The Gangland War (47 page)

Rarely a week went by where they failed to rate a mention in the media. Roberta was even the subject of a long profile in a weekend newspaper magazine.

The plot thickened with the appearance, centre stage, of a new ‘love interest' for Carl Williams, in the best soap opera tradition. When Williams first entered his guilty pleas on several murder charges in early 2007, a ‘mystery woman' appeared at court. Her name was Renata Laureano, she was young, attractive, and wore a conspicuously large diamond ring, all of which enraged Roberta, whose temper was uncertain at the best of times.

Asked about this on a television current affairs program, one of the authors said, poker-faced: ‘It's the next best thing to the
Melbourne Cup. We don't get the academy awards here — we have the Supreme Court.'

He was referring to the fact that Roberta, upset at seeing the other woman steal the limelight — and that copies of her husband's letters from jail had been published in the
Herald Sun
— had shouted obscenities at Renata Laureano.

No wonder she was unhappy. In the letters to his estranged wife, Williams boasts of his new love.

Furious that the letters had made their way into print, Roberta arrived at court spoiling for a fight. Before Williams had even arrived in the courtroom she expressed disappointment that he'd be locked behind a glass partition.

‘If I could spit in his face, I would,' she snarled. No one doubted her.

During the lunch break, she followed Williams' parents, George and Barbara, shouting obscenities at them in and outside the court as a huge media contingent looked on.

That afternoon, she was banned from attending court, and Renata Laureano took police advice to stay away.

But the gap was filled by Judy Moran. Dressed to kill, she attempted to use the courtroom to launch a tirade at Williams over the killing of her two sons and her ex-husband, Lewis Moran.

Invited by Supreme Court Justice Betty King to provide a verbal victim impact statement, the angry widow began: ‘Carl Williams, the evil person that you are' before being called to order by the judge, who insisted she keep emotion out of her testimony.

Judy Moran continued: ‘You have all but destroyed me, ripped out my heart'. She did not mention how many people her sons and husbands had hurt or killed.

SO what is it with women and gangsters? Roberta Williams and Judy Moran mightn't know Lady Macbeth from a Big Mac, but Melbourne psychologist Alex Bartsch, a former homicide detective,
says both women remind him of the ‘Lady Macbeth' stereotype. He says there are three other types of women who get mixed up with crooks — ‘risk-takers', ‘Florence Nightingales' and ‘helpless dependants'.

‘Criminals' wives can be pretty much like celebrities' wives,' Bartsch says. ‘They fall into definable types with different motives.' The Lady Macbeths chase power and influence. Risk-takers are attracted by danger and the reflected ‘glamour' of being with lawbreakers. The Florence Nightingales graduate from saving wounded birds and stray kittens to rescuing wounded men. Some like being in emotional control of a man — ‘the caged beast' who pines for them in prison in a way that usually dissolves when he gets out.

Then there are the doormats, helpless dependants often found in ethnic crime groups where marriage within the group is common and traditional gender roles are not questioned. They cook, clean and bear children, keep up appearances and don't ask hard questions. ‘Their entire sense of worth is tied to having a relationship,' says Bartsch.

Writers have always known about the allure of the outlaw. The bandit prince, the pirate king, the highwayman, the gunslinger, the bushranger and the modern gangster are prototype characters of drama. The mix of predatory appetites, reckless courage and offhand generosity has always attracted people, but more especially the opposite sex. Where you've got tough guys, you've got dolls, as Damon Runyon might have said.

There's a bit of Runyon's Broadway — and Al Capone's Chicago — in modern Melbourne. Two early casualties of the recent shooting outbreak highlight the sex appeal of gangsters.

Right up until Alphonse Gangitano killed him in early 1995, a good-looking gunman called Gregory John Workman had always been attractive to women. A senior policeman's daughter who went to Preston East state school with Workman recalls how
proud she was when he walked her home when they were twelve. He was the best-looking boy in school — and he had ‘dash', the word both crooks and cops use for the charismatic blend of courage, poise and recklessness valued on either side of the law.

Workman's killer was less courageous but more calculating. Some called the narcissistic Gangitano the ‘De Niro of Lygon Street', but he fancied he looked more like the actor Andy Garcia in
The Godfather III
. As a private school boy, Gangitano attracted girls, though boys remember him as a bully. ‘He was smooth and well-dressed, and when he turned eighteen he drove a flash red car,' one former admirer told the authors. ‘He used to play cards in my mother's garage with his mates. He was always charming to girls but he had a complete fantasy about New York mafiosi.'

Gangitano courted his future partner, Virginia, while she was a schoolgirl at the upmarket Genazzano College (‘We grew out of him but she didn't,' says the ex-admirer), but that long-term relationship didn't stop other women seeking his company when he became a serious gangster with the ‘Carlton Crew'.

Before Gangitano was gunned down in his Templestowe home in 1998 he was close to several women, notably bail justice Rowena Allsop, who risked her reputation with such an unlikely friendship. At Gangitano's funeral — the biggest underworld event in Australia in years — Allsop gave a gushing eulogy that ranged from Big Al's taste for poetry to his Dolce & Gabbana aftershave.

Gangitano's presumed killer, Jason Moran, condemned his own children to grow up without any male family figures by mating inside Melbourne's tightknit painter and docker crime ‘family'. His partner, Trish, is the daughter of Les Kane, a standover man murdered by rivals in 1978. Jason's half-brother Mark Moran was killed in 2000. Jason was shot in 2003 and his father Lewis Moran was killed later. Meaning the Moran children have lost their father, their uncle and both grandfathers to the gun.

Why would any woman risk that for her children by marrying a gangster?

‘I WAS a little Italian virgin, innocent and gullible,' Sylvia Radev sighs, nodding at the framed photograph of her teenage self: a touchingly pretty girl headed for heartbreak. ‘I'd never even seen a penis when I met Nik — let alone one with a tattoo on it,' she says. ‘He had “TAXI” on his — because it “went everywhere”, he told me.' She parodies her former husband's strong eastern European accent, giving it a sinister twist. No wonder. Even among bad men, his evil ways stood out.

He once held a gun to her head, suggested prostituting her and taunted her that he married her only to get an Australian passport.

How a respectable convent girl ended up with a monster is a cautionary tale. Her parents and sisters are ashamed and still frightened to be linked to Radev, and Sylvia worries that her neighbours will hold it against her. His malign power reaches from the grave.

She lives in a modern brick veneer in a new suburb southeast of Melbourne, not far from the shopping centre that inspires
Kath & Kim
. It's a small, neat house with a small, neat Japanese car in the drive, comfortingly anonymous.

A huge picture of a tiger hangs over the couch and prints of zebras and other animals are on the walls. At 40, wearing jeans and with her ash blonde hair short, Sylvia looks years younger. People sometimes mistake her and her 21-year-old daughter, Raquel, for sisters. But Raquel is painfully thin and looks older than her years because, her mother says, she has ‘seen too many bad things'.

After moving ‘maybe 30 times' in 22 years, Sylvia craves stability. She never again wants gangsters or police in her home. Police once found a pistol taped under a cabinet in Raquel's bedroom.
Radev had hidden it, but forced his daughter to lie that another criminal, by then conveniently dead, had put the gun there.

Sylvia doesn't want her two young children (to her new partner) to be exposed to the things Raquel has seen and heard. She doesn't swear or smoke in front of them and spells out words like ‘K-I-L-L' and ‘G-U-N'.

Sylvia's parents migrated from Calabria in the 1950s. Her father, now retired, was a driving instructor who paid off a big eastern suburbs house. Her two older sisters married young and have led law-abiding lives. Which is how Sylvia's would have gone, too, if Nik Radev hadn't trapped her.

At seventeen, she was an apprentice hairdresser working for a Bulgarian woman involved in bringing ‘refugees' to Australia. The woman, who called Sylvia a ‘rich Italian virgin nun', read tarot cards and predicted Sylvia would marry a man from ‘far away'. Sylvia was fascinated. Soon afterwards, two young Bulgarians turned up at the salon. They spoke poor English, but one spoke Italian. They were new arrivals, known to Sylvia's boss. After they left, she asked Sylvia which one of them she liked.

Neither, Sylvia said. But if you had to choose, the woman pressed, which one? Sylvia shrugged. The sporty-looking one, she said, meaning the one who spoke Italian and was ‘well-dressed' in a white tracksuit and runners.

What she didn't know was that under the tracksuit, apart from a fit wrestler's physique, were ‘jail tatts'. At 21, Radev had already served time in Europe. Far from being a genuine refugee, she later found out, he had worked the system to get to Australia. But in 1980 all she knew was that he kept coming to see her. The first time he brought her violets — not a bunch of flowers, but the whole plant in a pot. She didn't know he'd probably stolen it.

Radev manipulated her. Sylvia didn't fancy the Italian boy her parents wanted her to marry. To her, Nik seemed better than an arranged marriage. It wasn't love, but she wanted to escape her
family's control, and marrying him looked like a way out to a teenage girl. Radev charmed Sylvia's parents, speaking Italian and listening attentively. He knew the rules: that courtship must lead to engagement.

One day he got permission to take her out. He took her to a motel room in St Kilda.

‘I thought it would be like the Rod Stewart song
Tonight's the Night
— all romantic,' Sylvia recalls. ‘It wasn't. He virtually raped me. He hurt me. Then he said, “Now you'll have to marry me. No one else will have you”.'

The honeymoon was at Wrest Point Casino in Hobart. He gambled; she stayed in their room. Within days he made her ask her parents to send money: he'd blown their wedding-present cash.

At five months pregnant, Sylvia was hurt in a car crash. She lost the baby, a boy, but Radev, who had been driving the car, didn't come to see her in hospital. The strongest feeling she had for him was fear. ‘He didn't have to bruise me — he terrified me,' she says. ‘It was mental cruelty. I was conditioned.'

Radev worked for only a few months — in a pizza shop, then a factory — before turning to crime. ‘He didn't often involve me in what he was doing,' says Sylvia, ‘but he would come home with money or stolen clothes.' And he started carrying guns.

Radev ran with the ‘Russian mafia'. Drugs and prostitution were their main rackets, but Radev was up for anything, from burglary and armed robbery to extortion, fraud and blackmail. ‘He had no fear and no shame,' says Sylvia. ‘It was just a power thing for him. He wanted to be like Al Pacino in Scarface.'

He could be charming but was driven by forces she did not understand. ‘He was in his own world. He would go out in the afternoon, doing his things, and stay out all night. He could say he was going to the shop and then disappear for days.' She didn't ask questions.

If he did bring associates home, they didn't discuss ‘business' in front of her ‘because I was a squarehead. And that was good.'

Sylvia, still hairdressing, borrowed to buy a house in Hampton Park in 1983, the year her daughter Raquel was born. In 1984, when Radev was charged with armed robbery, he demanded she sign papers to sell it: he wanted money to flee the country before the trial.

She didn't want to sell. ‘He held a gun to my head while I was holding the baby and said if I didn't sign he would kill me. It traumatised Raquel because I was terrified and holding her so tight. I signed. I was crying so much I left drips on the paper.'

They sold the house and all their possessions but Radev was arrested at the airport. When he went to jail, Sylvia was relieved — but she couldn't share her troubles with friends. ‘I didn't tell anyone except my parents and my sisters that he was in jail. We told everyone he was overseas. Even my bridesmaids.' She warned Raquel never to tell people — at kindergarten and, later, school — that Daddy was in jail.

She moved into a flat, started going to a gym, landed a job as a public relations assistant — and filed for divorce. ‘He didn't really care because he had got Australian citizenship and a passport.' But she still visited him in jail so he could see his child. When he got out, he turned up at her flat. Unable to confront him, and helped by a female friend, she fled to a women's refuge, then rented a flat in Windsor.

‘That's when my life really began,' she recalls. She worked and went out. Whenever Radev was back in jail, she was happy. ‘I didn't need a man around.' But when he got out, he always found her and came and went as he wished. She had a boyfriend, but Radev bashed him and ‘threatened to put him in the boot'.

She was aware of his criminal activity, but ignored it. ‘Nik never told me any of his criminal plans and I never asked.' In 1998, he brought a friend from jail, Sam Zayat, later killed in the
underworld war. ‘Nik said Sam was a murderer but he wouldn't murder me unless Nik told him to.' She never knew whether to believe him.