In police circles no name
is more detested than that of
Victor Peirce. Many openly
rejoiced when he was
finally shot.
SHE was the ace in the pack — the witness that could prove to a jury of strangers how a gang of Melbourne armed robbers became ruthless police killers.
Taskforce detectives had worked on her for months, chipping away, hoping they could turn her against the men they were convinced had ambushed and murdered two young police constables in Walsh Street, South Yarra.
But she knew the rules. To talk to police, let alone give evidence for them, was an unforgivable act of betrayal. In the vernacular of the underworld, to give evidence — to tell the truth — is to turn ‘dog’. And she seemed set to be the biggest dog of all.
She was to be the 94th — and most important — witness, not only for what she was going to say under oath, but because of who she was.
Experienced defence barristers could easily discredit many of the witnesses in the case. These were criminals looking to curry favour, men trying to do deals with authorities over their own criminal activities, or those who could provide only small snippets to add to events that took years to build, hours to plan and minutes to execute.
But Wendy Peirce was no outsider looking in. She was the wife of the alleged ringleader and could provide the jury with the chilling details of how and why the gang chose two young policemen they didn’t know to ambush and murder.
Wendy was no tourist passing through. Her adult life had been spent in the black and bloody world of Australia’s most notorious crime cell — the Pettingill-Allen-Peirce clan, in which violence was seen as a solution and murder an attractive option.
Her husband, and the father of her children, was Victor George Peirce, the leader of a gang of armed robbers hitting targets around Melbourne.
Wendy Peirce was the reason police were confident they could convict the men charged with the murders of Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, who were shot dead on 12 October 1988.
The prosecution case was that Peirce and his crew were driven by a pathological hatred of law enforcement after police killed two of their mates the previous year — Mark Militano in March and Frankie Valastro in June.
Detectives maintained that both men, who had long histories of violence, were shot when they refused to surrender and chose to threaten police with guns.
The gang was convinced members of the armed robbery squad had become trigger-happy and embarked on a policy of being judge, jury and executioner. They believed that when frustrated detectives couldn’t find the evidence to convict suspects they would shoot them and later argue the killings were self-defence.
After Militano’s death, detectives claimed Peirce and his team began to talk of fighting back. If more of their mates were killed by police they would respond by killing two police in return, the story went.
There were rumours and whispers of the revenge pact and there was talk that members of the squad could be ambushed in the driveways of their own homes.
At the same time detectives grabbed Victor Peirce, told him they knew he was committing armed robberies and advised him he should pull up while he could.
The stakes were raised and a confrontation of sorts was inevitable.
On 11 October 1988, Peirce’s best friend and prolific armed robbery partner, Graeme Jensen, was shot dead by police in a botched arrest at Narre Warren after the suspect went to buy a spark plug for his mower.
It was now flashpoint.
On Wednesday 12 October, a Walsh Street resident reported to police that a white Holden Commodore was apparently abandoned in the street with the bonnet raised, the driver’s side door open and the rear passenger side vent window smashed.
At 4.34 am a D24 operator assigned the job to a patrol car using the call sign Prahran 311.
The two young policemen on night patrol in Prahran 311 were too inexperienced to be bored with routine calls and responded immediately.
The driver, Steven Tynan, 22, had been a policeman for two years and nine months. His partner, Damian Eyre, 20, was from a police family and had been in the job for six months after graduating from the academy on 27 April 1988.
It took just seven minutes for the pair to reach the suspect sedan. They had no reason to suspect a trap.
Tynan parked the divisional van behind the Holden. Both vehicles were facing north. Eyre got out of the passenger side of the van and walked to the car.
He glanced at the registration sticker on the front window and jotted down the number and expiry date on a sheet of paper on his clipboard.
Meanwhile, his partner went to the open driver’s door and slipped behind the wheel.
Eyre then walked around the car and squatted next to Tynan, who was still in the car.
They would have seen that the ignition lock was broken so that the car could be started without a key.
Tynan had started to get out of the car when the shotgun blast hit him. The deadly force threw him back into the car, where he collapsed, with his head between the front bucket seats. It was 4.48 am.
Eyre began to rise from the squatting position when he was shot across his back in the upper left shoulder, also with a shotgun.
It should have been enough to stop anyone dead, but Eyre somehow rose and turned to face his attacker. He grabbed the gunman and fought. Police believe the shotgun discharged twice more, one blast hitting the wall of a Walsh Street house.
Even though he was seriously, but not fatally, wounded, Eyre continued to fight until a second man slipped up next to him and grabbed the policeman’s service .38 revolver from its holster, put it to the policeman’s head and fired.
Eyre collapsed and was shot again in the back as he lay next to the rear driver’s side wheel of the stolen car. He was already dying when the second revolver bullet hit him.
Both Tynan and Eyre died in hospital from massive gunshot wounds without regaining consciousness.
It didn’t take detectives long to work out that this was a cold-blooded ambush.
The dumped car had been used as bait to lure police — any police — into the quiet street. At the top of a very short list of suspects were Victor Peirce and his team.
Within a day Victor’s mother, Kath Pettingill, the matriarch of the notorious crime family, was quoted as saying she knew her children were the prime suspects but denied they were involved.
‘It wasn’t us,’ she said. ‘I hate coppers but those boys didn’t do anything. Our family wouldn’t do that. We were not involved.
‘You don’t kill two innocent coppers. If you want to get back you would kill the copper who killed Graeme.’
Police responded immediately, conducting a series of sometimes brutal raids. They were sending a clear message to the underworld: all business was off until the police killers were charged and in jail.
But one of the most defiant in the face of constant raids was Wendy Peirce.
Apparently blood loyal to her in-laws, after one heavy-handed police raid on her house she posed in the debris for the media with one of her children, looking every bit the innocent victims of police brutality.
Homicide squad detective Jim Conomy formally interviewed her on 9 November 1988.
Not only did she refuse to implicate her husband but she gave him an alibi. They were together all night in a Tullamarine motel and he did not leave, she said.
It was a lie.
On 30 December 1988, Victor Peirce was formally charged with two counts of murder over Walsh Street.
Three other men, Peirce’s half-brother Trevor Pettingill, Anthony Farrell and Peter David McEvoy, were charged. Two other suspects, Jedd Houghton and Gary Abdallah, were shot dead by police in separate incidents. Peirce’s young nephew, Jason Ryan, was also charged, although he became a protected witness for the prosecution.
With no witnesses, police built a complex case that relied heavily on forensic evidence linking a shotgun used in Walsh Street to an earlier armed robbery alleged to have been conducted by the suspects, and a series of witnesses who were prepared to swear on oath that the men charged were the killers.
Much of the testimony was tainted by the fact it was from career criminals who were never going to be seen as reliable.
Many had at first denied any knowledge or helped provide alibis for the suspects.
Then, after being subjected to sustained pressure from detectives, they finally agreed to testify.
Members of the Ty-Eyre taskforce set up to investigate the murders continued to visit Wendy Peirce. They didn’t use tough-guy tactics but gently tried to persuade her that this would be the one chance she had to change her life — to leave the underworld and make a fresh start. They told her she had reached a fork in the road and had to choose which way she wanted to go.
In July 1989 — eight months after the murders — she would spend three days with Detective Inspector David Sprague and Senior Detective Colin McLaren of the Ty-Eyre taskforce, making an explosive 31-page statement.
On Sunday 16 July, she told the detectives she wished to go into the witness protection scheme. Two days later, in an interview room in homicide she repeated her statement on videotape — a confession that could have condemned her husband to life in prison.
Sporting bleached blonde hair and wearing heavy make-up, she appeared remarkably relaxed as she read her statement. Yes, she had been with her husband at the Tullamarine Motel on the night that Jensen had been killed but, ‘Victor was absent from the motel most of the night until the morning.’
In other words, he had plenty of time to drive to Walsh Street and return.
She read her statement in a monotone, stumbling over some of the words. But the message was clear. ‘He disliked police so much that he would often say to me, “I’d love to knock them dogs”. His hatred of police was so vicious that at times I was scared to be with him.’
She said the whole family hated police, but Victor was the worst.
‘On many occasions he would be holding on to a handgun and would say, “I would love to knock Jacks”.’
Wendy said there was one armed robbery squad detective ‘he wanted to put off’.
In February 1988, after police raided his family, Peirce ‘was yelling and screaming and in such a rage from yelling that he started crying from temper,’ she said.
Why then had she protected him with a false statement to police?
‘I have been an alibi witness for Victor many times. I did so out of loyalty to him and also out of fear. I was well aware he would bash me if I didn’t … I was fearful that Victor would kill me if I didn’t supply an alibi.’
In this version of events, she said that when Peirce first learned police had killed Jensen, he had said, ‘Oh, Jesus’, and had tears in his eyes.
She told police he then rang McEvoy and said, ‘What can we do, mate? Graeme’s dead, what can we do?’
She said he told her, ‘I’m next. They’ll shoot me now. They’re dogs; they knocked Graeme for no good reason.’
What she then said could have blown a hole in Peirce’s story that he spent the night with her.
She said they went to bed with his arm under her head. She heard him get up and get dressed. But she had learned over the previous thirteen years when it was best to mind her own business and she chose not to move or call out.
‘I heard him leave the motel.’ She dozed and when he came back to bed he was cold.
The taskforce was delighted. They had infiltrated the family that lived by the code of silence. Wendy Peirce continued to talk. Tape after tape was recorded that implicated Peirce in murders and unsolved armed robberies.
Police and prosecution lawyers were confident that once a jury heard her version of events they would convict the four men in the dock without hesitation.
After all, why would a woman lie to help convict the father of her children?
For more than a year Wendy Peirce lived in witness protection waiting for the day she would be called to help send her husband to jail.
The committal hearing at the Magistrates’ Court proved to be the perfect dress rehearsal. She answered all questions and made it clear her husband was the key figure in the group that killed the two police as a random payback after their mate, Graeme Jensen, had been shot dead by police during an attempted arrest the previous day.
She answered all questions, implicating her husband as the driving force behind the Walsh Street killings. She was cross-examined ruthlessly but stood up to the examination. A court veteran, she had acted as an unofficial legal assistant during many of the family’s battles with the law.
But there were warning signs. In November 1990, shortly after the committal hearing, Wendy Peirce’s brother told taskforce joint leader Inspector John Noonan they were about to be ambushed — that she would not give evidence when it counted.
It worried Noonan enough to front Wendy Peirce, who said the claim was ‘utter rubbish’.
But it wasn’t.
The jury would never hear her testimony. In the pre-trial voir dire — closed hearing — at the Supreme Court, Wendy Peirce suddenly changed her story and so effectively sabotaged the police case.
After eighteen months in witness protection and after swearing to her husband’s involvement at the Magistrate’s committal hearings, Peirce betrayed her police minders and saved her husband, Victor, from conviction and a certain lifetime prison sentence.
Not only did she deny that her husband was involved, but she declared that she had never seen him with guns in their Richmond home.
Yet in her earlier police statement she said her husband was an expert at hiding guns and that when she saw him in their shed sawing off a shotgun barrel he said to her with the pride of a home handyman, ‘This will be a beauty, Witch.’ (‘Witch’ was her nickname).
She also knew first hand of her husband’s interest in gunplay. She told police that once while sitting with Graeme Jensen, Victor became annoyed because they had run out of marijuana. ‘He was playing with a revolver and said, “Get up and dance”.’ When she refused, ‘he shot twice between my legs’ — the bullets were left implanted in the skirting board.
In December 1992, Wendy Peirce was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to a minimum of nine months jail.
In sentencing her, Judge Ross said the perjury was premeditated and she had shown no signs of remorse.
Seventeen years later, Wendy Peirce finally admitted what police had always known and no jury would ever hear. Her husband did do it.
IT is an early spring afternoon in Port Melbourne where new money, empty nesters and old crooks exist together with feigned indifference towards each other.
Wendy Peirce sits at an outside table near Station Pier, ignoring the bite from the wind off the bay while leafing through a bestselling true crime book.
The other tables outside are empty.
In the next block is the penthouse Tony Mokbel had to abandon after he was arrested and bailed.
Inside, the café is warm and busy but outside no-one minds if you smoke — and you can chat without worrying about eavesdroppers.
She sees a picture of her husband in the book. A detective is leading him in handcuffs to court. The prisoner’s right eye is puffy and closing.
‘They bashed him with gun butts,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘He needed a few stitches.’ She speaks without anger or grief. To her it seems to be just an occupational hazard for a career criminal.
Parked just ten metres away is her husband’s 1993 maroon Commodore sedan — the car he was sitting in when he was shot dead in Bay Street, Port Melbourne, on 1 May 2002.
When all the forensic checks were done and the police finally returned the car, Wendy Peirce immediately slid her fingers under the front ashtray with practised ease.
The grieving widow found what she was looking for — almost $400 in cash. She was pleased but not surprised at this small legacy. ‘It was his favourite spot to stook (hide) money,’ she shrugs.
Once police finished with the maroon sedan, Wendy had it detailed — which included patching a nasty bullet hole, replacing the shattered driver’s side window and fitting seat covers.
Now it looks good as new.
She decided to keep it ‘for sentimental reasons.’ Victor, she explains, always had a soft spot for Commodores and they were his vehicle of choice to steal for getaway cars. It was also the type he left abandoned in Walsh Street to lure two young police to their deaths.
Wendy Peirce has spent nearly 30 years watching, committing and concealing serious crime. She talks of her history with no obvious signs of guilt or embarrassment. What is done is done.
But she has finally agreed to talk, she says, to set the record straight. ‘I have been an idiot. If I could have me life back I wouldn’t have done this. It has been a total waste.’
She is considering changing her name and trying to bury her past. She says her son, Victor junior, is burdened with carrying the name of the brutal gunman, drug dealer, police killer and gangland murder victim.
Her daughter is still filled with anguish at losing her father. Her youngest son goes to school near where his father was shot dead.
So why did she agree to give evidence for the police and then change her mind before the trial?
Peirce says she was never going to give evidence: that her decision to go into witness protection was part of a long-range family plan to sabotage the prosecution from the inside.
She now says that although Victor organised the murders, he felt there would never be enough evidence to justify his arrest. ‘He covered his tracks and he didn’t think he’d get pinched,’ she says.
But when Victor Peirce’s sister, Vicki Brooks, and her son, Jason Ryan, went into witness protection, the police case became stronger.
At first Wendy Peirce stayed staunch, following the underworld code of refusing to make admissions. ‘My first statement was to Jim Conomy (on 9 November) stating that we had nothing to do with it. Noonan wanted to charge me with murder.’
Wendy Peirce claims she knew her alibi was worthless and no-one would believe her. She claims that Peter Allen — Victor’s half-brother and the jailhouse lawyer of the family — was the one who decided Wendy would be more valuable if she appeared to change sides.
‘He said, “If you give evidence for Victor he’ll go down (be convicted). With your priors (convictions) the jury won’t believe you”.’
‘He said that if I somersaulted them (changed sides) … Peter said I would get no more than 18 months for perjury and he was spot on.’
She said she never intended to give evidence against Victor and that she stayed in contact with him, even when in witness protection.
‘I would talk to mum and Kath (Pettingill, Victor’s mother) was there to pass on messages to Victor. I was posting him letters and photos. I always loved Victor and I was never going to give evidence against him.’
Police claim the suggestion that Wendy was planted as a witness is a fantasy.
One member of the taskforce says she saw the chance to start a new life and grabbed it but had second thoughts when she realised that she would have to work rather than living off the proceeds of drugs and armed robberies.
Another said she was happy when she was duchessed by the taskforce but felt miffed when moved to Canberra and put in public housing by witness protection.
‘She saw that even before the trial she was no longer special. She realised that after she had given evidence she would be left to fend for herself,’ one policeman said.
One detective said she was besotted by one of her guards and decided to flip sides and return to the Peirce camp when the policeman was moved to other duties.
Inspector John Noonan, who was joint head of the taskforce, blames the legal system. It was simply too long from arrest to the trial to hold the unreliable Peirce.
He says he has no doubt if a jury had heard her evidence all four accused men would have been convicted.
‘They (Victor Peirce and his family) kept at her. Getting messages to her that everything would be all right and if she changed her story back she would move back with Victor. She was getting messages from Peirce in prison through third parties that he understood the pressure she was under, but they belonged together.’
‘They told her they could look after her better than the police.’
The treatment of Wendy Peirce split the taskforce when some members were banned from dealing with her for fear their confrontational style would push her out of the prosecution camp.
Joint-taskforce head, Commander David Sprague, said police lacked the professionalism in witness protection at the time to deal with someone like Wendy Peirce.
‘She could not cope with witness protection. I think we had a real chance in the early days but as the case dragged on she changed sides again.’
He said she was difficult to control, continuing to shoplift and drive without a licence while under witness protection.
In the early months, she was protected by the taskforce and treated as a star. She stayed in hotels — some of them luxurious — and was constantly moved.
She was flattered, taken out for meals and her children entertained with outings that included sailing trips around Port Phillip Bay.
But as the months dragged on towards the trial, she was put into the much less glamorous witness protection program.
Many of her young guards had trouble concealing their contempt for the wife of a police killer. She had lost her friends and her extended dysfunctional family and the detectives who had persuaded her to become a prosecution witness were no longer there to fortify her weakening resolve.
Senior police say she had a glimpse of her future as a struggling single mother. And she didn’t like it.
WENDY Peirce says her husband was a criminal with two great passions — his love of armed robberies and his hatred of police. ‘Victor was the planner. He loved doing stick-ups. He was the one who would do all the planning and tell the others what to do.’
Police say the core members in the team, known as the Flemington Crew, were Jedd Houghton, Graeme Jensen, Peter David McEvoy, Paul Prideaux and Lindsay Rountree. The specialist car thief for the gang was Gary Abdallah.
Jedd Houghton would be shot dead by police in a Bendigo caravan park on 17 November 1988. Abdallah was shot dead by police in a Carlton flat in April 1989.
‘He (Abdallah) was always good with Holdens. Victor would tell him to steal two and have one left at a certain spot.’ The armed robbery team would do the job in one stolen Holden before swapping to the second a few kilometres away.
To Peirce it was a job. Nearly every work-day he would head off to observe possible targets and plan armed robberies. ‘He was an absolute expert,’ she says proudly.
But if it was a job, he certainly loved his work.
‘He told me he often got an erection when he charged into a bank. He was just so excited. He planned the jobs and then they did the robberies. He loved doing banks — he just loved it. He got off on it.
‘I always got him to ring me straight after a job to make sure he was okay. Then I’d tell him to get home with the money. I loved it.’
The most money she saw was $200,000 after Peirce robbed the ANZ bank in Ringwood in January 1988. ‘He did heaps, he did over twenty armed robberies.’
The money, she now admits, was laundered through lawyer Tom Scriva, but none remains.
‘We wasted it all. We wanted to buy a new house near Too-long (near Port Fairy). We had five acres picked out but we just spent all the money.’
Gaetano ‘Tom’ Scriva, 55, died of natural causes in July 2000 but by then much of the black money he was holding for his gangster clients had disappeared.
Scriva’s father, Michele, was a Melbourne mafia figure connected with the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. In 1945, Scriva senior was acquitted of the murder of Giuseppe ‘Fat Joe’ Versace in what was probably Victoria’s first mafia hit. Versace was stabbed 91 times.
Michele Scriva was later sentenced to hang for stabbing Frederick Duffy to death in North Melbourne, but the sentence was later commuted and he served 10 years.
Scriva was a trusted lieutenant to Godfather Liborio Benvenuto, who died of natural causes in 1988. Much later, Benvenuto’s son, Frank, would become good friends with Peirce.
According to Wendy, her husband robbed banks in East Bentleigh, Ringwood and Knox City in 1988. He also hit security guards carrying cash boxes into banks and attacked couriers who were picking up large amounts of cash.
‘He would knock them out and take the money,’ she recalls.
She says that when armed robbery squad detectives came to interview him, he told her ‘if he didn’t come back they had loaded him (fabricated evidence to justify an arrest). He came home and said they told him to pull up on the banks or they would load him’.
She confirms the stick-up crew saw the armed robbery squad as its enemy and believed the detectives were methodically murdering criminals they could not convict.
The pact to kill two police for every armed robber? ‘It was more Jedd and Macca (McEvoy) than the others.’
‘Jedd was the trigger man; he had the shotgun. Macca took the (Damian Eyre’s) handgun. Victor was pissed off with him for that. Abdallah knocked (stole) the car. I don’t think (Anthony) Farrell and Trevor (Pettingill) were even there.’
Wendy Peirce says Victor was convinced police were going to kill him. ‘We went on the run, living in motels with the kids.
‘It (Walsh Street) was spur of the moment. We were on the run. Victor was the organiser.’
But she says he showed no regrets over what he did. ‘He just said, “They deserved their whack. It could have been me”.’
According to Wendy, Jensen’s violent death hit Peirce hard. ‘Graeme was his best mate. He idolised him.’
But what Peirce didn’t know at the time was that his best mate and his wife were having an affair. ‘It just happened. Graeme would come over to see Victor to talk about jobs and he would wink at me. Then he came over and Victor wasn’t there and it just happened.’
It was the relationship rather than the double murder that led Peirce to his only moment of remorse.
He told her, ‘If I had known about the affair I wouldn’t have done it (Walsh Street).’
IT has taken Wendy Peirce almost two years — since agents acting for the Underbelly conglomerate first approached her — to finally agree to tell her story.
She has been interviewed on the record and then later asked for her story to remain unpublished. Now she says she is ready to tell the truth.
Her private life is a disaster, her family is collapsing and she is heavily in debt.
She says she hopes her life can show others that there is no glamour in the underworld. She claims that the death of her husband has finally given her the victim’s perspective of crime.
She was just a teenager from a law-abiding family when she met Victor Peirce and his mother, Kath Pettingill. She fell in love both with the criminal and his gangster lifestyle.
But in 1983, she says, Victor wanted to leave his criminal past and get a job.
He had just been released from Ararat prison after serving two years and they moved into a rented unit in Albert Park, suburbs away from the rest of his criminal family.
But Peirce’s half-brother, the notorious Dennis Allen, offered to give them a house next to his, in Chestnut Street, Richmond.
‘Once we moved in, that was the end. Victor was always helping out Dennis. If we hadn’t moved there, then none of this would have happened — none of the murders, the armed robberies and the drugs. If we hadn’t moved there, then Victor would be alive today and so would those two police (Tynan and Eyre).’
Allen was a prolific drug dealer in the early 1980s. ‘I saw Victor with cash, sometimes $50,000, sometimes $100,000. I saw Dennis with $500,000.’
Allen had many bank accounts but also liked to bury cash so it could never be traced. Much of it was never recovered when he died of natural causes in 1987. ‘When he got sick, he couldn’t remember anything. It must all still be buried around Richmond.’
Police say Allen was responsible for up to 11 murders and Wendy says she learned from experience to read the signs when her brother-in-law ‘was about to go off’.
One day in August 1984 she saw him turn and look coldly at small-time crook Wayne Stanhope, then turn up the volume of the stereo — not because he loved music but to drown the shots he was about to fire.
‘I told him, “Not in my house”.’ Allen grudgingly agreed and took Stanhope next door to shoot him, but left the body in the boot of a car in the street for two days.
Wendy Peirce later took police to a bush area near Ballan where Stanhope was buried. Detectives found the burnt-out car but could not find the body although they remain convinced they were close.
Allen was blamed for the deaths of Victor Gouroff and Greg Pasche in 1983, Helga Wagnegg in 1984 and Anton Kenny in 1985.
‘Dennis gave Helga Wagnegg pure heroin. They poured buckets of water from the Yarra River down her throat to try to make it look like she drowned.
‘Anton did nothing wrong. There was no reason. Dennis didn’t need a reason.
‘Victor Gouroff killed Greg Pasche. Dennis killed Gouroff because he didn’t get rid of the body properly.
‘Pasche said something out of school and Gouroff stabbed him. He was in the kitchen saying, “Dennis, help me, help me”. Dennis picked up a bayonet and stabbed him in the head. They dragged him into the backyard and wrapped him up. There was no need for any of this. It was madness.’
After the Walsh Street trial, many police expected Wendy Peirce to eventually be murdered by her husband or one of his criminal associates — but they remained together, when he was out of jail.
VICTOR Peirce got away with murder — and from the moment he was acquitted of killing two police he was a marked man. When he was released from prison after serving his armed robbery sentence, the crime world had moved on. New security measures meant armed robberies were no longer lucrative. Old stick-up men like Peirce had to either go straight or find a new line of crime.
An honest living was never an option for Victor. He moved into the stand over business — trading on notoriety — and also into the drug game.
Peirce, a traditional Australian crook, began to hang out with Italian organized crime figures. The introduction probably came through his links to bent lawyer, Tom Scriva.
There was trouble at the wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a flashpoint for violence in Melbourne since the 1960s, and Frank Benvenuto employed Peirce as his minder.
The middle-aged gunnie was quick to make a point when he fired a machine gun in the market to show that he meant business.
But, unfortunately for him, someone else did as well.
On 8 May 2000 Peirce’s best friend Frank Benvenuto was murdered by Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin — another gunman who had been employed down at the markets.
Some suggested Peirce had been offered a contract to betray Benvenuto but, if so, why didn’t he warn his best mate?
Wendy believes Benvenuto was murdered because he had ordered the killing of another market identity in the 1990s.
When Benvenuto lay dying, he managed to ring Victor on his mobile phone. ‘He just groaned.’
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. It was a major crime figure informing Peirce that Benvenuto was dead. How the man knew so quickly has never been explained. ‘There was $64,000 in the boot of Frank’s car and they didn’t even take it,’ she said.
‘Benji wanted a meeting with Victor and they met in a Port Melbourne park. He wanted to know if Victor was going to back up for Frank. He was his best mate. Victor took a gun and Benji would have been armed.’
They agreed there would be no payback. Well, that’s what Victor thought. History shows that Veniaimin went after anyone he suspected could come looking for him.
‘Frank kept my family going for six years (While Victor was in jail). Frank was a lovely man.’
Peirce was not the man he once was. He began to take the pills he was selling and was losing his rat cunning. He took to dressing like a young gangster and believed his reputation made him bullet proof.
Police were told Peirce accepted a $200,000 contract to kill Jason Moran. The story goes that Peirce was paid $100,000 in advance but then refused to carry out the contract and warned Moran his life was in danger.
Perhaps tellingly, Jason Moran was a prominent mourner at Peirce’s funeral although the two gunmen were never considered close. Moran could not know that his funeral would be held across town just over a year later.
Police suspect convicted murderer Mark Anthony Smith also accepted a contract he did not fulfill. But an attempt to kill Smith failed when he was shot in the neck in the driveway of his Keilor home on 28 December 2002. He recovered and fled to Queens-land for several months.
With all underworld murders, police look to those close to the victim to find a link.
On the evening of Wednesday 1 May 2002, Peirce was relaxed and chirpy. Forensic tests later indicated his good mood was chemically induced. His autopsy revealed residues of ecstasy, Valium and amphetamines.
He had played football with his son, Vinnie, and then kissed Wendy and daughter Katie before saying ‘he had to meet a bloke’.
‘He told me to go home and put his coffee machine on for his short black,’ Wendy says. ‘The last thing he said to me was, “I love you, Darl”.’
As he sat in his car, waiting for the meeting, two men in a stolen Commodore (hit men, like old armed robbers, prefer the home-grown Holden) pulled up. One was Veniamin, who walked over and shot Peirce twice from point blank range. A third shot missed, lodging in the pillar between the doors.
At the last second Peirce used his right arm to try to block the shots as he sat in the driver’s seat. Both bullets travelled through his arm into his body, causing fatal wounds to his liver, diaphragm and lungs.
‘They revived him twice there but he was unconscious and they couldn’t save him,’ Wendy says with little emotion.
He was taken to the Alfred Hospital — the same hospital where Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre were taken 14 years earlier.
Detectives found that Peirce, 43, was unarmed. He clearly was not expecting trouble and must have thought he was meeting a harmless friend.
They also found he had two mobile phones in the car — one rigged by a friendly technician from a telecommunications company so that it operated without charge. ‘He had one for home and the free one was for business,’ Wendy says.
So who was the ‘bloke’ Peirce was supposed to meet when he was ambushed?
It was Vince Benvenuto — Frank’s brother.
Peirce was murdered one week short of the second anniversary of Benvenuto’s murder.
GANGSTER. Drug dealer. Gunman. Cop killer. Victor Peirce was called all these things before he was shot dead in Port Melbourne.
But when he was buried eight days later he was just someone’s father, someone’s son. The grief of those who loved him was as real as anybody else’s, a sobering thought for the most hardened observer.
There were plenty of those at St Peter and Paul’s Catholic Church in South Melbourne, where mourners mingled with plainclothes police, reporters and at least one known gunman; a prime suspect in another, unsolved, gangland slaying.
It wasn’t, however, a huge funeral by underworld standards.
Whereas almost 1000 people had jammed St Mary’s by the Sea in West Melbourne to farewell Alphonse Gangitano four years earlier, perhaps a quarter of that many went to Victor’s.
And whereas Gangitano — a ‘celebrity’ gangster known by his first name — cultivated a Hollywood image, Peirce lived and died on a smaller stage.
Gangitano was a middle-class private schoolboy who turned his back on respectability to become the black prince of Lygon Street.
Peirce, by contrast, wasn’t so much working class as underclass, condemned from birth to a sordid life cycle of crime and violence. The wonder was not that he died violently, but that he survived as long as he did.
His mother, Kath Pettingill, once a notorious thief and brothel madam dubbed ‘Granny Evil’, had seven children by several men. With Victor’s death, she has buried three of her children and must wonder how many more family funerals she will attend. She herself narrowly escaped death years ago, when a bullet blinded her in one eye.
The mourners gathered well before the service, under a sky the colour of lead. Most of them looked as sullen as the weather. The men tended to mullets or close-cropped hair, the women were mostly bleached blondes, tattoos half-hidden under dark stockings. Sunglasses and cigarettes were compulsory for both sexes, chewing gum and earrings optional.
In the church, many shied away from the pews, preferring to stand together at the back of the church, as deadpan as the inmates of a prison exercise yard. Which many undoubtedly had been.
Father Bob Maguire, whose inner-city flock has included many a black sheep, conducted a service, as he called it, ‘designed by the family’. Instead of hymns, popular songs were played. Instead of a formal eulogy, the dead man’s children and friends read out personal tributes that were clapped, like speeches at a birthday party.
Katie Peirce said her father was a ‘strong, kind, family man’ who had hired a double-decker bus for her 16th birthday and taken her out to get her drunk as a treat. His pet name for her was ‘Pooh Bum’.
His youngest son, Vinnie, named in honour of his honour Justice Frank Vincent after Peirce’s acquittal in the Walsh Street murders, said he would miss his dad picking him up from school, buying him lollies and driving around.
‘I remember when he used to go fast in the car with me,’ he said.
The first line of the opening song (Soldier Of Love) began with the words ‘Lay down your arms’. The song chosen for the exit music was When I Die, by the group No Mercy. It sounded like a portent of funerals to come. Outside, it had begun to rain. A guard of honour, of sorts, lined the street, blocking traffic. It stretched about twenty metres. At Steven Tynan’s police funeral, more than thirteen years earlier, the honour guard stretched for kilometres.
But there was real sadness. As the hearse took the outlaw Victor Peirce for his last ride, hard faces softened briefly.
Under a tree in the churchyard, a homicide detective watched, wondering if the killer was in the crowd and how many more were destined to suffer the same fate.
WENDY Peirce was convinced that police would not try too hard to solve her husband’s murder. After all, he had killed two of them.
In police circles no name is more detested than that of Victor Peirce. Many openly rejoiced when he was finally shot.
The investigation was handed to Purana and nearly five years after the ambush the head of the taskforce, Jim O’Brien, stood next to Wendy as he made a plea for new information.
Years earlier, O’Brien had been a member of the Ty-Eyre task-force that had been betrayed by Wendy.
In 2007 the Purana Taskforce arrested a man accused of being the driver of the getaway car. They claim the hit was ordered by a senior gangland figure connected to an established Italian crime syndicate.
But Peirce was a man with many enemies. And Veniamin needed only half a reason to kill.