There is a tide in the affairs of men
When taken at the flood leads on to fortune
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.
– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
In the days before he fell off the face of the earth Mokbel was secretly laying the foundations for one of the most inspired fugitive escapes of all time. Through a devastating combination of desperation, design and dumb luck, Mokbel’s disappearing act was an absolute triumph. It fiendishly manipulated people’s assumptions that he would make a flash first-class getaway. It played on expectations that smooth-talking Tony with a cash-filled suitcase would have bribed his way to the other side of the planet overnight. And like all good magic tricks the real action went on out of sight while all eyes were fixed on the compelling spectacle playing out on centre stage.
When Danielle McGuire flew out of Melbourne just months after her boyfriend disappeared, those in her camp loudly proclaimed she was not going to reunite with Mokbel hiding out in a distant exotic locale. ‘I’m sure they’re following her anyway. And they’ll find out she’s just on a holiday,’ Danielle’s mum said.
It turned out that was the truth. Or at least a half-truth.
The federal agents following Danielle as she jetsetted around the globe, and others who had their heads turned from their work, were being drawn like sirens’ victims half a world away from their target. France, Italy and Turkey were some of the glamorous locations in which Mokbel was said to be hunkering down. But the whole time Mokbel had never left the garden state. The banal reality was that he was stuck in a small white Victorian homestead at the foot of a grassy hill, off a red dirt road in Bonnie Doon, nursing a case of fugitive ennui.
Despite the generous Scottish adjective, Bonnie Doon is a bland town at the desolate northern tip of Lake Eildon, about two hours north-east of Melbourne. It is a place where families like the Kerrigans in the film The Castle go to race jet-skis and speedboats on the big lake, smell the two-stroke and take in the serenity. Tony made his emergency tree change there after his last police check-in on that Sunday night in March. The rural property was owned by Company cook and trusted Mokbel man George Elias, and Mokbel shared the house with Elias, his wife, Sharon, and their daughter. Tony paid his way as a tenant at Bonnie Doon.
Elias’s wife didn’t necessarily, at least initially, know the true identity of her husband’s mate on the permanent sleepover. But as the months ticked by Elias must have warned his daughter, about twelve, not to mention ‘Uncle Tony’ to anyone. The fugitive passed the days watching the walls, phoning through speed-making tips to The Company and liaising with his ecape-plan mastermind. Remarkably enough, given the heat on him, he did get at least one special visitor to break the monotony.
The federal police had launched a massive operation to investigate Mokbel’s escape and hunt him down. They interviewed his girlfriend, Danielle McGuire, but in the weeks after Tony vanished it seems no one was tailing her. Under the noses of the authorities Danielle made the trek to Bonnie Doon and visited Tony. There among the lowing of the Bonnie Doon cattle the lawless lovers were reunited. And while police scoured the globe, Australia’s most wanted man and his girlfriend conceived a fugitive baby in country Victoria.
No one had been watching Tony when he legged it. But then he had been deemed fit for bail and conditional freedom by the courts. If police had caught him immediately after he vanished on Monday morning, it is likely his only offence would have been failure to appear. It is less comprehensible that after Tony vanished and became the nation’s most wanted fugitive, no one was watching his girlfriend.
Victoria Police still unofficially blame the feds who had carriage of finding Mokbel for the monumental slip. But a fair bit of dumb luck saved Mokbel’s bacon too. When Danielle made her move Melbourne was in the thick of hosting the Commonwealth Games. The event accommodated more athletes and meets than the 1956 Olympics in the same city, shutting down roads and bringing waves of visitors into the inner city. Public transport was extended and a massive law-enforcement contingent was supplied to prevent disorder, disaster or political embarrassment.
Given the global political climate at the time, the primary focus for the AFP when allocating staff was preventing a terror attack, a source said. Another long-time Mokbel watcher added: ‘You’ve got to have a mind to what was going on in Victoria at the time Tony left. It was the Commonwealth Games.’ And so while the sporting event was in full swing, the nation’s most wanted fugitive was able to have his girlfriend casually drive up to meet him for a rural date undetected.
Danielle was not Mokbel’s only visitor. Tony rarely left the indoors at Bonnie Doon but every so often he would walk through the farm to a nearby forest. There prearranged visitors would pop out of the bushes to discuss drug trafficking or nautical matters with him.
Mokbel conceived a child and watched a lot of television in the seven months he spent at Bonnie Doon. It is not clear what else, if anything, Tony did for fun in the great indoors deprived of gambling, epicurean delights, and with next to no female company. Police later found cannabis in the farmhouse, so it’s possible Mokbel fended off cabin fever by getting stoned and watching the sand fall through the hourglass on Days of Our Lives. Farmhouse living may have been a far more spartan existence than Tony was used to, but it was a mundane although necessary first step. Bonnie Doon was phase one of Mokbel’s plot: get the hell out of Dodge and fall off the radar at all costs. For the subsequent more complex phases of his extraordinary escape Tony would have to rely on his own personal Mr Fixit.
As a high-school dropout turned millionaire Mokbel was a big fan of rough diamonds. You could lord it over them, they showed more respect, and – the narcissist’s favourite reason – they reminded him of himself. Mokbel built a multimillion-dollar speed syndicate out of a disparate group of private-school misfits. And the man he chose for the epic task of squirrelling him out of the country was an equally unlikely character. The figure who would mastermind the million-dollar escape of public enemy number one was a work-shy 63-year-old pensioner from Reservoir called Byron.
Byron Pantazis and Tony Mokbel had met through their mutual love of gambling. The duo had a long history of playing together at backroom card games around Coburg and Brunswick. Byron was a serious gambler and would have found an easy use for the chunky cash prize Mokbel would deliver to him if he helped the fugitive to freedom. ‘He’s a very, very heavy gambler. You’ve got to remember he’s got to keep servicing that gambling habit,’ a police source said of Mokbel’s Mr Fixit. Under-employed and overweight Pantazis suffered from a number of ailments, including diabetes and arthritis. He had not worked for many years and he walked with a limp. If the devil makes work for idle hands, Mokbel’s big fat Greek pensioner was ripe for a diabolical masterstroke.
Mokbel and The Company had nicknamed Horty ‘the Greek’, but Pantazis was the real deal – a dual national with strong ties to the old country. With Pantazis’s help Mokbel would make a dash for Greece to start a new life. The fugitive had all sorts of links to Greece. He was taught how to cook amphetamines by Greeks and there was even a theory that there was a group of people he knew living there. But ultimately Tony’s target destination was chosen for him as the country where his Mr Fixit had the most connections. ‘Byron was organising it, Byron had the contacts in Greece, so that’s the place he’s going to head,’ Detective Sergeant Coghlan said. ‘If Byron had contacts in Libya the same thing would have happened [there].’
While Mokbel was stuck indoors in Bonnie Doon, the grey-bearded, bespectacled Pantazis and his wife, Foula, made a number of trips to Greece to pave the way for Tony to slip out of Australia and pursue his Grecian getaway. As part of the preparations Pantazis reached out to a long-time friend in Greece called Theo Angelakis. As well as associates in Greece, Pantazis was also willing and able to drag in family members as extras in the escape conspiracy.
Byron Pantazis had married Foula in 1982 after she left a failed arranged marriage. Foula had come to Byron with her toddler daughter in tow, so Byron got a new four-year-old stepdaughter, Yvonne, in the deal. More romance blossomed at their wedding, with Byron’s best man, George Verykios, and Foula’s sister, Angela, hitting it off. The wedding of George and Angela – the groom’s mate and the bride’s sister – followed the next year. But unlike Byron and Foula’s union, George and Angela’s marriage was a troubled one. George, like his best mate, Byron, was not what you would call a workhorse. Two years into his marriage he hurt his back working at Corinthian Doors, and got a settlement and a pension.
His injured back sustained the rigours of begetting three post-accident Verykios babies over the next eight years. But George Verykios’s industrial philosophy was to retire undefeated and he refused to ever risk a return to work, door-related or otherwise. That left Angela Verykios juggling a young brood and working in milk bars and factories while George preferred to stay home smoking pot. After nineteen years of this kind of marital bliss Angela Verykios left the lovable George and took their five children with her. And that was it but for one notable postscript: their separation process took a whopping five years because George refused to acknowledge the five children as his own until each had been DNA tested.
Fast-forward twenty-four years from the 1982 wedding of Byron and Foula to the year of Mokbel’s disappearance, and what it all meant for Byron is that he had a solid cast of reliable women for his escape plot. Byron’s sister-in-law, Angela, may have had profound buyer’s remorse about Byron’s best man, who had robbed her of the best years of her life, but she was magnanimous enough not to hold the disaster against her sister, Foula, or Foula’s hubby, Byron. And for his part Byron counted Angela in as potentially useful in the Mokbel plot.
By 2006 Byron and his adoptive daughter, Yvonne, after so much shared history regarded each other as kin bound by something as good as blood. It had been a long time since Yvonne was sent by Byron to school (ironically to St Joseph the Worker), and she had grown before his eyes from a toddler to a woman in her thirties with a baby of her own. So Byron counted Yvonne and her baby into the Mokbel plot too. Her seven-month-old baby boy was much more to Mokbel’s Mr Fixit than a bouncing grandson – he was also a great decoy prop for a fleeing fugitive.
When the going got tough for Mokbel, his unlikely escape mastermind, Pantazis, got off the couch and flew to Greece. He added a dash of vaudeville to the escape plot in Athens, recruiting a troupe of Greek sailors willing to fly Down Under for an unorthodox little earner.
East coast ports and air terminals were crawling with police. The nation’s airports were too hot for Mokbel to escape by plane. Technology, computer systems, biometrics and the authorities themselves had got smarter since 1981, when Bob Trimbole flew out as authorities prepared to charge him, eventually dying on the lam in Spain.
Bleaching his hair blonde, wearing glasses, growing a beard or changing a digit on his birth date would not be enough for Mokbel. Pantazis had a plan to address these dangers that was simple in design, more complex in execution, but potentially devastating to authorities if it worked. Mokbel would leave Australia by sea, sailing to freedom as a guest of the Greek sailors Byron had recruited overseas. While blanket Mokbel media coverage raged on the east coast he would depart from the opposite side of the country. Western Australia considers itself independent from the rest of Australia. Its capital, Perth, the world’s most remote city, is closer to Singapore than Canberra. Fremantle, just south of Perth, would be the launching place for Mokbel’s getaway vehicle. But first Pantazis needed to get Tony a nice big boat.
Pantazis sweet-talked his wife, Foula, and sister-in-law, Angela, into catching a train from Melbourne to Sydney to help him with some business. By law Australian-registered vessels require at least partial ownership by an Australian national. Byron told his sister-in-law some friends were having trouble with a boat so it would be put in her name. As instructed Angela Verykios handed over cheques, signed the documents and was made, with some strange Greek sailors, the proud co-owner of a $330,000 yacht. She was then put on a plane back to Melbourne.
The 17.3-metre-long yacht, known as a cutter sloop and named Edwena, had twice sailed around the world. The buyers told the New South Wales businessman selling the yacht that they wanted to fit it out to be used as a cruise vessel in Greece. One of the Greek sailors then flew from Sydney back home. The remaining trio sailed the boat to Newcastle, where Pantazis pimped Tony’s ride, adding secret hiding holes for Mokbel and a desalination unit for an ocean journey. The massive yacht was then lifted onto the back of a truck and transported nearly 4000 kilometres across the continent from Newcastle to the west coast at a cost of $350,000.
The tricking up of the Edwena continued en route, police said, with giant fuel tanks and a self-righting mast added. Slowly over six days it made its way through three states with wide load signs, flashing lights and pilot cars. In Western Australia tens of thousands more were spent on a life craft, generators, new sails and a specially fitted toilet, as Team Mokbel raced to be ready for the seasonal winds that would whisk them halfway across the world to Greece. The Greek sailors flew from Newcastle to Fremantle to hook up with their ride. And in early October the Edwena was lowered into the Indian Ocean at Fremantle harbour to await her controversial cargo.
Police from around Australia were still desperately chasing any lead that came their way. Officers raided the homes of Mokbel family members, cronies and any known Tony haunts. AFP Agent Ragg said: ‘Every security camera in Melbourne and surrounding areas – South Melbourne, where Tony lived, we had all the tapes of that. We had customs, all-ports alerts out. Obviously we had all the airports on alert.
‘We were at one point a day behind him. The information we were receiving from AFP informants had us a day behind him. He never went direct to Bonnie Doon, we think. We suspect that he was in Melbourne for a short amount of time and we were effectively a day behind him. He moved around a couple of times. We had some informant information that was putting us where he was twenty-four hours behind him. Once he moved on to Bonnie Doon we didn’t know where he was.’
The spooks were also adding to the foot traffic in the Mokbels’ home village of Achache, Lebanon, doorknocking weary relatives.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad if everybody just came here to his grandfather’s house with their questions,’ Tony’s first cousin Wajih, then thirty-three, said. ‘But the Interpol document has gone to all the security services and been stuck on their walls – anti-drugs unit, general security, all of them – and they all come around separately asking questions. They start by talking about something else, like bird flu, but we know where it’s going. They end up asking about Tony.’
By October 2006 the Commonwealth Games had been over for months and was just a collection of fond memories. It had gone off without a hitch, there were no terror attacks and the costume of the lovable mascot, Karak, the endangered black cockatoo, had been packed away. But Victoria’s number one crim and the nation’s most wanted man was still missing. Mokbel had been indoors with the curtains drawn for seven months. His Bonnie Doon blues were broken only by the thrill of seeing news reports that he still had not been caught. He was tiring of the same four walls and the constant waiting. But the monotony would be shattered when phase two of Mokbel’s escape began.
While Mokbel was on the lam his self-sustaining drug syndicate The Company, set up to need little priming from its long-distance puppetmaster, kept pumping out speed. Returning him his profits, the syndicate gave Mokbel a liquidity lifeline and the funds for his escape plan. The Company also paid off family and would-be snitches on behalf of Tony.
Trusted Company lieutenant Mansour was summoned to Bonnie Doon by a Mokbel call. Mansour had known two days before the rest of the country that Tony would not show at court that fateful Monday in March. As instructed he visited Mokbel’s Bonnie Doon bolthole, handed him $100,000 in cash and arranged for special phones to enable future contact. Days earlier The Company had placed another $140,000 of profits in an account for Tony for the next leg of his journey.
Mokbel then snuck from the Bonnie Doon farmhouse to another secluded regional property – this time in rural Elphinstone in central Victoria. It was a risky move, as the nation’s most notorious criminal had not told his would-be hosts – squarehead family friends of the previous generation of Mokbels – that he was coming. If they didn’t call the cops on him they might still just lock him out, leaving him stranded in country Victoria while the massive manhunt closed in.
Youseff and Evette Zeidan, sixty and fifty-two respectively, were hardworking Maronite church members originally from Lebanon. The retired empty-nester couple were understandably reluctant to open their house to the surprise criminal guest. They had suffered enough bad luck with health issues and the failure of their emu farm. The demise of the farming venture had left them living in the small rural weatherboard house Mokbel was trying to crash. They told the fugitive he was not welcome to stay. Mrs Zeidan recalled: ‘I told Joe [Youseff] he mustn’t allow Tony Mokbel to stay at our place but he’s soft hearted and I feel Tony Mokbel sort of pressured him into this. I was just frightened and I told Joe he mustn’t let him stay but I think Joe was scared of what might happen if he didn’t let him stay there.’
Mokbel was confident he could tug on the ties that bind and appealed to their sense of family and loyalty to his uncle Kabalan. Youseff Zeidan had been a close friend of Tony’s uncle Wajih Kabalan for forty years. He had known Tony’s dad, Sajih, before his death and had known Tony when he was just a small Brunswick boy. As a young man Tony had gone rabbit shooting on their property until he tired of small game. Tony pleaded: it would only be one night then he would be on his way and out of their hair. Evette Zeidan still said no but Tony’s hard words about family and friendship and the invocation of his kindly uncle eventually worked on Youseff, who later said: ‘When I had the stroke [Tony’s uncle] Wajih would come to us, to my wife saying, “We’ll help you.” When I was ill Wajih would cook for us.
‘When Tony Mokbel asked if he could stay a couple of days my wife and I tried to convince him to give himself up,’ he said. ‘We felt we couldn’t report him because of the family loyalty thing. In any case, I thought he would get caught and I didn’t want to get involved. I suppose in a way I felt a sense of obligation because I had such a close friendship with Wajih Kabalan.’
One night turned into two as the Zeidans fretted about their dodgy lodger who did not seem too keen to rush off.
Meanwhile in Melbourne’s northern suburbs the ‘Reservoir dogs’ – Byron Pantazis, his sister-in-law, Angela, his adopted daughter, Yvonne, and Yvonne’s baby – were putting another piece of the plot into play. The disparate group met in the morning at Pantazis’s Reservoir home, bundled into a hired Nissan Patrol four-wheel-drive and travelled to Elphinstone to pick up their mystery passenger.
Pantazis’s crew were told little about the job and seemed deliberately incurious about the unusual adventure. Pantazis had told Angela she would get paid $1000 for taking the trip. As a portly claustrophobic she would earn her fee. His wife also paid her sister to buy two mobile phones in her own name.
Pantazis told his daughter she would also get expenses and spending money for coming on the interstate trip. The unemployed work-shy dad told his stepdaughter it was for work and not to ask too many questions. The women’s lack of curiosity was down to Byron being the patriarch of the Greek family, a police source said. ‘More or less what Byron says goes.’
When the Reservoir dogs arrived in Elphinstone the women were introduced to their passenger. He was a man of few words called Yanni, who looked an awful lot like missing criminal Tony Mokbel in a bad wig. The Zeidans were happy to see the back of their imposing tenant. When he left with his pick-up crew the couple gratefully returned to their quiet country life. Before Tony’s arrival Youseff had cut down to twenty cigarettes a day but in the uninvited visitor’s wake, stressed and dragged into a criminal conspiracy, he quietly went back to eighty.
The Reservoir dogs travelled west towards Adelaide, silently watching cluttered skylines slumping into flat plains, the fauna getting sparser with every mile. Before crossing the Victoria– South Australia border speed siblings George Elias and Chafic Issa pulled in behind the 4WD in a rented motor home to form a convict convoy. The first night they all stayed at a Murray Bridge motel. Issa gave Mokbel another $100,000 from The Company’s ongoing profits.
On day two Yanni gave the women hundreds of dollars for food and magazines for the trip. The convoy arced westward around the Great Australian Bight, keeping the big blue on their left and dry paddocks on the right. They cut across hundreds of kilometres of indistinct country where the arid Great Victoria Desert bleeds down into the Nullarbor Plain. In the 4WD Pantazis drove and Yvonne rode shotgun. In the back were Angela, the nation’s most wanted criminal and a baby boy. The members of the odd travelling party each quietly kept their own counsel as they made the haunting 3400-kilometre trip across the barren continent. There were lots of deep silences among the travellers, but Mokbel did question Yvonne about her husband, Wes. The conversation ended with Mokbel telling her that if they were pulled over she was to say he was her husband, Wes, and that he was a deaf mute.
The vast space of the Nullarbor Plain is broken only by roadkill, the odd piece of desert art or strange and disconcerting sights like a dozen cats hung by their necks from a tree. There was nothing much to look at on the trip and little to do but think. The female passengers started to wonder about Yanni, the mysterious toupeed traveller. At a toilet stop Yvonne told her Aunt Angela she thought Yanni might be Tony Mokbel, the drug dealer off the news. Or if not that, she said, he’s still definitely wearing a wig. Angela was not convinced but a picture in a newspaper later obtained en route, and incidentally paid for by Mokbel, confirmed their late-breaking suspicions. When Yvonne asked her father if their passenger was Mokbel he said not to ask questions about it.
The Nullarbor remained unchanged as the convoy finally passed into Western Australia. As the sun set on their third day Tony’s travellers stayed that night at mining town Norseman – one of the first major signs of life after emerging on the western side of the plain.
Tony never left the car the whole trip except for furtive nightly dashes into motel rooms. He had to forgo outback bistro parmigianas as the group would stay only in rooms with kitchens and cook their own dinners behind closed doors. No one stayed in the campervan. It was there simply to add legitimacy to their appearance as holiday travellers and as emergency lodgings if waylaid on the side of the road.
After four straight days of highways – the Pyrenees, Calder, Sturt, Eyre, Great Eastern, Roe and Canning – the convoy finally made it to the other side of the country. They arrived in Fremantle where the Edwena was waiting.
Pantazis and Mokbel had loaded up Angela’s debit card with more than $48,000. It was used to cover accommodation costs for the convoy crew, and for the Greek sailors’ lodgings in the wildflower state. As last-stage preparations for the sea voyage were made, a generator, tools, batteries, a life raft, jackets, flares and long-lasting food were all swiped onto Angela’s card. Brothers Elias and Issa bought night-vision electronics for the yacht. Then Angela’s magic debit card was used to pay for Yvonne and her baby’s flight back to Melbourne. ‘Yanni’ gave Yvonne $5000 for her company on the most confusing and boring road trip she had ever taken and another $5000 for her bub. Later, once reunited back in Melbourne, Yvonne and her aunt sat down and discussed the trip. Angela said: ‘I asked her if she was ever going to tell the baby when he grew up that we went to Western Australia with Tony Mokbel. We decided between ourselves that we would not tell anyone.’
Four days after arriving in Fremantle Mokbel got three new reasons not to be in Victoria. He was convicted in his absence of trafficking a commercial quantity of ecstasy and smaller amounts of amphetamines and cocaine.
November 11 has long been a portentous date in Australian history. It’s the date Germany surrendered in World War I, a governor-general dismissed a prime minister, and our most famous bushranger was hanged on a judge’s orders. Tony added his criminal adventures to the ledger, choosing the eleventh of the eleventh 2006 to bid adieu to his adopted country – never, he hoped, to see her coast or constabulary again. On that date customs officers inspected the mega-yacht before it sailed out of its berth at the customs jetty of the Fremantle Sailing Club. The officers were told by the three Greek sailors on board that their destination was the Seychelles. They later watched the yacht sail from the Fremantle Sailing Club marina.
The west coast in November can get oppressively hot, redeemed only by the soothing breeze that comes in from the sea at the end of the long day to cool the coastal sandgropers. What the locals call the Fremantle Doctor would have been blowing in off the Indian Ocean as the Edwena sailed up then away from the Australian west coast.
It is possible Mokbel was hidden on the boat as a stowaway when it left Fremantle, but authorities suspect he actually joined the crew later after they sailed north up the coast. One of The Company men drove from Fremantle six hours up the coast to Geraldton. Police suspect it was there that Mokbel was ferried out to meet the Edwena, possibly in a small fishing boat or motorised dinghy. Mokbel’s father, Sajih, had journeyed across the world with his family to start a new life in a foreign country. Tony hoped to do the same.
Danielle had already left Australia and was somewhere out there in the world carrying his latest child. ‘She left the country in July as a decoy for the authorities,’ Detective Sergeant Jim Coghlan said. ‘That was a decoy run for the feds and they chased her all over Europe and the plan was to do that – put everybody off the scent so he could get his yacht and escape from Australia.’
With the wind in his sails Mokbel cut out of the country that wanted to see him rot in jail. Across the seas Tony hoped he would find a new life and an excellent and lengthy adventure.