‘He jumped out into the lounge room pointing a gun at everyone and going “Pow Pow!”. It’s a toy laser gun and he is running around shooting all of us with the flashing red light. We all had real guns with real bullets. We could have blown his head off’
THE more things change the more they stay the same. In each generation since World War Two the Melbourne underworld has started undeclared civil wars resulting in a series of unsolved murders.
In the 1960s two fruit and vegetable market identities were shot dead and another seriously injured in separate attacks. It resulted in an international inquiry into organised crime and a story that still makes headlines as the Market Murders.
In the 1980s, after the Great Bookie Robbery, gangsters Les and Brian Kane and Raymond Patrick Bennett were murdered as part of an underworld split and a television movie was made about it.
In the 1970s the so-called painters and dockers war ultimately led to a Royal Commission. In the 1950s it was the murder of gangster Freddie The Frog’ Harrison as he uncoupled a trailer from his car on the waterfront.
But by the year 2000 in Melbourne nine men were killed in what appears to be a series of planned, professional hits and there has been hardly a sign of community concern.
Three men were shot as they entered their front gardens, one in his home, two as they arrived or left work, another was followed and killed as he left his brother’s home, one ambushed in his car and another in a seedy motel.
Two were brothers killed ten months apart and all were known associates of major criminals.
One theory is that the underworld pecking order has been disturbed following the murder of Alphonse Gangitano, shot dead in his Templestowe home in January 1998. Another is that an Adelaide crime family has been expanding into Victoria.
But, as far as police are concerned, they are just theories that lack evidence. What they have confirmed is that the victims were all connected through a group of violent Melbourne criminals, but they don’t know if that circle is responsible for the murders, or just attracts them.
In the homicide squad, Crew Two was run by a veteran investigator, Rowland Legg. This team was assigned four of the murders that appear to be gangland related.
The victims appeared to be stalked, all were shot at close range in the head with handguns and all cases remain unsolved.
Because they were stuck with the four difficult murders members of Crew Two were to give themselves the nickname ‘The Headshot Team.’
‘MAD’ Charlie Hegyalji was always security conscious – those in the illegal amphetamine industry usually are.
He filled books with the registration numbers of the vehicles he believed might be following him, was always discreet on the telephone and chose a house that he believed offered him the greatest protection.
His comfortable brick home in Caulfield South is shielded from the traffic noises of busy Bambra Road by ten mature cypress trees that form a six-metre high hedge so thick it has been cut back to allow pedestrians access to the footpath.
There is a 1.5 metre horizontal plank wooden fence that acts as another buffer to noise and, more importantly for Hegyalji, as a screen to stop possible police surveillance.
Near the front door a small white surveillance camera is trained down the six-metre garden path. From inside the house anyone entering or leaving the property can be safely observed on a video screen.
‘Mad’ Charlie lived in the house relatively secure in the knowledge he had done all he could to protect himself and his business from the untimely interruption of police or possible competitors. But, in the end, it wasn’t enough.
‘Mad’ Charlie was killed by a lone gunman who used the criminal’s own security fetish against him. The killer crouched under the first tree inside the fence line and waited until Hegyalji came home just before lam on 23 November, 1998, confident he could not be seen from the street.
Hegyalji was picked up by a business associate about 6pm and they drank at the London Tavern, in Caulfield, the Grosvenor Hotel in Balaclava and Newmarket Hotel, in St Kilda. They met up with two other men for their night of drinking.
To an outsider it would seem like an old fashioned pub-crawl but people like Hegyalji are always on the move, conducting business in pubs and clubs, and avoiding set routines that make them easy to track.
Charlie and one of the men went back to a unit off Inkerman Street, St Kilda, just after midnight. Hegyalji rang a Yellow Cab from his friend’s unit to take the short trip home around 12.40am.
When the door rang Charlie got up to go, leaving half a stubbie. Instead of being dropped off outside his house he ordered the taxi to stop about a block away from home. It was another security habit Charlie had developed. The theory was that if someone was waiting for him he could sneak up unheard. It was 12.50am.
Hegyalji opened the wooden gate and took two steps along the stone path inside when the killer, armed with a handgun, opened fire. One shot missed but before Charlie could react he was shot several times in the head.
Neighbors heard the shots and called the police but Charlie’s obsession for privacy concealed his body from the police torches and the patrol car drove off.
It would have made no difference. He died instantly and the killer, believed to be a tall man with swept-back hair, was gone in seconds, running past nearby Freeman Street.
About seven hours later Hegyalji’s de facto wife, Ellie, was about to prepare breakfast for their two children when she glanced up at the security screen focused on the front path and saw his body.
The security camera remained operational and should have provided the biggest clue in the case. But for all his security precautions, Charlie had grown lazy – there was no tape in the machine. The sensor light at the front of the house had also malfunctioned and Charlie had not bothered to get it fixed.
It is almost certain the killer knew he would not be filmed or illuminated. The odds are he had been a guest in the house or had been told by someone who had.
Either way, it was an inside job.
WHEN Hegyalji, then aged thirteen, arrived at Station Pier as a European refugee he said to his mother in Hungarian: ‘Where is the Statue of Liberty?’ He eventually got over his disappointment at not being in New York, but never forgot the gangster dreams of his adolescence. According to his long-time friend and underworld associate, Mark Brandon Read, Charlie always wanted to be a mobster. ‘All he ever wanted to be was an American gangster in New York. Through his fantasies he ended up becoming everything he wanted to be, except it was in the wrong country,’ Read said.
According to Read, Hegyalji flew to New York and waited outside an old nightclub reputed to be a meeting place for members of the Gambino crime family. ‘He stood in the snow for a week before he finally was able to say hello to Carlo Gambino. He pinched Charlie’s cheek and said hello back. It was the best moment of his life.’
But he was to become more than just a tourist in the crime world. Hegyalji became a violent young standover man involved in rapes and robberies on massage parlours.
In the 1970s he began to call himself ‘The Don’ and modelled himself on the image of the US crime figures he revered. But by the 1980s he found there was more money to be made by being involved in the amphetamine trade than robbing fellow criminals.
In the 1980s a bright chemistry student, Paul Lester, quit university once he knew enough to produce the best amphetamines in Australia. He was a sought-after ‘speed’ cook who was more interested in tinkering with electronics as a hobby than making money from illegal drugs.
But Charlie was the sort who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He abducted Lester at gunpoint from a Rosebud street, then drove him, blindfolded, to a Gippsland property where he forced him to produce amphetamines.
In another cook in Carlton, the process didn’t work according to plan and Hegyalji poured the sludgy and volatile substance out on a tarpaulin, allowing the sun to evaporate the liquid and leaving the amphetamine powder. ‘He called it “sun-dried speed”,’ Read said. In fashionable inner-suburban Carlton, it went with sun-dried tomatoes. Police who dealt with Hegyalji said he was funny and, when it suited him, charming. ‘He was always jovial but he was always trying to run you. He would ask more questions than he answered,’ one said.
According to one detective he bought a book on police informing from the US in the hope he would be able to keep the upper hand when being interviewed. ‘He was prepared to inform but only out of self interest. He would give information to expose his enemies and to keep himself out of jail.’
There was no sign of him ever working and he saw no pressing need to collect unemployment benefits.
But if his quick wit failed he had alternatives. When police raided a Narre Warren farmhouse in 1995 as part of an amphetamines investigation they found a hidden armoury behind a false bedroom wall.
Inside they found nearly twenty pistols, machine guns and shotguns, six cans of mace, false drivers’ licences and silencers. They also found a computer printout from a national security firm that listed alarm systems used through Melbourne. A pink highlighter had been used to identify the systems used in police stations.
Hegyalji’s fingerprints were found on the list.
Read said Hegyalji was called ‘Mad’ Charlie after he bit off the nose of an enemy when he was still a teenager, but when another criminal was given the nickname ‘Machinegun Charlie’ he became jealous and tried to persuade people to give him a more glamorous title. ‘But to everyone he was still Mad Charlie,’ Read said.
In the 1990s he was a semi-regular at the specialist Prahran bookstore ‘Kill City’, where he would pull copies of Read’s books from the shelf and demand to know from the owner if the author had made ‘a million dollars.’ All the time one of Charlie’s minders, a giant of a man, would stand in the doorway of the shop, silently watching his increasingly-eccentric boss make a nuisance of himself. In 1989 Hegyalji was shot in the stomach outside a house in South Caulfield and he later shot a man in the carpark of a St Kilda hotel as a payback. In 1997 he was involved in a gun battle with another criminal associate outside a panel beaters in Prahran. Both men were unhurt.
Hegyalji was charged with attempted murder and kept in custody for just over a year until he was released in July, 1998. The charges were dropped because, as in so many cases involving the underworld, witnesses refused to testify.
Charlie went back to his old patch of St Kilda and Caulfield expecting business to return to normal but, according to police, his place had been filled by others. The people who had been left to run his business were not keen to relinquish control.
He had to flex his muscles and, when he was drinking, loved to wave his handgun around in hotels, playing up to his gangster image. But Hegyalji was forced to stop carrying his revolver with him at all times because, inconveniently, he was increasingly being stopped and searched by police.
In the drug business it can be as dangerous to be owed money as to be in debt. Charlie was owed more than $100,000 when he was killed but the debt lapsed with his death. It is not a financial arrangement that can be listed on Probate documents. Detective Senior Sergeant Legg, prone to the sort of understatement that comes from years of dealing with underworld murders, said: ‘There was a little bit of business friction and there had been some ongoing discussions over the debt.’
In the world ‘Mad’ Charlie inhabited all his adult life, business deals were never committed to paper and some contracts could only be enforced with a gun.
Police do not like to use the term ‘professional hit’, believing it adds glamour to a gutter business, but Legg concedes: ‘That someone was hired to kill him remains a possibility.’ Six days before his murder Hegyalji rang Read to wish the former standover man a happy birthday. ‘I asked him how he got my number (it is a unlisted) and he said; “You know me, Chopper. I’ve got everybody’s number.” He said he had a small problem with a mutual friend but he said it was nothing he couldn’t handle.
‘He seemed anxious and I knew he had some sort of problem.’ Soon after Charlie’s murder Read found that his wife was expecting their first child. It was a son. He named him Charlie in honor of his murdered mate.
VINCENZO MANNELLA was nearly everyone’s friend – outgoing, generous and funny – but sometime during his life of wheeling and dealing, he managed to make at least one serious enemy. And Mannella moved on the fringes of a world in which it doesn’t pay to rub the wrong people the wrong way.
His last night on earth started as a pleasant summer evening. It was 9 January, 1999, with the sort of balmy weather that encourages socialising, and Vince Mannella didn’t need many excuses to get out on the town.
He spent the evening with three friends in a coffee shop in Lygon Street, Carlton, and, later, a restaurant in Sydney Road. Even though it was nearly midnight the group decided to kick on to a wine bar in Nicholson Street.
Mannella, forty eight, and married with two children, drove his blue Ford Fairlane sedan back to his weatherboard house in Alister Street in North Fitzroy, from where he was to be picked up by one of the friends to go on to Elio’s Wine Bar.
He parked the car in the front driveway next to his wife’s BMW and walked towards the front door. The sensor lit the front landing and a security camera pointed from the roof but this would prove to be no help as the camera had never been connected.
He carried a plastic bag filled with leather belts he had just bought, a packet of Peter Jackson cigarettes and his car keys. It was 11.45 pm.
A gunman, who either waited outside the house or followed Mannella’s car, walked up behind him and shot him repeatedly with a handgun. Mannella fell forward, his head resting on the welcome mat at the front landing.
Police have established that the killer carefully planned his escape route before the night of the murder. He ran about eight hundred metres along nearby Merri Creek and then up Albert Street to an agreed pick-up point. He obviously did not want any possible witnesses to connect his getaway car with the sound of gunshots.
But if the killer wanted to leave the scene discreetly he made an odd choice of transport. Police believe he was picked up by someone driving a terracotta-coloured Pontiac Trans Am with an eagle mural on the bonnet.
MANNELLA was the sort of criminal who was big enough to make a good living but small enough to avoid constant police attention.
Detectives who investigate organised crime knew of him, more because he associated with some of the biggest names in the underworld than as a result of his own activities.
According to police, he was an associate of crime figure Alphonse Gangitano, shot in his Templestowe house almost a year before.
He also came to attention as a possible source of amphetamine chemicals during the drug squad operation, code-named Phalanx, into Australia’s speed king, John William Higgs.
When Gangitano opened an up-market illegal casino above a restaurant in Carlton in 1987 he invited many of Melbourne’s major crime figures for the launch. When police raided at 1.30am they found Mannella, Higgs and another major amphetamines dealer in the crowd. When asked by police why he was there Mannella said ‘I come here to eat’ while Higgs said he was ‘Having a feed.’
Police say Mannella was a middle level crime entrepreneur, the sort who was always looking to turn a profit, and wasn’t too bothered what product he had to move – or steal – in order to make one.
In late 1998 he became involved in a gang that specialised in stealing huge quantities of foodstuff. Police believe the gang hit two regional targets and Mannella was the man with the contacts to sell the produce.
Detectives have found he was a heavy gambler, and had owned or part owned nightclubs and coffee shops.
While he was well liked in his own circle and, for a man who didn’t work or receive unemployment benefits, extremely generous, there was an element of violence in his nature.
He was arrested when he was twenty-one for carrying a dagger in his pocket and six years later was found carrying two pistols. In 1981 he had a savage temper.
The owner of a small coffee shop in Nicholson Street, North Fitzroy, told Mannella that he was no longer welcome to play cards there because, ‘He was acting tough, carried a loaded pistol and drove a Mercedes even though he didn’t work.’
Mannella drove to the coffee shop on 20 February, 1981, and three times called the owner outside to try and persuade him to change his mind but he wouldn’t budge.
Mannella then pulled out a pistol and from a distance of less than a metre opened fire.
The wounded man ran down Nicholson Street while Mannella shot him a total of seven times.
Miraculously, he survived, having told hospital staff in Italian that if they didn’t save his life he would come back and haunt them.
Mannella was later sentenced to nine years with a minimum of seven over the shooting. Like ‘Mad’ Charlie Hegyalji, Mannella went back to what he knew when he was released from prison and, like Charlie, he was owed a six-figure amount when he was murdered.
One of the difficulties police face in an investigation into the murder of a man like Mannella is that ‘friends’ can be enemies and that business deals are never documented.
Arrangements are confirmed with a nod, plans are hatched in the back rooms of coffee shops and interested partners tell no-one of their schemes for fear they will be leaked to the police – or, worse, competing criminals.
Mannella was definitely owed money and may have, in turn, owed others big amounts. For a man who drifted in and out of the lives of some of Australia’s most dangerous criminals either situation could have cost him his life.
‘We are exploring possible motives including his criminal associations and debt matters but nothing has been discounted,’ says Legg.
Mannella had $500 in his pocket when he was murdered. The killer didn’t even bother to take it.
RISING early was no problem to Joe Quadara – after all, he had been getting up before the sun for as long as he could remember.
Horse trainers, newsagents and people in the fruit and vegetable industry don’t bother grumbling about early starts as they are a fact of life.
At least for Quadara, his trip to work would take only minutes on the empty streets from his unit in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s most expensive suburbs, to the Safeway supermarket in nearby Malvern Road.
After more than thirty years in the fruit and vegetable industry he had gone from being a millionaire to a bankrupt. He had once owned a string of big fruit shops and was a popular and generous patron of the Collingwood and Frankston Football clubs, but interest rates and an over-committed line of credit brought him crashing down.
He had to sell his shops in Frankston and Mornington, his lavish Mt Eliza house and virtually everything he owned to try and pay off his debts, but there were still at least sixty creditors when he closed his doors.
He owed businesses from $2000 to $50,000 although all of his creditors would admit he hadn’t run away from his debts and had battled to try and make good.
Even though his business reputation may have been in tatters, he was still acknowledged to be a perfectionist in fruit and vegetables, only presenting the best produce and providing the warm personality that makes customers want to come back.
By then aged fifty seven, he had become the produce manager at the Toorak supermarket and when it was taken over by Safeway he kept the job.
He had worked at the wholesale market and in shops nearly all his adult life and was known for his boundless energy and enthusiasm.
But recently he had not been feeling well and had yet another doctor’s appointment for later that day. He had already been told he might need surgery for cancer. What he didn’t know was that it was almost certainly terminal.
That morning he drove his green Commodore into the rear carpark and stopped behind the Crittenden’s liquor shop.
It was 3am on 28 May, 1999.
Two men, both armed with handguns, ambushed him and shot him repeatedly before he could get out of the car. People heard screaming and yelling before the shots.
His body was found ninety minutes later by a Safeway truck driver.
It was seemingly a murder without motive and police are yet to find the answer to a series of basic questions such as:
Why would two men execute a seemingly harmless fruiterer in a deserted Toorak carpark?
What is it about Joe Quadara that would drive other men to kill? And why, at his funeral a few days later, did three of Melbourne’s most notorious gangsters, including the main suspect on the shooting Alphonse Gangitano, the man who was at Alphonse’s house when the murder was committed and Gangitano’s former right-hand man, all turn up to pay their last respects?
Police have now established the two killers were seen in the car park the previous day in a dark, medium-sized station wagon. It is possible they believed Quadara had the keys to the safe and the yelling seconds before he was shot was part of a failed robbery bid.
But Joe Quadara wasn’t even the purchasing officer at the supermarket so he didn’t carry company funds or have access to it.
Detectives said he was a good fighter when he was younger and had developed a strong survival sense developed from three decades in an industry often connected with seemingly unexplained murders.
If someone had put the squeeze on him the pressure would have been put on gradually and he wouldn’t have been parking in a dark carpark at work,’ one detective said. If robbery was not the motive then the killers checked the scene the day before as part of their plan to execute Joe Quadara.
But was it the right Joe Quadara?
There is another Joe Quadara, also aged in his mid fifties, also with connections in the fruit and vegetable industry – and with a more colourful past.
This man was named in an inquest as having prior knowledge of the murder of Alfonso Muratore, who was shot dead in 1992. He denied the allegations.
Muratore was the son-in-law of Liborio Benvenuto, the godfather of Melbourne who died in 1988. If it was a payback, it seems the wrong man paid the debt.
GERARDO MANNELLA would have known in the last few seconds of life the answers to questions homicide squad detectives are still trying to find.
As he left the house of his brother, Sal, in inner-suburban Melbourne on 20 October, 1999, he saw two men walking out of a lane fifteen metres away.
Police say he immediately yelled ‘No’ and ran about fifty metres, dropping a power tool and mobile phone he was carrying.
Detectives say it was likely Mannella recognised the men or saw the guns and knew they had come to kill him.
He ran from the footpath out to the middle of the road when they caught him, shooting him repeatedly in the head.
Mannella, thirty one, had been to work as a crane supervisor at the City Square project and to a union meeting before going to his brother’s home in the middle of the afternoon. He had not been in trouble with the police for years and his last problem had been for carrying a pistol seven years earlier.
Police don’t know if he was followed to the house or the killers had been tipped off, but they were waiting when he left to go to his Avondale Heights house about 8pm.
The killers were picked up by a third man driving a dark Ford station wagon. Mannella, the father of three, gave no indication when he left the house that he thought was in danger, but one career criminal with a history of providing solid information said Gerardo had repeatedly said he intended to find and kill the men who shot his brother, Vince.
‘It is most unwise to speak openly about these matters because if people take you seriously they will be forced to get in first.’ Dead men can’t hurt anybody.
THE Esquire is a good magazine but a bad motel. It has about forty rooms and most nights nearly all of them are occupied by people who want cheap accommodation close to Fitzroy Street in the busy heart of St Kilda, Melbourne’s equivalent of Sydney’s King’s Cross.
The increasingly fashionable suburb, where millionaires and professionals now rub shoulders with the street people, still has a few hangovers of its seedier past – and the Esquire is one of them, a 1970s building in Acland Street that has packed a lot of low life into its three decades.
Drifters, backpackers, runaways, prostitutes and drug dealers can all get rooms. Some just stay the night; others stay for as long as they can afford the tariff, never having the security nor the confidence to look for something more permanent.
Late in 1999 a man moved into room eighteen and made himself at home. He showed no sign of wanting anything better. For him the location was perfect – and at $50 a night the price was right.
He was a drug dealer and he turned the room into a 24-hour a day business address. There was no need to advertise. Word of mouth in the street is all a pusher needs.
Local police say that for six months he worked ‘red-hot’ and built a strong customer base.
The dealer had visitors at all times of day and night. One of them was Richard Mladenich. The fact that it was 3.30am, that one man was asleep on the floor, a woman asleep in a bed and a third person was also in bed would not have fazed the man who loved to talk.
When the door of room eighteen swung open a little later to reveal an armed man, it was one of the few times in his life that the standover man and serial pest was caught short for words.
The assassin didn’t need to break down the door – underworld murders are seldom that dramatic. The door was unlocked and all he had to do was turn the handle slowly enough not to forewarn the victim. Before he walked in he yelled the name of the resident drug dealer – almost as a greeting – to show that he was no threat.
By the time Mladenich realised he was in danger it was too late. When he stood to face the young man in the dark glasses and hood, he saw a small-calibre handgun pointing directly at him.
His experience of more than twenty years of violence would have told him that only luck could save him. It didn’t.
Before he could speak the gun barked and the man holding it was gone, leaving Mladenich fighting a losing battle for life.
Many people would have wanted Richard Mladenich dead but, ironically, the man who pulled the trigger might not have been one of them. At least, that’s the theory put up by those investigating the shooting.
Rather than the killing being an organised underworld hit, some police say, it was more likely to have been a botched job, in that Mladenich was not the gunman’s intended target.
If the theory’s right it adds a black postscript to the recurring theme of his short, brutal and wasted life: that is, he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
MLADENICH was a drug dealer, a standover man and a loudmouth. He was also funny, outrageous, a showman and a jailhouse poet with a sense of theatre. If Mladenich, thirty seven, was hunted down by a hitman on 16 May, 2000, then detectives have a big problem. It will not be trying to find suspects who wanted him dead, but to eliminate potential enemies from the long list of possible gunmen.
If he was followed then the killer did a professional job, as Mladenich had visited several other rooms at the Esquire before he reached room eighteen just before 3am.
According to former standover man, Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, Mladenich was ‘a total comedy of errors’ and ‘without a doubt the loudest and most troublesome inmate in any jail in Australia.’
In 1988 Read and Mladenich were both inmates in the maximum security H Division of Pentridge Prison during the so-called Overcoat War between prisoner factions.
‘Poor Richard fell over and hit his head on a garden spade but he told the police nothing and dismissed as foul gossip and rumor suggestions that I had hit him with it.’ Read was never charged with the attack but Mladenich carried permanent reminders of it in the form of scars on his forehead.
One night in jail Mladenich grabbed his plastic chair and banged it against his cell bars from 8.30pm until 4.20am – not as part of a jail protest, but simply because he thought it was funny.
‘He was never short of a word. He went to Joe the Boss’s place and stood outside yelling threats. This was not wise and a short time later he was shot in the leg in what was an obvious misunderstanding. He kept yelling abuse before he limped off. He could be flogged to the ground and then he would say, “Now let that be a lesson to you”.’
Mladenich was fourteen when he was charged with stealing a car in Footscray. He was to end with a criminal record of more than nine pages and twenty-four aliases, including Richard Mantello and John Mancini.
But while he considered himself a smart criminal his arrest record is filled with offences involving street violence. He was no master gangster.
His lengthy police file included a large number of warnings, including that he had ‘violent rages that can be triggered off at any time … he will attempt to kill a (police) member or members.’
One entry read: ‘According to prison officers with years of experience they stated (Mladenich) was one of the craziest and most violent offenders they have seen. (He) is a mountain of a man who has a very violent and unpredictable nature. He must be approached with caution and extreme care. A tough cookie.’
Read said Mladenich had a fierce heroin habit from the mid 1980s. ‘He would come into jail looking like a wet greyhound and then he would pump iron and build up while inside.’
Nearly ten years ago Read predicted that Mladenich would die young. ‘The drugs will kill Richard and it’s sad to see.’
Read, now a best-selling author living in Tasmania, says many of his old friends and enemies were being murdered because they refused to accept they were too old to dominate the underworld.
‘The barman has called last drinks but these people won’t go home and they just hang around to be killed. I have found that the writing of books is a far better way for your middle-aged crim to spend his winter nights, well away from excitable types with firearms.’
Former drug squad and St Kilda detective, Lachlan McCulloch, said Mladenich was one of the more bizarre criminal identities he had investigated in sixteen years.
McCulloch said that during a drug raid in Albert Park armed police were searching a house when ‘There was this amazing scream and Mladenich jumped out into the lounge room pointing a gun at everyone and going “Pow Pow!”. He has this toy laser gun and he was running around shooting all of us with the flashing red light. The trouble was we all had real guns with real bullets. We could have blown his head off.’
McCulloch said that while Mladenich was eccentric and violent (‘He was as crazy as they came’) he lacked the planning skills to be successful in the underworld.
The former detective said Mladenich, who liked to be known as ‘King Richard’ but was also known by others as ‘Spade Brain’ and ‘Mad Richard’, had ambitions to run a protection racket. He stood over prostitutes and drug dealers but wanted to broaden his horizons. ‘He wore this black gangster’s coat and a black hat and walked into a pub in South Melbourne. He said he wanted $1000 a week for protection money and he would be back the next day.’
When he came back twenty-four hours later he didn’t seem to notice a group of detectives sitting at a nearby table, sipping beers. He was arrested at his first attempt at the shakedown.
Read said one detective tired of dealing with Mladenich through the courts. He said the detective walked him at gunpoint to the end of the St Kilda Pier, made him jump in and swim back. ‘Would have done him good too,’ Read said.
As a criminal he was a good poet, reciting his verse to a judge who was about to jail him. He once was waiting in a Chinese restaurant for a takeaway meal when he started a friendly conversation with the man next to him, complimenting him on a ring he was wearing.
When the man left the restaurant, Mladenich was waiting outside to rob him of the ring. ‘He nearly pulled the finger off with it,’ a detective said.
He had a long and volatile relationship with many Melbourne barristers and judges. He was known to have stalked a prosecutor, Carolyn Douglas (later appointed a County Court Judge), to have disrupted Supreme Court trials and abuse lawyers who have appeared against him. He once chested a respected barrister, Raymond Lopez, in the foyer of Owen Dixon Chambers. ‘It is the only time I have felt under physical pressure in that way. I thought he was as high as a kite,’ the barrister was to recall.
‘He calmed down but he struck me as the type who could turn quickly.’
He walked into one of his old lawyers’ offices, locked the door and asked for money. At the same time he noticed the barrister’s overcoat on the back of the door and started to go through the pockets. It was a stunning turnaround to have a client fleece his barrister, and earned Mladenich an enduring reputation in legal and police circles.
One member of the underworld said many were happy that Mladenich was dead. ‘He was a hoon, a pimp, and lived off everyone else. He never did one good job but he would come around looking for a chopout.’
But, as is the tradition in Melbourne when a criminal dies violently, the Herald Sun newspaper was filled with death notices, including some from well-known criminals, career armed robbers, and an underworld financier dying of cancer and several others well connected in the underworld.
It is believed that Mladenich had run up drug debts with at least two heavy dealers who were prepared to write off the money. Neither was likely to order his murder.
The dead man’s older brother, Mark, who repeatedly tried to help Richard straighten out, said of him: ‘He was sixteen when he was in the hardest division in an adult jail. He wasn’t allowed to be soft. He had to be hard to survive.
‘I know about his record but when he was with his family he was different. He was good-hearted.’
Mladenich was released from prison only a month before his death and told friends and relatives he was determined to keep out of trouble. But, as usual, Richard wasn’t telling the whole truth. Within weeks of his release he was trying to establish a protection racket by standing over restaurants in Fitzroy Street.
There was an incident in jail, shortly before his release, that left him with another group of enemies. The story circulating in some criminal circles was that Mladenich had stood over a relatively vulnerable young inmate in jail, unaware the man was connected to a powerful Romanian crime family.
When the young man told his family about Mladenich’s humiliation of him, the story goes, they sent a teenage gunman to avenge their relative’s honor. According to the story, the killer was too young to drive a car and had to be driven to the scene.
It is alleged he uttered the Romanian curse, ‘You are the Devil and we have rid the world of you,’ as he left the room.
But police are sticking to their less romantic scenario. They believe the young gunman went to the flat to either kill or rob the drug dealer who had lived in the room for six months. But when he opened the door and found Mladenich, he panicked and started shooting. If so, it proves the old saying about the dangers of having a reputation.
LESS than twelve hours after Mark Moran was murdered outside his luxury home, a group of his associates met in another house in the northern suburbs of Melbourne to begin planning a payback killing.
Even before the body was removed from the crime scene police knew they were in a race with the Moran clan to find the killer.
If homicide squad detectives were to get there first there was every chance the killer would be charged and, if convicted, would be sentenced to prison by a Supreme Court Judge.
But if the Moran gang won the race the sentence would be automatic – death – and there would be no appeal. Mark Moran, thirty six, was always the apparent white sheep of the family, the one who stayed in the background and kept a low profile. But on 15 June, 2000, the man who shunned publicity made the headlines, the latest victim in the underworld war known to have claimed nine lives since January, 1998.
Moran’s natural father, Leslie John Cole, was ambushed and shot dead outside his Sydney home on 10 November, 1982. He was the first victim of the gangland wars that resulted in the death or disappearance of eight Sydney underworld figures in the early 1980s. It took eighteen years, but Mark went the same way as his father – proof that, in crime as in horse racing, blood in the end will tell.
If police had any doubts about the potential consequences of Mark Moran’s death, they were to learn otherwise within hours. A close relative of the dead man snarled at detectives: ‘We will look after this. You can go and get fucked.’
The Moran name has been well-known through three generations in Melbourne criminal circles and the clan’s reputation was not earned with a pacifist philosophy.
Within twenty-four hours of the murder Detective Inspector Brian Rix of the homicide squad admitted police were receiving little help from the Morans. He further ventured that the shooting had ‘all the hallmarks of an underworld slaying.’ Then the normally taciturn Rix produced a remarkably long sentence.
‘The indications are that he was out of his car at the time of the shooting, which means that perhaps his killers laid in wait,’ he said.
Sometimes you can deduce more from what police don’t say. What Rix didn’t raise in public was why Moran had left his house for less than thirty minutes on the night he was killed.
Who had he gone to meet? Did the killer know Moran would go out and then come back fairly quickly?
It is fair to conclude that an armed killer would not sit outside a luxury house in a luxury street all night on the off chance the target would venture out. Unless he happened to follow Moran back to the house after seeing him elsewhere he had to have inside knowledge.
So the real question became: ‘Who set him up?’
Police tried to use the underworld anger to try and help solve the murder. They were the hunters on horseback chasing the hounds who were chasing the fox.
If they timed it well, the hounds would take them to the fox. If they didn’t the hounds would tear it apart first.
As Rix said: ‘Mark fancied himself as a bit of a heavy. I would think the underworld will talk about this to somebody, and I’m sure that will get back to us in some way.’
But he acknowledged the dangers. ‘It’s a real concern that they’ll go out and try and seek retribution, but we’ve got to try to get to the family and say that is not the way to go about things … they’ve got to trust the system.’
The basic facts are that Moran left his million-dollar home in Combermere Street, Aberfeldie, near Essendon, for just over twenty minutes. When he returned a gunman shot him as he got out of his late-model Commodore. The shotgun blast knocked him back into the car, killing him instantly.
It was no surprise when it became known that a Moran had been murdered. The surprise was that it was Mark and not his elder half-brother, Jason, the notorious gangster serving two years and six months over an assault in King Street, Melbourne.
Jason Moran was a close associate of Alphonse Gangitano. The two men were both facing charges over the King Street brawl, but Gangitano was murdered before the trial.
It is believed that Gangitano and Moran fell out ‘very shortly’ before Gangitano was murdered. Very shortly, perhaps.
While Jason Moran was seen as wild, violent and erratic, his younger half-brother was calmer and tried to keep a lower profile. ‘Jason was out of control, Mark was the brains,’ said one policeman who has investigated the family.
But as Jason became increasingly restrained by court action and stints in jail, Mark began to assume a higher profile.
About eighteen months before his death, he took offence when an associate made a disparaging comment about a female relative.
‘He went around to the guy’s house, stuck a gun in his mouth, took him away and seriously flogged him,’ a criminal source said.
Last year, he was involved in assaulting a policeman at Remington Racecourse on Oaks Day.
About six months before Mark’s death the Moran brothers had a falling out with a father-son team who produced amphetamines. The dispute was over a failed speed lab.
As is the norm in this world the dispute was handled with firearms. A women heard an argument in a Broadmeadows location followed by a man crying out, ‘No, Jason.’
The result was the son was shot in the stomach, a wound that apparently caused a form of amnesia, because the victim could not later assist police in finding out how the bullet got there.
Detectives believe the Moran brothers claimed the father-son team owed them $400,000. They believe that Mark pulled the trigger.
On 17 February, 2000, police noticed Mark Moran driving a luxury car. When they opened the boot of the rented car, they found a high-tech handgun equipped with a silencer and a laser sight. They also found a large number of amphetamine pills that had been stamped through a pill press to appear as ecstasy tablets.
In a raid the day after Mark’s murder police raided an associate’s home and seized another five thousand tablets similar to those found in the boot of the hire car. Months before Moran’s death he was ejected from the County Court after trying to use a false name to get into the plea hearing after his brother was found guilty over the King Street assault. AFL footballer Wayne Carey gave character evidence for Jason Moran, for reasons that remain unclear.
Police said Moran was one of the new breed involved in drug trafficking known as the ‘Bollinger Dealers’, who associated with minor celebrities and the new rich.
They wore designer suits and used a pill press to stamp their amphetamine products to look like party drugs such as ecstasy.
Mark was a former professional chef and a ‘gym rat’ who was often seen at the Underworld fitness centre in Melbourne. He once listed his occupation as personal trainer.
But he had not worked regularly for years and police say his high-income lifestyle and magnificent home could have only been supported through illegal activities. He refused to speak about business on telephones and rarely spoke with associates in his house because he feared he was being bugged by police.
He was extremely proud of his fitness levels and physique and was described ‘extremely narcissistic’. He was well dressed and when he was shot he was wearing a huge diamond stud in his left ear.
Mark Moran was young, good-looking, rich and extremely fit. But in the months leading up to his murder he was depressed and at one point hospitalised when he told friends he was considering suicide.
The day before Moran’s murder police conducted a series of raids on a sophisticated amphetamines network and a number of criminals, including one known as ‘The Penguin’, were arrested.
One theory police are looking at is that someone connected with the network wrongly blamed Mark Moran for having informed on them to try to remove a competing drug syndicate.
A second underworld rumor was that he was considered an easier target to kill, because Jason was in jail and unable to fight back.
A third source suggested that a gangster with a grudge against Mark ordered the murder after warning him he was on thin ice.
But the favorite early theory was that it was a payback by the father-son ‘speed’ team and certainly that was the one the Moran family seemed to believe, at least initially. The favourites had good alibis for the night in question. While this may have impressed the police it left associates of the Morans unconvinced.
Within days of the murder there were reports of shots fired near the North Fitzroy family home of the main suspects.
Police sources said they were concerned for the welfare of a lawyer who regularly socialises with several members of the Moran family.
‘It is not the right time to be taking sides,’ a detective said last night.
The Herald Sun, the underworld’s newspaper of record, was filled with death notices to a ‘lovely gentleman’. There were many from former league footballers including one from a colourful former Carlton captain who fondly remembering them running a victory lap after a premiership in the 1980s.
There was one notice falsely placed under the nick-name of a drug squad detective. Police suspect it was placed to give the appearance Moran was talking to police when he was killed.
The funeral was the usual procession of real friends, hangers-on, crims in black suits who refused to take their sunglasses off, even though it was a cold winter’s day, and bikies who would not take their colours off, even when inside the church.
Jason Moran was allowed day leave from prison to speak at the funeral. Mourners said the brother spoke with real emotion but his death notice concerned police. It read: ‘This is only the beginning, it will never be the end. REMEMBER, I WILL NEVER FORGET.’
Some mourners were less than impressed when a long-haired Hells Angel insisted on embracing Jason inside the church. ‘You should never touch someone on day leave.
What if the screws think you’ve slipped him something,’ said a mourner with plenty of jail time. Because the funeral was going to choke local streets a request was made for uniformed police to control traffic but a senior policeman vetoed the plan. He didn’t want media images of police holding up traffic for some of Australia’s most dangerous gangsters and their hangers on.
While Mark Moran had a low public profile police had no doubt he had a long, and violent, criminal history.
Career criminal Raymond John Denning once told an inquest that Moran was one of three men involved in an armed robbery where a guard was shot dead.
He said the other two men involved were the notorious Russell ‘Mad Dog’ Cox and Santo Mercuri.
The robbery occurred on 11 July, 1988, in Barkly Square, Brunswick. Two armed guards leaving the Coles warehouse with a cash tin were held up at gunpoint. A struggle followed and Dominik Hefti, thirty one, was shot in the chest and the leg. He died two days later at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Denning said the three men planned to kill a woman whose car Mercuri had stolen for his getaway. Denning said: ‘It was decided among the three of them that they try to find her home address and knock her because she was the only one that Sam believed had identified him.’
Senior Sergeant Peter Butts, formerly of the armed robbery squad, said that when police later raided Russell Cox’s Doncaster home, they found that the the page of the telephone book carrying the woman’s name and address had been torn out. Hefti’s murder sparked another spate of killings. Police wrongly believed that an armed robber called Graeme Jensen was responsible and he was shot during an attempt to arrest him on 11 October, 1988.
The following day two young police constables, Steven Tynan and Damian Eyre, were murdered in Walsh Street, South Yarra, as a payback. It was the biggest outrage against Victoria’s police since the Stringybark Creek shootings by the Kelly Gang in the 1870s. Mark Read had predicted only weeks before Moran’s shooting there would soon be another murder.
It is heating up quite nicely at the moment and it is a long way from finished. It is a good time to be retired,’ he said at the time.
Police said that in nearly all the underworld murders since 1998 the killers had either stalked their victims or had inside knowledge of their movements.
Police do not know if all the murders are linked but they have been able to find that nearly all the victims knew each other. Interestingly, many were invited to the opening of Alphonse Gangitano’s illegal casino in 1987. Which proves, if nothing else, that it’s a small world.
There’s another postscript to the Moran murder. In their idle moments, detectives and others interested in the case wonder if there might be a link between the murder and the unsolved killing of Frank Benvenuto, shot dead in Beaumaris on 8 May, 2000. Benvenuto was the son of the former Godfather of Melbourne, Liborio Benvenuto, one of the fortunate people in his field to die of natural causes, which he did on 10 June, 1988.
Moran and Frank Benvenuto were what police call ‘known associates’, which is not always the same thing as lifelong friends. Moran was killed with a shotgun, the preferred weapon in Italian payback killings. Although, as any member of the largely law-abiding Italian community would point out, shotguns are very common weapons.
VICTIM: |
Alphonse John Gangitano. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead in his Templestowe home on 16 January 1998. |
| MOTIVE: | Falling out with former friend. |
VICTIM: |
Mad Charlie Hegyalji. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead in front garden of his South Caulfield home on 23 November, 1998. |
| MOTIVE: | Possibly debt or drug related. |
VICTIM: |
Vince Mannella. |
| DETAIL: | Shot as he returned to his North Fitzroy home on 9 January, 1999. |
| MOTIVE: | Possibly debt related or connected with an underworld power struggle. |
VICTIM: |
Joe Quadara. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead as he arrived at work at a Toorak supermarket on 3am on 28 May, 1999. |
| MOTIVE: | Unknown, possibly armed robbery gone wrong. |
VICTIM: |
Dimitrios Belias. |
| DETAIL: | Found by cleaners in a pool of blood below a St Kilda Road office on 9 September, 1999. |
| MOTIVE: | Failure to pay gambling debt. |
VICTIM: |
Gerardo Mannella. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead as he left his brother’s North Fitzroy home on 20 October, 1999. |
| MOTIVE: | Possibly pre-emptive strike because the killers believed he planned to avenge his brother’s murder. |
VICTIM: |
Frank Benvenuto. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead in Beaumaris on 8 May, 2000 |
| MOTIVE: | Debt related. |
VICTIM: |
Richard Mladenich. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead while visiting a friend in a St Kilda motel on 16 May, 2000. |
| MOTIVE: | Possible mistaken identity. |
VICTIM: |
Mark Moran. |
| DETAIL: | Shot dead outside his luxury home near Essendon on 15 June, 2000. |
| MOTIVE: | Possible payback for earlier shooting. |