I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case
I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
– W C Fields
While in custody during the bribery trial Mokbel’s investments began to struggle and he missed the birth of his first child (a boy named Sajih, who would be followed by a little sister). Carmel, a new mum with an absent husband stuck behind bars, was shaken by the experience. She was now married to a jailbird, an accused associate of drug criminals and a deadbeat hubby and dad. She became, in the words of Tony’s sentencing judge, ‘psychologically disturbed’.
Tony, on the other hand, seized the opportunity prison life provided for an up and coming player who wanted to win friends and influence people, particularly if they had the right criminal skill set. But he still resented the chaos the jail term had wrought on his private life. His own father had been taken from him while he was still a youth and now he was stuck behind bars when his first child had emerged screaming into the world. Getting locked up in these circumstances was completely his own doing, but according to some, the incident simply turned Mokbel more defiantly anti-authority.
As well as a stretch, Mokbel had attracted another must-have underworld accessory – a criminal nickname, albeit a slightly second-hand one that had already done a bit of mileage. Portly New York mob boss Anthony Salerno had been dubbed ‘Fat Tony’. The Simpsons lifted Salerno’s moniker for Springfield’s head mobster. The husky-voiced cartoon character gave the nickname global cachet and soon Mokbel’s associates and Brunswick locals had started using it for him. Given the hours he spent in gyms trying to battle his natural barrel build, Mokbel was quite sporting in his embrace of the tubby tag. He apparently took it as an affectionate Mafiosi-style title rather than an insult.
The media first got wind of the moniker when Greg Domaszewicz, a Carl Williams associate acquitted of child killing, let it slip in an interview about Lewis Moran. ‘Lewis, he’s with, like, Fat Tony and them,’ he told a reporter in May 2004. The rest was history. Headline writers and news scribes have since rarely resisted enlivening any copy about Mokbel with the Fat Tony tag.
While in jail Fat Tony made friends with Phillip O’Reilly, a drug criminal who had been making amphetamines for the Bandidos outlaw motorcycle gang in Sydney. Once released, Mokbel cosied up to another major drug figure with links to the bikie world – ‘Kiwi Joe’ Moran. Not related to the Melbourne gangland Morans, Kiwi Joe had been supplying Black Uhlans bikie gang founder John William Samuel Higgs with the precursor chemicals for amphetamine production. Higgs was then presiding over the nation’s biggest amphetamine ring – a position that Mokbel, in time, would wrench from him. When Higgs and Kiwi Joe fell out, Mokbel sensed only opportunity and pulled off a brazen switch. He seized the initiative to sell amphetamine to Higgs’s syndicate while buying precursor chemicals from Kiwi Joe.
In April 1993 Mokbel popped in on Kiwi Joe for a business meeting at his inner-city Lonsdale Street unit. Tony was not long out of his first prison stint and the visit was to pave the way for his second. Mokbel and Moran spoke about bad speed yields and cook-ups gone wrong with a trainspotter-like intensity for their subject matter.
Kiwi Joe was still dirty that bikie boss Higgs had left him copping a half-million-dollar loss on a previous deal gone bad. He bemoaned the fact that he had shown Higgs his way around the kitchen before getting burnt by him and was now seeking to switch cooks. ‘He couldn’t cook before he come to see me,’ Kiwi Joe complained to Mokbel in a comment eavesdropping police suspected was not about duck à l’orange.
Mokbel made his application for the vacant position in the standard cryptic criminal patois designed to cheat any listening devices out of meaningful evidence. He made himself clear when he said he was keen to ‘have a go’ at cooking. But once some trade terms were thrown in, the stunted crim staccato became basically impenetrable.
Touting for business, Tony told Kiwi Joe: ‘I have got plenty of the red. I have got plenty … Yeah, I have got plenty of everything, it is just a matter of … No just a matter of … No I have got a fair bit of the HI, I have got three-quarters of it.’
It was all quite cryptic except to speed experts who knew that pseudoephedrine, an ingredient in some flu tablets, when heated for hours with hydriotic acid – or HI – and red phosphorous can make methamphetamine. Mokbel sometimes coded his conversations further by calling pseudoephedrine ‘Suzy’ or, by extension, ‘the girls’. It meant shady business could be done under the noses of spies with inconspicuous statements like ‘Why don’t you pick up the girls tonight?’
As Kiwi Joe got more comfortable with Mokbel, the supply deal grew from one 25-kilogram barrel of pseudoephedrine to as many as ten. ‘If you don’t get this one you’ll get the other one that comes through … cos I’ll get ten on the way and you are going to get half of them,’ Kiwi Joe said.
Despite their cautious lingo neither of the two crims knew police bugs had been set up to cover Kiwi Joe Moran’s apartment. For the detectives monitoring Moran’s activities, Mokbel wandering into their net on his opportunistic visit had been an unexpected bonus.
Kiwi Joe: ‘Yeah, I’m still debating whether to give you that run or not. Cos when can I get it done if I give it to you?’
Mokbel: ‘Yeah, I can pretty well straightaway … It would be good to have that extra.’
Kiwi Joe: ‘Well, I could give it to ya.’
Mokbel: ‘Thanks, Joe’
One of Mokbel’s more colourful lifelong contacts was a crook called ‘the Grifter’ (his real name cannot be used). It was rare for Mokbel to come across anyone who worked the angles as emphatically as himself, but the Grifter was a kindred spirit. An energetic and audacious crim of Middle Eastern ancestry, often seen with beautiful women, the Grifter must have reminded Mokbel more than a little of himself. In fact the two would lead strangely parallel, echoing lives. The Grifter subscribed to the view that it was morally wrong to let a sucker keep his money. And, to borrow from the song lyric, he stole from the rich, and the poor, and the not-very-rich and the very poor. No con was too elaborate for the ex-private-school boy who, like Mokbel, had spent a stint as a bouncer.
In one hustle the Grifter created a fake position vacant, advertised it in newspapers and requested that applicants send copies of their licences with their resumes. He then used the details to open a swathe of bank accounts with multiple credit cards. In eleven years he received about 400 convictions for fraud offences – and they were the ones he was caught for.
The Grifter once got wind that the Herald Sun newspaper was working on an article involving him. He confidently represented himself at the Supreme Court hearing to prevent the story being published wearing sandals, shorts, a T-shirt, and with hair halfway down his back. But the Grifter really made his mark as a talented speed cook at a time when the world of major crime was experiencing a quantum leap from armed robberies, cannabis and heroin to methamphetamine pills and powders.
‘He is a very accomplished cook,’ a police officer said of the Grifter. ‘Tony is a very good cook as well. He’s on tape telling a guy how to change it to get more out of it and make it better.’
Mokbel was also in close contact with Melbourne’s Moran clan, and between Tony, the Grifter and the Morans, most of the state’s flourishing meth trade ended up being spoken for.
Moran family patriarch Lewis was a shockingly tight-fisted crim who had raised his boys – son, Jason, and stepson, Mark – to be his brutal enforcers earning their pa fear and respect on the street. The old-school crim had got involved in the new drug scene through Jason and Mark. Lewis Moran was of a different criminal era to Mokbel. Tony started his life of crime with drugs and developed his trade in the city’s nightclubs. Lewis was an ex-pickpocket and SP bookie. For entertainment when he was younger, Moran and colourful friends like Graham ‘the Munster’ Kinniburgh would suit up to go to Sunday night dances with girls in bobbysocks. If Lewis didn’t like the meals his partner, Judy, made him, he would brutally bash her with a stick.
Lewis’s boys, half-brothers Jason and Mark, had a strong villainous heritage through marriage and bloodlines to the Kanes and Coles – the serious gunmen of the city’s last major shoot-’em-up criminal stoush. But the Morans would have struggled to break out in the new drug scene without the smarts and expertise of the Grifter.
The Grifter had been an interloper in the Moran family for years. In the Moran photo albums he looks out smiling at the birthday parties of Mark’s and Jason’s kids. Moran matriarch Judy recalled the Grifter in her autobiography: ‘There is a boy who befriended my sons and ate so many family meals at my kitchen table. He was at the funeral of Mum and Dad and later Mark … there was always something about this boy that didn’t quite gel.’
The Grifter, as intelligent as he was amoral, was the brains behind the Moran drug operation. He educated himself in the burgeoning criminal industries of methamphetamine creation and pill production. This made him a pioneer at a time few in Melbourne or Australia had the necessary specialised knowledge. The gifted cook would arrange chemical deliveries, manufacture the drugs and sometimes even handle the supply end to VIP clients.
Mokbel groomed the Grifter as a friend and colleague after learning he had a reputation as a cook par excellence and was one of the best pill makers in the country.
As well as drugs, crime and Aussie Rules football, Mokbel, the Grifter and the Morans all had the track in common. Mokbel had horses stabled near Lewis’s brother Tuppence’s Ascot Vale house on the edges of Flemington racecourse. Matriarch Judy Moran told the author, shortly before being thrown in the clink for organising a gangland hit on her brother-in-law Tuppence Moran, how she met Mokbel at the track: ‘Mark first met Tony through racing and the only time I ever met Tony I was introduced to him at the races during the Spring Racing Carnival back in the nineties,’ she said. ‘I only met him for five minutes – just hello goodbye sort of thing and I never saw him again. So that was the only time I ever had anything to do with him. I wouldn’t have known him again if I fell over him – only for all that happened.
‘This was in the members at Flemington. He was dressed up. He just said, “Oh yes, I know your boys.” It was just a mutual friend introduced us and I didn’t take any notice of it. When I saw Mark later in the day, when he was in one of the marquees, I said, “Oh, there was this guy I met today, Tony Mokbel.” He said, “Oh yeah, he’s a big punter, Mum,” and that was as much as he said to me.’
In the succeeding years Mokbel made the change from Brunswick boy to the powerful millionaire property magnate he had longed to be. Smart decisions and the rampant 1990s property market buoyed his rapid financial growth and success, but the wheels of Tony’s remarkable commercial rise were being lubricated by his secret businesses. Always with one eye on the future, Tony had made contacts in the nightclub world during his first job. And his easy charm attracted an array of friends he would ruthlessly assess in terms of their usefulness to him as either helpers or stooges, or both.
One such friend since childhood was the plumber Paul Howden. Mokbel was godfather to one of Howden’s children and had lured Howden into his plans with the promise of quick, easy riches. Mokbel had created a productive speed lab in a suburban house, nominally owned by Howden, on quiet Downs Street in Brunswick, and got Howden to run it. There are few signs to distinguish a regular house from a speed den. Some telltale clues are perpetually closed curtains, occupants keeping irregular hours and a persistent smell like cat urine from the cooking process. Behind the Brunswick den’s closed curtains was a goldmine operation that produced more than forty kilograms of pure methamphetamine over the life of the lab, with a potential street value of $78 million.
Mokbel’s licence to print money was revoked one day in February 1997 when Howden accidentally knocked over a container of solvents, starting a fire in the house. As speed labs often do, the volatile operation exploded in a fireball consuming the house. Police followed the smoke to a residential street, discovered the largest speed lab in Victorian history, and made one of the biggest and easiest busts on record. Howden had been burnt in the inferno but by the time the authorities arrived he had fled the crime scene. He was found in hospital and eventually moved from the burns ward to a small jail cell.
Investigators could not fail to notice that the house next door to the smoking remains was owned by a Mokbel. But as it turned out, they could not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Tony was linked to the lab. The Mokbels knocked down the burnt remains of the neighbouring drug house nominally owned by Howden, extended their backyard and put in a pool.
Howden refused to sing about his boss to police and a grateful Mokbel made regular visits to the loyal plumber in prison. On one visit Tony even persuaded the guards to let him take Howden out to a nearby McDonald’s for a respite from prison food, later dropping his mate back off at the prison.
The Big Mac might have been a nice break from the prison’s shredded lettuce and pressed meat but it was cold consolation for the risks Howden had taken in Mokbel’s employ. The jailed plumber soon died of heart disease at just thirty-six – twenty years younger than even Sajih Mokbel had been when he suffered his premature coronary demise.
Howden’s ill-health was possibly caused by his toxic work environment. A kilogram of meth produces about six kilograms of toxic waste, and exposure to lab chemicals in cooking can be fatal. Sampling the produce can be equally lethal. Amphetamine use had offed Melbourne gangster Denis ‘Mr Death’ Allen, whose speed-addled heart actually broke into bits. At the age of thirty-six also, Allen joined an estimated dozen of his murder victims below ground.
Mokbel put a heart-on-sleeve tribute in the newspaper for his dead lab rat. He drew a comparison with his father’s death but conspicuously failed to see his role in the demise of his professed friend. ‘My dearest friend. I just cannot believe this. I’m thinking of you and your family,’ Mokbel wrote. He recalled his sadness at his father’s passing in August 1980. ‘In December 2001 it has rehaunted me again and this is thought to be the saddest day since my father passed away. You’ll always be in my prayers and I will never, ever forget you. I promise to you my friend to be there for your family till the day I die. Your true friend Tony Mokbel.’
Dodging heat over the lab explosion was one of a string of lucky breaks for Mokbel. Authorities were flabbergasted by the Brunswick lab’s lucrative and lethal output. They could not lock Mokbel up over the lab – although he was being brought to court in the nineties over simmering small-time offences of possessing a pistol without a licence, driving while disqualified, failure to show P-plates, entering a building with intent and receiving stolen goods – but the inferno removed any illusions about the scale of the Brunswick boy’s criminal ambitions.
A few months later police busted Mokbel’s Coburg lab but again could not categorically connect ‘Teflon’ Tony. It was an enviable lucky streak but with each close call Mokbel was losing perhaps his most valuable asset – his anonymity.
A year after his lab went up in smoke Mokbel faced court over his incriminating chat about barrels of pseudoephedrine with Kiwi Joe years earlier. In April 1998 a jury found Mokbel and Kiwi Joe guilty of conspiring to traffic in a drug of dependence – methamphetamine. Both men were far from cleanskins. Mokbel had nineteen prior convictions in nine years and Moran had thirty-two over nearly three decades committed to crime. More time in the big house was inevitable. For Mokbel the judge ordered three more years, but Tony had a plan which would see him serve only months.
While Mokbel was locked up, Carmel, struggling to keep the home fires burning, came a cropper over another of her husband’s dodgy indulgences – his criminal love of fast horses. When she was questioned by racing officials over horses Tony had put in her name to avoid scrutiny, she clearly knew little about the steeds. Tony had been in jail when Carmel gave birth to their first child and now with the authorities pursuing her over her husband’s schemes, he was again behind bars, nowhere to be seen. Fortunately for Mokbel he was not like most of the other poor saps stuck in the penitentiary. He had the funds to buy back his freedom by hiring top lawyers to find holes in the prosecution case.
‘Tony’s usual form in court is to exhaust every potential avenue no matter what,’ said a federal policeman who came to know him well, Agent Jarrod Ragg. ‘Tony’s MO is if there is the slightest chance, he’ll go for it. He’ll be told, “This will not succeed at court but there is a slight chance it will succeed.” He’ll say, “Just do it.” If there’s a one per cent chance, he’ll do it.’
Mokbel would drive his barristers to distraction, sometimes calling ten times a day with new ideas for his cases – some legal, some just bizarre. He would also pass their phone numbers on to friends with legal queries that would range from large-scale problems to fencing disputes.
The case Team Tony mounted to appeal the conspiracy to traffic conviction involved the sort of mental gymnastics that make perfect sense to lawyers but leave police and many in the community aghast. Their argument had three parts. One: the police evidence showed only an agreement that Kiwi Joe would supply Mokbel with pseudoephedrine. Two: pseudoephedrine was not the same as the drug they were charged over – amphetamine. And three: even though the pair discussed recipes for turning the one into the other, the most that could be proved was that Kiwi Joe expected Mokbel to manufacture the amphetamine. This fell short, Mokbel’s mouthpiece argued, of establishing that the pair had committed the crime of plotting to traffic amphetamine. The Court of Appeal of the Supreme Court agreed with the defence argument and quashed the jury’s guilty verdict.
In the meantime Kiwi Joe, who was also acquitted of the traffic charge, had pled guilty to an amended count – conspiracy to possess a drug of dependence. But for Mokbel the legal win meant a key in the latch, civilian clothes and a walk from prison to freedom. The racetrack beckoned and it would not be hard to ditch prison porridge for ponies.