Well you wake up in the morning, hear the ding dong ring
You go a-marching to the table, see the same damn thing
Knife and fork are on the table, there’s nothing in my pan,
And if you say anything about it, you’re in trouble with the man.
– Huddie Ledbetter, ‘Midnight Special’
Inside Athens police headquarters a sullen Mokbel confirmed his true identity. Tony took his cap and sunglasses off and the Hellenic police took his fingerprints and mugshots. The iconic picture of the famously balding Mokbel with a face like thunder in an embarrassingly askew wig was beamed around the world.
The authorities’ sense of joy and relief at grabbing Fat Tony was made even headier by an opportunity to mock the villain. For Mokbel, his cronies and various lawyers, it left a bitter taste. A cartoonist depicted Tony’s rug as a furry woodland animal that – when police arrived pointing pistols – stood up with its paws in the air. ‘Nice try,’ said Assistant Police Commissioner Simon Overland, getting in on the carnival atmosphere. Editors published those words across the swizzled rug image for maximum effect.
Judge Betty King was on holidays overseas when she learnt Mokbel – and his toupee – had been apprehended. ‘I was sitting on a beach in Mexico and I got the text that Mokbel had been arrested but I couldn’t get the vision,’ she said. ‘So I didn’t get to see the really bad ferret – like a squashed cat.’
Back in Greece Mokbel’s initial sporting recognition of a job well done soured into threats against the Australian detective’s family. He was no longer happy to see Coghlan and was equally unimpressed with Ragg, who had been pursuing Mokbel since 2000 and was behind his cocaine conviction. ‘When [Ragg] couldn’t get at me he went after all my friends and associates, threatening them and trying to get them to give him stuff on me,’ Mokbel said. ‘It really pissed me off that he was going around pressuring people and putting the screws on them to roll over when we could have just worked things out and come to some sort of plea bargain.’
Ragg did not see it that way. ‘This is where Tony’s got a warped perspective. I investigated Mokbel hard. My personal opinion is everyone’s got a right to a fair trial but the public have a right to expect a vigorous, professional and competent investigation and that’s what I tried to deliver,’ he said. ‘If he took personal offence at that, well, the game he’s involved in is a game of criminal activity.’
Coghlan rang Melbourne with the good news: we’ve got Tony. Shut down The Company. Police had lanced the head of the beast and the green light was given to start lopping the tentacles. If they had reversed the order and gone after Company members first, Mokbel would have been notified and vanished into thin air. ‘If we had not got him first then arrested everybody here we’d never get him,’ Coghlan said. Instead they got one with the lot.
There were rude awakenings throughout Melbourne on Wednesday 6 June 2007 as more than 120 Victoria Police officers raided twenty-two homes across the city and reduced The Company to rubble. Fourteen Mokbel soldiers were arrested, including Mokbel’s amphetamines lieutenants Mansour and Rizzo and speed siblings Issa and Elias, who had helped Tony escape. Tricarico was picked up for following his dead dad into the drug business, and so were Company helpers Benedetti, Ferraro and Ryan. Discoveries made during The Company raids gave rise to dozens of new charges. Raiding officers netted half a kilogram of MDMA, more than $790,000 in cash, and a fortune in other drugs, scales, glassware, jewellery, mobiles, motorbikes, and framed memorabilia from the Al Pacino gangster film Scarface.
Greek police interviewed Mokbel and held him on document fraud charges. That afternoon police took him back to his Elliniko apartment for a search. There Danielle and Brittany also learnt it was curtains. Theo Angelakis was interviewed and let go without charge.
The Australians remained for a week, monitoring the media and Mokbel’s custody. ‘There was an absolute media frenzy. We warned the Greek cops and said there will be a fair bit of media attention. They couldn’t believe it,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘They truly didn’t understand the importance of Mokbel’s arrest until the media started.’
The then AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty jetted into Athens. It was reported Keelty had been at a conference of South-East Asian police chiefs in Singapore when Greek police arrested Mokbel. Agent Ragg said Keelty was either in Cyprus or on his way to Cyprus. ‘He went to Athens to formally thank the commissioner of the Greek police,’ Ragg said. ‘It was a coincidence. He wasn’t flown to this part of the world for that event.’
Others were more sceptical and viewed it as showboating by the plastics. ‘The feds are very quick to go around and claim somebody else’s work, as they attempted to do when we picked up Tony in Greece,’ ex-Purana chief Jim O’Brien said. ‘You couldn’t get Mick Keelty off the phone quick enough to get over there. Just happened to be in Singapore at the time. Apparently it’s a bit close to Greece.’
Danielle said she had known for months, even when still pregnant with Renate, that the police were closing in but she and Tony refused to leave because she was about to give birth. She claimed that while heavily pregnant she had spotted international surveillance teams in Athens just as she had in France and Italy. But her version fails to explain why they did not flee in the time between Renate’s birth and Tony’s arrest. ‘I saw them all through Europe … and I saw them here too,’ she said. ‘I was pregnant and about to give birth.’
Once caught Mokbel claimed he had been calling Australia laying the groundwork for a deal to return. ‘I don’t know how they did it, if it was an informer rolling over, but you’ve got to give it to them, they found me and got me,’ he said. ‘I knew I couldn’t last forever or even for ten years on the run. I’ve got Danielle and the kids to think about, and I had already decided to try to do a deal to come back and do some time. I know the police would have been bugging my phone here, and those tapes will show I was already talking to people back in Australia about sending Danielle back to represent me and try to come to an arrangement for me to come back.’ But Mokbel also said his plans were to open a restaurant in Greece and work an honest life in the kitchen.
Australian authorities would still face a nearly year-long tooth-and-nail fight trying to lawfully extract a recalcitrant Mokbel from Greece. ‘It’s a two-step thing. The big success was locating him and arresting him and getting him before a competent court’s jurisdiction,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘That was the big breakthrough. That was the big success. Then we were prepared for what could be years of delay.’
There would still be cause for nerves that Tony could revive his vanishing trick even from custody. But all said it was a famous victory for police. They had caught Australia’s biggest drug dealer and most wanted fugitive. There were a few more hoops to jump through but if everything went well the end for Mokbel was nigh.
Tony Mokbel, fallen from the Athenian high life to the slums of a seedy foreign prison cell, recognised the magnitude of the setback. But, delusionally optimistic, his spirit had still not been broken. Tony sincerely believed he would get bail in Greece. When that happened his plan was to reunite with the woman to whom he felt the greatest debt of obligation – Edwena, his sloop.
Now he was caught Mokbel could finally tell why, how and where he fled. But instead of a straight, unapologetic rollicking tale he kept silent on the details of his escape and claimed he fled because a fair trial was impossible on his upcoming murder charge. Mokbel claimed the very next month he was planning to contact Ragg to negotiate his return because he was missing his family in Australia ‘and life in Greece with McGuire was difficult’.
Mokbel claimed it was McGuire’s surprise conception that brought her to Greece. ‘He said to me the only reason she’s over there is she got pregnant,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘Knowing her she’s visited him in Bonnie Doon, got up the duff, then he’s done a runner. She’s worked out she’s up the duff and then she’s joined him,’ he said.
Mokbel spent six days in the cells of the Athens police station as a steady stream of drug addicts and sex workers passed through. He hired a local lawyer, Yiannis Vlachos, and sauntered into the central Athens court in jeans, T-shirt and thongs to face false document charges. He insisted Danielle retrieve his infamous wig, as well as his sunglasses, six mobiles, and $2700 in euros, from police custody.
Asked in court whether he had any objections to the extradition warrant he avoided torturous legal arguments. ‘Yes,’ Mokbel said. ‘I don’t want to be extradited.’ When Australian authorities refused to negotiate, Mokbel instructed his lawyer to use every available option to fight extradition and delay the case as long as possible. Mokbel said he would not have fought extradition had it just been the drugs charges, but he objected to the Lewis Moran murder charge. ‘I had nothing to do with any murders and morally it would just be wrong to go to jail for that,’ he said. ‘I didn’t do anything. Why would I be so stupid?’
Asked if he had ever killed anyone, Mokbel insisted: ‘No, a million per cent, no.’ His denials later assumed a DIY ethos. ‘I’ve never killed anyone, I never had any involvement with killing anyone,’ Mokbel said. ‘If I was going to kill someone I’d do it myself. I’ve always been a man like that. I wouldn’t get someone to do it for me. It’s embarrassing.’
After denying any blood on his hands Tony tried to spin the truly indefensible – his wonky wig of infamy. ‘When I took the cap off, it moved,’ Mokbel said. ‘It doesn’t look so bad.’ But the photo on his dodgy Stephen Papas driver’s licence showed the wig, even on straight, looked jarringly odd – like Tony was attempting to play the thirteen-year-old version of himself in a bad telemovie of his life, although the wig did attract some support from an unexpected quarter – Agent Ragg: ‘He copped a lot of flak over that wig. The wig is obviously going to look a bit rough when it’s taken off his head, looked at by half a dozen Greek cops and then stuck back on his head sideways.
‘You’ve got to have a bit of empathy for him. It was good enough that they couldn’t spot him in it. I feel a bit sorry for him. Danielle was caned for letting him go out with such a monstrosity on him considering her profession [as a hairdresser]. It was a relatively good quality wig if worn correctly and not just banged on his head by cops for a photo.’
Simon Overland also speculated that the terribleness of the wig was part of its criminal genius – it was so bad it drew the eye away from the wearer’s face.
Mokbel tired of the squalid conditions of the Athens police cells and the passing parade of prostitutes, pushers and trannies. He complained and asked to be moved. His request was met with a gruff ‘This is not a hotel.’ Mokbel should have been careful what he wished for. He was soon moved from the cells to one of the worst jails in Europe.
Korydallos prison is a crowded hellhole that houses three times its actual capacity of feral inmates. Mokbel’s living conditions were terrible. He routinely complained about nights spent wiping cockroaches off his face. He also grumpily eyeballed Michelin-free vegetable dinners.
Korydallos was also home to some very vicious characters, including members of Greek Marxist terror group 17 November, who were linked to twenty-three assassinations. But the squalid existence was not so bad that Mokbel surrendered his extradition fight, which would have guaranteed an instant ticket back to a Victorian jail. He was, for a time, in one of the cleaner, quieter wings with just one cell mate who was a fellow drug trafficker. Some former inmates said Korydallos was so horrific Mokbel would be begging to come home within weeks. They didn’t know Tony.
Mokbel had a multi-pronged legal strategy. His lawyer back home would argue in an Australian court action that the extradition order was invalid because it was signed by the Justice Minister not the Attorney General. In Greece he would seek asylum on the basis that he could never get a fair trial in Australia. More bizarrely, Mokbel had also pulled strings to get Lebanese authorities to apply to extradite him there rather than Australia.
While his hired guns fought the legal battle Mokbel deployed his famous charm during his perp walks to wage the battle for hearts and minds. According to Tony’s new script the Athenian waiters who daily noted Mokbel’s beaming smile had been mistaken. Mokbel now said his fugitive months were miserable. He had not been living the high life but pining for his barbecue, Hills hoist, thirty-two godchildren and the Aussie fair go. Life on the run was terrible. It was not something he’d wish on anyone, Mokbel said. ‘You miss your family and friends. It’s not a life,’ he said.
After six months living together in Athens the lovers were forced apart. Outside the court a downbeat Danielle breastfed her baby alone in a courtyard. A melancholy Brittany, who had grown fond of her father figure, sat patiently, paying in blues for her mother’s latest unorthodox choice of suitor. ‘Whether he is guilty or innocent, whatever, we have to think of the kids,’ McGuire said. ‘I’ve got to think of the kids. The kids come first. The children are innocent. Leave them alone. I’m sick of my life being portrayed as some kind of bullshit TV drama,’ she said. Earlier she had grabbed a female photographer’s wrist in a fevered attack. She was angry, she said, at her portrayal in the Australian media as ‘some kind of gangster’s moll’.
Unable to get a visit from his girlfriend, Brittany, and his lookalike baby girl, Renate, Mokbel started to contemplate making an honest woman of Danielle, or at least marrying her. ‘I would marry her and hopefully it would last until the day I die,’ Mokbel said. ‘I believe every woman in the world deserves a beautiful wedding. If I ever get that chance, I will make it up to her.’
But Mokbel’s Greek lawyer let slip that the wedding plans were to get improved visiting rights for Danielle, who had not been allowed to visit him at Korydallos. ‘That’s probably the biggest killer at the moment – not seeing Danielle and our beautiful daughter and my beautiful Brittany,’ Mokbel said. ‘It’s heartbreaking.’ The notorious couple scotched their plans for a jailhouse wedding after they became bogged down in Greek bureaucracy. Mokbel was unable to get documents from Australia proving he was single and therefore free to get married, as demanded by Greek law. He was also facing some resistance from Greek authorities over the planned prison wedding.
When Tony got a chance to address a Greek court he did so in a loud voice, speaking through an interpreter. He admitted fleeing Australia but claimed it was because the authorities there had waged a vendetta against him. He brought to bear some chequered character witnesses, saying quadruple killer Carl Williams had vouched for him.
At the jail Mokbel was permitted exercise in a congested yard for a few hours each day. His lawyer said he was depressed. But on the regular perp walks into and out of court, Mokbel maintained a constantly cool, even cheerful demeanour, winning over his guards and many in the press gang. Waiting in the back row of the chaotic courtroom for his case to come up, Mokbel would laugh and joke with his captors. One day dozens of prostitutes came before the magistrate. ‘This is the biggest brothel I’ve ever seen,’ Mokbel joked. But it wasn’t.
Tony’s affection for Greece remained undimmed despite the dramatic change in his circumstances. Sometimes he was too laidback even for his hosts. Mokbel angered a magistrate by failing to front on a day the mercury edged towards 40°C, the prisoner declaring it too hot to go out. On another no-show his lawyer said his absent client’s kidneys were playing up.
When his hearing over the fake document charges was adjourned due to a national interpreters’ strike, Tony said he was worried it would make him look like he was trying to hold things up. ‘What it does is it makes me look like a monster,’ he said.
Mokbel was occasionally moved between Korydallos and the ‘softer’ Larissa prison out of the city. But by late 2007 nervousness that the important inmate could either escape or become a target saw him consigned to solitary at Korydallos with no view of the sky. Details are sketchy and today police are dismissive that there was a serious escape plan being hatched. But at the time Mokbel’s lawyer said: ‘There was information from the Australian police that he might try an escape, but also there was information that his life was in danger.’ Perhaps it was an Australian ruse to ensure the Greeks gave Mokbel the attention he required. Whatever the case they were keeping their quarry guessing.
‘It has not been easy. I’ve had a tough time,’ a haggard Mokbel, flanked by seven armed policemen, said at court. ‘I’m OK, though. I’m holding my head up – always. At the moment they’ve got me in solitary confinement. I don’t know why, but, yes, it is very tough.’
Strangely enough Mokbel was not the only Melburnian amphetamines kingpin in Korydallos. Dimitros ‘Jimmy’ Samsonidis had been busted in Athens in May 2006 by an international sting involving the AFP. He was caught trying to send a tonne of ephedrine to Melbourne for processing into 80 million speed tablets. Samsonidis had done jail time in Victoria in the 1970s when he was convicted of manslaughter, and in the late eighties had become one of Australia’s biggest heroin dealers. Samsonidis had been involved with the Moran clan’s drug operations as Tony was coming up in the underworld. And police believe Samsonidis had been one of the young Mokbel’s ‘mentors’ who taught him the burgeoning arts of speed cooking and tablet pressing. In November 2007 Samsonidis was sentenced to life in Korydallos.
By late 2007 Mokbel had bounced back and was jogging eight kilometres a day in laps of his jail compound. In the heart of one of the world’s most brutal prisons in a foreign country with a foreign tongue, the charismatic Australian managed to get a group of hardened convicts to join his let’s-get-physical program. Prison authorities also noted Mokbel’s contagious humour but remained guarded lest it was an attempt to lull them into a false sense of security.
‘He’s got about a dozen other prisoners getting into his routine and the guards are very pleased because they’ve never behaved better,’ his Australian lawyer, Mirko Bagaric, said. ‘Next time you see him he’ll be as chiselled as Ben Cousins.’ The lawyer and academic then slammed as ‘scurrilous’ police speculation that Tony was getting in shape for a daring escape bid. ‘The Greek prisons are some of the best in the world in terms of security,’ he said. Others were not so confident.
While Mokbel was in Greek custody Purana detectives in Melbourne charged him with the murder of Michael Marshall. Tony said the cops were just loading him up to help the extradition attempt. He was partly right. Assuming they could bring Mokbel before an Australian court, prosecutors would only be able to pursue him for charges on which he was extradited. They were taking no chances on leaving any out they may have later wanted to pursue. ‘If anyone looks at the brief they’d laugh,’ Mokbel said. ‘They want to look good.’
What Purana really wanted was to stop Mokbel’s legal eagles dodging a prosecution down the line on a technicality of international law. ‘Prior to him going to Greece if you hadn’t charged him with certain charges you can’t then bring him back on three and hit him with another three,’ Purana Chief Inspector Bernie Edwards said. ‘Everything you think he has done they needed to charge him with those,’ he said. ‘So if you’ve got a particular charge – say the murder of Marshall – you would be more inclined to charge. If you don’t charge and bring him back and then the case gets really strong, you won’t have that option.’
Australian authorities were also nervous that Mokbel could put more egg on their face by slipping away from the laidback and corruptible Greeks. Their anxiety over whether Korydallos could hold Mokbel was not without foundation. Costas Passaris was a gang leader jailed over a litany of assaults and violent robberies. Passaris escaped Korydallos in 2001 while being transferred to hospital. Two police were killed in the process and the local force swarmed on his suspected location. Athens police thought they had him surrounded in his apartment, but somehow, even though he had been shot in the hand, Passaris managed to evade fifty officers waiting for him. The wig method had done little for Mokbel but it worked wonders for Passaris, who, wearing a rug and glasses, walked through a police cordon to freedom. He was eventually caught in Romania.
That was not the only Korydallos cock-up keeping Australian authorities awake at night. In 2006 the Greek Robin Hood – serial armed robber and kidnapper Vassilis Paleokostas, who shared his loot with poor farmers – mounted a spectacular airborne jail break from the fortress prison. A hijacked helicopter had landed in the jail courtyard spiriting away Vassilis and his Albanian sidekick, alleged hitman Alket Rizaj, taking guards by surprise. Guards said they did not react immediately because they thought the blue and white chopper belonged to police. Making matters worse, the plot’s mastermind was Vassilis’s brother Nikos ‘the Phantom’ Paleokostas, himself a wanted man who had managed to remain at large for a decade. The escapees deployed smoke flares to cause confusion as the helicopter took off with the two inmates on board. The crooks forced the pilot to land in a nearby cemetery where they fanged it to freedom on waiting motorbikes.
If knowing all this made Australian authorities a little edgy about their prized catch, it was fortunate they could not see into the future. After Paleokostas had been at large for two years, hiding out with his conspirators in mountains outside Athens, he returned to his old tricks. A Greek aluminium tycoon was kidnapped for a twelve million euro ransom and Paleokostas was the prime suspect. Police managed to arrest him two months later and he was returned to Korydallos.
This time the prison was taking no chances. Paleokostas and Rizaj were thrown into solitary confinement. They were removed from solitary only for their trial over their 2006 jailbreak. A day before the court case was to commence another rented helicopter appeared on the horizon. Less than three years after the first escape it all happened again using nearly the exact same method. This time a female passenger in the helicopter threw a rope ladder to Vassilis and Alket in the prison courtyard. The whole thing took four minutes. Guards managed to puncture the fuel tank but not stall its escape as the femme fatale in the chopper returned fire. As inmates cheered, a sinking feeling enveloped the guards, who fired hopelessly into the air and tried to figure out the Greek for déjà vu.
While locked up Mokbel was able to get his hands on several mobile phones. Eternally optimistic, egomaniacal and convinced of his prowess as a deal maker, he phoned the Purana taskforce from his Greek jail. He asked for the officer in command at the time, Detective Jim O’Brien, but was not patched through on his first attempt. O’Brien got a message Tony had called. He instructed that if Tony rang back he was to be put through. Mokbel phoned again and his attempt at getting a deal went something like the following.
O’Brien: ‘Hello, Tony.’
Mokbel: ‘Jim, let’s work this out. Con will speak to Paul when he gets back from overseas on Monday. They’ll talk and they’ll work out something. We’re all prepared to do a little bit of jail but not too much.’
O’Brien: ‘Look, come back and we’ll have a talk about this.’
Mokbel: ‘I’m a drug dealer but I’m not a killer.’
O’Brien: ‘Well, come back. All things are possible. Come back and we’ll have a talk.’
Con was Con Heliotis, QC, Tony’s reliable barrister. Paul was Paul Coghlan, the Director of Public Prosecutions. Tony not only knew the name of the DPP, he knew Mr Coghlan was overseas and he knew when he was getting back. O’Brien’s reasonable-sounding offer – ‘come back’ – was the last thing Tony wanted. ‘He was highly against coming back. At that stage the empire was crumbling around him. We never got to have the talk,’ Jim O’Brien said.
In Australia Mokbel’s legal team sought leave to appeal their flagging wrong-signature-on-the-extradition-order argument to the High Court. Leave was denied. Asked on his regular perp walk outside court by a fellow Australian if he would be home by Christmas, Tony wryly responded: ‘I hope not.’ The Greek Supreme Court stayed his extradition until his appeal to the Australian High Court was completed. Tony’s prize was getting to spend a cruel Yule and new year in a subterranean dungeon-like cell under the floor of Korydallos prison.
As Mokbel’s defensive legal actions floundered the jailbird reacted by expanding his coterie of lawyers. He hired a former Greek MP and high-profile celebrity criminal lawyer, Alexandros Lykourezos. The mouthpiece had previously advised accused war criminal Ratko Mladic, the so-called ‘Butcher of Bosnia’. ‘When you have Lykourezos by your side the other team normally go home – it’s over, he will win,’ a court observer said.
But in early 2008 Mokbel’s stalling tactics ran out. The Greek Supreme Court took just three minutes to order the fugitive back to Australia to face the music on his litany of drug and murder charges. Judge Konstantinos Sarandinos directed four words at Tony which the fugitive did not want to hear: ‘You will be extradicted.’ Tony’s wildcard also failed – a Lebanese warrant arrived just minutes before the decision, but was overruled.
Despite his inherent optimism Mokbel could recognise the dying of the light, and the bigwig wigged out. ‘I ran away when I realised I wasn’t going to get a fair trial, but there is absolutely no way in a million years I’m going to get a fair go now,’ Mokbel said. ‘You’ve had the prime minister and everyone getting stuck into me, so I won’t get a fair trial even if I die and come back again and appear in court. You would probably get a fairer trial for me in bloody Indonesia,’ he said.
Tony and Danielle exchanged ‘I love you darls’ across the courtroom as the prisoner was taken away. All that was left was for the Greek government to rubberstamp the decision. But Mokbel refused to concede defeat. He got a new Greek human rights lawyer, Vasillis Hirdaris, and appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.
‘Tony was a great believer that he would have got bail in Greece,’ said Purana chief Bernie Edwards. ‘His plan was he could extend his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights over a number of years, then the court would have to give him bail until that process ended,’ he said. ‘The way he saw things he had a chance to beat the lot. He believed he could get bail. He’s an eternal optimist.’
But before Tony’s human rights application got anywhere the Greek Justice Minister signed off on the court’s decision. It meant Australian authorities could extradite Mokbel back home to serve out his existing prison sentence and face the new charges.
Some had beaten the system. Christopher Skase and Robert Trimbole remained out of reach of authorities in Spain, which has no extradition agreement with Australia. But after an eleven-month legal fight fraught with fears that Mokbel would once more escape, it was over. Mokbel the uber-gambler had played a near-faultless hand but the house had still won. Fat Tony was coming home.