Throw a Lebanese to the sea and he will come out of it with a fish.
– Lebanese adage
Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne’s north is so large a train runs through its grounds. The fields of dead are so vast that visitors tend to drive around their mini-roundabouts and signposted streets rather than walking. It is mostly row after row of low-to-the-ground headstones poking out of green lawns.
When visitors reach the Roman Catholic vaults section the real estate becomes conspicuously high-rise. Mediterranean surnames have a near monopoly on the gilded, ornate vaults, making it a kind of posthumous Little Italy. Everywhere are Italian family names that, in the generations since arrival, have risen to prominence in food, hospitality, fashion, the law, and crime.
There among the tall headstones thrusting skyward and crowned with dozens of mini-Madonnas is a grave decorated with a cedar tree – the symbol of Lebanon. Under fresh flowers, laid for the anniversary of the occupant’s death, a golden scrawl chipped into its stone spells ‘Mokbel’. A pair of piercing tough black eyes peers out from a black-and-white photograph mounted behind glass. They belong to a man with a serious, even severe, look on his face. His head is round and balding and his moustache is small and pointy. The resemblance is strong enough that a passer-by might remark how similar the man staring out from the tombstone looks to the notorious criminal of the same name.
This decorated patch of ground marks a place one Mokbel story ended and another altogether different one began. It is where one man’s journey across the planet to seek exile from entropy and chaos ended. And it is where his son’s opposite journey, one that would take him back across the world as a pilgrim of disorder, was forged. This is where Sajih Mokbel came to rest, half a world away from where he started.
In a sleepy village in the top end of Lebanon not too far from Tripoli, the mayor is a Mokbel. The local Maronite priest is Father Mokbel and about a quarter of the 1200 villagers are Mokbels. In the house that belonged to Tony Mokbel’s paternal grandfather and was boyhood home to his late father, Sajih, Mokbels still meet for meals.
While the name Mokbel conjures one particular type of image in Australia, in Lebanon it has multiple, altogether more pedestrian associations. The criminal adventures of ‘Fat Tony’ Mokbel have successfully monopolised the family name in his adopted country, but in his family’s homeland, ‘Aussie Antonios’ is simply yet another of a multitude of Mokbels. The Mokbels were one of the founding families of the sunbaked rural community of Achache, but it was the Mokbels leaving Achache and the land of the cedars, not arriving, that launched the remarkable globetrotting criminal life of Tony Mokbel.
Half a century ago Sajih Mokbel, thirty-four, married Lora Naffaa in Lebanon. Children followed soon after. Lora gave birth to five children over six years during the 1960s. The first two were boys: Kabalan and then Horty. The pair played together and joined the boy scouts. But Sajih soon left his ancestral village and home nation, with Lora, to work as a truck driver in Kuwait. Kabalan and Horty remained in Lebanon and were reared by their grandparents.
‘They had a normal life the same as any family,’ said Tony’s cousin Wajih Mokbel, who still lives in the village. ‘When they went to work they left the children with their grandparents.’
The tubby little bundle of joy they named Antonios Sajih arrived in 1965 in the oppressive summer heat of the oil-rich desert nation of Kuwait. Antonios – who not long after he started talking would be calling himself Tony – was born in August. The Kuwaiti summer, which lasts from May to September, is extremely hot and dry with temperatures easily exceeding 45°C during the day, rising to around 52°C at midday. After Tony the only girl was born, Gawy, named after Sajih’s mother, and finally another baby boy: Milad.
‘Part of the time the children were with their parents in Kuwait, part of the time with grandparents in Achache,’ Wajih Mokbel said, speaking through an interpreter. ‘They used to go backwards and forwards because Kuwait is very close to Lebanon,’ he said.
Wajih Mokbel said Tony and his siblings had an uncle who was a monk, an aunt who was a nun, another uncle who was a schoolteacher for forty-five years, and an uncle in charge of the fire brigade for the whole of northern Lebanon.
‘The family were well known, well liked and well respected by everyone, and those kids were brought up in a very positive disciplinary environment. They weren’t brought up with hooligans, I can assure you, and not as ratbags.’
By the early seventies sectarian tensions were threatening to tear Lebanon apart. The republic had maintained an uneasy power-sharing arrangement between Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims since gaining independence from France after World War II. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), involved in an ongoing fight with Israel, had set up base in Lebanon and by the early seventies was launching military skirmishes across the border into northern Israel. The PLO had been driven out of Jordan and again it found itself unwanted by its host. The predominantly Christian Lebanese government sought to crack down on its activities on Lebanese soil (which were also unpopular among some groups of Lebanese Muslims). But the move simply prompted the PLO to open a second front in its military campaigning, the Palestinians forming an alliance with Lebanese Muslims in their fight with Lebanese Christians.
In the early seventies Sajih returned to his homeland from Kuwait with his family. He had earnt some money but the future in Lebanon did not bode well.
‘They all went together. They all came to Lebanon and then they all left Lebanon together to go to Australia,’ Wajih Mokbel said.
The Mokbels, Maronite Christians, flew halfway across the world, arriving Down Under in the mid-seventies. Sajih, listed on legal documents as a mechanic, got a job in Victoria with Ford. The family would make a permanent home in Canberra Street in the inner-north Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. Tony was no older than ten and the oldest of his four siblings was just thirteen when they landed in their bizarrely different adopted nation.
By 1975 the Lebanese conflict had erupted into a full-blown civil war which raged for two years, killed thousands and reduced much of the country to rubble. Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UN would become involved before a fragile ceasefire succeeded over still-simmering tensions. The Mokbels’ home village of Achache was devastated in the fighting. The local school, founded by Maronite monks, was reduced to cinders, and more than half of the villagers fled to start new lives abroad, many in Melbourne and Sydney.
Rolling waves of post-war migration from Europe had enlivened and changed the face of Melbourne and in particular its inner-north. The Mokbels arrived almost at the ebbing of a mass tide of Greek and Italian migrants. The paddocks at Tullamarine had opened as an airport just four years before the Mokbels arrived and the West Gate Bridge would not be completed until four years later. The ‘New Australians’ would pile out of ocean liners at Port Melbourne into brick homes predominantly in the city’s inner-north.
The Mokbels were part of the Lebanese wave but got the jump on many of their countrymen who left as the civil war worsened. Ten thousand Lebanese arrived in Australia in 1976 and 17,000 five years later. Lebanese bakeries and sweets became increasingly common in the city’s north and Lebanese-born residents went on to make up three per cent of the population of neighbouring inner-north suburbs Brunswick and Coburg by the early nineties.
Brunswick in the seventies was a flat, strange suburbia for the refugees from the mountainous republic. The northern suburbs had been mined voraciously for stone that had gone into countless buildings, including the imposing prison up the road. Once spent, the quarries had been filled in and turned into the area’s parks and football ovals. The area’s last blacksmith had just closed his doors and supermarkets were opening all over.
The Mokbels settled there at a time when Brunswick and the inner-north were rapidly changing. The city’s work was becoming cleaner, more white-collar and less backbreaking. While the suburb’s tough working-class roots were still not a relic of the past, a slow gentrification had begun, although it would be some time before Brunswick became a playground for bohemians, yuppies and artists, where a shoebox apartment could sell for a million dollars. Quarrymen and brickmakers had given way to a vibrant local textiles and manufacturing industry. Migrant women flocked to these jobs. And Lora Mokbel described herself on property documents as a machinist. But those industries too would slip into Brunswick’s past in the decades after the seventies.
The 1970s Lebanese migrants had some teething problems. They had escaped a war-torn homeland but in their new nation unemployment was rising. To many of the new inhabitants, Brunswick’s houses seemed ugly and its streets too quiet. Tony’s mum, Lora, maintained the Lebanese custom of sitting out the front of the house watching the passing foot traffic. But there was less opportunity to call out to passers-by she knew. Despite a strong diaspora of Achache villagers in nearby Carlton, there was a serious cultural clash for Lora. She said she could not sleep from boredom in the new country.
Sajih was by all accounts a hard worker who earnt an honest living. No one I interviewed knew of him having any links to crime or any dealings with police. Others, like Achache mayor, Georges Mokbel, a distant cousin, described him as a giving man who would always try to help others: ‘He had a bit of money when he went to Australia. He could have stayed here easily, but he wanted to make a better life over there,’ he said.
The Mokbels set up a temporary home, renting in Third Avenue, Brunswick, but within a year had bought a house just minutes away in Canberra Street in the same suburb. It would remain the family home and centre of Mokbel operations, with Lora sitting out the front, for more than the next three decades.
The Mokbel children were sent to local northern suburbs state schools where they were neither academic superstars nor complete social misfits. However, the aggression of some of the Mokbel boys in the schoolyard was noted, and one source recalled that teachers occasionally found them ‘scary’. There might have been eyebrows raised or even outright complaints about the boys but none of them could do any wrong in the eyes of their adoring mother. For a religious woman taken with blessing herself during conversation, Lora would be strangely quiet when her boys strayed from the path of righteousness.
Tony, with fewer ties to Lebanon, quickly ditched the family traditions and embraced the Australian way of life. A cousin still in Achache later recalled: ‘His mother and elder brother are closer to this village. I was staying at our uncle’s house and you feel that the uncles and brothers had this Lebanese way of life, but Tony didn’t.’ Tony’s uncle in Achache agreed: ‘Tony always said, “I left Lebanon as a kid, I’m Australian, I can’t go back there, my life is here.”’
Despite disliking school and not being brilliant academically, Tony had more street smarts than nearly anyone at Moreland High in Coburg in the late seventies. But he was nevertheless a moody teenager with a bad attitude and a short fuse. Then, on 11 August 1980, Tony’s father, Sajih, who had been in the country just six years, suddenly and prematurely dropped dead from a heart attack. He apparently had few signs of illness before his surprise demise which the death certificate listed as ‘Coronary sclerosis and thrombosis. Myocardial fibrosis’ – a heart attack from hardening of the arteries and heart tissue damage from a blockage.
Sajih Mokbel died aged fifty-four, just two decades after marrying Lora. The death occurred on Tony’s fifteenth birthday. A requiem notice appeared in the Sun on the eve of Sajih’s funeral. Three days after his death the requiem was held at Our Lady of Lebanon church in Carlton at 10 am. Ninety minutes later the funeral procession travelled up Sydney Road and Sajih was interred at Fawkner Cemetery in a tomb with a second space reserved for Lora for when she passed. It was a harrowing winter day as the close migrant family buried their patriarch in their new country. The eldest of Sajih’s surviving children, Kabalan, was just eighteen, Horty was seventeen, Gawy fourteen and Milad just twelve. Lora Mokbel was left a widow in a strange land with a brood of aggressive young pups.
Sajih’s brother Antonios, a Maronite priest, came to Australia for the first time after the death. Tony acted the dutiful nephew, he said. But the death deeply affected teenage Tony and left him with an even bigger chip on his shoulder; according to one of his later defence barristers, it sent him off the rails.
It was a grim occasion for Tony, his world rocked on the eve of becoming a man. He was a fatherless migrant in a country founded by convicts at the arse end of the world. And he had just learnt it can all be taken from you in a heartbeat. Tony would later recall: ‘In August 1980, I thought that was the saddest day of my life and not a day has passed that I have not thought of my father.’