Listen, I think that horse got scratched.
– Hitman to Carl Williams minutes after Michael Marshall was shot dead
Over time Mokbel expanded his influence at the track from terrorising outsider to that of a corrupting insider. With older brother Horty by his side, Tony set about establishing himself as a dapper doyen of the industry. Both brothers established their own stables. In the early nineties Tony bought a large Kilmore farm and started filling it with promising horses, initially paying up to $28,000 for some, but later the brothers would pay closer to half a million for a good steed. A stream of notable trainers and jockeys passed through their doors as the brothers dreamed of etching the Mokbel family name in racing’s pantheon, alongside Cummings, Waterhouse, Freedman and Hayes. Or if that didn’t happen, at least they would fix enough races and clean enough cash to justify the adventure. Some passed through, sniffed the wind, smelled something fishy about their employers and moved on. More than half a dozen jockeys and trainers, including Damien Oliver, were warned off getting too close to Mokbel.
Tony’s racing scams were not always well-kept secrets. On one occasion a private inquiry agent partnered to former colourful cop the Skull was drinking at a Middle Park hotel where jockey Damien Oliver was also imbibing. The agent, after a few too many, fired a round into the ceiling and shouted at Oliver: ‘You’re pulling horses for Tony Mokbel!’
Oliver and another jockey present were not impressed. Oliver denied the account, stating, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ It was not long before the Skull got a call from a Mokbel contact. ‘Damien called and Tony is very angry,’ was the message.
A meeting was arranged between the Skull and Mokbel. When the Skull saw Tony he remembered the teen tearaway. ‘You! You little fat cunt,’ he said. ‘I remember shining my shoes on your arse when you were fifteen.’
Tony reacted to quell the insubordination in front of his henchman. ‘Shh. Turn it up,’ Tony said, changing the subject to the agent Mokbel was unhappy with. ‘He’s going to cost me an absolute squillion!’ Mokbel complained.
The Mokbels would stop at nothing to ensure their horse came in. A police officer once got a late-night tip-off about the brothers’ plans. ‘They’re going to shoot Mahogany,’ the tipster confided. The horse’s owner – Lloyd Williams – was contacted and the beast was promptly moved out of harm’s way to a secret location.
Some stuck around either oblivious to or unconcerned by Mokbel’s gradually growing notoriety as the track became his mistress, laundromat, theatre and goldmine. Mokbel groomed jockeys and trainers for illegal tips and he paid bookies for inflated win receipts or even cheques showing wins he never won. Authorities suspect he corrupted jockeys to fix races on which he and associates would bet heavily. Helping him to this end was his secret ownership of at least nine racehorses, concealed behind the names of his wife, trainer and assorted trusted cronies.
Mokbel paid trainers an often lucrative cut of his winnings for helpful tips and he is believed to have made secret bets through an illegal unlicensed betting ring, later busted, run by Melbourne bookie Frank Hudson and two of Tony and Horty’s main commission agents. But if Mokbel was happy to know the result of a race before it had run, he was less forgiving if the race did not go as he planned. In November 2003 the favourite at Sandown, Leone Chiara, failed to justify her short odds after beginning awkwardly and throwing her head in the air. Mokbel is believed to have dropped $80,000 on the mare and was among those contacting stewards and crying foul, prompting a probe that led to the disqualification of five people, including jockey Craig Newitt.
It was much more fun when the jockeys were on side, and two of the track’s little people Mokbel got very close to were Sydney brothers Jim and Larry Cassidy. Jim, the older of the brothers and one of Australia’s best jockeys, had won two Melbourne Cups, two Caulfield Cups, a Cox Plate and a Golden Slipper. But his career had been marred by the ‘jockey tapes affair’. He had copped a lengthy suspension from riding in the mid-1990s after police involved in a major drug probe recorded him and others selling tips to criminals on the basis that they would fix their races. His form did not go unnoticed, and when he was back racing he was questioned by stewards over allegations that he had been paid more than $50,000 by Mokbel for tips.
Someone else who believed in the redistribution of wealth, Karl Marx, once said history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. And in the late nineties Jim Cassidy, whose memory must have been as short as he was, got the starring role in the jockey tapes affair 2 – the sequel to his initial public disgrace.
Police targeting Mokbel’s drug activities were surprised to hear Mokbel and the star jockey chatting amicably. The same police were also surprised to see another high-profile jockey zipping around town in Mokbel’s Ferrari. Jim Cassidy did not back away from his Mokbel links, describing the drug criminal as a friend and saying that he had been to his mother’s place and that their families were friends. Even later, when Mokbel’s notoriety sharpened and he became Australia’s most wanted man, the jockey said he had nothing but respect for him. But the closeness of the Mokbel and Cassidy clans would ultimately threaten Mokbel’s racing ambitions.
While Mokbel was behind bars doing time for plotting to traffic speed, his wife, Carmel, got a nasty surprise in the form of a steward’s inquiry into horses in her name. In 1998 New South Wales authorities queried the bona fides of racehorse Brief Promise, which was bought in the names of Tony’s wife, Carmel, and Larry Cassidy’s wife, Michelle, before Carmel handed over her half of the horse to Michelle as a ‘gift’. Mokbel was doing time when Carmel’s nominal horse ownership started to unravel. Larry and Michelle Cassidy were interviewed by stewards. Carmel was requested to appear at the inquiry but did not front. Brief Promise was sold after being refused approval to race. That sorted out the authorities’ concerns over that one horse, but alarm bells were now ringing about the size of the web Mokbel had quietly spun through racing. And on closer scrutiny a number of areas of concern emerged.
Victorian stewards interviewed a cast of Mokbel cronies including Horty and Carmel, and Natalie Doumani – wife of Tony’s childhood friend Jack – in relation to eight suspect horses. The owners of one horse, Scotch Gambit, were Carmel and crispy plumber turned jailbird Paul Howden (before his death). Carmel, whose name was involved with all the horses, took a lawyer to the inquiry and in a canny preemptive buckle (and an echo of the Mokbel solution to the heat over Brief Promise) said she wanted to relinquish ownership in all of them. The Mokbels were no longer invisible players in racing.
In April 1999 Tony’s owner’s ticket was torn up. The Victoria Racing Club announced both he and Carmel were banned from owning racehorses. The effort to shut the gate after the horse had bolted was by its very nature pointless. Ownership, after all, was always a fairly elastic concept for Mokbel and he was still free to mix at the track as a punter.
The law may require someone’s name to be on a piece of land, on a corporation or on a racehorse, but the system of nominal ownership can sometimes bear little resemblance to who might really be pulling the strings through friendship, fear or favour. Aside from his wife, no other Mokbel cronies who had been used to acquire Tony’s ponies received ownership bans. And in any case Mokbel, always a fan of the double-or-nothing approach, would not be so easily deterred.
There’s an old gambling trick some punters swear is foolproof so long as you don’t lose your nerve – or all your funds – before you hit paydirt. If you lose $10 on the first race you double your stake to $20 on your pick in the second. If that doesn’t come in you bet $40 on your pick for the third, $80 on the fourth and so on. The theory is that when your horse eventually comes in, the size of the stake ensures the payout will recoup the losses of the earlier bets. The problem is that if none of your horses have won after your seventh bet, a bid of $1280 is required as an attempted recoup of the initial $10 bid. And most serious punters bet with stakes in the hundreds and thousands, not $10, and some losing streaks last for years, not just seven races. But to a certain kind of tragic gambler the never-say-die double down makes perfect sense.
When Mokbel got banned from owning horses he did not take it as a warning or a defeat but an invitation to push on despite the increasing heat and mounting stakes. Mokbel the owner reinvented himself as Mokbel the breeder. Records showed ‘T Mokbel’ as the breeder of two horses in 2000 and 2001. Audaciously, Mokbel was using for his brood mare one of the horses he had earlier been banned from owning. And with Tony now in breeding it was time for Horty’s ownership scandal, which involved the family’s most promising racehorse.
Horty had named his lightning steed Pillar of Hercules – a geographic reference to its father, Rock of Gibraltar. It was a clever tribute to the horse’s lineage and allowed the Mokbel myth to mingle with the Greco-Roman warrior legend. But the mingling was more appropriate than intended, as Hercules, though a fearless soul, was not above cheating and using any unfair trick to his advantage. The colt had purportedly been seized by underworld finance adviser Tom Karas in lieu of a $100,000 debt owed by Horty. Majority ownership of the horse had then been transferred from Horty to Karas’s wife.
In the spring of 2007 the horse was in fine form, zipping home at Caulfield and poised to take out the $1.5 million Victoria Derby. But Melbourne’s celebrated Spring Racing Carnival was rocked when gangland detectives applied in court to seize the horse as an asset of Horty, who was then also an accused drug criminal. Police told the court that Karas, who had played the role of aggrieved creditor turned repo man, was actually behind a ‘large scale money laundering operation’ involving the horse.
Track officials announced a racing ban for the horse pending a steward’s inquiry into whether it was still secretly owned by the Mokbels. Just weeks later Pillar of Hercules went under the hammer. The auctioneer told the gathering that vets had inspected the horse and his potential as a sire was good, as the genitals were in working order. A Melbourne businessman spent $1.8 million to snap up the horse originally bought as a yearling for $475,000. In the years following the ‘trackside Tony’ era, Mokbel would demonstrate multiple similarities to the family’s estranged horse Pillar of Hercules. Not only would he, through his proclivities, cast aside any doubt that his genitals were in working order, his growing notoriety would belie a skyrocketing net worth.
The track had been a great college for Tony the high-school dropout (although it’s unclear whether he took or dispensed more lessons). He would remain reliant on it to launder his drug riches. And he would continue to indulge in horse talk over mobile phones if only because race numbers proved a handy code for conversations that were really about drug deals. But as it came time to move on and up the criminal tree, powders and pills replaced ponies, and his personal appearances at racecourses became much rarer.
In 2001 the Victoria Racing Club held a trial at Flemington in which rails bookmakers were relocated to a different area. As part of the pilot reforms the body specifically banned access to punters wearing T-shirts, thongs or tracksuits. Tony would have been chuffed at leaving a lasting mark. But by the time of the trackie ban, Mokbel’s tracksuit gang had retired into racing folklore undefeated. Mokbel himself had by then swapped FUBU sweats for pinstripes, the old gang for a new crew. And dead tracks for greener pastures.