Gatto has convictions for burglary, assaulting police, possessing firearms, and obtaining financial advantage by deception. He was also charged with extortion, blackmail and making threats to kill, but these annoying matters were struck out at committal.
Big Mick says such immature behaviour is all in the past. He maintains that these days he is as straight as a gun barrel.
In February 2002, he was invited, via a subpoena, to appear at the royal commission into the building industry to discuss his role as an industrial relations consultant on Melbourne building sites. The commission was interested in an alleged payment of $250,000 to solve some sticky industrial problems for a company that did not want extended labour conflicts. Inquiring minds at the commission found that $189,750 was paid to a company controlled by Mick Gatto and his business partner and good friend, Dave ‘The Rock’ Hedgcock.
When he gave evidence, Gatto appeared offended that people could suggest he used threats of violence to solve problems. ‘I’m not a standover man. I’m not a man of ill repute. Fair enough I’ve got a chequered past … but I paid for … whatever I have done wrong.’
Police who know Gatto say he is unfailingly courteous, slow to anger and always in control. He uses body language to ensure that people around him are aware that he remains a physically imposing man. ‘It is not so much what he says, but what he leaves unsaid,’ one detective said.
His unofficial office was La Porcella, an Italian restaurant on the corner of Faraday and Rathdowne Streets, Carlton. Most weekdays he was there, often in the company of men with healthy appetites and colourful pasts. But he was rarely there at weekends. That was time for his family. It is said that people with problems were prepared to pay $5000 to sit at the table with Mick and discuss solutions. Sometimes he could help and other times he couldn’t. But it would always be a pleasant and entertaining luncheon. The scaloppini was to die for.
Many police and criminals dine out on Gatto stories and it is hard to distil reality from myth because those close to the big man are staunchly loyal — and silent. Those not so close seem to believe it would not be wise to tell tales out of the old school.
But there are several stories to indicate that while Gatto is charming and does not use violence indiscriminately, he succeeds because people fear the consequences of not seeing his point of view.
In one case he was able to jolt the memory of a businessman who owed an associate $75,000. The debt was paid and Gatto was said to have kept $25,000 as his commission. Everyone was a winner. The man who owed the money is still able to walk without a limp, the businessman did not have to write off the entire sum as a bad debt and Gatto was handsomely paid for two phone calls.
One solicitor once used Gatto’s name to threaten someone who owed him $15,000 and then asked Big Mick to collect the debt. A policeman says Gatto did as he was asked, but pocketed the full amount as a fine for the lawyer using his name without permission. Again everyone was a winner — one man learned to pay his debts, another not to use people’s names to make idle threats and Mick’s bank balance received a healthy injection. That is, of course, if he put such a small amount in the bank. A detective said he knew a case of a man who was dancing at a nightclub when he had a nail punched into his shoulder. The reason? He owed Gatto $400.
Yet another policeman said he believed Gatto once shot a man in the leg in Carlton. When police tried to get a statement from the victim, the man not only denied that he knew who had shot him but denied he had been shot at all. When asked why he was sitting in casualty with blood seeping from the wound, he said he didn’t know why his leg was ‘leaking’.
Another time a man came asking for help but Mick’s advice was to deal with the matter rather than employ others who might lack the subtlety to solve the problem. This was not a time for the use of a sledgehammer to crack a walnut — or in this case two walnuts. Years later the man could see the wisdom of the advice. Many police had a grudging respect for Gatto as a man who did not go looking for trouble and saw him as ‘old school’.
But the underworld landscape was changing and Melbourne’s criminal establishment was being drawn into a gangland war not entirely of their making. When the Moran boys shot Williams over a drug business, it was nothing to do with Gatto — whose colourful background does not include drug charges. But it would become his business by default as his friends and associates continued to be picked off.
Some of those who were shot seemed to become fatalistic. Lewis Moran and Kinniburgh knew they were on a death list, yet took few precautions. Gatto was different. A good friend but a dangerous enemy, he was never going to let himself be stalked in the shadows.
It was the ambush killing of Graham ‘The Munster’ Kinniburgh in late 2003 that hit him the hardest.
The death of an old and respected friend distressed Gatto and made him realise that the dominoes around him were falling and he could be next. Within hours of the murder the dogs were barking (wrongly as it turned out) that one of the men who killed ‘The Munster’ was the hot-headed streetfighter turned hit man called Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin.
VENIAMIN was a small man with a growing reputation for violence. Like Mick Gatto, he was a former boxer, although they were from different eras — and vastly different ends of the weight divisions. Any chances of Veniamin making a name as a boxer ended when at nineteen he badly broke his leg and damaged his knee in a motorbike accident. But all this meant was that he could channel his violent inclinations to activities outside the ring.
Heavily tattooed, with a close-cropped haircut and a bullet-shaped head, the brooding Veniamin looked like a man who could take offence easily and was only a glance away from yet another over-reaction.
According to Purana Taskforce investigators, Veniamin’s criminal career could be broken into three phases. In the beginning, he was a street thug in Melbourne’s west. He ran with two other would-be gangsters, old schoolmates Paul Kallipolitis and Dino Dibra, and specialised in run-throughs, ripping off and robbing drug dealers who grew hydroponic marijuana crops in rented houses.
Veniamin had a criminal record that began in 1992 with a $50 fine for the theft of a motor car. In 1993, he was convicted of intentionally or recklessly causing injury and sentenced to 200 hours of unpaid community work. Over the next decade he was found guilty of theft, robbery, false imprisonment, assaulting police, arson, deception and threatening to cause serious injury.
The nature of the modern underworld is that access to drugs — and drug money — means relatively minor players can become influential figures in a matter of months.
While Gatto tended to look for amicable solutions, Veniamin saw violence as the first resort. Pasquale Zaffina was an old friend of Veniamin but that didn’t stop the gangster trying to move in on his girlfriend. When Zaffina objected, Veniamin responded with a surprising lack of contrition. He fired shots into Zaffina’s parents’ house and, apparently unimpressed with the results, left a bomb at the residence and threatened to kill Zaffina’s sister.
To settle matters they agreed to meet for a fight in a park in Melbourne’s western suburbs with seconds to back them up — as though conducting an old-fashioned duel. They agreed it would be fists and no guns. But as they shaped up, Veniamin produced a .38 calibre handgun and aimed it at Zaffina, who managed to push the gun towards the ground. Three shots hit him in the leg but he lived to tell the story — at Gatto’s trial, as it would turn out.
The defence would make much of the Zaffina story, claiming it showed Veniamin could conceal a .38, would ambush and attempt to kill people and did not care if witnesses were present. But that would be much later.
Soon Veniamin saw himself as a man of substance (as well as substances) and felt he could associate with men with established reputations. These included members of the so-called Carlton Crew and Mick Gatto, in particular.
The younger gun exhibited all the signs of being starstruck and appeared to hero worship the man who was a household name in a certain type of hous
ehold.
Gatto saw Veniamin as dangerous but extended his big hand of friendship, working on the principle that you keep your friends close and your enemies closer. He knew the new boy was vicious but Veniamin was a rising power in the west and Gatto thought that if he needed muscle in the Sunshine area ‘Benji’ could be handy.
Gatto loved to build networks — some good, some bad. Veniamin — twenty years younger — was high maintenance and at times was only just tolerated by the Carlton blue bloods. He was said to have asked Gatto to provide him with firearms and on more than one occasion the older man had to intervene after Veniamin involved himself in mindless violence at nightclubs.
Gatto said in evidence, ‘Well, I remember just one occasion, that he asked me if I could get guns for him, revolvers and, you know, I said I’d ask, but I mean I had no intention of doing that, to be honest, because it’s a no-win situation. And the other occasion I can’t really remember, but he was forever getting himself into trouble at nightclubs and what have you, and I was always sort of getting involved, sort of patching things up.’
But Veniamin was more than just a camp follower. He was already a killer. Police now believe he killed seven men in just four years. He killed friends, enemies and strangers for a price. He was Australia’s most dangerous hit man, but he would never have the chance to retire in anonymity. He would be shot dead, aged just 28.
THE Melbourne fruit and vegetable market has always been connected to a resilient strain of organised crime. The cash economy and Australia-wide transport network has sometimes been used for gambling, drug and protection rackets.
From the market murders of 1963–64 through to the cannabis boom of the 1970s and 1980s there has been money to be made on the side.
By the 1990s, tensions were again building with massive kickbacks by major retail outlets, bribery and battles to control the lucrative black economy.
Alfonso Muratore was steeped in the tradition. His father, Vince, was a senior member of the so-called Italian organized crime group, The Honored Society, and was shot dead outside his Hampton home in 1964.
Alfonso would later marry into the powerful Benvenuto family. His brother-in-law was Frank Benvenuto, the son of Liborio Benvenuto, the former Godfather of the mafia-like crime group the Honoured Society, who died of natural causes in 1988. Frank and his brother, Vince, became powerful figures at the market.
But Alfonso tried to rock the family boat. He left his wife for his mistress and at a secret meeting told the giant Coles-Myer group of a kickback scheme.
This was not a move to strengthen family bonds and on 4 August 1992, he was shot dead as he was about to hop into his car in Hampton in a virtual repeat of the ambush killing of his father 28 years earlier.
Frank Benvenuto was one of the main suspects for ordering Alfonso’s death.
At different times Frank employed two Melbourne gunmen with him at the market. One at the time was notorious, the other hardly known.
Accused police killer and armed robber Victor George Peirce was well known as a vicious gunman but Andrew Veniamin was yet to build his reputation. It didn’t take long.
Frank Benvenuto was shot dead outside his Beaumaris home on 8 May 2000.
Police say Veniamin was the killer but it wasn’t his first paid hit. In May 1999 another Italian fruit and vegetable identity, Joe Quadara, was shot outside a Toorak supermarket. Investigators are convinced Benji did it.
They also say he was the gunman who killed his former friends and criminal associates — Dino Dibra, shot dead near his West Sunshine home on 14 October 2000, and Paul Kallipolitis, whose body was found in his West Sunshine home on 25 October 2002. Veniamin was the hot suspect in the murder of standover man Nik Radev, shot dead on 15 April 2003. And he was part of the torture team that grabbed and killed Mark Mallia in August 2003. And police say he shot Victor Peirce in May 2002.
The dates, and the nationalities of the victims, suggest that Benji worked for more than one crime syndicate. The first two victims were clearly connected to Italian organised crime while many of the later ones were enemies of Carl Williams.
It now appears that Veniamin killed for a price — not a cause — and he was not too fussed who paid the bills.
In November 2002, Veniamin’s allegiances to the Carlton Crew began to drift. He swapped camps, moving to become Williams’ high-profile bodyguard and close friend.
The story goes that Tony Mokbel was bashed in Lygon Street by a Perth bikie during what was supposed to be a meeting set up by Carlton Crew heavy Mario Condello. It is said that when violence broke out, Gatto did nothing to protect Mokbel. It wasn’t his fight.
Veniamin drove the badly-injured Mokbel to hospital and, indignant at what had happened, changed sides. That is one version. There are others. But, for whatever reason, Veniamin became the constant companion of Carl Williams.
Weeks after the Radev shooting, police established the Purana Taskforce. The taskforce called for all intelligence holdings on suspects such as Veniamin and was stunned to find how little was known about the vicious killer. Assistant Commissioner (crime) Simon Overland would later use Veniamin as an example of how police had failed to monitor organised crime in Victoria.
In the last year of his life he seemed to think he was above the law. A suburban detective once drove past him in an unmarked car. Veniamin gave chase and confronted the policeman in a petrol station demanding to know if he was being followed. Veniamin, well-built but not much bigger than a jockey, seemed comfortable trying to intimidate the detective. In just a few months he managed to acquire more than 40 speeding and parking fines.
Police approached Veniamin in 2003 with a message to ‘pull up’ — warning him his activities meant he was now also a potential victim. It was no idle statement, as at that point at least five shooters in Melbourne’s gangland war had already been murdered. When detectives told him he was likely to die violently, Benji didn’t seem fazed. He told them he knew the risks and had already told his parents that if he was killed they should honour the underworld code of silence and refuse to co-operate with police. He wrote to one of the authors suggesting publicity at such a delicate time could ‘endanger my life’.
Having changed camps, Benji appeared blindly loyal to Williams, who was committed to kill all his perceived enemies. But there were certain perks in becoming a family friend and constant bodyguard to the new breed gangster. He was invited to share a family holiday with Williams, staying in a five-star resort in Queensland. It was a case of the boy from Sunshine spending up big in the Sunshine state. Never the master of measuring risks, he took to dog paddling in the surf, even though he could hardly swim. By late 2003 he had moved into a city penthouse and drove a borrowed $200,000 car said to belong to a bus line owner. And he was still registered to pick up the dole.
But even Williams, who claimed Benji was his best friend, had begun to distance himself because he feared the little killer could turn on him. When he had failed to deliver Jason Moran for an ambush, Williams began to wonder if Veniamin might have been recruited back to the Carlton Crew.
Eventually Williams stopped meeting Benji alone for fear of an ambush. But Roberta Williams didn’t share her husband’s concern and, in a touching show of faithlessness, remained close to Veniamin to the end.
Veniamin was one of the first principal targets of the Purana Taskforce and police developed a strategy of trying to harass and disrupt his routine so he would not have the freedom to continue to kill. Purana investigator Boris Buick (a passionate investigator and red wine connoisseur) gave evidence at the Gatto trial that police were constantly pulling Veniamin’s car and raiding his home and those of his friends and relatives. He said this curtailed his criminal activities:
‘To the best of my knowledge, and as I said, we had saturated coverage of him, he was no longer committing acts of violence and was well aware of our interest in him. As well as essentially saturating the deceased by means of surveillance, personal surveillance and electronic s
urveillance, we also commenced regularly intercepting him and his associates, specifically seeking to disrupt their criminal activities.
‘We searched vehicles and other persons, of associates of his, and some other premises that he was associated with. And he was well aware at that stage, and we essentially made it aware to him that we were targeting him and his associates … to prevent further offending, in particular to prevent offences of a violent nature and involving firearms.’
Police bugged his home and car and had a court order to bug his telephones. The court order covered the period from 20 July 2003, to 19 May 2004 — coincidentally just four days before he was killed. Veniamin knew he was bugged and complained to Gatto that anyone he spoke to was raided a short time later. But the constant police surveillance helped clear him in at least one case. When Graeme Kinniburgh was shot dead, police were quickly able to establish Benji was near Taylors Lakes at the time — on the opposite side of Melbourne from the murder scene in Kew.
Veniamin loved guns and was always trying to find more, allegedly keeping one cache of weapons at a friendly kebab shop. But with police always near him, he could not always carry a weapon. According to Purana investigator Detective Senior Constable Stephen Baird (who was to die suddenly just months after the trial): ‘Veniamin became paranoid, in fact, about being surveilled by police, both physical and electronic, and also paranoid about being intercepted by police at any time and both his person searched and any vehicle he was being in searched for firearms.’
So why then did he carry a .38 revolver with him to meet Mick Gatto in a Carlton restaurant on 23 March 2004?
ON 22 December 2003, nine days after Graham Kinniburgh’s murder, Gatto met Veniamin and others at the Crown Casino in what police claim was an attempted peace conference. For police it was an ideal spot as the area was saturated with security cameras and the meeting could be monitored. For the main players, who did not trust each other, it was also an ideal place for the meeting for the same reasons: it was neutral ground where the cameras ensured there could be no ambush. The Atrium Bar at Crown is much safer than from a dead-end corridor at the back of a Carlton restaurant.
The Gangland War Page 24