There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.
– F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Mokbel had been flagged with a global red notice. Police forces from Interpol’s 184 member countries had been sent photos of him. Federal officers scoured flight passenger lists around the world, put airports on alert and checked the nation’s ports.
Officers followed Fat Tony trails to Lebanon until the Israelis started shelling. There were rumours Tony had been tracked by global positioning technology to the Ural Mountains in Russia. Before that it was Lebanon then Dubai. Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland said his whereabouts were anyone’s guess. Hopeless Tony trails also led to Turkey, Brazil and even literally underground. Police were tipped Mokbel had been whacked in a revenge hit for his suspected involvement in the death of Mario Condello. The tip said Mokbel’s corpse had been thrown into a grave in regional Victoria. Investigating the information police poked torches down cracked country graves looking for a murdered Mokbel.
‘I was at that. I didn’t believe it for a bleeding moment,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘I did it because Renate Mokbel was in jail and if Mokbel was dead in a grave there was a fair case for her to be let out of jail. It was following up every possible lead and making sure every consideration was given to Renate Mokbel if indeed he was dead.’
Tony was, of course, in the land of the living and, police suspect, was probably behind the cemetery ruse. Meanwhile the nation’s largest manhunt kept terminating in a series of disheartening cul-de-sacs. The Australian Federal Police had urged the public to help find Mr Mokbel, describing him as ‘approximately 175 centimetres tall, solid build with an olive complexion and short, brown coloured, receding hair’. Police had been sweet-talking plebs, doorknocking docketheads and raising the dead but it was getting them no closer to finding their frustrating fugitive.
Tony’s ‘filthy-lucre FedEx’ was keeping would-be weak links staunch. And whether Mokbel had escaped by hovercraft or was hunkered down in Honiara, police knew they were not getting answers doing what they were doing. Mokbel was winning and police needed something new, a circuit breaker, a game changer, anything to reverse the dynamic. It was time to throw a great big rock in the pond and see what floated up. Mokbel had been gone more than a year when two things happened. First: the Victorian government offered a $1 million reward, unprecedented for a fugitive, for anyone giving information leading to Fat Tony’s whereabouts. The government reward was announced just weeks after a Melbourne newspaper chief of staff had proposed the idea as a great story to the head of the premier’s media unit. Second: the Purana anti-gangland taskforce of Victoria Police, which had been deferring to the federal-led escape probe, decided to embark on their own Get Tony mission.
A constant and important underlying factor in the hunt for Mokbel was the highly fraught relationship between the Victorian and federal authorities. It is a Hollywood staple to have the macho local sheriff and the arrogant federal agent standing at a crime scene in the driving rain shouting at each other over who has carriage of the case. The reality of tensions in Australian policing is similar to this cliché but less friendly. The relationship between the AFP and Victoria Police has soured over a number of joint ventures. There are many instances of unhappiness, and new fights continue today. Generally speaking the feds regard the staties as cowboys mired in corruption, while the staties regard the plastics as wealthy bunglers whose bacon they have to keep saving. Whatever the reality, a drug import destined for Tony Mokbel threatened to create a war between the staties and the plastics.
It is legal to import phenylacetic acid into Australia under licence for legitimate uses. The naturally occurring honey-scented compound is commonly used in perfume production. However, a two-step process can turn mundane phenylacetic acid into amphetamines. Mokbel associates had a cunning plan to come through the front door and use the legal structure to brazenly funnel large amounts of the lucrative drug precursor into Tony’s waiting clan labs for conversion.
Mokbel mates involved in the scheme used a chemical-company front to import phenylacetic acid under licence. Even legitimate industry importers like corporate perfumers only ever import the substance in very small amounts, so for the crims’ test run they brought in just a trifling eighty-nine grams. When that worked they made their next import bigger – over 2300 times bigger: 205 kilograms. It was a staggering amount to attempt to bring in declared and would have made ninety kilograms of speed worth more than $10 million on the street, but sources said the Therapeutic Goods Administration saw nothing fishy and issued a permit for the import.
Things hit a snag for the villains involved in the perfect crime when police stumbled over the front company while investigating a suspect in a separate plot. That suspect was then linked to the importer in the phenylacetic acid scheme – a man who was a known chemical supplier to a Mokbel drug cook. But watching detectives could not immediately pounce. ‘Of course there was no offence committed at that stage,’ said Jim O’Brien. ‘So really, until we could prove that they intended to deal with it inappropriately [by] diverting it into drug production we had no evidence to charge them with anything,’ he said. ‘Everything was going on swimmingly well with customs and us [Victoria Police] having signed a joint agency agreement, working hand in hand. But at the last minute they had a bit of a heart attack and had to tell the AFP about it and the AFP got involved. We explained. They said: “We’re prepared to let it run.”’
Police knew from surveillance that seventy-five kilograms of drugs had been made from the import but had lost track of exactly where they were. What they did have was a time and place the drugs and cash were going to change hands with direct involvement by the Mokbels. O’Brien said that because the location of the drugs was not known, the AFP turned around and accused the Victorians of corruption and swooped on the crooks involved. ‘They went and executed all the warrants and arrested all the targets and didn’t even tell us they were doing it,’ he said. ‘They arrested the two. They were remanded in custody and basically didn’t have a case against them,’ he said.
Had the prisoners given a no-comment interview everyone, particularly the Mokbels, who were not then able to be linked, would have got away with the massive import scot-free. But it wasn’t to be. O’Brien commented: ‘We decided to turn a negative into a positive and sent people out to interview them. Managed to recruit these two offenders and got them to give evidence against the main offenders and turned what was an abject failure into an overwhelming success. We then charged Horty Mokbel with importation as well because we had direct evidence then linking him.
‘Of course the AFP were then running around with faces like smacked arses that we didn’t communicate with them according to the joint agency agreement. What goes around comes around.’
Amid these simmering tensions the feds and Victoria Police would again be thrown together in the hunt for Mokbel. ‘The AFP were the taskforce set up to locate Mokbel. We weren’t involved. They took all the responsibility to locate where he was,’ Purana’s Detective Sergeant Jim Coghlan said. The fact that the feds had been working for a year and not yet found Mokbel had prompted Purana to conclude that Mokbel could still be in Australia. Operation Magnum, the Purana taskforce scheme to find Mokbel, started at the St Kilda Road police complex with just eight officers. ‘We sat in the kitchen one day and we thought, why don’t we have a red hot go at looking for Tony Mokbel? That’s how it started,’ Detective Sergeant Coghlan said. ‘We’d been looking at the Mokbel criminal enterprise for eight years and tasked for the previous eighteen months to take them on and we had done that in relation to Horty and all the rest of them. And then we decided: where’s Tony? We had the capabilities to find him – especially if he was still in Australia. We had no indication to believe he was overseas.’
Purana were half right. When Danielle was being chased around the Trevi fountain Tony was still living locally. But by the time Operation Magnum was launched he was practically speaking Greek. It was Tony’s bad luck that despite getting involved on a correct but dated assumption, Purana would break through to his whereabouts.
After the reward was offered the phones rang hot. One caller made all the difference. Authorities had hoped the reward bait might net them a useful lead from a peripheral Mokbel crony but it landed them a much bigger fish altogether. ‘When VicPol offered the reward which prompted their informant to come forward – that was the break that everyone needed and good on VicPol for getting that break,’ said Agent Ragg.
The month the reward was announced a member of Mokbel’s Company contacted police. The man dubbed here ‘the Reckoner’, as his real name cannot be used, had lost a brother to a heroin overdose months earlier. He denied crossing over for the money, saying he only wanted to keep from going to jail. The Reckoner told police: ‘I’m mucking around with these guys and they know Tony Mokbel but I don’t know where he is.’
Police said the Reckoner’s motivation was ‘probably a mixture of “I’m in the wrong crew here, I’m in deep,” and the fact that I’m bankrupt and a million dollars is a lot of money.’ Whether it was dead kin, a fear of prison, or the cash prize, the Reckoner had his choice of a million and two reasons to help police catch their absent amphetamines czar.
The Reckoner was a trusted friend of Rizzo and had got involved in The Company in late 2005 when Rizzo asked if he could use his spare room for mixing amphetamines. The Reckoner had given Rizzo his expired and current Australian passports, which had been doctored into Tony’s new identity – the hirsute Stephen Papas. And he had been granted access to the upper echelons of The Company. From the Reckoner police learnt not only about the existence of The Company but the identities of its individual members. Shocked detectives learnt how Tony, even on the run, had brazenly remained the local Mr Big using his drug trade to fund his international exploits.
The Reckoner’s account also gave authorities some alleged crimes on which to apply for phone and other warrants. Police promptly moved to bug the cars, houses and intercept the many, many mobiles of The Company men. Most importantly, the Reckoner helped two undercover officers infiltrate the fringes of The Company’s business. The flipping of the Reckoner and the police infiltration was a turning point. Suddenly Tony’s Australian ties were no longer a lifeline. They were a massive liability.
The Octopus might have been in a mystery location on the other side of the world, but desperate authorities had finally got a grip on one of his outer tentacles, and they would hold on for dear life. The challenge for the hunters would be clawing their way to where the main body of the beast really lay without alerting their prey to their presence. Mokbel would walk around Athens, as he did in Melbourne, with a big bag of mixed mobiles. He was still regularly in contact with his crew, checking who they were dealing with, that nothing out of the ordinary was happening, that there was nothing on the nose.
The Reckoner continued his business as usual with his Company cronies. He cut, weighed and parcelled drugs in rented hotel rooms. With Rizzo he ran cash and pounds of methamphetamine to Mokbel connections in Lygon Street. Mokbel’s justifiably paranoid appetite for new mobiles and SIM cards soon saw the Reckoner asked to get a new phone for the fugitive. It was a golden opportunity for authorities. Police immediately intercepted the number for a direct line to their prime target. But with Tony rotating his brief conversations across numerous handsets, the wiretap was not a final blow but a keyhole peek into Mokbel’s new world.
Using information from the Reckoner, police were able to disrupt Mokbel’s cash supply. In early May Company members, including Mansour and Issa, conspired to funnel nearly half a million dollars to their boss in Athens. The booty was spirited by Company men through Collingwood, Box Hill and Burwood while police watched on. When the nervous courier saw a marked car in his rear vision and ran a red light, the uniforms had their excuse to pounce without raising suspicions. After a routine search of the vehicle they seized a shopping bag containing $499,950. When Mokbel got the bad news he was not too bothered. He told his crew to get back to work and replace the lost loot within a week. But the dynamic in the hunt had changed. Now it was the police upsetting Mokbel’s plans.
In Melbourne Purana detectives pursuing Tony through Operation Magnum were inflicting a series of flesh wounds on Mokbel’s body corporate. The Operation Magnum officers used their new mole to set about identifying who was who in The Company and tracing the movement of cash. They had noticed a Company transaction wiring funds to a Stephen Papas in Athens and for the first time were considering Greece as a possible location for Mokbel. Purana were wary of making assumptions. All they had was a Greek connection to Mokbel’s crew. And the Mediterranean nation was not yet a big red flashing light on their map of where Tony might be. ‘The money was going to Greece. But Tony might have been travelling to Greece to collect money but living somewhere else,’ Detective Sergeant Coghlan said. ‘With the European Union open he could have been living in Serbia or Italy. Or the money could have been going to a contact or being re-transferred on to other destinations in Europe. All it meant to us was that money was going through certain banks in Greece.’ Nevertheless Melbourne police adjusted some of their shifts to correspond with Athens business hours.
Finding Tony was the biggest game in town for police. But The Company’s massive drug conspiracy and its constituent crooks presented an additional stand-alone case that itself had to be catalogued for eventual prosecution. The Reckoner was given The Company’s wish list of drug-making equipment and specialist glassware. Police obtained the items and introduced two of their moles into The Company, one posing as a glassware seller interested in buying large amounts of drugs. With the Reckoner vouching for them the two undercovers also made a number of large drug buys which went into the police vault. The Reckoner bought an ounce of cocaine from The Company with police money and also passed it into evidence.
Police now had three moles, a wire on one of Mokbel’s lines and a connected country. But despite the breakthroughs there was nervousness in the squad that Mokbel, on the other side of the globe, could slip through their fingers. If the identities of the two officers in The Company or the Reckoner’s real game emerged, the whole operation would have been blown. One warning call to Tony that The Company had been penetrated, that the heat was closing in, and Mokbel could again vanish into thin air. Officers had a recurring nightmare of storming European lofts to find them vacant and their pursuit extended for additional years of humiliation and misery. Aside from nabbing Tony, if the undercover officers were discovered by The Company’s drug dealers, the consequences could be dire. And just as officers were on the verge of getting their hands on Australia’s biggest drug dealer, most wanted fugitive and gangland player, there was a terrifying hitch.
Maybe it was the ease with which the Reckoner’s ‘friend’ was able to obtain specialist drug glassware. Maybe it was the way he had popped up out of nowhere with little backstory and unknown to the other Whitefriars boys. Or perhaps it was just instinct honed on decades of first-hand criminal deception. Whatever triggered his doubts, something about the undercover cop did not gel. Fat Tony smelt a rat. And at one deal everything could have gone wrong.
Big Bart Rizzo trusted his mate the Reckoner inherently but Rizzo’s role was also to update Mokbel on the operations of their multimillion-dollar business. In the course of doing this Mokbel told Rizzo he was suspicious about the Reckoner’s mate, who was one of the undercover officers. The sage older drug crim gave Rizzo three orders in case his instincts were right. One: keep up your anti-surveillance tactics. Two: never sell the Reckoner’s mate more drugs than what the law says is a commercial amount. That way even if it all goes bad you will get to keep your house. And three: strip search the Reckoner’s mate.
To make the situation even more precarious Mokbel apparently had a break-in-case-of-emergency scheme to again rapidly disappear. If Greece had been the Plan B to staying in Australia, it seems Mokbel had a Plan C. Mokbel wanted the Edwena parked around the corner as a getaway vehicle, police later came to believe. The trusty vessel had saved his bacon once, and, if it became necessary, he would back it for the encore. If Mokbel sensed the heat around the corner he could have quickly sailed from Athens to Cyprus. The north of Cyprus is Turkey-controlled, and under no international obligation to help authorities in Australia.
‘I believe [the yacht] was always there to be used,’ said Detective Sergeant Jim Coghlan. ‘Because he couldn’t fly out. Can’t walk out. The only other option is [by] boat, which could take him to anywhere there was no extradition treaty.’
Rizzo met with the Reckoner’s mate, the police mole, on purported drug business. Rizzo undressed until he was naked as the day he was born. He then demanded, as a show of trust, that the officer do the same. If the police mole refused things would start to get very serious indeed for both the Mokbel hunt and the safety of the undercover officer and the Reckoner.
At that moment, as the officer cast his eye over the unappealing sight of the fat naked felon standing before him, everything hung by a thread. He swallowed his pride and stripped bare in front of Rizzo. Fortunately that day the officer was not wearing a wire. He was clean. Rizzo and Mokbel’s immediate concerns were allayed. The hitch was smoothed over. The fugitive remained in Athens and the noose tightened around him.
Purana continued monitoring Mokbel’s bugged phone, and then one day as Tony was talking on the wired line the breakthrough came. Mokbel, who was partial to a crushed-ice latte, said: ‘I’m having coffee at Starbucks in Glyfada.’
Detective Coghlan’s ears pricked up. Having been to Greece, he was the only one in the room who recognised the name of the Athenian suburb. It gelled with the money trail to the Greek capital they had established earlier. ‘It wasn’t until that day we thought, shit, he’s there,’ a detective said. ‘It meant all right, we have a suburb. It still didn’t mean he was living there. The fact he’s having coffee could mean doing business with banks and not living there.’
Coghlan asked a Greek friend of his to take photos of the Glyfada coffee precinct so he could show the team the layout of the area. On a Monday morning in late May the photos arrived in Coghlan’s inbox. His friend had taken snaps of the Starbucks and then an ice-cream parlour directly opposite.
As Coghlan perused the pictures he heard on a live broadcast of a phone intercept that Danielle was going to meet someone at Haagen Daaz. He zoomed in on the ice-cream shop in the picture. The quality broke down but it was still readable: Haagen Daaz. ‘We were all sitting there and I said, “She’s going to this place where I’m looking at the picture of it right now,”’ he said. The pictures were printed up and the team quietly stared at them, soaking in the details.
Coghlan recalled: ‘I said, “There’s no way known that she would risk driving in Greece on the wrong side of the road and the potential of getting involved in an accident. I know Danielle and she wouldn’t risk doing it.”’ That meant for Danielle to go to the Haagen Daaz ice-cream parlour she would have to go on foot. Which meant the likelihood of Danielle and Tony both living in or near Glyfada was pretty high. ‘That was Monday morning. I was gone by Wednesday,’ Jim Coghlan said.
Based on the new information, authorities were confident enough to send a local team to Greece to liaise with the Hellenic authorities. In May 2007 a Purana detective and a federal agent got the two most prized plane tickets in Australian policing – return to Athens to catch Tony Mokbel. Jim Coghlan went for Victoria Police and Agent Jarrod Ragg for the feds. Ragg could not tell loved ones where he was going. He had to ditch his usual mobile phone because callers would be able to tell he was overseas. The pair flew out of Melbourne hoping that within days they could end the global hunt for Tony Mokbel and return with the biggest fish of all.
‘I’d been running the Mokbel job since October 2000. It had been a very difficult prosecution. I’d managed to turn two very difficult crooks into witnesses,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘There’d been an incredible number of issues that we’d overcome. I was just really hoping to get hold of him.’ Coghlan and Ragg met with the AFP’s man in Greece, David Dalton, who worked the bureaucracy to speed things up. The Australians received an elite team of Greek investigators who, among other things, were incorruptible. Upon landing they still did not have an address and had to energise the occasionally overly relaxed Greek police to get out and look for Mokbel. Only the Greek police would have the immediate authority to arrest and hold him on a domestic charge.
As well as observing the local legal niceties to make any arrest valid, the Australians had to keep out of the frontline lest Tony spot them around town and once again vanish with the wind. ‘On a day-to-day basis we were highly aware he would recognise me in a heartbeat because I’ve spent years sitting in court with him,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘McGuire would have spotted me in a heartbeat as well.’ The Australians kept a low profile, moving between their hotel, the Australian embassy and Greek police headquarters.
‘At the time, he was Australia’s number one fugitive. When I went to Greece they didn’t know who Tony Mokbel was,’ Coghlan said. ‘But when they brought up his Interpol file he made the top 100 in the world. Which meant the other people on that list were Osama bin Laden and all these other characters. So we’ve got a bloke from Coburg who’s on the top 100 wanted people in the world and that’s when they took real notice that he does mean something.’
The Australians gave Greek police twenty photos of Mokbel in various guises and a list of his likely haunts, and shared their belief that he was living in or near Glyfada. ‘If he is here, we will find him,’ the Greeks proclaimed, and deployed plain-clothes officers to walk past harbourside cafes.
Every day the Australians would check in and give the local police any new tips they had on Mokbel. ‘We were turning things that came across the wires from VicPol into intelligence for Greek police,’ Ragg said.
Days became a week as the duo tried to identify Glyfada locales that would fit Tony’s lifestyle, schools where they may have sent Brittany, and hospitals where Renate may have been born. ‘From the wires we were trying to get together a pattern of movement on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis that might enable us to trip over him if we could put him into a routine,’ Ragg said.
In early June police crashed a baby swim meeting at a local pool but just missed Tony and Renate by minutes. Frustratingly, even with a baby in tow the super-crim would follow his instincts or be rescued by his luck and become a phantom just moments before the cavalry would arrive.
‘By the time we received information, reported through Greek police and they responded, we were just missing him,’ Ragg said. ‘When we were missing him by half an hour, an hour, you could almost taste it,’ he said. ‘You just knew you were so close. You could feel there was just something in the air. You’re just so close to getting hold of it all.’
Without immediate success, the Greek unit assisting the Australians full-time had to drop the case to get on with their other tasks. ‘We started all this with the Greeks on 29 May. They worked solidly with us for the next five or six days but we weren’t getting anywhere. We were just too far behind,’ Ragg said. ‘This was a very busy tactical unit. So they gave us some advice on some official requests we should make.’
Momentum was being lost. Things were again sliding from hopeful to grim. Tony’s luck was again on the rise. And then, less than a fortnight after the Australians’ arrival, a phone call and a manila folder intervened to change the fortunes of everyone.
It was just like any other Tuesday in Athens for Tony. On 5 June 2007 he woke up in his luxury apartment next to Danielle as the sun broke in and woke the girls.
Mokbel was a fervent enough believer in his own mythology to imagine a lifetime of liberty and Greek sunsets. He and Danielle had been buying furniture and, according to local real estate agents, had planned to buy a house. Mokbel was even making moves to establish himself as a Greek drug kingpin. But Tony was also canny enough to realise each day of freedom could be the last. On that Tuesday he would spend time with the girls, don his wig and cap before visiting friends, warm the blood in the Athenian sun and have a business meeting at an exclusive harbourside eatery. Even if his days in the sun were numbered it would be la dolce vita to the last.
That morning Mokbel was on a call to Australia when he broke away from the chat to tell someone in the background: ‘I’ll see you at the Delfinia at eleven.’ It was an uncharacteristic slip-up for Tony, who usually tried to maintain a professional criminal phone manner. Purana’s surveillance picked up the comment.
Coghlan and Ragg leapt to the Greek phonebooks. The Delfinia’s number was 005. That meant it was in Glyfada. At 9.45 am the Greeks were forwarded the Delfinia intelligence and dispatched officers almost immediately. The first crew were deployed on mopeds to try to cut their way through the horrendous Athens traffic and get to Tony.
‘We were asked to make a decision on what we wanted the Greek police to do. Whether we wanted him followed or wanted him arrested on site. Given the circumstances we all agreed he should be arrested on site,’ Agent Ragg said. Under Greek law the Interpol red notice would allow them to arrest Mokbel. Authorities had also taken out a diplomatic document, a provisional arrest order, requesting Hellenic police to make an arrest.
Mokbel visited Foula Pantazis, the wife of his escape mastermind, Byron, in her room at the Hotel Fenix in Glyfada. There he unexpectedly bumped into her daughter, Yvonne Warfe, his co-traveller and baby provider from the surreal road trip across the Nullarbor. Tony was back in his ‘Yanni’ wig so the reunion, while a surprise, would not have been completely out of context for Yvonne. They had a short exchange of pleasantries then moved on. Mokbel went to meet his shipping-industry friend Theo Angelakis at the Delfinia – an expensive cafe overlooking a marina full of expensive yachts. Fat Tony nonchalantly sipped a short black and talked shop with Thin Theo in what would be their last rendezvous.
Tony and Theo were taking in the ambience of trams and sea and the sound of sail toggles clinking against masts when Greek police arrived. The officers cast their eyes about, but the paunchy pale Tony from the photos with signature exposed pate was nowhere to be seen. Members of the Greek team went through the cafe but they could not find their target. They saw Angelakis and his colleague with the moptop hairstyle but did not recognise the latter as Mokbel.
The officers had, however, been told Mokbel was to be at the Delfinia for a business meeting. One of the younger Greek officers again looked at the short, tanned man with the biker moustache, sunglasses, cap and Beatlesque wig. He then noticed the older pockmarked Greek he was chatting with was holding a manila folder. ‘He thought, stuff it, they’re the only two looking like they’re at a business meeting. So he’s gone over and fronted them,’ Agent Ragg said.
The officers worked their way through the exclusive cafe crowd as if on a routine identity check. The Delfinia’s menu touted $32 caesar salads replete with anchovies, and fresh red snapper at $96 a kilo, but the only catch the Greek police were interested in was the heavily disguised Octopus on the terrace.
Mokbel was asked for his ID. He showed them his Stephen Papas passport and said: ‘Why are you asking?’
The police perused Mokbel’s documents and asked the two men to accompany them to the station. The Greeks, who had been told by the Australians that Mokbel had been using the name Stephen Papas, were confident they had their man. At 11.15 they called the Australians and told them so.
Greece is the fifth most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International, and has been labelled ‘the EU champ of corruption’ for kickbacks to public officials. Mokbel – the Australian champ of corruption – allegedly offered his accompanying officers a $1.6 million bribe to let him go. Tony was good for the amount. But the arresting officers refused. Unrebuffed by the rejection Mokbel was optimistic he could talk his way out of the squeeze. He thought the local fuzz were just interested in his bodgy passport. He was still insisting he was Stephen Papas of Bondi and he was still confident that diplomacy and cash could conquer the small misunderstanding of his arrest.
Coghlan and Ragg made their way to the Athens police station. By the time they got there silver-tongued Mokbel had been making some progress with his captors. ‘Tony had been talking to them for quite a while by now and he had been denying who he was,’ Ragg said. Mokbel had been maintaining he was Stephen Papas and offering explanations which to the Greeks were plausible. The Australians outside Mokbel’s interview room were shown Mokbel’s hybrid Victoria–New South Wales fake licence and pointed out the flaws to the Greeks, stating it justified arrest. ‘They said, “Well, look, we’re happy with that but we want you guys to go in and do a physical indentification,”’ Ragg said.
Tony was sitting in handcuffs with two Greek police when Ragg and Coghlan entered the room. His face fell when he saw the federal agent and the Purana detective. ‘I walk in. His eyes went wide and he went, “Jarrod!”’ Ragg said. ‘I said, “How are you, Tony?” and he shook my hand. He looked genuinely pleased to see me for about five seconds. He then got pretty angry. He got very angry. And he had quite a bit to say about a number of issues.’
Mokbel unleashed a wide-ranging spray threatening Ragg. He told the agent he was prepared to do the jail time over the cocaine charges, but he said when he was provided with the witness statements against him on the Saturday before he left, he had to go. Mokbel told Ragg: ‘I won’t contest the extradition if Simon Overland agrees to drop the murder charges but otherwise I’ll tie things up in Greece for ten years.’
Mokbel was never going to stop trying his luck. He would never stop playing courts and legal systems like lotto machines. He would never stop offering bribes and trying to cut impossible deals. It was just not in his nature. But from the moment Tony saw the Australians he knew it was curtains. He knew the great escape was over.
Mokbel told Coghlan: ‘I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve done a brilliant job.’