His amigos were all in the clink, but after some initial nervousness, Mokbel was increasingly confident he had dodged a bullet on the Mexican coke import. Three weeks after his cocaine crew was picked up, Mokbel told the Grifter he reckoned he had once again given the jacks the slip.
When Buddha Cassar was nabbed red-handed he tried to persuade his arresting officers he was simply seizing the cocaine parcels as part of his role with UPS. The ruse was not successful given the furtiveness of his after-hours swoop and the fact that almost the whole perfidious plot was caught on tape. But what was important to Mokbel was that Cassar had not blabbed. Mokbel told the Grifter he had warned his cocaine crew to be wary of the Mexicans. He bemoaned that he would not see a grain of coke from the venture but now had to financially support the family of his jailed inside man. Mokbel was not always so benevolent, but since he was footing the bill he let the street know that loyal foot soldiers who stayed staunch got repaid for their discretion.
‘He was a fucking top bloke, poor cunt,’ Mokbel said of Cassar. ‘Doing the right thing, ya know … now I’ve got to give a grand to his family every week. Now I’ve got [to pay] the fucking solicitors.’
Mokbel’s criminal associates had maintained the code of silence before and he assumed his latest crew were being stand-up guys now. But while Buddha was feeling the love, Mokbel was less certain about the Stooge. Mokbel said the Stooge was greedy and needed to be killed. Threats to kill made by Mokbel were not to be trifled with. But the Stooge, in jail for his part in the crew’s failed cocaine caper, had more immediate problems.
Upon entering the prison system the Stooge found a card on his pillow from the homosexual convict sharing his cell. It read: ‘You are unique. Welcome to my harem.’ But no amount of sobering reality could cure the Stooge of his basic naivety and he managed to get duped again behind bars. The flamboyant cell mate conned the newest member of his harem into believing that his influence extended into the nation’s centres of power. He convinced the Stooge that he could bribe three High Court judges into reducing his sentence. The Stooge handed over thousands of dollars, which his fellow prisoner simply kept while pretending to call High Court judges to discuss the Stooge’s case.
Mokbel’s plan for the Stooge was cold-blooded but his underlying instinct about the Stooge turning dog was right. Still fuming at being duchessed then dumped by Tony, the Stooge leapt at the chance to turn witness for the prosecution. Mokbel’s antennae were less astute when it came to the Grifter – the man from the same criminal streets as Tony who posed a far greater threat to his epic ambitions.
Since his arrest and turning by police in August 2000, the Grifter had made massive inroads with his target. His established reputation as a lifelong crook, his status as a talented and pioneering speed cook and his strong links with the Morans saw Mokbel breezily take the Grifter deep into his confidence. The two men would discuss sexual conquests and the Grifter shared with Mokbel details of his love life – including a short dalliance with nubile television current-affairs host Naomi Robson.
‘So how’s Naomi?’ Mokbel would ask.
‘She is all right, she’s made, yeah,’ the Grifter would reply.
The brunette TV host met the Grifter through friends, and dated him for several months in 2000 – or, as she said, ‘caught up with [him] on a handful of occasions’. Ms Robson said the Grifter had presented himself as a successful corporate executive with brochures to fit his story, and insisted she knew nothing of his heavy involvement in drugs and crime.
But whether it was women or work the Grifter, much like his quarry, did not do things by half. When he got frustrated with the capacity of his police-supplied tape recorder, the Grifter used his own money to get a superior device.
His police handlers were providing him with money, and where necessary, drugs, to make deals with Tony. The Grifter and Mokbel would come to an arrangement then Tony would send his corrupted chef Pizzaboy to make the broad daylight exchange in TJ’s carpark just metres from the Brunswick cop shop. Over just two months in 2000 Mokbel used Pizzaboy to deliver to the Grifter around half a kilo of amphetamine worth at least $50,000 on the street, a thousand LSD tickets, five sample ecstasy tablets, another six sample Es from a different batch, and then an ounce (thirty grams) of amphetamine. The Grifter’s tape was rolling when he and Mokbel negotiated their deals and he kept it rolling when Mokbel boasted of his other drug ventures. Mokbel had a seven-figure corruption war chest set aside for stealing and destroying any evidence against him, corrupting police and generally subverting any Crown case, prosecutors later alleged.
At the Brunswick Market Mokbel met 45-year-old Fawkner man Joseph Parisi and made him his drug ‘gopher’. Tony got Parisi to pick up and store drug deliveries and bring samples to him at the Grove Cafe in Sydney Road. Parisi trafficked kilograms of pseudoephedrine, Valium and hundreds of LSD tablets. Police later warned Parisi that Mokbel regarded him as a ‘weak link’ in his syndicate and had issued a contract for his murder.
Tony was adept at using corporate structures and financial schemes and blending them with a criminal version of paperless community banks. But he was less sophisticated at avoiding police scrutiny. Amazingly for a Brunswick boy who built a drug empire large enough to attract the interest of the federal authorities, there was little subtlety to the successful operation. But if Tony was arrogant enough to think his brash, blunt appoach would work forever, he had a reasonable foundation for that view – it always had. Loyal lawyers had kept him mostly out of jail despite a long string of prior convictions dating back to when he was seventeen. His high-powered legal eagles had busted him out of prison despite being caught talking drugs with a fellow drug kingpin and it was not the last swifty they would pull for him.
Within weeks of the cocaine import going awry Mokbel imported $2 billion worth of pseudoephedrine hidden in a shipping container carrying ceramics, basins and toilet bowls. A short message – ‘the girls have arrived’ – heralded the entrance of the staggeringly large illegal import. The motherlode contained barrels of the chemical weighing more than half a tonne and capable of being turned into forty million pills. The container travelled from Yugoslavia to Melbourne’s waterfront then, following the Mokbel blueprint, it was taken to a factory in Coburg and furtively unloaded by three shadowy figures.
Mokbel was taped admitting he drove into the bush and hid the 500 kilograms of amphetamine precursor which police never found. Again he thought he was home free but again he was wrong. His day of reckoning was fast approaching. The drug boss had engaged in cosy trackside chats with Strawhorn, the state’s peak drug cop, and been invited to the police ball by him. It must have been nice for Mokbel to know the man who could do the most damage to his drug empire was without principles and entirely compromised.
Mokbel could convince himself the hashish bust was the work of the federal police and the cocaine debacle was sparked by a Mexican cock-up such as the use of wooden containers alerting customs. But with connections to dodgy cops in the debauched drug squad he expected to be forewarned before any bust or arrest involving Victorian officers.
Mokbel had grown up with police who charged you and dragged you in the second they had enough. Even as police nabbed two of his successive crews he had failed to imagine an operation devoted almost solely to him, patiently stacking up evidence for multiple charges over multiple imports and deals. Tony was confident he would be left alone or at least forewarned. But even bent police have to make occasional collars and Mokbel’s confidence in Strawhorn was as misplaced as his candour with the Grifter.
Mokbel was taped by the Grifter boasting about the arrival of the half tonne of pseudoephedrine and that another similar load was on its way. Police later recovered an empty shipping container with pseudo traces. The Grifter recorded Mokbel telling how he had sold one tub of the drug for half a million dollars and had twenty-one tubs left. The Grifter expressed interest in buying and Mokbel gave him a small sample which police forensic scientists found was chemically identical to traces of the drug found in the dumped container. The jig was up.
Before the sun rose on Friday 24 August 2001 more than one hundred officers swooped, raiding eighteen premises across Melbourne and arresting van-loads of slumbering crims. Serious crime-world figures, including Mokbel, Lewis Moran, Bert Wrout, Mokbel crony Lucky, ‘weak link’ Joseph Parisi and Mokbel’s corrupted chef, Pizzaboy, were all charged. When police stormed Pizzaboy’s house they found forty-six grams of methamphetamine, a set of scales and $3500 cash, seemingly indicating he was more than just a delivery boy and had graduated to a Mokbel street speed-dealer.
Mokbel was arrested at dawn by police, who took his beloved red Ferrari and a jet-ski from out the front of his large Pascoe Vale home. Authorities seized and froze an estimated $20 million of his assets including the beachside palace, the Merc and his Templestowe units. For all the straight state and federal police who had taken a daily interest in Mokbel there was no more pretending they had not been watching him.
It was the end of Victoria’s largest ever drug sting and of monitoring Mokbel’s efforts to bring in cocaine, hashish and pseudoephedrine. Months of patience by the operation targeting Mokbel and the Grifter’s year of living dangerously were rolled into a super brief that police hoped would lead to super sentences. It had taken a cast of hundreds, the involvement of federal police and customs. It had also taken months of endurance and a superstar grass with breakout talent and more front than Myer. But now it was over. Mokbel, the infuriatingly flashy and cocky crim, was finally behind bars. His red Ferrari would be replaced by a red tracksuit. And that Friday night straight and bent cops alike charged their glasses.