The Gangland War (16 page)

Tony Mokbel: the drug-baron before he jumped bail.

Robert Mammone as Mokbel.

Judy Moran: lost two husbands and two sons to the gun.

Caroline Gilmer as the Moran matriarch.

Lewis Moran is greeted after being bailed in July, 2003. Police said he was safer inside … they were right.

Kevin Harrington as Lewis.

Danielle McGuire: flew overseas to muddy Mokbel's trail.

Robert Mammone's Mokbel with MadeleineWest's McGuire.

‘I hope a war doesn't go
on over this.'

 

OUTSIDE, the Mercedes and BMW coupes circle in the afternoon sun like sharks, cruising for parking spots among shoals of lesser vehicles jamming the usually quiet streets in West Melbourne. They're late models in dark colours, mostly black or midnight blue, and run to sharp personal number plates and mobile phone aerials tilted rakishly, like dorsal fins on sharks.

The whiff of menace and money — fat rolls of cash — wafts from the drivers, their hard faces blank as they join the silent crowd at the church door next to a big, black Cadillac hearse parked near a pile of wreaths banked against the bluestone wall.

Not everyone here is a big shot and many mourners are clearly not from Melbourne's underworld, but they dress the part. There's a generic quality about the gathering that strikes a watcher. There are men old enough to be grandfathers who move confidently through the crowd, escorted by leggy young blonde women who are not their grand-daughters.

There are young men, with their hair cropped short, tied back in tight pony-tails or slicked back, hard and shiny. They mostly wear dark suits, gold jewellery, lightweight slip-on shoes and sunglasses. Many are heavily muscled, with the bulk that comes from weight-lifting, and perhaps steroids. They tend to favour permanent scowls, and would look at home on nightclub doors, as some no doubt do. If they don't smoke, they chew gum. The clever ones manage to do both at once.

One hardboiled character dragging on a borrowed Winfield has on the compulsory dark suit, but with fawn slip-on suede loafers. He wears no socks, but it doesn't matter much. His ankles are tattooed almost solid blue and green.

Across the street, marooned on a traffic island, the cameras of the media contingent are trained on the crowd. Those who hold the equipment keep their distance, perhaps remembering the ugly scenes at the funeral of Robert ‘Aussie Bob' Trimbole in Sydney in the 1980s, when angry mourners attacked cameramen and journalists.

This is the scene at St Mary's Star of the Sea Catholic church around 1.15pm on Friday 23 January 1998, as the minutes crawl towards the start of a funeral service for a man who died a week earlier the way he had lived: violently and fast.

His name is, or was, Alphonse John Gangitano, one of the few criminals in Australian history to be known — even by people he'd never met — simply by his first name. Like Squizzy. Like Chopper. Like Neddy. And, later, like Tony and Carl.

Alphonse, also known as Al, was shot several times at his Templestowe home by an assassin officially unknown, though his identity is no secret, who must have been well known to his victim.

An assassin trusted enough, it would appear, that he was let into the house unchallenged before he produced a weapon and squeezed the trigger at close range.

Some details of the shooting are a mystery. So is the question of how a boastful schoolyard bully, who left school with nothing more useful than a bad reputation, managed to support himself and his family in relative comfort most of his adult life.

Gangitano often claimed he was a ‘property developer', but that was probably just another example of the mischievous sense of humour his friends and supporters claim for him, exemplified by the fulsome praise heaped on him by one of his more unusual friends, bail justice, Rowena Allsop, who addressed the packed church at the funeral.

Allsop, who was criticised for her close association with Gangitano, was asked to speak by the dead man's family.

She delivered a ringing tribute in which she compared his wit with Oscar Wilde's, gushed about his silk ties, cashmere overcoats and ‘the lingering scent' of his Dolce & Gabbana aftershave, and noted his consuming interest in John F. Kennedy and Napoleon.

She said her friend had been ‘like a king commanding a court, with his friends laughing at his old jokes'. She said she was touched by him turning up at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital last Christmas with a bag of toys for the children in the cancer ward.

Others, however, detected a darker side to Gangitano's gregarious character.

He might well have developed properties, they say. And no doubt he sometimes arranged for holes to be dug — but not always to pour foundations.

If the man in the coffin wasn't a gangster, he acted like one. And he was certainly buried like one.

A fitting exit, some might say, for the Black Prince of Lygon Street.

MELBOURNE is Australia's Chicago, but with a touch of London's old East End ‘manor' tradition about it. A tradition of almost
feudal loyalty to local ‘crime lords' going back to the solidarity of the old working class inner suburbs in John Wren's and Squizzy Taylor's day.

Unlike the criminal subculture in other cities, Melbourne's underworld has a tradition of big occasion funerals, preceded by an avalanche of newspaper death notices. Many of these are effusive and ostentatiously long, implying that money is no object. Some are ‘crocodile tears'.

A few are downright tongue-in-cheek, and contain coded jokes and messages. Police searching for clues to gangland slayings are known to comb the death notices carefully. Indeed, some are rumoured to write the occasional contribution themselves.

Gangitano wasn't the only one with a mischievous sense of humour. One notice read: ‘The impression you left on me will stay eternally in my heart. Jim Pinarkos.' Pinarkos's headless body was found at Rye beach in July 1989. He died from an arrow through his heart. The murder was never solved.

Whatever the reasons, Gangitano's farewell was one of the biggest underworld funerals in Melbourne since the murder of master bank robber Raymond (Chuck) Bennett in the magistrate's court in 1979 and of Bennett's arch enemy, the notorious gunman Brian Kane, in a Brunswick hotel some time later.

The ritual ran over a week, starting with 22 death notices for Gangitano in the underworld's favourite newspaper, the
Herald Sun
, on the Monday after the murder.

The number of notices more than doubled to 48 on Tuesday, led by a joint tribute from Gangitano's widow and their daughters, and his sister, Nuccia, and including several from prominent underworld figures.

It peaked on Wednesday, with 68 notices, including one from Charlie Wootton, a reclusive but well-known and much-respected gaming identity whose past links him with the blood-spattered history of the painters and dockers union.

It's a well-worn legend that as a teenager in the 1950s, Wootton reputedly disposed of the empty shotgun shells left when an ‘unknown' gunman shot Freddy ‘The Frog' Harrison on the wharves.

Dozens of men saw ‘The Frog' get croaked, the legend goes, but it was never officially solved. Like the others, young Charlie Wootton developed amnesia, a condition that still affects police investigations.