Crime Time: Australians Behaving Badly

by Sue Bursztynski

At first, people felt sorry for the poor boy who had lost his family, but the police were never happy with his story. It didn’t make sense. For one thing, the bodies had been dead too long to believe that someone had hung around long enough to be seen by Sef. And why had they used knives from the kitchen to commit the murder? Also, the paint used for the message matched some paint kept in the garage.

  But it was going to take time to gather enough evidence against Sef, and he was allowed to go free for the time being.

  His relatives didn’t believe his story either, not even his grandparents, who left for Melbourne. If they supported him, it was from a long way off!

  Beginning to realise that he still might be caught, Sef tried desperately to fix up his alibi, but only made it worse. The evidence against him mounted up. Sef was arrested in June 2002, nearly a year after the murder, and sentenced to three life terms in prison.

  The spoilt rich boy was never going to enjoy life again.

  JOE KORP AND TANIA HERMAN

  In February 2005, Maria Korp, a mother of two, went missing. She was found after four days in the boot of her own car, near Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. The case became known as the ‘Mum in the Boot’ murder.

  Joe Korp was Maria’s second husband. After her first husband died in 1987, Maria met Joe at South Pacific Tyres, where they both worked.

  The couple married in 1991. Later, Joe became fascinated with the Internet. He met a woman called Tania Herman on the Net. He told her his name was Joe Bronte and that he was single.

  Tania lived in the town of Echuca, near the Murray River. In early 2004, Joe hired a car from Melbourne Airport and went to meet his new girlfriend. He told Maria that he had to go to Sydney on weekends to work on a new business with a friend.

  Tania was planning to move to Melbourne, to be near her new lover. Joe decided he had to do something about Maria. He even checked out the cost of having her killed by a hit man.

  Late in 2004, Maria found out about Tania. Angry, she left Joe’s belongings outside the house for him to find when he came home. She had changed the locks. She asked the police for an intervention order, which meant that Joe couldn’t come within 200 metres of her or the house. Later, he persuaded her to let him return to the family home.

  Around that time, Joe and Tania started to think about how they might get rid of Maria. In January 2005, Joe asked Maria to help him with the car. She became suspicious about the tube, cloth and tape he asked her to fix to the car’s exhaust. Maria was sure, now, that her life was in danger. She was right.

  The murderous couple had decided that Tania would commit the actual deed. She would hide in Maria and Joe’s garage, then strangle Maria. He put some equipment she would need into a backpack. She would even wear his running shoes so that her footprints would confuse police.

  Early on the morning of 9 February 2005, Joe picked up Tania and drove her to his home. He left her in the garage. After breakfast, he kissed Maria goodbye and left for work, only stopping to urge Tania not to let him down. She must kill Maria that day.

  When Maria came out to her car, Tania tried to choke her with a belt, but there was a struggle between the two women and Maria bled on to the concrete before Tania finally managed to overcome her. She put Maria into her own car boot and drove to the Shrine, where she dumped the car. She took Maria’s mobile phone, purse and car keys with her and threw the phone into the Yarra River.

  Joe told the police his wife was missing. During the night, he found a spot of blood on the garage floor and tried to scrub it off with bleach. He took everything he thought might be evidence against them to Tania and told her to get rid of it all.

  But some of the things they had tried to throw out turned up. It didn’t take too much questioning by police to find that he had been involved with Tania. Both their homes were searched.

  The car was still missing. Police asked the public to look out for it and on 13 February the car was found with Maria in the boot, still alive – just. She was taken to the Alfred Hospital.

  Now Joe and Tania were suspected. They insisted they were innocent, but when police told Tania what they had found in her bin, she confessed.

  In hospital, Maria was being fed artificially by tube, but she wouldn’t recover. In late July, the feeding tube was removed. She died nine days later.

  Joe had begun to feel guilty. Suddenly, he was grieving for the loss of Maria. After calling his first wife to share his grief, he hanged himself. Tania Herman went to prison, at least until 2014, regretting she’d ever been involved with Joe.

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  One day in 1919, Henry and Agnes Long were driving home along their local river bank. Suddenly they fell to the ground, dead. Both had been shot by one bullet, which had struck Henry in the neck, come out and hit Agnes in the right breast. It wasn’t murder. A man shooting pelicans on the river had hit the unlucky couple when a shot ricocheted from the water.

  NIKOLAI RADEV

  When Bulgarian Nikolai Radev arrived in Australia in 1980, nobody bothered to ask him what he’d done back home. It was only later that his criminal background was found out.

  Meanwhile, he was accepted as a refugee and soon settled into his new home in Melbourne. He married a nice girl called Sylvia and for a while he worked at an honest job, selling takeaway food in the suburbs.

  By 1983, he wasn’t working any more, but he was living the high life. It didn’t take him long to find out who was running organised crime in Melbourne and join them. The Department of Immigration hadn’t heard of him, but the Russian crooks in his new home certainly had.

  By 1985, he’d spent his first jail time in Australia, for selling drugs. He didn’t waste it. Criminals often see prison time as just a part of the job, and spend it learning new tricks and working on their next crime.

  Nikolai’s crimes were usually violent. Among other things, he had bashed an old man and tied up the man’s little granddaughter. He even threatened one policeman who had arrested him; the policeman finally couldn’t stand the pressure and quit his job.

  By 1998, Radev had started selling drugs in St Kilda, to help pay for the kind of life he liked to live. He paid in cash for the rent on a house in an expensive suburb of Melbourne. He wore expensive clothes and jewellery. His watch was worth $20,000 and work on his teeth had cost him $55,000. Just before his death, he bought himself a Mercedes for $100,000. Nobody without a job could live the way he did, except by crime.

  It was Nikolai’s greed that ended up killing him. He was making a lot of money from selling drugs, but this wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted his own drugs ‘cook’, who would make pills for him all day, every day.

  In 2003, he made the mistake of asking fellow drug dealer Carl Williams if he would introduce him to his cook.

  Williams invited Radev to a meeting with other drug dealers at a café in Brighton. There, Nikolai was told the good news: the cook was in Coburg, another Melbourne suburb, and he would be allowed to meet him.

  Happily, Radev got into his car and went to Coburg. Williams and his friends followed in two other cars. He reached Coburg and spoke to two men. On his way back to his Mercedes, he was shot seven times from behind.

  Nikolai Radev was dead. Witnesses in the street had seen a car that looked exactly like one belonging to Carl Williams’ father. In 2007, Carl Williams would go to jail for a number of other murders. However, he did a deal with the prosecution that he would plead guilty to those murders if neither he nor his father was tried for Radev’s death. Another criminal, a hit man called Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin, might have been one of the killers.

  Radev’s lifestyle had been good, but he died owing a lot of people money. Police found plenty of expensive goods at his home after his death. However, the money was gone, most probably stolen by fellow criminals. This didn’t stop him from being buried in a gold-plated coffin. If Nikolai Radev couldn’t have his money any more, nobody else was going to get it.

  THE MORAN FAMILY

 
; Imagine what it would be like to be a member of a family whose business was crime.

  You might live in a nice house and go to an expensive private school, but you would always have to worry about what might happen to you or your parents.

  Of course, you might join the family business. Half-brothers Jason and Mark Moran were happy to go into crime – dealing drugs in their case. It was a dangerous and violent way to live, but they didn’t mind. Neither did Lewis, Jason’s father and Mark’s stepfather.

  All three men were to die within a few years of each other, in Melbourne’s gangland wars.

  In 1999, Jason and Mark met their competition, Carl Williams, in a western suburbs park. They were all in the business of producing ‘upper’ tablets to be sold at nightclubs and parties. Jason and Mark were annoyed because Williams was selling the pills much cheaper than they were, and because some pills he had sold them had fallen apart. They also said he owed them a lot of money.

  Jason wanted to teach Williams a lesson, so he shot him in the stomach. He didn’t kill Carl, because that way they’d never get their money.

  Carl Williams decided to destroy the whole Moran family and their friends.

  Williams couldn’t do anything for a while, because he was in remand prison on drug charges, waiting for bail, but he didn’t waste his time inside. While waiting, he collected a team of hit men to help him in his plan. When he was released on bail, Jason was in prison, but Mark was a target.

  He was shot outside his $1.3 million home in Aberfeldie on 15 June 2000.

  Lewis guessed who was responsible for Mark’s death. He tried to take out a contract on Carl Williams, but had no luck. No one was going to commit murder for the mere $50,000 he was offering.

  Jason knew his life was in danger. He tried not to be too predictable in his movements. For a while, Williams and his hit team had a hard time keeping track of him. Jason even survived one murder attempt.

  But there was one thing he did regularly and it cost his life. He took his children to football training in Essendon every Saturday morning. On 21 June 2003, Jason and his friend Pasquale Barbaro took the children to training for the last time.

  Afterwards, a gunman simply leaned into their van parked in the car park of the Cross Keys Hotel and shot both men in front of the children sitting terrified in the back seat.

  Jason’s children had now lost their father and their uncle and would soon enough lose their grandfather.

  Lewis Moran had once been involved in illegal gambling, protection rackets and theft. It was Jason and Mark who introduced him to drug dealing, which paid so well.

  Like Jason, he was to die because he had a routine.

  Lewis didn’t care much any more. Both his boys were gone. Some of his best friends had also been killed in the gangland wars. He knew he was in danger, but it didn’t matter to him.

  In fact, he had been in remand prison on drugs charges and had fought to get out on bail, even though he was safer in jail than free. The police were trying to protect him by keeping him behind bars, but he wouldn’t be protected. Police made his bail conditions changeable so that any gunmen would find him hard to track.

  The trouble was, Moran loved his glass of beer. And he had to get it from the same place every day. Everyone knew where to find him from six p.m. onwards: the Brunswick Club bar. On 31 March 2004, two gunmen burst into the pub’s front bar and started shooting. Moran tried to escape, but had no chance. With two bullet wounds, he died on the spot.

  The Moran men were dead now, but the war continued until 2006, when Carl Williams went to prison for several murders.

  MARIO CONDELLO – THE EX-LAWYER

  Mario Condello was born in Carlton in 1952, to a hard-working family from the Italian region of Calabria. Mario was given every chance to shine in his family’s adopted country. His brother, Enzo, certainly did. Enzo became a well-known playwright.

  In fact, Mario did well at first, studying law at Melbourne University and practising law in Carlton afterwards.

  But Mario had other plans for his life. In 1982, he was sentenced to six years in jail on fraud and drug-related charges. He was banned from practising law again.

  Mario was working for the Calabrian Mafia, importing and distributing drugs in Australia. This job gave him more money and power than working as a lawyer ever could.

  Condello knew a lot of people and at one point was running a sort of criminal employment agency. Did you want someone to burn down your business so you could claim insurance? He could arrange it. You needed advice on growing marijuana? He knew just the person to help you! For a price, of course.

  He was also a loan shark. Those people who couldn’t persuade banks to lend them money could come to good old Mario. Naturally, they had to be willing to pay huge interest rates. And if you borrowed from Mario, you’d better pay up on time. Mario wouldn’t just sell your house. He’d send the boys around to ‘talk’ to you.

  In 1980, the police set up an entire taskforce, Operation Zulu, to investigate what Mario was doing. The taskforce worked for two years and found he was involved in drug trafficking, arson, fraud and one attempted murder.

  Police raided the home of a criminal with whom Mario had been in jail and found a list of names and phone numbers. They were all the same as the surname of the detective who had started up the Zulu investigation. Clearly, someone was trying to track down this detective.

  After all the jail time he had done, Condello was careful not to be directly involved in crime. He was satisfied to be the one who arranged and financed it. This made it a lot harder to build evidence against him.

  Besides, although he was responsible for a lot of violence, someone who had worked with him said he couldn’t use a gun and fainted at the sight of blood!

  Condello bought a lot of property in Australia and Europe. He owned expensive cars and homes. He gambled at Crown Casino, spending at least $7.5 million a year on his hobby.

  And still, he had no day job anyone knew about.

  It was because of Mario Condello that police finally managed to arrest the drug dealer Carl Williams without a chance of bail.

  Police believed Williams had a contract out on Condello. Mario was a friend of Mick Gatto, who had killed one of Williams’ hit men, Andrew Veniamin. Gatto was in prison, but Williams could take his revenge on Condello.

  Police, who knew something was going on, were bugging Williams and his hit men. Mostly, this was useless, but there was a breakthrough in May 2004, when two of Williams’ hit men were talking in a car they thought was clean. They were discussing a plan to kill Condello while he was walking his dog outside his Brighton home. They didn’t know Condello had moved just after Veniamin’s death.

  It took a while for police to catch them in the attempt. Twice, the hit men slept in. Once, one of them was on a hot date when he was supposed to be committing murder. But on 9 June 2004, the two men were caught.

  Williams and his men were charged with conspiracy to kill Condello, but that was all right, because four days later, Mario was arrested for conspiracy to kill Williams and his father, George. Unfortunately for Mario, the ‘hit man’ to whom he offered $500,000 for the killing was a police informer.

  Mario survived until 6 February 2006. After a nice dinner with friends at a Bourke Street restaurant, he left for home. He had a strong security system, but someone followed him into the garage and shot him.

  There were 600 mourners at his funeral at St Ignatius Church in Richmond. Most of the mourners, old and young, male and female, were wearing sunglasses, a gangster fashion statement.

  According to his family and the priest, Father Norden, Condello ‘got religion’ during his last year of life, praying daily and carrying a rosary on the night he was shot.

  But Father Norden told the congregation, ‘Never try revenge.’

  DID YOU KNOW…?

  Australia’s first piece of art was the Charlotte Medal. It was commissioned by the First Fleet ship Charlotte’s surgeon and made from a
silver kidney dish by convict Thomas Barnett. It is a very beautiful piece of work, with the ship, sun, moon and stars on one side and a description of the voyage on the other. The medal was bought in 2008 by Sydney’s National Maritime Museum. Barnett didn’t have such a happy ending. On the way to Australia, he continued the forgery for which he’d been transported in the first place, making quarter-dollars to buy goods, through the portholes, from merchants in Rio Di Janeiro. Only a few weeks after arrival in Australia, Thomas stole some food and was executed.

  DONNA HAYES AND BENJAMIN JORGENSEN

  THE APRIL FOOL’S DAY STUFF-UP

  Parents of two and armed-robber wannabes, Donna Hayes and Benjamin Jorgensen, will always have good reason to hate April Fool’s day.

  The pair hadn’t lived together for a while, but when they needed cash badly, they decided to work as a team to raise it.

  Benjamin hadn’t taken drugs for years, but had gone back to them after a failed relationship had upset him badly. Donna, also a drug user, had used speed to help her get through a long night of housework in 2006. Two days later, she had still had drugs in her blood when she drove 100 km an hour in a 70 km zone. There was an accident and somebody died.

  She was out on bail for that charge when the couple received a tip-off. The manager of the Cuckoo, a popular restaurant in Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges, would be carrying over $30,000 in cash after the restaurant closed on Sunday 1 April 2007. This had to be the perfect way to raise the money they wanted so badly!

  Benjamin armed himself with a sawn-off shotgun. Later, he said he hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, just frighten his victims. This may be true, but the gun was still loaded. It was going to make trouble for them and send Donna to hospital. Donna took a hammer to use as her weapon. With a third person to drive the getaway car, they went to Olinda, the suburb where the restaurant was located.

  After midnight, when the staff members were beginning to leave, they sprang out at the restaurant’s manager, Peter Schmidt, who was carrying a black plastic bag.