For a single man gets bottled on them twisty-wisty stairs,
An’ a woman comes and clobs ’im from be’ind.
– Rudyard Kipling, ‘Loot’
After a year behind bars Mokbel was bailed in September 2002. Walking free from custody he said he just wanted a good night’s sleep. But there was to be little rest for the heavy gambler and notorious pants man.
Upon release Mokbel made a sombre pilgrimage to Fawkner cemetery to visit his father’s grave. He then lived his next few years like they were the last he had, painting as much of the town as red as possible before his bailee’s nightly curfew of 10 pm. He moved to a central city pad, was seen dropping bundles trackside, indulging at expensive restaurants, and getting chauffer-driven to the Grand Prix. Within two months of being released he got his bail altered so that for ten days he could take his children to the Gold Coast and the strip of giant theme parks south of Brisbane on the Pacific Motorway. He then spent his nights living it up in his luxurious accommodation at Jupiters Casino.
In June 2004 Tony visited a friend locked up at the Melbourne Custody Centre, turned on the charm and slipped the prison guards $350 for officers to order forty super special and Hawaiian pizzas and dozens of Cokes from a gourmet city pizzeria. The cash splash treat for all the inmates and guards was highly welcome but also highly illegal. As an accused on bail Tony should by law have been excluded from visiting in the first place. But not for the last time, when Tony turned on his highbeams, logic seemed to go out the window.
All charm, braggadocio and bogus bonhomie, Tony had lived the first act of his criminal life as if everyone was watching. He had been the hail-fellow-well-met drug boss of Sydney Road, conspicuous in power suits and his zippy red sports car, dropping big drug-money tips to grateful waiters. If you had thrown a rock in the Brunswick air it would have hit a Mokbel mate, possibly one in a blue uniform. But in reality, during that period Tony was a legend in his own overloaded lunchbox and little known outside police, crime, clubbing or northern suburbs circles. That all changed with coverage of his dawn raid arrest, his brothers’ growing notoriety and the deepening gangland war.
The Mokbel moniker and even the tag ‘Fat Tony’ became household names. Out on bail and in the second act of his criminal life Mokbel kept living as though everyone was watching. The difference was that this time they actually were. With court pending, the prospect of more jail in the offing, bullets flying and cameras flashing, it might have been wise for Tony to take a break and retreat into the shadows. But Mokbel did what his particular sect of aggressive flashy gamblers, known as ‘blasters’, always do – he doubled down and raised the stakes.
Detectives figured Mokbel had multiple crews working for him on a national basis and that he upped the ante as he became a criminal celebrity. ‘From August 2001, that was the period when he was most prolific, believe it or not,’ Detective Sergeant Jim Coghlan from the Purana anti-gangland taskforce said. ‘During that period he would have made over maybe a hundred million dollars. Probably about the GDP of a small island,’ he said.
But a man is not an island in all aspects. And by then Mokbel was estranged from Carmel. If at any point he had maintained a moment of monogamy, he now quickly shunned it to return with relish to the life of single Tony on the town. When he was not importing or snorting cocaine – sometimes called ‘the white lady’ – Mokbel’s head was turned by white ladies of a non-inhalable variety.
He stood, balding, tubby and 167 centimetres short, on the precipice of turning forty, but when it came to seducing beautiful women Mokbel was a rotund Romeo without peer. Police watching him around the clock could not help but notice his all-hours meetings with his glamourpuss solicitor Zarah Garde-Wilson. A federal agent and a Purana detective swore in court that Tony had a constant on-off sexual relationship with the raven-haired beauty. Mokbel might have been a charmer but with Garde-Wilson he had big shoes to fill – her old flame had been a real killer boyfriend.
The love of Zarah’s life had been Lewis Caine, a gangland thug not long for this world, whose sperm she kept on ice after the zip went up on his body bag. Caine, who was Zarah’s client before becoming her lover, was less a tactical underworld Mr Big than a senselessly violent career crim. One night in 1988 he was ejected from a King Street nightclub after having a row with a stranger over a woman. When the stranger left the club Caine followed him in a taxi to Spencer Street then kicked him in his head until his skull gave way. The man died and Caine then walked back to the nightclub in bloody shoes and boasted of his kill. He copped a dozen years for what became known as the ‘pizza head murder’ because of the state of his victim, and then he met Zarah.
A farm girl turned private-school princess turned legally licensed crime groupie, Zarah tended to go that extra step for her clients. Well endowed, with a leaning towards the skimpy, her prison visits became legendary among female-deprived inmates. A coquettish woman of few words, Zarah has not been averse to posing in beach showers or suggestively with her pet python, Chivas, in racy photo shoots for lads’ mags. But on issues of more substance she has otherwise been notoriously shy of the spotlight. When chequebook media outlets or even judges have asked her tough questions, her answers have been stunted, legalistic or missing in action. She was convicted of contempt of court for refusing to testify against the two gangland killers who gunned down her boyfriend Caine. She said her defiant silence was not part of a gangland code but ‘so I don’t get my head blown off’.
Her family originally ran a 6000-head merino farm near Armidale in northern New South Wales. When wool prices went south her family went north to Queensland and Zarah boarded at Toowoomba’s Fairholme Ladies College. She got her law degree at the University of Western Australia then landed on Melbourne’s mean streets as an articled clerk under colourful bouncer turned lawyer George Defteros. Her legal mentor momentarily handed in his practising certificate after he was charged with a gangland plot to kill Carl and George Williams. The charges were later dropped.
Zarah met Caine when she represented him on a driving charge and the pair fell into bed. They became qualified reiki healers together – a method of spiritual healing drawing on life-force energy. But all Caine’s life-force energy left him when he was gunned down then dumped in Brunswick Street. Zarah included the dead killer’s name in her new law firm – Garde-Wilson and Caine – and told a lads’ mag she still spoke to his spirit (which was presumably kicking in the heads of other spirits in the sweet hereafter). A psychological report described Zarah’s posthumous attachment to the dead thug as pathological and abnormal behaviour.
Police feared Zarah was too close to the underworld and could be passing briefs of evidence and witness statements to third parties with criminal connections. Her unique presence in the staid Melbourne legal community as a snake-owning solicitor with a double-barrelled surname saw her dubbed ‘the hyphen-with-a-python’. But Zarah’s designer wear and sexy reputation distracted from her steely survivor streak. She came back from professional death to beat perjury and gun charges and to overturn a legal watchdog’s ruling that she was not a fit and proper person to be a lawyer.
Her stock agent father is believed to have passed away and she seems to have little to do with her mother. Zarah has amiably refused various interview requests stating, ‘I don’t like journalists,’ and refusing even to comment on the health of Chivas – ‘None of your business.’
Police said the gangland solicitor who would house-sit for Carl and Roberta Williams lived in an apartment bankrolled by Mokbel. Questioned in court about Mokbel, Zarah said, ‘I’m waiting for my counsel to object to relevance.’ The leggy lawyer and pint-sized paramour made an unlikely couple, but Zarah’s flirtatious mix of vulnerability, self-confidence and plunging necklines meant that within minutes of meeting her Tony would have been smitten. In the same way Mokbel just had to have the latest Ferrari, Zarah would have gained an instant number on his must-have list.
Mokbel was in the same callous human trade as the head-stomping Caine, but unlike her last boyfriend Mokbel had money, brothers and associates to take care of the rougher edges of his business. Tony once combined two of his loves by taking Zarah to a Queensland casino, where she was seen collecting his thousands of dollars of winnings. His charm, charisma and sheer front, combined with some conspicuous displays of wealth, saw Mokbel punch well above his not insubstantial weight when it came to women.
Zarah was a prize conquest and handy contact, but since the turn of the millennium the main woman in Mokbel’s life was Danielle McGuire.
Like Zarah, her raven-haired rival for the balding man’s affections, Danielle was also a thin, buxom underworld vamp with a dead gangster on the ex-boyfriends list.
Her poor taste in men may have been genetic – her mum, Joan Madin, dated a gunman who police later linked to the Hodson killings – and at fourteen Danielle was dating a twenty-year-old. She had a daughter, Brittany, from a subsequent abusive relationship that lasted only six months.
When police raided her Collingwood home in 1998 McGuire was living with her new beau – a male model – and her then two-year-old daughter. As the raiding officers discovered, McGuire was also sharing house with pill-making equipment, 7300 speed tablets worth about $400,000, cocaine and $9200 in cash. The pretty and feisty young mum was an ecstasy-and amphetamine-using party girl who did not know when the party was over. She left her daughter with her mother most weekends so she could rave until Monday, cutting a drug-fuelled swathe through the city’s nightclubs.
McGuire also had an affair with married mobster Mark Moran. When Moran was gunned down outside his family home in 2000, McGuire recovered sufficiently from her grief to begin an affair the same year with Mokbel. But while Mokbel was clearly a charmer, his wandering eye meant his main molls never rested easy. There were heated scenes between the balding man’s blonde and dark-haired companions when Danielle learnt of Zarah.
Moon-faced millionaire Mokbel could excite a lot of passion among his envious coterie of admirers. A Melbourne gumshoe said his private detective agency was hired by two different women to watch Mokbel. Each client was unaware of the other’s existence but both had a nasty hunch their man was straying and wanted Mokbel tracked. McGuire took her concerns into her own hands and bugged Mokbel’s car. What she learnt led her to angrily confront Zarah. Someone then, in return, smashed in the windows of McGuire’s luxury Toyota Lexus.
Roberta Williams was friends with Danielle (just as her husband Carl was mates with Mokbel) and was relatively close to her and Carl’s criminal solicitor and occasional house-sitter, Zarah. Roberta said Zarah denied an ongoing affair with Mokbel so she warned Danielle off going the scrag against her. ‘I had a falling out with Danielle because I said to her, “If you fucking go near Zarah we will punch on because I am not going to let you hurt Zarah,”’ she said. But Roberta said her loyalties changed when she realised Zarah was lying to her and living high on the Williams hog while secretly sleeping with her close friend’s man. She has successfully maintained the rage against Garde-Wilson ever since.
Roberta and Danielle were no longer ‘great mates’ at the time of writing but Roberta said she still regretted Zarah getting between them. ‘I’m spewing I didn’t listen to Danielle in regard to Zarah. I should’ve believed her and a few other people instead of listening to Zarah’s lies,’ Roberta said. ‘Zarah did the wrong thing and I should have listened to other people and I lost good friends out of the lying whore in the situation.’
Years earlier Danielle McGuire had pled guilty to her drugs charges. As those charges had slowly crept through the courts she had met Mokbel and been won over by his admit-nothing-and-unleash-the-lawyers approach. She appealed to the Supreme Court to change all her guilty pleas to not guilty. But it didn’t work. Not even borrowing Mokbel’s legal dream team of Nicola Gobbo and Con Heliotis, QC, could save her from the big house. McGuire was given a blue tracksuit and sent to do a minimum of nineteen months, allowing Mokbel to revert to his preferred status as single Tony on the town.
One night Mokbel drank too much and got thrown in the drunk tank without charge by Melbourne West police. Mokbel associates would not say what the usually temperate drinker was celebrating. Whatever it was, when Mokbel stepped out of the cells hungover at dawn, there was a bright side. It was his only walk to freedom that would not cost him a fortune in legal fees.
When Danielle McGuire was released from her substantially longer stay at Her Majesty’s pleasure, she and Mokbel set up home at a Southbank penthouse reportedly owned by bookie Frank Hudson. The expensive luxury accommodation came with multiple personal carparks. A fellow resident could never undertand why his portly, balding neighbour always parked his luxury cars wherever he wanted – often in the resident’s own spaces. The resident raised it with the body corporate and eventually Mokbel himself only to be told, ‘Don’t you know who I am, mate?’ It was only later that the resident saw Tony’s face on the news and realised why he could never get the building authority to act on his carpark complaints.
McGuire established her own business, Hollywood Hair Extension & Beauty Salon, in the yuppie belt of Toorak Road, South Yarra, in July 2005. More than $250,000 was reportedly channelled through the business to Betfair in London. The great thing about betting accounts is you can be penniless – like if you’re stuck in a prison or a fugitive from justice – and with a telephone and a password can move money around. Milad’s wife, Renate, later became a co-director in the South Yarra salon with Danielle.
Crown Casino is a modern megalith rising from the banks of the brown Yarra River. Giant flame-throwers at the entrance spew fireballs into the air and, according to local legend, roast the occasional disoriented pigeon or bat. To mega-gambler Mokbel, who had grown up on illegal backroom games, the casino was a devil’s playground. He was a regular at the high-roller Mahogany Room and was treated to free and discounted room rates due to his Very Important Punter status. Crime colleague Lucky was also a Crown VIP and Tony’s brothers, Milad, Kabalan and Horty, regularly used the casino as a rendezvous point. At the height of the gangland war Mokbel would hunker down in the palatial suites of the Crown Towers hotel.
Mokbel had been banned from about five hundred bars and clubs in Prahran and neighbouring suburbs after police adopted a rare procedure allowing people of ‘notoriously bad character’ to be excluded. He had already been banned from owning racehorses. And then in June 2004 the Chief Commissioner, Christine Nixon, used special police powers to ban dozens of gangland figures from the casino. All four Mokbel boys got letters from the chief telling them their days of spread misères, rivers and flops were numbered. Tony’s increasingly notorious protégé Carl Williams and his pa, George, were banned. So too was Carlton Crew figure Mario Condello, who once robbed a fellow high-roller at knife-point in the Mahogany Room toilets. Some gangland figures took the news better than others.
One day the author had a sit-down with Mick Gatto – also on the casino banned list – followed by an interview with the state’s top cop, Nixon. On learning of my next appointment Gatto said: ‘Tell her thanks for banning me from Crown – she’s saved me a fortune. I was gonna send her a diamond ring but I don’t want her to get the wrong idea.’ Nixon got the joke, laughed, and said: ‘I remember signing those letters.’
Mokbel loved the casino but as far as he was concerned the sweetest gamble around was the legal system. It was the only game totally stacked in the player’s favour, one where the house has to play with an open hand while the punter keeps his hidden. So he pointed his one indulgence at the other and asked his lawyers to sort out his casino problem. Though Mokbel initially attempted to mount a legal challenge to the ban he ultimately dropped his appeal, wistfully comparing himself to Joe Pesci’s character in Scorsese’s mob movie Casino. ‘If a casino is good enough for Nicky Santoro it should be good enough for me,’ Mokbel said.
Horty Mokbel also attempted to legally challenge his casino ban as a deprivation of liberty, even summonsing the Chief Commissioner who had issued the bans to appear in the Supreme Court. But Horty had a more pragmatic fall-back plan. He was listed as a Conrad Club member – the high-rollers clique of Queensland’s biggest casino, Conrad Jupiters, on the Gold Coast. While Horty headed north in the pursuit of income detached from work, Tony went back to the track.
Mokbel boasted he made $380,000 at the 2004 Melbourne Cup as crowd favourite Makybe Diva chalked up her first of three historic consecutive Cup wins. He won the princely sum, more than seven times the average wage, from home, laying phone bets with a rails bookie. But the flamboyant gambler was no good at being a homebody. Two days later, amid growing public notoriety and while on very contentious bail, Mokbel surfaced at the 2004 Oaks – one of the biggest events on Australia’s racing calendar – to splash the cash.
Undercover police had watched him at the Oaks four years earlier, aghast at the openness with which the crime lord distributed cocaine to the celebrity in-crowd. Now while on a controversial million-dollar bail, with $20 million in assets seized and facing very serious drugs charges, Mokbel brazenly returned to the scene of his earlier infamy.
Looking like a short, balding Johnny Cash, Mokbel made his grand entrance dressed from head to toe in black designer wear. He horsed around with mate Sam Greco, ex-world kickboxing champion and cafe owner. He mingled with high-profile sporting, business and social figures in the members’ betting ring. And he even gained access to the exclusive Birdcage section of the track which hosts prestige marquees, international celebrities and supermodels. ‘I’ve been betting from home,’ Mokbel, wearing a dark pinstriped suit, black shirt and black tie, said on the day. ‘But this is a nice day and everybody gets dressed up.’
Mokbel said he put an $80,000 bet on a short-priced winner and before the seventh race picked three firsts in a row. One of his suspiciously serendipitous steeds was the ominously named Oaks winner Hollow Bullet. Tony was either very tinny on the day, had an inside word or more likely was loudly inflating his winnings for the benefit of the tax man and forensic accountants.
He was photographed smiling alongside bookie and associate Frank Hudson, who had copped the fine and ban for the unlicensed wagering in New South Wales and was technically Tony’s Southbank landlord. The defiant display led to headlines like ‘BAIL IS A CARNIVAL’ and prompted an inevitable backlash, with politicians drafting laws to help keep crime bosses away from the track. But then just days after his ostentatious appearance at Oaks Day, Mokbel was excused from the grind of attending his cocaine committal hearing, after his lawyers argued he could not attend court because he feared for his life. They were very good lawyers. Hundreds of thousands of people attend the Spring Racing Carnival each year, entry can be bought with a $60 ticket and, unlike the Supreme Court, there are no metal scanners at the entrance.
The police had seized the Mokbel assets they knew of, amounting to a $20 million big freeze. There were undoubtedly millions more in names and from sources they could not connect to Mokbel. But the cash-flow problems did hurt business and, in Mokbel’s mind, made it more necessary to do more business – even while on bail awaiting his cocaine trial. Mokbel had a new $80,000 pill press made so his syndicate could up production and had an underworld killer show him how to work the press. ‘Tony then started punching pills out with a fox symbol on them,’ the killer said. ‘I would estimate that Tony Mokbel would have made over $100 million through his dealings in the drug world.’
Mokbel wanted to bring in a shipment of the chemical MDMA to turn into millions of dollars of ecstasy tablets for the Australian market. He urged two men to import an initial delivery of 100 kilograms of the powder, agreeing to pay $8000 per kilo, and was caught on tape bragging how he had police and federal agents on his side. But the men he was dealing with were an informer and a federal agent. ‘Mr Mokbel claimed he was producing MDMA tablets and he could make $15 to $20 million in a fairly short period of time,’ AFP agent Glen Meredith later told a court.
At some point Mokbel must have smelt a rat and he rang the undercover agent telling him to ‘stop the project’ and that he never ‘had any intention’ of going ahead. He was arrested near his Southbank apartment carrying six mobile phones and $38,000 in cash in a Prada bag. He was caught with the impressive wad just six days after telling his cocaine trial judge he would need taxpayer funded Legal Aid because he was too broke to pay his lawyers.
Mokbel became the first person in Australia to be charged with inciting others to import MDMA. He claimed he was not really trying to import ecstasy ingredients, just seeking drug world information he could then give police as a ‘bargaining chip’.
Con Heliotis, QC, told the court he could only appear for Mr Mokbel thanks to the generosity of friends paying his bills. He claimed the cash Mr Mokbel was arrested with had been given to him by one of his brothers to pay outstanding legal fees. The feds opposed bail saying Mokbel was a flight risk and unreconstructed crim.
‘What an extraordinary thing to do when you are facing serious Commonwealth matters whilst you are on bail,’ the prosecution said. ‘This man plays according to his own rules and no others.’ Magistrate Phillip Goldberg disagreed and Mokbel was again granted bail less than a month after his arrest.
Mokbel was perhaps the most notorious Victorian criminal since Ned Kelly to remain free while his infamy rapidly increased. Unlike Ned, he could defiantly thumb his nose at authorities without going into hiding. But in place of a sound prosecution case or a tougher court system, a tapestry of rarely used bans were applied like bandaids to a gangrenous leg. There were casino bans, local bar bans and horserace bans. The police described their casino ban as a ‘form of public shaming’. The bans sprang up to try to cope with the peculiar problem of Tony Mokbel – guilty as hell, presumed innocent.
Mokbel got his cocaine trial delayed because he was waiting for public funding – necessary, he said, because police had frozen all his assets. The judge allowed the postponement but claimed his lawyers, including Zarah Garde-Wilson, had sat on their hands. He also noted it was odd that Tony claimed to be cash strapped given he had varied bail several times in the past year to holiday in Queensland. ‘That does suggest there is some money,’ Judge Gillard said.
Mokbel’s lingering cocaine charge continued through the wheels of justice. A police witness appeared by video-link from a secure location. But the court television had folders taped to the sides like blinkers. Mokbel’s latent menace and ability to get to people was apparent in a cordon of crime-scene tape strung up across the court, keeping the public and media back and all but the lawyers from seeing the face of the witness on the television screen. The menace was made more palpable when gangland patriarch George Williams – father of Mokbel’s mate gone large Carl – later wandered into the court followed by two known Mokbel associates.
There was further drama at court the day arrangements to protect the Stooge were discussed. His testimony would be another blow to the defence case and an angry Mokbel confronted Agent Ragg outside the courtroom. ‘He was in a temper because he denied being the financier. He got hold of me outside the court and said, “I’m not the financier.” He made a number of admissions which were unrecorded and got into a right temper,’ Agent Ragg said.
Mokbel’s lawyers tried to calm their client down saying, ‘That’s enough, Tony.’ But when he refused to relent they vacated the ugly scene.
‘He had a lot to say. He made admissions to his involvement,’ Ragg said.
‘I’ll do two years,’ Mokbel offered.
Ragg responded that it was not up to him how long Mokbel did. He told Mokbel that yelling outside the Supreme Court was not the way to get his side of the story across. He said if he wanted to dispute the witnesses he should do a record of interview. But Mokbel wasn’t interested. ‘He had an unrealistic perception of my ability to influence the judicial process. He thought just by talking to me he could come away with a two-year jail sentence,’ Ragg said. ‘I tried to say to him it doesn’t work like that, it’s up to a court, not me.’
There was a dark underside to Mokbel’s time on bail. It had been busy, pleasurable and high paced – perhaps because he sensed the evidence against him was stacking up and the walls were closing in. But while Tony on the town was ostentatiously embracing his passions, in the background bullets were flying. Murder and death were stalking the drug trade and the bodies of people he liked and people he detested were piling up. The gangland would provide a carnival mirror showing how every one of Mokbel’s jovial indulgences had a distorted and dark flipside.
Mokbel’s cool in a crisis and efforts with the opposite sex were legendary. He once combined both to flirt with a policewoman who was searching his house, even asking her to come and work for him. But his charm extended only to those who could help him and did not stand in his way. Coked-up airheads willing to laugh at his jokes would meet a charming cherub of a man. Others – like the female prison guard Mokbel threatened to kill – found him less chivalrous.
Mokbel got in an argument with the woman during visiting hours at the Melbourne Assessment Prison. He eyeballed the woman trying to earn a basic wage and, as he was walked to the officer’s station for a strip search, he spat his venom.
‘I’ll make one phone call and I’ll have her knocked tonight,’ he said.
He repeated the threat loud and clear twice more and then exclaimed: ‘She is dead!’