Chapter 13

Carl Williams observed

By early May 2004, there was often surveillance on Carl Williams. Covert crews followed him about his business, watching from their cars while he met colleagues at the local Red Rooster or any of his other favourite haunts.

On Wednesday 5 May, a team of four covert cops observed Carl Williams and his dad, George, park a silver Mercedes in Lonsdale Street in the city and walk over to a cafe to meet their lawyer, Nicola Gobbo, who was waiting out the front. The three spoke for about forty minutes, then Nicola left and walked towards the County Court. Williams and his dad stayed at the cafe for another twenty minutes before beginning a series of twenty-minute stops – one at a pub, one at an address in Prahran, and then one in Brunswick. Finally, George dropped Carl at a pub at 5.15 p.m., and the surveillance cops sat outside until their shift ended at 9 p.m.1

A day in the life of Carl Williams. Meet with the lawyer, make a few quick stops about the place, end up at the pub.

At 11.13 a.m. on Friday 7 May, Carl Williams, dressed in blue jeans and a light-blue jumper and carrying a jacket, was observed leaving his mother’s house in Primrose Street, which was also under constant camera surveillance. Williams drove off in a gold Nissan Maxima. He was driving to meet his friend and hitman Rod Collins. Williams’s phone records showed that he spoke to journalist Adam Shand on the way. And what was Williams telling the journo on the way to meet the man later accused of murdering the Hodsons? Funnily enough, he was talking about Terry. At 11.15 a.m., Williams chatted to Shand about the document he’d seen recently in which Terry Hodson was implicated in the contract on Williams’s life.

Twelve minutes later, Williams pulled into the Red Rooster at Maribyrnong and got out of his car. Two minutes after that, he met with Rod Collins. The two were videoed as they spoke in the car park. Collins was wearing a black jacket and dark blue trackie dacks. Five minutes later, the two men moved over to Williams’s car and climbed inside. They were joined by what surveillance cops described as an ‘unknown female’, who was undoubtedly Collins’s partner, Joan McGuire. Phone taps showed she had a doctor’s appointment at a surgery opposite the Red Rooster. Williams drove off with Collins and the woman and was seen dropping them both off in West Footscray six minutes later.

All up, Williams and Collins had been together for fourteen minutes.

Williams parked outside an address in Lalor for another of his twenty-minute stops. When he emerged, he was with an associate, Terence Chimirri. Ironically, the cops followed Williams and Chimirri to the Mill Park police station and watched Chimirri enter and emerge four minutes later. Shortly afterwards, Carl Williams turned into a service station in Mill Park and left, undetected by the watching cops.

It was a couple of hours before Williams was spotted again. He was at Windows Restaurant on the corner of Lonsdale and Exhibition streets with his wife, Roberta, Roberta’s sister Michelle, and Chimirri. Twenty minutes after the surveillance had resumed, the four were joined by Rod Collins, wearing a blue beanie. He had a conversation with Williams and then the two men moved through the restaurant, out of sight of the watching police. Twenty-three minutes later, Williams and Collins returned to the group.

At 2.51 p.m., Roberta Williams left the cafe to chat with a man out the front. Then Lewis Caine arrived, followed Roberta into the restaurant and joined the group at the table.2

Rod Collins stayed with the group until leaving the restaurant at 4.02 p.m. Two minutes later, Tony Mokbel was reported getting into a black Mercedes sedan in Lonsdale Street. He was carrying a beige shoulder bag, and wore a beige baseball cap and a red windcheater. He was later identified by the surveillance cops as the man seen talking to Roberta. After Mokbel and his manbag had disappeared, Rod Collins came back into the restaurant. It’s a pity he missed seeing his son-in-law, Tony Mokbel.3

Throughout the afternoon, small break-off groups would leave the table for a couple of minutes at a time. The surveillance crews don’t say what they were doing and they stopped watching the rogues’ gallery at 4.25 p.m., when they packed up and went home.4

The meal would prove to be a last supper of sorts for Lewis Caine. A day later, a crook I’ll call Mr Y and his mate met him to discuss the planned assassination of underworld lawyer Mario Condello for Carl Williams. But things became confused and Lewis Caine ended up dead.5 Killed by a shot to the face.

 

What was going on between Carl Williams, Lewis Caine, Rod Collins and Tony Mokbel is anybody’s guess. But if anybody were to guess, it was common knowledge that when a group like that met, there was about to be a murder. The Purana Taskforce knew this all too well. And it wasn’t good news for Terry Hodson.

Terry Hodson’s bungling of the Oakleigh robbery had led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of pills – pills that were to be sold by Tony Mokbel. Mokbel had lost millions of dollars in potential drug sales.6 Of course, the MDID would have seized the drugs anyway, but that was hardly a consolation to Mokbel. Abbey Haynes, the drug-house babysitter, would later admit that Azzam Ahmed had exaggerated the amount of drugs in the house to Mokbel and alleged that $700,000 had also been stolen. Ahmed had clearly jumped at the opportunity to explain away the disappearance of probably a million dollars in cash and drugs. Mokbel would have been a million times more angry.

Carl Williams had admitted to journalist Adam Shand that he’d recently seen documents suggesting that Terry Hodson had been in on Lewis Moran’s plan to kill him. According to Shand, Williams was incensed.7 Not that Williams had to worry about Lewis Moran any more: he’d arranged his murder on 31 March, when he was gunned down at the Brunswick Club. This was how Williams dealt with his enemies.

Later, it was suggested that Tony Mokbel had offered $150,000 (by coincidence, the same amount I was accused of offering for Terry Hodson) so that Carl Williams could organise the hit on Moran. Williams was later convicted of this. Mokbel was acquitted.

Without any help from me, any or all of these men easily had motive to kill Terry. These men had a history of killing anyone who crossed them. And they were together ten days before Terry was murdered.