In 1984, at the age of nineteen, Tony had found a vivacious young Melbourne girl called Carmel. Not only did they share an amorous relationship, Tony and Carmel went into business together. The pair bought a failing suburban milk-bar business in Melbourne’s north-east. It was a ‘squarehead’ path for ambitious Tony, albeit one taken at a precocious pace.
Tony and Carmel, who would later marry, poured their hearts into the Rosanna business, working seven-day weeks. But after two years of hard slog and milk deliveries they sold the business for the same price they had paid for it. The young lovers were left exhausted and disheartened at just breaking even after twenty-four months’ solid grind. For Tony, in particular, it was a hard knock to a determined young man.
Mokbel already had petty criminal acquaintances in his network of family and friends in and around Brunswick. During the eighties, a hirsute Tony played cards in Carlton backrooms before the Crown Casino behemoth landed and crushed them out of existence. At the illegal card games Tony, often accompanied by brother Horty, met characters like rising Carlton crime figure Mick Gatto for a few hands of Russian poker. Like Gatto, Mokbel had a virulent strain of the gambling bug and developed a love of what poets have called the holy game of poker.
‘We had a few games and he used to frequent. More so his brother Horty – he’s an absolute gentleman. Horty’s a mate of mine, he’s a really good bloke. Tony’s no friend of mine. Simple as that,’ the Carlton Crew figure said.
Cards can teach skills for life. They can reveal a person’s real character. They can hone one’s ability to detect coffeehousing in the real world. And they can diagnose human frailties. In poker a player is ‘on tilt’ if they let their emotions disrupt their play. Tilting is what you do when annoyance or disappointment pushes you to do what you would not normally do. The milk-bar experience put Tony on tilt. If he was ever in any doubt that virtue is not its own reward, the failed business made concrete his scepticism. He walked away from milk crates and chocolate bars resolved that the only way to insure against failure was to diversify into revenue streams with huge and guaranteed returns. Tony took his lumps on the milk-bar misadventure but would bounce back to invest in pizzas and a trade of an entirely different sort.
Mokbel’s troubled decade of the 1980s had started with the horrible harbinger of his father’s death. But as the eighties gave way to the nineties Tony’s ambitions bloomed as he diversified his income streams to pills and powders. The times would perfectly suit his most successful business endeavour. The power ballads, hair bands, wine coolers and leather pants of the previous decade were giving way to a completely different music and recreational scene. Techno music, sometimes called ‘doof doof’ for its bass-heavy repetitive beats, and its associated party drug use, was creeping out of gay venues into mainstream clubs and raves.
The Mokbel boys grew up, married (none of them to Lebanese girls, relatives lamented), reproduced and got their own houses in or near the family nucleus of Brunswick. Meanwhile, a network of family, friends and local petty criminal acquaintances had grown around Tony. Tony and Carmel were living in Grandview Avenue, Pascoe Vale, just a seven-kilometre dogleg from Brunswick on gridlocked roads heading north-west.
Mokbel had set about establishing himself as a player in Melbourne’s drug scene, using his innate charm to woo hostile crime figures into friends and friends into accomplices. In the process he notched up a few more criminal convictions including receiving stolen goods, possessing an unlicensed pistol and hindering police. Then in the nineties he set up an amphetamine lab in a suburban Brunswick house using a plumber friend, Paul Howden, and another lab churning out the lucrative white powder in Coburg.
Amphetamine labs are volatile endeavours that often betray their location to police by exploding. Their high risk also makes them high yield, and the money Mokbel brought in from his drug initiatives made his profits from selling capricciosas look like loose change.
But in his efforts to network, look after friends, earn favours and generally empire-build, Mokbel the new player landed for the first time in some serious trouble that would cause ructions in his family and thrust him further into a life of crime.
In 1988 two Mokbel associates, Marcel Karim Nassour and Trevor Douglas Young, were arrested on charges of drug trafficking. Young was willing to plead guilty but was petrified of going to jail. So with Mokbel’s help the criminal duo hatched a double-or-nothing plan to pay off a judge in return for a soft sentence for Young with no jail time. Nassour approached a former associate to a judge at the Accident Compensation Tribunal and asked for ideas on a bent beak who might be a good candidate for a brown paper parcel. The authorities were alerted to the scheme and a police operation was launched to nab the brazen criminals in their bribery attempt.
A drug squad detective posed as a bent court staffer and met Nassour at North Melbourne watering hole the Arden Hotel. As the two stood on the sticky carpet Nassour told the detective he was acting as an agent for Young who was very hesitant about meeting anybody. ‘We’re frightened of someone taking us for a ride,’ Nassour confided to the undercover cop.
The detective said bribing a County Court judge would cost more than $30,000. But the high asking price was no problem – the men were willing to pay up to $53,000 for the right result. ‘We’re willing to supply whatever it takes as long as the results are there,’ Nassour said. Mokbel, ostensibly an aspirational small-businessman, stepped in as the influence-peddling bagman of the scheme to rescue his drug associates. He attended a second meeting with the undercover cop, this time at the President Motel in South Melbourne. There Mokbel handed over $2000, stating there was plenty more to come in cocaine and cash. He thought he had bought the law but, ultimately, the law won. After a third meeting, which connected the nervous Young to the scheme, the trio were arrested and, with Tony also nicked, the original two defendants became three. The men were charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. And, in a decision that must have induced a profound feeling of regret in the plotters, a magistrate dismissed the initial drug charges against Young and Nassour – the reason for the botched bribe scheme – due to lack of evidence.
Had he done nothing, Young’s fears of going inside would never have been realised, but his attempt to change his destiny had created the very real prospect of a future in the slammer. Seemingly exhausted and resigned to his fate Young, unlike Mokbel and Nassour, did not bother applying for bail.
Mokbel was found guilty over the bungled bribe in 1992 and copped his first jail sentence – a year inside with a six-month minimum.
There is more to be learnt from defeat than victory and though smarting from misadventures in crime and milk bars, it was a slightly more learned Mokbel who, in the mid-nineties, bought an Italian restaurant in Boronia specialising in pizza. The residents of Boronia (sometimes referred to by its neighbours as Bosnia for its rougher elements) proved partial to Tony’s quick and greasy carbohydrate-laden dishes, and business boomed. The menu’s No 15 pizza – with tomato, cheese, bacon, beef, onion and egg – was dubbed Tony’s Special. Mokbel bought next door and expanded the restaurant to include a takeaway counter as well as the dining room. The business was promoted on the awning by a cartoon of a short, portly Tony-like pizza chef.
Tony and Carmel ran the pizza parlour from November 1995 to July 1998. Tony was then still green enough, or sufficiently well meaning, to have his name down as an owner of the business – a practice he would soon ditch. Later Mokbel sold the business while keeping ownership of the building, using it as a springboard to a more leisurely life as landlord, not workhorse.
One of the employees at Mokbel’s pizza house was a young man who we cannot name but will call ‘Pizzaboy’, and who was ripe for Tony’s picking. Pizzaboy’s parents had split when he was sixteen and he had enjoyed scant contact with his father since. He had dropped out of high school and started a chef’s apprenticeship. Pizzaboy worked in several commercial and business kitchens before landing among the pots and pans of Tony’s Boronia lair. The food-loving boss took an interest in him and eventually moved him to Brunswick to be chef at his next restaurant. Pizzaboy still lived with his beloved grandmother and when she died he was left distressed and disturbed. Around that time he started seeing more of Mokbel and his conspicuous displays of wealth, position and influence.
According to a forensic psychologist who later analysed Pizzaboy, the chef was dazzled by Mokbel’s charisma and his seeming aura of immunity to the mundane trappings of society. So impressed was Pizzaboy by Mokbel’s flashy ways, he ditched working as a chef for the more ambiguous role of ‘Mokbel associate’. Life as an associate was much more instantly gratifying than humping potato sacks and slicing and dicing in overheated kitchens. It involved expensive cars and lavish VIP rooms. Pizzaboy started hitting the nightclubs and using amphetamines. ‘It was exciting and rewarding, although it totally contradicted the values with which he had been raised,’ psychologist Ian Joblin found. Pizzaboy’s corruption would be complete when Mokbel made him his speed gopher and pill runner – the drug world equivalent of potwash in his old hierarchy. Pizzaboy was not to be Mokbel’s last corruption. And the pizza parlour would become just the first of many pies Mokbel would get his stubby fingers into across the quasi-respectable fields of real estate, fashion, horseracing, bars and clubs. But those ventures were all far from his most lucrative earner.
Over the coming years Tony would go from small business suburban dad to the flash king of Sydney Road. It would be a seductive transformation but one made at the cost of a lot of things, not least his young love who helped lay the first foundations of empire. The marriage was not destined to last as Mokbel’s business got larger, less respectable and less legal.