Life in sunny Athens was good for the first couple of Australian crime. But it was not a victimless existence for the expat duo. Back in Melbourne their freedom was being paid for with the freedom of a Mokbel by marriage. Fine-featured, mouselike Renate was married to Tony’s punchy younger brother, Milad. She had gone into business with Tony’s girlfriend, Danielle. The two women, both thin, chic, bottle blondes of similar height, together ran the hair extension and beauty salon.
When Tony had applied for bail years earlier, the court had demanded a million-dollar surety to ensure the cherub-faced charmer would not do a runner. To prove she was good for the bail amount Renate had sworn on oath she was the owner of the massive Mokbel mansion where she and Milad lived in Downs Street, Brunswick, then worth about $1.1 million. When Mokbel vanished the justice machine started churning to recoup the pledged million-dollar bail from Renate. It then emerged the Brunswick property was owned not by Renate but by a Mokbel family corporate trust and had in any case also been frozen by court order.
The Supreme Court warned Renate she would go directly to jail if she did not come up with the $1 million. Renate couldn’t and in March 2007, while Tony and Danielle were soaking up the Athenian sun, Renate was given a blue tracksuit and locked up to serve two years in Victoria’s highest security female jail. Graduates of Renate’s new home, the Dame Phyllis Frost women’s jail in Deer Park in Melbourne’s north-west, have told horror stories about the place. Butch convicts carry drug-filled syringes in body cavities, dispense bashings as ‘verdicts’ of prisoner courts, and stand over epileptic inmates for their medicine. Renate mentally struggled in jail and her three children struggled outside without her. She was ultimately allowed to have her and Milad’s pre-school son with her in jail for extended periods. The boy became the youngest Mokbel behind bars.
There were bitter recriminations that Tony’s escape had led to the jailing of Milad’s wife even in the close-knit Mokbel family where Tony was usually regarded as incapable of doing wrong. Tony and Danielle tried to make some amends, calling their Athens baby Renate. But a mini-namesake was a poor consolation prize for the mother of three locked up with the state’s worst female prisoners for two years.
Renate tried to get the court order that demanded she repay the pledged million dollars revoked, but her legal ploy ultimately backfired. As part of her bid Renate had filed an affidavit detailing her assets and financial position. But she failed to disclose the half-million in cash and jewellery she and Milad had buried in her uncle’s garden. When police unearthed the booty, prosecutors returned to court and the incarcerated mum copped perjury charges and an additional six-month jail whack.
Renate said she believed Tony would have done the right thing by her, husband Milad, and their three children, aged between three and fourteen. ‘I have absolutely no idea where Tony presently is. By absconding, Tony has essentially destroyed my family,’ she said. But the prosecution said Tony chose Renate because she was ‘most able to play the role of the dumb wife’ after he fled.
Renate’s mother pleaded with Tony to turn himself in to save her daughter. ‘Renate is appealing to Tony to do the right thing and set her free,’ she said. Her daughter, she said, had no idea her brother-in-law was a criminal mastermind when she had gone guarantor for him. But, she said, Renate had certainly changed her mind now.
Renate’s brother said even Ma Mokbel was none too chuffed with the latest actions of her little cherub. ‘Even his mother thinks he should do something to get Renate freed,’ the brother said. ‘She doesn’t speak much English but I get the distinct impression she thinks Tony should face the music. It’s not right that Renate should be in jail because of something Tony did.’
Publicly Mokbel matriarch, Lora, was still backing Tony and blaming police for Renate’s treatment and the circumstances of her arrest. ‘Swear on the life of your own children, do you think these people have any conscience?’ she said. ‘If they had any conscience would they take a woman from her home and leave [a teenage girl] there?’
But even from sunny Greece Tony was still funnelling cash to Renate and, like many Mokbel matters, it seems the performance was mostly for show. From Athens Tony would speak to his mum and other relatives and associates over the phone. He would get Company members to front at their homes, secure mobile in hand, with Tony already on the line. Mokbel made 2000 phone calls from Greece using a bundle of phones and a collection of codenames. Milad was Baldy, Horty was the Greek, Roula the Greek’s wife, and Renate lingering in jail was Blondie.
Mokbel devised a serious but later-abandoned plan to raise $1 million through The Company and other debt-owing associates to bail Renate out. Even had it happened police would have regarded the money as an asset of Tony’s and seized it. It never happened anyway and it was unlikely Mokbel was letting Renate’s plight ruin his holiday. On a good day he might be his brothers’ keeper but surely that didn’t extend to their wives as well.
‘He didn’t care what happened to her even though he made out that he did,’ Detective Sergeant Coghlan said. ‘He’s self-centred. The world revolves around Tony Mokbel and what he can get out of it.’ In Tonyworld, police observers have said, even lovers, partners and kin come a distant second to numero uno. ‘Obviously he loves his child but when the crunch comes – it’s Tony Mokbel,’ Coghlan said.
Another Tony plan was to resurrect ‘the Uncle’ – Renate’s uncle Garry, whose garden once had the richest soil in Australia – to buy the Brunswick mansion back after it was forfeited. But that plot, too, ultimately came to nought. Still, Tony was cognisant that the motherless residents of the Downs Street property might not be feeling the most pro-Tony sentiments. From Greece he phoned Renate Mokbel’s then fourteen-year-old daughter, Jade, had a chat, and then sent her $4000 for good measure.
While Renate was in Deer Park jail in her blue tracksuit, and Mokbel was walking a Grecian marina in bermuda shorts, the spotty misfits behind The Company continued pumping out speed and raking in millions. Their efforts paid for his escape, sustained his life on the run and bankrolled his existence in Greece. The Company sent at least $400,000 overseas to finance Mokbel’s fugitive lifestyle. They would wire some of it to Greek bank accounts and convert other bundles to euros then have peripheral members of The Company hand-deliver them to Tony. Few weeks would pass without Tony being wired at least another $40,000 or $50,000.
The Company accounts also gave Tony the means to pay friends and family and buy the continued loyalty of those tempted to turn snitch. Tony knew there were a lot of loose lips in the ganglands. Mid-ranking crims who know things talk a lot of bollocks but police can find helpful nuggets of truth among the white noise. Tony also knew persuasive women and men in suits would be doorknocking old associates, planting seeds, and whispering sweet nothings in the ears of the disaffected.
By the first anniversary of his failure to show at court Mokbel had used The Company to get $40,000 to Milad to be spent on lawyers for Renate. A month later The Company gave Horty another $10,000 for legal fees. Despite her family’s protests over what a surprise bounder Tony had turned out to be, Renate herself was kept sweet with two direct payments of $20,000 and another of $3000.
When he was still hunkered down in Bonnie Doon Mokbel had sent $2000 to his ex-wife, Carmel. And when he arrived in Greece on Christmas Eve he sent the mother of his earlier children a more substantial yuletide gift of $50,000. On Christmas Day the dutiful son sent his mother, Lora, $10,000. Horty’s wife, Zaharoula, who also needed a good lawyer after being charged over the $2 million in fraudulent loans – got $19,500. And a variety of aunts and relatives were also made to feel more positive about the wayward Tony with the arrival of their Company-delivered, tax-free packages.
Mokbel even arranged a special treat for his would-be mother-in-law, Danielle’s mum, Joan Madin, although her gift did not materialise until after the fugitive lovers reunited in Greece, so it is possible Danielle was the driving force behind the gesture. On Ms Madin’s birthday Company honchos Bart Rizzo and Joseph Mansour journeyed out west to the badlands of the Sunshine shopping plaza to meet their absent boss’s would-be mother-in-law. Big Bart handed over photos of Madin’s months-old new Grecian granddaughter. Rizzo referred to the baby as the ‘heir to the throne’ and also gave Ms Madin $2000 cash in an envelope. No stranger to shady characters, Madin lived with the Duke, the alleged shooter of the Hodsons. But the transaction nevertheless left her feeling more positive about her notorious would-be son-in-law. ‘That was a good man to my granddaughter,’ she said of Mokbel. ‘That was her father and that was his daughter.’
Two days after the Sunshine plaza meeting The Company shuttled another $1000 to Madin.
Tony’s friend in Athens, Theo Angelakis, owned his own shipping company and agreed to set up a similar business for Mokbel. The resulting entity was a shelf company with one asset – Mokbel’s car. Police believe the company was a front to help ‘rinse’ money and to help Tony get the Edwena registered locally in Greece. It is also possible that in sanctuary Mokbel’s global drug ambitions had been reborn and the shipping initiative fitted with his plans for a mass export of drugs in drums by sea.
‘They were setting up a new life. They were definitely there to set up a new life,’ a police source said. ‘He was doing everything to set up a new lifestyle in Greece – including everything. He is not a carpenter or a plumber. He hasn’t got a trade.’ As for the fugitive potentially alerting local authorities to his existence by re-embarking on a drug career, police said Mokbel would not have worried. ‘Tony is a very confident man. He doesn’t care. He thinks he can get out of it and do anything he wants. Money speaks all languages,’ a detective said.