The Gangland War (26 page)

On 17 February 2006, Nicholas Ibrahim stood in the dock of the Victorian Supreme Court and appeared shattered when he heard the jury announce he was guilty of murder. In fact, it was all a mistake. The forewoman had pronounced the wrong verdict — she had meant to say guilty of manslaughter.

Ibraham was later sentenced to fifteen years in jail, with a non-parole period of thirteen years. It could have been worse.

On 6 February 2007, Sam Zayat's brother was also murdered. Haysam Zayat, 37, was found dead in his Noble Park home shortly before 7am. He had been stabbed to death. A man was later charged with his murder.

For men like Radev, Mallia, Kallipolitis and Dibra, the inexhaustible demand for amphetamines and ecstasy created a gold rush. Men too lazy to hold down a job on a factory floor found they could maintain the lifestyle of wealthy industrialists. But only for a while. Eventually, they screwed it up by killing each other.

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 by the bogan bandits of the urban badlands.

The truth is that Moran
was born into a life
of violence and crime
and revelled in it.

 

EVERYONE in the underworld knew Jason Matthew Patrick Moran was a dead man walking.

Too erratic to be respected and too violent to be ignored, the drug dealer and suspected killer was always the popular tip to become a murder target in Melbourne's crime war.

At the funeral of Jason's half-brother, Mark Moran — murdered outside his Aberfeldie home on 15 June 2000 — a well-connected crime figure gave a friend a two-word warning that he should distance himself from the younger Moran. ‘He's next,' he whispered.

Not that underworld identities and a select group of police were the only ones to suspect that Moran's name was on a death list. It was Australia's worst-kept crime secret.

Standover man turned author, artist and renowned after-dinner speaker, Mark Brandon Read, released his tenth book,
The Popcorn Gangster
, in November 2001. On the back cover Read
stands in an old Tasmanian cemetery near three weathered gravestones. The photograph has been digitally altered to show one headstone with the name, ‘Mad Charlie' (a murdered gangster friend) and the date of death; on the second is, ‘Big Al' (Alphonse Gangitano) with the date of his murder. On the third is simply, ‘Jason' with a question mark. The message was clear. The fact that Moran was to be murdered was no longer an issue. It was simply a matter of time.

Less than two years later that date was filled in — 21 June 2003. And so it had come to pass: Chopper Read was not just making a crime-writing profit, he was a crime-writing prophet.

But there were no jokes about the way the murder was carried out. It was unusually brutal, and smacked of a South American drug-cartel killing in Miami or Colombia rather than the old painter and docker way of doing the business. For, while Moran's murder came as no surprise to police, criminals or true-crime devotees, the nature of the double execution shocked almost everyone — making him more famous in death than in life.

The details are now well-known: Moran was with a group of children after a game of junior football when he was gunned down with his friend, Pasquale Barbaro, at the Cross Keys Hotel car park in Essendon North.

Murdering two men in front of hundreds of people might seem reckless, but to the killer it made perfect sense.

Moran was no easy target. He had carried a gun since he was a teenager and was considered an expert in counter-surveillance. For added security he had repeatedly changed addresses in the previous year.

After selling his luxury home in Grosvenor Street, Moonee Ponds, he moved into his sister-in-law's, before relocating to the large house of a friendly hotel owner. He made sure he had a bodyguard with him when he did business at night.

Months earlier, there had been an incident where shots were exchanged near a pizza parlour. In James Bond style, Moran had flicked the boot of his car to act as a shield as he sped away.

Three weeks before being shot, Moran was again warned he was a target. Never short of guns, he made it known he wanted fresh stock and was prepared to pay $3500 per handgun — well over the going rate.

The killer would have found Moran's unpredictable movements hard to track. But Moran did have a habit he was reluctant to break: he loved football and regularly took his children to the local Auskick clinic.

On Saturday mornings he would park his pale blue Mitsubishi van at the Cross Keys Hotel overlooking the reserve.

To the killer, it was ideal. Moran was at his most vulnerable at the children's football: more like an average suburban dad than a gangster in survival mode, although associates say he always carried a gun, even there.

The gunman knew no-one would notice him in the crowd. A stranger in a quiet street sparks interest. A man in a busy car park is anonymous.

The spot also gave the killer a clear escape route — across a footbridge over the Moonee Ponds Creek to a waiting car. The killer had to be confident in his running ability — relying on his pace and the shock of the gun blasts — to be sure no one followed.

He pulled a balaclava over his face and blasted Moran through the closed driver's side window with a shotgun. He then used a handgun to shoot Moran's mate Barbaro, in the passenger seat.

At least five children, including Moran's twin girl and boy, aged six, and Mark's fatherless children, were in the Mitsubishi van when the gunman fired. Several other kids were playing near the vehicle. ‘I have just seen my uncle shot,' one of the girls from the van told an Auskick umpire moments after the attack.

Barbaro, known as ‘Little Pat', was a long-time friend and a low-level crook. His criminal history included nine convictions for possessing cannabis and one for trafficking and using heroin. A big drug syndicate once used him as a trusted courier.

West Australian organised crime squad detectives arrested him at Perth Airport on 11 May 1999 with a bag holding 367 grams of amphetamines.

His choice of lawyer said much about his criminal connections. Andrew Fraser, who later that year was arrested in Melbourne and charged with cocaine trafficking, defended him. Fraser was also the Moran clan's lawyer of choice.

Fraser told the court Barbaro was paid $3000 for carrying the drugs and was financially ruined after losing $100,000 at Crown Casino. He said his client was an alcoholic who drank Scotch and smoked marijuana as soon as he woke up in the morning.

When Judge Alan Fenbury sentenced Barbaro to six years' jail, he said the prison term ‘might even save your life'. In reality it just postponed his death.

When ‘Little Pat' was released in 2001, he returned to Melbourne and quickly re-established his links with Moran.

The killer selected his weapons with care. He used the shotgun to blast through the closed window. In the crime world, the shotgun is considered perfect for close-range work. You don't miss from a metre with a 12-gauge and don't provide much for ballistics experts to work with.

The killer then dropped the sawn-off gun next to the van and used the pistol to shoot Barbaro up to five times.

The same types of weapons, a shotgun and handgun, were used to kill Moran's half-brother, Mark, three years earlier.

It was no coincidence. The one man, Carl Williams, was behind both killings.

The 12-gauge shotgun used to kill Jason was a popular, and
cheap, Miura model Boito brand imported from Brazil in the early 1970s.

An inscription engraved on the metal breech of the shotgun reads: ‘Mitch on your 21st … from The Boy's' with the date ‘22-4-56', suggesting the gun had been originally bought in 1977.

One of the first on the scene that Saturday was, ironically, an ex-detective called Phil Glare, who was working at a scrap-metal merchant's across the road. He found Moran and Barbaro already dead in the van.

Glare, an old-style detective from the disbanded consorting squad, is no stranger to gangland wars and public executions. He was escorting Raymond Patrick Bennett to an armed robbery hearing when Bennett, also known as Chuck, was shot dead by an unknown gunman inside the old Melbourne Magistrates' Court building in November 1979. Bennett's murder remains unsolved.

The court hit was a payback. Bennett had been one of three men who had walked into the Wantirna unit of well-known gangster Les Kane and shot him in the bathroom, using modified automatic rifles fitted with silencers. Kane's body was never recovered.

Les had been married at least twice. His daughter from his first marriage, Trish, went on to marry a young Jason Moran. Police insist the bald facts are that Kane's brother, Brian, was the gunman in the City Court who killed Bennett. In November 1982, Brian Kane was shot dead in the Quarry Hotel, Brunswick.

Days later the young Jason Moran placed a death notice in
The Sun
to ‘Uncle Brian' from ‘Your Little Mate'.

But the Moran family connection to underworld murders does not stop there.

Jason and Mark Moran were half brothers. They had the same mother, Judy, but different fathers. Mark's father was a Sydney
gunman called Les ‘Johnny' Cole, originally a painter and docker from Melbourne who became a standover man for NSW gangster Frederick Charles ‘Paddles' Anderson.

Cole was gunned down outside his luxury home at Kyle Bay in November 1982, in what was the first of eight murders in a Sydney underworld war.

Jason's father was Lewis Moran who, together with his brother ‘Tuppence', was respected by Melbourne's underworld. Both were well-known figures at the racetrack.

But Tuppence's health had been failing for years and he had become less active than he once was. He indulged in breeding a few racehorses at a property near Melton, west of Melbourne. Tuppence was well-liked. So much so that he would be the only adult male Moran to survive the war.

Lewis had his own problems and was on remand over drug charges when Jason was shot. He was refused permission to attend his son's funeral on security grounds and declined to share his thoughts on the murders with homicide squad detectives.

Besides crime and punting, the Morans' great love was Carlton Football Club. Judy Moran's father, Leo Brooks, was the club's doorman and general assistant. Many star recruits, from rogues to Rhodes scholars, boarded with Brooks during the 1970s and '80s.

For some, the bonds remained for life. Premiership star Wayne Johnston told a reporter he met Mark and Jason through Brooks. ‘In those days a lot of the players, myself included, used to come down from the country and stay with Leo and that's where I first met the boys. I used to babysit them.'

For one of the Moran funerals, the club lent the family one of its treasured Premiership flags. It took years to get it back. Judy Moran insisted it was a gift. Perhaps she was confused.

JASON Moran came from a family of career criminals, but had many chances to break free. In the end, he loved the idea of becoming a gangster too much.

The deaths of his wife's father and uncle, as well as the murder of his half-brother's father, didn't seem to show him that it was a career with clear limitations. In the underworld, fringe benefits can be tempting, but the redundancy package is distinctly unattractive. It is small, made of lead and arrives suddenly. You don't even see it coming.

Educated at a solid middle-class private school, Moran excelled at sport but was not interested in taking advantage of academic opportunities or tertiary studies. Why be a lawyer when you could buy one?

Never too concerned about blood, he worked at the City Abattoir near the Newmarket saleyards for three years before the business closed. He then worked at a duty-free shop and later in the jewellery industry. But as his tastes for an expensive lifestyle increased, his stomach for honest work declined.

He carried a handgun before he was old enough to drive and was always prepared to let people know he was armed. Regular drinkers at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale tended to give young Moran a wide berth. He once followed a family friend into the toilet after a minor argument, pulling a gun and shoving the barrel into his head with the accompanying threat to blow it off. Lightweight criminals were frightened of him, while heavyweights did not react because of their respect for his father.

When Moran went to jail, his reputation for violence grew. One fellow inmate remembers the new boy in the (shower) block would tell anyone who bothered listening he was a force to be reckoned with. ‘Do you know who the fuck I am?' he would ask. It was a rhetorical question.

Moran became a staunch ally of Alphonse Gangitano, selfproclaimed De Niro of Lygon Street. They shared interests: protection rackets, illegal gambling and violence.

Some of the violence was premeditated — some simply mindless. He bashed a stranger with a wheel brace in Punt Road because he believed the man had not used his indicator when passing.

No-one challenged him.

In 1995 police set up a video camera in the house of a family across the road from Moran's. When he found out, he is alleged to have responded by telling the family he would bomb their house and harm their children.

They sold the house, allegedly at a hefty loss, and launched a writ against the police force.

After Gangitano shot standover man Greg Workman at a St Kilda party, Moran helped get his then friend off the hook.

But it all changed after December 1995, when Moran and Gangitano went berserk in a bar in Melbourne's nightclub strip of King Street.

They were charged and the court case dragged on for years. Moran was caught on police listening devices saying Gangitano was out of control — a ‘Lulu'.

On 16 January 1998, Gangitano was shot dead in his home in Templestowe. Police say Moran was the gunman and the murder weapon was thrown from the Westgate Bridge. Police divers were never able to find the gun at the bottom of the Yarra.