The Gangland War (24 page)

Police say Allen was responsible for up to 11 murders and Wendy says she learned from experience to read the signs when her brother-in-law ‘was about to go off'.

One day in August 1984 she saw him turn and look coldly at small-time crook Wayne Stanhope, then turn up the volume of the stereo — not because he loved music but to drown the shots he was about to fire.

‘I told him, “Not in my house”.' Allen grudgingly agreed and took Stanhope next door to shoot him, but left the body in the boot of a car in the street for two days.

Wendy Peirce later took police to a bush area near Ballan where Stanhope was buried. Detectives found the burnt-out car but could not find the body although they remain convinced they were close.

Allen was blamed for the deaths of Victor Gouroff and Greg Pasche in 1983, Helga Wagnegg in 1984 and Anton Kenny in 1985.

‘Dennis gave Helga Wagnegg pure heroin. They poured buckets of water from the Yarra River down her throat to try to make it look like she drowned.

‘Anton did nothing wrong. There was no reason. Dennis didn't need a reason.

‘Victor Gouroff killed Greg Pasche. Dennis killed Gouroff because he didn't get rid of the body properly.

‘Pasche said something out of school and Gouroff stabbed him. He was in the kitchen saying, “Dennis, help me, help me”. Dennis picked up a bayonet and stabbed him in the head. They dragged him into the backyard and wrapped him up. There was no need for any of this. It was madness.'

After the Walsh Street trial, many police expected Wendy Peirce to eventually be murdered by her husband or one of his criminal associates — but they remained together, when he was out of jail.

VICTOR Peirce got away with murder — and from the moment he was acquitted of killing two police he was a marked man.
When he was released from prison after serving his armed robbery sentence, the crime world had moved on. New security measures meant armed robberies were no longer lucrative. Old stick-up men like Peirce had to either go straight or find a new line of crime.

An honest living was never an option for Victor. He moved into the stand over business — trading on notoriety — and also into the drug game.

Peirce, a traditional Australian crook, began to hang out with Italian organized crime figures. The introduction probably came through his links to bent lawyer, Tom Scriva.

There was trouble at the wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a flashpoint for violence in Melbourne since the 1960s, and Frank Benvenuto employed Peirce as his minder.

The middle-aged gunnie was quick to make a point when he fired a machine gun in the market to show that he meant business.

But, unfortunately for him, someone else did as well.

On 8 May 2000 Peirce's best friend Frank Benvenuto was murdered by Andrew ‘Benji' Veniamin — another gunman who had been employed down at the markets.

Some suggested Peirce had been offered a contract to betray Benvenuto but, if so, why didn't he warn his best mate?

Wendy believes Benvenuto was murdered because he had ordered the killing of another market identity in the 1990s.

When Benvenuto lay dying, he managed to ring Victor on his mobile phone. ‘He just groaned.'

A few minutes later, the phone rang again. It was a major crime figure informing Peirce that Benvenuto was dead. How the man knew so quickly has never been explained. ‘There was $64,000 in the boot of Frank's car and they didn't even take it,' she said.

‘Benji wanted a meeting with Victor and they met in a Port Melbourne park. He wanted to know if Victor was going to back up for Frank. He was his best mate. Victor took a gun and Benji would have been armed.'

They agreed there would be no payback. Well, that's what Victor thought. History shows that Veniaimin went after anyone he suspected could come looking for him.

‘Frank kept my family going for six years (While Victor was in jail). Frank was a lovely man.'

Peirce was not the man he once was. He began to take the pills he was selling and was losing his rat cunning. He took to dressing like a young gangster and believed his reputation made him bullet proof.

Police were told Peirce accepted a $200,000 contract to kill Jason Moran. The story goes that Peirce was paid $100,000 in advance but then refused to carry out the contract and warned Moran his life was in danger.

Perhaps tellingly, Jason Moran was a prominent mourner at Peirce's funeral although the two gunmen were never considered close. Moran could not know that his funeral would be held across town just over a year later.

Police suspect convicted murderer Mark Anthony Smith also accepted a contract he did not fulfill. But an attempt to kill Smith failed when he was shot in the neck in the driveway of his Keilor home on 28 December 2002. He recovered and fled to Queens-land for several months.

With all underworld murders, police look to those close to the victim to find a link.

On the evening of Wednesday 1 May 2002, Peirce was relaxed and chirpy. Forensic tests later indicated his good mood was chemically induced. His autopsy revealed residues of ecstasy, Valium and amphetamines.

He had played football with his son, Vinnie, and then kissed Wendy and daughter Katie before saying ‘he had to meet a bloke'.

‘He told me to go home and put his coffee machine on for his short black,' Wendy says. ‘The last thing he said to me was, “I love you, Darl”.'

As he sat in his car, waiting for the meeting, two men in a stolen Commodore (hit men, like old armed robbers, prefer the home-grown Holden) pulled up. One was Veniamin, who walked over and shot Peirce twice from point blank range. A third shot missed, lodging in the pillar between the doors.

At the last second Peirce used his right arm to try to block the shots as he sat in the driver's seat. Both bullets travelled through his arm into his body, causing fatal wounds to his liver, diaphragm and lungs.

‘They revived him twice there but he was unconscious and they couldn't save him,' Wendy says with little emotion.

He was taken to the Alfred Hospital — the same hospital where Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were taken 14 years earlier.

Detectives found that Peirce, 43, was unarmed. He clearly was not expecting trouble and must have thought he was meeting a harmless friend.

They also found he had two mobile phones in the car — one rigged by a friendly technician from a telecommunications company so that it operated without charge. ‘He had one for home and the free one was for business,' Wendy says.

So who was the ‘bloke' Peirce was supposed to meet when he was ambushed?

It was Vince Benvenuto — Frank's brother.

Peirce was murdered one week short of the second anniversary of Benvenuto's murder.

GANGSTER. Drug dealer. Gunman. Cop killer. Victor Peirce was called all these things before he was shot dead in Port Melbourne.

But when he was buried eight days later he was just someone's father, someone's son. The grief of those who loved him was as real as anybody else's, a sobering thought for the most hardened observer.

There were plenty of those at St Peter and Paul's Catholic Church in South Melbourne, where mourners mingled with plainclothes police, reporters and at least one known gunman; a prime suspect in another, unsolved, gangland slaying.

It wasn't, however, a huge funeral by underworld standards.

Whereas almost 1000 people had jammed St Mary's by the Sea in West Melbourne to farewell Alphonse Gangitano four years earlier, perhaps a quarter of that many went to Victor's.

And whereas Gangitano — a ‘celebrity' gangster known by his first name — cultivated a Hollywood image, Peirce lived and died on a smaller stage.

Gangitano was a middle-class private schoolboy who turned his back on respectability to become the black prince of Lygon Street.

Peirce, by contrast, wasn't so much working class as underclass, condemned from birth to a sordid life cycle of crime and violence. The wonder was not that he died violently, but that he survived as long as he did.

His mother, Kath Pettingill, once a notorious thief and brothel madam dubbed ‘Granny Evil', had seven children by several men. With Victor's death, she has buried three of her children and must wonder how many more family funerals she will attend. She herself narrowly escaped death years ago, when a bullet blinded her in one eye.

The mourners gathered well before the service, under a sky the colour of lead. Most of them looked as sullen as the weather.
The men tended to mullets or close-cropped hair, the women were mostly bleached blondes, tattoos half-hidden under dark stockings. Sunglasses and cigarettes were compulsory for both sexes, chewing gum and earrings optional.

In the church, many shied away from the pews, preferring to stand together at the back of the church, as deadpan as the inmates of a prison exercise yard. Which many undoubtedly had been.

Father Bob Maguire, whose inner-city flock has included many a black sheep, conducted a service, as he called it, ‘designed by the family'. Instead of hymns, popular songs were played. Instead of a formal eulogy, the dead man's children and friends read out personal tributes that were clapped, like speeches at a birthday party.

Katie Peirce said her father was a ‘strong, kind, family man' who had hired a double-decker bus for her 16th birthday and taken her out to get her drunk as a treat. His pet name for her was ‘Pooh Bum'.

His youngest son, Vinnie, named in honour of his honour Justice Frank Vincent after Peirce's acquittal in the Walsh Street murders, said he would miss his dad picking him up from school, buying him lollies and driving around.

‘I remember when he used to go fast in the car with me,' he said.

The first line of the opening song (
Soldier Of Love
) began with the words ‘Lay down your arms'. The song chosen for the exit music was
When I Die
, by the group No Mercy. It sounded like a portent of funerals to come. Outside, it had begun to rain. A guard of honour, of sorts, lined the street, blocking traffic. It stretched about twenty metres. At Steven Tynan's police funeral, more than thirteen years earlier, the honour guard stretched for kilometres.

But there was real sadness. As the hearse took the outlaw Victor Peirce for his last ride, hard faces softened briefly.

Under a tree in the churchyard, a homicide detective watched, wondering if the killer was in the crowd and how many more were destined to suffer the same fate.

WENDY Peirce was convinced that police would not try too hard to solve her husband's murder. After all, he had killed two of them.

In police circles no name is more detested than that of Victor Peirce. Many openly rejoiced when he was finally shot.

The investigation was handed to Purana and nearly five years after the ambush the head of the taskforce, Jim O'Brien, stood next to Wendy as he made a plea for new information.

Years earlier, O'Brien had been a member of the Ty-Eyre task-force that had been betrayed by Wendy.

In 2007 the Purana Taskforce arrested a man accused of being the driver of the getaway car. They claim the hit was ordered by a senior gangland figure connected to an established Italian crime syndicate.

But Peirce was a man with many enemies. And Veniamin needed only half a reason to kill.

In each case they were set up,
not by an enemy but a friend.
It is the way of the drug world.
Loyalty is a commodity to be
bought and sold.

 

NIKOLAI Radev, a young Bulgarian wrestler, arrived in Australia in 1980 without any assets, but was welcomed by his country-of-choice and granted refugee status. It would prove a fatal mistake.

In 1981 he married Sylvia, a teenage hairdressing apprentice in Melbourne.

He worked at a Doveton fish and chip shop owned by his in-laws and then opened a pizza shop nearby. But after about a year he decided there were better ways to make a crust than from pizzas.

From 1983, until his death twenty years later, Radev did not work or pay tax, yet maintained the lifestyle of a millionaire.

He was quick to collect debts but not so quick to repay them.

‘His attitude to personal accounting has always been cavalier,'said Mark Brandon Read, a keen observer of local criminal matters and manners.

Soon after arriving in Australia, Radev made contact with-known members of Melbourne's flourishing Russian organised crime syndicates. His reputation had preceded him and he was already known as a ruthless young gangster from his early years in Bulgaria, yet Australian authorities were not aware of his record before granting him refugee status.

His former wife, Sylvia, says Radev always wanted to be a gangster. ‘He had no fear and no shame. It was just a power thing for him. He wanted to be like Al Pacino in
Scarface
.'

When they were married he could be occasionally charming but more often brutal — and he would disappear for days. ‘He would say he was going to the shop and then not come back.' She soon learned not to ask for an explanation.

‘He told me later that he married me just to get Australian citizenship. He ended up just wasting his life. It was really sad.'

In 1985 he was first jailed in Victoria for drug trafficking. After experiencing prison in Bulgaria, Melbourne's jails were like weekend retreats for the hardened gangster. It was just another place to pump iron and plan his next standover campaign.

Radev's criminal record shows his life-long love of violence. His prior convictions include assaults, blackmail, threats to kill, extortion, firearm offences, armed robbery and serious drug charges.

A police report said: ‘He is a dangerous and violent offender, well connected within the criminal underworld. He carries firearms and associates with people who carry firearms.'

In early 1998 Radev began a relationship with a Bulgarian woman twelve years his senior. She was financially comfortable, but that was not enough for Nik. Soon they were trafficking heroin in the St Kilda district.