Chopper Unchopped (229 page)

IN 2003, police were finally forced to admit Melbourne was in the middle of an underworld war. They responded by setting up the special gangland taskforce code named Purana.

The investigators quickly established that a small gang of crooks controlled by a chubby western suburban drug trafficker called Carl Williams was determined to kill most of Melbourne’s established crime figures. Many of the victims could be linked to Read’s old enemies – Alphonse Gangitano and the notorious Moran family.

The feud began when standover men Jason and Mark Moran shot Williams in the stomach in October 1999. Williams vowed revenge and effectively declared open season on his enemies. (At the time of writing, he has been sentenced to 35 years’ jail for masterminding the audacious series of murders that came to be called the underworld war.)

But four years before police set up their taskforce, poacher-turned-gamekeeper Mark Brandon Read warned that Melbourne was about to witness a serious underworld war and predicted many of the dead and wounded would be old associates of the man he dubbed ‘Fat Al.’

Read was amazed that no-one seemed to realise what was happening in front of their eyes.

In 1999 Read wrote
: Make no mistake, the bodies will keep falling but for reasons I don’t understand, no-one seems to get excited.

You can find it between the fashion pages and the sports liftout.

They write more about a new risotto recipe than the blood and guts of an underworld war. God help us and pass me a café latte …

Let’s make it clear on the long-range forecast. Before this is finished, it will make the old Market Murders back in the ’60s look like nude mud wrestling.

There is a group of whackers who ran around flogging, belting and shooting people when they were part of Al’s team.

Each and every one of them has been noted and their dance cards have been marked. They will all get a visit and then will head to the morgue.

In years to come, we will talk of the sabre-toothed tiger, the dodo and Alphonse’s crew in the same breath … all extinct.

I was considering retiring from crime writing, but from what I have heard, I may have a lot more to write about quite soon. Watch this space. There are more bodies to come.

If you sit by a river for long enough, you will see the bodies of all your enemies float by.

I said that years ago.

I forgot to mention that they will float past a damn sight quicker if you have a couple of mates upstream pushing the bastards in for you.

YEARS before Purana was established, Read predicted that a new group of criminals planned to wipe out the existing underworld power brokers. He wrote:

The media will gobble it up as an underworld war. They will never know it is an extermination program. With any luck some of those on the list will blame others on the list for some of the deaths and start to kill each other.

READ now gives an insider’s view of the murders that fascinated Australia.

Shot dead by fellow standoverman Al Gangitano in St Kilda on February 7, 1995

GREG wasn’t a bad bloke. He came from a tough working-class family in Preston, not that he ever did much work himself. Good looking and with the gift of the gab, in the underworld sea he was neither a bottom dweller nor a shark. He was big enough to eat little fish, but had to keep away from the big ones.

If he had stayed in the second division he could have made a bit of money, done a bit of jail, given it all up, got a job, drank beer and eaten hamburgers, dying fat and happy in his mid-60s from heart disease.

Instead, he dreamed he could be a player in the big league. But, sadly, he wasn’t up to it. He was a flathead who thought he was a killer shark.

He had a falling out with Fat Al when they both ended up at a party in St Kilda. It was supposed to be a party – a ‘pull up’ where everyone tipped in for bail money for a sucker who had just been snipped for some armed robberies.

But Al wasn’t in one of his more charitable moods and things turned nasty. Workman and Al exchanged words – they must have been loud ones because someone called the local police over the noise. The coppers were assured there wouldn’t be a problem and believed them and cleared off.

I don’t know what they teach them in the Academy these days. There must have been about sixty people in a room, most covered with tatts, carrying guns and drinking bourbon and the uniformed locals thought it was some kind of peace rally.

After the coppers left, Greg made the mistake of going outside with Gangitano. Maybe he thought they were going to settle matters like gentlemen. Er, I don’t think so.

Al pulled out a little shooter and put eight slugs into Workman – a shocking waste of bullets and total overkill, I think.

Two sisters saw it and became police witnesses, but eventually Al reached out to them and the girls were soon flying out of the country on the holiday of a lifetime. They were soon waltzing around Disneyland and if the homicide squad thought they had enough to bin Al, they were in Fantasyland. The case collapsed and, like the police, I was saddened when he walked away.

Alphonse had been making noises about me while I was inside and I was looking forward to having a chat with him in H Division.

Without his team of would-be Mafia goombahs Al would have soon realised he was no Mr Big. A good cut-throat razor will do that. I also knew we would never square up on the outside because it was the beginning of the end for Big Al. I knew back then that Al was already on borrowed time as well as borrowed money.

After Al beat the Workman blister, his lawyer hit the coppers with nearly $70,000 in legal bills. Now everyone knows there is only one thing coppers hate more than losing and that is parting with folding notes. As they say, there are only two things that don’t pay – crime and detectives.

Everywhere Al went from then on he brought police attention and that was bad for business. He loved the idea of playing the public role of a gangster, but he could see the final curtain was about to fall.

Al was a dead man walking – or, in his case, waddling. He may as well have shot himself in the head the night he shot Workman and saved someone else the trouble a few years later.

A crime figure with legal connections; he was shot dead after visiting a criminal’s wife in Box Hill North on April 20, 1991

ANOTHER wannabe crook disliked in some legal circles. Who killed him? Let’s just say, by George, that he fought the law and the law won. The killer will never be charged.
MOTIVE: Possible underworld hit
.

Shot dead in his Templestowe home on January 16, 1998

THE beauty of being a known killer and an alleged author is that you can have an opinion on any murder and people don’t know if it is a theory based on experience or the facts based on inside knowledge. Sometimes I don’t know myself. I prefer not to. It’s less complicated.

Take poor Alphonse. Some pretty young television thing wanted me to debate him when I got out of jail. I told the little vixen that it was not to be unless it was done through a ouija board, as Al was about to cop a couple of lead injections in his cranium. As suspected, Alphonse ran out of breath rather suddenly just a few weeks later.

Was that inside knowledge or just a lucky guess? Any fool could see that Alphonse was running red-hot and couldn’t be allowed to keep going. But then again, I’m no fool.

Whether I had inside knowledge or just suspected what was going to happen doesn’t matter. He is dead and I am not. I can’t be blamed, as I was inside Risdon Prison in cold old Tassie, well out of harm’s way.

There was no way out for Fat Al. He hated me, but he didn’t know that I almost saved his life. He was so frightened of me that he pissed off to live in Italy for a year when I got out of prison. When I ended up back in a tin-pot prison in Tassie, he got out his double-breasted pinstripe and jumped on a Jumbo to get back to Lygon Street. If he’d stayed in Italy, he would have grown old and fat on homemade spaghetti but the trouble with Al was that he couldn’t resist a walk-on part in Melbourne’s gangster movie.

After he knocked Workman, he was a marked man with the coppers and he brought attention to everyone. He had to go. It was said that his pal Jason Moran pulled the trigger on him.

It is so often the case in underworld killings. If a man who fires the bullet is not a friend, the person who sent him there often is.

Jason was supposed to have gone to Al’s that night for a chat with the rule that there would be no guns, but Jason cheated, pulled out the shooter and that was it. Good friend ‘The Munster’ Graham Kinniburgh was there too, but he was almost as shocked as Big Al when the bullets started flying. Kinniburgh was a seriously good crook who flew under the radar for years. Why he got connected with Alphonse I will never know, but it would prove to be a fatal misjudgment in the end.

Jason always said he didn’t do it, but I beg to differ. What I don’t know is whether he went there to do it. I would suspect not. He was always just a dickhead who pulled guns when he lost an argument. He would have been knocked years earlier except his family had pull with many heavies back then and he was allowed to put holes in his manners when someone should have put a hole in his guts as a lesson.

I believe he lost his temper that night and just started shooting.

Kinniburgh did a runner after the shooting and probably would never have been linked to the whole mess, but after he left he saw Alphonse’s missus and kids driving down the street.

At least he drove back so they wouldn’t have to deal with the whole mess on their own. The Munster showed a bit of dash that night. He ended up linked to the crime and his low profile was fucked then and there.

In his paranoid world, Alphonse always thought I would be the one who would come after him, but I knew it would be his friends, not his enemies who would knock Al from his perch.

Alphonse was always a salesman at heart. Sharp, well-dressed, well-spoken, fairly well educated from a fairly well-to-do family, but a fucking salesman. That’s all. He sold shit and told people it was chocolate.

The Mafia began as a group of honourable men who fought for the poor and then it got corrupted into a crime gang.

Then idiots like Alphonse tried to jump on board wearing imported clothes, eating garlic and kissing people on the cheeks, and sometimes on the face too.

Eventually the fiction becomes a reality, but Alphonse didn’t flick to the end of the book of his own life of make-believe. It ended with him being shot. Everyone knew what was on the last page but the poor fat slob himself.

His fantasy became reality and he ended up dead. I guess this book, if you bother to read further, is meant to help the reader unravel the sticky mess of glue that holds the legend together.

If Alphonse had known what was going to happen, would he have lived his life differently? I wonder? I suspect not. He got his picture in the paper.

Some people who believed the crap actually treated him with respect.

If it weren’t for the myth, he would have been just another used car salesman in a bad suit.

THIS is what I wrote about him eight years before he popped off. Was I right? You be the judge.

‘ANOTHER major figure we will call Al is Lygon Street’s answer to Robert De Niro. He goes under many names: The Fairy Godfather, The Plastic Gangster, Melbourne’s Princess of Crime, the King of Paranoia and the Italian French Poodle. That’s right, I don’t like Al. I first met him when he was 19, pinching money out of girls’ handbags in nightclubs while the chicks were on the dance floor.

I’ve never heard of Al having a punch on without having ten or twelve helpers backing him up. He is a bully and he picks his mark. He will only fight if he can win. He started off as a bouncer at the two-up school; he has shot a few drunks in the leg at nightclubs and he has learnt how to run card games. He may be rich and he may be well-connected but the hole he will one day go into has already been dug. He lives in fear, a prisoner of his own wealth. He is backed up by a private army of kick boxers, gunmen and bouncers, all with their hands out for money. The only one in that crew with guts and brains is the one called Mick (Gatto), who has the sense not to shoot his mouth off.

Every time Al needs some advice he puts on
The Godfather
movie to see how Marlon Brando did it. Once I went to say a friendly hello to him in a card game in Lygon Street – with a stick of gelignite. Funny thing, Al wouldn’t come out of the toilets for a chat.

This big clown may be a hero to a large part of the criminal world, but personally I wouldn’t give him a job as a towel boy in a gay Turkish bath: he wouldn’t be tough enough. He is another of that crew who is that master of the swap-out, which is why he hasn’t been to jail.

YOU see? I was always a prophet for profit.

Died when his white Subaru Liberty exploded as he drove it along Lorenson Avenue, Merlynston, on August 3, 1998

JOHNNY Furlan was another ‘businessman’ who thought he was a tough guy. He was wrong. He had a dispute with a spivvy used car salesman named Mick. Trouble was Mick wasn’t an Irish Mick who would settle any blues over twenty pints of Guinness and a punch-on, but a woggy one called Domenico Italiano.

Italiano liked to think of himself as connected. His grandad was Domenico Italiano, who was Victoria’s undisputed Mafia Godfather in the 1950s.

When the old man died from natural causes all the would-be Mafia Dons got excited and that resulted in the Melbourne market murders of 1963–64.