Mokbel was the drug dealer
from central casting.
IT was just a little stumble that spilt the tin that caused the fire that led to the explosion that brought the firemen who called the police who found the amphetamine laboratory that Tony built.
The lab, in a quiet residential street in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, had proved a virtual goldmine, pumping out speed until the day Paul Edward Howden kicked over a bucket of solvents that ignited and burnt the house down in February 1997. Police didn’t have far to look for their main suspect. They found Howden at the Alfred Hospital being treated for severe burns to 30 per cent of his body.
Police also discovered the lab had produced at least 41.25 kilograms of pure methylamphetamine with a potential street value of $78 million. Prosecutors claimed the clandestine operation had produced enough speed for 1.3 million users. ‘It is the largest seizure of methylamphetamine in Victoria and it’s the largest detected manufacture of methylamphetamine in the state,’ the County Court was told. Even the seasoned trial judge, Graeme Crossley, seemed impressed. ‘I can’t believe how big it is,’ he declared.
Howden’s barrister, the energetic and multi-skilled Con Heliotis QC, told the court his client was just a minor player who agreed to the plan out of loyalty to a friend — the godfather to one of his three children — identified only as, ‘Tony’. For Howden’s work in the massively profitable enterprise, Heliotis claimed, he was paid just $10,000 — and even that wasn’t cash. It was cut out in home renovations.
Police agreed that Howden, a plumber by trade, was the stooge of the operation and Heliotis helpfully added that his client was ‘just short of stupid’. When he jailed Howden for four years, Judge Crossley took into account his minnow status: ‘You were a factory roustabout rather than the managing director.’ The managing director was Godfather Tony — who was never formally identified in court — but police needed only to look over the badly charred side fence to solve the mystery. The house next door was one of many owned by a tight-knit family with unlimited ambitions and unexplained incomes — the Mokbel clan. It was purchased for just $161,000, but the Mokbels were to be enthusiastic home improvers.
Tony Mokbel was said to have lost millions when the lab was discovered, but he was a master at finding advantage in adversity. While the court was told Howden was the official owner of the speed lab house, the property was soon absorbed into the growing Mokbel Empire. The extended Mokbel family knocked down the burnt shell to enlarge their garden, planting a mature palm worth $15,000 to go with their sparkling new swimming pool.
The furnishings were another matter. A policeman who raided the property described the décor as ‘Franco Cozzo on angel dust’. Long before Tony Mokbel had become the public face of drug dealing in Victoria, children in the street began to refer to the million-dollar property as ‘the drug house’.
The $1.1 million Brunswick property would be used as bail surety for Tony Mokbel when he was charged with cocaine trafficking in 2002.
The property was listed as being owned by Mokbel’s sister-in-law, Renate Lisa Mokbel, but police believe the house was financed through Mokbel’s prodigious drug activities.
But Howden, the burnt patsy, would never tell detectives who funded the initial venture — and ‘Tony’ would not forget his loyalty. During Howden’s sentence, Mokbel would regularly drive to the jail to visit, even persuading prison officers to let him take his friend for an unauthorised trip to a local McDonald’s for a break from prison food.
It would not be the only time Mokbel tried to lift the spirits of inmates with fast food.
In June 2004, he visited a friend at the Melbourne Custody Centre who complained about his bland dinner. Mokbel — who had once owned an Italian restaurant — immediately spoke to a guard and peeled off $350 to pay for pizzas and soft drink from La Porchetta in North Melbourne.
The obliging officer popped out to collect 40 large pizzas for all inmates and staff.
It was typical of Mokbel, whose seemingly impetuous generosity was calculated to build long-term loyalty. Police say he would hand over $10,000 on a whim for a friend to have a bet, with a casual, ‘Pay me back if you win’.
One associate said he was known as the ‘softest touch in town’. Any sob-story resulted in Mokbel handing over $5000, but in return he expected total support and the money repaid on demand.
Tony’s reliance on fast food rewards for his team backfired when Howden, 36, died of heart disease in December 2001. Mokbel placed a death notice in the Herald Sun that read, in part, ‘You will always be in my prayers and I will never ever forget you. I promise to you my friend to be there for your family till the day I die.’ It was another Mokbel trademark — never forget a friend or an enemy.
While police had known for years that Mokbel was involved in drug manufacturing, it was the Brunswick lab fire that showed the businessman on the make had become a big underworld player. And it would be another decade before they were able to trace his shadowy financial network and prove he was one of Australia’s richest — and nastiest — men.
Of course, by the time Mokbel was finally sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison for cocaine trafficking in early 2006, he had jumped bail and become Australia’s most wanted man.
ANTONIOS Sajih Mokbel was one of the sharper students at Coburg’s racially diverse Moreland High School in the late 1970s, but he was never going to push on to tertiary study. He had no desire to spend years as a poor undergraduate, although he would later employ university chemistry students in his drug enterprises.
The school was divided into three sub-schools and the teenage Mokbel stayed in the Zeta stream of nearly 100 students until he was old enough to leave.
He might not have immediately embraced the school motto of Sapere Aude (‘Dare to be Wise’) but outside the classroom the apprentice wise guy was keen to excel.
The Kuwaiti-born boy with rich Lebanese heritage and traditional Australian tastes was always in a hurry to make money. His first full-time job was as a dishwasher at a suburban nightclub before he became a waiter. Later, he worked in security — a surprising choice for a man not much bigger than a football rover. But Mokbel was smooth. He found he could often persuade people to his point of view without overt violence.
Later, if he decided there was a need for bloodshed, he would employ others. Young and ambitious, he soon realised that to get the sort of money he wanted, he would have to be his own boss. It was in those early years, too, that Mokbel noticed that people who were partying often lost their inhibitions, and were prepared to pay for a good time.
In 1984, aged just nineteen, he bought his first business — a struggling Rosanna milk bar. For two years he and his young partner, Carmel — whom he would marry in 1989 and with her have two children — worked long hours seven days a week battling to make a living before finally selling out for their original investment price.
It would be the one and only time Mokbel didn’t seem to make massive profits in his business ventures, despite an early police report saying he ‘lacked financial acumen’.
In 1987, he bought an Italian restaurant in Boronia. In those days he was content to roll the dough — years later he was rolling in it. He steadily built the business, expanding when he bought the shop next door. He sold the restaurant as a going concern in 1994, but kept ownership of the building.
It would remain his long-term strategy — to invest in bricks and mortar, among many other things. It was a sound investment strategy, but it was also a simple way to transform fresh drug money into seemingly solid assets.
In 1996, he bought a bar and restaurant in Swanston Street, Carlton, but sold it a year later to a property developer for a substantial profit.
In 1997, he bought several adjoining properties in Sydney Road, Brunswick, and opened T Jays Restaurant. It was around this time he started being noticed as an ambitious developer with an appetite for consuming businesses. Police should also have been aware of the man on the make. T Jays was opposite Brunswick Police Station.
By 2000, the former struggling milk bar proprietor bragged to friends he owned or controlled 38 different companies. In the same year, he began his most ambitious development — an $18 million, ten-storey ‘winged keel’ apartment tower over Sydney Road. The plan was to build 120 apartments and townhouses, offices, restaurants, gym with pool and a four-storey car park on the old Whelan the Wrecker site. No-one seemed to wonder how he could generate that sort of money. Much later, police financial experts would find that he needed at least $2 million from drug money every year to fund the so-called ‘legitimate’ arm of his business.
Moreland development services manager Michael Smit was quoted as saying of the Mokbel monolith: ‘It has the potential to be a strong landmark in the sense of buildings like the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe — which the architects have used as inspiration — and change people’s perceptions of Sydney Road.’
Perhaps Mr Smit should get out more.
At the same time as Mokbel was planning to turn Sydney Road into a tourist attraction for visiting architects, he was also developing ten units in Templestowe that he intended to sell for $300,000 each. In 2000, he owned the Brunswick market site and claimed to make $500,000 a year in rent money.
His business portfolio was as wide as it was impressive, with interests in shops, cafes, fashions, fragrances, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs and land in regional Victoria. He and his companies owned two white vans, two Commodores, a red Audi, a 2000 silver Mercedes, a Nissan Skyline and a red Ferrari Roadster that he bought in September 1999. He even managed to give his wife a pub in the town of Kilmore as part of the family businesses. Intriguingly, the pub was granted a gaming licence to run lucrative poker machines after the owners passed the highest probity checks — even though Tony Mokbel was a convicted criminal and prolific drug dealer.
One of his fashion houses was appropriately named LSD — ostensibly an abbreviation for Love of Style and Design. It was apparently the drug dealer’s idea of a private joke. He also opened a café near his old school — Moreland High. He owned fourteen properties in Brunswick, three in Boronia, two at Kilmore and one each in Coburg, Pascoe Vale and Templestowe.
Just about everyone seemed to know that Tony was a big-time crook — that is, except some of the bankers from the top end of town.
The National Australia Bank loaned Mokbel nearly $6 million, apparently unaware their cashed-up client was a drug dealer. He had nineteen accounts and an A-Grade credit rating with the NAB between 1985 and 2001. Clearly, credit officers were not prepared to ask too many questions of the ‘property developer’ with the flash clothes and the big dreams.
Mokbel was the drug dealer from central casting. He bought a top-of-the-range jet ski and was a regular at marquees at the Grand Prix. He once managed to get not one but two personally signed Ferrari caps from champion driver Michael Schumacher. The speed producer loved fast cars, fast horses and life in the fast lane.
He left his wife and in late 2000 began an affair with Danielle McGuire, who ran a Mokbel-owned South Yarra beauty shop. But she was not the only woman in his life — he apparently believed monogamy was a board game for bored people.
He’d been living with McGuire when he was found to have disappeared on 20 March 2006 — days before his cocaine trial was due to finish. Oddly, McGuire was unable to assist police in their enquiries about the whereabouts of her once-constant companion. But in the last days before he flew the coop, the lovebirds were not living in sin. Mokbel’s divorce from Carmel had finally come through. His long-suffering ex-wife was either extraordinarily naïve or born with no sense of curiosity. In court documents she swore she had no idea of her husband’s prodigious criminal activity during their married life. In other words, Carmel claimed she was a Patsy.
McGuire was no stranger to police investigations — she was the ex-girlfriend of Mark Moran, the drug-dealing standover man murdered on 15 June 2000. She was truly unlucky in love. But with Mokbel she had the million-dollar lifestyle, living in a massive city apartment and dining at the best restaurants.
When Mokbel was arrested, he was living in a Port Melbourne bayside penthouse he rented for $1250 a week. He told friends he planned to buy the property. He would never have the chance. Not that his lifestyle suffered. He moved into the four-bedroom apartment in Southbank with panoramic views of Port Phillip Bay, which was a world away from his previous address — a onebed cell in Port Phillip Prison.
But Tony, the former suburban pizza shop proprietor, never lost his common touch and loved nothing better than to snack on a Capricciosa.
He was a well-known customer and generous tipper at the city’s up-market pizzeria — Sopranos, naturally.
Sopranos manager Frank Sarkis was quoted as saying: ‘He came for breakfast, lunch and dinner and his favourite meal was medium-rare eye fillet steak topped with prawns and smoked salmon — about $50.’
When Tony wanted to snack in the privacy of his own home the restaurant would send over platters of pasta and pizza to the penthouse.
‘My staff described it (Mokbel’s penthouse) as something so beautiful they had only seen anything like it in movies,’ the restaurant man said. ‘And money was no object. He’d regularly spend $200 a night on pizza and pasta. The staff cried (when Mokbel absconded) — he was a big tipper, $100 bills.’
IT was not through drug dealing or shady business dealings that Mokbel first started to develop a questionable public profile, but through one of his other great passions — gambling. In later years, with nearly $20 million of his assets frozen, he took to describing himself as a professional punter, even though he was banned from racetracks and casinos as an undesirable person.
For years, Mokbel was the type of heavyweight punter who used inside information to tip the odds his way. He was the leader of the notorious ‘tracksuit gang’ — a group responsible for a series of suspicious late plunges on racetracks in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
His team once won $500,000 and demanded to be paid in green $100 bills, after lodging the bets with the older grey notes, in what was clearly a money-laundering exercise.
Some bookies refused to take credit bets for Mokbel because he was often forgetful on collection day. One claimed he lost more than $1 million from the non-payer.
Bookies soon learned it was best to write off the debts from the dealer with the long pockets and even longer memory.
In 1998, racing officials launched an investigation into the ownership of nine horses linked to Tony and Carmel Mokbel. The following year, the Victoria Racing Club banned them from racing horses.
But racing experts say Mokbel continued to own horses although they were officially under the names of friends and associates. He used the same strategy in ‘legitimate’ business, hiding his interests under the names of friends and family.
During the 2001 police investigation into Mokbel, police found the prolific drug dealer had strong links to seven jockeys and trainers. Phone taps picked up his regular conversations with three leading jockeys, but racing authorities were powerless to act, as the phone taps could not be released for a non-criminal investigation.
While under surveillance in the Flemington young members’ enclosure on Derby Day 2000, Mokbel was seen to be unusually popular. Some of his ‘friends’ that day were household names — television identities and members of the ‘A List’ crowd endlessly photographed for the covers of glamour magazines and newspaper social columns. Police said he brazenly handed out small ‘gifts’ of cocaine to the partying punters.
Years later, he was still a regular at the races even though he was on $1 million bail for serious drug charges.
In 2004, despite having his assets frozen, Mokbel told friends he had won nearly $400,000 on the Melbourne Cup. He was also seen punting heavily at the Oaks two days later, backing three winners in a row, including the appropriately named Hollow Bullet.
The public display so angered senior police they moved with racing clubs to ban him from the Melbourne casino and Victorian racetracks.
He was also banned from entering licensed premises in the South Yarra and Prahran areas, meaning he could not walk into some nightspots he owned.
SO HOW did Tony Mokbel graduate from dishwasher to unknown amphetamine dealer and then to the Hollywood crime cliché of the millionaire, Ferrari-driving drug baron with the blonde girlfriend and the celebrity lifestyle?
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.’
Later, when Williams, Mokbel and The Runner were out of jail, they continued to associate. But it was no wine and cheese club. ‘Although a lot of the meetings were social in nature they also involved conversations about business,’ The Runner said.
He gave information that showed how Mokbel tried to pull stings without getting his hands dirty. ‘Tony would also provide Carl with information on the movements of Jason Moran.’
The Runner told police that shortly after the murder of drug dealer Willie Thompson (gunned down as he sat in his car in Chadstone on 23 July 2003) he met Williams, Carl’s father George, the gang’s Lieutenant, Mokbel and others at the Red Rooster store in Moreland Road, Brunswick. ‘Tony was upset and angry about Thompson’s death, he mentioned that he went to school with him and was a very close friend. He made clear that he wanted to exact revenge on whoever was responsible.’
According to The Runner, Mokbel was obviously unaware there had been a treacherous double-cross: ‘I was surprised because I knew that Carl was behind Thompson’s murder but it appeared that Tony had no idea of that. That is why I didn’t ask any questions. I was surprised that Tony didn’t know what had really happened.’
And clearly Carl Williams was not about to fill him in over a chicken and chips snack-pack.
A few weeks later, according to The Runner’s confessions, they met again at the same Red Rooster store and Mokbel was ready to put his money where his mouth was.
‘At this meeting Tony confirmed that he believed Michael Marshall was responsible for Willie’s death and he wanted him dead. Tony offered Carl and I $300,000 to kill Marshall. When I shook hands with Tony he passed a piece of paper to me, which had the details of Marshall’s address.’
The agreement was that The Runner was to be paid $200,000 and Williams $100,000. But The Runner was understandably wary. After all, for the Moran murder, despite Williams’ assurances, he had still only paid $2500. This time he wanted a serious down payment. According to the statement, Williams gave him $50,000 in a manila envelope outside a South Melbourne coffee shop saying, ‘Here, this is from Tony.’
Most of the blood money disappeared at the casino and the TAB. It wasn’t only Tony who backed the wrong horse.
The statements against Mokbel were part of the brief of evidence against Williams and were, quite properly, handed to his defence team.
Police would later claim in court the statements were then, quite improperly, handed to Mokbel by one of his many lawyers, the glamorous Zarah Garde-Wilson.
‘Mokbel has been named by a Victoria Police informant as having paid for a contract murder and provided the firearms to commit the murder,’ a federal police statement lodged at the Supreme Court alleged.
‘A statement had been provided to this effect and is suspected to have been made available to Mokbel by his former solicitor and current girlfriend, Zarah Garde-Wilson.’
Justice Gillard said, ‘Australian Federal Police were told on Friday 17 March 2006, that Victorian police proposed to arrest the prisoner and charge him with being involved in the murder.’ In another unrelated hearing, Detective Sergeant Andrew Stamper, of the Purana taskforce, claimed in evidence, ‘I understand that Ms Garde-Wilson is involved in an on-off sexual relationship with Mr Mokbel and is living in a house that belongs to him.’
The puppet-master who pulled the strings was no longer looking at a long but manageable jail term for drug trafficking. If charged and convicted of a gangland murder, he was facing life with no minimum.
During the Crown’s final address, federal police took the unusual step of asking for Mokbel’s bail to be revoked. But they did not tell Justice Gillard that the accused had just learnt he had become a Purana target and was facing imminent murder charges. If they had, perhaps the judge would have placed him in custody. As it was he would have revoked bail when he began his charge to the jury early the following week.
But if police suspected he was about to flee, they did not have hard evidence. If they had, they would have told Justice Gillard or, at the very least, put Mokbel under surveillance. They did neither.
There has been much implied criticism of Justice Gillard for not revoking bail, but in reality he was given no reason to take that step.
Mokbel must have sat in court on that Friday, knowing that if his bail was cancelled, it may have been his last moment as a free man. Facing inevitable conviction on the drug charges, he would have been out of the way as Purana investigators worked on their murder case against him. Then he would have been charged again and again and would have faced jail for the rest of his life.
But the Crown did not back up its claim — police were nowhere near ready to charge Mokbel with murder and had no evidence he planned to flee. At the end of the court day, he was free to go. So he went … as far as he possibly could. There was only a small window of opportunity and Fat Tony slipped through it.
He was confident that those left behind would continue his drug business and he could take on the role of absentee landlord. Over the previous few years he had secretly moved money overseas and was ready to go.
On 20 March 2006, he did not report to South Melbourne Police Station, as dictated by his bail conditions. He left his three mobile phones, his regular girlfriend, his frozen assets, his city apartment and his high public profile and vanished.
Without a client, his legal team, led by Con Heliotis, withdrew. But as all evidence had already been led, Justice Gillard allowed the case to run. Mokbel was found guilty of drug trafficking and sentenced in his absence to a minimum of nine years jail.
‘I think he has had an exit strategy in place for some time,’ said a policeman who has worked on him for years. ‘Tony never liked to back losers.’
FOR years Tony Mokbel survived because his underlings gave him unquestioned loyalty. They went to jail knowing they would be rewarded when they were released and their families would be cared for while they were inside.
But the Purana gangland taskforce started to work on some of the players, reminding them that this time there would be no reward on release because they might stay in jail until they came out in a cheap coffin or were ready for a nursing home. Professional hit men were likely to be sentenced to life with no minimum. ‘Hop on the bus or risk being run over’ was the blunt message they got.
Faced with the so-called underworld code of silence, police and prosecutors began playing a deadly game of Let’s Make A Deal. And, for the first time, prosecutors were prepared to cut deals with trigger men.
The Runner was one Williams’ hit man who took a seat on the bus, but there was another who jumped on board, too, and that was more bad news for Mokbel.
The first official sign that the underworld code had been smashed came in May 2006, when Supreme Court Justice Bernie Teague sentenced a career criminal we shall call, ‘The Journeyman’, to a minimum of nineteen years for two contract killings.
The Journeyman was the equivalent of a washed-up boxer who refused to retire. He was the product of a third-generation criminal family and connected with at least six killings. He once shot an unarmed policeman during a bank robbery and was a key figure in a vicious war inside Pentridge prison. Violent, manipulative and an underworld tactician, he presented during the gangland underworld war as an expert who was quoted in the media as a retired practitioner turned crime historian. But behind the scenes he could not bear the thought of being left behind. A contemporary said: ‘He forgot that an underworld war is a young man’s game. He wanted to be a part of it and jumped in. He was always a fool and now he’s just an old fool.’
The Journeyman was a gunman who became the loose cannon, prepared to do jobs for both sides, and one-off hits on a freelance basis.
There is little chance he will ever reform. Put simply, he is no good. That is, except to the Purana taskforce.
In November 2005 The Journeyman was found guilty of shooting and dumping fellow gunman Lewis Caine in Brunswick on 8 May 2004. But after fighting the first case, he had a change of heart and pleaded guilty to the murder of Lewis Moran, shot dead in the Brunswick Club in Sydney Road on 31 March 2004.
The Journeyman usually persuaded someone close to him to take the fall. He repeatedly managed to paint himself as an unfortunate who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when shots were fired. But this time he knew he was trapped. In sentencing him to a minimum term of nineteen years, rather than life with no minimum, Justice Teague opened himself to critics claiming the sentence was under the odds.
Surely a career killer who was prepared to murder for cash should be jailed for the rest of his life? But ultimately, police and prosecutors concluded — and Teague agreed — the old hit man could be of more value in a witness box than spending a lifetime in a prison cell.
The Journeyman, then 53, was an old-style gangster who would not have survived a lifetime of crime without being able to sniff the wind. For instance, once when he had been suspected for a murder committed during a robbery, he was left a short message by a homicide squad detective. The message was: Come to the homicide squad to be interviewed or risk having the armed robbery squad shoot you in bed for resisting arrest. The next day at 9am, he was at the St Kilda Road crime department complex, freshly showered and well-dressed, ready to be interviewed. He felt safer there. Soon, four men were charged over the armed robbery and murder. According to police, The Journeyman used his own form of plea bargaining. He gave one of his co-accused a simple choice: plead guilty or die. The man pleaded guilty.
The other three were then able to blame the guilty man for the murder and The Journeyman was sentenced to thirteen years for the armed robbery, but was not convicted of murder. Until now.
Earlier in 2006, he asked Purana detectives to visit him in jail. He was ready to talk. This does not mean he suddenly found morality and remorse that had evaded him all his life; he just knew that if he remained silent, they would throw away the key.
By cutting a deal with the prosecution to give evidence against long-time associates in gangland murder trials — and providing new leads on others yet to be charged — he gave himself a chance of walking out of jail an old, but free, man.
With time served, he could be 71 when released. More importantly, he would not have to do his jail time in 23-hour solitary confinement.
For police, the idea of allowing The Journeyman to dodge the rest of his life in jail must have been repugnant. He had once shot a policeman and had lied and cheated to save himself for years. But the move to deal with him showed that police and prosecutors were prepared to deal with the hands-on killers to gather sworn evidence against those who pull the strings.
It was a move that brought an unexpected dividend. After he was sentenced, The Journeyman confessed to a senior Purana detective that he had carried out another gangland murder — calmly dropping the bombshell that police were allegedly directly linked to an organised crime hit. His allegations were serious enough for a special taskforce to be set up to investigate his claims, which ultimately led to the explosive public hearings by the Office of Police Integrity in November 2007 that resulted in the disgrace of an assistant commissioner and a senior public servant, and internal divisions in the powerful police union. But that was later.
The Journeyman came to the negotiating table with another powerful bargaining chip. He was prepared to talk of Tony Mokbel’s alleged direct connection to one of the murders.
According to The Journeyman, his hit team was to be paid $150,000 by Carl Williams and Mokbel to kill Lewis Moran. A few days after the killing, he was paid $140,000. He planned to get the remaining $10,000 later. It is now unlikely he will ever collect his debt.
In sentencing him, Teague said Moran’s murder, ‘was a callous, planned, premeditated execution for money. To some people, life is not as sacred as it should be. To some people, life is cheap’.
Police were confident they could make a case against Mokbel for murder. But they had to find him first.
Teague said: ‘In your case, the indications are that the benefit from the co-operation will be extremely high.’
The Journeyman was reminded that if he tried to renege on the deal, he could be re-sentenced less sympathetically.
Others have also turned. At last count, eight underworld witnesses have been hidden away from the public glare to give evidence at a later date.
One Melbourne gang built on unquestioned loyalty and drug money has been destroyed. One of their hit men is dead, three have been jailed and other key figures are believed to be co-operating with police.
There can be no doubt that underworld solidarity has ruptured. Purana detectives and homicide investigators claim they have laid charges or have made inroads in seventeen recent underworld killings.
They say that in seven cases, the gunmen responsible were later themselves killed in the underworld feud.
Detective Superintendent Richard Grant, the head of police tasked operations, said, ‘Our aim is to destroy the code of silence so the crooks can’t trust each other.’ So far, so good.
WITH The Runner, The Journeyman, The Cook, The Driver, The Lieutenant and many others lining up to tell tales on him, Mokbel was under siege. His asset base was frozen, his brothers jailed, he was under investigation for murder and he had a nineyear jail sentence waiting for him. And he was losing his hair.
But he had another powerful enemy — a man he had never met. A Melbourne figure with close connections to a famous northern suburban football club had been watching the underworld war develop in the streets of the city where his family lived and he wasn’t happy. And this Melbourne man controlled one of the most feared gangs in Australia.
His name was Peter Costello, then the Treasurer of Australia and ultimate overseer of the tax department.
ALMOST twenty years earlier, when the tax department completed a secret investigation into a drug dealer who had evaded police for years, they hit him with a bill for $1,348,048.60. But instead of jail and certain financial ruin, the dealer was able to cut a deal.
The Australian Taxation Office ultimately negotiated a settlement of $440,000 as full payment for the period 1984—87. To the drug dealer, it was loose change. To the tax department, it was money in the bank.
The drug trafficker has long moved out of crime and is now a semi-retired — and semi-respectable — property developer in the moneyed area of Melbourne’s north-west.
For decades, police have complained that the tax department has seemed happy to accept tainted money from crooks instead of using their powers to drain the gangsters’ finances.
Many police considered tax officials to be revenue raisers rather than law enforcement officers, more interested in money than morality. With a few notable exceptions, it seemed, the pen pushers were reluctant to take on the drug pushers. Complex laws, which at times protected wealthy criminals who could afford to pay experts to conceal their wealth, did not help.
The tax office has traditionally pursued professional groups, the self-employed and small businesses, often choosing to ignore those who make their money through more nefarious means. On purely financial terms it makes sense. It is harder, and sometimes more risky, to track the assets of serious criminals than those of doctors, plumbers or schoolteachers.
The director of the Australian School of Taxation at the University of NSW, Professor Chris Evans, says the tax office concentrates on areas of evasion that generate large amounts of black money: ‘They make decisions where they can get the biggest bang for their buck.’
He says gangsters who hide their assets and deal in cash are not considered cost-effective targets compared with businesses that keep ordered records.
‘By the time their assets are identified they may be dead or have done a runner. I think sometimes they may be put in the too-hard basket,’ he says.
But, in 2004, Treasurer Costello began to show obvious frustration at the underworld war that had broken out in his hometown. In a pointed message during a speech at Melbourne’s Scots Church, he said: ‘I pledge that if federal tax authorities can assist in tracking and taxing the flow of money that sustains the lifestyles of these drug barons, then everything that can be done will be done. We stand ready, anxious to assist.’
Weeks earlier, he had said he was worried that many of Melbourne’s underworld figures had become celebrities and were being glamorised by the media.
Costello told the authors soon after Mokbel fled that investigators and police would work together to nail gangsters. ‘These drug barons can expect to be hit harder under the Tax Act. Let us hope that they are hit even harder under the criminal law.’
Clearly, Costello was flagging the possibility of the tactics used by US federal authorities in the early 1930s to snare the mobster Al Capone, who had seemed immune from prosecution for his many criminal activities for years.
Back in the Prohibition era, the US Treasury Department charged Al Capone and other mobsters with tax evasion. Capone was convicted in 1931 and sentenced to eleven years, fined $50,000, hit with a back tax bill of $215,000 and charged $7692 in court costs. He was released from jail after serving seven years, six months and fifteen days, a broken and sick man. Syphilis can do that — even to seemingly tough guy gangsters. It would seem Al had needed a condom more than a bullet proof vest. He did not return to Chicago and died a ‘vegetable’.
Many criminals see jail as an occupational hazard. They view it the way a farmer sees drought — nasty, but at times unavoidable. The main aim is never to lose the farm. It is the police’s aim, now, to seize the farm. While arrests bring headlines, it is the methodical finding, freezing and seizing of assets that permanently damages organised crime groups.
‘Cut the assets and you destroy their power bases,’ is the philosophy of Detective Superintendent Richard Grant, who was assigned to modernise police investigations into organised crime.
While the Victorian Government introduced tough new asset seizure laws, financial and legal advisers urged their gangster clients to put their investments in the names of trusted family members.
Police say they will work with the Tax Office to chase the money that in some cases has been hidden for years. One senior policeman once complained that he had personally told the tax department of at least $10 million in a criminal’s hidden assets but still couldn’t claim the suit he wore to work as a tax deduction.
The difference is that police are now employing specialists to identify the hidden assets of organised crime figures so that the tax office will receive detailed information on people that were previously undetected.
Up to 32 lawyers, forensic accountants, analysts and administrators have joined specialist units and the Victoria Police criminal proceeds squad to track the finances of organised crime suspects and police have pledged to set up three Purana-like taskforces.
If police can’t get them, they will pass the information to the tax man. Evans says the tax office can assess an individual’s lifestyle and likely income and then lodge a statement to that effect. It is then up to the target to prove that the statement’s assessment is not accurate. Individuals found to have cheated the tax department can be charged under the Crimes (Taxation Offences) Act and face a maximum of ten years’ jail and a $100,000 fine. In addition, they can be ordered to pay back taxes, be hit with punitive double taxes and face a punishing interest bill.
All of which was bad news for the likes of Tony Mokbel, top of the list of drug baron tax evaders. Just months before he disappeared he was hit with a $4 million bill for back taxes.
Police say Mokbel’s power base was always purely financial. Take the money and the trinkets and he would just be a former milk bar owner with a wig.
The underworld war has shown the sort of money some of Melbourne’s unemployed gangsters have been able to acquire — wealth that is often kept in the names of family, friends and ‘front’ businesses. It can take the form of hidden cash, jewellery and luxury cars, as well as real estate.
Yet Mokbel tried to cry poor. He launched a failed court appeal to try to free assets frozen by police, saying he did not have enough money to support his lifestyle and to pay his lawyers.
But ‘poverty’ is relative. When he was arrested (again) in 2005, he was carrying nearly $40,000 in cash and six mobile phones. Later that year, he was still trying to buy businesses, including a men’s fashion label, on the understanding that others would front the companies.
The family’s preference for cash again surfaced in 2006, when police seized $116,255 after they arrested Tony’s brother Milad Mokbel on drug charges. Milad’s home was put up as surety for Tony before he jumped bail.
Peter Costello has made it clear that Mokbel is not the only crook in the tax department’s sights.
A study of some of the victims of Melbourne’s underworld war shows that Mokbel was not the only gangster to revel in the lifestyle of the rich and infamous drug traffickers.
Michael Marshall sold hot dogs for a living. When he was shot dead in October 2003, he had a property portfolio worth around $1.5 million, including a double-storey house in South Yarra bought from a Melbourne surgeon in 1991. Marshall was only 26 when he bought the house yet was able to pay it off within three years. Title documents show it had taken the surgeon many years to do the same thing. Saving lives does not pay nearly as well as ruining them.
Willie Thompson supposedly sold lollipops to nightclubs until he was shot dead in his expensive Honda sports car in Chadstone in July 2003. The former kickboxer and part-time actor listed his occupation as ‘company director’ and he had $245,000 in a Greek bank account.
Jason Moran had no known occupation other than career gangster when he was shot dead in Essendon North in June 2003. He had a life insurance policy worth $16,000 and $413,211.81 in the Stevedoring Employees Retirement Fund. But his wife Trish, who listed her occupation as home duties, had built an excellent property portfolio valued at $1.845 million — although some of the units were mortgaged through Moran Investments Pty Ltd.
Jason’s half-brother Mark was shot dead outside his $1.3 million home in Aberfeldie in June 2000, when houses worth more than a million dollars were still scarce. He was an unemployed pastry chef at the time.
Frank Benvenuto was shot dead outside his Beaumaris house in May 2000. In the boot of his car was said to be $64,000. He owned property and was able to spend $5000 on his sport of choice — pigeon racing.
Nik Radev was a drug dealer who didn’t pay tax for years. When he was shot dead in April 2003 he was standing next to his $100,000 Mercedes. He was wearing a Versace outfit and a $20,000 watch and had recently spent $50,000 to have his teeth fixed. He was buried in a gold-plated casket valued at $30,000.
Police say that no matter how well business is going, many gangsters hate paying tax and will try to take on the system.
In a celebrated case that changed tax law, a convicted heroin dealer successfully claimed a deduction for money he claimed was stolen during a raid.
Perth drug dealer Francesco Dominico La Rosa argued he should be allowed to claim $224,793 stolen from him in 1995 after the Tax Office had assessed his income in that financial year as $446,954.
La Rosa — who was sentenced to twelve years jail for dealing heroin and amphetamines — was quoted after he won his court battle saying: ‘As drug dealers or business people, we should have the same rights as any taxpayer.’
The Federal Government changed the law so convicted criminals could not claim as deductions money spent or lost during unlawful activities. It is also illegal to claim bribes as a business expense.
But Evans says it is still technically possible for a non-convicted criminal to make claims. For example, a hit man who was paid to kill could theoretically claim guns, bullets and disguises as legitimate business expenses.
WHILE photos of Mokbel at the races or leaving court have filled newspapers for years, police artists have drawn a cartoon image that portrays the career criminal in a classic ‘Where’s Wally?’ pose, complete with the Crime Stoppers number branded across his chest.
It shows Australia’s most wanted man ready to flee Australia either by plane or ship, carrying suitcases of money and a plastic surgery kit. The satirical image suggests that Mokbel, who described himself as a professional punter, would leave his favourite track, Flemington — from which he was banned — for Dubai, where he could punt on the camel races, among other events.
Police were joking about the whereabouts of Australia’s number one fugitive but it would take them more than a year to find, not for the first time in the gangland war, that truth can be stranger than fiction.