The Gangland War

by John Silvester

  Tina Nhonthachith was a businesswoman in her own right and had her own fashion line, ‘Tina’s Trends’. But she and Gulyas ran the introduction agency for several years. Both often returned home: Gulyas to Hungary and Nhonthachith, whose three adult children live in Australia, to Thailand.

  The house where the couple died is 500 metres from the road. It is well-hidden and surrounded by hills. The couple kept to themselves, and their neighbours liked it that way. ‘They are not the type of people you would want to associate with,’ one said.

  Gulyas bought the Sunbury property about two years before his death, which proved he had plenty of money. He filled the house with his collection of stuffed animals, proving he had no taste.

  In Melbourne, Gulyas had confided to neighbours he felt he was being watched. He was concerned about the Russian Mafia. His fears were well-founded.

  On the weekend of the murders, the couple had planned some hard work on the Saturday to be followed by a relaxing Sunday. On Friday, Gulyas had picked up a stuffed polar bear from a Thomastown taxidermist to go with his lion and bison. On Saturday, a neighbour saw Gulyas shifting earth on a bobcat — the small machine, not the large cat.

  There was a barbecue on Sunday and a mechanic who worked for Gulyas picked up a bottle of his boss’s favourite Hungarian Golden Pear liqueur at Dan Murphy’s in Ascot Vale.

  The mechanic stayed for lunch with business associates, but agreed to take the couple’s dogs to Coburg that night. He knew the dogs usually snarled and growled at motorists from the back of his ute, and did not want them acting up on the Tullamarine Freeway in Monday’s traffic, so drove them to Coburg on Sunday afternoon. With the dogs gone and the gates not yet erected, the killer had open access.

  If the dogs had stayed, there might have been no killing at all. Or a triple murder.

  There was another man at the barbecue: a business associate who owed Gulyas around $500,000. He told detectives he had left the property but returned later that night, supposedly to have some papers signed.

  The businessman was said to have ripped off banks for around $3 million and was found to have moved nearly $5 million through the casino.

  He told police he had nothing to do with the murder. He has since moved overseas. But before he did, he bought the dead couple’s Sunbury farm at auction for around $600,000 and sold it a few months later for about $1.1 million. A profit of $500,000 — the exact amount he owed Gulyas. Meaning, in effect, he was a total of a million dollars up on the deal.

  Sometimes in the underworld it is more dangerous to be owed money than to be in debt.

  Art imitates life … the paid actors are the ones in the bottom picture.

  Mark Moran: shot near his home in mid-2000.

  Callan Mulvey as Moran.

  Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh dresses down at Alphonse Gangitano’s inquest.

  Veteran Gerard Kennedy as ‘The Munster’.

  Graham Kinniburgh’s funeral in leafy Kew … Mick Gatto (back, right) is one of the pallbearers

  Pallbearers play their part.

  Detective Sen Sgt Stuart Bateson leads members of the Purana Taskforce away from the Melbourne Magistrates Court after winning an order to interview a murder suspect.

  Actor Rodger Corser channels detective ‘Steve Owen’.

  Purana Taskforce members led by dogged detective inspector Gavan Ryan (centre) just after Williams had been sentenced to 35 years. This time, police held the press conference.

  Frank Holden plays a character uncannily similar to Ryan.

  Mario Condello … a man of means by no means.

  Changing places: Martin Sacks tries the dark side.

  Every dog has its day: CarlWilliams in happier times, when he gave the press conference and the police said ‘no comment’. It didn’t last.

  Red Rooster or KFC? … Gyton Grantley’s ‘Carl’ ponders the big questions.

  Roberta Williams with family friend Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin. A short time later he was shot dead.

  Below: Kat Stewart as Roberta.

  16

  THE TIDE TURNS

  It was the beginning of the end

  but it was not the end

  of the killings.

  THE kilometre-square block in the middle of South Yarra is one of the busiest in Melbourne. Traffic there regularly slows to a crawl. No-one would have noticed the late-model sedan that cruised the choked streets for days.

  No-one, that is, except the police surveillance experts assigned to help Victoria’s gangland taskforce, codenamed Purana.

  Police were tracking two of the suspects in some of Melbourne’s unsolved underworld murders. Both were known to police. Neither can be named but they were, at the time, loyal members of Carl Williams’ rat pack. Much later they would rat on him. They were The Runner and The Driver and this would be their latest (and last) hit for the supermarket shelf stacker turned crime boss.

  They drove around the block bounded by Chapel Street and Malvern, Toorak and Williams Roads, past the upmarket boutiques that thrive near the 1960s housing commission flats. They cruised by the 24-hour Prahran police complex in Malvern Road then turned left into Williams Road and past The Bush Inn Hotel, a favourite with local police. They pulled over, checked the side streets and studied the area as meticulously as town planners.

  In one week in October 2003 they went to the block at least four times.

  Experienced police knew these men were not sightseeing. They were there on business.

  Detectives checked the area for likely targets and considered the possibility of a Spring Carnival raid on the Pub TAB at The Bush Inn. Two luxury car dealerships were also marked as susceptible. There was also a theory that the two suspects might have been planning an armed rip-off of a drug dealer in the area. But the investigators could only make educated guesses.

  The detectives did have one big advantage — they had planted a tiny bugging device in the car being used by the suspects. But while it may have seemed that the men were researching a crime, they were not discussing details. Why would they? They knew what they were planning so there was no need to spell it out.

  They also had another advantage. The hit team was stupid. They had to know police were close to them, but they continued on regardless. And Carl Williams, who now believed his own publicity, considered himself untouchable.

  For the first time, Purana was ahead of the pack. Investigators had found the source of the gang’s clean cars — untraceable sedans that could be used as getaway vehicles. The source was a close friend of The Driver — a backyard mechanic who re-birthed abandoned cars.

  A police technical expert managed to plant a tracker in the car. All detectives had to do was wait.

  But when The Driver picked up the car, he noticed the brake light was flashing. He pulled over, checked the wiring, found the bug and ripped it out.

  The police infiltration should have been blown but inexplicably the hit team didn’t abort their plan.

  The Driver wanted to pull out, but The Runner and Williams suspected he was fabricating the story to avoid the latest hit.

  And The Runner was getting impatient to kill. He followed the target several times from his home in South Yarra to his business in Abbotsford. He knew his movements and was confident he could set up an ambush. The man who had been marked for death was Michael Marshall: hot dog salesman, kick boxer and drug dealer.

  The Runner knew Marshall’s movements. He knew he had a shop in Hoddle Street, picked up his rolls on Friday and Saturday afternoons and had a hot dog stand outside Motel nightclub.

  He knew because Carl Williams told him. And he knew the information was right because it came from Tony Mokbel who, it is alleged, ordered the hit.

  But police would not learn who was to die until it was too late.

  According to The Runner, ‘(The Driver) mentioned to me that he had found what he thought was a tracker in the car. I dismissed the thought because my mind was focussed on doing the job…I decided to keep
going without the clean car. In hindsight, it was sheer stupidity that I didn’t take notice of the locating of a tracking device, but my mind was elsewhere and I was feeling the pressure of the job and that we had already wasted enough time’.

  That night Williams backed The Runner and told them to push on.

  At the last minute, The Driver decided to use his own silver Vectra, once owned by Williams. That car was already bugged by Purana.

  So while police knew a crime was about to happen, they did not know what it was. All they could do was wait.

  Four months before this surveillance exercise, on 21 June 2003, the same hit team had shot dead Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.

  On the day of the murders, detectives were tipped off that one of the men subsequently monitored in South Yarra was the likely gunman. Any chance of police having the advantage of surprise was lost when a television reporter rang the Moran family and nominated the suspect.

  Now there would be a breakthrough — but it would come at a price.

  The first job of police is to deter rather than apprehend. If detectives know a crime is to be committed, they have a duty to try to prevent it. But intercepting a major criminal and his sidekick because they appear to be driving suspiciously looks more like harassment than deterrence.

  Police had not enough evidence to lay charges, and pulling the suspects over would only alert them to the electronic surveillance. There was no real choice but to let them run.

  The then head of the Purana Taskforce, Detective Inspector Andrew Allen, was at work on the evening of Saturday 25 October, when he got the call from police monitoring the listening post. The suspects were on the move, but their intent was still unclear.

  Then police started to get calls from the public. There had been a shooting in South Yarra. At gangland taskforce headquarters, investigators had a database of victims, suspects, potential targets and associates. They had established a core of around 100 and a second ring of about the same number. The man who was killed was not on the police list of possible targets — but he was on someone’s list.

  In underworld terms, Michael Ronald Marshall, 38, was a nobody with a minor criminal record — a former kickboxer turned self-employed hot dog vendor, selling mainly around nightclubs.

  The fast-food business can be lucrative, but Marshall appeared to be flying. He lived in a big, double-storey house on the corner of Williams Road and Joy Street in South Yarra. He and his de facto wife had bought it from a Melbourne surgeon in December 1991, paying off their ANZ mortgage in just three years.

  A three-metre-high brick fence and an electronic security camera at the gate on Williams Road protected the house. But it wasn’t enough.

  The men who had come for Marshall had done their homework. The getaway car was parked in the next road, Howitt Street, facing Williams Road.

  Marshall had been to a local bakery with his five-year-old son to buy rolls for his busiest night, Saturday.

  Joy Street is a narrow road filled with blocks of flats and townhouses. Marshall parked his four-wheel-drive halfway down the short street, behind his hot dog van.

  Although his house had a double garage, he preferred to park in the street. His second security camera, looking down on Joy Street, was not working.

  As Marshall stepped from the car, at about 6.30pm, and before he could open the back door to help his son from his harness, The Runner jogged up and shot him at least four times in the head.

  But it was no clinical hit.

  Just as in the Moran-Barbaro case, The Runner had no qualms about shooting a man in front of his children. And, as in the earlier case, the gunman had his escape route planned.

  The killer ran down a partially hidden 50-metre path through a block of flats to Howitt Street. The Driver had the motor going and took off in the classic getaway style, making sure there was no need to cross traffic flows, turning left into Williams Road and left again into the next main street.

  ‘I was jogging along the footpath towards Marshall’s driver’s side door as he hadn’t got out yet. Just before I got to his car I pulled the balaclava down over my face. I was about three metres away from the driver’s door, standing in the middle of the road when Marshall started to get out of the car.

  ‘I had the gun in my right hand and Marshall was out of the car and noticed me. We looked at each other briefly and I started to raise the gun as he went to lunge at me. As he lunged, I fired a shot but I am unsure if this hit him. As the gun fired, the kickback, along with the combination of me taking a step backwards from Marshall’s lunge, caused me to fall over. I also think the ground may have been a bit wet. I quickly got up again and was face to face with Marshall. He was a large person, over six feet tall and I was aware he was a former kickboxer.

  ‘I was concerned that he might overpower me, so I just began firing shots at him at close range to the head area. I am not sure how many shots I fired; I think it may have been three or four. Marshall started to fall to the ground and I think I fired one more shot into his head as he was going down towards my feet. At no stage during the altercation did I see or realise that Marshall’s son was still with him.’ The young boy got out of the car and ran home to tell his mother his father had been shot. But, he later told police; he first looked right, then left and right again to make sure there was no traffic — exactly as his parents had taught him.

  Later The Runner rang Williams to tell him, again, ‘That horse has just been scratched’. It was the same code he’d used when he shot Jason Moran.

  Again they were stupid. The Driver had found a police listening device in his house but did not want to alert police he had discovered it — working on the basis that he would avoid making incriminating statements within its range.

  Unfortunately for that theory, the ‘scratched’ comment was made around 5pm — after the last race of the day. Williams just grunted when told — but it was enough.

  Within hours, police arrested the pair near the Elsternwick Hotel. They were in a white Toyota Hiace van. Marshall was still alive in the Alfred Hospital but died about three hours later.

  Williams was also grabbed and finally taken off the streets. It was the beginning of the end for him — but not the end of the killings.

  MICHAEL Marshall had an interesting circle of friends and business associates. He trained at the same gym as Willie Thompson, another kickboxer connected to the nightclub business.

  Thompson sold lollipops for vending machines at nightspots — although police suspected he was also involved in selling more lucrative products to clubbers. He had been shot dead in Chadstone three months earlier, on 21 July 2003.

  The lives and deaths of Marshall and Thompson were remarkably similar. They were opportunists on the fringes of the nightclub industry — men who appeared to live well beyond their ostensible means and who paid with their lives when they finally alienated more powerful criminals.

  Willie Thompson was shot dead as he sat at the wheel of his $81,000 Honda S-2000 sports car in Waverley Road, Chadstone about 9.30pm. He was ambushed by two gunmen who approached him from either side of the car, as he was about to pull out from his parking spot.

  Thompson, 39, of Port Melbourne, had just left a martial arts class at the Extreme Jujitsu and Grappling gym when he was gunned down. The killers used their stolen car to block the sports car’s possible escape route with a T-Bone manoeuvre.

  Police found a bullet lodged in the wall of a bookshop in Waverley Road, two metres from Thompson’s car. The killers were lucky not to have shot each other as they fired from opposite sides of the vehicle.

  The two gunmen who ambushed Thompson’s Honda had waited at a Red Rooster restaurant directly across the road for their target to leave the gym.

  The gunmen’s stolen Ford sedan was later found burnt out in Port Melbourne — two streets from where underworld figure Victor Peirce was murdered on 1 May 2002.

  It was clear the killers knew Thompson’s movements and while the job wasn’t as ‘clean’
as some, it still showed the prerequisite planning.

  Certainly this is one job where Veniamin had a rock solid alibi. But two other men close to Carl Williams did not. So was Carl behind the killing? Certainly some close to him believed he ordered the hit.

  Thompson was another victim of the underworld war without a big reputation, although he had big enemies.

  Drug dealer Nik Radev had firebombed Thompson’s car about 18 months earlier. So in hindsight, replacing the destroyed car with a convertible was probably not one of Willie’s better moves.

  But it was clear Radev didn’t kill Willie — because he himself was already dead.

  Thompson was a familiar face at some of Melbourne’s biggest nightclubs and a well-known bouncer for more than ten years.

  Through his nightclub contacts he became involved in the film industry as a bit actor with roles in films partially financed by the owners of a city strip club.

  He appeared in The Nightclubber, an alternative film shot at the Tunnel Nightclub and the Men’s Gallery. It is a motion picture unlikely to be mentioned in dispatches at Cannes or even Cairns.

  But none of these side interests could maintain Thompson’s lifestyle.

  Colourful Melbourne identity, Mick Gatto, placed a death notice in the Herald Sun for Thompson — a sure sign the dead man was connected to the underworld.

  Friends said he was a ‘gentleman’ and well-liked. But, apparently, not by everyone. Like many who were gunned down in Melbourne’s gangland feud, he lived like a drug dealer and ultimately died as one.

  According to The Runner in a statement to police still to be tested in court, the hit on Marshall was mistakenly ordered by Tony Mokbel as a payback for the murder of Willie Thompson.

  According to The Runner, Mokbel offered a massive bounty for Marshall’s murder because he blamed the hot dog vendor for killing Thompson.

  ‘Tony confirmed that he believed Michael Marshall was responsible for Willie’s death and he wanted him dead. Tony offered Carl and I $300,000 to kill Marshall. When I shook hands with Tony he passed a piece of paper to me, which had the details of Marshall’s address.’