by Gordon Kerr
But Moran was not easy to find. He kept a low profile, employed a bodyguard and kept on the move.
In February they finally spotted him at a fast food outlet in Gladstone Park, but Williams was not carrying a weapon. Nevertheless, they followed his car which was being driven by a woman not known to them. However, Williams drove too close and when he spotted them, Jason fired a volley of shots at them from the back of his car. Williams decided to call it quits on that occasion.
Once again, Jason vanished and Williams began to get desperate. He ordered Brincat to keep an eye on his target’s friends, but still to no avail. Finally, he offered Brincat and gunman and former kickboxer Andrew ‘Benjy’ Veniamin, a massive bounty of AU$100,000 each to find and kill Moran. They approached the task with renewed vigour. They waited outside the school Moran’s children attended – coincidentally, the same one that Williams’s kids went to. Still no sign. They even persuaded Roberta Williams to start a fight with Moran’s wife at the school gates in the hope that he would turn up to support her, but still he did not show.
Then they found the perfect opportunity. They learned that Moran regularly took his children to an Australian Rules football clinic every Saturday morning in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon North. By this time, Brincat had a new partner, Thomas Hentschell, and he and Hentschell practised the hit at the football oval for a week before the designated date. Meanwhile, Williams arranged to have a blood test that morning, providing himself with a watertight alibi.
On the Saturday morning they waited at the oval and, before too long, spotted Jason. They waited until he made his way back to the car park at the end of the game and climbed into a blue van. Brincat and Hentschell drove to the rear of the car park, Brincat pulled a balaclava over his head and jumped out of their vehicle with a shotgun as well as two revolvers stuffed into a belt around his waist. He ran to the window of Jason’s car, raised the shotgun and let off a round through the closed window, killing Moran instantly. He then dropped the shotgun, pulled out one of the revolvers and fired a further three shots into Moran’s slumped body behind the shattered glass. Unknown to him, another man was in the front seat of the van, a small-time crook, employed by Moran, called Pasquale Barbaro. He, too, was dead. Brincat then ran over a footbridge to Hentschell in the waiting van; he wasn’t known as Brincat for nothing.
The simple phone message ‘that horse has been scratched’ told Williams that the hit had been carried out. Brincat was paid $2,500 and was supposed to be given, in addition, a unit in the nearby city of Frankston. The unit never materialised, however, an oversight Williams would live to bitterly regret.
There had now been 11 unsolved underworld-related killings in two years and police were frustrated by the lack of progress. In Moran’s case, Carl Williams was an obvious suspect, but his alibi placed him somewhere else at the time of the hit.
Senior homicide detective Phil Swindells lobbied for a taskforce to tackle these crimes and the Purana taskgroup was formed in May 2003 with Swindells in command. In the beginning they were at a disadvantage due to their lack of intelligence on the leading players. So they doggedly began to compile dossiers on their targets and even called on the Essendon Aussie Rules coach, Kevin Sheedy, to help boost morale.
In October they enlarged the taskforce to 53, with Detective Inspector Andrew Allen in charge. Of course, they knew that Williams was behind the killings, but there was as yet no hard evidence.
They did get one break after months of work, however. Checking calls made from a public phone box near where Moran was shot, they discovered that on the day before the shooting, someone rang Carl Williams from this phone. They found out from other calls made around the same time that it had been Hentschell, already known to them as a thief, drug dealer and friend of Carl Williams. Then, in Hentschell’s driveway, they found a white van of the kind that had been spotted by a closed-circuit camera at the scene of the crime.
It would be 14 months before they could press charges, however, and in the meantime the killing continued.
Another victim of Williams was drug dealer Mark Mallia, 37, whose body was found in a burning wheelie bin in Sunshine in August 2003. Williams had lured Mallia to a meeting and had then bound and gagged him before torturing him with a soldering iron. He was then strangled and put in the bin which was set on fire.
Williams’s team was becoming overconfident, though. In October 2003 a bug was placed in a car Hentschell was using in a hit. When he discovered it, he wanted to abandon the hit but Brincat insisted on carrying on with it. This view was supported by Williams when they met him later that evening. Williams, by now calling himself ‘The Premier’, as he believed he was controlling the entire state of Victoria, ordered them to continue with the job. Stupidly, Hentschell then used his own car to drive to the location. This car was also bugged and he and Brincat were heard discussing guns and getaways. However, the tracker that police had placed on the car failed and they had no idea where the action was going to take place.
Then, in their earphones, they heard what sounded like gunshots and, shortly after, received calls that a man had been shot in South Yarra. Michael Marshall, a drug dealer and hot-dog salesman, had climbed out of his four-wheel drive, in which his five-year-old son was sitting, and had been shot four times. Police overheard Hentschell asking: ‘Shall I ring the Big Fella?’ Williams shortly afterwards received the same message as before: ‘That horse has been scratched.’ Within a few hours, Hentschell and Brincat had been arrested and the clock began to tick for Carl Williams.
The war continued and, not long after, Andrew Veniamin was killed by known criminal Mick Gatto, whose close friend Graham Kinnisburgh had been a recent victim of Williams’s vendetta. Veniamin had advised Williams to take out Gatto, in effect sentencing himself to death when Gatto heard of it. Gatto shot him in a Carlton restaurant but was acquitted in June 2005 on grounds of self-defence.
Kinnisburgh’s murder also resonated with Lewis Moran. As if it were not bad enough losing his two sons, Lewis was destroyed by the loss of Kinnisburgh who was his best friend. He did not seem to care about anything any more and made no effort to protect himself. On 31 March 2004 he was gunned down by two contract killers at his favourite haunt, the Brunswick Club. They were paid AU$140,000 for the hit by millionaire drug dealer Tony Mokbel and Carl Williams.
In May 2004 the police finally nailed Williams when two of his associates were overheard carelessly discussing a hit in a car they wrongly thought to be clean of bugs. Four men were arrested, including Williams who had been implicated by the men’s conversation. This time there would be no bail.
However, Williams was confident his men would stay loyal, especially Brincat. After all, following the Marshall killing, forensic officers had tried to take a swab from his mouth and had found a brown ‘substance’ there. It was never properly identified, but it compromised any evidence. And it smelled terrible.
Nonetheless, the case against Brincat was unimpeachable. Marshall’s blood was found on his trousers, and the taped conversations as well as positive identifications, provided police with a solid case against him for the murder. The Runner realised that the game was up, and, anyway, he now also bore grudges against Williams who had failed to pay him in full for the hits he had carried out. He caved in and, over the course of 30 days of interviews, told police everything he knew, linking Williams comprehensively to Melbourne’s gangland murders.
In quick succession, five more of Williams’s lieutenants turned on him. Police learned that he had armed robber George Peirce killed by Veniamin because he reneged on a contract to kill Moran. Mark Anthony Smith was shot after he, too, agreed to kill Moran and didn’t go through with it. Smith survived and fled to Queensland.
Police realised that if they were to get anywhere near putting Williams away for good, they would have to make some deals. Consequently, they offered the criminals they had rounded up the chance of freedom if they cooperated. Men who faced decades in prison suddenly saw an o
pportunity to taste freedom once again.
Hentschell did a deal, but the star witness was Brincat who implicated Carl Williams in at least six murders. He also fingered Tony Mokbel for one killing. Mokbel saw the writing on the wall and disappeared. The police dismantled his financial empire, and finally caught up with him in June 2007, arresting him in a Greek café.
Williams, too, knew it was all over once Brincat started to talk. He was convicted of the murder of Michael Marshall and was sentenced to a minimum of 21 years for that. Many other trials are pending forthe murders of, amongst others, Mark and Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro.
Recently, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Lewis and Jason Moran and another man whose name has not been released. He refused to include Barbaro because, he says, that death was an accident. As a result, he will never be charged with the other six murders he is believed to have committed. Carl Williams still hopes that one day he will be free again.
Pablo Escobar
Colombia
In 1989 Forbes Magazine listed ruthless Colombian drug dealer, Pablo Escobar, as the seventh richest man in the world. He owned a multi-million dollar home, ranches, farms and horses. He had beautiful fixtures in his home and an antique car collection. At the time, his Medellín drug cartel was raking in around $30 billion a year and controlling 80 per cent of the cocaine market. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Escobar was born Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria in 1949, the son of a peasant farmer and a teacher, in humble surroundings in Medellín, a city in the Antioquia region of central Colombia. Medellín is not a quiet town – in 1991 it recorded a murder rate 11 times that of Chicago – and Escobar’s criminal career began when he was a teenager, after he was expelled from school – stealing cars on the city’s streets. Allegedly, he also did a good trade in stolen headstones, selling them in other towns and villages of the region. It was during the 1970s that he saw the vast potential in cocaine-trafficking and began building his enormous empire. But he began his life in drugs as a courier, transporting coca paste from the Andes to the laboratories in Medellín.
There was a lot at stake and that meant that life was pretty cheap. Escobar bolstered his own reputation and his bank balance in 1975 when he murdered a well-known drug dealer by the name of Fabio Restrepo, from whom he had purchased a quantity of cocaine. Restrepo’s men were instructed that they had to work for Escobar now.
In March 1976 Pablo married Maria Victoria and they had two children: Juan Pablo and Manuela. However, he is known to have had affairs with several women and towards the end of his life he seemed to have shifted his sexual preferences to underage girls. For him and his new family, however, he built a luxurious estate called Hacienda Napoles (Spanish for Naples Ranch), complete with private zoo, and had planned to construct a Greek-style citadel which was started but never finished. He hired a professional cameraman to shoot his home movies. He and his men posed in front of his proudest possession, a car that had once belonged to the gangster Al Capone, and he saw himself as a future Al Capone. The ranch, the zoo and the citadel were expropriated by the government and given to low-income families in the 1990s under a law called extinción de dominio (domain extinction).
In May of the same year that Pablo got married, his luck ran out temporarily when he and a number of his associates were arrested following a drug run to Ecquador. In response, Pablo introduced what was to become his customary tactic when dealing with intransigent authorities, a tactic he called plata o plomo, Spanish for ‘money or lead’. He tried to bribe the judge and, when that failed, and months of legal wrangling passed without a satisfactory outcome for him, he had the two arresting officers killed. The official documents disappeared from the courthouse and nine judges refused to try the case after receiving death threats. The case was dropped.
Escobar’s genius was in realising that the smugglers were stronger together than individually. So he persuaded his rivals to share shipments, no matter whom it belonged to. They constructed a massive processing plant deep in the Colombian jungle. It was called Tranquilandia and consisted of an entire complex of airstrips and laboratories capable of refining and shipping cocaine on an industrial scale. When it was located by the authorities, Colombia's head of anti-narcotics, Colonel Jaime Ramirez, was visited by Escobar’s people who offered him a multi-million dollar bribe to cease all operations in Tranquilandia. He refused and ordered his troops to torch the place.
Escobar’s reputation grew further when he succeeded in getting elected to the Chamber of Representatives of the Colombian Congress – his election brought the additional benefit of giving him immunity from prosecution. But it was his drugs network which garnered international interest, especially in the United States. The Medellín cartel came to control a huge proportion of the cocaine that entered the States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. But Colombian cocaine was of poor quality. Therefore Escobar would buy coca paste in Peru and Bolivia, and have it processed and shipped to warehouses in the Bahamas and Mexico. From there it would enter the United States. And his tentacles are alleged to have reached into many other parts of the world, even beyond the Americas and into Asia. In his last years, it is reported that he distanced himself from direct involvement in drug-trafficking, instead syphoning off profits from cocaine dealers through a kind of taxation system he imposed on other criminals operating within his area of influence. He considered this to be compensation for his contribution to the development of the Colombian cocaine industry and his efforts to have the American–Colombian extradition treaty of 1979 nullified.
Hundreds died as Pablo Escobar went about his business, often killed personally by Escobar himself – anyone who failed to cooperate with him or who presented any kind of threat was ruthlessly disposed of. He was also responsible for the deaths of three presidential candidates, all taking part in the same election, and numerous government officials, judges and politicians were accepting bribes from him.
On 6 November 1985, 35 armed rebel commandos of the left-wing M-19 guerrilla group took hostage 300 lawyers, judges and Supreme Court magistrates at the Palace of Justice in Bogota, where the Colombian Supreme Court sits. They demanded that the Colombian President Belisario Betancur be tried for allegedly betraying the country’s desire for peace. The army surrounded the court and negotiations began. With no resolution in sight, it was decided to let the army take the Palace by force, but in the ensuing gun battle and fire, some 100 people died and vital records were destroyed.
Debate rages to this day about the correctness of the government’s approach, but it is also said that Pablo Escobar may have instigated M-19’s operation in order to destroy documents relating to several criminal investigations into his activities. It is also worth noting that at the time of the siege, the Colombian Supreme Court was studying the constitutionality of Colombia’s extradition treaty with the US, a matter of some importance to Escobar.
In late 2006 a Truth Commission, comprising three judges of the current Supreme Court, presented a document which argued that the M-19 met with Escobar, received money from the cartel and executed some joint actions, although some M-19 members disagreed with that course of action. It also mentioned a claim made by former Escobar associate John Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, known as ‘Popeye’, implicating the druglord in the events, allegedly through the payment of some $2 million to the rebel group.
Then, in 1989, Escobar was responsible for an even greater atrocity. On 27 November the worst single criminal attack in Colombia’s violent history occurred when a Boeing 727 of Avianca Airlines, en route from the Colombian capital Bogota to Cali in the west of the country, was ripped apart five minutes after take-off by an explosive device. All 107 passengers and crew on board died and a further three were killed on the ground by falling debris. Escobar and the Medellín cartel immediately claimed responsibility for the bomb, saying they were targeting César Gaviria Trujillo, a candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections. Trujillo never made it onto the plane, thoug
h, and the assassination attempt was in vain. Dandeny Munoz-Mosquera, Escobar’s chief enforcer, was convicted in the United States for the bombing and was given ten consecutive life sentences.
In spite of these dreadful actions, the people of Medellín worshipped Pablo Escobar. He bought their love by building hospitals and football stadiums and by sponsoring football teams. He won over the Catholic Church by using his vast wealth to build a number of churches in the city. He even distributed large sums of money to the poor and built houses for them. They, in turn, watched out for him, informing him if the authorities were closing in on him and they did not give information to the police.
By 1991, however, things were getting too hot and, in order to avoid his inevitable extradition to the USA and incarceration for the rest of his days in a federal penitentiary, or death at the hands of one of his rivals, Escobar tried to win public support by calling a halt to his violent terrorist acts and handed himself over to the Colombian government. He was put in prison, but it was no ordinary jail. Amazingly, he was allowed to build his own luxurious private prison, called La Catedral. He had a suite with a living room, a kitchen, a master bedroom and an office. The bathroom had its own jacuzzi. The prison itself contained its own discotheque as well as its own bar where parties were held on a weekly basis. He was known to have visits from family, but additionally, outside his personal room at the prison, he had a very powerful telescope set up which pointed at the building where his wife, son and daughter lived. He would talk on his cell phone to his daughter while looking at her through the telescope. He negotiated a five-year jail sentence and a guarantee that he would not be extradited to the United States in exchange for the cessation of his drug-dealing activities.
Even in his country club prison, Escobar’s violent nature was given full vent and a report that he had murdered two business associates, the Moncada brothers, at La Catedral, coupled with pictures in the media of his lavish prison, incensed public opinion. The government was forced to make plans to move him to another prison. However, fearing that he was about to be extradited, Pablo did the only thing he could. He escaped.