The Gangland War (48 page)

Two things stick in her mind. One is that he told her that when he was a child in Bulgaria, he pushed an old man from a third-storey balcony just to see what it was like to see someone die. The other was his boasting that when he died, everybody would know about it. As he predicted, his murder and his funeral made front-page headlines. Radev's gangster friends buried him in a gold-plated casket worth $30,000. But when Sylvia took their daughter to see his grave later, there was no headstone and the plot was covered in weeds. They left a cigarette on the grave and haven't been back.

MARIA Arena was in the kitchen with her younger son when she heard the shot that ended 25 years of marriage. By the time they reached her Joe he was dead, shot from behind as he put out the garbage bin.

It was midnight. The Arenas had just got home to Bayswater, an outer suburb in the foothills east of Melbourne, from a wedding in Footscray. Maybe the killer had known where they'd been, knew when their Toyota would pull into the drive.

A year before, there had been another big Italian wedding when the Arenas' daughter Lisa married. Almost certainly, among the 450 guests at the lavish reception in Brunswick was someone who plotted her husband's execution. That thought still gnaws at Maria.

Of all the wedding guests, those who ate and drank and kissed the proud parents, only a few comforted the stricken widow and children after Joe's funeral. The rest, she said bitterly in a newspaper interview at the time, ‘dropped off like flies', as if the whole family had been buried with him. If that is the Calabrian way, she said then, she wanted no part of it.

That was nearly twenty years ago. Time has dulled her anger but hasn't solved her husband's murder. Police believe Giuseppe ‘Joe' Arena was tied to the Calabrian crime group, the Honoured Society. As an insurance broker and financial adviser, they say, he helped launder cash for marijuana growers in Griffith and Mildura.

Police say Arena was anointed by the secret society's Godfather, Liborio Benvenuto, as his successor. But, after Benvenuto's death in June 1988, rivals jostling for power in the society decided to kill him and take over. Police think Arena, only 50, sold up his moderate business interests after Benvenuto's death as if he expected a fresh source of income.

But his widow disputes that he was setting up as the new Godfather: ‘He might have known these people [the Honoured Society] but it was only through business clients.'

Nothing about Maria Arena or the way she lives hints that her husband was anything other than what she claims: a hard-working family man who had paid off a house and made small investments. ‘We were comfortable, but a lot of our friends had bigger houses than we did,' she says.

Certainly, Maria seems an ordinary suburban grandmother. She opens the door of her small unit wearing a striped pinafore over sensible trousers and a blouse. She looks as if she has been baking cakes in case the grandkids visit.

A gangster's wife? It seems ridiculous. She doesn't fit any stereotypes. Not the faded glamour girl with the big hair, the winter tan, plastic surgery and loud jewellery. Nor the traditional Italian widow in black. She looks like a middle-aged department store assistant — which she is, at a shopping centre up the road.

Maria Arena is short, in her late 50s, with golden-brown eyes, rosy cheeks and fair skin. Her mother's family was from Subiaco, near Rome, and her father was Yugoslav, so she is not tied by blood or custom to the tightknit Calabrian clans she married
into. Having arrived in Australia as a five-year-old, she speaks English as if born here. Her children have Anglo names. None of them now has much to do with the Calabrian community.

The way she tells it, her marriage was just another modest migrant success story — apart from the ending. It started when she was seventeen, and began work for an Italian-run concreting firm at Lilydale that needed an office girl fluent in both English and Italian. Joe, eight years older, was her boss's cousin. He worked at a cafe where she went for coffee, and nature took its course. Within a year, she was engaged, pregnant and married, in that order. They were to have three children in four years.

They opened a dress shop that failed. ‘Joe worked three jobs to pay off the debts so he wouldn't be known as a bankrupt,' Maria says. He worked shifts in a factory, mowed lawns and started selling insurance and real estate on the side. They tried a fruit shop, but Joe was so good with insurance and real estate that he took it on full-time.

‘He had the gift of the gab and he was likeable,' she says. ‘He always had time for old people and they trusted him.' Trust was vital: many older migrants spoke little English and were illiterate. They trusted Arena to handle their affairs and he became an influential figure in the Italian community.

Maria fetches a framed snap of Joe. It shows a dark, nattily dressed man with the signature smile that led the media to dub him ‘the friendly Godfather'. He was so gentle, his widow says, that the only time he spanked their younger son — for setting fire to the garage — ‘he felt so sick about it he went to bed'.

She tells other stories. Once, a jealous colleague at the insurance company he worked for tried to undermine him by complaining about his spelling. The workmate received a memo from the boss saying, ‘If you were as good at your job as Joe Arena is at his, you wouldn't have to worry about spelling.' The rest of the memo was deliberately misspelt to make a point.

Jealousy is a recurring theme. Maria doesn't speculate about who ordered Joe's murder but she suggests he was too popular for his own good — that maybe others thought he was currying favour with certain people.

But he did not just inspire jealousy, he could be jealous himself. Asked if he had ever been in trouble, Maria gets tears in her eyes. ‘We had a bad patch in our marriage once,' she quavers. It is the only reference she makes to the fact Joe was convicted of manslaughter in 1976 for killing a man he thought was her lover. He served two years in jail.

He was, she says, an intelligent man whose life was governed by his lack of education. Had he been educated, ‘he could have been a lawyer or some other profession'. She means he would also still be alive.

Maria says she is not rich. She lives on her small wage and rent from an investment property. Joe's superannuation is invested to leave to her children. Her greatest pleasure now is to be ‘Nonna' to her grandchildren.

The youngest is only four. He is bold and cheerful and reminds her of the grandfather he will never know. ‘Sometimes I look in his eyes and say, “Are you in there, Joe Arena?”'

Her eyes are bright with tears again.

Hardnosed detectives gaped
When Garde-Wilson answered
the door with the snake
draped around her neck.

 

IT'S lunchtime in the legal quarter and Zarah Garde-Wilson, a country girl before she turned herself into a city lawyer, looks after the livestock first, the way they do things back home on the farm.

A little earlier, she had taken a frozen mouse from a refrigerator hidden in a sleek cupboard in her sleek office in the heart of the Melbourne CBD. Now she crouches elegantly beside a long glass tank under the window, long legs tucked under her on the gleaming black floor, and works the latch on the lid.

Inside on a bed of litter is a fake rock, hollowed out underneath. She lifts it, speaking softly. To anyone eavesdropping on this private moment, it sounds as if she is saying ‘shivers' … and anyone who hasn't seen her pet might well shiver when they do. In fact, she's saying ‘Chivas', a play on the name of her favourite top-shelf liquor.

In fact, the object of the glamorous Garde-Wilson's affections is a snake — a Queensland scrub python, sometimes called a diamond python because of the shape of the head and the vivid yellow pattern on the dark gun-metal skin. ‘Hello, darling,' she murmurs, but the sleepy snake maintains the right to silence.

It's the perfect in-joke. Here, across the street from the back door of the Victorian Supreme Court, lives a cold-blooded reptile that preys on vermin: the ideal pet for a criminal lawyer whose clients, past and present, include several notorious names from Melbourne's underworld war. A lawyer whose own double-barrelled name has become entwined with gangsters' in the public imagination — and whose supposed
femme fatale
persona has scriptwriters sharpening their pencils and their wits.

The farmer's daughter in Garde-Wilson likes animals, but you won't catch her being gooey about them. Where she comes from in rural New South Wales, snakes were shot rather than petted. ‘King browns would get their heads blown off if they came near the house,' she observes with a faint smile. She admits that she used to get quite fond of half-tame goannas when she worked a holiday job at Fraser Island to help pay her way through law school in the 1990s. But she says what she really wants is a cobra and maybe that tells you something. The cobra is exotic, fast and deadly — the reptile world's version of a hooded killer.

Of course, Chivas the sleepy python isn't venomous and is relatively harmless except to rats and mice. Not that her mistress would give her live rodents. ‘Her skin is like silk. Cornered rats will fight and they'd scratch her,' she explains. ‘Besides, it would be cruel.' To the rats and mice, that is. No matter what impressions strangers might form of Zarah Garde-Wilson the ‘gangland lawyer', she is not cruel. The opposite, in fact.

She bought the snake from a pet shop at the Victoria Market — a shop stocking spiders, lizards and other exotic pets of the sort that police often find when they raid drug dealers' houses.
Amateur psychologists might see the impulse to buy the snake as being linked to the sort of feelings that makes a ‘nice girl' take in an edgy, tattooed loner with a taste for drugs and violence.

Whether the pet snake is an ironic joke, a prop or just provides quiet, low-maintenance company in her owner's smart but eerily spartan office, is hard to say. But the reptile occasionally earns her keep. Once, when the Victoria Police anti-gangster taskforce, codenamed
Purana
, came calling, hardnosed detectives gaped when Garde-Wilson answered the door with the snake draped around her neck — ‘she was like Eve,' one quipped later.

The hyphen with the python stole the scene.

Of course, sexy-woman-with-snake is so like something from a James Bond film that it verges on an Austin Powers caricature, and Garde-Wilson must know that. A cynic might see the python as a theatrical touch to go with her heavily stylised look — long hair often dyed jet black to match the slinky clothes that display her lithe bikini-model frame and big bust in ways the legal profession notices but has increasingly not approved of.

Of course, a lot of perfectly respectable people keep unusual pets, though not usually at the office. Where Garde-Wilson lives, in an inner suburb of Melbourne, she has another pet — one that
can
bite. It's a tan pit bull terrier bitch she calls Taser, after the stun-gun police use. ‘Good for security,' she says cryptically. She rarely uses a dozen words if two will do. And she knows the value of silence — a conversation with her can be a series of pauses as she weighs up what to say, if anything at all.

A client gave her the pit bull bitch in lieu of paying a hefty bill. This doesn't happen much for tax lawyers or patent attorneys and it tells you something about Garde-Wilson's clients and how close she is to them. It also shows she's a soft touch for a hard luck story, and has a tendency to befriend those she sees as in need of help. Whether they all repay her kindness is a moot point. But, regardless of the fact that she got Taser in lieu of an
unpaid fee, she is fond of the dog — one of few friends she can trust, it seems.

Some are dead, some are in jail and others have faded away in the aftermath of the underworld war that transfixed the nation, earning Melbourne a backhanded accolade as some sort of latter-day Chicago where opposing crime ‘families' hire gunmen to mow each other down.

Talking about her dog, Zarah drops her guard a little. ‘He (the client) showed me a picture on his phone of this little pup and that was it,' she says. As she speaks, the watchful coolness vanishes and her poker face breaks into a big smile. Cruella turns into Pollyanna as you glimpse the freckly, country kid pictured in her boarding school year book in 1995 — a diligent girl determined to study law, escape the pressure to marry a suitable boy on the land (‘you know: “Fred” next door,' she grimaces) so joining the slow slide into genteel rural poverty she saw around her as she grew up in the New England area of New South Wales.

She turned her back on all that by the time she left school. Now, like her python, she is a long way from home. She still thinks she made the right choice — but others are not so sure.

LET'S get it straight: Zarah Garde-Wilson has not asked for this, to be the subject of a story that inevitably shoves her back into the spotlight, a target of public curiosity, professional criticism and private gossip too salacious and nasty to repeat.

In fact, when a stranger calls, she is at first not just cautious but hostile, and with good reason: her career is in the balance. What she says or does could weigh against her.

When speaking to the author in 2006, she was waiting on the result of an appeal by the Director of Public Prosecutions against the leniency of a conviction-without-jail she had previously received for contempt of court. She was charged for refusing to testify against two men accused of killing her boyfriend, on the
grounds she feared for her life — fears that a judge acknowledged were not groundless, given the identities of the two notorious men implicated in her boyfriend's murder.

Still pending at that stage were charges over an unregistered pistol that a criminal-turned-informer claims he picked up from her place. Then there were four counts of giving false information to the Australian Crime Commission. No wonder she seems jittery when the author comes calling.