Bulletin - Mobsters Inc: How Melbourne became No.1 with a bullet (original) (raw)
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Carl Williams and his wife Roberta are standing waiting, as arranged, by the condiments counter at the McDonald’s restaurant. In cop-speak, Williams is regarded as a man of great interest in the investigation into Melbourne’s underworld war, a conflict that has claimed 22 lives in just five years. It’s perhaps only police surveillance that’s keeping him alive now.

A little murder has always been a part of doing business in the southern capital but even by Melbourne standards this killing is right out of hand. The police, who usually watch the wiseguys kill each other with faint amusement, are now taking a special interest in finding the shooters. There’s talk of crime commissions and extra budgets for special police Taskforce Purana, set up to investigate. Melbourne may well be the world’s most liveable capital, but right now the city’s criminal class would certainly disagree.

The atmosphere in the underworld is tense as the villains wait for the next killing. Two of the city’s most feared crime factions have been effectively broken. The Moran clan, a family of waterside workers steeped in crime for three generations, has buried its second son in three years. The gang of drug manufacturers and murderers who ran with Nik “The Russian” Radev is all but wiped out.

It’s easy to say this is all about control of the $5bn amphetamine and party drugs market, but that undersells the roles of revenge and pre-emption. There’s talk of a new faction asserting itself and settling old scores.

When I meet Carl Williams, far from the gangster of press repute, he’s dressed as if for a day in Bay 13 at the MCG: faded long denim shorts, a white sports top and lairy high-top runners. At 33, he has a fleshy, baby face, a ready smile and big brown eyes that fix you in a disarmingly innocent sort of way.

Roberta, clutching a big handbag, looks every inch the suburban mum and housewife, were it not for the glittering diamonds on her fingers. (Obviously, the maternal sleepwear business she had set up was very lucrative indeed.)

Before my images of gangland glamour completely fade, I hustle them across the road to one of Melbourne’s many dark and private cafes. On the Gold Coast, good crims will always take you off the strip to the beach to do business beyond the electronic eyes and ears of the police. In Melbourne, it’s all done in cafes and restaurants, the theory being that if things go awry, you’re less likely to be knocked off in public. But after four months of cafe crawling, trying to meet the leading lights of the Melbourne underworld, I begin to see why they murder each other. If the boredom of idle plotting in cafes all day doesn’t send you stir crazy, the caffeine surely will.

On this Sunday morning, Roberta and Carl Williams want to talk PR. They say they want to strike back against police for what they claim have been attempts to set up Carl. “Who do I see if I wanted to write a book? I want people to know what the stress of this has been like,” says Roberta. Her kids are getting a hard time at school and the neighbours have been avoiding her and Carl.

Perhaps worst of all, she says, Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper has inferred that her husband is fat.

Welcome to what passes for the high life in Melbourne’s ganglands 2004.

It had rained all evening that Friday and by midnight, Belmont Avenue, Kew, was slick and glistening under the street lights. For the killers, it was a question of patience as they watched the residents returning from their Christmas parties, winding their way home down the leafy avenue. Occasionally, a passerby would set off the motion sensors at No. 35 and the killing ground would be momentarily bathed in light.

They could wait all night and every night. Until in one dread moment their chance would come. Or another team would take their place. Melbourne’s underworld had come to reclaim its own this night and it didn’t matter who pulled the trigger. This hit, the 22nd in five years, would be known in crime circles as the biggest in Melbourne since standover king Freddy “The Frog” Harrison was gunned down on South Wharf back in February 1958. That day in front of dozens of Harrison’s dockside workmates, the gunman strolled up with a 12-gauge shotgun and with the words, “This is yours, Fred”, blew half his head away. No one saw a thing, not even a man alongside who was splattered with Harrison’s brains.

The killing of Belmont Avenue resident Graham Kinniburgh would raise this civil war to a dangerous new pitch, and the implications of this night are still spreading three months later.

But to the pair sitting in the blue Ford Falcon, this was just a job, a $100,000 payday, if you believe the talk in the underworld.

And like many victims, Graham Kinniburgh knew they were coming. For the first time in years, he was carrying a gun. He managed to get off one shot before he fell in the street outside his home, his pistol and a bag of groceries by his side. It was a grisly reminder there is no such thing as semi-retirement in the underworld. The last week of “The Munster’s” life (the nickname paid tribute to Kinniburgh’s likeness to TV’s Herman Munster) was a series of meetings and negotiations. He was observed having dinner on the previous Tuesday in Italian restaurant La Villa Romana on Carlton’s Lygon Street with up to five of his most trusted friends in the underworld, each one a leader of the main non-Asian crime groups in Melbourne.

More curiously, the day before he died, Kinniburgh was seen having coffee in Lygon Street with a police detective from Carlton CIB. Some of his criminal peers had always been suspicious about Kinniburgh’s ability to avoid jail, despite his involvement in so many crimes. It pointed to a special relationship with senior police, perhaps as an informer. Yet his friends say Kinniburgh was staunch; it would be unthinkable for the Munster to have ratted out his mates.

The Melbourne press had dubbed him “the Mr Big” of the ganglands, an outrageous beat-up according to the friends and family who knew The Munster as a kindly, sentimental bloke. At the funeral at Kew’s Church of the Sacred Heart, an old friend emerged from the crowd of mourners to berate me for the press coverage of his friend’s death. He’d known Kinniburgh through the racing scene in Melbourne and was appalled to see the media had linked the Munster to the most depraved elements of organised crime.

“Tell people who Graham really was,” he said. “He wasn’t a gangster, he didn’t terrorise people, he didn’t stand over people. He was an old-style crook.”

Kinniburgh had lived in the space where the underworld meets the real world. He was a face in crowded city restaurants, a wise counsellor to jockeys and owners at the racetrack, a nodding acquaintance of senior politicians and a purveyor of services to business not usually found in the Yellow Pages.

Though Graham Kinniburgh had grown up a few kilometres away in the slums of working-class Richmond, he felt remarkably at ease in the middle-class suburbia of Kew. He lived most of his life among “the squareheads”, the term criminals give those of us who work for a living, pay taxes and die of natural causes. But his peers could read his life story in that knockabout face with its heavy lantern jaw, the impassive deep-set eyes that darted away from inquiring gazes.

In his youth, Kinniburgh had a quicksilver temper and an uppercut to match. But that was when he was shearing, when it paid to advertise your credentials in the sheds and pubs. As he drifted into ever-more sophisticated crime, the fighting stopped. He learnt to “nut off”, to avert his eyes from police or some knockabout looking for trouble. He learnt that a moment’s indiscretion in a bar could put an entire criminal enterprise at risk, and probably cost you your life. And he kept secrets, even from his closest friends and associates.

As a close associate, Mick Gatto captured the Munster’s essence in a death notice in the Herald Sun: “You were a true Chameleon, you could adapt to any situation, rubbing shoulders with the best of them and being able to talk at any level about any topic. I was so proud to be a part of your life.”

Kinniburgh had become a safe cracker par excellence, reputedly a member of the Magnetic Drill Gang which carried out more than a dozen heists in the 1970s and 1980s including a $5m haul of gold and jewels in Sydney in 1983. He was also regarded as a peripheral player in the infamous Kangaroo Gang, a group of Australian shoplifters who terrorised retailers in Australia, the UK, France, Belgium and Germany for a generation.

Later, some of the Kangaroo Gang veterans reformed into the Grandfather Mob, which reputedly imported an estimated 1bnworthofhashishintoAustraliaintheearly1990s.Policesourcesconfirmedthegangwascaughtbringingthefourthdrugshipment,worthabout1bn worth of hashish into Australia in the early 1990s. Police sources confirmed the gang was caught bringing the fourth drug shipment, worth about 1bnworthofhashishintoAustraliaintheearly1990s.Policesourcesconfirmedthegangwascaughtbringingthefourthdrugshipment,worthabout225m alone, into Australia via Hervey Bay in Queensland, but the villains had already made their fortune. Part of the proceeds from that operation, $4m, sat for years in a Dutch bank. Last year, the wife of one of the ringleaders, the late Jack “The Fibber” Walsh, launched legal action aimed at claiming it but failed and the Australian government may now end up with the loot.

Sources close to the investigation said the deckhands on each run received 1mfortheirtrouble.Kinniburghwaschargedwithconspiracytoimportafterhavingorganisedthetrawlerandoutfittingitwithcommunicationsequipment.ButtheCrown’scasewasweakandthejuryacquitted.Bynowhisfamilywasprogressinginsociety.HisdaughterSuziehadmarriedthesonofaformerVictorianattorney−general,VernonWilcox,QC.SonBrentbecametheprofessionalataprestigiousMelbournegolfclub.Inhislateryears,KinniburghspentmoretimeconsortingwithmembersofMelbourne’selitethanitscriminalfraternity.FormerCrownCasinochiefLloydWilliamssaidKinniburghwas“theperfectgentleman”whenheoccasionallyencounteredhiminthecasinoorattheraces.OneofAustralia’sleadingjockeyswasalsoaclosefriendandKinniburghissaidtohaveextendedaninterest−freeloanof1m for their trouble. Kinniburgh was charged with conspiracy to import after having organised the trawler and outfitting it with communications equipment. But the Crown’s case was weak and the jury acquitted. By now his family was progressing in society. His daughter Suzie had married the son of a former Victorian attorney-general, Vernon Wilcox, QC. Son Brent became the professional at a prestigious Melbourne golf club. In his later years, Kinniburgh spent more time consorting with members of Melbourne’s elite than its criminal fraternity. Former Crown Casino chief Lloyd Williams said Kinniburgh was “the perfect gentleman” when he occasionally encountered him in the casino or at the races. One of Australia’s leading jockeys was also a close friend and Kinniburgh is said to have extended an interest-free loan of 1mfortheirtrouble.Kinniburghwaschargedwithconspiracytoimportafterhavingorganisedthetrawlerandoutfittingitwithcommunicationsequipment.ButtheCrown’scasewasweakandthejuryacquitted.Bynowhisfamilywasprogressinginsociety.HisdaughterSuziehadmarriedthesonofaformerVictorianattorney−general,VernonWilcox,QC.SonBrentbecametheprofessionalataprestigiousMelbournegolfclub.Inhislateryears,KinniburghspentmoretimeconsortingwithmembersofMelbourne’selitethanitscriminalfraternity.FormerCrownCasinochiefLloydWilliamssaidKinniburghwas“theperfectgentleman”whenheoccasionallyencounteredhiminthecasinoorattheraces.OneofAustralia’sleadingjockeyswasalsoaclosefriendandKinniburghissaidtohaveextendedaninterest−freeloanof80,000 to help him pay off a tax bill.

His barrister Robert Richter, QC, says Kinniburgh was a regular in cafes around the legal district, often seen in conversation with leading solicitors and barristers.

“Even if he wasn’t involved in cases, you would still see Graham there. He just liked to know what was going on,” says Richter.

Kinniburgh was dragged into the public spotlight when the Victorian coroner implicated him and Jason Moran in the 1998 murder of Carlton boss Alphonse Gangitano. In a nice twist, the impeccably tailored Gangitano was shot dead in his underpants in his laundry. Police found a scrap of Kinniburgh’s skin on a screen door and some blood on a bannister as he apparently checked whether he had been captured on the home security system. He had then rushed to a local convenience store to establish an alibi. The coroner concluded Jason Moran had probably killed Gangitano but a long-time associate of Kinniburgh’s said Mark Moran had pulled the trigger as Gangitano, with his love of violence and publicity, had become a liability to the Morans’ drug interests.

The dinner on the Tuesday before Kinniburgh died became almost like a wake for the old school of Melbourne’s underworld.

Kinniburgh’s old friend Lewis Moran was there; he had already lost his son Jason and stepson Mark to the war. He was, and still is, marked for death, but still won’t share what he knows with the police. At times during their 30-year friendship, Kinniburgh had apparently carried Moran’s handgun for him, a special bond that creates an intimacy neither wife nor mistress could match. Big Mick Gatto, who calls himself an industrial “consultant”, was also there, looking to make peace, sources said. Gatto’s deft negotiating skills had helped ensure some of the biggest building projects in Melbourne were completed on time, on budget. Apparently he tried to help the man he loved and knew simply as “Pa”. Gatto was once a contender for the Australian heavyweight boxing title but friends, police among them, say Gatto’s hulking frame conceals a warm almost sentimental heart. Often characterised as the stereotypical man of honour, Gatto would laugh it off to friends: “It’s my face. I can’t help the way I look.”

In early December, I had called Gatto through his lawyer George Defteros, seeking an interview for a segment on the murders for the Nine Network’s Sunday program. He called back to decline in person, perhaps curious as to why anyone would want to delve into this topic. “Whaddya doing?,” he asked incredulously. “Do you wanna be victim number 22 or something?”

Little did he know then that his great friend and mentor the Munster would unfortunately fill that role just a few weeks later.

Gatto agreed to meet the next afternoon at a Carlton cafe but warned he didn’t want anything to do with stories about murder, or any stories for that matter. He was still smarting from the press coverage of his 2002 appearance before the building royal commission when he felt he had been vilified for his role as mediator and peacemaker.

I waited for an hour in the cafe, empty but for a table of diners apparently also waiting for the man. Finally I called Gatto and he apologised profusely: Melbourne’s once-in-a-century storms that week had flooded his house and could we meet the next day. The same two fellows are waiting patiently again as he arrived with the venerable Ronny Borghetti, at one time the king of Melbourne’s SP betting, a pace behind. Gatto had just clipped his brow with the car door but he’s polite and even charming as we talk.

Gatto told me emphatically to leave him out of all this murder business. But he talked about the changes in his community, how people didn’t pay respect to each other anymore, how some in the new generation were happy to consort with police. But not his people, he said quietly looking into the distance.

He went off to a corner table for his next appointment (the two men who had been waiting), but he invited me to stay for a coffee. For the next five hours, Gatto held court like a jolly African potentate. He was a laughing, animated presence as a stream of European types in sunglasses drifted in and out of the cafe to do business, to share a coffee or simply catch up. There was much ceremonial kissing and embracing. When told there was a reporter in their midst, each extended a polite handshake, the diamonds of their pinkie rings lent a hint of civilised menace to the gesture. The conversation flipped from the price of an introduction to a former senior ALP figure ($100,000) to the parlous state of Australia’s taxation system. Another man, a former business partner of Jason Moran, talked of his new venture in the construction business. A while back he beat a murder rap where he was accused of stomping a man to death in a Carlton cafe. Now with a new baby and a new business, he’s keen to put his past behind him. Tony, a legendary Yugoslav hard man, now over 60 but still wiry and powerful, complained that helping film-maker Nick Giannopolous bring some authenticity to his film Wog Boy had brought him some unwelcome attention from the police.

“I see the film and there’s this [character] bloody Tony the standover man and drug dealer [in the film]. I can’t believe it. Now twice police have pulled me up in the city and they tell me: ‘Hey, aren’t you Tony the bloody drug dealer and standover man?’ Bloody Giannopolous,” he says laughing uproariously. (For the record, the Tony character is actually called Tony the insane local drug lord.) One celebrated night back in the 1970s, a group of five police chased Tony on foot for some misdemeanour so he climbed a tree. The police stood below taunting him so Tony came down and gave them a flogging.

When I left the cafe, all the men of honour pointed at each other in great amusement, Hey, write about him; No! Write about him; You wanna see a gangster? Hey, get a load of that head.

The next time I saw most of these men was at Kinniburgh’s funeral. No one was laughing.

Carl and Roberta Williams are at pains to say they never knew the Munster – they moved in different circles. They seemed oblivious to the idea that Carl’s own life might have been in danger that day. There was talk that Williams had been marked for execution as payback for his rumoured involvement in at least three of Melbourne’s unsolved gangland murders.

With his father George Williams, Carl is already facing charges relating to a multimillion-dollar manufacturing operation for amphetamines, the prize in this bloody conflict. The fact two of Carl’s close friends, Victor Brincat and Thomas Hentschell, have been charged with one of the killings – of former kick-boxing champion and hot dog salesman Michael Marshall – has not helped Carl distance himself from the growing pile of bodies.

Thomas Ivanovic, the godfather of their infant daughter, was also jailed last year for the road rage murder of a motorcyclist who followed him home after a minor traffic incident. And the list of friends and acquaintances of the Williams family who have died in recent years is getting longer and longer.

Of all the hits and memories of 2003, the killings of Nik Radev and Jason Moran resonated most widely. Radev, a Bulgarian immigrant, built up a sizeable fortune in his 20 years in Australia, though his only formal record of employment was eight months in a fish and chip shop in the early 1980s. He died wearing Versace from head to toe and with a 20,000watchonhiswrist.Atleasthewasdressedfortheoccasion.Radevstoodatthetopofachainofsmall−timedrugmanufacturerswhosharedthesamedrugcooksandmuscletodealwithrivals.Businesswasgood,Radevwasburiedina20,000 watch on his wrist. At least he was dressed for the occasion. Radev stood at the top of a chain of small-time drug manufacturers who shared the same drug cooks and muscle to deal with rivals. Business was good, Radev was buried in a 20,000watchonhiswrist.Atleasthewasdressedfortheoccasion.Radevstoodatthetopofachainofsmall−timedrugmanufacturerswhosharedthesamedrugcooksandmuscletodealwithrivals.Businesswasgood,Radevwasburiedina35,000 gold-plated coffin that took more than a dozen pallbearers to lift.

Jason Moran was murdered with his bodyguard Pasquale Barbaro in their family van as they watched a junior football clinic at Essendon last June. Five children, including Moran’s six-year old twins, were in the back seat. Hundreds turned up to Moran’s funeral but in reality few would truly mourn the dead mobster.

For all his swagger, Jason was at his best when he had a gun in his hand or a weaker foe in his clutches. He made an art form out of inflicting non-fatal wounds over the years, but probably lacked the courage to actually kill anybody, friends said .

“He loved the whole gangster image; that’s all he ever wanted to be from when he was eight years old,” said one long-time associate who declined to be named. “He’d shoot you in the legs, but he wasn’t a killer.” He’d traded on his painter-and-docker heritage, linking up with some of Melbourne’s best armed robbers. But the drug trade was more to his liking and he and his half-brother Mark became key suppliers of amphetamines and party drugs. On the surface, selling drugs wasn’t as risky as armed robbery, but as he discovered, the redundancy package was less attractive.

The killings of Radev and Moran were followed by a string of hits on their soldiers and friends. The deaths of men such as small-time dealers Willy Thompson and his friend Michael Marshall and hitmen Housam Zayat and Mark Mallia meant nothing to the public; to the underworld, it seemed a hostile takeover was under way.

But Roberta and Carl wouldn’t know anything about that. “We’ve got nothing to do with all this,” says Roberta. “I saw Carl cry when Nik [Radev] was killed. He was our friend.”

Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland, the head of Taskforce Purana, which is investigating the murders, rejects outright the notion police are setting up the Williamses for the murders. He also ridicules suggestions that corrupt police allegedly involved in the drug trade are trying to cover their tracks by killing their criminal associates “We will follow the evidence wherever it may lead,” he says resolutely.

Still, much of the drama surrounding Williams has been played out in public.

First, there was Williams’ arrest on threat-to-kill charges against a police detective and his girlfriend. A passing photographer from The Age newspaper had snapped the moment police had slammed Williams’ face into the grit of a Port Melbourne nature strip as they handcuffed him. Williams had been forced off the road by police and ordered to put on his handbrake. He said he refused fearing it might be another set-up: “You go for the handbrake and they shoot you and say you were going for a handgun.” A stand-off ensued until Williams crawled out of his 4WD onto the nature strip, all captured by a photographer apparently just passing by.

Williams claims a history of police harassment and says an officer once whispered in his ear: “We know who you are and what you’ve been up to and we’re coming for you; you won’t know when, but we’re coming.”

Then there was the Judy Moran incident as Williams was leaving the County Court. He’d just been released on bail on the threat-to-kill charges, and was enjoying the attention of the media while cradling his infant daughter Dhakoda in his arms. But his smile vanished when Judy Moran, the mother of slain gangsters Mark and Jason, approached him from behind and jabbed him with a finger saying in a low growl: “Why don’t you admit you murdered both my children?”

“Is this another set-up?” cried Williams as he hurried away from Moran, cutting short his media opportunity. “It’s probably why I’m here, another set-up from your family.”

The Moran and Williams families go back some time, some of the children of the warring clans attend the same grammar school. At one time, Carl Williams and the Moran boys were friends – some say business associates.

Then in late 1999, someone shot Carl Williams in the stomach from close range in the outer suburb of Broadmeadows. Williams has no idea who shot him and disputes where the incident took place. And, of course, he denies emphatically the bullet was settlement for an unpaid debt of more than $500,000 as was rumoured. It’s been widely reported that just before the shooting, a woman was heard to cry, “No, Jason, no”. Police believe it was actually Mark Moran who pulled the trigger that night. It’s understood there are police surveillance tapes of the Moran brothers discussing the incident afterwards. Mark Moran was taking precautions after this; when police pulled him over in February 2000, they found a high-tech handgun in the boot of his car, fitted with silencer and laser sights.

In June 2000, Mark Moran was shot dead as he got into his car outside his luxury home in suburban Aberfeldie.

Then in June 2003, a lone hooded gunman shot Jason Moran and his associate Pasquale Barbaro as they sat in their van. But why Judy Moran should have picked Williams as her son’s killer, she never explained. It’s a cliche in Melbourne that Jason Moran had enough enemies to fill a phone book.

Certainly it’s all getting a bit claustrophobic in the ganglands these days. On a single double Melways spread, you can fit the murder scenes of Jason and Mark Moran, their residences and those of Lewis Moran, Judy Moran and Roberta and Carl Williams and his constant companion Andrew Veniamin, not to mention a host of smaller players, some living some deceased. No doubt they bump into each other while shopping down Puckle Street, Moonee Ponds.

The last straw for the Williams clan came when a photographer from the Herald Sun followed them and Veniamin around Surfers Paradise snapping unflattering shots of Carl in the surf and running pictures of the luxurious resort they were staying in. Williams looked like any Victorian on holiday on the coast, nose smeared with zinc cream and the merest hint of tradesman’s cleavage peeping out of his boardshorts.

The newspaper reported how Veniamin, “his well-muscled associate”, had stayed close by his side as they frolicked in the breakers. The message was that Veniamin, also known as “Benji”, was there to protect Williams from assassination. The reality, said Williams, was that for all his fearsome reputation Benji cannot swim. He was looking after Benji, said Williams indignantly. Veniamin confirmed this when I met him outside the County Court one day. “I was staying by Carl because he was looking after me. I even went up to the lifeguards and asked how many were on duty and that I might need them. I can’t swim,” he said. Police later confirmed that Veniamin is also a person of interest to Purana.

As Christmas approached, it was dawning that perhaps this was no ordinary gang war. No longer was it just a chaotic blood spree that followed no plot, no carefully laid conspiracy. Villains and police alike were beginning to talk of the possibility that a single individual was taking advantage of the crossfire to pick off key underworld figures. Perhaps six to eight of the murders could be sheeted to a conspiracy to change the pecking order of the underworld. Taskforce Purana is not trying to solve all 22 murders, but is focusing its efforts on the killings that follow a thread of organised crime. The logic being that if you follow the money, you might find the murderers.

Perhaps all the senior men of honour were potential targets. Maybe the mere fact of their status in the underworld was enough reason to get them killed. For old-style crooks like Kinniburgh, murder was bad for business: it disturbed the equilibrium of the underworld; it brought political and judicial scrutiny upon them and their allies in the police force alike. It scared their friends and associates in legitimate business who from time to time discreetly required the services of such people.

But for a new generation, steeped in the $5bn amphetamine and party drug trade, violence is a calling card. It provides the “teeth and claws” – the fear essential to the success of the criminal enterprise. Without violence, says former standover man Mark “Chopper” Read, your enemies will know you’re just a paper tiger.

Read, very much the celebrity gangster these days, told The Bulletin it was very easy to get killed in Melbourne in a gang war like this. Forget all the elaborate theories of the media and police, he says. It’s enough that “someone simply doesn’t like you”.

“In my view all that’s been happening is that people who have been putting holes in their manors are getting shot and that’s as simple as that ...,” says Read. “When the little bell goes off in your head and you keep ignoring it because of drug use or egos gone mad and you keep fronting up to the same places, to do business with the same people ... that’s what gets you killed in Melbourne.”

Even during his days of gore back in the 1970s and ’80s, Read the criminal terrorist knew when to back off. Or perhaps he was lucky enough to return to jail before his enemies could get to him. Freedom for Read was a few brief interludes of parole in 22 years of jail time – a chance to settle scores from the inside on the outside. Remarkably, Read has survived his criminal insanity to become the storyteller of his bloody community. Booksellers say that his crime titles (what he calls “faction” – a little fact blended with fiction) are among the most shoplifted titles around as his brother criminals steal them, perhaps affronted that they have to pay to read their own stories. Now in the ultimate irony, Read looks set to outlive his characters.

“I’d like to spread a picnic rug on the banks of the Yarra and watch as the bodies of my enemies float serenely by,” says Read as he stands in the backyard of his Collingwood cottage painting a canvas of two boxers smashing each other to pieces. It’s a departure for Read the artist. He’s been concentrating on a series of Sidney Nolan-esque studies of Ned Kelly – but with breasts. Read sums up his approach to art with a single phrase: “F*** Picasso!”

In Melbourne, the underworld lives by the principle: “We catch and kill our own.” It’s a code that goes back to the bloody days of the ’60s and ’70s when the painters and dockers’ union ruled the Victorian crime scene. In three years, 40 people died as factions battled for control of the union and the criminal enterprises, armed robbery, standover and drug distribution, that went with it. There was little for the courts to do after the assassins had finished their work – only two people were ever convicted for their crimes. This was the breeding ground for much of today’s criminal hierarchy – Kinniburgh, the Morans and many of their associates all met down at the docks, their connections bonded in the “College of Knowledge” as Pentridge Prison was known.

The “self-regulation” of the underworld saved the taxpayer from funding long, unavailing investigations of crimes that no one in polite society really cared about. As long as no innocent bystander was killed, police could argue, in private at least, that this was a social good: a cleansing by fire that would eventually consume itself. And it always did.

Every so often, Victoria police manage an arrest for a gangland murder, and even more rarely a conviction.

Billy “The Texan” Longley was the only man to be convicted of murder in the painters and dockers war. A jury found Longley had ordered the 1973 murder of union rival Pat Shannon, gunned down in a South Melbourne hotel. He spent 13 years in Pentridge for a crime he claims he did not commit. He did it tough in prison; there were many inmates who wanted to test how tough the Texan really was. He reckons he might not have survived had Chopper Read not taken his corner at various times while both were in Pentridge’s notorious H Division. Longley says he was a convenient fall guy for police who could not break the painters and dockers’ code of silence.

Not that Longley claims to have been an angel among demons in that bloody era. “We all live with regrets but you do what you had to do at the time ... I mean I’m still alive,” he says. He agreed to come out of prison to testify at the Costigan royal commission into organised crime only after his lawyers warned him police were preparing to charge him with seven more murders. “I would respectfully suggest to you that someone will get scapegoated over the present spate of shootings,” he says.

Another criminal legend, Kath Pettingill, says the tradition of catch and kill is alive and well. She says that a year after the death of her son Victor Peirce in May 2002, she received a telephone call from a homicide detective with a tantalising opportunity. She claims the detective told her the names of four men police were planning to arrest on suspicion of Peirce’s murder.

Later, police did arrest five suspects, but they were released without charge. To Pettingill, the detective’s message was clear. “They wanted us to shoot ’em dead, to catch and kill our own, but I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen,” says Pettingill. A flash of anger ripples across her face, so strong it even seems to light up her glass eye.

Peirce, a career criminal, was shot dead in Port Melbourne after police believe he was lured to a drug-related meeting. Two men drove up and he got out of his car. One stepped out of the passenger side, shot Peirce in the chest, and calmly placed the dying man back in his own car and drove away.

Detective Inspector John Noonan spoke for many in the force when he suggested it was Peirce’s comeuppance for his role in the shooting of two young police constables in Walsh Street, South Yarra, in 1988. Noonan had led the investigation into the shootings for which Peirce and his brother Trevor Pettingill were ultimately acquitted.

“It’s just nice that people pay for their sins ... certainly, I don’t view it with any sadness,” Noonan told the Herald Sun. Kath Pettingill still rankles at Noonan’s comments, that there is no escape from the ganglands.

“You saw how Inspector Noonan carried on; you live by the gun you die by the gun ... he wants to think about that [as a policeman],” she says. At 68, Pettingill is trying to put her past life in the underworld behind her. When The Bulletin visited her at her home in Venus Bay on Victoria’s East Gippsland coast, the local women were there for the weekly bingo. She moved here after the death of the eldest of her 10 children, Dennis Allen. She had lived next to Allen in Stephenson Street, Richmond, at the height of his reign as drug lord when he was known as Doctor D for his penchant for despatching his rivals. It’s thought Allen had a hand in more than a dozen murders, yet he was connected with just two. Some of the killings took place inside his small nondescript Richmond semi during drug binges where he would stay awake for two weeks at a time, injecting speed whenever he felt sleep coming on. When he died in 1987 of heart failure, his trustee in bankruptcy sold the house, and a group of young people moved in. For Pettingill, the sound of their parties next door brought all the ghosts of Stephenson Street back to haunt her.

“It was like Dennis had never left. I had to come down here for me sanity,” she said.

The locals were wary when she first moved to Venus Bay, but now they’re fiercely protective. If a stranger comes asking for her address, they “get short shrift”, says Pettingill. She spoke of her sadness that Peirce didn’t manage to get away, too. On one of the last occasions he visited, he had brought along a girl, the mother of his child. Pettingill said her son had finally escaped the malevolent influence of his former partner Wendy, who had sensationally reversed her statement implicating Peirce in the Walsh Street killings at his trial.

“He met a girl and this is what Victor said: ‘Mum, she doesn’t talk gangster talk, she doesn’t pop pills, she doesn’t do this, and she doesn’t do that and I intend to marry her’,” said Pettingill. In passing, Peirce also mentioned he had a problem, a debt of $29,000. But Peirce seemed unconcerned and so she let it go. If he had asked, she would have mortgaged her house to pay the debts, said Pettingill. But in the 14 years since Walsh Street, there wasn’t a day that Pettingill didn’t worry about him. He had found it hard to stay out of trouble, serving time for his role in the prison drug cartel set up by his half-brother Peter Allen. He was convicted of drug trafficking and even shoplifting a jar of coffee from a supermarket, wrote Adrian Tame in The Matriarch, a biography of Pettingill.

There was also talk Peirce had been a hired gun for reputed godfather Frank Benvenuto, a prominent player in Melbourne’s fruit and vegetable trade. Peirce was reputed to have opened fire with a machine-gun at the Footscray markets early one morning during one of the regular conflicts between rival factions. When Benvenuto was murdered as he sat in his car in May 2000, police interviewed Peirce but he had an ironclad alibi – he was working at the docks that day. It’s tempting to think Peirce was killed as a payback for Benvenuto’s murder, but the underworld confounds such logic. In the small, tight-knit crime community, alliances shift like schoolgirls’ in the playground. It’s reasonable to assume individuals connected with the killing were among the 250 who turned up at St Peter and Paul’s Church, South Melbourne, to farewell Peirce. To absent oneself from an underworld funeral tends to lead to unhealthy speculation.

Chopper Read describes Melbourne’s underworld as a combination of “Chicago, the East End of London and Chickasaw county Mississippi. Chickasaw county for the inbreeding ... a lot of the crims in Melbourne are basically feral because of the inbreeding,” he says.

Underworld funerals begin to look like the weddings – all the same people show up, minus the man in the coffin. “If no one knows you in the criminal world, then you don’t exist because everyone knows everyone or has heard of the person,” says Read. “That’s how small it is. Things happen and people get killed. In Melbourne, we catch and kill our own. We’ve been doing it for years, since Squizzy Taylor was a boy.”

But Carl Williams is a newcomer; it’s hard to place him in the hierarchy, therefore he’s assumed to be everyone’s enemy. And Roberta says the police campaign against her husband is intensifying. She claims Thomas Hentschell’s Japanese girlfriend tried to pass her a gun to give to Carl in a recent meeting at Essendon railway station. She refused the weapon after she noticed police officers lurking nearby. She believes the police were trying to connect Carl with one or other of the murders. She fears he may die in a shoot-out with police.

The last time I saw Carl and Roberta Williams together was in the County Court fronting another mention. At the end of proceedings, without explanation, their counsel handed up two new separate addresses to the magistrate. I caught up to Roberta after court and she dissolved into tears. It seemed Melbourne’s No. 1 gangland couple were no more. It’s the pressure, she said. She said police were listening to every minute of their lives. Their homes, their cars and mobile phones were all bugged, she said.

“I have to lip-read what the kids are saying, because they don’t want to talk inside the house,” she says tearfully. “I’ve had enough ... I just want this all to go away.”

But Purana assistant commissioner Simon Overland has other ideas. “We’re not going away. I am not sure we’ll solve all the murders, but I think we will solve some of them, and I think we’ll get to the bottom of the surrounding criminal activity. We’re not going to give up on this and we’re not going to go away ... if it takes a long time, it takes a long time.” Whether the killing is over, only time will tell.

Billy Longley, a veteran of an earlier war, is not about to call time on this one. “There’s a theory that vendettas last a generation, which we both know is 25 years. Some things only blood will settle.” l

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