Carl Williams was a chatty bloke. Watch CCTV footage of him in Barwon Prison’s high-security Acacia Unit 1 and there he is nattering away to either or both of his two fellow inmates: career criminal Matthew Charles Johnson and a convicted killer we shall call Mr Red, for legal reasons. On another occasion he sits at the unit’s dayroom table, his hands gesticulating as fast as his mouth can move. In the concrete recreation yard he jabbers away while ‘cutting’ laps with his two criminal pals. And there he is, still humbugging away only minutes before Johnson crowns and kills him with the steel stem of an exercise bike. While Williams may have been an annoying cellmate because of all his chit-chat, what really got under Johnson’s skin—according to Crown prosecutor Mark Rochford, SC—was the fact that Carl Anthony Williams was assisting police with an investigation. In Johnson’s eyes Williams had turned into what criminals colloquially term a ‘dog’. And Johnson, quite possibly the most fearsome and influential prisoner in the Victorian jail system at that point in time, hates ‘dogs’—make no bones about it. Much to Matty Johnson’s surprise, he was able to smash Williams eight times in the head with his heavy makeshift weapon without any immediate reaction from prison guards.

‘In my mind I thought the officers would have got there before I finished hitting him,’ Johnson would say in court.

A convicted drug trafficker, Williams was serving life in jail with a minimum term of thirty-five years for organising the gangland murders of mortal enemies Jason and Lewis Moran and perceived foes Michael Marshall and Mark Mallia, as well as conspiring to murder a man, when Johnson walked up behind him and bashed his head in like it was a watermelon. While Williams may have built a reputation as an unlikely crime boss on the outside, he was a naïve sitting duck in jail. As one prison Intelligence Unit supervisor would explain to Ombudsman George Brouwer:

He was very high profile but at the end of the day he had no prison sense … And then all of a sudden Johnson comes out of nowhere. And Johnson wasn’t part of the gangland set up; he was a prison thug … How they [Corrections Victoria] ever let it happen [Johnson and Williams being housed together in the same unit] I will not know. Because basically as soon as Johnson found out that Williams was cooperating with police to either get years off his own sentence or help his father out, he was doomed. ‘He appointed his own assassin’ are the words that I’ve used, and I stick by it.

George Williams knew his son Carl was fond of a chat.

‘He was a talker, yes,’ George would say in court.

Apparently Williams was also a prolific letter writer.

‘Yeah, Carl wrote a lot of letters,’ Matt Johnson would confirm while giving evidence at his own murder trial. ‘He was always running out of stamps.’

When George was jailed mid November 2007 for drug trafficking, he immediately began to ask to be housed with his son, the gangster who called himself ‘The Premier’ and who was considered by his dad to be a ‘big time’ drug dealer.

‘[Carl] said he made the hard decisions,’ George would say during Johnson’s trial in the Victorian Supreme Court. ‘I think he liked the notoriety a lot.’

Carl Williams’s former wife Roberta also gave some rare insights during Johnson’s trial. She painted Williams as a ‘caring’ and ‘generous’ man despite the fact he once fired a gun at her while she was pregnant with their daughter. Under cross-examination by one of Johnson’s two defence barristers, David Drake, Roberta told how Williams often lavished her with gifts and expensive jewellery. The couple lived a high life obviously well beyond any lawful means—and they milked it hard.

DRAKE: You had a fairly extravagant lifestyle, would you say?

ROBERTA: To some extent, yep.

DRAKE: There was plenty of money floating around?

ROBERTA: Yes.

DRAKE: Holidays—did you take holidays together?

ROBERTA: Yes.

DRAKE: Stay at the best places?

ROBERTA: Not necessarily the best places. Whatever we liked at the time we chose and stayed there.

DRAKE: Regularly go out and wine and dine?

ROBERTA: Yeah.

Drake asked Roberta if it ever crossed her mind to wonder what her husband did for a living.

‘Of course it crossed my mind,’ she replied, ‘but I just pushed it to the back of it.’

DRAKE: Well, there’s a lot of money that was flowing through that house, wasn’t there?

ROBERTA: There was, yes.

DRAKE: And you believed that it was just from buying and selling jewellery?

ROBERTA: No I didn’t but, like I said, I didn’t really think about it.

DRAKE: Was there any mention ever of selling drugs?

ROBERTA: Any mention? We were arrested for selling drugs.

In court, George Williams spoke of the hatred his son bore toward half-brothers Mark and Jason Moran. The Moran boys shot Williams in a park over a drug debt in October 1999. The Morans were into Williams for $1 million, according to Roberta, and it was Jason who pulled the trigger. Jason’s decision to shoot and wound Williams in the guts instead of acing him in the head sparked Melbourne’s gangland war, a war Roberta denied any knowledge of.

‘It wasn’t apparent to me that some drug war was happening, no,’ she told the Supreme Court. ‘I don’t believe everything I read in the newspapers.’

The Moran boys created a paranoid and vengeful monster when they shot Williams, who would go on to develop a knack of befriending ultra-violent criminals and convincing them to do his deadly dirty work. (While it is believed Williams may have organised seven or more gangland murders, police suspect he pulled the trigger on one man—Mark Moran in June 2000).

‘Many times he said that he’d like to kill Jason Moran,’ George told Justice Lex Lasry. ‘He had a passion to kill Jason Moran. He had a hatred for the man.’

Nearly three years to the day after Mark Moran was shot dead, a hitman working for Williams blasted Jason— and his mate Pasquale Barbaro—at a Saturday morning kids’ footy clinic. George Williams said of that shooting: ‘I don’t condone the killing of someone in front of kids but I didn’t say it was a horrible thing to happen.’

Roberta told Johnson’s trial that Williams never told her of any of his kill plots.

‘Carl was the most placid, quiet person you could ever come across,’ she said with a straight face. ‘Even with my ranting and raving and yelling and screaming that I often did, Carl would sit there quietly and not even answer me back. That’s how quiet he was.’

In December 2008, well into his prison sentence, George Williams was moved to Acacia Unit 4 at Barwon Prison. He spent one night there before being taken to a location outside jail where his son was meeting with detectives. Williams Junior and Senior spent eight nights at that location with the cops. Johnson told the Supreme Court he believed Williams was allowed to see his girlfriend and have sex with her during the organised outing. In an investigative report compiled by George Brouwer about Carl Williams’s murder, Brouwer wrote: ‘[The lead detective with whom Carl Williams was dealing] denied that prostitutes visited Mr Williams, however confirmed that Mr Williams’ then girlfriend and his father’s partner had a supervised visit at the permit location.’ Upon their return to Barwon, Williams and his dad were placed in the Melaleuca Unit. Johnson formally requested that he be housed with Williams as, according to Ombudsman Brouwer’s report, ‘they had formed a friendship’. Williams, meanwhile, wrote to Corrections Victoria requesting he be accommodated with Johnson. The placement of prisoners is the responsibility of the Sentence Management Unit. A range of factors is considered before certain prisoners are housed together.

Peter Hutchinson, the manager of the prison Security and Emergency Services Group (the prison system’s version of the Victoria Police Special Operations Group), agreed at Johnson’s trial that prison gossip, media reports in relation to prisoners, outgoing prison phone calls, prisoners’ letters and general correspondence were all reviewed by staff when considering the initial and continuing placement of prisoners.

In January 2009, the Sentence Management Panel approved the move of Johnson to the Melaleuca Unit after Rod Wise, the acting commissioner of Corrections Victoria, sent an email to Penny Armytage, Secretary of the Department of Justice, warning of the move. Brouwer’s report stated ‘Mr Wise identified significant risks to Mr Williams’ safety should Mr Williams and Mr Johnson be placed together.’

‘There is little doubt that Johnson is capable of causing Williams harm if he were to find out the true nature of Williams’ co-operation with police,’ Wise wrote in part. He cited three reasons why Johnson might want to harm Williams: financial incentives; an opportunity to enhance his jailhouse reputation; and the fact he was already facing a murder charge, so any subsequent sentence for another serious offence would run concurrently.

According to Brouwer’s report, senior police dealing with Williams supported the proposed move to house Williams with Johnson. ‘Victoria Police considered Mr Johnson’s criminal history and noted that he was not aligned with any key members involved in Melbourne’s then long-running gangland violence,’ Brouwer wrote.

They formed the view that Mr Johnson did not pose a threat to Mr Williams arising from any gangland allegiances and supported the proposed co-placement … [But] Mr Johnson was known to Corrections Victoria to have participated in two serious assaults on fellow prisoners in the past, with one assault in retribution for a prisoner’s co-operation with police.

In my view, the placement decision relied too much on: police advice; Mr Williams’ perception of his own safety; and his wish to be accommodated with Mr Johnson. It gave too little weight to knowledge Corrections Victoria had about Mr Johnson that mitigated against the co-placement request … Despite [the three reasons why Johnson might want to harm Williams], Mr Wise recommended to Ms Armytage that the placement be allowed unless Ms Armytage had any ‘major concerns’. He also suggested that the placement be monitored ‘very closely’ and reviewed if Mr Williams was to be taken out of prison in the future to assist Victoria Police.

In a response email, Armytage had written to Wise:

I feel reasonably comfortable with your proposal and note the fact that you have consulted the police and they have no concerns about it. Balancing all considerations it appears appropriate to accede to Carl Williams’ request on the basis that we will monitor the situation and review it as soon as any new factors emerge …

Armytage would later tell Brouwer: ‘I was mindful that no placement involving Mr Williams was risk free, other than a placement in total solitary confinement.’

Less than four months later (on 13 May), Carl and George Williams and Matt Johnson were moved from Melaleuca to Acacia Unit 1. According to George, his son had kept Johnson up to date about his police dealings.

‘He said Mr Johnson was okay with that,’ George said at Johnson’s trial.

Mr Johnson was saying that Carl should get everything down. There was a bit of a disagreement about what benefits Carl was getting off [the police], and Mr Johnson said he should get it down pat. And then Mr Johnson said, ‘Can you get me on board?’

In evidence, Johnson denied ever saying that. He claimed Williams told him he was only going to talk to police and ‘spin ’em a yarn’ to get his father moved in with him. ‘He said that they [the police] … would gobble it up,’ Johnson claimed in court.

As was widely reported in the media, and detailed in court, Williams had received several benefits from police. Those benefits included having his daughter’s $8000 school fees paid.

‘Roberta found herself in a position where she couldn’t pay the fees so she was using Carl and his relationship with us to seek some relief with those fees,’ the detective directly dealing with Williams said in court. ‘In other words, “Carl, if you don’t get them to pay these fees”—and I am paraphrasing—“then I want you to withdraw your cooperation with them.”’

Williams also demanded police pay his dad’s $750,000 tax bill. (That deal would later fall through due to a higher court decision interstate.)

‘Carl was very up-front about that,’ the detective dealing with Williams told the court. ‘He insisted that that be paid because he felt that he didn’t want George to be effectively homeless or turfed out on to the street if the houses were seized in lieu of the debt at any stage.’

Williams was also chasing a police reward and hoping to have up to ten years lopped off his minimum term.

‘I found Carl to not be a stupid person,’ the lead detective said.

George Williams was released from jail on 20 June 2009. His replacement in Acacia Unit 1 was a bloke called Mr Red, who was moved there on 29 July. Mr Red was doing a minimum fifteen-year stretch for a road rage murder. He and Williams were close, from their days on the outside.

Carl Williams stayed in daily contact with his dad after the old man’s release. During the phone calls between father and son, George spoke to Johnson on the phone every now and then, and each month put $200 into the big bald prisoner’s jail ‘spend account’.

‘While I was in there Mr Johnson and I got on quite well, and he didn’t have much in the way of income or family to look after him,’ George explained.

In February 2010 police wanted to take Carl out of jail to talk to him again. According to George, his son was reluctant. ‘Carl spoke to me on the phone and I think on a visit, and he said that he didn’t want to go out, that he wanted it held in the prison,’ George said in evidence. ‘I spoke to [the lead detective] about it and he said, “No, it’s too dangerous to be held in the prison … it would be better if he went out.”’

High-security offenders like Williams, Johnson and Red are interviewed by the Major Offenders Review Panel on a regular basis to gauge any underlying or brewing animosity. There was no sign of any trouble between the trio in Acacia Unit 1, according to all relevant prison staff who gave evidence at Johnson’s trial. But, according to Brouwer, some intelligence suggested that ‘the dynamic between Mr Williams and Mr Johnson was changing’. On 14 February 2010, Red had a telephone conversation with an associate that should have rung alarm bells. Brouwer wrote:

The associate referred to a ‘lot of people being unhappy’ with Mr Williams … He described Mr Williams as a ‘dog’. The associate urged Mr [Red] to separate himself from Mr Williams. While this telephone call was entered onto the prison’s PROTEL (intelligence) system on 15 February, no further action was taken. It was not reported to the panel monitoring Mr Williams’ placement.

Barwon’s then–acting general manager Nicholas Selisky held a meeting with Williams, Johnson and Red in the week before Williams was killed.

‘I attended the unit and spoke to the prisoners, had a general conversation with all of them and there was nothing [in terms of personal issues] brought to my attention,’ Selisky told the Supreme Court.

A hulk of a man at around 188 cm tall, and weighing a muscle-bound 100 kilograms, Johnson has a frightening aura. By the time he was a raw and ready twenty-one-year-old with a growing list of criminal convictions, he was serving his third stretch in Pentridge Prison.

‘This young man has been in the system for many years now,’ his barrister, Duncan Allen, told a County Court plea hearing back in September 1994.

While the Dickensian jail and its tough-nut population no doubt proved daunting to most young inmates, Matt Johnson used his time in Pentridge wisely—as good grounding for his eventual position as ‘The General’ of Barwon Prison. For a bloke a Supreme Court judge described as ‘intelligent and articulate’, Johnson squandered any potential he may have had. The man is an enigma: disciplined in the ways of personal fitness and prison regimes yet unbridled when it comes to matters of violence. His eyes peer from dark recesses hollowed into his gaunt, bald head. In a black hooded cloak with sickle in hand, Johnson would make a formidable Grim Reaper. In prison he is top dog and self-contained. He walks with the strut and talks with the guttural slang of an institutionalised criminal. He refers to jail as his ‘paradise’. At the time he so clinically and brutally murdered Williams, his cell resembled the living quarters of an army drill sergeant: shoes lined up in straight pairs, clothes and towels squarely folded, his desk in neat order. If it wasn’t for the fact that his toilet was positioned in his cell, he would be a man to certainly never shit in his own backyard. For the most part, Johnson’s history—and with it any possible reasons for his criminal behaviour— has proved a closed book. One has to delve back to the September 1994 County Court plea hearing for any detail of his past. Born on 9 August 1973, Johnson was four when his father died. His mother, Carol Hogg, remarried and had another son: a boy with cerebral palsy.

‘I spent that whole pregnancy in hospital … and Matt was put into, like, a type of foster care because Wayne had to work,’ Carol Hogg told the County Court in 1994.

Johnson’s stepfather was said to be a harsh taskmaster who liked a drink. He ended up walking out on the family, leaving them to fend for themselves. Johnson was about nine at the time.

‘Since those early years it seems that he has been a child initially, adolescent and now a young man with his unresolved anger and hurt,’ Allen said in ’94.

Ms Hogg said:

[Matt] missed Wayne in one sense because the only time that Wayne really paid any attention was when he was playing football, because Matthew has always loved his sport. He used to instil into Matt, you know, you have got to be tough, you have got to be strong … He was just very cruel in the words and the way he would speak to him.

Johnson grew up in the Dandenong area, living in a Housing Commission home. He went to Dandenong Technical School from Years 7 to 9, but was expelled as an undisciplined student. His mum explained:

He was starting to muck up a lot at school and the teachers used to say that they would get frustrated with him because if he misbehaved in class they would put him outside the classroom and even if they brought him back in he would always pass whatever they had learned that day.

Duncan Allen added: ‘[He had] a general unruliness with great problems of relating to people and disciplining himself.’

Johnson was moved to the St Kilda Community High School, which specialised in dealing with problematic students. He passed Year 10 at age sixteen and never returned.

He was a chronic cannabis user. ‘He could never get enough,’ Allen told the court. Johnson also used amphetamines. Despite a couple of months’ work as a concreter and in a bakery before that business shut down, Johnson—who wanted to be a chef—remained long-term unemployed.

‘Like so many others it seems that he may have dropped the bundle in terms of any prospect or hope of finding employment,’ Allen said.

Johnson’s criminal career began in typical fashion with car theft and a weapon offence. Drug and more theft crimes followed. Despite his bleak outlook, he always respected his mum and tried to help care for his younger brother.

‘I never had any problems with Matt at home,’ his mum said in the County Court. ‘Matt has never been rude to me. He has never sworn in front of me.’

And he liked to set the ground rules for his mates. ‘Even to this day his friends sort of know that once you hit that front door there is a rule that they all treat me with the utmost respect,’ Ms Hogg said.

It was said that Johnson had experienced an epiphany while in jail in 1994, and vowed to come out clean the other side of whatever sentence he was about to cop for intentionally causing injury and affray. Allen told the judge:

He tells me, Your Honour, not only does he never want to go to jail again once he has got all this behind him, but he never wants to see the inside of a police station again. He acknowledges that the police dislike him very deeply and he accepts that they have good reason for doing that. He just wants to keep out of their way in future.

It was a hollow hope. Johnson had no strong father-figure and was disillusioned with society. A psychologist would later deem him an institutionalised man ‘living in jail by the law of the jungle in order to survive’. The prison system only helped channel Johnson’s inner demons. In March 1999, County Court judge Michael Strong would sentence him to six years’ jail with a minimum of four on five counts of armed robbery. Armed with a knife and a gun, Johnson and another man broke into an elderly couple’s Safety Beach house thinking they were running through a drug dealer’s den. They robbed the elderly pair anyway, before moving on to another home and robbing separate victims. Judge Strong described Johnson and his co-offender as ‘lawless thugs’.

Four months later, in May 1999, Johnson was sentenced to twenty months’ jail for an aggravated burglary committed against another prisoner whom he planned to assault. It seemed a common theme. In October 1998, Johnson and four other Barwon inmates had kicked and rammed their way into Acacia Unit 4 and bashed deadly career criminal Gregory John Brazel—because they believed Brazel was providing information to prison authorities. The gang’s makeshift weapons included a sandwich maker and a vacuum cleaner extension. An exercise bike seat was also used by one of the prisoners. The assault led to what became known as ‘the trial from hell’, during which County Court Judge Warren Fagan was abused in an extraordinary fashion. Two of the five accused men flashed their buttocks from the dock, Johnson farted into a microphone and a bag of excrement was thrown at the jury.

After being found guilty, Johnson told the judge: ‘Been in the slot [maximum security] for three years and love it … I don’t want to plea. I want to get sentenced right now. I’ve got more dogs to bash.’ In late 2000, Johnson and two of his co-defendants received cumulative sentences of eight years with minimums of six for the Brazel bashing. They successfully appealed and were granted a retrial, pleaded guilty to a lesser assault offence and received concurrent 12-month sentences on top of time for contempt of court.

After his eventual release, Johnson and criminal mate Mark Alan Morgan went on a robbery rampage. It started on 24 May 2007 when the pair terrorised a woman, her fifteen-year-old daughter and a male teenager in a car outside a McDonald’s store in Doveton. Johnson held a semi-automatic handgun to the woman’s head and Morgan punched the teenage girl before the duo commandeered the car. In Craigieburn, the two criminals forced their way inside a house where Johnson placed his gun to an innocent man’s head. The duo robbed the place. Police arrested them that morning at Tooronga Railway station: Johnson’s handgun was cocked and loaded.

Before Johnson answered to those crimes, he went before a Supreme Court jury (in 2009) for the murder of an eighteen-year-old by the name of Bryan Conyers. BJ, as the kid was known, was shot with a 9 mm Luger pistol in a Berwick garage on 22 May 2007 (two days before Johnson’s arrest at the railway station). At a disused house in Pakenham, the youth was sliced open and his insides doused with petrol before his body was incinerated. Police alleged Johnson shot Conyers after giving the kid $50 cash to go and buy cannabis and cigarettes—an errand Conyers failed to complete. During the trial, a man named Timothy Prentice claimed in evidence that Johnson pulled the gun on BJ, asked about the missing money and then shot the kid. Conyers was stripped to his boxer shorts, wrapped in a tarpaulin, placed in the back of a ute with a jerry can of petrol and driven away, according to Prentice. He said a wooden pallet was propped up with bricks, the body was placed on the makeshift pyre and mutilated and doused in fuel. Prentice told the jury he lit his cigarette lighter to look at a bag of clothes. He told the court he was accused of being a ‘a fucking idiot’ and a ‘scatterbrain’ for causing the ensuing explosion.

Cop killer Peter Allen Reid also gave evidence for the prosecution during the Conyers murder trial. Reid claimed that, while in Barwon’s Banksia Unit, he overheard a conversation between Johnson and another prisoner. ‘He knew that [the other prisoner] Paul … was getting out very soon and he was rallying him, as we call it, to help him with the disposal of a witness and some evidence pertaining to this case,’ Reid claimed.

Reid also told the jury that Johnson admitted to shooting Conyers. Reid said Johnson also talked of other things. ‘He talked about things like that if Paul needed weapons or anything of that nature he could go to some people … That they were extremists and they were the type of people that didn’t like Australians. Didn’t like authority.’

In his own defence, Johnson said it was Prentice who had shot Conyers. Johnson told the jury that Prentice had shot Conyers because he said he was not going to give him any speed. ‘I said to Tim, “You fucked up now cunt … you’re a fucking idiot. What’s wrong with you? You’ve just shot him.”’

Johnson also denied confessing to the killing in jail, branding Reid a ‘slimy little critter’. ‘A dog is someone who gives somebody up,’ Johnson said.

A lying dog is someone who makes up lies about someone when they give them up … A lot of people know what Mr Reid’s about. What he does. His trickery … He’s known to make things up about people to better his own situation.

In the end, the jury found Johnson not guilty of murdering Bryan Conyers.

Johnson did not fight the charges relating to the Doveton car-jacking and the Cranbourne armed robbery. In November 2010 (having already murdered Carl Williams while on remand), he pleaded guilty to armed robbery, aggravated burglary, theft and being a prohibited person in possession of an unregistered firearm. In sentencing him to a maximum term of sixteen years with a minimum of thirteen for the car-jacking and the hold-up, County Court Judge Geoff Chettle said:

Your extensive criminal history, together with your conduct on 24 May 2007, demonstrate you to be a career criminal who is a real menace to society. You have not been specifically deterred by prior jail sentences. Your prospects for rehabilitation must be seen as effectively nil. The community needs to be protected from you.

At the time he bashed Carl Williams to death, Johnson had a correctional history of seventy-six separate incidents including multiple assaults on inmates and prison staff, starting a fire, returning positive drug tests, making threats, possessing contraband and damaging property. He had established himself as the founder and leader of a group of inmates who called themselves the Prisoners of War. That group openly loathed anyone who sided with or assisted police. During the Williams murder trial in November 2011, Security Emergency Services Group general manager Bruce Polkinghorne was asked about the POW group and its mantra.

ROCHFORD: In the system, for instance, do Vietnamese prisoners associate together, do Koori prisoners associate together and in this case in Barwon Prison was there a group of prisoners who colloquially were known as the Prisoners of War?

POLKINGHORNE: That’s correct.

ROCHFORD: And Mr Johnson was the self-titled ‘general’ or one of the leaders of that group in the prison system?

POLKINGHORNE: That’s correct.

ROCHFORD: Is one of the codes that that group adopt and tend to live by that they don’t like informers— people who give information to authorities?

POLKINGHORNE: That’s correct.

Despite his obvious standing within prison ranks, Johnson claimed at his trial that Williams was able to intimidate him and even threaten him after Red moved into Acacia Unit 1. When asked how he would have fared in a fist fight with Williams, Johnson admitted that he would have won quite easily. That was an understatement. Johnson would have destroyed Williams in a punch-on at close quarters.

‘He seemed to think that he had to show [Red] that he was the boss of me, sort of try and talk down a bit—get his own way,’ Johnson claimed in evidence.

As time went on it got a bit worse. Some days I’d come out of me cell and I’d make it a habit of saying good morning to everyone. He’d just look at me, stare through me like, ‘What are you talking to me for.’ I’d just let it go … There was many times I would have liked to have punched him in the jaw but you’ve got to think of outside issues. He let it be known that he got Mario Condello killed while he was in jail. He let it be known that when he fell out with the Morans he went after their family. He was always boasting about things like that.

(Mario Condello was a reputed leader of the criminal group commonly referred to as the Carlton Crew. Condello was shot dead in his garage on 6 February 2006. At the time this book went to print, no-one had been charged.)

In court, Johnson claimed Williams boasted of personally killing three men: Mark Moran, a standover merchant named Richard Mladenich, and an unnamed bloke he supposedly hit with a hammer when he was in his twenties. According to Johnson, Williams also bragged that he had organised other gangland murders including that of Moran family ally Graham Kinniburgh.

‘Like I’d be talking to someone about the footy, he could talk about having people murdered,’ Johnson said during his trial. ‘He claimed that there was fifteen people all up.’

BILL STUART [DEFENCE BARRISTER]: What was his reputation in the prison?

JOHNSON: We all watch TV—underworld kingpin. Serial killer … [he] lapped it up.

Mark Rochford challenged Johnson on the subject of Williams’s alleged jailhouse confessions.

ROCHFORD: There’s one golden rule in prison—you don’t talk to other people about what you’ve done because someone might turn into a dog and bring up a jailhouse confession against you. Correct?

JOHNSON: Some people live by that rule. Yep.

ROCHFORD: I suggest to you … it’s completely unbelievable for you to be saying that Carl would be telling people about murders he’s committed— in the [unit] gym, in the exercise yard, so loud that you could overhear it … Because you wouldn’t do that in jail because someone might turn around and actually use it against you.

JOHNSON: I wouldn’t but, you know, Carl was different.

To prop up his desired image of Williams, Johnson told the court a tale of how Williams once threatened his life. He said Williams walked up behind him, ran his finger across his throat and told him that’s how easy it would be to kill him.

The Grim Reaper: Johnson fixes the camera with a cold stare as he is lead into court.

‘He thought it was funny,’ Johnson said. ‘Carl was silly for the way he would treat people—very silly—but [he was a] very dangerous man.’

For protection, Johnson told the jury, he placed makeshift weapons around the unit for the time if push ever came to shove. Johnson claimed if that did happen he would have had to kill Williams to ensure his family’s safety on the outside. ‘I had the bike out the front of me cell for easy access,’ he told the jury. ‘I had the sandwich maker up the other end of the unit if I ever needed that … Most people are armed up in jail to protect themselves.’

Prison letters tendered during the trial revealed great insight into Johnson, his true mindset and prison allegiances. It might not surprise many that when it comes to Australian Rules Football he is a Collingwood supporter. He is a fitness and training fanatic. Nicknames of some among his circle include the likes of Andre the Giant, Crazy Eyes, The Chook, Goldmember, and Drama and Turtle of Entourage fame. Camaraderie is strong, and the members try to use code. Enemies are referred to as ‘dogs’ and ‘skunks’. More importantly, the letters— and prison visit conversations—revealed Johnson’s true standing as the self-appointed general and the fact that he viewed Williams as nothing more than a ‘fat sook’ who ‘bit off more than he could chew’.

A Johnson letter to Red, dated 1 January 2010, was written while Red was temporarily moved from Acacia 1. It read in part:

I trust that this letter will find you, my friend, in the very best of health and fighting spirits. Don’t let the dogs win, not ever. I can’t believe that some mindless idiot somewhere actually thinks that your and mine friendship could be under any sort of strain let alone be breakable. Are these people for real?

Mate, just let these idiots know that whatever bullshit intelligence they think they have picked up on is nothing at all but a misreading on their behalf and I’ll be letting them know the same. People make mistakes and this is one. I miss ya big time already, buddy. This bloke here [Williams] now thinks that I have to train with him again in the gym now. Fuck, it took me long enough to sack him as my training partner and now I’m back to the start. He means well. Just reads too many of these bullshit books that all end the same way. Happy New Year mate. We are another year closer to being able to kick back outside one day on a yacht laughing about these bullshit times of our past … See now the enemy even think that they know what is going on and they wouldn’t even know if they had the rubber dick act themselves. I shouldn’t laugh because you’re over there freezing your big balls off while I’m still over here. I’m sure that the powers that be will see this is just a very bad mistake and you’ll be back here cooking up a storm again very soon. I’m still not sold that you have your certificate but you can cook not too bad. But truth be known I do not truly think you’ve worked in any quality restaurants— not the sort that I dine at anyway. But you can cook a decent soup but who can’t, true? I love ya buddy. I’m just stirring. You can also do decent toasted sangas.

Red replied on 4 January. His sense of humour was obvious. In this letter he talked about his new temporary fellow inmate.

Fuck he’s funny this bloke. He’s shorter than me and 145 kilograms and says he only eats salads. He has got ten containers of chips, chocolate, et cetera, et cetera … He got a mad laugh on him, too. He’s got more chins than a Chinese phone directory. I also think they have to lay out speed humps when they seen him going for a smorgasboard. Anyway my friend, train hard and miss you buddy. Your friend always until the end.

Another inmate wrote to Johnson on 14 February 2010.

I’m really glad that the football has started again as I believe that the Pies are going to be a big chance this year. You should have heard [two other inmates] go off last night when Hawthorn was playing. They are already talking about Buddy [Franklin] kicking one hundred goals and Hawthorn winning the flag. I told them to pull up as they only beat Richmond, who in my opinion with their current list would be lucky to make the top eight of the Diamond Valley league. Ha ha. I bet you and Carl are going to give [Red] heaps over the Tigers this year.

I watched a really top Spanish movie on SBS last Thursday night called Amores Perros which was about dog fighting, rooting, armed robberies, hitmen and drugs. It was pretty trippy. Did you watch it? Apart from this brother, not much else going on so I’ll sign off for this week and hope to hear from you soon. Your loyal brother from another mother.

Melbourne city gunman Christopher Wayne Hudson wrote to Johnson on 29 March 2010. Hudson addressed his mail to Matty ‘Hot Pies’ Johnson.

I hope this letter finds you in good spirits as it left here that way … Not much else to say other than Hot Pies. What a win and all the so-called experts had the Doggies as premiers already. I was rapt and let everybody here know it will be the year of the Magpie if we play like that week in, week out. Spewing I’m stuck here and not out there collecting, ha ha. Thanks for the paper clippings. Always find them interesting and good to keep up on the latest—even got a quick mention. Fuck I laughed at Bubbles having Viagra. Ha ha. The villains are killing it and heroes are self destructing. I’m loving it. My time here is good. I have to say I don’t mind it one bit at all so I’ll just cruise until cleared, whenever that may be … Train hard buddy and take the very best of care. Strong and constant. Love and respect. Huddo, Hells Angels MC.

In a letter dated 5 April, about two weeks before he killed Williams, Johnson warned a relative that there would be some upcoming publicity about him. It seems that, even at that point, Williams was a marked man.

Cuz, there will be some media attention soon. I just don’t want you to worry so I’m giving you the heads up. You know what these idiots are like. I’ll be sweet so don’t stress about your big Cuz.

The faithful letters, in the meantime, continued. Another inmate wrote to Johnson on 12 April.

Dear Matty. Hello brother. How are you going? As always I hope that you are well. Thanks very much for the birthday card. It was greatly appreciated and put a big smile to my face … So what’s been happening lately? Are you still training like a machine and if so, what routine are you doing? I had a really strange dream last night that it was your birthday and we were all gathered for drinks at your place. There were bitches everywhere. However we did not get to root any of them which was a shame. However, it looked as though you were enjoying the party which is the main thing. When I woke up I tried to will myself to go back to sleep and continue the dream in the hope that it would turn into one big orgy followed by a massive torture session involving 1) all the cunts we don’t like, 2) sharks, 3) a blowtorch, 4) a nice boat. Unfortunately this did not occur. Ha ha ha ha.

In a letter dated 15 April, Johnson told how prison was a great leveller and returned to the subject of Williams—and how he was expendable. ‘All these so-called underworld gangsters are full of themselves and get a huge shock when they realise they’re all just another bare bum in the shower here. Nothing more.’ Johnson would later say at trial: ‘Jail is a great equaliser. We’re all the same in prison.’

In letters sent the day before he murdered Williams, Johnson hinted through some ominous code about what lay ahead for Carl Williams. One stated, in part:

Adonis, what’s doing buddy? I trust that you and Turtle are coping okay after such an awful loss to the mighty Magpies. Not to worry buddy, as there’s always next time. By now you’d know that Charlie’s [Williams’s] team also lost. What can you do buddy—life goes on, and the vouchers must come to an end. No bad feelings I trust. Well brother, not a lot doing over this way. Same old shit. Just another day in paradise. My paradise.

Go the Pies for the flag this year. Biggest year ahead yet mate. What’s the Turtle reckon? I hope he understands that it’s more than just a game. The chocolate factory is no good through and through. Easter is over—there is no grey area on the footy field. Love you buddy, your loyal friend till they kill me— Matty the General.

In a separate letter he wrote: ‘Not much doing here brother, just D2TE [death to the enemy], the way it should be … I love this shit. I’m the true general so I must keep things in good order true.’

Mark Rochford explained to the jury who Johnson was referring to as ‘the enemy’ in his ‘D2TE’ code.

‘The enemy are the dogs … the people who the Prisoners of War hate,’ Rochford said. ‘Johnson is the founder. He is the general. He feels so strongly about this that in fact, he has it tattooed down the left-hand side of his body.’

Ombudsman Brouwer’s investigation found that, due to a staff shortage, prison collators were up to a week behind in listening to inmates’ recorded phone calls and up to three days behind in reviewing prisoners’ mail. Hutchinson told Brouwer:

Prisoner mail is usually very cryptic and for this reason most gangland-related mail was read by a supervisor [of the Intelligence Unit] … as he … had the experience and the background knowledge to, in most cases, understand the meaning of the mail … This could also lead to a delay in actioning mail if [the supervisor] … was on days off. In the ideal world we would have a number of staff devoted to gangland management but our staffing levels prevent this.

Secretly recorded conversations in visit rooms further revealed Johnson’s contempt for Williams.

‘He’s a fat fucking sook and he bit off more than he could chew,’ Johnson told one visitor.

Out there, the only reason he got away with so much is ’cos no-one suspected him ’cos he was a fucking idiot … [He’s] never done one in his life. Forget Mark Moran mate. He never shot Mark Moran. He never shot a man in his life mate. But [he’s a] very evil thinker … He will get something done if he’s got someone to do it.

At trial, Johnson would claim he was talking shit to a mate when he said that.

‘Just came up in conversation,’ he told Rochford. ‘Talking about the Underbelly movie and how much shit it was.’ Johnson was also heard to describe Williams as a ‘broken man’.

‘He just couldn’t handle the jail,’ he muttered. ‘He was like an evil dangerous cunt but just a weak person.’

The basis for Johnson’s defence was that he killed Williams in self-defence.

‘I had to kill him to keep myself safe and so there could be no repercussions on my family or friends outside,’ he claimed during cross-examination.

The jury was told that Red stuck his head into Johnson’s cell as the Acacia Unit 1 trio were being locked down at 3.30 pm on 18 April. The claim was that Red told Johnson that Williams was planning to kill him. Johnson claimed in court: ‘[Red] said, “Don’t say anything but this one”—meaning Carl—“is planning to get you with pool balls.”’ Johnson’s story was that he sat and stewed in his cell that night and decided to ‘get in first’.

‘I decided that I’d get the bike stem and get him in the morning when he’s eating breakfast, when reading the paper,’ he claimed. Johnson went on to say that Red filled him in with more information the following morning as they walked laps of the yard.

He said he walked into Carl’s cell a couple of days earlier, or the day earlier, and Carl was stretching a sock in his hands. He told [Red] he was going to put pool balls in it and get me with it when I’m eating.

Defence barrister Bill Stuart told the jury that Johnson was a marked man in a ‘kill or be killed’ situation.

According to police statements, Red had told prison staff of tension between Johnson and Williams in the days before April 19 2010. When told that Johnson better not direct any animosity towards officers, Red replied: ‘Johnson told me that the war was not with the staff.’

Rumours that one of Johnson’s mates on the outside had been bashed by Hell’s Angels bikies may have added to Johnson’s frustrations. In his report, Brouwer said that Johnson believed members of the Williams family may have been spreading that information.

‘On 6, 8, 12 and 18 of April 2010, Mr Johnson made a series of telephone calls to a criminal associate concerning rumours of an assault involving his associate,’ Brouwer stated.

In these telephone calls, Mr Johnson sought to establish whether the associate had been physically assaulted by members of the motorcycle gang. Mr Johnson refers to Mr Williams’s family members as being the source of these rumours. Mr Johnson states that he is very upset about the rumours and from the tone of his voice and the language used, appears keen to find the source of the rumours. Mr Johnson seems increasingly angry during each of these phone calls when the involvement of the Williams family is discussed.

A unit supervisor and seven staff were working in the Acacia Unit on the day Carl Williams was to die. Williams had ordered the Herald Sun newspaper for that morning. A story about taxpayers picking up his daughter’s private school fees and his dad’s tax bill happened to be on the front page. George Williams, in his evidence, said those payments were ‘old news’ to Johnson. Nicholas Selisky had read the article before allowing the copy of the paper into Acacia 1.

‘I had no specific concern that Mr Johnson would take any particular view of it,’ Selisky said of the article. ‘It was just another day in Acacia.’

Prison officers Brendan Butler and Suzette Gajic unlocked the cell doors at 8.10 am as normal, releasing the three Unit 1 inmates for their seven-hour ‘run out’. This was life in Acacia.

‘They [the three prisoners] were the same to me as any other day,’ Butler told the court. ‘There was nothing that stood out to me.’ Butler handed Williams his pre-ordered copy of the Herald Sun, and mentioned that he’d made the front page again. Butler clearly recalled Williams saying back to him: ‘Front page today, fifth page tomorrow. It’s just another day.’

Two cameras monitored the Acacia Unit 1 dayroom. The area contained a billiard table, table tennis table, treadmill, weight station with Swiss balls, an exercise bike and kitchenette. There was also a laundry off-camera. The open-air concrete recreation yard was also monitored by camera. The camera feed was relayed to a central post.

‘In the centre [of the Acacia Unit block] is the officer’s post and there’s an area where an officer is rostered for the day to look at the monitors and the alarms that may go off around the whole unit,’ Brendan Butler said at Johnson’s trial. ‘There are a lot of cameras.’ Ombudsman Brouwer found that the CCTV system in the Acacia Unit was ‘unfit for purpose’. ‘There were five monitors, three of which displayed live vision from numerous cameras simultaneously, rotating through different source material. Each small split-screen image was displayed for four seconds only, before the image cut to another source.’

Unit 1 CCTV footage on the morning of 19 April 2010 shows Williams, Red and Johnson going about just another mundane day in jail. As Selisky suggested during his evidence, life in Acacia ‘can get a bit like Groundhog Day’. Johnson does not seem hyper vigilant of Williams, who by that stage of his prison term had dropped about fifteen kilos and weighed in at 87 kilograms. The muscle-bound Johnson turns his back on Williams regularly. Mark Rochford suggested that was odd behaviour for a man who believed that Williams was going to bash his head in with billiard balls. During the morning, Williams rang his barrister, Shane Tyrrell. They spoke about the Herald Sun article.

According to Tyrrell, Williams never expressed any concerns about Johnson, or Red for that matter.

‘He expressed to me that he was happy to be running out with those two people,’ Tyrrell told Johnson’s trial.

Williams also spoke to Roberta on the phone that morning. It was a rushed conversation, thanks to her. ‘We had a small disagreement,’ she said in a police statement. ‘I had to go to a photo shoot for a magazine and Carl wanted to keep talking. Carl seemed a bit agitated about something, but he did not mention any problems.’

Prison officer Butler escorted Williams to the visits area for a meeting with dad George at 10.30 am. Afterwards, Williams said everything was good and Gajic returned him to the interior of Unit 1. In joking fashion she suggested it was his lucky day as she took him in through a different entrance from normal, an entry she referred to as the ‘tradesman’s entrance’. Williams didn’t smile or smirk or crack a funny, as Gajic might have expected. She sensed he was unusually quiet and that something was awry. ‘Carl was usually a pretty jovial type of person.’

Prison officer Stuart Drummond delivered the three inmates their lunch. ‘It’s basically a salad bowl and a roll. They assemble it,’ he explained.

The CCTV footage shows the three inmates pottering around after lunch. Williams sits at the dayroom table and rereads the newspaper while chewing Johnson’s ear off. Johnson stands and disappears into a cell. He reappears brandishing the bike-seat stem (which he had earlier unscrewed after placing his mattress against the bike for cover). He stands behind Williams for a second or two and then marches right up behind him. At 12.48 pm Johnson lands the first blow. It is a mighty whack, much like a baseballer at bat taking a swing. Williams does not know what hit him. He falls out of his chair: lights out. Johnson rains seven more blows down on his head. He openly admitted in court that he was trying to kill Williams when he hit him the first time. Bill Stuart asked him what he was intending when he hit Williams the other seven times.

Murder weapon: The bike seat stem that killed Carl Williams.

‘Make sure he was dead,’ Johnson replied deadpan.

Even though the attack was cold-bloodedly quick, the prison officer with the duty of watching the monitors at central post presumably missed the bashing. Johnson said he was surprised guards did not immediately storm the unit when he started to pound Williams’s head in. Johnson also had time to dump the murder weapon in the laundry before dragging Williams’s limp body by the feet into his cell. Johnson placed a towel over the pool of blood and brain matter on the dayroom floor. Once Williams’s body was in his cell, there would have been no reason to think anything untoward had occurred in Acacia Unit 1. Brouwer would determine that due to the cut feed system in the monitoring room, it was understandable how the console operator failed to witness the killing.

‘It is difficult if not impossible to monitor these screens and take in all the information they transmit,’ Brouwer wrote in his report.

At interview … [the prison officer monitoring the screens] said that at the time of the incident she had directed the self-controlled monitor to view Acacia Unit staff taking a prisoner to another area of Barwon Prison … Prison staff raised concerns that the functionality of the CCTV system in place in the Acacia Unit at the time of Mr Williams’ death was both ‘inadequate’ and ‘faulty’. Prison staff used words such as ‘antiquated’, ‘pathetic’ and ‘abysmal’ to describe the CCTV system.

One guard told Brouwer: ‘I’m not saying [a better system] would have saved Carl’s life but it would have stopped the questions as to why it took us so long to find him.’

At 12.54 pm, about six minutes after the brutal murder, Red picked up the unit landline telephone and called his sister’s number.

‘I can’t talk for long … something’s happened here,’ he said. ‘I think he’s … done something to him … he just went crazy … he’s all right with me—we’re good friends. I don’t know what happened. He just went crazy.’

The sister asked what happened.

‘Oh, he hit him,’ Red replied. ‘I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t looking. I don’t know …’

At 12.58 pm, Red called an associate. ‘I’m shocked, mate,’ Red told him. ‘Something just really terrible just happened. I think Carl’s dead … I think Carl’s dead, mate … Matty just went crazy.’

The associate asked what happened.

‘I don’t know, mate,’ Red said. ‘The screws haven’t come yet or nothing …’

No-one from the jail was monitoring the calls.

It was some twenty-seven minutes after the jailhouse murder when guards came across Johnson and Red marching laps in the recreation yard. The two moved like caged animals in a zoo: confined and annoyed with something playing on their minds. Johnson approached the prison officers and told Gajic to press her alarm buzzer.

‘Carl’s hit his head,’ Johnson said. ‘Don’t send any females in there.’ Gajic asked Johnson what the fuck he’d done. Johnson said that Williams was in his cell. Gajic announced an emergency. ‘Carl’s down! Carl’s down!’ Several guards ran into the unit and located Williams’s body lying face down in a pool of blood in Cell 2. Looking down from the wall with a big blonde smile was a topless centrefold. It was her turn to leer.

‘We’ve ran in, noticed on the ground a towel, an awful lot of blood on the floor and the cell door was pulled ajar,’ Butler recalled of the gory find. ‘I actually opened the cell door and … we have seen Carl lying face down on the ground with an awful lot of blood around him. I could see a large open wound to the back of his head.’

Williams appeared not to be breathing. A ‘Code Black’ was called. Stuart Drummond felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one, and Williams’s pupils did not respond to stimuli. Johnson and Red shook hands before being separated. They stripped off their orange prison gear and were put into empty Cells 5 and 6. Prison staff swarmed the unit. Williams was dragged from his cell back out on to the dayroom floor where prison medicos commenced CPR. They worked for some time in an effort to get his heart beating again. It was like trying to pump petrol through a smashed engine. Williams’s head just gushed red oil. With a battered face and gaping skull, Carl Williams had long departed. MICA paramedics arrived and pronounced him dead.

Johnson yelled at Red in the adjacent cell. ‘I think he’s gone.’

Later, Johnson asked senior prison officer Ashley Langsworth if he could have a shower to wash Williams’s brains off. Langsworth replied: ‘C’mon Matthew, there’s no reason to say things like that.’ An emotionless Johnson then said: ‘Come on boss, people die every day. What’s the big deal?’ In a later recorded interview with Detective Senior Sergeant Peter Harrington, Johnson made a mostly ‘no comment’ interview. The only thing he did say: ‘I acted alone.’ Johnson wrote a short letter to Red nine days after Williams’s death.

No comment: Matt Johnson says very little to police after the jail killing.

He wrote in part:

How are ya doin’ buddy? Stay strong my friend. I’m sure soon enough they will see you had nothing to do with what happened. As I said, just a short one so take care and keep training the body and the mind. Love ya […], you’re a good man. Your loyal friend till the end. Matty.

Matthew Johnson’s murder trial before Justice Lex Lasry kicked off on 6 September 2011. Before it began, Lasry issued a stern warning to the jury members about what would constitute evidence in the high-profile case.

‘I tell you now that publicity about Carl Williams and any previous publicity that you may have seen about this case you must put out of your mind,’ Lasry said. ‘The publicity is irrelevant to the case. Also the fact that the accused man, Matthew Johnson, was a prisoner at Barwon Prison and the circumstances which led to that are likewise irrelevant and should be put out of your mind.’

In his opening address, Crown Prosecutor Rochford told the jury that the killing was deliberate and intentional. While the Crown did not have to prove motive, Rochford suggested the slaying occurred because Williams had talked to police about an investigation. Before playing CCTV footage of the killing to the jury, Rochford warned of its graphic nature.

‘It is real,’ he said.

It’s not TV, it’s not a movie. It is expected that you will have some sort of emotional reaction to it. Everyone in this courtroom, I expect, asks you to get that past you and then to concentrate on the intellectual task in which you are asked to engage … It’s graphic but it’s necessary.

While Rochford told the jury the Crown did not concede ‘in any way, shape or form’ that Johnson felt threatened by Carl Williams, he asked Nicholas Selisky about what other options Johnson may have had if he had felt threatened. Rochford wanted to show the jury that Johnson had other courses of action open to him if, in fact, his tale about being scared of Williams was true.

ROCHFORD: If Mr Johnson on the morning of 19 April 2010 had wanted to be put into an isolation unit, even for a short period of time, could he have abused a staff officer—pushed or verbal abuse— something of that nature, and been moved into a loss of privileges unit as a matter of course? Would that have happened?

SELISKY: There’s an intercom in the cell. You can just press the intercom and alert the staff and say, ‘I need to get out of this unit.’

ROCHFORD: But if he, for instance, didn’t want to inform authorities could he have chosen that other course?

SELISKY: Yes … It’s what’s termed as a professional bail-out in the prison system. The prisoner will do a disturbance to get moved.

Michelle Hosking, acting manager of the Major Offenders Unit, told the trial that Johnson never raised any concerns about Williams or requested a transfer. Johnson tackled that issue while being examined by his counsel.

STUART: Why not during this period speak to the prison officers when you were going to your monthly meeting or just a prison officer who happens to come in on a particular day. Why not tell them?

JOHNSON: Because we don’t do that. That’s informing.

In his opening, defence counsel Bill Stuart foreshadowed the defence case. It was a case of kill or be killed, he said. ‘Mr Johnson was a marked man and, as such, he killed Carl Williams in self-defence,’ Stuart offered up to the jury. ‘There could be, as you will hear, no running from Carl Williams. There could be no hiding from Carl Williams.’

During the three-week trial, Detective Senior Sergeant Stuart Bailey, of the taskforce investigating the murder, said CCTV footage showed that Johnson read a Herald Sun article about defensive homicide a week before the killing. The headline on that story read: ‘And he said it was self defence’.

Johnson told the jury: ‘I don’t read every article. I mainly read the sports or if there’s things about people I know.’

In his closing address, Rochford said Johnson did not have a belief that it was necessary to kill Williams in order to defend himself. ‘He has other options available to him if he believed he was being threatened by Carl Williams,’ Rochford said.

The fact that he chooses not to exercise those other options because of whatever code of behaviour he chooses to live by doesn’t mean it was necessary to do what he did in order to defend himself. He, on the Crown case, preferred to kill Carl Williams rather than choose one of the other options, such as go to the authorities and ask to be moved … If someone is coming at you with a samurai sword trying to harm you, it becomes necessary to do something about that then and there, but this isn’t that sort of situation.

Rochford repeated phrases from Johnson’s letters written in the days before the prison murder. ‘“I am the true general so I must keep things in good order.” That’s got nothing whatsoever to do with a man believing he had to act out of self-defence,’ Rochford said.

That has got to do with the general applying the rules to the Prisoners of War. ‘I must defend myself’—he doesn’t write that.

He is not scared. He is not worried about Carl Williams. Williams is just ‘another bare bum in the shower’. He is not a big-time anything to Matt Johnson.

Rochford said the case was not about the history of Carl Williams.

‘It doesn’t matter what you think of Carl Williams,’ he said.

It doesn’t matter if someone in the community thinks Matt Johnson did the world a favour by killing Carl Williams. It is not about that. Carl Williams was a prisoner sentenced in a high-security unit sitting reading the newspaper, doing his sentence, when Johnson came up behind him and took him out deliberately. It doesn’t matter what Carl Williams was or who he was. That’s no excuse.

Bill Stuart wanted the jury to believe that Williams wanted the role of top dog in jail. ‘Carl Williams was probably, and in fact I suggest, the most dangerous man to have walked the streets of Melbourne in our times,’ Stuart proclaimed. ‘He’s a drug trafficker. He’s a gangland boss. He was a murderer. He was a hirer of assassins. He was a liar. A perjurer. A master manipulator of people. And a “fugazi”; a fake.’

‘With the death of Matthew Johnson, the general of the Prisoners of War would be gone,’ Stuart continued.

You see, the bottom line for Carl Williams was that whilst he walked the streets of Melbourne he thought himself top dog; kingpin … Did Carl Williams no longer wish to be top dog; kingpin, simply because he was removed from the streets of Melbourne? Or did he then decide to become the most dangerous man to walk the corridors of Victoria’s prisons?

Life inside as top dog was what he was looking to.

The jury found Johnson guilty of murder on 29 September 2011 after two days of deliberations. The big bald man, flanked by four prison guards as stout as rugby-union fullbacks, showed no emotion as the forewoman announced the verdict.

In December 2011, Justice Lasry sentenced Johnson to life with a minimum of thirty-two years, telling him his defence of self-defence was ‘fanciful’. Lasry also said he was staggered as to why Johnson and Williams were allowed to remain together in the same unit, considering the dynamic between the two.

‘How the prison authorities permitted that to happen is beyond me,’ he said. ‘It was a killing which appears to demonstrate your belief [Mr Johnson] that you have some special entitlement to kill when you think it appropriate or your ego demands it according to some meaningless underworld prison code.’

At the time this book was written, Johnson was living in Barwon Prison literally like a caged animal. Bill Stuart had told Johnson’s pre-sentence plea hearing of the Spartan conditions Johnson would have to endure for many years to come.

‘He is effectively in isolation and he expects to remain in isolation for the very, very distant future—and that’s a certainty,’ Stuart said. ‘Since the murder of Mr Williams … he spends up to twenty hours a day locked in his cell.’

Johnson was allowed out of his cell for four hours each day, most of which was used for physical training. His yard contained a boxing bag, weights, a treadmill and … an exercise bike.

‘He spends a couple of hours doing exercise and pacing in the yard but cuts short that period out of his cell because there’s no-one to talk to,’ Stuart said. ‘No-one to interact with.’

Every third day, Johnson was allowed into a yard next to other inmates and could converse with them through a cage across a metre-wide walkway.

‘There’s two sets of bars between himself and [the other inmates] … and that is the extent of his contact with any other prisoners face to face,’ Stuart explained. ‘Because of the general absence of interaction with other humans he chooses to return to his cell earlier than would be otherwise allowed.’

In his cell Johnson had a computer, television, radio and books. He was permitted thirty-two phone calls a week, and one contact visit and four box visits—where he is separated from the visitor— per month.

‘It is patent from this that this man will, for the best part of his life, be isolated from other direct contact with people,’ Bill Stuart said. ‘It is a harsh regime … and it is one that he expects will continue perhaps forever.’

In April 2012, Ombudsman George Brouwer presented to State Parliament his report outlining his investigation into Corrections Victoria and the extraordinary murder of Carl Williams. The report ran to 163 pages.

‘As a result of my investigation, I consider that Corrections Victoria failed in its statutory duty to ensure Mr Williams’ safety,’ Mr Brouwer wrote.

This case also highlights several shortcomings which need to be addressed by Corrections Victoria in its administration of Victoria’s correctional system … During my investigation, several witnesses including experienced prison staff raised concerns about Correction Victoria’s decision to allow Mr Johnson to be placed with Mr Williams. They said that they were ‘never comfortable with the placement decision’ and ‘were not surprised’ when they heard that Mr Williams had been killed by Mr Johnson.