The Underworld Podcast - Melbourne's Gangland Killings: The Smiling Assassin Carl Williams w/ guest Sami Shah

Episode Date: December 22, 2020

Danny is out this week, and Sean is joined by comedian Sami Shah. He came from nowhere to become the murderous king of Melbourne's 'underbelly.' But how did Carl Williams, a "shelf stacker - and not a good one," lead the Australian city's long established Calabrian and Irish mafias into its biggest-ever war? And how did cops, and an informant named 'Lawyer X,' stoke the flames? Sean is joined by writer and comedian Sami Shah to explore the Melbourne Gangland Killings. Patreon.com/TheUnderworldPodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And a little caveat if you hear our jailers wandering around outside the door, that's why you can hear some background noise. Yeah, so it's just a few days from Christmas, a time for giving and receiving joy and probably a bit of drunkenness and repressed family tensions. So why not help us receive some joy at the Patreon? We've got a bunch of interviews coming up for patrons, including from Mexico and a follow-up from this episode,

I think will be really awesome. So check us out at Patreon slash the underworld podcast. Soon we'll have an episode from here with hopefully some reported stuff about Kiwi gangs, crimes, politics, all of that stuff. But today we're hopping across the Tasman Sea to Australia and an era that shocked Melbourne in the early 2000s. And my guest is someone today who knows Melbourne pretty well because he lives there, for one. He's sitting in Danny's chair and he's like 10,000 miles away from New York. It's writer, comedian, actor. Is there more? Sammy Shaw?

No, I think that should be it. That should cover it pretty much. I think actors definitely a strong one. I don't think have much done much of that, but yes, thank you. Okay, cool, cool. So, Sammy, tell us a bit more about yourself. Like, you've lived in Australia for quite some time now, right? It's been almost a little over eight and a half years.

So I got here in 2012 and early 2012. And I spent the first three, four years in WA, and then I moved across to Melbourne. So I've been in Melbourne for five years now, almost six. at this point. And yeah, and being a, being someone, I used to be a journalist in Pakistan and I used to be, you know, very much into, just a person who's a bit of a nerd and a geek when it comes to things like crime and true crime and all that. So for me, coming to Melbourne, one of the first things that kind of immersed myself into was the true crime history of the city. It's just

something I always find fascinating. Is it, is it quite a, is it quite a rough city? I mean, it sounds like it from the stuff I've been researching. So there was definitely, period when it was. There was definitely a period in the early 2000s in the late 90s particularly when there was a massive spike in a mafia-related crime issues. There's still issues

with biker gangs or biker gangs as they call in the rest of the world and you know every now and then of course you'll have some and there's a smaller gang activity. The same way there is in most places in the world but you know it's definitely

and if you ask Melbourneians because a lot of them is spoiled by having lived here their whole lives. They'll go, oh, my God, there's so much crime. And there's African gangs everywhere, which is just a bunch of teenagers from African backgrounds hanging out. You know, there's no African gangs. So it's just stupid things like that. But overall, when you come from a country with properly high crime rates,

you're like, this place is pretty much heaven. So it's Melbourneian, right? Just so I've got that correct. All right, well, we're going to go back to. 2010, April 2010 for the start of this. So Obama's the president, Haiti's just had a massive earthquake and those Chilean miners.

You remember them? They got saved. Yeah. So across in Australia, the bloodiest era in the country's organised crime era is about to come to a close in the way it began with extreme violence. Carl Williams,

this paunchy, so-called smiling assassin, he's sitting down at his prison desk to read the paper. One of his cellmates, Matthew Johnson, this hulking, bald criminal with a history of violence, walks up behind Williams, and he just casually beats him to death with a stem of a workout bike. So that's where this story ends, really.

The Aussie presses in uproar, and they call it in typical style a bashing death. A few grisly blows, one of the maddest and weirdest characters in the mob history of Melbourne, Australia's biggest city, is dead, and with him a police corruption case that rocks the entire country for years. So before I started researching this, I had pretty much no idea about Australian organised crime at all.

I knew there were connections with the Italian Mafia, and I knew about the Aussie bikies, the biker gangs you just mentioned, actually. They were shipping meth over from Southeast Asian kingpins. But beyond Ned Kelly, Chopper and Steve Smith, I didn't know much about crime on Aussie soil. There was a cricket joke in there, so sorry to our American listeners. And another thing, Carl Williams,

so we're getting into this episode. This guy who kind of came out of nowhere to run Melbourne's Underbelly, as people called it at the time. He's got exactly the same name as my dad, by the way. And his dad, who's this old-time drug dealer crook called George Williams, that's my dad's dad's name too. So, yeah, I remember we got stuck in JFK once on holiday to New York years and years ago, and my dad was saying something about cops having him on a blacklist at customs or saying.

So unless my old man's a liar and a drug baron or something, I reckon that was maybe because of this guy. Plus, I don't think the Americans can really tell ours and the Aussies accents apart anyway. So, yeah, Carl and George Williams, that's pretty weird. It's definitely the most Carl Williams, particularly, as we'll find out, is, you know, basically a psychopath in terms of the amount of people he killed and stuff. It's the most benign and mild serial killer mass murderer name in history, I think. No one ever suspects a guy named Carl Williams of having killed lots of people and selling drugs. Yeah, I mean, and to look at the guy, right, he doesn't exactly look like your classical description of a kind of hood.

I mean, Australia's, yeah. He looks very much like a real estate agent, you know, and like a crap one like that, not even a good one. Right. So I'm going to set the scene that, I mean, with Melbourne, it's the capital of Victoria, which is, I mean, I guess it's probably the world's greatest sporting city, right? I mean, you've got the Aussie rules and the cricket, you've got the Aussie Open Tennis, the Grand Prix. It definitely takes sports very, very seriously. It's also the most livable city in Australia and the second most livable city in the world. This was all pre-COVID, so I don't know where the standings are now.

What's it like there at the moment? Because I know you had some issues with guards at the hotels, having some happy times with the people in quarantine. It turns out that was nonsense. It actually never happened. And it was just a, yeah, so the whole thing about a security guard having sex with someone in quarantine was just a, someone had made a joke on social media, and Rupert Murdoch's journalism, journalists who work for News Corp over here,

are incapable of understanding satire. It's just, it's that part of their brain just never developed. And so they just assumed that it was real and ran it as a news story for, it's such a prolonged period of time that everyone's at all right of believing it until other news outlets had to do proper investigation and go not. this is just nonsense like you guys are complete idiots so yeah no it's spread because of just you know bad um handling off quarantine because of privatization and and all those other basic issues that are ruining the world yeah um but no we were we were in seven months of lockdown and now we're

out and we have zero cases now for the over a month and a half so you know we put in the hard yards but it worked yeah and i'm sitting here in oakland about to come out of quarantine myself so this is another country that's done pretty well But that's such a shame that that that story wasn't true. I thought it's like the most Australian story ever. Oh, yeah, absolutely. We were all thrilled about it. We were all, you know, we're like, if this is why we're in seven months lockdown,

at least it was worth it for someone, you know? But no, it turns out the whole thing is nonsense. Oh, God. Well, I mean, in the case people don't know, Australia is pretty bloody big. So the biggest state Western Australia is about quarter of the size of the entire US. and I think Victoria is twice the size of New York State. So Australia is big, basically.

And I remember when I was in Burma covering drug crime out there, like the cops were sending me from Australia that they have such a hard time catching anything because you can pretty much just land your boat anywhere on the coast and there's just too much of it for anyone to cover the whole thing. So, yeah, I think, I mean, there's a big sort of meth epidemic in Australia right now from what I'm reading, right? There has been for a while.

There's ice is just because it's relatively cheap to make. And, you know, there is increasing poverty, which is largely one of the reasons why sometimes ice addiction takes place, as well as, you know, an increase in opiate addiction and stuff. We're seeing kind of a upwards trend in ice addiction, the way we did, the way they did in America in maybe, I'd say, the early 2000s, and they didn't get under control there. and it doesn't seem like we're doing a good job of getting it under control here either. Right, right.

And we're going to get into a bit of that further down the story. But, yeah, I mean, Melbourne, to kind of tell you what Melbourne was like, it was a bit like New York in the early 20th century by the sounds of it. It was like a city of immigrants, mostly from Europe, coming to take over the land of indigenous people that the British had committed terrible acts of cruelty to. So basically the same as America, I guess. And in 1922, there's a ship called,

the raid Italia, and that rocks up at Melbourne Port, and it unloads a bunch of Italian migrants looking for a better life, so the story goes. It's also carrying three members of the Calabria and Drangeta Mafia, and they quickly set up shop in their new home. So just like there were five criminal families in the US, the Gambinos and the bananas and so on, there were seven in Australia, and they mostly made their money at Melbourne's fruit and veg markets, extorting local sellers and making them pay pizza or a levy on their food. So these were nice guys, and they also sold weed, good old weed. So this group of families, they just get more and more powerful,

and Australia in its modern form is a pretty new place, so the infrastructure can't keep up with these old suited and booted mobsters from southern Italy have been learning their trade for ages. They call this Amalgam, the Honoured Society, by the way, which is one of the Italian names of the Mafia in Calabria. And they're still, from what I can see, they're still in partial control of the black markets today. Yeah.

So it wasn't just Italians. No, sorry, I didn't interrupt you, but there's definitely suburbs of Melbourne that are still, you know, have a, if not as heavy, but definitely a mild kind of level of control by the Calabrian mafia here. I don't know if, like, if people even know about the, like, about Calabria that much and how powerful the mafia still is there compared to other parts of Italy. Like, we always hear about Sicily and stuff, but if you go to Calabria, apparently, it's an extremely powerful organization. there where you can't even mention it without getting into trouble. And the reason I know this is because my ex was a Calabrian Italian and her family, which lives here, although most of them were born, you know, the parents and everyone, aunts and uncles were all born in Calabria and then came across in the 60s and the 50s.

They are all still tangentially related to the Calabrian Mafia in terms of, you know, every now and then boxes of cheese and olive oils, will just pop up in their homes and be like, oh, someone brought a gift and it fell off the back of a truck and you're like, oh boy. And so you really do, I mean, it's really kind of a strong presence still today then. I mean, it's definitely here. It's just not, you know, and we've had a few weird crime things. There was, pardon, sorry, I was prior to this, I just moved suburbs, but I used to live in a suburb called Brunswick. And Brunswick is where some of the Carlton crew shootings and killings that we hear about. in a bit, no doubt, took place.

And the main thing over there now is that there still is, like some shops, particularly the Italian shops, do have to pay kickbacks and protection money to the mafia. There have been wiretaps of people, you know, talking about how they control the streets of Melbourne. And a few, I think about a year and a half ago or a year ago, a flower seller was accidentally gunned down in a hit that was meant to get someone else and they got the wrong guy and that was still a mafia related hit but you know it's one of the things like this is one case that took place out of you know a year of crime which had nothing do with them so they're definitely a diminished presence and that's largely down to the melbourne gangland

killings okay um so i'm going to do a little shout out for some of the reading material that i've gone through uh there's a really good documentary called dead famous which is goes into all of the history that we're going to get into um and then someone's made this great blog called mafia on australia which is like this deal like real deep granular look into all this stuff going back like a century um and then while i'm giving a few shoutouts adam shan this true crime writer uh in australia he's done a book called big shots about the gangland killings um he's written about mark chopper reed who's this kind of psycho gangster that people might remember from the film of eric banner um he's written about car william so he's really like the authority on this stuff uh and he's written some great books

Anyway, so you've got Italian mobsters ripping off markets, and there are Irish gangs as well, and they're based mainly down on the waterfront, where the painters and docker's unions are based. And so like everywhere, all the dodgy shit's coming in on the boat, so the real scraps were had down there. But there seemed to be a high value on honour, at least the kind of honour that means you don't just gun people down all day long. This is relative, of course. And so this honour society is growing, mostly in Sydney and Belmont. And these cities are melting pots for people all over the world. When Godfather Domenico, the Pope, Italiano, and Antonio the Toad, Barbaro, both die of natural causes.

I know, right? They die in 1962, and it sparks a gang war for control of Melbourne. And I was going to say, like, get used to the nicknames, because this being an Aussie episode, almost everyone's got one, right? Well, it's not really a clever nickname. Australians are notorious for just, you know, shortening every word and adding an O at the end of it and considering that their work done for the day. So instead of like, you know, Sammy, it'll be Samo. Or instead of having a banana, it'll be having a banal or something, you know, like just

unimaginative nonsense like that. So the fact that they actually went to the limits of actually calling that guy towed means someone put in time, effort, concentration, thought. and they came up with that, which means he should be flattered, and that was pretty much everyone checked out for the day after that. Do you reckon someone tried to make the argument that he should be flattered to be called the Toad? Well, he obviously allowed it, and this is a mafia boss, so we're assuming for some reason he thought it was okay.

I'm not sure why. True, true. Maybe he's just really enlightened and he knows himself. He's been getting on that therapy. Yeah, that's what they're doing for the love of therapy, yes. Definitely, yeah, yeah. So at this 60s kind of mini-gang war, the media calls it the Victoria Market murders. It seems like shotguns were the favoured weapons, especially from behind,

which is supposedly a traditionally disrespectful death in Calabrian history. After all of it, this family called the Benvenuto's comes out on top, led by the patriarch Liborio, who's this moustachio kind of pint-sized Bert Reynolds-looking market stall owner. This guy rules like a king and his daughter, Angela marries Alfonso Muratorre, who's the son of Vincenzo Moratore, who was shot dead in the battle. So they lived down the street and there was relative peace in the underbelly for a while. Not far away across town, another crime dynasty is being formed. Louis Moran and Graham Kinnaburg, who's called the Munster from Melbourne's Irish contingent,

were powers from the Painters and Dockers Union, which was known throughout the 60s and 70s for a ton of criminal stuff, and it led to a Royal Commission. It's a bit like how the Yakuza started out, actually, similar to that. We've done a number of episode on that. But Moran and Kinnaberg built a small criminal empire and powered up with the Colton crew, another local Italian mafia,

which was enemies with the honor society. So you were mentioned in a minute ago, right? They're based in this kind of area that's known as Little Italy, apparently. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of suburbs in Melbourne that have an Italian communities there, an Italian settlement over here. Brunswick is one of them

there's Carlton there's a lot where the mafia gets gets his name from but you know they expand all the way out to reservoir and sunshine and all these other suburbs it's mostly the northern suburbs of Melbourne and and

and the unions back then particularly the painters and docker's union was made up of Irish you know Irish waterfront workers and then also the Italian collaborating mafia kind of people

and they worked together to kind of set up a mafia crew. That was actually largely, like the Morans that you mentioned weren't of collaborating background. They were Italians, but I don't think they were collaborators. I think they were, they were Irish, right? Yeah, that's right. They were Irish down the dots.

That's right. That's right. Yeah, they were Irish. And then you get these underbelly figures called Mike Gatto, who's going to come up bit later. And then this guy called Alphonse Gangitano, which is just really. It's a hard Ging and stop and then a soft G in the middle. Oh, I'm so sorry, Alphonse.

But so things plod along between these groups, and there's the odd sprout of violence, but mostly business is good, the pizzo's doing okay, and the factions keep mostly to themselves. Quote, the Honour Society was never quite as big as influential in Australia as people thought, says a former policeman. This guy is called Brian the Skoll Murphy. So even the cops have got pretty scary nicknames in Australia. he continues. Ben Venuto had had to cast a big shadow to maintain the status quo.

This occasionally had to be backed up by action, lest the aura of power diminish. To get the young Italians to show loyalty to him required a fear of the unknown. So he's talking to talk, but maybe not walking so many walks at this time. But Liborio dies in 1988, and instead of his son Frank, he grooms this dashing lawyer called Joseph Pino-Aquiro to take over. I looked up Pino, by the way. It just means pine tree. Oh, really? It's not quite the skull.

Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a gentleman, quite lovely nickname. Yeah, this guy's like all pinstripe suits and sort of coiffered hairdo, so he's kind of a slick, slick a side of the business. Yeah. Acquire is clever, and he knows the law and how to get around it. Liborio's no fall, basically. In 92, Revenge Murders account for Frank and Alfon's Muratore, but by and large, that's how things were paning out.

And the Honor Society and Colton Crew, they're getting along pretty much okay. It's when drugs come along really in a big way that things change. So especially with heroin and meth, you've got Vietnamese and Chinese gangs bringing them over and there's speed by the bikers. And I think it seems like the bikers are used as kind of couriers for the bigger crime syndicers, right? It seems like they're just the kind of foot soldiers or how does that kind of work? Well, I mean, yeah, basically they've got their own bikey gangs and everything

and they're not really, you know, I mean, they exist in their own world and they've got their own drug cartels and their own revenue streams and everything. But yeah, they do work with the mafia as the on the ground guys because obviously they're more intimidating, they're more violent, they've got literally giant bikes that they're ride around in. So they're, you know, they make for a good PR move. Are they big? I mean, do you see them around?

Like, do they make the news? Not really. I mean, there are suburbs again where you might see them and, and it'll be the seedy part of the suburb and stuff. But Melbourne cops have done a very good job in the last decade or so of kind of pushing a lot of this stuff out and shutting it down. And, you know, at the very least, like, you still hear about biky wars or biky fights and stuff, but it's very minimal at this point. Right, right. So the weed in Australia has mostly been dished out by the. Italians as it has been for years and what's important is that there's new party drugs so ecstasy

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We've just spoken about it, but Cole Williams kind of comes out of left field altogether, right? And a news guy told an ABC crew that, quote, Cole was a supermarket shelf stacker and not a particularly good one, but along the way he learned that there was more money in drugs. So, yeah, I mean, You've got these kind of picture-perfect gangster-looking guys on the Italian and Irish sides. There's all these suits and slick back hair and tacky jewelry, shiny shoes, the whole works.

This is especially the case of Alphonse Gantanjo, by the way, who's tall, built, fond of a suit and sunglasses combo. It'd be hard to pick him out of a Sopranos line up, basically. In fact, one cop says that, quote, The Melbourne Lot thought the Sopranos was a documentary, which is kind of what I feel about it since Danny described growing up in New York. but anyway. So there, you've got this kind of this whole scene going on, you know. I think it's quite regimented and it's full of this tradition and so-called honour.

And then this kind of weird guy just shows up. And the cops at this time, this is kind of mad, they're not really helping the scene out at all. They buy chemicals at wholesale and they sell them on the black market and they call it control delivery. I'm not really sure what their Engel is there. Basically, there's a long, history of Melbourne policing and Victoria Police.

And I'm sure it's largely the same in the whole country, which is what happens when you've got cops who don't have to deal with very intense levels of crime, that they don't really, they're not very good at that. And what ends up happening here is that they just crap at their job, you know, largely. If what's required of them is just pepper spraying and beating a whole bunch of activists trying to stop a refugee from being put, taken from one detention center to another, because that's a human rights violation. The cops are phenomenal.

They will dress up into the nines. They'll put all kinds of protective gear on, helmets and bulletproof shields and all kinds of vests and stuff. And they will pepper spray and baton beat the crap out of you. But when it came to just this, which was a fairly obvious crime story where like the names of all the major players was known. you know everyone knew who was involved who wasn't involved everyone knew where you know where to trace the money you know even carl williams who came out of nowhere a little bit was you know a fairly big figure and a well-known figure by the end of it and it took them ages to catch them it took them absolutely ages because just basic policing uh was so outside their purview so you know something like you know if you did the wire in australia it would make the American version of the wire with the Baltimore situation seem like a very successful series of arrests and very efficiently done,

whereas the Melbourne one is like a more of a bumbling kind of buffoonery exhibition. Yeah, a bumbling is like, I think, a very kind term for the cops, because we're going to get into a lot of that in a moment as well. I mean, there is actually like a wire style show about all this, right, called Underbelly. Yeah, it's quite a well-known at the time. It's not great. it's okay. There's some great acting in it, but it's very badly edited and produced and directed and stuff. And there's some bizarre choices in that. And in that they glorify the daylights out of the cops. You know, obviously it's very much a police propaganda piece where, you know, the task force piranha, which is kind of put together, is made to look like an amazing task force for these super motivated individuals who it turns out were all fictional because real cops were just that shit at it.

I mean, there's, I don't know, will you be covering the Nicola Gobbo element of this? Yeah, yeah, we're going to get to her soon. I'm going to not get there right now, but she's the perfect example of how utterly terrible the police are. Yeah, we don't have to be waiting for Gobbo. I was waiting for a reason to use that pun. Yeah, so, yeah, didn't Underbelly getting trouble for, like, following the story so down to the wire that they were actually like in contempt of court for some of these things or something I read? There's a lot of weird contempt of court rules in Australia.

So, for example, if you remember the Cardinal George Pell case that came, that was a big deal in 2019, where a Catholic cardinal with the church was accused of child abuse and then found guilty in two cases and then those were reversed later. But the entire world was reporting on it. But in Australia media outlets were not allowed to even mention him by name. because of privacy laws and stuff. So, yeah, there's a lot of weird kind of regressive, very, very out-of-date privacy laws here. Right.

I just called him Cardi P, I was saying. Yeah. So, yeah, so we've got this whole scene and this guy, this guy comes onto the scene and there's these cops. So they're doing this control delivery and they're doing this so much that the police are actually the biggest customer for Sigma at the time, which is this leading pharma firm.

as you can imagine this genius brain idea doesn't work that well and just kind of floods Melbourne with drugs I had a little note at this point saying believe it or not this is the least shit thing, the Victoria Police team in his story but Alphonse he wants to be the kind of big man in Melbourne the godfather and Jason Moran son of Lewis has other ideas and he goes to Alphonse's home for a chat, pulls a handgun and shoots Alphonse dead so there's chaos in the underbelly and the cops are pretty much pushing it along

themselves. And at the same time, there's dumpy butt-chin guy called Carl Williams's corner in the party drug scene by pressing so-called dog tablets, which is a mixture of ketamine and pseudo apparently. And they branded these pills, Fuboos or UFOs. They don't sound like a lot

of fun, to be honest, but him and his dad, George, make a packet selling it with the help of the bikeies, and they undercut the underbelly with George. And George is kind of this small-time crook, right? He's called a, the gangsters called him a shit man, which is a nobody, right? I guess you didn't need the translation. And so, Carl doesn't look like these other gangsters at all. He's kind of fat and

he's got frosted tips and sunglasses they look like they've come from some cheapo beach hut. And they call him the smiling assassin, but he, I mean, he could more accurately be called the most Bogan gangster ever. Am I getting, am I getting Bogan? You are, well done, correct, yeah. Although you might have to translate Bogan for the non-Azzi listeners. Yeah. Is it like a sort of redneck or like a hick? It's like a hick. Not even a redneck so much, it's just like a hick. And the idea is there's obviously a lot of classism involved in that.

You know, it's just someone who is very, very fine, you know, lower class in terms of financial income. And then there's the mullet and then there's the addiction to doing burnouts in a yute and eating meat pies and having VB beer for breakfast. And so, yeah, it's very much a lifestyle choice. Okay, sounds great. I think he looks a bit like a nozzy Guy Fieri, so that was where I was trying to draw the line with America. I would say Guy Fierry still has a bit of pizzazz. Carl Williams, like, if you look at his pictures, if he walked into the room with three other people, he's the one you would not notice. And I think maybe that's what kind of worked in his favour in the end, the fact that he's utterly, utterly forgettable. Yeah, he keeps wearing these kind of oversized shirts and like leather jackets I thought were cool that made me look grown up when I was. was like four two.

But like, yeah, there's a great quote from Mark Reid, by the way, Chopper, who people should definitely look up if they don't know who he has. He says, quote, to get anywhere in the criminal world, you had to fucking fight. Then along came drugs and you didn't have to be able to fight anymore. The village idiots and town mice were becoming drug laws. He sounds so upset about that. I know, I know. It's really pissed him off.

Williams is upbringing is pretty tough. He grows up in West Melbourne and gets into drugs early. Is West Melbourne bad? Is that a bad place? Not anymore, but yeah, apparently it was at one point. Long before I got. Is it kind of like hipster gentrified these days? Everything is hipster gentrified these days.

It's basically, yeah, West Melbourne is now where you would get avocado on toast, but back then I'm sure it was more frightening. Right, right. So Williams' older brother Shane dies of a heroin overdose in 97, but it doesn't seem to have put Carl off the industry at all. and when brothers Jason and Mark Moran pay Williams to do a pill job for them he doesn't mix the binding agent properly apparently and the pills just go to shit it's not clear whether he did this on purpose or by accident but you can imagine

these old grizzled docker gangsters aren't too happy with him at this point so so they set up a meeting in 99 with Williams on this little empty patch of green in a suburb an argument breaks out and Jason pulls out a 22 pistol and he threatens Williams Mark at this point orders Jason to shoot Williams in the head, but Jason instead puts one in his beer belly because he didn't know how he'd get his money back with a dead Williams. So this moment here, when he's getting shot in this tiny little park, this is when the Melbourne gangland war really kicks off in earnest.

And Williams, this cheery-faced kind of dopey-looking guy, he wants revenge. A guy who's called Mr. X, who's this underworld figure who gets in with Williams at the time and later testifies against him, going to get into him as well in the moment. He says that Williams would rant and rave about the Moran family saying, quote, I want them, I want every one of them dead and every one of their crew dead.

So I guess that's pretty clear. And they had wiretaps going on a lot of their stuff. So they had the recordings of them saying this. I don't know why they decided not to act at the time. There's another story with a bug later on, I think. One of the police puts it in a car and it causes the brake lights to flicker. Yes. But it's catching like every single thing.

It's like they've got every single thing on record at this point and no one's getting arrested at all. So yeah, it just keeps on happening. And so Williams recovers from his gunshot wound and he gets straight back to pressing those pills. Soon after cops find him and George in their house and cars asleep tucked up in bed. And his pill press is just going like the clapper's working on a job worth over 15 million Australian dollars apparently. I think it's like 75 US cents to an Aussie dollars. Yeah, that's right. So that's a decent amount of money for a little homespun pill press.

The police obviously they throw Williams in jail and he meets a guy called Victor Brinkat. So this guy is called the runner because he does bank jobs with his getaway car park miles away and he runs to it instead of getting straight in the car. Again, it sounds very Aussie to me. Like it sounds like a terrible, terrible plan, but for some reason it didn't work as a schick. Like it became his thing, you know? No, the thing I do is I go on foot and then get it. in a car. That's great. Yeah. And they're like, wow, this guy's the riddler of Melville.

Genius. But I mean, this guy is going to be involved in a very big way. So William's offered this guy 70 grand to offer them around brothers. And soon after he gets out on bail himself and then all hell breaks loose. Right. So Jason Moran at this time, he swerves his first wave of violence because he's actually chucked in jail himself over a massive nightclub brawl. But his brother, not so much. So there have been a bunch of killing. at this point, Drugwell drive-by, his execution-style shootings. But on June 15th, 2000, Carl Williams steps it up. He ambushes Mark Moran in his car, outside his luxury mansion, and he shoots him dead.

Moran had been under police surveillance, of course, but cameras have been switched off before the murder. And this is the only one of the gangland killings, I believe, where Williams actually pulled the trigger himself. But for him, things are on the up. He marries Roberta Mercerra, an ex-wife of one of the Morans. and a convicted drug dealer in 2001. So that's going to make everyone happy.

And in the same year, he had a kid with her, and they called her Dakota. So then Jason Moran gets out of prison, but rather than get out while everyone's getting killed, he decides he's going to take over the family business, which is a bad idea. Brinkat gets out of prison himself, and the murders continue.

In 2002, a police informant is shot in the chest and head while wearing a wire, and he survives. By this time, there have been 20 murders in six years and the police are the ones who haven't been paid off don't really know what to do. Like you said, I think they're just kind of bewildered at this point, right? And it's remarkable because how many people survive shootings that, you know, the Carl Williams shot in the gut, no problem. This police, the informant shot in the face and body, no problem, walks it off.

And you're just like, okay, so even the gangsters aren't that good at doing what they're supposed to do. This shouldn't be so hard to catch them. Yeah, you would think so. I mean, but some of the cops definitely do know what they're. doing so at this time and then they're not doing the right thing shall we say um but then the next year in 2003 something really shocking happens so jason maran in his minder pascali barbado no nickname sorry pascali uh a waiting outside an osclic kinik ozkit ozkit clinic god that is awesome kitt yeah it's a

weird it's it's a soccer camp that's all right so it's like quick cricket or touch football or something like that well it's um you know it's what in in america it's called soccer which is, you know, there's football in the rest of the world. And it's basically like an indoor version of that. And then they do outdoor as well with slightly modified rules for kids and stuff. I see. All right. So these guys, they're in a blue Mitsubishi wagon with about seven kids in the back.

And Brinkat and a guy's cops are going to call the driver, walk up to the van and blow Moran and Barbara away with, yep, shotguns. Then Brinket runs off, of course. Yeah. That's his case. Of course, yeah. And then he meets Williams to tell him the job's done. So we know he tells Williams the job's done,

because we've got it all on records. So this point, Williams makes a pretty weird decision. So he stiffs the assassins. He gives Brinkat an envelope with two grand in it, and nothing to Mr. X, or the driver, sorry. So that's a cracking idea. Yeah. Yeah.

So either way, a killing like that in front of kids, in broad daylight, tons of witnesses, this changes the whole thing for the police and the media. And one lawyer tells ABC, quote, previously people were murdered in their driveways, in their cars at night. And now you've got normal suburban families going to a Noskic clinic. I've got it right that time. Seeing two people being brutally murdered in front of their own children.

And then another murder cop says simply, Crooks don't do things like that. So this is like a major turning point. Yeah, it's a massive escalation at this point. It's, and it caught everyone by surprise, apparently the cops were out. I spoke to at the ABC when I was working there, some of the guys who covered

this beat were people that were my colleagues and they used to tell me stories about how this was an unprecedented thing. Like no one had seen any, you know, it was the 9-11 of Victorian police and crime association. Right, right, right. And so

yeah, about the same time, this third guy from the neighbourhood called Andrew Benji Veniamen, he's hired to take out Williams in his family. and he takes an accomplice along and he waits on the roof of their home. But the story goes that when Venamin sees Roberta breastfeeding Dakota, he can't bring himself to carry out the hits. And then he weirdly becomes Williams' best friend and confident.

Yep. And Dakota even calls him Uncle Andrew. So that's a nice, sweet, happy story. Yeah, he ends up having what many believe is an affair with Carl Williams' wife. She calls him her soulmate. and yeah and he was also my exes family's friend like apparently when I was watching the underbelly TV series and you know the the actor who plays Carl Benjamin kind of walks in and out of screen and one of my exes's aunties walked into the room at that point and said yeah we remember him he used to

come around all the time he was a lovely guy and I'm like great awesome I'm in a wonderful place right now Wow, wow. I didn't realize you were that close to this story. Neither did I until it saw it happening. It takes a lot for a guy from Pakistan, particularly Karachi, to feel unsafe. In that moment, I definitely did. So until this point, cops really hadn't joined the dots with all these killings. And it seems like they, despite all of the wiretaps and everything, they're still not kind of fingering Williams as the main guy involved in all of them.

Maybe they just think he's too much of this happy. go lucky idiots. I think it was just for them, just like everyone else, it was just too hard to believe. You know, every time they'd be like, oh, it's definitely Williams, then someone would pull up a photograph and they'd be like, can't be. Look at him.

Look at the frosted tits. Look at the infitting suits. It's got to be someone better than this. It's like this overweight 90s boy band guy. He can't be killing everyone. So in 2003, Victoria Police, I guess they're under a lot of pressure by now. And they launched this task force called Piranha,

which isn't the fish, but P-U-R-A-N-A, which is, I looked at it. It's an ancient collection of Sanskrit literature. It's really strange. On the force being brushing up or... It's really strange because Purana in Urdu and in Hindi just means old. So, and I can't really find other meanings for it. Basically, they're like, yeah, we'll have a task force and we'll call it old, I guess.

So someone on the task force knows Urdu or Hindi. Yeah, Urdu, Hindi or Sanskrit. But either way, they were poorly placed in their job. Like, they should have had some other... Incredibly literary. Yeah. So these guys then begin building this idea of Williams' drug empire and Brinkat. But there's trouble on that horizon, too, and we're going to find out in a moment.

But meanwhile, it just becomes the Carl Williams show. He doesn't mind speaking to the media. He takes to call himself the Premier. Quote, he got bigger and bigger and greedy and greedier, as they tend to do, one police officer says. So now we're getting to the... real dark meat of the gang ganglan killings i guess in 2003 cops bug a car yes this is the car that's being driven by a brinket but yeah this thing makes the brake lights flicker and the crooks find it anyway they so this is something i didn't understand they bring the bug to williams and he brushes

it off and says he'll quote do the job anyway so they've got him with this bug and he still says something on record um that just kind of shows you the brazenness of how it's getting at this point I think brazen is the wrong word there. I think the intense stupidity of everyone involves. Intent stupidity. So while police are flounding around trying to figure out what that actually means, Brinkat guns down Michael Marshall, who's this hot dog vendor and drug dealer. I guess he was probably making more from one of those jobs than the other.

They do it next to his five-year-old son, so it's pretty grim. And anyway, Brinkat runs home, as he wants to do. for some reason he calls Williams and he tells them in a pretty slack code that a horse he likes as being, quote, scratched. So there's your criminal mastermind. I guess you are right. Yeah, it's less brazen than idiotic. Anyway, so the cops pick this conversation up and they take them both into custody. So finally they've got off their ass and done something.

Williams then distances himself from Brinkat. And when Brinkat begs him to at least look after his own mum, Williams wires her just a few girls. grand so he shortchanged him again and that unsurprising he's going to bite him in the backside in a little bit um so now we get to this really strange period in the in the killings um in september that year the home of a notorious drug smuggler called tony mock bell is broken into by a small-time mobster called terry hodson and this ponytail cop and they take a bunch of money and guns and there's a great quote from the officer who gets called to the scene i wish i could do this in an Aussie accent he said i thought here we go this

This is going to be an all-nighter. I think it's part of an ABC program that I saw. It is brilliant when he says that. So this guy who's caught this cop is called David Michel. And he's actually supposed to be put in the house under surveillance, not robbing it. And Hodson is actually a police informer himself who's been ratting out of his mates to Michelle and Paul Dale, who's Michelle's boss. So that might sound a bit fishy, to say the least. Later in 2003, police charged Dale, Michelle and Hodson with the break-in.

And they want to put Hodson into witness protection because he's obviously on a bunch of killlists at this point. But Hudson's daughter has just had a baby and she refuses, and they carry on in their Melbourne home. So Hodson then tells the leader of Victoria's anti-corruption squad, Murray Greger, no nickname again, sorry Murray, that Dale has been on the take from Carl Williams. And George Williams even tells him he's given Dale six grand

at one point himself. Dale had also been trying to figure out the location of Jason Moran before the Mitsubishi killings, by the way. so this is all turning into a real web of dark shit and then in 2003 December Graham Kineberg this point is considered the city's biggest gangster he's shot dead his associate Mike Gatto accuses Veneman

who police believe has committed seven murders at this point cops say Williams is next for the block he says quote If anyone wants to come and get me then come and get me Just don't miss So at this point he's very much kind of modelling himself after Al Pacino in what's the movie with the comical amounts of cocaine

at the end of it? Oh right, yeah, Scarface. Yeah, Scarface. He sees himself as a Scarface. This is going to be a great last stand. It doesn't work out that way, but that's very much what he's aiming for and home for, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in March the next year, Gato shoots Vinham in around the back of a Colton pizza joint, so that's very Godfather as well. amazingly given he literally said he wanted to kill Vennimin

the jury believes Gatto acted in self-defense and finds him not guilty of murder that's pretty laughable basically everyone in the jury's last name was Audley Gatto as well probably or something yeah Orly the mouth Gato so back to the cops

so Dale has got a bunch of vice squad colleagues to inform on the anti-corruption squad which is pretty mad. And phone lines being tapped, actually catching, they actually catch him reaching out to Williams at this time. But this info isn't obviously getting back to Gregor on the anti-corruption squad. This is crazy.

And then on the eve of May 16th, 2004, police are called to Terry Hodson's home, where he and his wife, Christine, have been shot twice in the back of the head, execution style. Not only that, but the killer, and this is brazen,

had picked up the empty shells and placed them on the bodies carefully. and secret police files on Hodson snitching have been stolen from the station and leaked to folks in the underworld. So it's all gone a bit the departed now, right? Yeah, there's a lot of leaks and those, by the way, those investigations are still ongoing to this day. Like, you still have Task Force, Purana, you know, grand jury investigations taking place in Australia. Right. So this stuff's still going on. Well, it's mainly the level of infiltration into the cops, the amount of, the amount of, of bribery that was involved and everything, that's still coming out, yes.

Wow. Yeah, so it's gone a bit departed, but this is actually going to get a bit crazier now. So now we're going to get into Nicola Gobbo. So she doesn't really need a nickname, I guess. She's been a star criminal defense lawyer in Melbourne for years. In Australian media, she was called Lawyer X for the longest time. Lawyer X. Yeah, yeah.

And I was reading about that. And actually, the Victoria Police had tried. to sort of muzzle the press and issue all these injunctions and stop them even calling her that. Well, it's funny. They really didn't want this out at all. You know, for example, when I first started looking into the story, it was around the time the lawyer X stuff was coming out, and I was working on radio at the ABC. And, you know, the first day that we kind of covered this lawyer X thing, the cops said, you can't name her. No one knows the name. No one knows who is it, who it is. All we know is their name is Lawyer X, and they were a major informant. And the text lines on the,

the radio station went nuts because every single listener was like, yeah, it's Nicola Gobbo. We all know it's Nickla. Everyone knows Nicola Gobbo. It's obvious, like, it was crazy. The whole city of Melbourne knew the identity of lawyer X and the cops were pretending as if no one knew. I remember the thing about Ryan Giggs sleeping with his brother's wife. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so yeah, Nicola Gobbo is this kind of like star criminal defense lawyer in Melbourne for years. and she's the door of this legal dynasty high-riser, the whole shebang. And she ends up representing, among others, Tony Mockbell, the guy whose house was burgled,

and yet Carl Williams. And there's this actual picture of them together at a casino. It looks so small-time crook, it's really funny. So it turns out Mockbell is getting pissed off with Gobbo, and he starts threatening her. Then she goes to the police and offers to turn informant on her celebrity clients for them. at this point you might assume the cops tell her to do one right because she's a lawyer it's highly morally improper for her to be passing on details of clients to police uh well no we're learning that's not the way of melbourne cops so so they sign her up where can you sign nicola um and this this war is

raging on at this point so louis moran lewis miranda patriarch of the family he's killed in a shootout at northern melbourne club italians are killing irish irish killing italians all the time we Williams is making a packet and ordering these murders. Brinkat, bless him, still hasn't turned on his absolute shit of a boss. He's in jail, but Williams selling himself out, sorry. But Williams selling him out, eventually takes his toll, and Brinkat sends a letter to the police. And when they ask him what he wants in return, he says, quote, I'd kill for a vanilla slice. Of course.

So, yeah, why not, eh? He's got to keep that energy out for all the running. Hotels.com is the place you go to book, of thousands of hotels. It's exactly what it sounds like. Just like save your way from Hotels.com is exactly what it sounds like. Choose to save now with an instant discount or bank that discount as rewards for later. Your trip, your call.

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Visit Spectrum.com slash free for life to find out how. Restrictions apply. Service is not available in all areas. Jesus. I mean, it's kind of crazy, right? Like, so yeah, we'll jump toward to 2007 at this point. So Williams is actually sent down for three of the murders and he gets off a fourth. Although the true number of people he killed is probably quite a few more. and he gets 35 years.

At this point, Dale, the accused officer, he's in deep trouble, obviously. If William spills the beans about the Hodson couple's killing, he'll probably be screwed, although I probably should add at this point that he denies everything. And by the way, he's being represented by Nicola Gobbo. And she's having an affair with the Assistant Police Commissioner, who's called Jeff Pope. And these names, yeah, these really don't need any nicknames at all at this point. And Williams has realized that Gobbo is the Gob,

shooting her mouth to the police at this point, because she's been visiting all sorts of people in prison who aren't even their clients, and he can see. So this is just mad. And at one point, she breaks into the office of another lawyer. I think that is the Zara.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and she finds a bunch of phone records that would have outed her at this point. So she slams the cops for their, quote, sloppy work. What do you think she wanted as payback? It wasn't a vanilla slice, but it was tickets to see Lionel Richie. Well, look, to be fair, I think that's a good buy. Like, if you're going to get tickets for anything,

I would say Lionel Richie is a concert that you definitely want to risk your life for. You know, at least it wasn't something crap. Fair, fair, yeah, maybe I'm being too harsh on the rich. But so the net is tightening, obviously, on Gobbo and Dale at this point. point and Williams realizes and he decides to turn supergrass behind bars at Barwin Prison which is near Geelong in Victoria that's like what a short hour drive away from Melbourne I say yeah not far at all so he tells cops that under Dale's orders he paid a small-time gangster called Rodney Collings to kill Terry and Christine Hodson and that year actually off to

the side a little bit but still involved in mafia documents provided by Gobbo help make the world's biggest ever ecstasy bust, when 15 million pills hidden in 3,000 tins of tomato are stopped in New South Wales, where they're being brought in by the Honor Society Calabrian guys. And there's rumours that the Andrangetta mobsters back in Italy still want people dead over that bus today. So she's got the goods, like, but she's a lawyer, so this is not going to end well. Well, that's the problem is she did a good job. It just wasn't her job to do at all. Yeah, I mean, and she definitely knows what she's doing, right? So she says, she says, quote, I've chucked ethics out the window.

I've chucked legal professional privilege out the window. I've chucked my career out the window. And if any of this came out, she tells a handler, she'd be so fucked, it's not funny. So, yeah, she knows exactly what she's doing now. So now we've got Williams in a high security prison singing about everyone in the underbelly. We've got Paul Dale sweating out a double murder charge. And we've got Nicola Gobbo getting increasingly wound. up in all this dangerous informing and she's getting death threats.

And it's now 2010 and everyone in Melbourne's mafia is shitting bricks basically about what Williams is telling the police. One of its biggest players by this time is a guy called Rocco O'rico. And of course, Paul Dale's entire case rests on Williams's testimony. Well, bad news for Williams. The two guys he's sharing a cell with and this is this kind of big common room with cell rooms off to one side and a gym sitting there it looks quite nice actually i'm just trying to stoke the prisons a bloody cakewalk guys you know um so these these two guys one's an associate of roco rico and the other is this big scary guy called matthew johnson long history of violence pretty nasty bloke um how he ended up in a cell with those two guys is just

incredible um so one day in april 2010 johnson walks up behind williams while he's reading the paper and he smashes his head in with the stem of the exercise bike. 10 minutes afterwards, the third cellmate calls up O'RICO and tells him about it. Like, they just have open phone lines. Yes, for somebody, there's no, yeah, there's no, you know, how in the start of serial season one you have that, you know, you've got to collect call from so-and-so prison. There's none of that here.

It's just everyone's got a cell phone. They've got a good data plan, yeah. It's incredible. And this guy calls up Rocco O'Rico, tells him the deed is done or whatever. and it's in another 17 minutes before the guards even realizes, like any guards realize what's going on. The anti-corruption cop at this point, Murray Gregory, he's just like, I think he's just like bewildered that this happened.

Like literally every single thing they could have done to protect Williams and Hodson has just been scuppered by their colleagues. And that's really the end of the Melbourne gang killings, really, because Dale, obviously with the biggest evidence against him, he's now six feet under. and by the way he gets taken out in a gold coffin so he keeps the look to the end of course um yeah so dale on the coffin yeah yeah perfect so he gets off the charge dale and uh gobo she gets increasingly death threats and the police aren't uh protecting her at all she flees to another

country with her kids um and until recently she was there i believe and the Australian police said that if she returned they take the kids off of her because of the dangers she was under so they really did a number on her um And like you're saying, there's tons of inquiries about police corruption in the last few years. And it seems that the cops are trying to scupper that too. And then what's more, because the evidence supplied by Gobbo was clearly tainted. The bunch of guys have already got off their charge. So, yeah, a complete chit show, basically.

Yeah, there you have it. That's the Melbourne ganglan case. One of the guys you mentioned Tony Mockbell, he's in prison, but he's been, you know, he's been contesting his conviction because he says that the way that the police. caught their information on which to arrest him. That is in and of itself illegal because it came through Garbo. So she basically compromised the whole case. And the reason why the police were so desperate to use her, because they had no other ways of bringing these guys in.

And so they went with the extreme option, except when you look at the court coverage and the police investigation, there were a million other ways to bring these guys in. The wiretaps, for example, or the eyewitness accounts or any of those things, they just were either so compromised by corruption themselves or were just so utterly terrible at their jobs that they never bothered bringing anyone in properly. It doesn't sound like a lot has changed since either, right?

Well, I mean, basically, the one thing that's changed is either the mafia and everyone have really gone underground and done a better job of hiding themselves, or the cops have, or, you know, I think basically what, honestly, what ended up happening is this whole Melbourne gangland killings was such a high-profile event. It worked badly for not just the police, but also for the mafia. You know, they don't want to,

be, you know, this isn't the Sicilian mafia, which has a more prominent public profile, you know, even in Italy, even in, and if you go out to places like in New York and all these places, you know, the Sicilian mafia are media figures. We always know their names. We always know their personalities and all that stuff. The Calabrian mafia is very low key. They don't like being talked about. They don't like being in the press. And so that's how they exert their power is by being the invisible hand. And so the fact that this was such a high profile thing, I think for them was a lesson in decorum and a lesson in restraint. And you've seen a bit of that now. Okay. Well, I mean, yeah, that kind of brings us full circle. Does that sound like the city

you know and love, Sammy? Honestly, it sounds like, it does not sound like the city I know and love now. It's very much the past of Melbourne. And it is something that's a big part of the past in Melbourne. You know, like when, you know, you'll drink and go to the areas now. But, you know, There's, for example, one of the Moran family was shot in the Brunswick pub, which you know, you can go into and just see if you want. So the Oz Kakes Clinic where those guys were shotgun to the face while there were seven kids in the back seat. That's near where I'm living right now. So that is very much still there, the history of it's there, and you're aware of that history.

but it's so different in terms of, you know, a lot of it's like, if you go to Times Square now, or in the last, you know, 20 years, and you see this kind of Disney-ified version of Times Square, which used to be a really seedy place in the 80s and 90s. You know, 80s and 90s, New York, Times Square was just peep shows and drug deals and things like that. And now it's just, it's this wonderful place where you can take awesome photographs. And that's what's happened. It's been like the gentrification of Melbourne has kind of pushed all of that underground and out of sight. And Melbourne is such a great, such a modern, such a livable city with such a good reputation for peace and low crime, that I think it works in everyone's favor to maintain that.

Okay, so the Tourism Board of Victoria State are going to be very happy with that. That's a final part-party advert for them. They took a beating because of COVID lockdown. So, yeah, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear that they're doing a lot better now. Cool. Well, Sammy, thanks ever so much for you coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's been a ride talking about this. Cheers.

And yeah, don't forget you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, our website, Patreon, obviously, and all of that good stuff. So, yeah, thanks again, and we'll see you soon. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.

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