The Gangland War (13 page)

In the early 1990s, many police were confused about Gangitano. They were not sure if he was just another try-hard bash artist or a man building a serious criminal network. Their informer network reported he was a big underworld player yet several investigations found he was more style than substance.

If the aim of crime was to make big money, Gangitano was still an apprentice. But still the rumours continued that he was on the way to being ‘The Godfather' of Melbourne.

He was seen with experienced and respected criminals. One of his new friends was Australia's best safebreaker, Graham Kinniburgh — who should have known better. It would be a disaster for Kinniburgh, who was sucked back into the limelight and, fatally, into the gangland war that was about to erupt. Alphonse also grew close to three brothers who controlled much of Lygon Street.

It perplexed police. Why did the big names of crime tolerate the dangerous and unpredictable new boy?

Gangitano brought publicity and the headlines made senior police demand reports from their organised crime experts. It was not good for business. In the underworld, fame rarely brings fortune.

Most major crooks need a semi-legitimate veneer. Like the American gangsters he mimicked, Gangitano chose boxing and aligned himself with the Lester Ellis camp. But Gangitano could not grasp the fundamentals of lawful business — even if it was only a front. He bashed and bit the well-known boxer Barry Michael, a professional rival to Ellis, in a city nightclub in 1987. More headlines followed.

Around the same time, Gangitano went into partnership to build a casino in Fitzroy with a well-known Lygon Street identity, investing $300,000 in the project. Unfortunately for the entrepreneurs, police raided and closed the club two days after it opened.

It was a classic police sting. Watching from a secret surveillance post in a building across the road, they allowed him to pour his money into the project before they shut it down.

Gangitano was handsome, smooth and liked to think he was well-read. He could quote Oscar Wilde, John F. Kennedy and Adolf Hitler. Or, at least, he got away with it. In his crowd, no one would check if the quotes were accurate. And even if they did, they would be too tactful to mention it.

On one occasion an off-duty detective was dining in Lygon Street with a woman other than his wife. He heard a group of men at a table behind him swearing and laughing. He turned and curtly told them to improve their manners — before he realised the head of the table was Gangitano. The policeman expected trouble. Instead, the group finished their meal and filed out. The
waiter came to the detective's table with an expensive bottle of wine and an apology from Gangitano.

Yet he could also be short-tempered, irrationally violent and tactically naive. He often needed associates or his expensive team of lawyers to help clean up the messes he made.

A group of criminals, headed by Mark Brandon ‘Chopper' Read, once planned to use land mines to kill Gangitano at his eastern suburbs house, but scrapped the plot because of the likelihood of others being killed.

Shortly before Read was released from prison in 1991, an associate of Gangitano went to Pentridge with a peace offer. But police say Gangitano had a back-up plan. He had placed a $30,000 contract on Read's head.

When Read was released, Gangitano produced yet another plan … he took his family to Italy and did not return until January 1993, when Read was back in custody on another shooting charge.

Gangitano should have learned from Read's carelessness with pointing guns. It was little more than two years later that he had his own problems, when he killed Greg Workman.

It was lucky for Big Al that the two sisters who had witnessed the shooting later changed their stories because they felt abandoned in the police witness protection. But his good fortune cost him a small fortune when he picked up the bill for their extended overseas trip. He was, of course, compensated for legal costs of $69,975.35 over the failed prosecution. In the end, it might not have been worth humiliating the police.

Incensed that they had to drop the charges, police then decided on a campaign of death by a thousand cuts. Gangitano's Eaglemont house was raided. Police said he resisted arrest and so suffered nasty head injuries.

Within a few months, he was charged with assault, refusing a breath test and possession of firearms. He spent time in jail and was bailed on a night curfew. The myth that he was untouchable began to fade.

When reporting for bail, Gangitano saw an unflattering police Polaroid picture on his file. He paid for a professional portrait shot and took it to the station to replace the Polaroid mugshot. In September 1997, a crime report on radio 3AW stated Gangitano had fallen out with old friends and would be murdered. Gangitano scoffed at the suggestion — but police found a transcript of the report in his home the day after he was killed.

A television reporter contacted Mark ‘Chopper' Read in late 1997 when the standover man was about to be released from jail. She wanted to organise an interview with Gangitano and Read.

‘Not possible, darling,' Read said. ‘He'll be dead before I'm out, I'm afraid.'

IN many ways Graham Allan Kinniburgh and Gangitano were the odd couple of the underworld.

Kinniburgh was wealthy, but tried to hide it — Gangitano was struggling but deliberately cultivated an image of affluence.

Kinniburgh was an old-fashioned Anglo-Celtic ‘Aussie' who kept a low profile, preferring to conduct his business in private. Gangitano was the son of Italian migrants and loved the headlines, even if it meant he was always the target of police investigations.

Kinniburgh's apparently slight criminal record understates his influence on the Melbourne underworld. It lists crimes of dishonesty, bribery, possession of firearms, escape, resisting arrest and assaulting police. But criminal records list only an offender's arrest history — his failures. Successful criminals learn from their mistakes and don't get caught.

Police became convinced that Kinniburgh — known as ‘The Munster' — was close to the infamous ‘magnetic drill gang', responsible for many of Australia's biggest safe breakings.

Right up until the day he was killed, Kinniburgh lived in a double-storey house in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Kew. Now a well-known media personality lives in the same street. Cynics say both made handsome livings from very little work. One difference was that Kinniburgh always carried plenty of cash.

The Munster's occupation seemed to be a mystery. Interviewed by police after Gangitano's murder, he struggled to remember how he paid the bills. When asked by the astute Detective Sergeant Gavan Ryan of the homicide squad what he did for a job, Kinniburgh eventually suggested he might be ‘a rigger'.

But while regular employment was not at the top of his priorities, life had been kind to ‘The Munster'. When police searched him outside the scene of Gangitano's murder he was carrying some change, keys, cigarettes and just over $3000 in $100 notes.

While Kinniburgh could afford imported suits, he preferred the casual clothes of an off-duty dock worker, but in middle age he had acquired expensive tastes and was a regular at the budget-blowing Flower Drum restaurant in Chinatown. He unofficially holds the record for spending more money on fried rice than any other human on the planet.

But the master criminal planner made a big mistake. He ignored the fact that Gangitano was a magnet for publicity and trouble.

ALPHONSE Gangitano didn't look like a worried man as he stood on the steps of the Melbourne Magistrates' Court after round one of his committal hearing.

Despite facing serious assault charges over a brawl in a King Street bar, he told friends he was confident he would eventually be acquitted.

He bragged that he was not concerned about the police case and his legal team would ‘blow them away'.

But one of two co-accused, Jason Matthew Patrick Moran, was not so confident. After the assault on 19 December 1995, which had left thirteen people injured, Moran was recorded on a police listening device saying he had to ‘shower to wash the blood off' and ‘to cut a long story short, I started it'.

Gangitano's declaration that he would win the case was typical Al bravado. He was apprehended at the scene still swinging a pool cue and chasing yet another victim. Gangitano had done what police investigators could not — bring an open and shut case to conclusion. He was going to jail for a long time.

But Jason had got away from the scene. Perhaps he later wished he hadn't because when he was finally arrested, enthusiastic police fractured his skull.

Moran and Gangitano were long-time associates but their relationship was starting to fray. Moran was secretly taped saying of Big Al: ‘He's a fucking lulu … if you smash five pool cues and an iron bar over someone's head, you're fucking lulu.'

The case against Jason was strong, but not as strong as the one against Alphonse. If they stood in the same dock together Jason would sink with the weight of evidence against his mate and if Alphonse pleaded guilty it would add to the resolve of wavering witnesses to give evidence against Moran.

But Jason was brought up in the old school. It seems unlikely he would off a mate on the off chance he would get off. That would be off.

There must have been more to it. Even Jason's enemies acknowledge he was tough and he soon recovered from his police-inflicted fractured skull. The injury and the pain-killers did not help him see the light.

In 1996 Moran was again charged with assault-related offences after another attack in a nightclub. He was always close to losing control, but his family tried to keep him on track.

But Gangitano had no support network. Increasingly isolated, he was seen as a loose cannon that made problems for everyone. He was expendable. Those close to the Morans noticed there appeared to be growing tension between Jason and Alphonse.

But on the morning of 16 January 1998, as they left court together, they seemed as staunch as ever. They shook hands before moving off with a group, including four defence lawyers, for coffee at the Four Courts Cafe in William Street.

Later, Gangitano and his solicitor, Dean Cole, walked to George's Cafe in Lonsdale Street for a light lunch before going to a small TAB for two hours of punting. Gangitano placed bets on seven races before he was picked up and taken back to his Templestowe home by his regular driver, Santo.

Soon after arriving home in Glen Orchard Close, Templestowe, Gangitano rang Cole to say he was tired and would have a nap. It was 4.45pm. He promised to ring back later but didn't.

Gangitano was alone in his 30-square double-storey house. His de facto wife and their two children were visiting a relative in St Kilda.

Gangitano removed the expensive, imported grey suit he had worn in court and placed it on the banister before heading upstairs for a four-hour sleep.

Gangitano had bought the house four months earlier for $264,000, but still had a mortgage of $200,000. The house was large, comfortable and suited his purposes.

It was in a dead-end road. From the upstairs windows Gangitano could see any friends, enemies — or both — as they
entered the street. The sloping block meant the ground floor was not visible from the road, making police surveillance difficult. A four-camera security system was used when Gangitano was not at home.

The crime boss was not so much concerned about other criminals; he wanted the video system to deter police — the secret ‘tech' branch — from breaking in and hiding listening devices in his home.

For a self-made crime headline, Gangitano valued his privacy. He tried to protect his family from his working life. Many of his closest crime contacts had never been to his home.

Those who had been there found themselves in the back garden. Gangitano's fear of listening devices meant he didn't like to talk business inside the house.

He did not tell his wife about his work and she did not ask. Her job was to care for the children. His was to pay the bills. He had a full-time mistress who might have been more aware of his work, but she was just as coy when asked questions at his murder inquest years later. She said she thought he might have been some sort of a property developer.

Alphonse seemed to attract women who weren't curious.

GANGITANO rose from his sleep just after 9pm on 16 January 1998. Years of working as a night-time gangster left him with a nocturnal body clock. As part of his bail conditions, Gangitano had to be home after 9pm, although he did not always stick to the letter of the law.

While he liked to be seen after dark in Lygon Street, the bail restrictions meant his nationwide network of criminal associates knew where to find him.

Gangitano's unlisted number had found its way into the contact books of established and would-be criminals around Australia.
In the hours before he died, Gangitano made — and received — many calls.

One was from his wife, telling him she was at her sister's house and would be home before midnight. An inmate from Fulham Prison rang, wanting a chat and some racing tips. A friend in Brunswick called, and a colourful West Australian personality, John Kizon, also rang.

Kizon was to Perth what Gangitano was to Melbourne. Big, handsome, charismatic and seemingly bulletproof, both men protested that they were not crime bosses, yet seemed to enjoy their public notoriety. They even shared the same lawyer — Croxton Park Hotel bouncer-turned-courtroom-fighter, George Defteros.

Kizon was a convicted heroin trafficker, nightclub owner and entertainment promoter. Like Gangitano, he claimed to be misunderstood. His range of associates included Rose Hancock (he once dated her daughter, Joanna, before she was mysteriously bashed and fled to England), jailed businessman the late Laurie Connell, and Andrew Petrelis, a man who went into witness protection before being found dead in bizarre circumstances in Queensland.

Police believed Kizon had been involved in trafficking large amounts of cannabis from Western Australia to the eastern states.