Authors: John Silvester
The Gangland War
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The authors
John Silvester has been a crime reporter in Melbourne since 1978. He worked for
The Sunday Times
Insight team in London in 1990, and has co-authored many crime books, including the
Underbelly
series,
Leadbelly
and
The Silent War
. He is currently senior crime reporter for
The Age
.
Andrew Rule started in journalism in 1975 and has worked in newspapers, television and radio. He wrote
Cuckoo
, the inside story of the âMr Stinky' case, since re-issued in the collection
Sex, Death and Betrayal
, and has co-written, edited and published several other books, including the
Underbelly
series. He became deputy editor of
The Sunday Age
in 2007.
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GANGLAND WAR
JOHN SILVESTER AND ANDREW RULE
Published by Floradale Productions Pty Ltd and Sly Ink Pty Ltd
January 2008
Reprinted February 2008 (three times), March 2008, April 2008 (twice), May 2008, June 2008, August 2008, February 2009, December 2009
Distributed wholesale by Gary Allen Pty Ltd
9 Cooper Street
Smithfield, NSW
Telephone 02-9725 2933
Copyright Floradale Productions and Sly Ink, 2008
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means without the publishers' permission
Underbelly: The Gangland War
ISBN 0 9775440 6 0
Cover design, typesetting and layout: R.T.J. Klinkhamer
Front cover image of Vince Colosimo as Alphonse Gangitano
in the Channel Nine drama series
Underbelly
courtesy of
Greg Noakes Photography
www.gregnoakes.com
Back cover image of Carl Williams being arrested courtesy of
AngelaWylie,
The Age
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âHere we go again,
fasten your seatbelts.'
CARL WILLIAMS MINUTES AFTER HIT MAN
ANDREW VENIAMIN WAS SHOT DEAD.
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âFor the salvation of the good,
the destruction of the
evil-doers, and for firmly
establishing righteousness.'
HINDU PROVERB: PURANA
GUT REACTION
âHe became the most dangerous
gangster in Australia.'
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THE bloodiest underworld war in the history of Australian crime began with both a bang and a whimper in a tiny park in the western suburb of Gladstone Park, near Melbourne Airport.
A gunman, drug dealer and notorious hothead called Jason Moran made two decisions â one premeditated, the other off the cuff â that started the vicious vendetta which would wipe out his crime family, including himself and his closest male relatives.
The longest journey starts with a step, and the path towards death, destruction and lifetime detention began simply enough. Moran and his half-brother, Mark, had arranged to meet amphetamines manufacturer Carl Williams to discuss their mutual business interests. Williams liked to talk in parks and public places to avoid police listening devices, and the Morans were happy to meet in an open space where they thought they would not be ambushed.
The Williams and Moran families had trafficked drugs for years and while they were sometimes associates, they were never close.
They did deals and begrudgingly co-operated when it suited, but they also competed with each other for a slice of the obscenely lucrative illegal pill market.
While there were reasons for their hostility, none was pressing enough for them to go to war. Business was booming. Demand had increased ten-fold as amphetamines became a mainstream âparty drug'. All they had to do was keep a low profile, source their pills and count the cash.
But there were niggles. The Morans, always quick to take offence, began to stew.
At first it was a simple domestic matter: Carl Williams' wife, Roberta, had previously been married to Dean Stephens, a friend of the Morans, and there was lingering ill-feeling over the broken relationship.
The next was competition: Williams was undercutting his rivals, selling his pills for $8, compared with the Morans' $15.
The third was business: Williams had supplied the Morans with a load of pills, but he had not used enough binding material and they were crumbling before they could be sold.
The fourth niggle was greed: the Morans claimed ownership of a pill press and said Williams owed them $400,000. Carl disagreed.
The problems could have been settled, but the Morans, known for short tempers and long memories, tended to use unreasonable violence to achieve what they believed were reasonable outcomes.
All of which meant that the meeting at the Barrington Crescent park, no bigger than two suburban blocks and bordered by houses on three sides, gave the Moran brothers the perfect
opportunity to remind Williams where he stood â before they shot him off his feet.
It was 13 October 1999, Carl Williams' birthday. He was 29.
Williams was unlikely to have sensed danger. The mid-week meeting was to be held in the afternoon in the open â hardly the ideal place to pull a double cross. But soon after they arrived, Jason Moran pulled a gun, a .22 Derringer. A woman nearby heard a man cry out, âNo, Jason!' and then a single shot.
It showed the Morans' arrogance. It was broad daylight in suburbia, not some dark alley or an isolated spot in the bush. They simply did not believe they could be stopped.
But this time the gunman showed uncharacteristic restraint. Mark Moran urged his half-brother to finish the job, but Jason said they needed Williams alive if they were ever to get their money. That hasty decision to shoot him â but not to kill him â would destroy the Moran clan, and many who were close to it.
The brutal truth was that if they had killed Williams, he would have been just another dead drug dealer and the case would probably have remained unsolved. Instead, the wounded Williams turned into an underworld serial killer determined to exterminate every real or imagined rival he could find.
From the day he was shot, Williams refused to co-operate with police. He was young but had started life in Richmond and prided himself on being an old-school crook. When detectives interviewed him in hospital, he said he had felt a pain in his stomach as he was walking, and only then realised he had been shot. It was straight out of the painters and dockers rulebook.
Much later Williams told the author he did not see his attacker. âI have no idea who shot me and I've never asked ⦠I don't know who did it. Police told me who they think did it, but that's their business.' When the author suggested they had nominated Jason Moran, he smiled and said, âYou'd better ask them.'
Roberta Williams gave more away in a later conversation, but denied the shooting was drug-related. âMark was yelling, “Shoot him in the head,” and Jason then shot him in the stomach,' she said.
If the Morans thought shooting Williams would frighten him off, they were wrong. The wound soon healed but the mental scar remained. The drug dealer began planning his revenge, setting off an underworld war that would catch police, the legal system and politicians unprepared.
Williams, with his plump, pleasant face, his shorts and T-shirts, did not look like an influential crime boss who could and would order a death with a phone call. As a strategist he would appear more a draughts man than a chess player. Perhaps that is one of the reasons he flew under the police radar for many months. By the time they realised who and what he was, he had become the most dangerous gangster in Australia.
At first, police knew he was part of his family's drug business but they assumed the former supermarket packer was a worker â not the foreman.
Like the Morans, police underestimated Williams and his power base. He was ruthless, cashed-up and had recruited a loyal gang of reckless young drug dealers driven by pill money, wild dreams and illegal chemicals.
His team went from underworld try-hards to big players in a matter of months. Guns, drugs and rivers of cash can do that. At one point his family drug business was turning over $100,000 a month.
Williams' reputation and power grew with every hit. He began to refer to himself as âThe Premier' because, he smirked, âI run this fucking state'. But to detectives, he was just âThe Fatboy'.
Police say Williams was connected to ten underworld murders and would have kept killing if he had not finally been jailed.
He will never face charges over many of the murders he arranged because he cut a deal with police that gives him some chance of release one day. His only hope is that he will die a free old man, rather than in jail.
Williams' rise from middle-ranked drug dealer to heavyweight killer should never have happened. His plans for revenge and control of a big drug syndicate should have collapsed when he was arrested in slapstick circumstances six weeks after the Morans shot him.
For Broadmeadows police, it began as a low-level fraud investigation and ended as a $20 million drug bust. The fraud involved an enterprising local family running up credit card debts with no intention of paying, then changing their names to obtain new cards to repeat the scam.
On the morning of 25 November 1999, police arrived at a Housing Commission house in Fir Close, Broadmeadows, to serve warrants, but no-one was home.
Later that day, Detective Sergeant Andrew Balsillie was passing, and noticed two cars at the house. He recalled his team to issue the warrants and, after bursting in, found a pill press, 30,000 tablets (almost certainly the Moran pills that had been returned to be re-pressed) and nearly seven kilograms of speed valued at $20 million. Williams was found hiding in a bed fully dressed and his father, George, was found between a bed and the wall in another room, in which a loaded Glock semi-automatic pistol was later found.
Local police rightly chose to run the investigation but called in the amphetamines experts from the drug squad. They were not to know that the two drug squad detectives â Malcolm Rosenes and Stephen Paton â were corrupt and would later be jailed. While there was no suggestion Rosenes and Paton interfered with the investigation, the Supreme Court later decided that several drug
cases, including Williams', should be delayed until the detectives' prosecutions were completed.
It was while Williams was on bail for those (and other) drug charges that he organised the underworld murders.