Chopper Unchopped (235 page)

No-one took Judy too seriously. That’s why Lewis pissed off on her years ago. At least he got that right.

Shot dead and body dumped in Brunswick on May 8, 2004

FOR a start – who the bloody hell was ‘Lewis fucking Caine?’

When he starts getting mentioned as some sort of underworld heavyweight, then the mice have taken over the jungle.

I was in H Division with Lewis Came – he was just a fucking weak-gutted idiot when I first met him and hadn’t grown in status or reputation since then.

He was also an alleged karate expert who kicked some harmless bloke to death for looking twice at his girlfriend.

Caine entered Pentridge under a cloud of suspension along with a storm of laughter.

My old enemy in prison, a man I will call CIA, was on a recruitment drive and Caine put his hand up and quickly joined his crew and then shit himself when he got put into the same shower yard as my good self. In H Division Pentridge all he got from me was my foot up his arse as he scurried out of the shower yard almost in tears.

It is hard for me to believe that anyone would have offered Lewis Caine a contract to kill anyone. What I can believe is that CIA would eventually shoot his one-time friend for money.

I also knew CIA’s criminal ego couldn’t allow him to sit on the sidelines while the biggest underworld gang war in Melbourne criminal history was going on without him being involved in some way, shape or form.

I was told that he was ringing around trying to get a foot in the door of either camp.

The Italians no longer trusted him – and he was trying to get his head in with the Carl Williams Western Suburbs mob.

So stupid Caine hopped in a car with CIA and his crew. Did he think they were going to the drive-in to see a double feature?

Talk about Dancing with Wolves. Or in this case Driving with Ferrets.

Shot dead in their Kew home on May 15, 2004

TALKATIVE Terry was a police informer and it was the worst-kept secret in Melbourne. No-one with a brain trusted Terry and then he ended getting arrested with a drug squad detective doing a burg on an amphetamines lab. That was pretty good proof that he was working with the coppers. Then he rolled again and started working with the anti-corruption police against his former partners.

I don’t think that would have made him too popular.

A few police documents were leaked to the crooks to prove he was an informer. It was like berley to fish, encouraging them into a feeding frenzy.

Terry always had good security, but that night he let his killer in, so you can guess it was a friend who did the shooting. Another case of never trusting those close to you. His wife was killed because she knew too much.

Who was behind this appalling crime? Probably a regular at the old police picnics, I would think. Certainly fuel for thought.

Found down a mineshaft on March 6, 2006

LEE Torney was another street fighter who lost his dash when he was locked up in H Division. It’s funny how many big men become little men when they have to do hard jail time. Lee killed a mate named Sidney Graham back in 1982. Silly Sid punched a hole in his manners at a party when he started complaining about his cut in a bank robbery.

Lee later told him they had another job – he just forgot to mention the job was to kill Sid. Fair enough, too. Sid might not have been that enthusiastic if he knew the truth.

Anyway, Torney took Grizzling Graham out into the bush and shot him. It worked. Sid never complained again. When Torney got out after 11 years, he still wanted to be the two-bob gangster, playing around with guns and growing a bit of dope up the country.

He went missing in 2005 and I thought back then it would end in tears because people like Lee don’t just run off to join the circus. They found his body, or what was left of it, about a year later down a mineshaft. Call me a cynic, but I doubt if he was out mushrooming and just fell down the hole. I suspect someone helped him find the bottom.

The funny thing is that after Lee’s funeral they found that they had forgotten his head, which was still down at the coroner’s office.

It wasn’t a big problem because Lee was never a deep thinker.

Shot dead as he returned to his Brighton home on February 6, 2006

WILLIAMS was in jail, Veniamin was dead and all the Morans that mattered were no longer with us, so you would have thought all the fun and games were over. But there was one more surprise – the murder of Mario Condello.

Condello was a big man and Mick Gatto’s offsider. In fact when Mick was in jail for a 14-month rest (and fitness program) waiting for his trial over Veniamin, it was Condello who had to run things. Mick wrote to him from jail and gave him instructions, but Condello had to walk the walk.

Sure he looked the part. He dressed in Lygon Street black and could have had a walk-on role with
The Sopranos
if he wanted, but I never saw him as having Mick’s guts.

Condello was smart – no question about that. He had been a qualified lawyer until he was struck off over a few trifling matters like drug dealing and arson.

He served six years for that, which can put a hole in your work CV.

Mario wanted to be a gangster, but he also wanted to be a judge at one time.

Bit hard to do both unless your name is Lionel Murphy, I reckon.

Condello was on bail and about to have his trial on planning to kill Carl Williams. I have no doubt he would have beaten the charges but we’ll never know now.

His trial was about to start and the courts had ordered he be home every night by 10pm.

For any killer worth his salt, that was just perfect. You don’t have to do all the homework on your victim. You know what time he has to be home, so you can just sit off and wait.

Tick-tock then bang-bang. Then it’s off home in time for a hot chocolate and the late news.

Mario spent nine months in solitary before he was bailed over the Williams plot and he came out half a broken man. Mick did his time easy, but I suspect it was too much for Mario.

Some people can do mainstream jail easy, but solitary plays with their head. After more than twenty years in the hardest jails in Australia, believe me – I know.

Mario was a blood and guts man. His guts and someone else’s blood – as long as it didn’t touch his manicured fingers.

He was another in a long line who was happy to order others to take the risks, but wasn’t too keen on seeing the end product.

The closest he got to the blood was the chance of a nasty paper cut when signing dud cheques.

So who killed him? I would suggest Carl was on the way out by then and didn’t have the pull.

Half his crew was turning on him and he had his own problems.

But Tony Mokbel was still about and Tony still blamed Mario for the beating he got in Lygon Street.

It was supposed to be a peace conference and Tony got jumped and bashed. Tony blamed Mario for that.

Both Mario and Tony were money men and Tony was the richest one.

Money talks all languages – but particularly Italian and Lebanese.

Another thing, Carl had a direct line to Victoria’s most dangerous stone-killer – a man mentioned over many murders but never charged.

The killing of Mario was text-book. The victim drove into his garage and before the electric doors closed the gunmen was in, did the job and was out.

That was no apprentice – it was the professional.

At the funeral there were 600 at the church. It was further proof that the Carlton Crew was going to stick fat. It was a message that Mick Gatto’s crew were not going anywhere.

For Carl and Tony, it was a parting shot.

MUHAMMAD ALI was one of the greatest boxers the world has seen, but in the end he stood there getting the shit punched out of him by people who weren’t fit to empty his spit bucket. Ted Whitten had to have his coat pulled and told it was time to give the game away. Dennis Lillee stopped bowling, lost his hair and started doing carpet ads.

So what has this to do with the underworld war? What I am getting at is you can beat murder charges, you can beat the coppers and you can beat your enemies, but you can never beat the clock.

When the bodies started dropping there were some blokes of my generation who wanted a piece of it.

There is nothing more pathetic than some over the hill, middle-aged, has-been still trying to pretend he is a tough guy. And one of those who turned killer is a prime example of this.

I have mentioned this turkey to you already. I have known him for thirty years: he wasn’t much good in his prime and age hasn’t improved him. He was born an imbecile and has been losing ground ever since.

We went to war years ago in Pentridge and while he had the numbers, I had the psychopaths, so you know who won.

The courts have told me I can’t name him, so I will keep calling him CIA, because that’s the initials I gave him a few pages back. Remember?

Anyway, CIA was born to be a criminal and all his family were thieves and murderers. He thought of himself as an underworld aristocrat, but I bet his dead relatives would be rolling in their graves at what CIA has become.

The problem with CIA is he loves the headlines but hates the jail time involved and will pull every stunt he can think of or tell any lie he has to tell or point the finger at whoever else he could in order to avoid a sentence. His usual method is to talk one of his of his co-accused into putting his hand up for the murder or the shooting. That’s correct; more than once CIA has talked one of his co-accused into taking the full blame when he is the one who has pulled the trigger.

He is quite brilliant in his ability to talk other people into helping him out and has been talking men and women into believing in him and his lost causes for years.

He is a criminal conman who launches into massive verbal games with men younger than himself. All those his own age and older are awake to him. He always plays to a much younger criminal and pulls them into his psychological web. Generally, it is one of these starry-eyed poor stooges who agrees to put their hands up in the air.

For years, he said he was an enemy of mine, but when he got out he made a trip to Tassie, where I was living at the time, to see if we were squared away.

I wished him no harm and hoped he would retire like me, but when the shooting started and the money was flying around, CIA couldn’t resist sticking his giant hooter into the middle of it all. I’m sure the old fool thought he could slip through the middle, playing both sides off against each other and when they were all gone, he would be the winner.

That was always him – an ego that didn’t match his ability.

He offered himself up as a hitman, which didn’t surprise me, but what shocked me was that some idiots were prepared to entertain his offers.

He and his team of dickheads killed Lewis Moran and Lewis Caine (must have hated the name Lewis) but they were in the frame for both and it was only a matter of time until the police came knocking. And true to form CIA started trying to do the best deal he could for himself and stuff the rest of them.

The Carlton Crew wouldn’t have hired him, as they know his true form only too well. It only tells me whoever involved him had to be a younger crew with no memory of his real criminal history.

I’m reliably informed it was CIA who hawked his services around in the first place. So CIA knocked on a drug dealer’s door crying poor, begging for work.

Anyway, CIA was promised $150,000 to knock Lewis Moran and after the job, his team got $140,000.

But in crime terms CIA was an old man and, faced with spending the rest of his life in jail, he turned informer, pleaded guilty and gave his two bosses up in the hope he got a sentence that would get him out before he was dead.

If Williams had asked me, I would have told him how it would end up. He always got caught and then he always looked after himself.

CIA turned dog so quickly it was amazing. But I’ve always known this about him. He was the one who turned Alphonse Gangitano against me.

Alphonse thought CIA was a member of the Victorian Federated Ship Painters and Dockers, but now we find out he never even held a Dockies brief.

He controlled 300 Painters and Dockers in Pentridge Prison through his friendship with Johnny ‘Piggy’ Palmer, who was a Painter and Docker and back then a very powerful and respected member of the docks fraternity, having beaten the Car-O-Tel Motel double murder back in the 1970s.

Barry Robert Quinn wore that, but he kept his mouth shut, unlike the crims of today.

I went to war with Piggy and CIA in H Division and they called me a dog. That’s all it took back then. No one has ever spent a night in prison over a Chopper deal; not a day, a night or a single hour has any one spent in prison over me. In those days some saw him as an underworld hero – some staunch, old-school crook taught the right way by generations of Dockies. He shouldn’t have been at Pentridge, but down the road at the showgrounds. He would have won the gold medal for the best dog award.

CIA has been doing secret deals with the police for over thirty years and now it is all out in the open. Too late for me, but not for him. I still believe revenge will be mine. Every day I wake up in my own bed is a win. CIA will have to be protected and will look over his shoulder for the rest of his miserable life.

Let’s make it clear, it took about twenty-four years for the penny to drop with me. I kept doing crime and jail time, but eventually even I realised it was over for me.

Sure there were a few who would have liked me to get involved this time around, but that was never going to happen.

A few years earlier, my crew, including Mad Charlie and Dave the Jew, would have sat off, said nothing and then killed a few from either side just to keep it interesting. We would have put another log on the fire. But not now. Charlie’s dead and Dave and I have retired. At least, I have.