In a business where attention
can be fatal, Gangitano was
a publicity magnet.
IT was just after midnight when the two men in the green hire car cruised over the empty Westgate Bridge, heading away from Melbourne’s city skyline.
The driver took little notice as his passenger casually picked up a McDonald’s paper bag, apparently containing the remnants of their late-night snack, and threw it out the window.
It was only later that the driver would wonder why the bag wasn’t sucked behind the fast moving car and, instead of fluttering onto the roadway, flew straight over the railing into the mouth of the Yarra River, 54 metres below.
And it would be months before police would conclude that the weight in the bag thrown from the bridge equalled that of a .32 calibre handgun — the one used to kill one of Australia’s most notorious gangsters less than an hour earlier.
Alphonse John Gangitano was still lying dead in the laundry of his home with two bullet wounds in his head and one in the back when the two men crossed the bridge, but it would take four years before the events of that night were exposed.
GANGITANO was not Melbourne’s best gangster, but he was the best known and certainly one of the best dressed. Glamorous, charming and violent, he played the role of an underworld identity as if he had learned it from a Hollywood script. Which, to some extent, he had. He watched a lot of films. Too many, maybe.
The sycophants would call him the Robert De Niro of Lygon Street. His critics — and there were many — called him the ‘Plastic Godfather’.
In a business where attention can be fatal, Gangitano was a publicity magnet, first as a boxing manager, photographed with world champions such as Lester Ellis, and then as a crime figure whose court appearances were routinely followed by an increasingly fixated media.
He posed for photos and loved the crime boss image. He craved the centre stage and shunned the shadows. The only time he became outraged was when one of the authors said on radio, ‘Alphonse Gangitano has the brains of a flea and the genitalia to match.’ It is not known which part of the barb he found most offensive. He sued using his favourite lawyer, George Defteros, but when Al died, so did the legal action.
Some gangsters are born into the underworld, driven there by a cycle of poverty, lack of legitimate opportunities and family values that embrace violence and dishonesty. But that was not Gangitano’s background. He came from a hard-working, successful family. His father had run a profitable travel agency and invested astutely in real estate.
Young Alphonse was given a private school education — at De La Salle, Marcellin and Taylor’s College — but struggled to justify his parents’ investment. He was remembered as a big kid with attitude, but not much ability and no application.
He was quick with his fists but not with his wits, though he was cunning enough to fight on his terms, usually king-hitting his opponents. He was charged with offensive behaviour when he was nineteen and, over the next five years, he graduated from street crimes to serious violence. Along the way he started to gather a group, which for two decades was known as the Carlton Crew.
Most young men eventually grow out of being fascinated with violence. Gangitano didn’t. He was 24 when police first found him with a gun.
A confidential police report warned of Gangitano and his team: ‘They approach (police) members and assault them for no apparent reason. They are all extremely anti-police and are known to be ex-boxers. They often frequent in a group numbering approximately fifteen. They single out up to three off-duty police and assault them, generally by punching and kicking them. On most occasions in the past, members have been hospitalised due to injuries received from these persons.’ Gangitano was described as ‘extremely violent and dangerous.’
In the early 1980s, Gangitano worked as a low-level standover man using an old tactic. He would walk into a club with a small group and tell the owners that he expected protection money or he would begin bashing patrons. Many quickly paid — others were slow learners. He was making more than $1000 a week. Not huge money, but enough for a young man on the make.
He was charged with hindering police, assault by kicking, assaulting police, resisting arrest, and other crimes of violence. Each time, the charges were thrown out. The fact he was able to beat charges helped build his reputation. Some suggested he had influence inside the police force.
Before long, he started to take on the trappings of a crime boss — wearing expensive clothes, reading biographies on Al Capone as if they were DIY manuals and watching videos such as The Godfather. He didn’t seem to grasp that in Hollywood, the good guys almost always win and the bad guys end up behind bars. Or dead.
BEFORE poker machines and government-sanctioned casinos creamed off the easy money, the illegal gaming business was the underworld’s most consistent money-maker. Gangitano might have been bored at school, but he was a quick learner on the street. He bought into a profitable baccarat school in Lygon Street and, some say, either part-owned or ran protection on Victoria’s then lucrative two-up school.
Police intelligence reports listed him as a big punter and suggested he was a race-fixer in Victoria and Western Australia. He allegedly sold guns at an old Brunswick nightclub.
In the early 1990s, many police were confused about Gangitano. They were not sure if he was just another try-hard bash artist or a man building a serious criminal network. Their informer network reported he was a big underworld player yet several investigations found he was more style than substance.
If the aim of crime was to make big money, Gangitano was still an apprentice. But still the rumours continued that he was on the way to being ‘The Godfather’ of Melbourne.
He was seen with experienced and respected criminals. One of his new friends was Australia’s best safebreaker, Graham Kinniburgh — who should have known better. It would be a disaster for Kinniburgh, who was sucked back into the limelight and, fatally, into the gangland war that was about to erupt. Alphonse also grew close to three brothers who controlled much of Lygon Street.
It perplexed police. Why did the big names of crime tolerate the dangerous and unpredictable new boy?
Gangitano brought publicity and the headlines made senior police demand reports from their organised crime experts. It was not good for business. In the underworld, fame rarely brings fortune.
Most major crooks need a semi-legitimate veneer. Like the American gangsters he mimicked, Gangitano chose boxing and aligned himself with the Lester Ellis camp. But Gangitano could not grasp the fundamentals of lawful business — even if it was only a front. He bashed and bit the well-known boxer Barry Michael, a professional rival to Ellis, in a city nightclub in 1987. More headlines followed.
Around the same time, Gangitano went into partnership to build a casino in Fitzroy with a well-known Lygon Street identity, investing $300,000 in the project. Unfortunately for the entrepreneurs, police raided and closed the club two days after it opened.
It was a classic police sting. Watching from a secret surveillance post in a building across the road, they allowed him to pour his money into the project before they shut it down.
Gangitano was handsome, smooth and liked to think he was well-read. He could quote Oscar Wilde, John F. Kennedy and Adolf Hitler. Or, at least, he got away with it. In his crowd, no one would check if the quotes were accurate. And even if they did, they would be too tactful to mention it.
On one occasion an off-duty detective was dining in Lygon Street with a woman other than his wife. He heard a group of men at a table behind him swearing and laughing. He turned and curtly told them to improve their manners — before he realised the head of the table was Gangitano. The policeman expected trouble. Instead, the group finished their meal and filed out. The waiter came to the detective’s table with an expensive bottle of wine and an apology from Gangitano.
Yet he could also be short-tempered, irrationally violent and tactically naive. He often needed associates or his expensive team of lawyers to help clean up the messes he made.
A group of criminals, headed by Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read, once planned to use land mines to kill Gangitano at his eastern suburbs house, but scrapped the plot because of the likelihood of others being killed.
Shortly before Read was released from prison in 1991, an associate of Gangitano went to Pentridge with a peace offer. But police say Gangitano had a back-up plan. He had placed a $30,000 contract on Read’s head.
When Read was released, Gangitano produced yet another plan … he took his family to Italy and did not return until January 1993, when Read was back in custody on another shooting charge.
Gangitano should have learned from Read’s carelessness with pointing guns. It was little more than two years later that he had his own problems, when he killed Greg Workman.
It was lucky for Big Al that the two sisters who had witnessed the shooting later changed their stories because they felt abandoned in the police witness protection. But his good fortune cost him a small fortune when he picked up the bill for their extended overseas trip. He was, of course, compensated for legal costs of $69,975.35 over the failed prosecution. In the end, it might not have been worth humiliating the police.
Incensed that they had to drop the charges, police then decided on a campaign of death by a thousand cuts. Gangitano’s Eaglemont house was raided. Police said he resisted arrest and so suffered nasty head injuries.
Within a few months, he was charged with assault, refusing a breath test and possession of firearms. He spent time in jail and was bailed on a night curfew. The myth that he was untouchable began to fade.
When reporting for bail, Gangitano saw an unflattering police Polaroid picture on his file. He paid for a professional portrait shot and took it to the station to replace the Polaroid mugshot. In September 1997, a crime report on radio 3AW stated Gangitano had fallen out with old friends and would be murdered. Gangitano scoffed at the suggestion — but police found a transcript of the report in his home the day after he was killed.
A television reporter contacted Mark ‘Chopper’ Read in late 1997 when the standover man was about to be released from jail. She wanted to organise an interview with Gangitano and Read.
‘Not possible, darling,’ Read said. ‘He’ll be dead before I’m out, I’m afraid.’
IN many ways Graham Allan Kinniburgh and Gangitano were the odd couple of the underworld.
Kinniburgh was wealthy, but tried to hide it — Gangitano was struggling but deliberately cultivated an image of affluence.
Kinniburgh was an old-fashioned Anglo-Celtic ‘Aussie’ who kept a low profile, preferring to conduct his business in private. Gangitano was the son of Italian migrants and loved the headlines, even if it meant he was always the target of police investigations.
Kinniburgh’s apparently slight criminal record understates his influence on the Melbourne underworld. It lists crimes of dishonesty, bribery, possession of firearms, escape, resisting arrest and assaulting police. But criminal records list only an offender’s arrest history — his failures. Successful criminals learn from their mistakes and don’t get caught.
Police became convinced that Kinniburgh — known as ‘The Munster’ — was close to the infamous ‘magnetic drill gang’, responsible for many of Australia’s biggest safe breakings.
Right up until the day he was killed, Kinniburgh lived in a double-storey house in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Kew. Now a well-known media personality lives in the same street. Cynics say both made handsome livings from very little work. One difference was that Kinniburgh always carried plenty of cash.
The Munster’s occupation seemed to be a mystery. Interviewed by police after Gangitano’s murder, he struggled to remember how he paid the bills. When asked by the astute Detective Sergeant Gavan Ryan of the homicide squad what he did for a job, Kinniburgh eventually suggested he might be ‘a rigger’.
But while regular employment was not at the top of his priorities, life had been kind to ‘The Munster’. When police searched him outside the scene of Gangitano’s murder he was carrying some change, keys, cigarettes and just over $3000 in $100 notes.
While Kinniburgh could afford imported suits, he preferred the casual clothes of an off-duty dock worker, but in middle age he had acquired expensive tastes and was a regular at the budget-blowing Flower Drum restaurant in Chinatown. He unofficially holds the record for spending more money on fried rice than any other human on the planet.
But the master criminal planner made a big mistake. He ignored the fact that Gangitano was a magnet for publicity and trouble.
ALPHONSE Gangitano didn’t look like a worried man as he stood on the steps of the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court after round one of his committal hearing.
Despite facing serious assault charges over a brawl in a King Street bar, he told friends he was confident he would eventually be acquitted.
He bragged that he was not concerned about the police case and his legal team would ‘blow them away’.
But one of two co-accused, Jason Matthew Patrick Moran, was not so confident. After the assault on 19 December 1995, which had left thirteen people injured, Moran was recorded on a police listening device saying he had to ‘shower to wash the blood off’ and ‘to cut a long story short, I started it’.
Gangitano’s declaration that he would win the case was typical Al bravado. He was apprehended at the scene still swinging a pool cue and chasing yet another victim. Gangitano had done what police investigators could not — bring an open and shut case to conclusion. He was going to jail for a long time.
But Jason had got away from the scene. Perhaps he later wished he hadn’t because when he was finally arrested, enthusiastic police fractured his skull.
Moran and Gangitano were long-time associates but their relationship was starting to fray. Moran was secretly taped saying of Big Al: ‘He’s a fucking lulu … if you smash five pool cues and an iron bar over someone’s head, you’re fucking lulu.’
The case against Jason was strong, but not as strong as the one against Alphonse. If they stood in the same dock together Jason would sink with the weight of evidence against his mate and if Alphonse pleaded guilty it would add to the resolve of wavering witnesses to give evidence against Moran.
But Jason was brought up in the old school. It seems unlikely he would off a mate on the off chance he would get off. That would be off.
There must have been more to it. Even Jason’s enemies acknowledge he was tough and he soon recovered from his police-inflicted fractured skull. The injury and the pain-killers did not help him see the light.
In 1996 Moran was again charged with assault-related offences after another attack in a nightclub. He was always close to losing control, but his family tried to keep him on track.
But Gangitano had no support network. Increasingly isolated, he was seen as a loose cannon that made problems for everyone. He was expendable. Those close to the Morans noticed there appeared to be growing tension between Jason and Alphonse.
But on the morning of 16 January 1998, as they left court together, they seemed as staunch as ever. They shook hands before moving off with a group, including four defence lawyers, for coffee at the Four Courts Cafe in William Street.
Later, Gangitano and his solicitor, Dean Cole, walked to George’s Cafe in Lonsdale Street for a light lunch before going to a small TAB for two hours of punting. Gangitano placed bets on seven races before he was picked up and taken back to his Templestowe home by his regular driver, Santo.
Soon after arriving home in Glen Orchard Close, Templestowe, Gangitano rang Cole to say he was tired and would have a nap. It was 4.45pm. He promised to ring back later but didn’t.
Gangitano was alone in his 30-square double-storey house. His de facto wife and their two children were visiting a relative in St Kilda.
Gangitano removed the expensive, imported grey suit he had worn in court and placed it on the banister before heading upstairs for a four-hour sleep.
Gangitano had bought the house four months earlier for $264,000, but still had a mortgage of $200,000. The house was large, comfortable and suited his purposes.
It was in a dead-end road. From the upstairs windows Gangitano could see any friends, enemies — or both — as they entered the street. The sloping block meant the ground floor was not visible from the road, making police surveillance difficult. A four-camera security system was used when Gangitano was not at home.
The crime boss was not so much concerned about other criminals; he wanted the video system to deter police — the secret ‘tech’ branch — from breaking in and hiding listening devices in his home.
For a self-made crime headline, Gangitano valued his privacy. He tried to protect his family from his working life. Many of his closest crime contacts had never been to his home.
Those who had been there found themselves in the back garden. Gangitano’s fear of listening devices meant he didn’t like to talk business inside the house.
He did not tell his wife about his work and she did not ask. Her job was to care for the children. His was to pay the bills. He had a full-time mistress who might have been more aware of his work, but she was just as coy when asked questions at his murder inquest years later. She said she thought he might have been some sort of a property developer.
Alphonse seemed to attract women who weren’t curious.
GANGITANO rose from his sleep just after 9pm on 16 January 1998. Years of working as a night-time gangster left him with a nocturnal body clock. As part of his bail conditions, Gangitano had to be home after 9pm, although he did not always stick to the letter of the law.
While he liked to be seen after dark in Lygon Street, the bail restrictions meant his nationwide network of criminal associates knew where to find him.
Gangitano’s unlisted number had found its way into the contact books of established and would-be criminals around Australia. In the hours before he died, Gangitano made — and received — many calls.
One was from his wife, telling him she was at her sister’s house and would be home before midnight. An inmate from Fulham Prison rang, wanting a chat and some racing tips. A friend in Brunswick called, and a colourful West Australian personality, John Kizon, also rang.
Kizon was to Perth what Gangitano was to Melbourne. Big, handsome, charismatic and seemingly bulletproof, both men protested that they were not crime bosses, yet seemed to enjoy their public notoriety. They even shared the same lawyer — Croxton Park Hotel bouncer-turned-courtroom-fighter, George Defteros.
Kizon was a convicted heroin trafficker, nightclub owner and entertainment promoter. Like Gangitano, he claimed to be misunderstood. His range of associates included Rose Hancock (he once dated her daughter, Joanna, before she was mysteriously bashed and fled to England), jailed businessman the late Laurie Connell, and Andrew Petrelis, a man who went into witness protection before being found dead in bizarre circumstances in Queensland.
Police believed Kizon had been involved in trafficking large amounts of cannabis from Western Australia to the eastern states.
It was just before 11pm Melbourne time when Kizon rang Gangitano from a Chinese restaurant in Perth. They talked about how the court proceedings had gone that day. Gangitano chatted easily and sounded confident. He had a visitor who took the phone for a brief conversation. It was his long-time friend Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh.
The phone call lasted less than ten minutes. Kizon said he would ring back. He didn’t get the chance.
Earlier that evening, Kinniburgh had had a drink with Carlton identity Lou Cozzo at the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale. Around 10.30pm, he drove his red Ford across town to visit Gangitano.
‘The Munster’ was one of the few men in Melbourne who could drop in on Gangitano without an invitation. According to Kinniburgh, the big man was on the phone when he arrived and told him to clear off for about 30 minutes as he was waiting for another visitor to arrive for a meeting. But those who knew them say the younger man would never be so dismissive of ‘The Munster’.
Kinniburgh gave that version to write himself out of the house at the time of the murder. It didn’t work.
So what really happened?
Gangitano was sitting downstairs at a round kitchen table. From this spot he could see down the hallway to the wooden front door, which was open to let in the cool night breeze. Through the mesh of the second security door he could see out but no one could see in.
It was eighteen degrees at 11pm and Gangitano hadn’t bothered to change from his pyjama top and blue underpants. Judging from the time of Kizon’s phone call, Kinniburgh was already in the house.
When Gangitano opened the door for a second visitor he didn’t bother to put on clothes. It was a casual meeting with a man he knew well — his old mate and partner-in-crime, Jason Moran.
What was said in those few minutes will never be known as the three men present have now all been shot dead. But forensic evidence suggests Moran was standing in the kitchen to his victim’s left and Gangitano ran towards the laundry to his right as shots were fired from close range. He was shot in the back, nose and head, before collapsing.
Kinniburgh said he had slipped away to a Quix convenience store in Blackburn Road to buy a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes. He was recorded on the store’s security camera at 11.45pm and left a minute later.
Coincidently, Gangitano’s wife stopped at the same shop eight minutes earlier to buy the children ice-creams and drinks on the way home. Kinniburgh said he was gone for 30 minutes. He has not yet explained what he did for the other 25 before he returned to his friend’s home.
When he pulled up at the house, Gangitano’s wife was already inside. She had found the body and dialled 000. The emergency tape recorded her call as she desperately tried to keep her children from seeing their dead father. Kinniburgh attempted to help, rolling the body over and trying to administer first aid, but Gangitano had already bled to death.
Kinniburgh must have known the big man was already gone. Did he go through the masquerade of trying to revive him to strengthen his alibi, or was it to ensure there was a logical reason for his DNA to be found on the body?
Those who knew the Munster say he placed himself back at the crime scene because he would not want the dead man’s family to have to deal with the horrendous scene alone.
Police believe Moran and Gangitano argued, then Jason pulled a gun and shot his best friend three times. They think Kinniburgh was shocked, ran to the closed front security door and tried to burst through, cutting his hand on the strong mesh.
But the Munster didn’t become a great underworld survivor by panicking. Even though he was in a mess not of his making, he coolly weighed up what to do. Police deduced that he immediately slipped upstairs to check the security video system, which would explain why blood matching his was found on the upstairs banister.
Gangitano was slack when it came to his security system. He sporadically used it when he was out to see if police had broken in to fit listening devices or telephone taps. He would leave one tape in the machine and re-record over it. But when police checked, the machine was off and the tape was gone and was nowhere in the house. They believe the Munster grabbed the evidence before he left.
RUSSELL Warren Smith was a dangerous man until the drugs beat him. In 1988, when he was more than half way through a ten-year term for killing a man, he noticed a tough youngster who turned up in Geelong jail.
The new kid was Jason Moran, born into a crime family and brought up with gangsters. When gunman Brian Kane was shot in the bar of a Brunswick hotel in 1982, the teenage Jason placed a respectful death notice in the paper to his ‘Uncle Brian’ from ‘Your Little Mate’.
In prison, there are few loners. You team up with a gang, known as a crew, or you can be picked off.
‘When Jason came into the jail he joined up with the crew I was running with,’ Smith would later tell police.
‘I found him to be a good bloke, but he was wild. He was always big-noting himself and I remember his big line, “Do you know who the f… I am?”
‘Jason was only a young kid and nobody in jail had heard of him (but he) could look after himself. Jail is a very violent place and Jason had to fight to protect himself.
‘Jason would always be threatening people, it was his nature.’
They lost contact when they left jail, but six years later they met again, through mutual friend Lou Cozzo, son of Melbourne furniture identity Frank.
In 1995, the three had been drinking in the Depot Hotel in Richmond. Cozzo and Smith were on day leave from the Odyssey House drug clinic and were not worried that a bellyful of beer would be a problem on their return — ‘we always found it easy to get through the tests they would give’.
It was just after 11pm on a Saturday when Moran generously offered to drive them back to the clinic to beat the midnight curfew.
Like his long-time associate, Gangitano, Moran was a hothead who would act first and think later. Consequences were for others to worry about.
Another driver cut in front of Moran without using his indicator. The lights turned red and so did Moran. At one of Melbourne’s busiest and best-lit intersections, the corner of Bridge and Punt Road, Moran grabbed a wheel brace, smashed the other motorist’s windscreen, dragged him from the car and beat him severely. No one stopped to help.
‘Jason got back in the car and was laughing,’ Smith said later.
‘Lou and Jason were part of the Lygon Street crew and that is where I met Alphonse Gangitano. Alphonse would have been the leader of this crowd, some people called him the Lygon Street Godfather. All that crowd wanted to be known as gangsters. They all cultivated tough reputations. I don’t know why they did this. It was just in their nature.’ Smith said that Gangitano ‘always seemed to keep his family separate from the Lygon Street crowd.’
On 16 January 1998, Smith was drinking at a hotel in Campbellfield and watching the lunchtime strip show when he saw Moran. The two talked and smoked some marijuana.
They went back to Smith’s Preston flat to smoke some more. Moran promised to return that night to pay $500 for a marijuana debt.
He returned at 9.45pm. They smoked, talked and then Moran suggested a drive. Moran threw him the keys of his late-model green Commodore sedan.
Moran was no longer the new kid on the block and Smith was no longer the more experienced man. The pecking order had changed. When Moran suggested something, it was done.
The car had a no-smoking sticker on the glove box. Smith believed it was a hire car.
‘I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t ask.’
It was about 10pm when they left Preston and Moran told Smith where to drive — ‘Jason was talking and seemed calm.’
They pulled up in Templestowe. One of the first things Smith the career criminal noticed was that ‘most of the houses had alarms or sensor lights on them’.
Moran opened the passenger door and said, ‘You can’t come in. Just wait here and I’ll be back in five or 10 minutes.’
But Moran didn’t walk in to the double-storey house next to where they had parked but behind the car and down the street. Smith knew too much curiosity could be fatal, so he ‘lost interest’.
After about fifteen minutes, Moran jumped back into the car and told Smith to drive. They went to a 24-hour McDonald’s drive-through in South Melbourne.
Moran told him to drive to Williamstown. As they crossed the Westgate Bridge in the left-hand lane Moran picked up the McDonald’s bag and threw it out the passenger window. Smith saw it clear the railing and fall towards the water far below. It was only later, he said, that he wondered how a paper bag didn’t flutter behind a car travelling at more than 80kmh and instead went almost straight over the railing.
And it was only much later that he thought that Moran may have slipped his gun into the bag and thrown it into the river. Or so he was to say.
‘I knew Jason always carried a gun. I don’t know why he carried them, but he seemed to like guns.’
More than three months later, police divers spent a week trying to find the gun. Police threw paper bags with weights about the size of a .32 handgun off the bridge.
Detectives offered a bottle of malt whisky to the diver who could find the murder weapon. But tidal currents and the Yarra’s permanent silt made it impossible.
A well-known underworld gun dealer lives in the Williamstown area. Police believe Moran made the trip to pick up a new gun after he threw the one used to kill Gangitano into the river.
Next morning, Smith was woken by radio reports that a ‘gangland figure’ had been murdered in Templestowe. ‘I started to get nervous. I didn’t know if Jason had anything to do with it but I started to think he may have.’ When he found out the victim was Gangitano he become increasingly worried. ‘To say I was shocked was an understatement.’
Two days later, Moran turned up at Smith’s flat at 7am. Despite the hour they shared a bong and, according to Smith, Moran said, ‘Alphonse has been put off … don’t talk to any of the crew, especially Lou (Cozzo) and don’t tell anyone you were driving me the other night.’
A few days later Cozzo rang and asked him if he knew anything about the murder and asked ‘if Jason was involved’.
Police arrested Smith for stealing cars more than three months after Gangitano’s murder.
He then decided to tell them what he knew because he wanted a fresh start and was ‘sick of always looking over my shoulder for Jason Moran’.
His evidence may well have been compelling in any future murder trial but Smith committed suicide by hanging himself in jail — eight months to the day after Gangitano’s death.
WITHIN 48 hours of the murder, a freshly-showered Moran arrived with his long-time lawyer, Andrew Fraser, to be interviewed by homicide squad detectives in their St Kilda Road office.
Some might expect a murder victim’s friend to be visibly upset and keen to help detectives. But Moran feigned indifference and refused to answer questions.
Kinniburgh was also interviewed and while he also refused to answer questions the old head was unfailingly polite. When police said they were about to get a warrant to search his house, he quietly pointed out that his money and house keys had been seized by police at the scene. If there was gunshot residue on the money then it may have come from contamination from the crime scene and if there was any evidence of a crime at his house then it could have been planted.
He was clever, but not clever enough to avoid a bullet.
More than two years after Gangitano’s murder, Jason’s half-brother, Mark Moran, was murdered in the driveway of his luxury home near Essendon. Police say Carl Williams was the shooter but the charges against him were dropped when he agreed to plead guilty to three other hits. Mark Moran was a victim but no innocent one.
Some in the underworld believe that Jason was not the only Moran in Gangitano’s home that night. They say Kinniburgh tried to organise a peace meeting between the Morans and Gangitano, assuring Big Al there would be no weapons.
The theory goes that one of the Morans produced a gun and killed Gangitano in an ambush that shocked Kinniburgh — hence his reaction to the murder.
There were two witnesses who were in the street that night having an argument in a car. One saw a man walk down the road into Gangitano’s house and leave a short time later. The description fitted Jason, but the witness insisted he had tattoos and Jason didn’t. The witnesses identified a ute in the street — a car similar to the one driven by Mark, who did have impressive tattoos.
Jason Moran was eventually sentenced to jail for the King Street brawl where Gangitano was a co-accused. In September 2001, Moran was granted parole and released from prison. In an unusual move, the National Parole Board allowed him to leave Australia with his family because of fears for his life. But he was too stubborn and arrogant to stay away. Despite advice from his own family he returned to Melbourne on 20 November.
On 21 June 2003, he was shot dead with his friend, Pasquale Barbaro, while they watched an Auskick junior football session in Essendon North.
On 13 December 2003, the man who wanted a low profile, Graham Kinniburgh, made headlines when he was murdered outside his Kew home.
Criminal lawyer Andrew Fraser knew many secrets. His clients believed they could tell him anything and their conversations would remain confidential.
A ready talker himself, Fraser knew the value of silence. His first advice to his many clients was that if questioned by police, refuse to talk. He would tell them to provide their name, age and address, but to respond to every further question with a standard ‘no comment’.
Private school-educated, Fraser prided himself on his ability to talk to his clients using the language of the underworld.
In September 1988, his private language became public knowledge when a conversation with a murder suspect was recorded in a city watch-house cell.
He was representing Anthony Farrell, one of four men charged with, and ultimately acquitted of, the Walsh Street ambush murders of young police constables Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre.
Fraser said to Farrell: ‘All you’ve got to do is fucking keep your trap shut. So say fucking nothing. And don’t consent to anything.
‘So just keep your trap shut, mate. This is the rest of your life here, because, don’t worry, if you go down on this you’re going to get a fucking monster, and we all know that, right?’
Fraser’s tough-guy talk and his 24-hour-a-day availability made him popular with some of Victoria’s best-known crime families. Drug dealer and killer Dennis Allen always used Fraser and the Moran family swore by him.
But by the late 1990s Fraser was battling his own drug demons. He ignored his own advice to keep silent and by 1999 he was reduced to cocaine-fuelled rambles in his city office. In December 2001, Fraser was sentenced to a minimum of five years’ jail for his part in a cocaine smuggling scheme.
A key piece of evidence was a conversation secretly recorded in his office by police on 16 August 1999, when he discussed with his usual supplier a plot to import cocaine valued at almost $3 million. But five days earlier, drug squad police from Operation Regent recorded another fascinating conversation.
Fraser told a colleague that one of his clients, Jason Moran, was ‘crazy’.
The colleague asked the lawyer entrusted with many of the criminal secrets of Melbourne, who had killed Gangitano.
Fraser responded with one word: ‘Jason.’
THE fact and fantasies of Gangitano’s life and death will never be separated.
He gave the impression of wealth, but he had serious debts; he appeared unworried by constant police investigations and court appearances, yet his autopsy showed traces of the prescribed anti-anxiety drug — Diazapam.
He owed his lawyer George Defteros $100,000 and had about $2000 in a bank account. He was a paper millionaire, with assets valued at just over $1.1 million, but with debts of more than $300,000. Most of his wealth was in his late parents’ property in Lygon Street that he and his sister had inherited. Most crooks use dirty money to invest in legitimate business. He used good money to try and build a crime empire.
There were more than 200 death notices for Gangitano. As has become an underworld tradition, hundreds packed St Mary’s Star of the Sea church for the funeral. It made the headlines and led the television news. He would have liked that.
Gangitano referred to himself as a property developer, although the occupation listed in his will was ‘gentleman’.
But the myth did not die with his murder and he proved to be more famous dead than alive.
The theatre continued at his inquest, four years later. Deputy Coroner Iain West heard that a musician had composed a song to Gangitano and the crime boss wanted Hollywood star Andy Garcia to play his role in a proposed movie. He would have been chuffed with the choice of local star Vince Colosimo in Channel Nine’s $10 million series Underbelly.
Kinniburgh and Moran attended the inquest but both chose not to give evidence on the grounds of self-incrimination. Kinniburgh wore casual clothes befitting a man who didn’t want to be noticed. Moran wore an expensive pinstripe suit and a flash diamond ring.
Observers noticed a large scar running down the side of his head, legacy of having his skull broken by police when he was arrested a few years earlier — an action which the trial judge said was ‘remarkably heavy handed.’
Coroner West found that both Kinniburgh and Moran were in Gangitano’s house and ‘implicated in the death’ but he did not have sufficient evidence to conclude who fired the gun.
Now Kinniburgh and Moran are also dead. The case is closed — dead men tell no tales.
Armed and dangerous … action scene from Underbelly drama series.
Alphonse Gangitano … accused killer and later a victim.
Vince Colosimo as Gangitano.
Jason Moran dresses up for the inquest … it did him no good. He was still blamed for Al’s murder.
Les Hill as Moran.
Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin: prime suspect in seven gangland murders before he was shot dead.
A blood-spattered DamianWalshe-Howling as Veniamin.
Mick Gatto invited ‘Benji’ to a Carlton restaurant and left Veniamin dead on the floor … he claims self-defence.
Simon Westaway as Gatto.
Tony Mokbel: the drug-baron before he jumped bail.
Robert Mammone as Mokbel.
Judy Moran: lost two husbands and two sons to the gun.
Caroline Gilmer as the Moran matriarch.
Lewis Moran is greeted after being bailed in July, 2003. Police said he was safer inside … they were right.
Kevin Harrington as Lewis.
Danielle McGuire: flew overseas to muddy Mokbel’s trail.
Robert Mammone’s Mokbel with MadeleineWest’s McGuire.