Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.
– Winston Churchill
He had put a major criminal in jail but the Grifter, although a conscientious police informant, had not exactly turned his back on his criminal past. Just three months before Mokbel’s arrest the Grifter, on behalf of Lewis Moran, was shopping in the underworld for a hitman to kill Carl Williams. When small-time drug dealer Terrence Hodson was still alive and a one-time detective, Senior Constable David Miechel, was a policeman not a prisoner, Hodson told Miechel that the Grifter had offered him $50,000 to take out the Morans’ arch enemy, Williams. (Terrence Hodson and his wife, Christine, were later to be executed in their home, just prior to giving evidence about alleged dirty dealings in the drug squad involving Miechel, and their murder remains unsolved to this day.)
Even when working with his police handlers, Detectives Paton and Rosenes, the Grifter’s dealings were not squeaky clean. If Mokbel quoted the Grifter $10,000 on a drug deal, the police handlers would tell their bosses they needed $140,000 and then the treacherous trio would split the difference. When it came to how much illegality was too conspicuous, the Grifter had more nous than the bent coppers. Fearing the detectives’ greed outweighed their sense, the Grifter took out his own insurance policy by recording their dodgy dealings on the extra space of his self-bought recorder.
One day the Grifter wandered into the police’s Ethical Standards Department to turn his technology against his malignant police masters. He brought with him his own extended remix of his law and order tapes. He played his explosive director’s cut. And he almost single-handedly detonated the drug squad. Paton and Rosenes were arrested, tried and jailed for drug trafficking as more details came to light of misuse of speed chemicals by other bad boys in Strawhorn’s squad.
The new female chief commissioner, Christine Nixon, brought in from interstate to sweep the force clean, ended the controversial chemical diversion program and ordered a probe into the drug squad which by the end of the year saw it disbanded. Sergeant Ray Dole, who had written Mokbel a reference, was probed for a time by anti-corruption officers but ultimately resigned and was never charged.
Nixon’s campaign to expose corruption would have a positive flow-on effect for those like Mokbel who were caught by drug squad officers. It is even possible the Grifter – as a double agent running with the fox and the hounds – foresaw it could play out that way. Whatever the case, the prisons were getting a steady stream of new inmates – ex-detectives and Mr Bigs alike – with a serious grudge against the Grifter. Mokbel, like all accuseds, was entitled through his lawyers to learn the specific evidence against him. The Grifter’s name would not need to have been included for the scales to be lifted from Mokbel’s eyes as to who was behind his recent run of bad luck.
Mokbel had been arrested in August 2001 and by the following month his legal team persuaded a magistrate to bail him on a million-dollar surety. It would have been a nervous time for the Grifter, who won bail on his drug charges in recognition of his hard, risky work. But the dangerous decision to let Mokbel loose was corrected a month later, in October, when the Supreme Court overturned the magistrate’s decision. The somewhat bewildered judge described Mokbel in arachnid terms. He said if the police claims were true, Mokbel ‘propounded a web of illegality and corruption’ with himself at the centre. The judge said that given Mokbel’s potential to pervert the course of justice, ‘It is manifest that the Magistrate fell into serious error in concluding that exceptional circumstances existed which justified the granting of bail.’ Mokbel was sent back to the slammer. But the man once christened ‘the Octopus’ by the press still had tentacles everywhere.
The Grifter had made a powerful and ruthless enemy and would have had plenty of cause to be nervous. But in the meantime he decided to live it up. While on bail his car was firebombed and even his attempts to party away any fears were spoiled by a failed bid to abduct him from a nightclub. The Grifter’s bail conditions meant he was forbidden from leaving the country and regularly had to check in with nominated police. But to simplify some of the onerous requirements, the grass with the gift of the gab made a unique arrangement with police (who could monitor the location of his mobile phone) to make his regular check-ins by SMS.
Police were still getting the text messages, their origin reassuringly traced to near the Victorian–New South Wales border, when the Grifter left the country. Never one to give a sucker an even break, the Grifter had left his phone with a friend near the Murray River. He packed his fake passport and in late 2001 jumped a jumbo for a refreshing overseas holiday. Months later, the day before he was due back in court, he casually flew back home. Grabbed by annoyed cops as he landed at the airport, his bail was revoked and he was thrown into the prison system where the Mokbel menace machine was in full swing.
At the Melbourne Assessment Prison a guard approached the Grifter on behalf of Mokbel and told him all would be forgiven if he just walked away from testifying. A million-dollar bounty then materialised on the Grifter’s head. Writing from prison the Grifter said: ‘My life is in danger because I exposed police corruption. I’ve been promised, pledged, reneged on, lied to – you name it. My family is copping threats [from] persons threatening me and them harm. I have sacrificed my life, as it will never be the same or safe for me.’
One claimed kill plot targeting the Grifter involved notorious prison pest Greg Brazel, who was locked up for decades after being convicted of killing three women. Brazel told police he was hired to poison the Grifter while both men were in Barwon prison together. Brazel said he shunned the contract and instead blew the whistle on the plot. He swore in an affidavit to police: ‘I had received certain messages from other criminal identities requesting that I take action to prevent [the Grifter] from being in a position to give evidence against certain persons charged with, or about to be charged with, criminal offences.’
Brazel would not name the plotter but the spectre of Mokbel hung heavy in the background. ‘I, in fact, warned prison staff that it would be prudent that [the Grifter’s] milk etc be stored in the staff fridge, rather than the fridge within the Acacia Unit for prisoner use. I did not tell staff why this would be prudent, but knowing me over a long period of time they accepted this advice without question.’
Brazel said after he told the Grifter he was a murder target the Grifter reciprocated the trust and confided another reason he feared for his safety. ‘[He said] that he was involved in a sexual relationship with this woman and that she was the woman of another criminal, that is, the wife or girlfriend of another criminal,’ Brazel said. ‘This is commonly referred to as “back-dooring” and is a cardinal sin within the criminal community.’
When the author visited the state’s two highest security units at Barwon, a padlock had been added to the communal milk fridge. The warden offered the benign explanation that it was to stop the prisoners nicking each other’s milk.
By mid-2003 when he got a discounted sentence on his drug charges, the jailed Grifter was somehow still staying alive, beating the odds and dodging inmates trying to claim Mokbel’s million-dollar bounty. But an underworld source said the incident that really spooked the Grifter while he and Mokbel were ‘in boob’ was not overtly violent at all. ‘The pair of them were in there together, separated, one to a cell, high security, the whole bit,’ the man said. ‘Then one day a guard opens [the Grifter’s] door, he looks up and there’s Mokbel standing there at the entrance to his cell.’ Mokbel said ‘Hi’ and the Grifter’s real name and then the guard Mokbel had clearly bribed closed the Grifter’s door and returned Mokbel to his cell. It was not an overtly violent visit but Mokbel’s message was clear: there is no place I cannot get to you.
The Grifter was released on parole in September 2003, the bounty on his head still weighing on his mind, but nevertheless in one piece despite what he claimed were multiple attempts on his life in jail. Mokbel’s influence and connections did not stop at the prison gates. The crime boss’s network of eyes, ears and enforcers was everywhere and once out of prison the Grifter decided he needed to be out of sight and out of mind. He needed to at least get out of the city and ideally flee the country. Leaving Melbourne’s September winter blues would not be hard. Still, the Grifter would miss the upcoming AFL Grand Final and the thrills of the Spring Racing Carnival. There would be hard times ahead for the Grifter if he left Australia. But in his mind these compromises were balanced out by the complete lack of Mokbels in Holland.
After his last escapade got him sent back to the big house for a volatile stay with his would-be killers, the Grifter was a little more reticent to flee the country without permission. He successfully applied to the parole board to vary his conditions allowing him to leave Australia because he feared for his safety. He was given a green light but authorities expected the Grifter to return to testify against Mokbel when his case eventually slouched to court. But in May 2004, as Melbourne shrank to a patchwork of farmlands out his plane window and his jet trails marked the sky, the incorrigible Grifter had other plans. Or, as the underworld source summarised it: ‘After that surprise visit from Mokbel in boob he just said fuck this I’m gone.’
The Ethical Standards Department probe into the conduct of the drug squad was delaying and even destroying police cases and having an open-sesame effect on the jail cells of underworld figures. Mokbel’s old street dealer Carl Williams, locked up awaiting trial on drugs charges, had walked out into the fresh air because of the probe.
Mokbel, betting the corruption clean-up could help his cases too, refused to plead despite the strong evidence against him. Depending on one’s view of the justice system it was either a big gamble or the type of delay-and-defend tactics that are a sure bet for rich defendants. Either way it paid off. By the time Mokbel’s committal rolled around, drug squad Detectives Paton and Rosenes were in jail. And the police informant who had fronted court on the Friday of the dawn patrol over Mokbel’s pseudo import – Sergeant Paul Firth – was no longer above suspicion. The same month that Paton and Rosenes went inside, Firth was suspended from the force pending an Ethical Standards investigation. Firth later resigned, which meant the ESD probe could go no further and he was not charged with any criminal offence.
Defence lawyers were at the ready to make a meal out of the emerging corruption in the drug squad. They would have a particularly good time with those involved in the operation that targeted Mokbel. Adding to authorities’ woes their star witness had gone feral. The Grifter and his hidden wire had been the scourge of the underworld, then of bent drug detectives. As Mokbel’s trials approached, the absent grass was making yet another powerful enemy – the prosecutor’s office. From his overseas hideout the Grifter said he was not coming back to testify in the trial. There was anger that the career crim had fled and was not fronting up to do his duty. But the anger would have become blind rage had anyone known what the prodigal perp was really up to overseas.
The Grifter had a rough time leaving Melbourne to fall off the radar. He told a friend how he lost five months of his life stuck in a Spanish jail before flying by seaplane to an island without security checks. Reborn yet again with a new identity, the charismatic conman eventually fell on his feet in Holland where he set about creating a new drug empire while on the lam. As Mokbel was counting the days waiting for his court dates, the man he wanted dead was setting up an international team of drug mules spanning Europe to South-East Asia. The Grifter’s mules would each swallow up to a kilogram of cocaine wrapped in condoms and smuggle the drugs into Canada and Australia in their stomachs. Australia’s most wanted fugitive had learnt the secrets of counter-surveillance from bent drug squad detectives. And for three years he would pull off the ultimate feat of criminal multitasking, presiding over a global drug ring while on the run.
Back in Victoria the Grifter’s absence meant prosecutors had to re-evaluate their prospects against Mokbel. The Commonwealth Department of Public Prosecutions asked its Victorian counterpart to commence action against the Grifter to have him re-sentenced for failing to honour his undertaking to give evidence. The Grifter’s barrister, Nick Papas, defended his client’s decision not to testify against Mokbel in the wake of the execution of the Hodsons, who paid the ultimate price for snitching on cops and crims alike, and other gangland slayings. ‘We’re not whistling Dixie here,’ Mr Papas said. ‘Everyone else is dead.’
Prosecutors were left with the bitter task of cutting Mokbel’s charge sheet down to the offences they could still establish beyond reasonable doubt that would not give rise to a courtroom carnival about police corruption. The vast majority of the trafficking and possession charges against Mokbel – relating to drugs like ephedrine, LSD, cocaine and ecstasy – were dropped. The only ones left – and paltry compared to his $2 billion import and the true scale of Mokbel’s real operations – were the carpark drug deals and a federal charge over the cocaine import. Mokbel’s corrupted chef, Pizzaboy, had ten charges dropped and others in the crew also won out of the big shrink.
On the cocaine import the prosecution still had the Grifter’s tapes and the Stooge’s willing testimony and Mokbel was committed to trial. But against his own lawyers’ advice Tony – who boasted of keeping a seven-figure kitty for stealing evidence and ruining trials – would not plead to it. That meant remaining in jail, the novelty of which had worn off for Mokbel over successive visits. But the jailbird did not plan to stay locked up for long – and nor would he. He needed the two things that always got him out of trouble: a little of his legendary luck and his loyal platoon of high-powered lawyers. An initial application for bail was refused at the first legal hurdle and did not get to court.
Mokbel’s lawyers argued in a three-day Supreme Court hearing that their client should be bailed because police corruption probes were delaying his case, meaning an untried, presumed innocent man was spending longer and longer in jail. Mokbel’s barrister, an expensive QC presumably not acting on a pro-bono basis, argued that his client was $8 million in debt to the bank, a situation that was getting worse because being locked up prevented him from managing his assets. His lawyers also sought to rely on the absence of the Grifter as a changed circumstance justifying bail. The argument ignored the fact that the Grifter had fled because Mokbel put a $1 million price on his head.
The bail application was dismissed but less than four months later Mokbel’s lawyers tried again, arguing that Tony’s trial looked certain to be delayed even further. The same judge found that despite the unfortunate delays the risk of Mokbel jumping bail, reoffending or interfering with witnesses was too great and again refused bail. Undeterred, Team Mokbel tried again a month later, arguing that delays meant the prisoner could be jailed for up to three years from his arrest before getting to trial. It was third time lucky and in September 2002 Mokbel got bailed on strict conditions.
Near the height of his bigwig status Mokbel had once more been saved by a very lucky twist of fate – bailed to the bewilderment of the public because of police corruption bloodletting. He even seemed to get a promotion from the judge from witness tamperer to messianic figure. ‘This is not an occasion for the court to act as Pontius Pilate by washing its hands of the matter,’ the judge said before freeing Mokbel and washing his hands of the matter. As the drug tycoon once more walked from jail, shocked police and prosecutors were more convinced than ever that Mokbel was not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy.