The Gangland War (7 page)

It began modestly. In the early days, he was more bumbling crook than master criminal. In 1992, Mokbel was convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice, after a clumsy bid two years earlier to bribe a County Court judge was undone in a police sting. He was trying to shop for a ‘bent judge' who would give an associate a suspended sentence for drug trafficking. Typically, he wanted to pay the bribe in a mixture of cash and drugs.

Why he would imagine a judge would be interested in drugs is anybody's guess, although it was rumoured that he had provided some court staff with drugs in the hope they would be useful contacts some day. It was his version of networking.

Mokbel and two others were arrested as he handed over $2000 as the first payment of $53,000 that was supposed to have gone to the supposedly corrupt judge. Part of the ‘agreed' payment was to be made in cocaine.

In 1998, he was convicted over amphetamine manufacturing but beat the charge on appeal. His lawyers successfully argued he should not have been charged with amphetamine trafficking when the drug he was handling was pseudoephedrine — a drug that could be used to make amphetamines.

People who had known him in prison remembered Mokbel as ‘cunning and a fast learner'. The main lesson he learned was to ensure he insulated himself from hands-on drug dealing and use only middlemen he could trust.

Even in prison he craved the good life, bribing catering staff for extra food and a steady supply of alcohol. He also had access to smuggled mobile phones to maintain hands-on control of his business interests.

Police say he was one of the first of the major drug dealers to move into the designer pill industry, pressing tablets for the nightclub crowd.

According to the United Nations, Australia has the highest use of ecstasy per capita in the world and the second highest amphetamines use. Mokbel could cater for both markets, manufacturing speed in Australia and importing ecstasy from Europe. And for his top-shelf clients, he smuggled cocaine from Mexico.

He had pill presses hidden in Coburg and Brooklyn. A consummate networker, he developed his own team, which included an industrial chemist, rogue police, a locksmith, dock-workers, jockeys, trainers, a pill press repairer, distributors and cargo bonds officials. He had used two brothers as local speed lab cooks to make amphetamines, but also sourced drugs from Sydney.

His profits jumped from large to massive. Convinced he was born lucky, Mokbel started to spend $20,000 a week on Tattslotto. It was more than a Saturday night interest. First division wins and big plunges on the track helped launder drug money into punter's dividends. (Some of his laundering efforts were less successful. It was rumoured he left millions hidden in a large washing machine but that the cash mysteriously disappeared after an unwelcome late-night visit.)

No drug trafficker, no matter how powerful, can work alone and Mokbel was to develop an extensive underworld network, although his contact list has shrunk somewhat due to the gangland war. Among his associates were Nik Radev (killed in April 2003), Willie Thompson (July 2003), Michael Marshall (October 2003), Andrew Veniamin (March 2004), Lewis Moran (March 2004), and Mario Condello (February 2006).

He grew close to Veniamin after the sawn-off gunman took him to hospital after he was bashed in Carlton in November 2002. It was rumoured that Condello persuaded Mokbel to
attend the crime conference that resulted in him being bashed on Radev's instructions.

When Veniamin was shot dead in a Carlton restaurant, Mokbel placed a death notice in the
Herald Sun
that read: ‘To a friend I haven't known for very long, you were a true friend … will be sadly missed.'

At the funeral, Mokbel was the first to kiss the body lying in an open coffin. Members of the Victoria Police Purana taskforce suspected Mokbel was involved in some of the killings, employing paid hit men to fire the bullets. While some say he was the puppet-master, police lacked evidence of his involvement, at least initially. As Mokbel's wealth and profile grew, so did the interest of drug squad detectives. Two police investigations into him failed, but a third, Operation Kayak, set up in 2000, began to track the activities of the massive drug dealer.

It would be a trusted insider who worked as a police informer who would destroy him. The informer, (who would flee the country only to be arrested, much later, in Amsterdam in late 2007) became an ethical standards department source and helped expose corruption within the drug squad.

The extremely persuasive informer was a born con man turned gifted double agent. He was a businessman who thought nothing of spending $5000 on a night out. A police profile showed he spent $80,000 in twelve months on hire cars, and $150,000 on air fares. He had 30 aliases, and was one of the biggest drug movers in Melbourne. After he was arrested with two kilograms of cocaine in August 2000, he agreed to turn informer and became an enthusiastic double agent.

The man knew most of Melbourne's major drug dealers but also had high-profile associates, including Channel 7's Naomi Robson, then the glamorous host of the
Today Tonight
current affairs program.

The informer bragged to police and crooks about his relationship with Robson, claiming she was his girlfriend, but at no time during the protracted investigation was she observed or recorded with the man and there were no suggestions she was involved in drugs.

Robson explained on air shortly after Mokbel fled Australia: ‘I caught up with him (the informer), usually in the company of others on a handful of occasions over a couple of months and I decided I didn't want to take it any further.'

Once the informer took police inside the secret world of Tony Mokbel, they were able to establish the unprecedented size of the empire.

First there was his fake, or pseudo, ecstasy business. Using locally produced amphetamines mixed with other available drugs, he pressed millions of tablets. He told his friends he made them for $3 a pill and sold them for $12 to $14. You didn't need an MBA from Harvard to know that it was a massive profit margin while it lasted.

He imported hundreds of thousands of MDMA ecstasy tablets from Europe, paying $4 and selling for $17 in minimum 1000 lots. Still not satisfied at quadrupling his money, he would sometimes crush the pills and re-press them at half-strength to double his profits.

In late 2000, the informer said, Mokbel was part of a team importing 500,000 ecstasy tablets although he said his normal shipments were around 75,000 tablets. The load arrived in a container ship and cleared Melbourne docks just before Christmas.

Around the same time, Mokbel wanted to open a licensed restaurant under his own name but his criminal record was a slight problem. He tried to use high profile referees. For one of them, it was a ticking time bomb that would blow up seven years later.

In March 2007 Kelvin Thomson, the Labor Federal member for Wills, resigned as Shadow Attorney General after it was revealed he had given Mokbel a generous reference in 2000 — long after Tony had first been convicted of drug trafficking.

He said he was unaware of Mokbel's background when he gave him the reference for a liquor licence.

It read in part, ‘Mr Mokbel is making a significant contribution to the community and employing a substantial number of people … I urge you to take into account Mr Mokbel's last year of unblemished conduct, his commitment to family and his successful establishment as a local businessman in making your decision concerning his application.'

The application failed. Kelvin Thomson said he could not recall meeting Mokbel.

Another referee for the application was former drug squad detective Ray Dole, who was then the liquor licensing sergeant for Brunswick. Dole wrote that Mokbel was ‘of reformed habits and is making a worthwhile contribution to society.' This must have come as a surprise to the drug squad, which was investigating Mokbel for trafficking.

After the application failed, Mokbel put his licensed premises and gaming facilities in other people's names and got back to concentrating on his core business. He planned a three million pill importation worth more than $50 million in March or April 2001. It is not known if it landed.

Always keen to explore new drug markets, Mokbel bought 80,000 LSD tablets for $5 a tablet, later being told by a colleague he had been ripped off.

Over an eight-month period in 2000, he made fifteen deposits in just one bank account, ranging from $10,200 to $125,000 for a total of $600,000.

For Mokbel, it was a glorified Christmas club account.

He would lend associates large sums of money knowing that he could call it back with no records ever being kept.

In August 2001, Mokbel was finally arrested over importing barrels of the chemical ephedrine to make an estimated 40 million amphetamine-based pseudo-ecstasy tablets. Police estimated the 550 kilograms of the chemical, once turned into pills, would have had a street value of $2 billion.

The battler from Moreland High had turned himself into the equal of a multi-national corporation.

But while Mokbel's arrest over the ephedrine importation made headlines, the charges didn't stick and were later dropped by lawyers from the Director of Public Prosecution's office. The case against Mokbel and several other major drug investigations, were compromised when a small group of drug squad detectives were found to be corrupt. The men whose word would have to be believed by juries were themselves facing charges or had already been convicted.

But in the Mokbel case it must have been a close decision. Mokbel spoke to an informer about the shipment, not only declaring when it arrived, but providing a sample that proved to be identical with the container load of chemicals. It was clearly a Mokbel-run operation. But the key witness — the high-flyer, who had flown overseas — would not be found to give evidence until much later.

While police lost their main case, separate charges of trafficking 5000 ecstasy tablets, and trafficking amphetamines and cocaine remained.

IT WAS the beginning of the end for Mokbel. His business assets were frozen after his arrest and were managed by the National Australia Bank, which had loaned him millions for his questionable property developments.

Without regular cash injections from his drug operations, the loans could not be serviced and his empire collapsed.

Federal police also charged Mokbel over importing three kilograms of cocaine from Mexico, an enterprise that Mokbel dismissed as ‘just rent money'. Rent money or not, it was a compelling case. Even his lawyers advised him to plead guilty to get a reduced sentence.

But the punter was keen to back the long shot. Mokbel knew that many big drug cases had been delayed because some drug squad detectives had been charged with corruption. He pleaded not guilty and in 2002 was bailed after twelve months in jail. He was to report twice daily at a local police station, but at one stage had the conditions altered so he could take his children to Gold Coast theme parks. Naturally, he stayed at his own idea of an adventure playground, Jupiters Casino.

Two of the police involved in Operation Kayak, Stephen Paton and Malcolm Rosenes, were later jailed over drug trafficking charges. Rosenes bought some of his drugs, through an informer, from Tony Mokbel.

During the long court delays, Mokbel informally approached detectives offering a deal. He would plead guilty and guarantee two other drug dealers would also plead if they received only two years each. Then, he explained, all those nasty corruption allegations would disappear. It would be business as usual.

But there were no deals and one of the traffickers was sentenced to five years and the second to eleven.

During the trial, Mokbel remained relaxed — even to the point of appearing cocky — a puzzling performance considering his defence veered from ludicrous to laughable.

Certainly there were rumours that Mokbel had bought a juror, an allegation almost certainly put about by the accused man himself in a bid to abort the trial.

But just days before the jury was sent out to consider its verdict, the trial judge, Justice Bill Gillard, dismissed one of the jurors and told the remaining thirteen that their former colleague had done ‘something today which compromised his position'. He told them he had also observed things weeks earlier ‘which also caused this court a little bit of concern'.

But with the trial close to complete, Mokbel looked a beaten man. Either he knew his dream run was over or he had learned even more disturbing news: Tony Mokbel, the hands-off drug dealer, was under investigation for murder by the Purana gangland taskforce. Mokbel was given copies of statements that confirmed he was a main target of the Purana taskforce over his role in underworld killings.

The statements were not from a bit player who could easily be discredited, they were from a hit man who claimed Mokbel was the eye of the underworld storm.

The hit man known as The Runner worked for Carl Williams but he also told police he was employed by Mokbel.

These words, taken from The Runner's secret statements and passed to Mokbel, were the ones that convinced Tony his time in Australia was up.

The Runner was the career armed robber Williams had recruited when they were both in Port Phillip Prison's high security Swallow Unit in 2001–2002. This is what he revealed:

‘Tony Mokbel came into the unit when he was on remand for drug charges. I hadn't had any dealing(s) with Tony before he came into the unit. After a period of time Tony became part of our crew; we used to eat together and occasionally drink alcohol. I was working in the kitchen at the time and used to smuggle food out for Tony as he loved his food.'

Over this time Tony and I became friends. I helped Tony with a dispute he had with another prisoner. I also managed to
smuggle in a mobile phone for him whilst he was in Penhyine Unit. The mobile was later found by guards outside Penhyine unit near one of the cell windows. Tony told me later that he had thrown the phone out the window as he heard the guards were doing a search.'