Underbelly 2

by John Silvester

  The pair are questioned in separate rooms at Shepparton police station. Latorre is twenty-nine, heavily built and quiet. He agrees he was in Bendigo on the day of the burglary, but says he was visiting his brother.

  In the next interview room his employee and alleged accomplice, barely nineteen, has a little more explaining to do; the police have found goods that look suspiciously like Monti’s at his house. Rocky claims he bought them from a stranger selling ‘hot’ stuff.

  Despite the denials, the detectives put together what they judge is a strong case, which is set to go to court in early 1991. But a funny thing happens on the way to trial. The police, it seems, aren’t the only ones doing their homework; someone else believes, or is told, that Vince Latorre might know where the Monti loot is.

  This is why — about 1.30am on Thursday 20 July 1989 — Latorre is abducted from his flat by two men wearing masks, caps and overalls. They tie and gag his wife and leave her in the flat, bundle him in a car, bound and blindfolded, and drive into the bush. There they bash and interrogate him for more than an hour.

  Latorre doesn’t talk. Either he is brave, or it’s true he doesn’t know what’s happened to the loot because he didn’t do the burglary, or he’s even more frightened of someone else than he is of the thugs working him over. Whatever the reason, the abductors get nothing from him.

  Bleeding and battered, he’s driven back to Shepparton and shoved out the door near his unit, still tied and blindfolded. He has to be taken to hospital.

  Local police soon hear of two men who’d been staying at a Shepparton motel the night before. An alert receptionist tells them she assumed the pair were police special operations group members because they were dressed in dark blue overalls and baseball caps, and acted as if they were planning some sort of raid.

  Local police trace calls the men made from the motel room. Curiously, some of the calls are to detectives — one in Melbourne and one in Bendigo. The local police aren’t sure if this is linked with Latorre’s idea that a third person was lurking in the background where he was bashed. Latorre thinks his assailants stopped working him over to consult someone else, but he can’t be sure.

  Like the mysterious telephone calls, Latorre’s suspicions of a third person being involved in his abduction come to nothing. What does happen is that two standover men, Chris Dudkowski and Robert Punicki, are arrested, charged and convicted of the abduction and assault of Latorre, among other offences.

  The pair, who have been well-known bouncers at Shepparton hotels, are described by police as ‘opportunists’ acting independently to find the Monti money. Dudkowski and Punicki go along with this. They are especially discreet after one is warned in jail he’ll be ‘knocked’ (killed) and an inquisitive lawyer ‘loaded up’ with bogus drug charges if there is any loose talk about anybody else being involved.

  Allegations of such activities have no bearing, of course, on the subsequent disbanding of the major crime squad, despite speculation to the contrary. If there is any background involvement by rogue cops in the abduction and bashing of Latorre, it is unclear who they are.

  Not all police work is as surefooted as the Dudkowski-Punicki arrests. Surveillance police working for the major crime squad waste several days watching the wrong Vince Latorre, an uncle of the wanted man who then lives in Doyle’s Road, Shepparton, some distance from his nephew.

  Despite such bumbling, the major crime squad is confident when Latorre and Iaria finally face the Bendigo County Court on 11 February 1991. But not all jury members, after a hearing that stretches into early March, are so sure of the police case. Result: a hung jury.

  At the time, Rocky Iaria is happy enough to avoid a conviction, even if it means facing another trial later that year. But the truth is, if he’d been found guilty and gone to jail he’d probably be alive today.

  It’s a tip-off — allegedly anonymous — that gets Rocky killed.

  The official version of events is that someone telephones Bendigo police to say a relative of Iaria’s, a tobacco farmer near Myrtleford, has a video recorder stolen in the Monti burglary. A detective goes to the farm and identifies the machine as Monti’s. The relative says he bought it for $150, while Rocky was present. It’s the link the prosecution needs to tie Rocky to the burglary.

  Which it does. On 6 September 1991, just seventeen days before the second trial is set to start.

  ROCKY is driving around that Friday afternoon, in his white XW Falcon. About 3pm he ferries cold drinks to his older brothers, who are pruning fruit trees, then comes home to the house in Orchard Court his parents have put up as surety for the $50,000 bail to guarantee he will front at the new trial.

  In the lull before the evening meal, he kicks a football around the back yard with two of his brothers, Nick and Fiore, still schoolboys.

  His mother calls out to ask him if he will be home to eat with the family. He asks his brothers to tell her he’ll be home ‘about 8 or 9 o’clock’. Then he gets into the Falcon and drives off. They don’t see him again. Ever.

  He doesn’t meet his brother, Paddy, at a parking spot near the lake where young bucks gather on Friday nights. It’s not the first time Rocky has stayed out all night. But it is the first time he doesn’t telephone early next morning to tell his parents he’s all right.

  They’re worried. On Sunday they visit a local detective at home … accompanied by Vince Latorre. The detective is wary; he suspects they are trying to use him to make it look as if Rocky’s disappearance is not just jumping bail. He soon changes his mind.

  He talks to Latorre and the Iarias separately. Latorre, he is to recall, shrugs off Rocky’s disappearance, saying he doesn’t know where he is, and suspects Rocky has ‘pissed off because he’s shit frightened of the second trial coming up’.

  But Antonio Iaria is ashen with fear for his son. He thinks the boy is dead, that he would never run away without telling the family, and in any case he wouldn’t jump bail because it would cost the family their house. The father’s distress is convincing.

  The detective sends the family to the police station to file a missing person’s report. Iaria’s disappearance isn’t made public until two days later, when the Shepparton News runs a small story saying police ‘fear for the safety’ of a local man after discovery of his car the day before in the carpark at Benalla railway station.

  There’s speculation Rocky has fled the district on the train, but his family knows it’s not true, as much as they would like it to be.

  Two weeks later, on 23 September, the new trial begins at Bendigo. Latorre, facing the jury alone, is quickly acquitted. Evidence involving Iaria is inadmissible, and so the case against Latorre doesn’t stand up, just as predicted.

  Latorre returns to the vast, white ranch-style house built on the orchard he has bought in Central Avenue, Shepparton East, near the old place where he and his brothers grew up. Close, too, to his friend Danny Murtagh, who has come under police notice for stealing farm machinery and other offences.

  For the Iarias, there is an appalling silence that is to last more than six years. Grieving for their boy, but not knowing what has happened, they hire a lawyer for court hearings to lift the $50,000 bail surety on their house. Eventually, they sell out and move to Myrtleford, away from cruel rumors in Shepparton that they have hidden Rocky interstate or overseas.

  Now, at least, they have a grave to tend. But will it end there?

  SUSPICIONS linger in Shepparton about who killed Rocky Iaria. When the autopsy showed he died of a shotgun blast, it made some people think hard about a gun handed anonymously to police in 1993.

  It was a sawn-off single-barrel shotgun, found in an irrigation channel at Shepparton East. It was identified as a Stirling … registered to Danny Murtagh. Questioned, Murtagh asserted the gun had been damaged in a fire, then given to an unknown person, who might well have sawn it off and thrown it in the channel.

  Police have not proved the gun is linked to Iaria’s murder, but believe it could be a vital
clue in any future trial. Unfortunately, they don’t know who handed in the weapon — and it has since reportedly been destroyed in a clean-up of Shepparton police station.

  Chances of finding who handed in the shotgun faded when the officer in charge of Shepparton CIB, a Detective Sergeant Barry Stevens, made a public appeal on local television in which, inexplicably, he described the weapon as a ‘long-barrelled firearm’ handed in during a gun amnesty. Meanwhile, strange things happen in the orchards and farms around Shepparton.

  Police were set to move against a local gang suspected of stealing irrigation equipment from an Italian farming family at Tatura in 1997, when a neighbor talked of giving evidence.

  Days later the neighbor’s entire tomato crop — a year’s work worth tens of thousands of dollars — withered and died. It had been poisoned. The theft case collapsed through of lack of evidence. ‘I don’t want a bullet in the back of my head,’ a potential witness told police.

  The thieves are feared, but they have their own fears, too. Especially one, a man many in the district believe was behind the Monti burglary — and consequently, the murder of Rocky Iaria.

  The old Calabrian way of seeking revenge, says a man who knows the main players, would not simply be to kill the person suspected of murdering Rocky Iaria.

  It would be to kill that person’s son, when the boy turns the same age Rocky was when he died. It has already been decided, he says.

  CHAPTER 8

  Stares and whispers

  The mystery of Muriel Street

  Police are no closer to establishing a motive than they were on the day Jane Thurgood-Dove died.

  IT was a happy family home. Right up until the moment a pot-bellied coward with a pistol killed Jane Thurgood-Dove in front of her children as they cowered in the family car. That was in November, 1997.

  Weeks later the home was only a house, one of the plainest in a street of weatherboard houses as simple and tidy as its name. Muriel Street, Niddrie, less than half an hour from the city but, dozing in the spring sunshine, it could pass for a street in almost any country town.

  Outside number five, the flowers had gone from the footpath. The flood of letters and sympathy cards delivered to the rickety letter box leaning over the wire mesh fence had been carefully filed away as a private memory to a very public death.

  The family’s blue heeler dog barked and thumped its tail at passersby as it peered hopefully beneath the picket gates in the drive, where the yellow paint police use to mark crime scenes was already fading.

  There remained one reminder of the awful thing that happened here at 3.50 pm on Thursday, November 6: a hole in the wall, ugly as a missing tooth, where police had taken a board to examine the bullets lodged in it. There were other, more subtle, changes. Muriel Street had become a place of stares and whispers. As locals drove past, their eyes flicked sideways at the murder house, fascinated and a little fearful.

  When facts are thin, theories fill the void. Police admit, after thousands of hours of investigation, they are no closer to establishing a motive than they were the day Jane Thurgood-Dove died. But many of the people who live there believe the murder had nothing to do with the victim or her husband, Mark. They believe it was a case of mistaken identity. And they think they know who the real target was.

  The circumstantial case for this is intriguing.

  The Thurgood-Doves’ house is the third from the corner, on the left heading west from Hoffman’s Road. It is two doors from St John Bosco’s parish school, church and presbytery, which covers twelve house blocks. Then there is a cross-street. The third house from this corner – still on the left heading west – is number thirty nine. It belongs to a family that some locals suspect was the hitman’s target.

  Most people in the street are original ‘settlers’ from the early 1950s, and are now grandparents. Jane Thurgood-Dove was one of few women in the street with school-age children.

  One of only three young mothers living on her side of the street is Carmel Kypri, who has occupied number thirty nine with her husband Peter since the mid-1980s. Peter Kypri has renovated their weatherboard – making it one of the best houses on the street – and keeps it spotlessly tidy. But in some circles he is not popular.

  The reasons for this are buried deep in muttered conversations. Muriel Street folk are a friendly lot, but Peter Kypri isn’t, they say.

  But it’s not only neighbours who dislike Peter Kypri. Much heavier people have disliked him enough to plan his murder.

  Enter Philip Peters, a greedy, crooked lawyer who claimed Kypri had cost him $200,000 in an insurance scam that went wrong. Peters was taped plotting Kypri’s abduction and murder ‘because the bastard has pinched $200,000 of stock’. Peters told associates he arranged for Kypri to steal computer equipment from his (Peters’) office so he could claim insurance, but then found the policy was void because he hadn’t paid the premiums. Peters was very unhappy.

  In a police operation codenamed ‘Soli’ detectives foiled the murder plan and saved Kypri’s life. They succeeded because the man Peters recruited to kill Kypri became a police agent and provided evidence that resulted in the conviction of the former solicitor.

  Peters’ plan was for his partner, known as ‘John’, to lure Kypri into a bogus $200,000 marijuana deal, drug him with a sedative, and take him to a farmhouse at St Arnaud in central Victoria, where he would be tortured in a hidden cellar, then killed. Peters ordered John, a butcher by trade, to cut Kypri’s body into pieces for easy disposal and to prevent identification.

  The police transcript reads in part:

  John: ‘Yeah, well, you said that the other day, and you know, it makes sense. How’s he gonna be killed? You said you were gonna do it.’

  Peters: ‘Well, I thought you might do it, John. You know how to cut up sheep.’

  John: ‘Yeah.’

  Peters: ‘There’s no difference.’

  Operation Soli revealed that Kypri had more than one enemy. Peters claimed, in one of many secretly-recorded conversations, that another gangster had taken a contract out on Kypri’s life.

  Peters: ‘He was going to vanish totally.’

  John: ‘As in totally dead, dead?’

  Peters: ‘Dead, dead. Well, he has pinched so much from so many people that the world – you would get a medal … Yeah, well, Danny has, I believe – no, not has, had – put a contract out on him … I made some inquiries and Danny had apparently put a contract out on him two years ago.’

  John: ‘Yeah.’

  Peters: ‘The bloke took Danny’s money, then told Kypri.’

  John: ‘They’re not going to find the body, are they?’

  Peters: ‘Nuh, Nuh, they’re not gonna find anything.’

  John, who later gave evidence against Peters, said in an interview with the authors that Kypri was an unpleasant man with many enemies and deliberately gave the impression he was connected with the underworld.

  ‘He always said he carried a gun. I didn’t see it, but he showed me the bullets. He was a calculating type, and a loner. He had the reputation that if you needed anything done, he could do it.’ When John visited Kypri’s home in Muriel Street he learned that the family had its own alarm code. If Peter Kypri saw a strange car in the street, he would give a particular whistle. This was the signal for his wife and children to lock themselves indoors immediately.

  Kypri took other elaborate precautions. He always backed his vehicles into the drive, ready for a fast getaway, and insisted visitors not block his escape route by parking in front of his car.

  John has since left the shadowy world of Peters and Kypri. But, when he saw the picture of Jane Thurgood-Dove, it reminded him a little of Kypri’s hairdresser wife, Carmel. ‘They had the same facial features and same hairstyle. Camel’s hair was more fawn than blonde, but they were very similar.

  ‘And when I saw her on Australia’s Most Wanted the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.’

  A policeman who knows Kypri well says he ‘woul
d have plenty of enemies’. Another said he would like to be known as a mover and shaker and would relish his local notoriety. ‘He’d be loving it.’

  But neighbours claim the Kypris became even more cautious about the family’s security in the months before the murder. Whereas they once let their two children play in the street, the pair began to be driven to and from the local secondary school, were rarely seen outside and often taken away from the house for hours in the early evening.

  Carmel Kypri runs a hairdressing business from a converted garage at the rear of the property. Her husband has dozens of brand new tyres stacked in the drive, in the spot where he once kept an expensive boat that neighbours say was stolen and burned.

  The house has a heavy mesh security door through which a visitor can barely see the occupant. All that can be seen of Carmel Kypri when she comes to the door is the glint of large gold earrings through the grille.

  Mrs Kypri agrees with her neighbours that Jane Thurgood-Dove’s murder was ‘probably’ a case of mistaken identity. ‘If it wasn’t meant for her it makes you wonder,’ she says. ‘It has made us wary. My husband says to watch out when we come into the drive, to look around the place.’

  She volunteers that ‘it’s a pretty “old” street. There aren’t many young mothers here … me, her and Sue down that end.

  ‘They (the Thurgood-Doves) seemed like a close-knit family. When I first heard about it I thought it might be road rage, but then I heard they’d been watching her.

  ‘I keep the door locked. Maybe it was for us. Who knows? But you can’t let it stop your life. The kids still go to school.

  ‘If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, but we try not to worry. We are a bit more wary, that’s all.’

  The puzzle facing police is this. If Jane Thurgood-Dove was the wrong woman, how could professional hitmen who stalked their quarry for two days make such a fundamental blunder?

  The truth is that so-called ‘professional’ hitmen are often criminal misfits who will kill strangers for a few thousand dollars, risking a life sentence for no more money than a competent burglar can steal by breaking into a shop.