The Gangland War (46 page)

As Doyle went to sign, it exploded. It was a joke, but one with a message. Gatto later said: ‘That was for naming me in the House.'

Gatto left a different sort of message in the death notices of the
Herald Sun
after Condello's murder.

‘I was honoured to be your close mate and will remember the wonderful times we shared.'

And in what might have been a message to others: ‘Your passing has left a great void in my life, but life goes on and I know you would expect me to keep punching.'

If Gatto thought he could drift back into the shadows, he was to be disappointed.

The underworld war had made him headline news and while he might have been able to distance himself from his rivals, the media proved harder to shake.

When Gatto was acquitted of the murder of Andrew Veniamin, he would have hoped that he would not have to return to the witness box, but just twelve months later Big Mick would again head to the Supreme Court.

This time, he was a witness in a messy wrongful dismissal case involving the even bigger end of town.

Ted Sent had been the head of the massive retirement-village developer Primelife Corporation until he was sacked in 2003 from the $850,000-a-year job running the firm he had originally founded.

In the wrongful dismissal case, it was revealed that Sent had paid Gatto a monthly retainer to be his ‘eyes and ears' in the hope of encouraging industrial harmony on the company's building sites.

The payments began at $4400 a month and rose to $6600. Each payment, although most were made in cash, included the mandatory ten per cent for GST.

Mick pocketed $220,000 over three years from the grateful Sent. The money was paid over during a monthly lunch — usually at La Porcella — the restaurant where Benji permanently lost his appetite after trying the .38 diet.

During cross-examination, Gatto revealed he had been hit with a back tax bill of $1 million but had settled the bill for $200,000.

‘The tax is up to scratch if that's what you're looking for,' he declared.

‘I was investigated by the ACC (Australian Crime Commission), dragged through a Royal Commission … Prior to me giving evidence they raided my home, they took every mortal thing, photos, receipts, God knows what, documented everything and took it away. They went through me like Epsom Salts … they spent $100 million, and found nothing.'

It was revealed that during the long and entertaining lunches Sent would slip over and hand the cash-filled envelope to Mick.

The invitation usually began with a quick call where Gatto would simply say, ‘It's that time of the month, mate.'

Lunch would usually rely on the chef's special. ‘We'd sort of have something to eat, whatever was on the menu that day, could have been a pig or whatever,' Gatto recalled.

‘There would be a big group of us there just to laugh and joke. And then (Sent) would pull me aside and we would have a little chat in relation to building issues or things that were troubling him at the sites or whatever.

‘He would just pull it out of his pocket and say, “Here”, and I would give him the invoice,' Gatto said. ‘He would always do it in private; he'd never do it in front of anyone else.'

Shortly after his two-day cameo appearance in the Supreme Court, he was again in the news.

This time the colourful and somewhat eccentric former federal policeman and barrister Kerry Milte was behind the story.

For decades, Milte lived on the fringes of Melbourne's crime, police and legal worlds.

He was big, smart and impressive, but many saw him as a Walter Mitty character who loved nothing better than a complex conspiracy.

When he was a Commonwealth policeman, Milte led then Federal Attorney-General Lionel Murphy's 1973 raid on ASIO's former Melbourne headquarters. It was said that when Murphy arrived he said to the big policeman, ‘What the fuck have you got me into, Kerry?'

Milte offered to provide information on organised crime in Victoria to Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon during the underworld war.

But his involvement became a public embarrassment when he was charged with criminal offences, including bribery.

In an interview with police, he claimed the secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, Dean Mighell, had been ‘threatened by Gatto with death, and he came to see me via a politician'.

When the claim was made, both Gatto and Mighell denied the allegation.

Gatto went public to slam Milte and the claims.

He said he had not threatened Mighell. ‘It's made me sick, really sick, because there is no substance to it whatsoever. (There is) not a skerrick of truth in it. Not a skerrick of truth. The man is a friend. The man is a man that I have dealt with for years,' he said.

Mighell said Gatto had ‘never threatened me with violence. I have never had reason to approach the police'.

Gatto admitted he had been a criminal, but said he was now legitimate. ‘I haven't done anything. My conscience is clear.'

He knows his name has been whispered in relation to unsolved murders and that he remains a person of interest to Purana. Sour grapes rather than fresh leads, he says.

‘I always thought that our system of justice and common fairness required that if someone with a colourful past decides to go straight, it is something which is to be encouraged rather than sabotaged.

‘It seems that some people and the media do not want people to go straight or just want them to try but fail. Well, I did try, I did so successfully and I intend to continue to do so.'

While many of his friends and enemies have fallen, Big Mick may be the last man standing — legitimately.

In 2007 he sat for a young painter who wanted a portrait of a high profile figure to enter in the Archibald Prize.

Gatto sat patiently and later remarked he thought it had a good chance. When the modest artist said it would be difficult to win Australia's most prestigious art award, Gatto smiled and replied, ‘I'll make a couple of calls.'

He was joking. We think.

The men live fast and die young
or rot in jail. Their women face
the mess left behind.

 

THE last time Sylvia saw him alive, he was standing at the door of their daughter's flat, head cocked, looking at her in a way that didn't match the tough-guy talk. It was as close to wistful as a sociopath gunman and drug dealer gets.

‘You don't look happy,' she said to him — sympathetically, she thought later, considering how cruelly he'd treated her.

‘I'm all right, love,' he said. ‘But I got a $100,000 contract on my head.'

‘Why not go overseas?' she asked, then added, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot: you gotta make a million dollars first.'

A flash of gangster bravado returned. ‘I'm not running away,' he snarled. ‘No one will touch me.' But then he stepped forward and kissed her on the forehead. It was the most tender gesture he'd made to her in twenty years. She knew it meant goodbye.

Two weeks later, Nik ‘The Bulgarian' Radev was dead, shot seven times in a Coburg street, murder number sixteen in Melbourne's underworld war, which would end up with double that many casualties. Police believe he was set up by criminals he knew well, lured by the promise of a lucrative drug deal. The hit man thought to have done it, Andrew ‘Benji' Veniamin, was himself shot a year later in a restaurant by Dominic ‘Mick' Gatto, subsequently acquitted on self-defence.

Sylvia didn't go to her ex-husband's funeral. She had never liked gangsters and, at 39, she was free of them at last. She felt sorry for their daughter at losing her father, but for herself, she mostly felt relief. She thought she could finally get on with the life the bullying Bulgarian had hijacked when she was seventeen.

But it's not that easy to put the pieces back together, patch up fractured family ties and lead a normal life when people stare and whisper and call you a gangster's moll.

This is how it goes for those married to the mob. The men live fast and die young or rot in jail. Their women face the mess left behind.

IN 2003, Roberta Williams was an unknown nobody. In less than a year she became the best-known nobody in town. She of the toothy smile, pugnacious attitude and sharp tongue was a compulsory inclusion in media coverage of Melbourne's underworld shootings.

While the gangland war shot a lot of Roberta's male acquaintances to death, it shot her to a sort of fame. She professed to know nothing, of course, except that her chubby hubby Carl Williams didn't do it. Carl, who has a baby face, no visible means of support and a lot of dead associates, is now doing 35 years on multiple murder charges.

But back when Carl was first arrested, Roberta did the talking in the Williams family. While wiser heads in the underworld
stayed low, she was a dial-a-quote for reporters. There she was, on the court steps, standing by her man. And again, praising Carl's slain bodyguard, the terminally tattooed ‘Benji' Veniamin, her ‘best friend'. Next, she was holding court at her daughter's ‘christening' party — at that well-known place of worship, Crown Casino. Then she scuffled with a cop as the cameras rolled. Roberta said she and Carl were just normal folks minding their own business. What that business was, a court decided, was drug dealing and murder. The fact is that Roberta got to star in her own grubby soap opera and seemed to love it, while the nation looked on, bemused.

Not everyone with a deprived and troubled childhood ends up as a foulmouthed gangster's moll, but there are reasons for the path Roberta chose, reasons outlined by the judge who sentenced her to jail in October 2004 for assisting Carl to traffick drugs in 2001.

Justice Murray Kellam said in part of his lengthy sentencing remarks:

 

1. Whilst it is true that your plea of guilty was entered only on the day before your trial, I accept that your circumstances were bound up with those of your husband and that for reasons of loyalty and other reasons it was difficult for you to enter a plea until such time as it became apparent that your husband intended to plead guilty to more serious charges. That said however, there is no evidence before me of any expression of real remorse on your part for your involvement in the crime.

2. I have been told something of your personal history and your circumstances. You are aged 35 years, having been born on 23 March 1969. You have four children, three from a previous marriage. These children are aged 17, 12 and 10. You have a fourth child from your marriage to your co-accused, Carl Williams. That child is aged three years. Your counsel spelt out your background before me in some detail. You are one of eight children. Your father, a truck driver, was burnt to death in a trucking accident when
you were eight months old. Following that, your mother had grave difficulty coping with eight children. She was engaged in two de facto relationships following her husband's death, and both such partners, I was informed by your counsel, were physically violent both to you and to your siblings. You became a Ward of the State at age 11 and you were placed in Allambie where you remained for some three years before being transferred to Winlaton and then subsequently accommodated at a hostel in Windsor. You now have no relationship with your mother. I accept that you have a background of childhood and adolescent deprivation.

3. You formed a relationship with your first boyfriend at age 16, and by age 17 you had given birth to your first child. You later married him and had a further two children by reason of that relationship. However you separated from your first husband in 1997 after you suffered considerable violence from him. You met Carl Williams in 1998 and in March 2001 you gave birth to your youngest child, a daughter. I accept that you have a close relationship with Carl Williams.

4. You have admitted before me to prior convictions which in general relate to offences of dishonesty and an offence of causing injury recklessly between 1987 and 1990. No doubt those offences are reflective of your troubled youth and are of no relevance to my task of sentencing you today. Of relevance, however, is the fact that you were convicted of trafficking in amphetamines at the County Court on 9 April 1990 and sentenced to be imprisoned for six months, which sentence was wholly suspended. That suspended sentence was reinstated by reason of a breach thereof and you served three months' imprisonment in respect thereof.

5. In November 2000 you were convicted at the Magistrates' Court at Sunshine of being in possession of ecstasy and cocaine. You were sentenced to a term of imprisonment for three months, such sentence suspended for a period of 18 months. The event which brings you before me is clearly a breach of that suspended sentence and it can be anticipated that you will be dealt with for that matter in due course. The significance of that matter is that notwithstanding the fact that you had been given a suspended sentence, you were
still prepared to engage in the criminal activity which brings you before me.

6. A number of medical reports have been tendered before me by consent. In particular, a report from Mr Jeffrey Cummins, consulting psychologist, in relation to his examination of you on 21 September 2004 provides a detailed history of your background and your psychological state. I will not repeat that detail here but I have taken the matters contained in that report into account…

THE judge saw beyond the defiant, publicity-hungry woman in court — and on television and in the newspapers — to the scarred, scared child she had been.

If Roberta is a type whose fate is to ‘star' briefly in a grubby crime soap before fading back into the inevitable oblivion, then a co-star in the same tear-stained drama is the tragic Judy Moran, a gangster gran from central casting whose blonde mane has stood out in a sea of men in black at the funerals of her two sons and two husbands.

At the height of the gangland war, both women became media celebrities in their own right, feeding off the insatiable public interest in those at the centre of the action.