The Gangland War

by John Silvester

  ‘You don’t look happy,’ she said to him — sympathetically, she thought later, considering how cruelly he’d treated her.

  ‘I’m all right, love,’ he said. ‘But I got a $100,000 contract on my head.’

  ‘Why not go overseas?’ she asked, then added, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot: you gotta make a million dollars first.’

  A flash of gangster bravado returned. ‘I’m not running away,’ he snarled. ‘No one will touch me.’ But then he stepped forward and kissed her on the forehead. It was the most tender gesture he’d made to her in twenty years. She knew it meant goodbye.

  Two weeks later, Nik ‘The Bulgarian’ Radev was dead, shot seven times in a Coburg street, murder number sixteen in Melbourne’s underworld war, which would end up with double that many casualties. Police believe he was set up by criminals he knew well, lured by the promise of a lucrative drug deal. The hit man thought to have done it, Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin, was himself shot a year later in a restaurant by Dominic ‘Mick’ Gatto, subsequently acquitted on self-defence.

  Sylvia didn’t go to her ex-husband’s funeral. She had never liked gangsters and, at 39, she was free of them at last. She felt sorry for their daughter at losing her father, but for herself, she mostly felt relief. She thought she could finally get on with the life the bullying Bulgarian had hijacked when she was seventeen.

  But it’s not that easy to put the pieces back together, patch up fractured family ties and lead a normal life when people stare and whisper and call you a gangster’s moll.

  This is how it goes for those married to the mob. The men live fast and die young or rot in jail. Their women face the mess left behind.

  IN 2003, Roberta Williams was an unknown nobody. In less than a year she became the best-known nobody in town. She of the toothy smile, pugnacious attitude and sharp tongue was a compulsory inclusion in media coverage of Melbourne’s underworld shootings.

  While the gangland war shot a lot of Roberta’s male acquaintances to death, it shot her to a sort of fame. She professed to know nothing, of course, except that her chubby hubby Carl Williams didn’t do it. Carl, who has a baby face, no visible means of support and a lot of dead associates, is now doing 35 years on multiple murder charges.

  But back when Carl was first arrested, Roberta did the talking in the Williams family. While wiser heads in the underworld stayed low, she was a dial-a-quote for reporters. There she was, on the court steps, standing by her man. And again, praising Carl’s slain bodyguard, the terminally tattooed ‘Benji’ Veniamin, her ‘best friend’. Next, she was holding court at her daughter’s ‘christening’ party — at that well-known place of worship, Crown Casino. Then she scuffled with a cop as the cameras rolled. Roberta said she and Carl were just normal folks minding their own business. What that business was, a court decided, was drug dealing and murder. The fact is that Roberta got to star in her own grubby soap opera and seemed to love it, while the nation looked on, bemused.

  Not everyone with a deprived and troubled childhood ends up as a foulmouthed gangster’s moll, but there are reasons for the path Roberta chose, reasons outlined by the judge who sentenced her to jail in October 2004 for assisting Carl to traffick drugs in 2001.

  Justice Murray Kellam said in part of his lengthy sentencing remarks:

  1. Whilst it is true that your plea of guilty was entered only on the day before your trial, I accept that your circumstances were bound up with those of your husband and that for reasons of loyalty and other reasons it was difficult for you to enter a plea until such time as it became apparent that your husband intended to plead guilty to more serious charges. That said however, there is no evidence before me of any expression of real remorse on your part for your involvement in the crime.

  2. I have been told something of your personal history and your circumstances. You are aged 35 years, having been born on 23 March 1969. You have four children, three from a previous marriage. These children are aged 17, 12 and 10. You have a fourth child from your marriage to your co-accused, Carl Williams. That child is aged three years. Your counsel spelt out your background before me in some detail. You are one of eight children. Your father, a truck driver, was burnt to death in a trucking accident when you were eight months old. Following that, your mother had grave difficulty coping with eight children. She was engaged in two de facto relationships following her husband’s death, and both such partners, I was informed by your counsel, were physically violent both to you and to your siblings. You became a Ward of the State at age 11 and you were placed in Allambie where you remained for some three years before being transferred to Winlaton and then subsequently accommodated at a hostel in Windsor. You now have no relationship with your mother. I accept that you have a background of childhood and adolescent deprivation.

  3. You formed a relationship with your first boyfriend at age 16, and by age 17 you had given birth to your first child. You later married him and had a further two children by reason of that relationship. However you separated from your first husband in 1997 after you suffered considerable violence from him. You met Carl Williams in 1998 and in March 2001 you gave birth to your youngest child, a daughter. I accept that you have a close relationship with Carl Williams.

  4. You have admitted before me to prior convictions which in general relate to offences of dishonesty and an offence of causing injury recklessly between 1987 and 1990. No doubt those offences are reflective of your troubled youth and are of no relevance to my task of sentencing you today. Of relevance, however, is the fact that you were convicted of trafficking in amphetamines at the County Court on 9 April 1990 and sentenced to be imprisoned for six months, which sentence was wholly suspended. That suspended sentence was reinstated by reason of a breach thereof and you served three months’ imprisonment in respect thereof.

  5. In November 2000 you were convicted at the Magistrates’ Court at Sunshine of being in possession of ecstasy and cocaine. You were sentenced to a term of imprisonment for three months, such sentence suspended for a period of 18 months. The event which brings you before me is clearly a breach of that suspended sentence and it can be anticipated that you will be dealt with for that matter in due course. The significance of that matter is that notwithstanding the fact that you had been given a suspended sentence, you were still prepared to engage in the criminal activity which brings you before me.

  6. A number of medical reports have been tendered before me by consent. In particular, a report from Mr Jeffrey Cummins, consulting psychologist, in relation to his examination of you on 21 September 2004 provides a detailed history of your background and your psychological state. I will not repeat that detail here but I have taken the matters contained in that report into account…

  THE judge saw beyond the defiant, publicity-hungry woman in court — and on television and in the newspapers — to the scarred, scared child she had been.

  If Roberta is a type whose fate is to ‘star’ briefly in a grubby crime soap before fading back into the inevitable oblivion, then a co-star in the same tear-stained drama is the tragic Judy Moran, a gangster gran from central casting whose blonde mane has stood out in a sea of men in black at the funerals of her two sons and two husbands.

  At the height of the gangland war, both women became media celebrities in their own right, feeding off the insatiable public interest in those at the centre of the action.

  Rarely a week went by where they failed to rate a mention in the media. Roberta was even the subject of a long profile in a weekend newspaper magazine.

  The plot thickened with the appearance, centre stage, of a new ‘love interest’ for Carl Williams, in the best soap opera tradition. When Williams first entered his guilty pleas on several murder charges in early 2007, a ‘mystery woman’ appeared at court. Her name was Renata Laureano, she was young, attractive, and wore a conspicuously large diamond ring, all of which enraged Roberta, whose temper was uncertain at the best of times.

  Asked about this on a television current affairs program,
one of the authors said, poker-faced: ‘It’s the next best thing to the Melbourne Cup. We don’t get the academy awards here — we have the Supreme Court.’

  He was referring to the fact that Roberta, upset at seeing the other woman steal the limelight — and that copies of her husband’s letters from jail had been published in the Herald Sun — had shouted obscenities at Renata Laureano.

  No wonder she was unhappy. In the letters to his estranged wife, Williams boasts of his new love.

  Furious that the letters had made their way into print, Roberta arrived at court spoiling for a fight. Before Williams had even arrived in the courtroom she expressed disappointment that he’d be locked behind a glass partition.

  ‘If I could spit in his face, I would,’ she snarled. No one doubted her.

  During the lunch break, she followed Williams’ parents, George and Barbara, shouting obscenities at them in and outside the court as a huge media contingent looked on.

  That afternoon, she was banned from attending court, and Renata Laureano took police advice to stay away.

  But the gap was filled by Judy Moran. Dressed to kill, she attempted to use the courtroom to launch a tirade at Williams over the killing of her two sons and her ex-husband, Lewis Moran.

  Invited by Supreme Court Justice Betty King to provide a verbal victim impact statement, the angry widow began: ‘Carl Williams, the evil person that you are’ before being called to order by the judge, who insisted she keep emotion out of her testimony.

  Judy Moran continued: ‘You have all but destroyed me, ripped out my heart’. She did not mention how many people her sons and husbands had hurt or killed.

  SO what is it with women and gangsters? Roberta Williams and Judy Moran mightn’t know Lady Macbeth from a Big Mac, but Melbourne psychologist Alex Bartsch, a former homicide detective, says both women remind him of the ‘Lady Macbeth’ stereotype. He says there are three other types of women who get mixed up with crooks — ‘risk-takers’, ‘Florence Nightingales’ and ‘helpless dependants’.

  ‘Criminals’ wives can be pretty much like celebrities’ wives,’ Bartsch says. ‘They fall into definable types with different motives.’ The Lady Macbeths chase power and influence. Risk-takers are attracted by danger and the reflected ‘glamour’ of being with lawbreakers. The Florence Nightingales graduate from saving wounded birds and stray kittens to rescuing wounded men. Some like being in emotional control of a man — ‘the caged beast’ who pines for them in prison in a way that usually dissolves when he gets out.

  Then there are the doormats, helpless dependants often found in ethnic crime groups where marriage within the group is common and traditional gender roles are not questioned. They cook, clean and bear children, keep up appearances and don’t ask hard questions. ‘Their entire sense of worth is tied to having a relationship,’ says Bartsch.

  Writers have always known about the allure of the outlaw. The bandit prince, the pirate king, the highwayman, the gunslinger, the bushranger and the modern gangster are prototype characters of drama. The mix of predatory appetites, reckless courage and offhand generosity has always attracted people, but more especially the opposite sex. Where you’ve got tough guys, you’ve got dolls, as Damon Runyon might have said.

  There’s a bit of Runyon’s Broadway — and Al Capone’s Chicago — in modern Melbourne. Two early casualties of the recent shooting outbreak highlight the sex appeal of gangsters.

  Right up until Alphonse Gangitano killed him in early 1995, a good-looking gunman called Gregory John Workman had always been attractive to women. A senior policeman’s daughter who went to Preston East state school with Workman recalls how proud she was when he walked her home when they were twelve. He was the best-looking boy in school — and he had ‘dash’, the word both crooks and cops use for the charismatic blend of courage, poise and recklessness valued on either side of the law.

  Workman’s killer was less courageous but more calculating. Some called the narcissistic Gangitano the ‘De Niro of Lygon Street’, but he fancied he looked more like the actor Andy Garcia in The Godfather III. As a private school boy, Gangitano attracted girls, though boys remember him as a bully. ‘He was smooth and well-dressed, and when he turned eighteen he drove a flash red car,’ one former admirer told the authors. ‘He used to play cards in my mother’s garage with his mates. He was always charming to girls but he had a complete fantasy about New York mafiosi.’

  Gangitano courted his future partner, Virginia, while she was a schoolgirl at the upmarket Genazzano College (‘We grew out of him but she didn’t,’ says the ex-admirer), but that long-term relationship didn’t stop other women seeking his company when he became a serious gangster with the ‘Carlton Crew’.

  Before Gangitano was gunned down in his Templestowe home in 1998 he was close to several women, notably bail justice Rowena Allsop, who risked her reputation with such an unlikely friendship. At Gangitano’s funeral — the biggest underworld event in Australia in years — Allsop gave a gushing eulogy that ranged from Big Al’s taste for poetry to his Dolce & Gabbana aftershave.

  Gangitano’s presumed killer, Jason Moran, condemned his own children to grow up without any male family figures by mating inside Melbourne’s tightknit painter and docker crime ‘family’. His partner, Trish, is the daughter of Les Kane, a standover man murdered by rivals in 1978. Jason’s half-brother Mark Moran was killed in 2000. Jason was shot in 2003 and his father Lewis Moran was killed later. Meaning the Moran children have lost their father, their uncle and both grandfathers to the gun.

  Why would any woman risk that for her children by marrying a gangster?

  ‘I WAS a little Italian virgin, innocent and gullible,’ Sylvia Radev sighs, nodding at the framed photograph of her teenage self: a touchingly pretty girl headed for heartbreak. ‘I’d never even seen a penis when I met Nik — let alone one with a tattoo on it,’ she says. ‘He had “TAXI” on his — because it “went everywhere”, he told me.’ She parodies her former husband’s strong eastern European accent, giving it a sinister twist. No wonder. Even among bad men, his evil ways stood out.

  He once held a gun to her head, suggested prostituting her and taunted her that he married her only to get an Australian passport.

  How a respectable convent girl ended up with a monster is a cautionary tale. Her parents and sisters are ashamed and still frightened to be linked to Radev, and Sylvia worries that her neighbours will hold it against her. His malign power reaches from the grave.

  She lives in a modern brick veneer in a new suburb southeast of Melbourne, not far from the shopping centre that inspires Kath & Kim. It’s a small, neat house with a small, neat Japanese car in the drive, comfortingly anonymous.

  A huge picture of a tiger hangs over the couch and prints of zebras and other animals are on the walls. At 40, wearing jeans and with her ash blonde hair short, Sylvia looks years younger. People sometimes mistake her and her 21-year-old daughter, Raquel, for sisters. But Raquel is painfully thin and looks older than her years because, her mother says, she has ‘seen too many bad things’.

  After moving ‘maybe 30 times’ in 22 years, Sylvia craves stability. She never again wants gangsters or police in her home. Police once found a pistol taped under a cabinet in Raquel’s bedroom. Radev had hidden it, but forced his daughter to lie that another criminal, by then conveniently dead, had put the gun there.

  Sylvia doesn’t want her two young children (to her new partner) to be exposed to the things Raquel has seen and heard. She doesn’t swear or smoke in front of them and spells out words like ‘K-I-L-L’ and ‘G-U-N’.

  Sylvia’s parents migrated from Calabria in the 1950s. Her father, now retired, was a driving instructor who paid off a big eastern suburbs house. Her two older sisters married young and have led law-abiding lives. Which is how Sylvia’s would have gone, too, if Nik Radev hadn’t trapped her.

  At seventeen, she was an apprentice hairdresser working for a Bulgarian woman involved in bringing ‘refugees’ to Austr
alia. The woman, who called Sylvia a ‘rich Italian virgin nun’, read tarot cards and predicted Sylvia would marry a man from ‘far away’. Sylvia was fascinated. Soon afterwards, two young Bulgarians turned up at the salon. They spoke poor English, but one spoke Italian. They were new arrivals, known to Sylvia’s boss. After they left, she asked Sylvia which one of them she liked.

  Neither, Sylvia said. But if you had to choose, the woman pressed, which one? Sylvia shrugged. The sporty-looking one, she said, meaning the one who spoke Italian and was ‘well-dressed’ in a white tracksuit and runners.

  What she didn’t know was that under the tracksuit, apart from a fit wrestler’s physique, were ‘jail tatts’. At 21, Radev had already served time in Europe. Far from being a genuine refugee, she later found out, he had worked the system to get to Australia. But in 1980 all she knew was that he kept coming to see her. The first time he brought her violets — not a bunch of flowers, but the whole plant in a pot. She didn’t know he’d probably stolen it.

  Radev manipulated her. Sylvia didn’t fancy the Italian boy her parents wanted her to marry. To her, Nik seemed better than an arranged marriage. It wasn’t love, but she wanted to escape her family’s control, and marrying him looked like a way out to a teenage girl. Radev charmed Sylvia’s parents, speaking Italian and listening attentively. He knew the rules: that courtship must lead to engagement.

  One day he got permission to take her out. He took her to a motel room in St Kilda.

  ‘I thought it would be like the Rod Stewart song Tonight’s the Night — all romantic,’ Sylvia recalls. ‘It wasn’t. He virtually raped me. He hurt me. Then he said, “Now you’ll have to marry me. No one else will have you”.’

  The honeymoon was at Wrest Point Casino in Hobart. He gambled; she stayed in their room. Within days he made her ask her parents to send money: he’d blown their wedding-present cash.