In 1996 the economy was just starting to properly fire up after a debilitating recession. The median price for properties in Melbourne was $150,000 but the only way was up for speculators like Mokbel, who were getting in on the ground floor. Eleven years later the median Melbourne property price was $485,000 – an increase on investment of 223 per cent. In the interim those with enough money to throw around, and sufficient cajones to back their judgement that it would be a long time before property prices plateaued, were set to make a mint.
Melbourne was a boomtown. And Mokbel – an amphetamine czar and land pirate – was its rat. He started buying up properties around his restaurant on Sydney Road. He bought units in Templestowe, and real estate in nearby Coburg. He bought a property in Queensland and a hotel and farm in Kilmore. His brother Horty was linked to valuable properties in Coburg and Safety Beach and two each in Caulfield, near the track, and Preston. In conversations about importing drugs Mokbel would speak airily of property investment. ‘I reckon if you can buy two or three million a year in … fucking solid assets, you’re laughing … that’s what I try … and average,’ he said.
Tony’s family home with Carmel and the nippers was a high-tech camera-festooned haven in the relatively inner suburb of Pascoe Vale. Its proximity to the city meant Tony’s purchase of a waterfront Port Melbourne penthouse – next door to Jack Smit – must have screamed ‘love pad’ rather than convenience even to Carmel.
Mokbel continued his unholy TJ’s alliance with Smit, and the pair made ambitious plans to crown their Brunswick patch by erecting an $18-million winged-keel apartment tower on Sydney Road. The planned ten-storey avant garde edifice, dubbed ‘the winged wonder’, would contain 120 apartments, restaurants, a gym, a four-storey carpark, solar lighting and solar hot water. To residents it was a money-spinning monstrosity that could only jar with its low-rise urban village surrounds. But bombastic proponents touted Tony’s tower as an architectural jewel with the potential ‘to be a strong landmark in the sense of buildings like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe’.
Unhappy locals derided the comparisons, instead labelling it ‘the Eye-Full Tower’ and ‘Bent Penis’. They compared the design’s appearance to periscopes, Lego blocks, Rubik’s cubes and exhaust stacks. And the riled residents formed a protest group to trump the tower before it permanently put them in the shade. Some argued that no one in their right mind would want to live in the design’s outermost ‘wing’ apartments which were cantilevered eight metres out from the main structure, hovering twenty-three metres above the ground with no visible means of support.
Following seventy-four objections, the council’s own planning unit rejected the proposal. But it seems some Moreland councillors were sufficiently charmed by the pimp and the man rapidly becoming Australia’s biggest drug dealer to put those reservations to one side and give Tony’s tower the green light. One of the councillors at the time was a Kelvin Thomson staffer, who later insisted he did not vote on the project. Whatever the case, Tony’s towering aspirations were finally kyboshed seven months later when residents successfully appealed to a civil tribunal which ruled that the size of the project went beyond the council’s planning guidelines.
Their phallic ambitions rendered flaccid, Jack and Tony must have pined for the absence of red tape and democratic process involved in their more lucrative fields of running whores and drugs. But another exotic business opportunity – a multimillion-dollar stake in a 460-hectare East Gippsland marina and resort – would ensure Mokbel and Smit’s lifestyles of the rich and heinous would roll on. Smit and a lawyer and property developer, Douglas Harle, had planned to build a boat basin on the Nicholson River to provide dockage to watercraft on the Gippsland Lakes near Bairnsdale. Harle had acted for Tony before and Tony took an active interest in the marina development, even visiting the site.
Police feared their interest in the location was as a means of funnelling drugs into the country by sea. But the Mokbels’ desired involvement and attempt to muscle in ended in tears. When an attempt to buy a half stake in the project by a Mokbel-linked company was rebuffed, the Mokbels defaulted to a traditional shakedown. Milad Mokbel met Mr Harle and his wife, Barbara, at Kew restaurant QPO and said he had lent Jack Smit the money for his stake and now he needed it back from the Harles. The squarehead couple patiently tried to explain that Smit was responsible for any debts he incurred, not them. They said if Smit wanted to be paid out what he had put in the project they would repay it to Smit directly.
Six weeks later the put-upon property developer, Douglas Harle, and his wife, Barbara, were out at dinner with two friends at another Kew restaurant, Di Palmas, when Douglas got a call on his mobile. According to Douglas, he recognised the voice as belonging to Tony’s ostentatiously vicious little bro, Milad. ‘We met a few weeks ago in the restaurant in Kew. You will be approached in the next few days by someone … You will sign an agreement,’ the menacing caller said. ‘Tell your wife with the Luna Park mouth to shut up or the last thing both of you will see is my eyes at 4 am in the morning.’
The Harles were left in fear for their lives and the project fell over as Harle and Smit sued and counter-sued. Milad got his threat-to-kill charges dropped by pleading to attempting to blackmail. At the hearing Milad was flanked by three large security guards in the dock lest he decide to arc up over a point of law.
Tony had registered a company in the name of his father, Sajih, in the mid-nineties and dozens more followed. The registered names of the companies Mokbel was either a shareholder in, or director of, reveal the sweep of Tony’s investments and influence. There were Trackside, Street Side, South Yarra Shopping, Apparel Shopping, Bridge Road Shopping, Chapel Street Shopping, Brunswick Market, Chadstone Store, Collins Street Shopping, Fashion Innovations and Brunswick Market Deli, to name a few. Carmel Mokbel was a director of the Half Glass Hotel, and Horty’s wife, Roula, was a director of H & R Petroleum. Paul Howden was also a co-director in one venture. Mokbel had secret stakes in dozens of other businesses not directly linkable to him.
‘How it operates is I go to someone and I’ll say: this is my hotel but it’s in your name. The profits will come to me. If I want to liquidate that hotel you’ll sell it and give me the money. And if you ever step outside, I’ll kill you,’ ex-Purana chief Jim O’Brien said.
Mokbel bankrolled fashion designer Chris Chronis to launch a chain of LSD – Love, Style and Design – clothing stores. Mokbel and Jack Smit were also involved when Chronis, a one-time fight promoter and dab hand at poker, launched his own ‘personal fragrance’, Christos. Like a number of colourful characters, Chronis, who was also Playboy’s Australian licensee, later became embroiled in the Opes Prime corporate collapse.
Mokbel had a genuine love of corporate procedures, corporate language and the way company structures and protocols could be abused. His penchant for mimicking and sheltering under legitimate commercial structures even saw him label a later crime crew The Company. It is hard not to wonder whether Mokbel, had he finished school, might have had his ruthlessly sociopathic smart-alec capitalism and compulsive desire for status satisfied by becoming a stockbroker in the 1980s.
As things turned out it was a drug kingpin who wore the fine suits, made the attempted entrees into high society and drove the speedy red sports car that went from zero to 100 kph in four seconds. ‘I am the kind of guy who drives the latest Ferrari,’ Mokbel said.
His cousin Jamil Abou Baker had a more defensive position on the flash wheels and conspicuous wealth of the Mokbel boys, their friends and associates. ‘A lot of people think that because we’re young and drive nice cars that we’re drug dealers. It’s just that we work hard,’ he explained.
Mokbel was not a blue-collar or white-collar crim but a particularly devastating mix of both. If his corporate interests expanded it was usually as a result of an expansion in his criminal endeavours. Sometimes the police quietly intercepted an imported Mokbel motherlode but Tony was so prolific that others simply slipped through the net. A massive Mokbel three-million-pill import worth $50 million was likely among the ones that got away.
Mokbel was behind the biggest haul of LSD police had nabbed in Victoria when in 1999 a drug dealer was caught with 50,000 acid tabs. The dealer confirmed to police he had obtained the booty from Mokbel but would not give evidence against him. In another deal Mokbel upped the ante and organised an even larger batch, this time of 80,000 LSD tablets. Despite the hauls being busted, Mokbel had still not been linked to the biggest speed lab and the biggest seizure of LSD in his state’s history.
Mokbel would pay top dollar for precursor chemicals that could be spun into more lucrative products. But if he could steal drug ingredients for free that was even better. Packaging found in the lab explosion (which saw plumber Paul Howden jailed) was traced back to a 750-kilogram load of pseudoephedrine stolen from docks in New South Wales in late 1996. And in 2001 Mokbel was believed to have organised the theft of 175 kilograms of pseudoephedrine from a colourful former police officer who was taking the amphetamine-precursor chemicals to a drug company in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. But it was two of his most notorious drug schemes that would reveal just how far Antonios Mokbel had come. The twin schemes – international imports of hashish and cocaine – would also reveal just how a greedy but self-preserving Mr Big could become obscenely rich and remain free by getting a series of fall guys to take all the risks.