Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly (17 page)

MARIO CONDELLO – THE EX-LAWYER

M
ario Condello was born in Carlton in 1952, to a hard-working family from the Italian region of Calabria. Mario was given every chance to shine in his family’s adopted country. His brother, Enzo, certainly did. Enzo became a well-known playwright.

In fact, Mario did well at first, studying law at Melbourne University and practising law in Carlton afterwards.

But Mario had other plans for his life. In 1982, he was sentenced to six years in jail on fraud and drug- related charges. He was banned from practising law again.

Mario was working for the Calabrian Mafia, importing and distributing drugs in Australia. This job gave him more money and power than working as a lawyer ever could.

Condello knew a lot of people and at one point was running a sort of criminal employment agency. Did you want someone to burn down your business so you could claim insurance? He could arrange it. You needed advice on growing marijuana? He knew just the person to help you! For a price, of course.

He was also a loan shark. Those people who couldn’t persuade banks to lend them money could come to good old Mario. Naturally, they had to be willing to pay huge interest rates. And if you borrowed from Mario, you’d better pay up on time. Mario wouldn’t just sell your house. He’d send the boys around to ‘talk’ to you.

In 1980, the police set up an entire taskforce, Operation Zulu, to investigate what Mario was doing. The taskforce worked for two years and found he was involved in drug trafficking, arson, fraud and one attempted murder.

Police raided the home of a criminal with whom Mario had been in jail and found a list of names and phone numbers. They were all the same as the surname of the detective who had started up the Zulu investigation. Clearly, someone was trying to track down this detective.

After all the jail time he had done, Condello was careful not to be directly involved in crime. He was satisfied to be the one who arranged and financed it. This made it a lot harder to build evidence against him.

Besides, although he was responsible for a lot of violence, someone who had worked with him said he couldn’t use a gun and fainted at the sight of blood!

Condello bought a lot of property in Australia and Europe. He owned expensive cars and homes. He gambled at Crown Casino, spending at least $7.5 million a year on his hobby.

And still, he had no day job anyone knew about.

It was because of Mario Condello that police finally managed to arrest the drug dealer Carl Williams without a chance of bail.

Police believed Williams had a contract out on Condello. Mario was a friend of Mick Gatto, who had killed one of Williams’ hit men, Andrew Veniamin. Gatto was in prison, but Williams could take his revenge on Condello.

Police, who knew something was going on, were bugging Williams and his hit men. Mostly, this was useless, but there was a breakthrough in May 2004, when two of Williams’ hit men were talking in a car they thought was clean. They were discussing a plan to kill Condello while he was walking his dog outside his Brighton home. They didn’t know Condello had moved just after Veniamin’s death.

It took a while for police to catch them in the attempt. Twice, the hit men slept in. Once, one of them was on a hot date when he was supposed to be committing murder. But on 9 June 2004, the two men were caught.

Williams and his men were charged with conspiracy to kill Condello, but that was all right, because four days later, Mario was arrested for conspiracy to kill Williams and his father, George. Unfortunately for Mario, the ‘hit man’ to whom he offered $500,000 for the killing was a police informer.

Mario survived until 6 February 2006. After a nice dinner with friends at a Bourke Street restaurant, he left for home. He had a strong security system, but someone followed him into the garage and shot him.

There were 600 mourners at his funeral at St Ignatius Church in Richmond. Most of the mourners, old and young, male and female, were wearing sunglasses, a gangster fashion statement.

According to his family and the priest, Father Norden, Condello ‘got religion’ during his last year of life, praying daily and carrying a rosary on the night he was shot.

But Father Norden told the congregation, ‘Never try revenge.’

DID YOU KNOW…?

Australia’s first piece of art was the Charlotte Medal. It was commissioned by the First Fleet ship Charlotte’s surgeon and made from a silver kidney dish by convict Thomas Barnett. It is a very beautiful piece of work, with the ship, sun, moon and stars on one side and a description of the voyage on the other. The medal was bought in 2008 by Sydney’s National Maritime Museum. Barnett didn’t have such a happy ending. On the way to Australia, he continued the forgery for which he’d been transported in the first place, making quarter-dollars to buy goods, through the portholes, from merchants in Rio Di Janeiro. Only a few weeks after arrival in Australia, Thomas stole some food and was executed.

DONNA HAYES AND BENJAMIN JORGENSEN

THE APRIL FOOL’S DAY STUFF-UP

P
arents of two and armed-robber wannabes, Donna Hayes and Benjamin Jorgensen, will always have good reason to hate April Fool’s day.

The pair hadn’t lived together for a while, but when they needed cash badly, they decided to work as a team to raise it.

Benjamin hadn’t taken drugs for years, but had gone back to them after a failed relationship had upset him badly. Donna, also a drug user, had used speed to help her get through a long night of housework in 2006. Two days later, she had still had drugs in her blood when she drove 100 km an hour in a 70 km zone. There was an accident and somebody died.

She was out on bail for that charge when the couple received a tip-off. The manager of the Cuckoo, a popular restaurant in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges, would be carrying over $30,000 in cash after the restaurant closed on Sunday 1 April 2007. This had to be the perfect way to raise the money they wanted so badly!

Benjamin armed himself with a sawn-off shotgun. Later, he said he hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, just frighten his victims. This may be true, but the gun was still loaded. It was going to make trouble for them and send Donna to hospital. Donna took a hammer to use as her weapon. With a third person to drive the getaway car, they went to Olinda, the suburb where the restaurant was located.

After midnight, when the staff members were beginning to leave, they sprang out at the restaurant’s manager, Peter Schmidt, who was carrying a black plastic bag.

‘Give me the bag or I’ll blow your head off!’ shouted Benjamin.

‘What do you want with the bag?’ asked the surprised Peter Schmidt. ‘There’s only bread rolls in there.’

But he handed over the bag and also didn’t think it was safe to argue when Jorgensen demanded his car keys.

That was when things really began to go wrong for the klutzy armed robbers. Jorgensen fumbled with the keys, trying to open the wrong car. His gun went off, but it didn’t shoot the robbery victim. It hit Donna, who fell to the ground screaming with pain.

While this was going on, Schmidt and his boss, Horst Lantzsch, ran back into the restaurant, where they called police.

Poor Donna and Benjamin! They had failed to get their money. One of them was injured. And the rolls weren’t even fresh! Peter Schmidt had been taking them home to feed his chickens.

Somehow, the failed robbers got back to their car and drove to Donna’s home in Belgrave. There, Benjamin asked a friend to take Donna to hospital. If he had taken her himself, perhaps the police would have taken longer to find him, but they caught up with him at the house soon afterwards.

Donna was moved from the William Angliss, a local hospital, to Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital, where she was treated, but kept under guard.

Melbourne newspapers, which thought the story was very funny, couldn’t agree on where Donna had been injured. Some papers said she’d been shot in the stomach. Others thought the wound was in her hip, or her hip and leg. There was even a suggestion she had been shot in the bum!

Wherever she had been injured, Donna survived and both she and Benjamin went on trial for the attempted robbery. They must have been very embarrassed. Certainly, the court felt that they had both shown remorse for their crime. Benjamin’s family said that this was just not the sort of thing that he would normally do.

That didn’t stop them from being sentenced to fairly long terms in jail. The judge, who called them fools, took into account their problems and Benjamin’s prospects of rehabilitation. Still, Benjamin received a term of seven years, with a minimum of four-and-a-half years before he could apply for parole. Donna’s sentence was longer. She would have to spend at least five-and-a-half years of her eight-year sentence in jail.

They would have a long time to cringe with embarrassment over their failed attempt to get the dough!

CARL WILLIAMS

DRUG DEALER AND GANGSTER

H
appy birthday – bang! Being shot in the stomach isn’t a great birthday gift. It was the gift Jason Moran gave Carl Williams on his twenty-ninth birthday in October 1999, when they met to discuss their business differences in a park in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Carl decided to return the favour, with interest. Not only Jason, but also his family and friends would die for this particular birthday present.

For a long time, even police thought that Carl Williams was only working for the family crime business, not running it. He was fat and cheerful-looking. One of his former teachers from Broadmeadows Technical School said he was always half-asleep.

But Carl called himself the Premier, because, he said, he ran the state.

After dropping out of school in Year 11, Carl got a job stacking shelves at a supermarket. He didn’t do it for long, though. Working for bookies at the racetrack was more fun.

When he was 24, he was sentenced to ten months in prison for working for drug dealers, but it was reduced to six. The judge thought he was likely to go straight.

Even judges can get it wrong.

By the time he was shot in that park, Carl had a lot of money, a pill-pressing machine, someone to cook the drugs for him and plenty of supporters in the underworld drug industry.

In the world of crime, you don’t dob. Carl told police he had been just walking along when he had felt the bullet hit him. No, he didn’t know who had done it.

For a while, he and his enemies were popping in and out of jail, just missing each other. But Carl didn’t waste his prison time. While he was in remand prison over drug-manufacturing charges late in 1999, he began to arrange his revenge, discussing his plans with people who later carried out his hits. When he was out on bail, Jason Moran was inside, but that was okay. Mark Moran was still around and Carl could start with him.

Carl shot Mark Moran outside his home on 15 June 2000. It was the only time he actually pulled the trigger himself, but there were at least ten underworld killings which police believe he arranged. He will never be tried for most of them.

In 2001, the Morans plotted to kill Williams at his daughter’s christening. Police were informed about it three days before and decided that the best way to protect him was to make sure he was in jail. With the previous charge still hanging over his head, it shouldn’t be too hard. An undercover police agent pretended to want to buy drugs from him. He sold them – and found himself back inside.

While Williams was in prison, in September 2001, Jason Moran was released. Police persuaded Jason to take his family out of the country, as his life was in danger. He went, but foolishly returned after only a few months.

Carl Williams and his hit men discussed a number of crazy ideas. The loopiest was to have the hit man dress as a woman and whip a gun out of a pram! Williams went as far as buying a wig for that, before dropping the plan.

Jason was hard to catch, but finally, they shot him after a children’s football clinic in Essendon, in front of his children.

Lewis Moran,Jason’s father and Mark’s stepfather, was next. He was killed at his favourite pub in March 2004.

Police were frustrated. They believed they knew who was behind so many gangland killings, but couldn’t get enough evidence. Carl and his wife, Roberta, knew that their home, cars and phones were bugged. Police listening in to the Williams home complained it was like listening to 24 hours of the Jerry Springer show. What it wasn’t, was useful.

Finally, though, they managed to record something that let them arrest Carl, without the possibility of bail. Williams was one of a number of criminals charged with planning to kill Mario Condello. Now there was time to get evidence.

Realising that he might end up spending the rest of his life in prison, Carl did a deal. He pleaded guilty to three counts of murder, provided that a fourth was dropped. His total jail sentence was 35 years.

Mario Condello died anyway, shot in early 2006.

DID YOU KNOW…?

In 2001, British backpackers Peter Falconio and Joanne Lees bought a Kombi van to travel around Australia. Unfortunately, while they were in the Northern Territory, driving down the Stuart Highway, they stopped when Bradley John Murdoch flagged them down, indicating that there was something wrong with the van. Murdoch attacked the tourists. Joanne Lees managed to escape and contact police, starting a major manhunt. Murdoch was caught and convicted, but Peter’s body was never found. In 2008, Northern Territory police released the orange van, offering to auction it for Joanne Lees, now back in England, but she asked for it to be destroyed instead, not wanting it to become a horrible relic for someone with weird tastes.