demand for $200,000 interest, on threat of death. But he was so terrified that he committed suicide with a samurai sword.

When news of Condello's shooting broke, a retired detective's wife, who had spent almost a year living in fear of Condello's threats against her family, said: ‘It's about time.'

AS is usually the case, the murder victim was remembered as a kind family man with a generous spirit and a passion for life. There were 600 at the church to say goodbye to Condello. Many were sincere mourners and devastated family members, but some there were drawn to what has become a peculiarly Melbourne event — a gangland funeral. Others were there to show solidarity, not with the dead but with the living — fellow Carlton Crew member, Mick Gatto, who delivered the eulogy.

The message to enemies real and imagined was that if you pick off those close to Mick in the hope he would be left exposed, then think again. There will always be others prepared to step up.

In front of the mourners in the packed church, Gatto spoke with eloquent compassion and composure. It was no surprise.
With the number of associates and allies he had lost violently in recent gangland violence, he has had plenty of practice.

‘To know this noble gentleman was to love him. I say goodbye to Mario Condello, a man among men who I'll miss more than words can say.'

But on the other side of the country, there is a man with a new name and a new life who has different memories of the slain underworld figure.

It was in the early 1980s and Condello's right-hand man already suspected he was being set up when he decided to check the case that he was about to deliver in exchange for 200 kilograms of top-grade cannabis.

The case was supposed to contain $150,000. The men who were to make the deal were from a serious Italian crime family in South Australia — they were known to turn nasty if they were ripped off. But when ‘Reggie' checked, he found that more than half was counterfeit and some of the notes were so bad ‘they glowed in the dark'.

‘I would have ended up with my brains all over the ceiling,' he recalled, just days after Condello was killed.

Instead, Reggie called Condello to a house in Fawkner and several times gave the practising lawyer the chance to pull out of the set-up. ‘All he kept asking was when was the deal going down.

‘I gave him three chances. That was enough.' Although Reggie was smaller, he was tougher, and he beat Condello so badly the young gangster ended up in hospital. It was the end of their business dealings.

Condello was then a young lawyer with an office in Carlton. But he was open to all offers, including trafficking drugs, organising frauds, franchising arsons and laundering money. ‘He was just a very greedy man,' Reggie says.

Condello retaliated over the beating by bringing in a gang of five heavies and offering a bounty to find Reggie. Before they got to Reggie, the heavies found his brother. They tortured him so badly that more than 20 years later he has still not recovered.

One of the men present recalls that each gang member was wearing balaclavas during the operation. Then Condello arrived wearing a leather face mask favoured by bad-boy wrestlers and S&M aficionados. ‘He got it at a sex shop for sure. He was wearing gloves with the fingers cut out. It was all we could do not to burst out laughing.'

According to the insider, Condello stalked around the room, punching one fist into the opposite palm and urging his team on, but leaving the actual brutality to the experts.

When the men had finished, Condello kept suggesting the victim should be taken to a friend's place, ‘up north'. He was referring to a pet food factory where criminals had previously disposed of victims through the industrial meat mincer.

The rule was the gang could slip in at night as long as they were gone before 6am, when the first of the morning shift arrived to feed more than 600 kangaroo carcasses into the mincer.