Tony Mokbel was a scoundrel who had caused untold grief. The Ferrari-driving criminal behind the Victorian amphetamine trade had been immortalised in the hit television shows Underbelly and Fat Tony & Co. for his involvement in the Melbourne gangland wars, which had been investigated by Victoria Police’s Purana Taskforce in the 2000s. Judge Gordon Lewis, who in 2008 had been appointed to examine integrity in the Victorian racing industry, wrote: ‘A major focus of Purana has been the investigation of a well-known criminal and his direct associates who, despite the best efforts of Racing Victoria stewards, had long been suspected of laundering the proceeds of large-scale drug trafficking, and other organised crime, through the thoroughbred racing industry. It was acknowledged that, while some emphasis had been given to his name in respect of dealings with bookmakers and trainers, he did not enjoy a monopoly over these illicit activities attributed to him.’
This one-man crimewave was born in Kuwait in 1965 to Lebanese parents. He came to Australia as an eight-year-old and grew up in the Melbourne suburbs of Coburg and Brunswick. At school, he made up for being barely literate by becoming the class clown. His father died of a heart attack when he was fifteen and that was the end of school for Tony. He took menial jobs, including waiting tables and washing dishes. He got involved in fights and a few cannabis deals. There was a chance that he could have made it as a legitimate businessman after he married Carmel Delorenzo, a good Catholic girl, and together they worked hard running his brother’s pizza shop in Boronia. But he loved to gamble and the money was simply not coming in quick enough. Mokbel was dealing speed with Horty when the game changed and ecstasy became the drug of choice for young clubbers. That put the Mokbels in the driving seat as one of the biggest producers and suppliers of methamphetamines in Victoria.
He disguised his dirty deals with a cover as a genial entrepreneur, beginning with a milk bar he and Carmel bought when they were in their early twenties. The drug business boomed and was concealed behind a network of legitimate investments in property, fashion labels, brothels, and coal and oil companies. They were all fronts. As an in-joke, one of his fashion houses was called Love of Style and Design, or LSD for short. Tony loved to have his in-jokes. As his drug empire blossomed, so did his love for horse racing, which proved a wonderful place to launder the cash from his $180-million drug-dealing empire.
Tony and his cronies became known to racing authorities as the Tracksuit Gang, because of their lurid race wear. In the early 1990s, he would organise his group of punters to co-ordinate betting plunges — putting the money on just moments before the start of the race to get the biggest odds before the bookies can react — on racetracks in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. One late plunge won the gang a cool $500,000. Naturally, they demanded it be paid in fresh green $100 bills, rather than the old ones they had used to place the original bet.
At other times, the winnings were paid into the accounts of third parties to distance Mokbel from the sting. When he lost, the bookies would often write off the debts either out of fear, or because they knew they would make it back when he returned to the track.
But eventually betting was not enough. Mokbel became a player in the racing world when he bought a 200-acre horse property, Somerset, at Kilmore, north of Melbourne. He cheekily named his horses after slang terms in the drug trade, including Frosty the Snowman and My Cook.
These were dirty, dangerous times in the Melbourne crime world. In 2000, police were investigating the drug activities of underbelly thug Mark Moran, who was found gunned down outside his home. The man they arrested for the murder rolled over, and agreed to record his interactions in the underworld. All paths led to the door of Tony Mokbel, who looked to be one of the biggest drug dealers in the state. He was arrested, but his trial for cocaine importation was delayed because the illicit tapes had also revealed widespread corruption within Victoria Police.
Mokbel was released on a $1-million bail in 2006, but walked out to another problem. While in jail, he had referred to various members of the Perth-based Coffin Cheaters bikie gang as ‘dogs’ — one of the worst insults you can pay a crook. They heard about it and asked Melbourne criminal identity Mick Gatto, the man with all the underworld contacts, to arrange a meeting. The meeting was to take place in La Porcella restaurant in Carlton. The way Gatto remembers it, Mokbel again called one of them a dog, and received a punch to the head and a good kicking while he lay helpless on the ground. Gatto could not stop the fight and helped Mokbel clean up afterwards. For his part, Mokbel believed Gatto had set him up. Over the years that followed, he made no secret of his dislike for Gatto, who was later cleared of the shooting of fellow criminal Andrew Veniamin, the hitman for the Williams family suspected of seven killings in the Melbourne gang wars, in a Carlton restaurant in 2004. ‘The way Mick does it, I mean Mick is a fucking cock sucker, as far as I am concerned, in my eyes, because … I don’t invite you to a place where I feel comfortable and pop you,’ Mokbel told Purana Taskforce detectives. He predicted of the Melbourne gang war: ‘It won’t be over until that fat c*** is dead.’
Mokbel was busy during his time on bail. He had several meetings with drug boss Carl Williams, whom police believed Mokbel had paid to arrange the hits on hotdog salesman and ecstasy dealer Michael Marshall and drug trafficker and Moran family patriach Lewis Moran. Mokbel’s lawyer later successfully argued that his friendship with Williams was a mistake, not a crime.
The drug business was also keeping him busy; he was alleged to have laundered $2 million through his high-end Melbourne brothel Talk of the Town.
Mokbel, who certainly had an eye for the ladies, had finally left his long-suffering wife, Carmel, for his mistress, Danielle McGuire, when he was charged with importing drugs from Mexico. Once again he was given bail, despite his appalling track record.
In March 2006, on the eve of the trial for cocaine trafficking, he put on a really bad wig and did a runner. His escape was well planned. After hiding out in a remote farmhouse in rural Victoria, he drove a rented Nissan Patrol four-wheel drive across the Nullabor. Finally, off the coast of Western Australia near Fremantle, he clambered aboard a 57-foot yacht called Edwena and set sail for Greece via the Maldives and through the Suez Canal. Once in Athens, he moved into a seaside apartment and regularly ventured out to flash restaurants in the bad wig and under the alias of Stephen Papas.
Meanwhile, McGuire left the beauty salon she owned in partnership with Mokbel’s sister Renate, and flew out to join him. She slipped the Australian Federal Police in Rome and went on to Greece unobserved.
In Greece, the lovers had an idyllic life funded by Mokbel’s drug empire in Melbourne — The Company, as his syndicate was known, was earning up to $500,000 a week. Renate was having a far less idyllic time, having been placed in jail herself for failing to pay the $1-million bond she put up as surety for her runaway brother. It was probably small consolation that Mokbel and McGuire named the daughter they had in Greece Renate in her honour.
However, Fat Tony was not that smart. One day in 2007, in a phone call to McGuire’s mother, he bragged about how well they were doing. As he described how they were lounging back by the pool in Greece, the Victorian Police were listening and putting together every clue in a bid to work out exactly where in Greece he was.
It had not been easy for the police to get this far. For a long time they had nothing to go on, until an informant, who was unhappy that his details were being used to transfer money overseas to a mate of The Company’s accountant, decided to rat Mokbel and McGuire out. The police were naturally more than a little suspicious that this could be their man. The informant provided more information, including the phone number of the clean phone Fat Tony used to keep track of his lieutenants in Australia. The police started listening and, after being forced to listen to Mokbel boast about cash and pools and domestic bliss for months, they hit pay dirt. Fat Tony got complacent and mentioned in one call that he was at Starbucks in the Glyfada piazza.
Now the police k
new where he was. Two detectives scrambled from Australia to Greece and recruited the local Greek police to help. They got to the city, but faced what appeared to be an overwhelming problem — they had no idea what alias he was using or where he lived. It was also the height of the tourist season, and Fat Tony and his mistress could look like any other badly dressed visitors slurping ice creams and pushing strollers. The cops did know, however, that he would be wearing a toupee, because their surveillance picked up an order for two new ones from a top thatch weaver in Italy.
The overstretched Greek police offered the Australian police the use of their local surveillance team for just one week. Seven days to find a needle in a haystack. They staked out the Starbucks Fat Tony had mentioned, and scoured the Hippodrome racetrack on its Monday, Wednesday and Friday race days. Back in Australia, they were still listening in to Mokbel’s calls, and in one of them they heard a supermarket spruiker pushing a special on nappies. The Australians and their surveillance team checked twelve local supermarkets with no success.
The only thing playing in their favour was Mokbel’s cockiness. ‘Where I am at the moment, this is the last place that they would look for me,’ he said in a call back to Australia.
The Australian detectives needed some luck, and they finally got it when Mokbel called his lieutenant Joe Mansour in Melbourne in June 2007 and asked for a price list to be sent to a PO Box in Glyfada under the name Stephen Papas. Bingo — they had the alias. Then, while on the phone to Mansour, he answered one of the other five phones he carried with him and told the caller he would meet him in the Delfinia Cafe at 11 am. Now they knew where he would be and when.
The police staked out the packed restaurant, but there was no one inside that fitted the description of Fat Tony. The police sent in one of their own men undercover as a customer, and then staged an immigration raid, asking for his papers and dragging him into the street when he failed to produce them. It was a desperate attempt to flush Mokbel out. As the sting went down, they watched the reactions of everyone in the restaurant. One customer at the very back, with long hair and wearing a baseball cap, shifted around uncomfortably and then started to edge towards the exit. After the fake immigrant was taken outside, the baseball-cap-wearing customer slid back to his friend and his coffee at the small table.
With no time and nothing to lose, the police went up to him and asked for his papers. He sheepishly handed over his passport and driving licence, both in the name Stephen Papas. They had their man. The notorious crook in the embarrassingly bad wig was flown home to face the music on a privately chartered jet at a cost to the taxpayer of over $400,000. In 2012, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for masterminding the sophisticated drug syndicate known as The Company.
Fat Tony is reportedly finding it tough in jail. He has already had one heart attack and has taken to cooking his own food in case someone tries to poison him. But he is only allowed out of his cell for seven and a half hours a day and is lonely, with only a few crooks deemed suitable by authorities for company.
In 2012, he attempted to show that he was a reformed man. ‘I would like to apologise to the community because of my gambling habits and my greediness. I would like to apologise to the Supreme Court for breaching bail, and to the magistrates. Also to the ladies who tried to help me — I think and I pray for them. I have a lot of making up to do. I won’t be going anywhere near drugs again: I feel saddened by it all now.’
Two years after penning that heartfelt missive, Mokbel, who had just been released from the prison’s management unit for breaking a fellow inmate’s nose in a fight, was busted laying huge bets on races via coded phone messages. Those are the perils of the punt — you get hooked on the thrill, even when you know the odds are not bent in your favour!
The Fraud Catcher: Ken Gamble, PI
CON artists weave intricate webs of lies that can baffle and deceive even the most intelligent of victims. It is a constant refrain of people when referring to these fraudsters that it is a dreadful abuse of an incredible talent. But what of the people who catch the con artists? Like a brilliant chess player, they have to be not only immersed in every facet of the con artist’s game, but three steps ahead of it, anticipating what moves will be played next. They have to be able to swim in the pool with sharks and be capable of emerging from it unscathed and with their soul untainted by the glittering temptation of easy money.
Raymond Chandler, creator of fictional detective Phillip Marlowe, wrote of such a man in his book The Simple Art of Murder:
He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks — that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
Such a man is Australian Ken Gamble. A man driven by a desire for justice and a dogged, almost obsessive, boxer’s determination not to quit from a path once he has started, even though it’s not a path most of us would choose. He is not learned, he is certainly not without ego and he wants to get paid for what he does. And what he does is catch con artists.
Gamble was born in 1965 and moved to Mount Isa, Queensland, as a five-year-old. For two years, his father ran the Gregory River Hotel while young Ken studied with the School of the Air. The family lived upstairs from the pub. ‘As a young kid growing up in the outback, there were no police. My father was the publican and he would enforce the law, kick people out when they were drunk … I used to run around as a kid watching my dad laying down the law and loved it,’ recalled Gamble.
His father was a big man and former boxer, but occasionally there were things he couldn’t deal with alone. If there was a serious incident, the police would come from Burketown 500 kilometres away to investigate. Not exactly a rapid response you could rely on in an emergency and one which left Gamble’s dad to mete out his own justice. Once, when the pub was being refurbished, the caravan Ken and his family were sleeping in was hit by rifle shots, and the police were called in. ‘I was transfixed by the investigation,’ said Gamble. But he did not have the education to become a policeman. He left school after year 10, joined the Army Reserve and became an auxiliary fireman instead. He also started boxing after the family moved to Gympie, Queensland.
He won the Queensland light middleweight title in 1982. In July of that year, he was selected to go with the Queensland team to Perth to fight in the national titles. ‘I fought Craig Bushby and beat him on points to become the Australian light middleweight champion at the age of sixteen,’ said Gamble, who returned home to a tickertape parade down the main street of Gympie. The win sealed his relationship with his proud father.
Sadly his boxing career was cut short at age nineteen. ‘I got caught in a street fight outside a pub and cut my eye. I couldn’t box after that,’ he said. Gamble took odd jobs, working in a photo shop before buying a Ford Cortina and driving down to Sydney. ‘I looked up my great uncle Ray Stubbs who was a private investigator for the Webster Group — it was the best-known detective agency in Australia. He gave them a call on my behalf and they gave me an interview,’ said Gamble. The agency was looking for surveillance people to investigate insurance fraud for GIO. ‘The next day I was in the back of a van and watching how it all worked, filming people, tracking people down.’ Gamble was put with veteran investigator Kurt Hippe, who taught him the ropes.
Gamble studied hard. He learnt how to be invisible in plain sight and how to find people who did not want to be found. He saved enough money to buy his own van, cameras and camouflage equipment, and set up his own company. He then went over to the Philippines to look for new business. The 32-year-old investigator merged his surveillance and security operation there with a risk management company being r
un by former US intelligence operatives. ‘That took me to the next level,’ said Gamble, who trained his own Filipino surveillance team for operations in China, Indonesia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
In Borneo, Gamble and his team were contracted by a major shipping inspection company, which was being blamed for losses of chicken feed. ‘No one knew what was happening but the chicken feed was going missing and the shipping company was copping the blame,’ said Gamble.
The feed was being stored in an independently owned warehouse in a secure local port-side compound. Gamble and his surveillance team set up in bushes and in trucks and vans near the compound. In the early hours of the morning, Gamble snipped through the wire fence and snuck in. Carefully, he went up to the feed bags that had recently been stacked on pallets. He slit the corner of one and found it was full of sand. They went back to watching.
Trucks were coming in full with bags of sand and driving out full with bags of chicken feed. The man who should have picked that up was on the weighbridge, but he was in on the deal. Gamble arranged for an independent inspection that blew the con wide open. ‘It was like a drug bust, but with sand instead of heroin,’ he chuckled.
* * *
Not every job in Asia was chicken feed. In December 2000, the CEO of tissue giant Kimberly-Clark, American Bob Tober, was arrested at his office in the Philippines and thrown into a cell. He had fallen foul of congressman Rolex Suplico, who was named after the watch that deflected a bullet and saved his father in World War II. Kimberly-Clark was leasing land that had a twenty-year renewal option, which Tober was attempting to exercise. The problem was that the value of the land had increased and Suplico wanted to sell it.
Suplico claimed it was owned by his wife, who did not want to renew the lease. When Tober stood on his legal rights, Suplico told him he would have to pay the difference. It was extortion, and Tober reported it to the FBI. Things started to escalate. Suplico set up a bogus NGO to lobby against Kimberly-Clark, claiming it was illegally pumping water off the land. The fake charity went to the police, filed a case and Tober was dragged from his office, arrested and jailed by the Philippine National Police. While Tober was being released, his company contacted Gamble’s team to arrange for his security.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Page 14