Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  Nine months after the murder police offered a $50,000 government approved reward for the arrest and conviction of the people responsible for Gangitano’s murder. Detective Inspector Dave Reid of the homicide squad said that in the circles that Big Al frequented, greed could prove to be a more powerful motivator than comunity spirit. ‘It is a lot of money for not a great deal of work,’ he said.

  Chief investigator in the case, Detective Senior Sergeant Charlie Bezzina, said police were more advanced than many believed. Clearly police were satisified they had established the identity of the gunman.

  But knowing, and proving can be a world apart.

  Usually, after a crime figure is murdered, some form of underworld revenge is expected. But, following Gangitano’s death, there has been a peaceful silence.

  It is as if both his friends and enemies have decided he died of natural causes.

  CHAPTER 5

  A week later

  Burying the Black Prince of Lygon Street

  ‘He is one of the few criminals in Australian history to be known simply by his first name.’

  OUTSIDE, the Mercedes and BMW coupes circle in the afternoon sun like sharks, cruising for parking spots among shoals of lesser vehicles jamming the usually quiet streets in West Melbourne. They’re late models in dark colors, mostly black or midnight blue, and run to sharp personal number plates and mobile phone aerials tilted rakishly, like dorsal fins on sharks.

  The whiff of menace and money – fat rolls of cash money – wafts from the drivers, their hard faces blank as they join the silent crowd gathered at the church door next to a big, black Cadillac hearse parked near a pile of wreaths banked against the bluestone wall.

  Not everyone here is a big shot and many mourners are clearly not from Melbourne’s underworld, but they dress the part. There’s a generic quality about the gathering that strikes a watcher.

  There are men old enough to be grandfathers who move confidently through the crowd, escorted by young blonde women who are not their grand-daughters.

  There are young men, with their hair cropped short, tied back in tight pony-tails or slicked back, hard and shiny. They mostly wear dark suits, gold jewellery, lightweight slip-on shoes and sunglasses. Many are heavily muscled, with the bulk that comes from weight-lifting, and perhaps steroids. They tend to favor permanent scowls, and would look at home on nightclub doors, as some no doubt do. If they don’t smoke, they chew gum. Some do both.

  One hardboiled character dragging on a borrowed Winfield has on the compulsory dark suit, but with fawn slip-on suede loafers. He wears no socks, but it doesn’t matter much. His ankles are tattooed almost solid blue and green.

  Across the street, marooned on a traffic island, the cameras of the media contingent are trained on the crowd. Those who hold the equipment keep their distance, perhaps remembering the ugly scenes at the funeral of Robert ‘Aussie Bob’ Trimbole in Sydney in the 1980s, when angry mourners attacked cameramen and journalists.

  This is the scene at St Mary’s By The Sea Catholic church around 1.15pm on Friday, 23 January, 1998, as the minutes crawl towards the start of a funeral service for a man who died a week earlier the way he had lived: violently and fast.

  His name is, or was, Alphonse John Gangitano, and he is one of the few criminals in Australian history to be known – even by people he’d never met – simply by his first name. Like Squizzy. Like Chopper. Like Neddy.

  Alphonse, also known as Al, was shot several times in the laundry of his Templestowe home by an assassin still officially unknown, and likely to remain so, but who must have been well known to his victim.

  An assassin trusted enough, it would appear, that he was let into the house unchallenged before he produced a weapon and squeezed the trigger at close range.

  Many of the details of the shooting are a mystery. So is the question of how a boastful schoolyard bully, who left school more than twenty years ago with nothing more useful than a bad reputation, managed to support himself and his family in relative luxury most of his adult life.

  Gangitano often claimed he was a ‘property developer’, but that was probably just another example of the mischievous sense of humour his friends and supporters claim for him, exemplified by the fulsome praise heaped on him by one of his more unusual friends, bail justice Rowena Allsop, who addressed the packed church at the funeral. Ms Allsop, who has been heavily criticised for her close association with Gangitano, was asked to speak by the dead man’s family. She delivered a ringing tribute in which she compared his wit with Oscar Wilde’s, gushed about his silk ties, cashmere overcoats and ‘the lingering scent’ of his aftershave, and noted his consuming interest in John F. Kennedy and Napoleon.

  She said her friend had been ‘like a king commanding a court, with his friends laughing at his old jokes’. She said she was touched by him turning up at the Children’s Hospital last Christmas with a bag of toys for the children in the cancer ward.

  Others, however, detected a darker side to Gangitano’s gregarious character. He might well have developed properties, they say. And no doubt he sometimes arranged for holes to be dug – but not always to pour foundations.

  If the man in the coffin wasn’t a gangster, he acted like one. And he was certainly buried like one.

  A fitting exit, some might say, for the Black Prince of Lygon Street.

  MELBOURNE is Australia’s Chicago, but with a touch of London’s old East End ‘manor’ tradition about it. A tradition of almost feudal loyalty to local ‘crime lords’ going back to the solidarity of the old working class inner suburbs in John Wren and Squizzy Taylor’s day.

  Unlike the criminal subculture in other cities, Melbourne’s underworld has a tradition of big occasion funerals, preceded by an avalanche of newspaper death notices. Many of these are effusive and ostentatiously long, implying that money is no object. Some are ‘crocodile tears’. A few are downright tongue-in-cheek, and contain coded jokes and messages.

  Police searching for clues to gangland slayings are known to comb the death notices carefully. Indeed, some are rumoured to write the occasional contribution themselves. Gangitano wasn’t the only one with a mischievous sense of humor. One notice read ‘The impression you left on me will stay eternally in my heart. Jim Pinarkos.’

  Pinarkos’ headless body was found at Rye beach in July 1989. He died from an arrow through his heart. The murder was never solved.

  Whatever the reasons, Gangitano’s farewell was one of the biggest underworld funerals in Melbourne since the murder of master bank robber Raymond (Chuck) Bennett in the magistrate’s court in 1979 and of Bennett’s arch enemy, the notorious gunman Brian Kane, in a Brunswick hotel some time later.

  The ritual ran over a week, starting with twenty two death notices for Gangitano in the underworld’s favourite newspaper, the Herald Sun, on the Monday after the murder.

  The number of notices more than doubled to forty eight on Tuesday, led by a joint tribute from Gangitano’s widow and their daughters, and his sister Nuccia, and including several from prominent underworld figures.

  It peaked on Wednesday, with sixty eight notices, including one from Charlie Wootton, a reclusive but well-known and much-respected gaming identity whose past links him with the blood-spattered history of the painters and dockers union.

  As a teenager in the 1950s, Wootton reputedly disposed of the empty shotgun shells left when an ‘unknown’ gunman shot Freddy ‘The Frog’ Harrison on the wharves.

  Dozens of men saw the Frog get croaked, the legend goes, but it was never officially solved. Like the others, young Charlie Wootton developed amnesia, a condition that still affects police investigations today, including this one.

  In the seven days before his burial there had been two hundred and nine death notices for Gangitano. This was a bonanza for Rupert Murdoch’s classified advertising coffers – and a measure of the generous underworld protocol that makes a hero of a man dismissed by some as a thug who didn’t have the brains to be a ‘Mr Big’. />
  Criminal groupies who hardly knew the dead man put notices in the paper as though they were great friends. But columns of newsprint aren’t the only measure of Gangitano’s posthumous popularity. At least eight hundred people, and possibly a thousand, turned up to the funeral service, filling the church and spilling outside.

  So why the big deal?

  One reason could be that Gangitano was, in his own way, a ‘crossover’ criminal. He was from a respectable Italian family – not one, according to police sources, that automatically connected him with organised crime from birth, as with some Calabrian and Sicilian peasant clans for whom kidnapping, extortion and violence are facts of life. He went to school with other middle-class boys, and could just as easily have become a lawyer or an accountant if he’d studied, which he didn’t. Schoolmates recall that he was always aggressive, but that his father was outraged when he secretly tattooed his arms, and forced him to have skin grafts to remove them. When forced to leave Marcellin College, he did his last year of school at Taylors’ College. Classmates there remember that even then, he was lazy, manipulative, on the make and constantly accompanied by the first member of what was to become his gang.

  The picture that emerges is of an egotistical young bully whose nature made him gravitate towards a life of crime. His charm and his looks attracted attention. So did his vanity and appetite for extreme violence, especially when the odds were in his favor.

  But whereas more traditional Italian organised crime figures kept largely to their own, the more urbane Gangitano slipped easily between the Calabrian and Sicilian crime syndicates, other ethnic crime groups, and mainstream Australian criminals connected with the painters and dockers union. In the end, this willingness to deal with all comers might be what got him killed.

  A former associate from the boxing world – who did not attend the funeral because of a violent disagreement many years ago – recalls being present when Gangitano spoke at length to the notorious Sydney standover man Tom Domican, with whom he evidently had a warm relationship.

  Others describe Gangitano’s links with one of Perth’s heaviest criminals, the convicted heroin trafficker John Kizon, named recently in connection with the late Laurie Connell, millionaire race-fixer and the most ruthless of the ‘WA Inc’ corporate robber barons.

  Domican and Kizon were reportedly among several interstate criminals who flew to Melbourne to attend Gangitano’s funeral. They were joined, rumor has it, by an Asian contact who counted Gangitano a close-enough friend to travel to Australia for the service.

  In his private life, Gangitano was unlike the strictly-controlled members of the traditional Italian groups, where marriages are often organised, often between distant relatives from the same region in Italy. He did not marry, but lived with Virginia, a private school girl who was not Italian. Her sister, Fiona, a handsome and distinguished-looking woman, added a touch of class to the proceedings by giving one of the readings during the service.

  But, for all his wide-ranging contacts, Gangitano was best-known and – at least on the surface – most admired in Melbourne’s little Italy, Lygon Street.

  There, according to one of the many death notices placed by people who had met him, he was ‘an icon’ in certain sections of the community.

  All of which has a bearing on the huge turn-up at his funeral. It seems St Mary’s By The Sea in West Melbourne, close to the Victoria Market, is the church of choice for Melbourne’s mafia.

  It was a case of history repeating itself. Hairstyles, hemlines and cars change, but among the older people in the congregation were some who have attended more than one big mafia funeral there.

  When one of Victoria’s earliest godfathers, Domenico ‘the Pope’ Italiano, died in 1962 he was buried from St Mary’s. So were Vincenzo Muratore and Vincenzo Agillette, killed little more than a year later in the power struggle caused by Italiano’s death.

  They were all given elaborate funerals, early proof of the potency and loyalty of the Italian organised crime groups that had taken control of Melbourne’s fruit and vegetable markets.

  But none was more elaborate than Gangitano’s. From the taped music to the singing of Ave Maria by his friend, Simon Pantano, it was a lavish production from start to end.

  Of course, not everyone present was in mourning. Apart from a core of family and close friends, the crowd comprised mostly those who felt obliged to be there, and hangers-on attracted by the publicity.

  One reason for the big crowd, joked a well-known criminal lawyer afterwards, was the number of undercover police there to execute outstanding warrants on elusive criminals drawn from cover for the occasion. Another, he said, was the number of lawyers trying to collect overdue fees for court appearances for some of the colorful identities in the congregation.

  A former detective who first ran against the young Gangitano in nightclubs in the early 1980s, and was respected by him, injects a sombre note.

  ‘I hope a war doesn’t go on over this, because the biggest losers are their kids,’ he says. ‘I have seen the toughest men, but all their lives consist of are a series of battles with the law and with their criminal counterparts. No kid deserves to have their father taken away like this.

  ‘But it’s happened to Alphonse’s kids, and now there’s probably someone out there scheming to kill some other kids’ father.’

  So, whodunnit? There were rumors. That the Albanians did it. That the Lebanese did it. That the Lebanese rumor was started by someone wanting to cover the real killer’s tracks. That it was an inside job, performed with the blessing of people close to him. Any, or none, of these theories could be correct, although the smart money is on the inside job.

  Rumors spread at the funeral that the mystery man who was at the house the night Gangitano was killed was a criminal well-known on racetracks. And he wasn’t the only visitor Gangitano had that night.

  Police have their job cut out to sort the red hot from the red herrings.

  A cryptic message from a well-informed underworld source says the shooting granted the dying wish of an old man … and that the process of spreading disinformation about who and why it was done began ‘before the gun was chosen’.

  A postscript. In August, 1992, another man called Al – Alfonso Muratore – was shot dead outside his Hampton home, twenty eight years after his father Vincenzo was shot outside his house in the same way, less than a kilometre away.

  Afterwards, a potential witness told police why he couldn’t cooperate with them. ‘You can put me in jail,’ he said, ‘but they can give me the death sentence.’

  Nothing’s changed since then.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jaidyn’s world

  Broken hearts and stunted dreams

  ‘She was only thirteen, but she had big norks’

  WHERE does it really begin and end, the pathetic story of Jaidyn Leskie? Not when he’s born, although the portents are ominous enough: the birth is the week of the Port Arthur massacre.

  Not the night he disappears from a house in Moe in June, 1997, starting a search that runs longer than the one for a prime minister thirty years before.

  Not when the tiny body floats to the surface of a lake on New Year’s Day, 1998. Nor when the sordid squabble over where – or whether – to bury the remains is settled, so he can be laid to rest at last.

  The truth, elusive in all this, is that the black farce played out for more than six months was only the public part of a story that started long ago, and which isn’t finished yet. It is not only the story of a battered baby, but of where he came from … from a place of broken families and broken hearts, shattered trust and stunted dreams.

  It’s an ugly soap opera with real blood and real bruises. It’s a tragedy, a morality tale, and a love story gone wrong. Like all dramas, it turns on sex, betrayal and death. It goes something like this …

  IT’S the late 1960s. She is the policeman’s daughter in a mountain town in far East Gippsland. He works in the timber mill, the district’s only
industry apart from sheep and cattle. If it’s not love, it’s near enough, even if her parents aren’t too keen on the idea.

  Which is how Pam (‘don’t use my maiden name, for my dad’s sake’) comes to be married at nineteen in the old Presbyterian church in the main, and only, street of Swift’s Creek in 1970.

  Despite the rumors, she is not pregnant. It’s not until nearly two years later, in the Omeo hospital, that she has her first child. They call her Katie.

  Married life is fine – for a while. To hear Pam tell it, as soon as she’s pregnant, her man chases women, drinks, and belts her. ‘I ran into that many cupboards and brooms,’ she laughs mirthlessly twenty-five years later. ‘Once I told the truth about how I got a black eye, and nobody believed me. Even his own mother told me to get out. She’d put up with the same thing for ten years herself.’

  Between drinking and fighting, there are reconciliations. Bilynda is born three years after Katie, at Bairnsdale. Then comes a son, Glenn. But babies don’t make it better, nor does the first of many shifts – this one to Myrtleford in 1977.

  There, he goes to work in the bush at 3am on Mondays, returns on Friday nights. She dreads weekends. One Monday she hires a van and flees to a family friend at Mooroopna, then rents a house in Bendigo. He finds her, begs forgiveness, promises to give up drinking. He does – for six weeks.

  She works in a motel at night. He works on her best friend, an amorous alcoholic with plenty of kids and no man. Katie, now eight, one day asks why Daddy was in bed with Aunty B. It’s a tough question. Pam answers it by dumping all his gear on her ex-friend’s doorstep, including his guns. Aunty B. doesn’t like guns ‘because her father shot himself’, Pam is to recall with grim pleasure. ‘I told her, “if you want him so bad, then you can have his stuff, guns ’n’ all”.’

  Pam is to leave her husband three more times. The last time is a month before her tenth wedding anniversary. Her father moves her to Lakes Entrance, warns her that if she ever takes the bastard back, he’ll never talk to her again. This time, she listens.