Melbourne's Gangland Killings: The Smiling Assassin Carl Williams w/ guest Sami Shah
01:04:08 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat. That's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

All right, welcome to Underworld, a podcast all about crime all over the world. I'm your host, Sean Williams. Usually I'd be coming to you from a Berlin studio or an apartment, but right now I'm about two hours away from getting out of quarantine in a hotel somewhere outside Auckland, New Zealand. So I'm pretty happy about that. And a little caveat, if you hear our jailers wandering around outside the door, that's why you can hear some background noise. Yeah,

Yeah, so it's just a few days from Christmas, a time for giving and receiving joy and probably a bit of drunkenness and repressed family tensions. So why not help us receive some joy at the Patreon? We've got a bunch of interviews coming up for patrons, including from Mexico and a follow up from this episode, I think will be really awesome. So check us out at Patreon slash The Underworld Podcast.

I'm assuming we'll have an episode from here with hopefully some reported stuff about Kiwi gangs, crimes, politics, all of that stuff. But today we're hopping across the Tasman Sea to Australia and an era that shocked Melbourne in the early 2000s. And my guest is someone today who knows Melbourne pretty well because he lives there for one.

he's sitting in Danny's chair and he like 10,000 miles away from New York. Uh, it's writer, comedian, actor. Is there more? Uh, Sammy Shah. No, I think that should be it. That should cover it pretty much. I think actor is definitely a strong one. I don't think I've done much of that, but yes, thank you. Okay, cool. Cool. Um, so Sammy, tell us a bit more about yourself. Like you've lived in Australia for quite some time now, right? Uh, it's been almost a little over eight and a half years. Um, so I got here in 2012. Uh,

And early 2012. And I spent the first three, four years in WA and then I moved across to Melbourne. So I've been in Melbourne for five years now, almost six at this point. And yeah, and being a, being someone, I used to be a journalist in Pakistan and I used to be, you know, very much into politics.

just a person who's a bit of a nerd and a geek when it comes to things like crime and true crime and all that. So for me coming to Melbourne, one of the first things that kind of immersed myself into was the true crime history of the city. Uh, it's just something I always find fascinating. Is it, is it quite a, is it quite a rough city? I mean, it sounds like it from the stuff I've been researching. There was definitely a period when it was, there was definitely a period, uh, in the early two thousands in the late nineties, particularly, um,

when there was a massive spike in, uh, mafia related crime issues. There's still issues with bikey gangs, um, or biker gangs as they call them the rest of the world. Um, and, uh, and you know, every now and then, of course you'll have some, and there's, you know, smaller gang activity the same way there is in most places in the world. Um,

But, you know, it's definitely, and if you ask Melburnians, because a lot of them are spoiled by having lived here their whole lives, they'll go, oh my God, there's so much crime and there's, you know,

There's African gangs everywhere, which is just a bunch of teenagers from African backgrounds hanging out. You know, there's no African gangs. So it's just stupid things like that. But overall, when you come from a country with properly high crime rates, you're like, this place is pretty much heaven. Yeah.

So it's Melburnian, right? Just so I've got that correct. All right. Well, we're going to go back to 2010, April 2010 for the start of this. So Obama's the president. Haiti's just had a massive earthquake. And those Chilean miners, you remember them? They got saved. Yeah. Yeah.

So across in Australia, the bloodiest era in the country's organized crime era is about to come to a close in the way it began with extreme violence. Carl Williams, this paunchy so-called smiling assassin, he's sitting down at his prison desk to read the paper. And one of his cellmates, Matthew Johnson, this hulking, bald criminal with a history of violence, walks up behind Williams and

and he just casually beats him to death with the stem of a workout bike. So that's where this story ends, really. The Aussie press is in uproar, and they call it, in typical style, a bashing death. A few grisly blows, one of the maddest and weirdest characters in the mob history of Melbourne, Australia's biggest city, is dead, and with him a police corruption case that rocks the entire country for years. So before I started researching this, I had pretty much no idea about Australian organised crime at all.

I knew there were connections with the Italian Mafia and I knew about the Aussie bikies, the biker gangs you just mentioned, actually. They were shipping meth over from Southeast Asian kingpins. But beyond Ned Kelly, Chopper and Steve Smith, I didn't know much about crime on Aussie soil. There was a cricket joke in there, so sorry to our American listeners. Yeah.

And another thing, Cole Williams, who we're getting into this episode, this guy who kind of came out of nowhere to run Melbourne's underbelly, as people called it at the time. He's got exactly the same name as my dad, by the way. And his dad, who's this old time drug dealer crook called George Williams. That's my dad's dad's name, too.

So, yeah, I remember we got stuck in JFK once on holiday to New York years and years ago. And my dad was saying something about cops having him on a blacklist at customs or saying so. Unless my old man's a liar and a drug baron or something. I reckon that was maybe because of this guy. Plus, I don't think the Americans could really tell ours and the Aussies' accents apart anyway. So, yeah, Carl and George Williams. That's pretty weird.

It's definitely the most, uh, Carl Williams, particularly as we'll find out is, you know, basically a psychopath in terms of his, the amount of people he killed and stuff. It's the most benign and, and mild serial killer mass murderer name in history. I think no one ever suspects a guy named Carl Williams of having killed lots of people and selling drugs. Yeah. I mean, and to look at the guy, right. He doesn't exactly look like your classical description of a kind of hood, uh,

Yeah, absolutely. He looks very much like a real estate agent. And like a crap one at that, not even a good one. Right. So I'm going to set the scene. I mean, with Melbourne, it's the capital of Victoria, which is... I mean, I guess it's probably the world's greatest sporting city, right? I mean, you've got the Aussie Royals and the cricket...

You've got the Aussie Open tennis, the Grand Prix. It definitely takes sports very, very seriously. It's also the most livable city in Australia and the second most livable city in the world. All of this was all pre-COVID, so I don't know where the standings are now. What's it like there at the moment? Because I know you had some issues with guards at the hotels having some...

happy times with the people in quarantine. It turns out that was nonsense. Like it actually never happened. And it was just, yes. The whole thing about a security guard having sex with someone in quarantine was just a, someone had made a joke on social media and, um, Rupert Murdoch's, uh, journalism, uh, journalists, uh, who work for news, uh, over here, um, uh,

are incapable of understanding satire. It's that part of their brain just never developed. And so they just assumed that it was real and ran it as a news story for such a prolonged period of time that everyone started believing it until other news outlets had to do proper investigation and go, nah, this is just nonsense. Like, you guys are complete idiots. So, yeah, no, it spread because of just, you know, bad handling of quarantine because of privatization and

And all those other basic issues that are ruining the world. Yeah. But no, we were in seven months of lockdown and now we're out and we have zero cases now for over a month and a half. So, you know, we put in the hard yards, but it worked.

Yeah, and I'm sitting here in Auckland about to come out of quarantine myself. So this is another country that's done pretty well. But that's such a shame that that story wasn't true. I thought it was like the most Australian story ever. Oh yeah, absolutely. We were all thrilled about it. We were all, you know, we're like, if this is why we're in seven months lockdown, at least it was worth it for someone, you know. But no, it turns out the whole thing is nonsense. Oh God. Well, I

I mean, in case people don't know, Australia is pretty bloody big. So the biggest state, Western Australia is about quarter the size of the entire U S. Um, and I think Victoria is twice the size of New York state. So Australia is big basically. And I remember when, when I was in Burma covering, uh, drug crime out there, like the cops were sending me from Australia that they have such a hard time catching anything. Cause you can pretty much just land your boat anywhere on the coast. And there's just too much of it for anyone to cover the whole thing. So, um,

Yeah, I think... I mean, there's a big sort of meth epidemic in Australia right now from what I'm reading, right? There has been for a while. There's... Ice is just because it's relatively cheap to make and, you know, there is...

increasing poverty which is largely one of the reasons why sometimes ice addiction takes place as well as a you know an increase in opiate addiction and stuff we're seeing kind of a upwards trend in ice addiction the way we did the way they did in America in maybe I'd say the early 2000s and they didn't get it under control there and it doesn't seem like we're doing a good job of getting it under control here either right right and we're going to get into a bit of that further down the story but um

Yeah. I mean, Melbourne to, to, to kind of tell you what Melbourne was like, it was a bit like New York in the early 20th century, by the sounds of it, it was like a city of immigrants, mostly from Europe coming to take over the land of indigenous people that the British had committed terrible acts of cruelty to. So basically the same as America, I guess. Um,

And in 1922, there's a ship called the Ray d'Italia that rocks up at Melbourne Port and it unloads a bunch of Italian migrants looking for a better life. So the story goes. It's also carrying three members of the Calabrian and Drangheta Mafia and they quickly set up shop in their new home.

So just like there were five criminal families in the US, the Gambinos and the Bananas and so on, there were seven in Australia. And they mostly made their money at Melbourne's fruit and veg markets, extorting local sellers and making them pay pizza or a levy on their food. So these are nice guys. And they also sold weed, good old weed.

So this group of families, they just get more and more powerful. And Australia in its modern form is a pretty new place. So the infrastructure can't keep up with these old suited and booted mobsters from southern Italy have been learning their trade for ages. They call this amalgam the Honored Society, by the way, which is one of the Italian names for the mafia in Calabria. And they're still, from what I can see, they're still in partial control of the black markets today.

Yeah. So it wasn't just Italians. No, sorry to interrupt you, but there's definitely suburbs of Melbourne that are still, you know, have a, if not as heavy, but definitely a mild kind of level of control by the Calabrian mafia here. I don't know if like, if people even know about the Calabria that much and how sparsely

The mafia still is there compared to other parts of Italy. Like we always hear about Sicily and stuff. But if you go to Calabria, apparently it's an extremely powerful organization there where you can't even mention it without getting into trouble. And the reason I know this is because my ex...

was a Calabrian Italian and her family, which lives here, although most of them were born, you know, the parents and everyone, aunts and uncles were all born in Calabria and then came across in the 60s and 50s. They are all still tangentially related to the Calabrian mafia in terms of, you know, every now and then boxes of cheese and olive oils will just pop

up in their homes and be like oh someone brought a gift and it fell off the back of a truck and you're like oh boy and so so you really do i mean it's really kind of a strong presence still today then i mean it's definitely here it's just not taught you know like and we've had a few weird crime things there was pardon sorry um i was uh prior to this um i just moved suburbs but i used to live in a suburb called brunswick and brunswick is where some of the carlton

crew shootings and killings that we hear about in a bit, no doubt, took place. And the main thing over there now is that there still is like some shops, particularly the Italian shops, do have to pay kickbacks and protection money to the mafia.

There have been wiretaps of people, you know, talking about how they control the streets of Melbourne. And a few, I think about a year and a half ago or a year ago, a flower seller was accidentally gunned down

in a hit that was meant to get someone else and they got the wrong guy. And that was still a mafia related hit. But, you know, it's one of those things where like, this is one case that took place out of, you know, a year of crime, which had nothing to do with them. So they're definitely a diminished presence and that's largely down to the Melbourne gangland killings. Okay. So I'm going to do a little shout out for some of the reading material that I've gone through. There's a really good documentary called Dead Famous, which goes into all of the history that we're going to get into.

And then someone's made this great blog called Mafia Australia, which is like this deal, like real deep granular look into all this stuff going back like a century. Yeah.

And then while I'm giving a few shout outs, Adam Shand, this true crime writer in Australia, he's done a book called Big Shots about the gangland killings. He's written about Mark Chopper Reed, who's this kind of psycho gangster that people might remember from the film with Eric Banner. He's written about Carl Williams. So he's really like the authority on this stuff. And he's written some great books.

anyway so you've got italian mobsters ripping off markets and there are irish gangs as well uh and they're based mainly mainly down on the waterfront where the painters and dockers unions are based um and so like everywhere all the dodgy shit's coming in on the boat so the real scraps were had down there but there seemed to be a high value on honor at least the kind of honor that means you don't just gun people down all day long this is relative of course um

And so this homeless society is growing, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne. And these cities are melting pots for people all over the world. When Godfather Domenico the Pope Italiano and Antonio the Toad Barbaro both die of natural causes, I know, right? They die in 1962 and it sparks a gang war for control of Melbourne. And I was going to say, like, get used to the nicknames because this being an Aussie episode, almost everyone's

got one right well it's not really um a clever nickname uh australians are notorious for just uh you know shortening every word and adding an o at the end of it and considering that their work done for the day uh so instead of like you know uh sammy it'll be sammo or instead of um having a banana it'll be having a bano or something you know like just a

unimaginative nonsense like that. So the fact that they actually went to the limits of actually calling that guy Toad means someone put in time, effort, concentration, thought, and they came up with that, which means he should be flattered. And that was pretty much everyone checked out for the day after that. Do you reckon someone tried to make the argument that he should be flattered to be called the Toad? Well, he obviously allowed it. And this is a mafia boss. So we're assuming for some reason he thought it was okay. I'm not sure why. Yeah.

True, true. Maybe he's just really enlightened and he knows himself. He's been getting on that therapy. Yeah, that's what they know from the love of therapy. Yes, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. So in this 60s kind of mini gang war, the media calls it the Victoria market murders. It seems like shotguns were the favoured weapons, especially from behind, which is supposedly a traditionally disrespectful death in Calabrian history.

After all of it, this family called the Benvenutos comes out on top, led by the patriarch Liborio, who's this mustachioed, kind of pint-sized Burt Reynolds-looking market stall owner. This guy rules like a king and he's

Daughter Angela marries Alfonso Muratore, who's the son of Vincenzo Muratore, who was shot dead in the battle. So they lived down the street and there was relative peace in the underbelly for a while. Not far away, across town, another crime dynasty is being formed. Louis Moran and Graham Kinneberg, who's called the Munster from Melbourne's Irish contingent, were powers from the Painters and Dockers Union, which...

uh which was known throughout the 60s and 70s for a ton of criminal stuff and it led to a royal commission it's a bit like how the yakuza started out actually similar to that we've done a number episode on that um

moran and kinnenberg built a small criminal empire and piled up with the colton crew another local italian mafia which was enemies with the honor society so you were mentioning a minute ago right they're they're based in this kind of area that's known as little italy apparently yeah i mean it's there's there's a lot of suburbs in melbourne that have an italian communities there an italian settlement over here uh brunswick is one of them there's a carlton there's at carlton's lodge where the mafia get his

gets its name from. But yeah, they expand all the way out to reservoir and sunshine and all these other suburbs. It's mostly the Northern suburbs of Melbourne. And, and, and, and, and the unions back then, particularly the painters and dockers union was made up of Irish, you know, Irish waterfront workers. And then also the Italian collaborative mafia kind of people and the, and they work together to kind of set up a mafia crew.

That was actually largely Italian. The Morans that you mentioned weren't of Calabrian background. They were Italians, but I don't think they were Calabrian. I think they were Irish, right? Yeah, that's right. They were working with the Irish down the dock. That's right. And they teamed up with the Italians. Yeah. And then you get these underbelly figures called Mike Gatto, who's going to come up a bit later. And then this guy called Alphonse Gangitano. Gangitano. It's a hard G at the top and then a soft G in the middle. Yes.

I'm so sorry. But so things plod along between these groups and there's the odd sprout of violence, but mostly business is good. The pizza is doing okay. And the factions keep mostly to themselves. Uh, quote, the honest society was never quite as big as influential as in Australia, as people fall, uh, says a former policeman. Uh, the, oh yeah, this guy's called Brian, the skull Murphy. Um, so even, even the cops have got pretty scary nicknames in Australia. Um,

He continues, Benvenuto had to cast a big shadow to maintain the status quo. This occasionally had to be backed up by action, lest the aura of power diminish. To get the young Italians to show loyalty to him required a fear of the unknown. So he's talking the talk, but maybe not walking so many walks at this time.

um but liborio dies in 1988 and instead of his son frank he grooms this dashing lawyer called joseph pino aquaro to take over i looked up pino by the way it just means pine tree so oh right the skull yeah yeah that's actually a gentleman quite lovely nickname yeah this guy's like all pinstripe suits and sort of coiffured hairdo so he's he's kind of a slick slicker side of the business yeah um aquaro's

clever and he knows the law and how to get around it. Laborio's no fool, basically. In 92, revenge murders account for Frank and Alphonse Muratori, but by and large, that's how things were panning out. And the Honor Society and Carlton crew, they're getting along pretty much okay. It's when drugs come along, really, in a big way that things change. So,

Especially with heroin and meth, you've got Vietnamese and Chinese gangs bringing them over and there's speed by the bikers. And I think it seems like the bikers are used as kind of couriers for the bigger crimes.

crime syndicates, right? It seems like they're just the kind of foot soldiers or how does that kind of work? Well, I mean, yeah, basically they're, uh, they've got their own bikey gangs and everything and they're not really, um, uh, you know, I mean, they, they exist in their own world and they've got their own, uh, drug, uh, cartels and, and their own revenue streams and everything. Uh,

But yeah, they do work with the mafia as the on the ground guys, because obviously they're more intimidating. They're more violent. They've got literally giant bikes that they ride around in. So they make for a good PR move.

Are they big? I mean, do you see them around? Like, do they make the news? Not really. I mean, there are suburbs, again, where you might see them and it'll be the seedy part of the suburb and stuff. But Melbourne cops have done a very good job in the last decade or so of kind of pushing a lot of this stuff out

and shutting it down. And, you know, at the very least, like you still hear about bikey wars or bikey fights and stuff, but it's very minimal at this point. Right, right. So the weed in Australia is mostly being dished out by the Italians as it has been for years. And,

What's important is that there's new party drugs. So ecstasy is going wild in the 90s. Obviously, there's rave culture all over the world. And that's when we get to 1999 and Carl Williams. So it might be obvious by now we've just spoken about it, but Carl Williams kind of comes out of left field altogether. Right. And a news guy told an ABC crew that, quote, Carl was a supermarket shelf stacker and not a particularly good one. But along the way, he learned that there was more money in drugs.

So, yeah, I mean, you've got these kind of picture-perfect gangster-looking guys on the Italian and Irish sides. There's all these...

and slicked-back hair and tacky jewellery, shiny shoes, the whole works. This is especially the case of Alphonse Gangitano, by the way, who's tall, built, fond of a suit and sunglasses combo. It'd be hard to pick him out of a Sopranos line-up, basically. In fact, one cop says that, quote, the Melbourne lot thought The Sopranos was a documentary, which is kind of what I feel about it since Danny described growing up in New York. But anyway, so there, you've got this kind of, this whole...

going on you know I think it's quite regimented and it's full of this tradition and so-called honor and then this kind of weird guy just shows up and the cops at this time this is kind of mad they're not really helping the scene out at all they buy chemicals at wholesale and they sell them on the black market and they call it controlled delivery and

I'm not really sure what their end goal is there. Basically, there's a long history of Melbourne policing and Victoria police. And I'm sure it's largely the same in the whole country, which is what happens when you've got cops who don't have to deal with very intense levels of crime, that they don't really, they're not very good at that. And what ends up happening here is that they just crap at their job, you know, largely. If what's required of them is,

is just pepper spraying and beating a whole bunch of activists trying to stop a refugee from being put taken from one detention center to another because that's a human rights violation the cops are phenomenal they will dress up into the nines they'll put all kinds of protective gear on helmets and bulletproof shields and and all kinds of vests and stuff and they will pepper spray and and baton beat the crap out of you but when it came to just this which was a fairly

obvious crime story where like the names of all the major players was known. You know, everyone knew who was involved, who wasn't involved. Everyone knew where, you know, where to trace the money. You know, even Carl Williams, who came out of nowhere a little bit, was, you know, a fairly big figure and a well-known figure by the end of it. And it took them ages to catch them. It took them absolutely ages because just basic policing was

was so outside their purview. So, you know, something like, you know, if you did The Wire in Australia, it would make the American version of The Wire with the Baltimore situation seem like a very successful series of arrests and very efficiently done, whereas the Melbourne one is like more of a bumbling kind of buffoonery exhibition. Yeah, bumbling is like, I think, a very kind term for the cops because we're going to get into a lot of that in a moment as well.

I mean, there is actually like a wire style show about all this, right? Called underbelly. Yeah. It's quite well known at the time. It's not great. It's, it's okay. There's some great acting in it, but it's very badly edited and produced and directed and stuff. Um,

And there's some bizarre, like, choices in that. And in that, they glorify the daylights out of the cops. You know, obviously, it's very much a police propaganda piece where, you know, the task force Purana, which was kind of put together, is made to look like an amazing task force full of these super motivated individuals who it turns out were all fictional because real cops were just that shit at it. I mean, there's, I don't know, will you be covering the Nicola Garbo story?

element of this? Yeah, we're going to get to her soon. I'm going to not get there right now, but she's the perfect example of how utterly terrible the police are. Yeah, we don't have to be waiting for Gobbo. I was waiting for a reason to use that pun. Yeah, so didn't Underbelly get in trouble for following the story so

down to the wire that they were actually in contempt of court for some of these things or something I read. There's a lot of weird contempt of court rules in Australia. So, for example, if you remember the Cardinal George Pell case that was a big deal in 2019, where a Catholic cardinal

with the church, was accused of child abuse and then found guilty in two cases and then those were reversed later. But the entire world was reporting on it, but in Australia, media outlets were not allowed to even mention him by name because of privacy laws and stuff. So, yeah, there's a lot of weird kind of regressive, very, very out-of-date privacy laws here. Right. I just called him Cardi P or something. Yeah. Yeah.

uh so yeah so we've got this this whole scene and this guy this guy comes onto the scene and there's these cops so they're doing this controlled delivery and they're doing this so much that the police are actually the biggest customer for sigma at the time which is this leading pharma firm um as you can imagine this genius brain idea doesn't work that well and just kind of floods melbourne with drugs uh

Yeah, I've got... I had a little note at this point saying, believe it or not, this is the least shit thing the Victoria Police do in this story. But Alphonse, he wants to be the kind of big man in Melbourne, the godfather. And Jason Moran, son of Lewis, has other ideas. And he goes to Alphonse's home for a chat, pulls a handgun and shoots Alphonse dead. So there's chaos in the underbelly and the cops are pretty much pushing it along themselves.

And at the same time... This dumpy butt-chin guy called Carl Williams... Is cornering the party drug scene... By pressing so-called dog tablets... Which is a mixture of ketamine and pseudo apparently... And they branded these pills...

FUBUs or UFOs they don't sound like a lot of fun to be honest but um him and his dad George make a packet selling it with the help of the bikies and they undercut the underbelly with George um who and George is kind of this small-time crook right he's called a the gangsters called him a shit man which is a nobody right I guess you didn't need the translation um and

And so Cole doesn't look like these other gangsters at all. He's kind of fat and he's got frosted tips and sunglasses. They look like they've come from some cheapo beach hut. And they call him the smiling assassin, but he, I mean, he could more accurately be called the most bogan gangster ever. Am I getting...

Am I getting Bogan? You are, well done. Correct, yeah. Although you might have to translate Bogan for the non-Aussie listeners. Yeah. Is it like a sort of redneck or like a hick? It's like a hick. Not even a redneck so much as just like a hick. And the idea is that there's obviously a lot of classism involved in that. You know, it's just someone who is very, very lower class in terms of financial income.

And then there's the mullet and then there's the addiction to doing burnouts in a ute and eating meat pies and having VB beer for breakfast. And so, yeah, it's very much a lifestyle choice. Okay.

Sounds great. I think he looks a bit like a Nazi Guy Fieri. So that was where I was trying to draw the line with America. I would say Guy Fieri still has a bit of pizzazz. Carl Williams, like if you look at his pictures, if he walked into the room with three other people, he's the one you would not notice. And I think maybe that's what kind of worked in his favor in the end. The fact that he's utterly, utterly forgettable. Yeah.

Yeah, he keeps wearing these kind of oversized shirts and like leather jackets I thought were cool and made me look grown up when I was like 14. But like, yeah, there's a great quote from Mark Reid, by the way, Chopper, who people should definitely look up if they don't know who he is. He says, quote, to get anywhere in the criminal world, you had to fucking fight. Then along came drugs and you didn't have to be able to fight anymore. The village idiots and town mice were becoming drug lords. Yeah.

He sounds so upset about that. I know, I know. It's really pissed him off. Williams' upbringing is pretty tough. He grows up in West Melbourne and gets into drugs early. Is West Melbourne bad? Is that a bad place? Not anymore. But yeah, apparently it was at one point.

Long before I got here. So kind of like hipster gentrified these days. Everything is hipster gentrified these days. It's basically, yeah, West Melbourne is now where you would get avocado on toast. But back then, I'm sure it was more frightening. Right, right. So Williams' older brother Shane dies of a heroin overdose in 97. But it doesn't seem to have put Carl off the industry at all. And when brothers Jason and Mark Moran pay Williams to do a pill job for them,

He doesn't mix the binding agent properly, apparently, and the pills just go to shit. It's not clear whether he did this on purpose or by accident, but you can imagine these old grizzled docker gangsters aren't too happy with him at this point. So they set up a meeting in 99 with Williams on this little empty patch of green in a suburb. An argument breaks out and Jason pulls out a .22 pistol and he threatens Williams.

Mark at this point orders Jason to shoot Williams in the head, but Jason instead puts one in his beer belly because he didn't know how he'd get his money back with a dead Williams. So this moment here where he's getting shot in this tiny little park, this is when the Melbourne gangland war really kicks off in earnest. And Williams, this cheery-faced, kind of dopey-looking guy, he wants revenge.

a guy who's called Mr. X, who's this underworld figure who gets in with Williams at the time and later testifies against him. We're going to get into him as well in a moment. He says that Williams would rant and rave about the Moran family saying, quote, I want them, I want every one of them dead and every one of their crew dead. So,

So, uh, I guess that's pretty clear. And they had a wiretaps going on a lot of this stuff. So they had the recordings of them saying this. Um, I don't know why they decided not to act at the time. There's another story with a, with a, with a bug later on. I think one of the police puts it in a car and it causes the brake lights to flicker, but it's catching like every single thing. It's like, it's they've, they've got every single thing on record at this point and no one's getting arrested at all. Um,

So yeah, it just keeps on happening. And so Williams recovers from his gunshot wound and he gets straight back to pressing those pills. Soon after, cops find him and George in their house and Carl's asleep, tucked up in bed. And his pill press is just going like the clappers working on a job worth over 15 million Australian dollars, apparently. I think it's like 75 US cents to an Aussie dollar. So I guess it's 10 million bucks. Yeah, that's right.

So that's a decent amount of money for a little homespun pill press. The police, obviously, they throw Williams in jail and he meets a guy called Victor Brinkat. So this guy is called The Runner because he does bank jobs with his getaway car parked miles away and he runs to it instead of getting straight in the car. Again, sounds very Aussie to me. Like, it sounds like a terrible, terrible plan, but for some reason it didn't work as a shtick. Like, it became his thing, you know? Yeah.

No, the thing I do is I go on foot and then get in a car. That's great. Yeah. And they're like, wow, this guy's the Riddler of Melbourne. Genius.

But I mean, this guy is going to be involved in a very big way. So he Williams offered this guy 70 grand to offer the Moran brothers. And soon after he gets out on bail himself and then all hell breaks loose. Right. So Jason Moran at this time, he swerves his first wave of violence because he's actually chucked in jail himself over a massive nightclub brawl. But his brother, not so much.

So there have been a bunch of killings at this point, drug world drive-bys, execution-style shootings. But on June 15th, 2000,

Carl Williams steps it up. He ambushes Mark Moran in his car outside his luxury mansion and he shoots him dead. Moran had been under police surveillance, of course, but cameras had been switched off before the murder. And this is the only one of the gangland killings, I believe, where Williams actually pulled the trigger himself. But for him, things are on the up. He marries Roberta Merciera, an ex-wife of one of the Morans and a convicted drug dealer in 2001. So that's going to make everyone happy.

And in the same year, he had a kid with her and they called her Dakota. So then Jason Moran gets out of prison. But rather than get out while everyone's getting killed, he decides he's going to take over the family business, which is a bad idea. Brinkak gets out of prison himself and the murders continue. In 2002, a police informant is shot in the chest and head while wearing a wire and he survives.

By this time, there have been 20 murders in six years, and the police are the ones who haven't been paid off, don't really know what to do. Like you said, I think they're just kind of bewildered at this point, right? And it's remarkable because how many people survive shootings? Carl Williams shot in the gut, no problem. This police informant shot in the face and body, no problem.

walks it off and you're just like okay so even the gangsters aren't that good at doing what they're supposed to do this shouldn't be so hard to catch them yeah you would think so i mean but some of the cops definitely do know what they're doing so at this time and then they're not doing the right thing shall we say um

But then the next year, in 2003, something really shocking happens. So Jason Moran and his minder, Pasquale Barbaro, no nickname, sorry, Pasquale, are waiting outside an Auskick Clinic. Auskick Clinic. Yeah, it's a soccer camp, that's all. Right, so it's like...

quick cricket or touch football or something like that. It's just football. In America, it's called soccer, which is just football in the rest of the world. And it's basically like an indoor version of that. And then they do outdoor as well with slightly modified rules for kids and stuff. I see. All right. So these guys, they're in a blue Mitsubishi wagon with about seven kids in the back. And Brinkhat and a guy's...

cops are going to call the driver, walk up to the van and blow Moran and Barbara away with, yep, shotguns. Then Brinkett runs off, of course. Yeah, that's his thing. Of course, yeah. And then he meets Williams to tell him the job's done. So we know he tells Williams that the job's done because we've got it all on record. So at this point, Williams makes a pretty weird decision. So he stiffs the assassins.

he gives Brink at an envelope with two grand in it and nothing to Mr. X or the driver. Sorry. So that's a cracking idea. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So either way, a killing like that in front of kids in broad daylight, tons of witnesses, this changes the whole thing for the police and the media. And one lawyer tells ABC, quote, previously people were murdered in their driveways, in their cars at night. And now you've got normal suburban families going to an Auskick clinic. I got it right that time. Seeing two people being brutally murdered in front of their own children. And then another murder cop says simply, crooks don't do things like that. So, yeah.

This is like a major turning point. Yeah, it's a massive escalation at this point. And it caught everyone by surprise, apparently. The cops were out. I spoke to someone at the ABC when I was working there.

Some of the guys who covered this beat were people that were my colleagues and they used to tell me stories about how this was an unprecedented thing. Like no one had seen any, you know, it was the 9-11 of Victorian Police and Crime Association. Right, right, right. And so, yeah, about the same time, this thug guy from the neighbourhood called Andrew Benji Veniamin, he's hired to take out Williams and his family.

and he takes an accomplice along and he waits on the roof of their home. But the story goes that when Venoman sees Roberta breastfeeding Dakota, he can't bring himself to carry out the hits. Yep. And then he weirdly becomes Williams' best friend and confidant. Yep. And Dakota even calls him Uncle Andrew. So that's a nice, sweet, happy story. Yeah, he ends up having what many believe is an affair with Carl Williams' wife. She calls him her soulmate.

and yeah and he was also my ex's family's friend like apparently when I was watching the Underbelly TV series and the

Wow, wow.

I didn't realize you were that close to this story. Neither did I until it started happening. It takes a lot for a guy from Pakistan, particularly Karachi, to feel unsafe. In that moment, I definitely did. So until this point, cops really hadn't joined the dots with all these killings. And it seems like they...

despite all of the wiretaps and everything, they're still not kind of fingering Williams as the main guy involved in all of them. Maybe they just think he's too much of this happy-go-lucky idiot. I think it was just for them, just like everyone else, it was just too hard to believe. You know, every time they'd be like, oh, it's definitely Williams, then someone would pull up a photograph and they'd be like, can't be. Look at him. Look at the frosted tip. Look at the ill-fitting suits. It's got to be someone better than this. It's like this overweight 90s boy band guy. He can't be killing everyone. Um...

So in 2003, Victoria Police, I guess they're under a lot of pressure by now, and they launched this task force called Purana, which isn't the fish, but P-U-R-A-N-A, which is, I looked at it, it's an ancient collection of Sanskrit literature. It's really strange. Has someone on the force been brushing up? It's really strange because Purana in Urdu and in Hindi just means old. And I can't really find other meanings for it. So basically they're like, yeah, we'll have a task force and we'll call it old, I guess. Yeah.

So someone on the task force knows Urdu or Hindi. Yeah, Urdu, Hindi or Sanskrit. But either way, they were poorly placed in their job. Like they should have had some other... Incredibly literary. Yeah. Yeah.

um so these guys then begin bringing like building this idea of williams's drug empire and brinkhat um but there's trouble on that horizon too and we're going to find out in a moment um but meanwhile it just becomes the carl williams show he doesn't mind speaking to the media he takes to call himself the premier um quote he got bigger and bigger and greedy and greedier as they tend to do one police officer says

So now we're getting to the real dark meat of the gangland killings, I guess. In 2003, cops bug a car. Yes, this is the car that's being driven by a brink cap. But yeah, this thing makes the brake lights flicker and the crooks find it. Anyway, so this is something I didn't understand. They bring the bug to Williams and he brushes it off and says he'll, quote, do the job anyway. So they've got him.

with this bug, and he still says something on record. That just kind of shows you the brazenness of how it's getting at this point. I think brazen is the wrong word there. I think the intense stupidity of everyone involved. Intense stupidity.

So while police are floundering around trying to figure out what that actually means, Brinkac guns down Michael Marshall, who's this hot dog vendor and drug dealer. I guess he was probably making more from one of those jobs than the other. But it

They do it next to his five-year-old son, so it's pretty grim. And anyway, Brinkhat runs home, as he wants to do. And for some reason, he calls Williams and he tells him in a pretty slack code that a horse he likes has been, quote, scratched. So there's your criminal mastermind. I guess you are right. Yeah, it's less brazen than idiotic.

Anyway, so the cops pick this conversation up and they take them both into custody. So finally, they've got off their ass and done something. Williams then distances himself from Brinkhat. And when Brinkhat begs him to at least look after his own mum, Williams wires just a few grand. So he shortchanged him again. And now, unsurprisingly, he's going to bite him in the backside in a little bit.

so now we get to this really strange period in the, in the killings. Um, in September that year, the home of a notorious drug smuggler called Tony Mockbell is broken into by a small time mobster called Terry Hodson and this ponytail cop. Uh, and they take a bunch of money and guns. And there's a great quote from the officer who gets called to the scene. I wish I could do this in an Aussie accent. He says, I thought, here we go. This is going to be an all nighter. Uh,

And I think it's part of an ABC program that I saw. It is brilliant when he says that. So this guy who's caught this cop is called David Michel.

And he's actually supposed to be put in the house under surveillance, not robbing it. And Hodson is actually a police informer himself who's been ratting out his mates to Michel and Paul Dale, who's Michel's boss. So that might sound a bit fishy, to say the least. Later in 2003, police charged Dale, Michel and Hodson with the break-in. And they want to put Hodson into witness protection because he's obviously on a bunch of kill lists at this point.

But Hodson's daughter's just had a baby and she refuses and they carry on in their Melbourne home. So Hodson then tells the leader of Victoria's anti-corruption squad, Murray Greger, no nickname again, sorry Murray, that Dale has been on the take from Carl Williams and George Williams even tells him he's given Dale six grand at one point himself.

Dale had also been trying to figure out the location of Jason Moran before the Mitsubishi killings, by the way. So this is all turning into a real web of dark shit. And then in 2003, December, Graham Kinneberg, who at this point is considered the city's biggest gangster, he's shot dead.

His associate, Mike Gatto, accuses Veneman, who police believe has committed seven murders at this point. Cops say Williams is next for the block. He says, quote, If anyone wants to come and get me, then come and get me. Just don't miss.

So at this point, he's very much kind of modeling himself after Al Pacino in, what is the movie with the comical amounts of cocaine at the end of it? Oh, right. Yeah, Scarface. Yeah, Scarface. He sees himself as a Scarface. This is going to be a great last stand. It doesn't work out that way, but that's very much what he's aiming for and hoping for, I think. Right.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in March the next year, Gatto shoots Veneman around the back of a Carlton pizza joint, so that's very Godfather as well. Amazingly, given he literally said he wanted to kill Veneman, the jury believes Gatto acted in self-defense and finds him not guilty of murder. That's pretty laughable. Basically, every one of the jury's last name was oddly Gatto as well, probably, or something. Yeah. Yeah.

Or leave the mouth ghetto. So back to the cops. So Dale has got a bunch of vice squad colleagues to inform on the anti-corruption squad, which is pretty mad. And phone lines being tapped, actually catching, they actually catch him reaching out to Williams at this time. But this info isn't obviously getting back to Gregor on the anti-corruption squad. This is crazy.

And then on the eve of May 16th, 2004, police are called to Terry Hodson's home where he and his wife, Christine, have been shot twice in the back of the head. Execution style. Not only that, but the killer, and this is brazen, had picked up the empty shells and placed them on the bodies carefully. And secret police files on Hodson's snitching have been stolen from the station and leaked to folks in the underworld. So it's all gone a bit the departed now, right?

Yeah, there's a lot of leaks. And those investigations are still ongoing to this day. Like you still have Task Force Purana, you know, grand jury investigations taking place in Australia. Right. So this stuff's still going on. Well, it's mainly the level of infiltration into the cops, the amount of bribery that was involved and everything. That's still coming out. Yes. Wow.

Yeah, so it's gone a bit departed, but this is actually going to get a bit crazier now. So now we're going to get into Nicola Gobbo. So she doesn't really need a nickname, I guess. She's been a star criminal defense lawyer in Melbourne for years. Well, she has a nickname, though. In Australian media, she was called Lawyer X for the longest time. Lawyer X. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I was reading about that, and actually the Victoria Police had tried to sort of muzzle the press

and issue all these injunctions and stop them even calling her that. They really didn't want this out at all. For example, when I first started looking into the story, it was around the time the Lawyer X stuff was coming out, and I was working on radio at the ABC, and the first day that we kind of covered this Lawyer X thing, the cops said, you can't name her, no one knows the name, no one knows who it is, all we know is their name is Lawyer X, and they were a major informant.

And the text lines on the radio station went nuts because every single listener was like, yeah, it's Nicola Garbo. We all know it's Nicola. Everyone knows it's Nicola Garbo. It's obvious. Like, it was crazy. The whole city of Melbourne knew the identity of Lawyer X and the cops were pretending as if no one knew. I remember the thing about Ryan Giggs sleeping with his brother's wife. Yeah, same thing. Same kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

so yeah nicola gobbo is this kind of like star criminal defense lawyer in melbourne for years and she's the door of this legal dynasty high riser the whole shebang um and she ends up representing among others tony mockbell the guys who had a guy whose house was burgled and yep carl williams uh and there's this actual picture of them together at a casino it looks so small-time crook it's really funny um

So it turns out Mock Bell was getting pissed off with Gobbo and he starts threatening her. Then she goes to the police and offers to turn informant on her celebrity clients for them. At this point, you might assume the cops tell her to do one, right? Because she's a lawyer. It's highly morally improper for her to be passing on details of clients to police. Well, no, we're learning that's not the way of Melbourne cops.

So they sign her up. Where can you sign Nicola? And this war is raging on at this point. So Louis Moran, the patriarch of the family, he's killed in a shootout at Northern Melbourne Club. Italians are killing Irish, Irish killing Italians. All the time, Williams is making a packet and ordering these murders. Brinkhat, bless him, still hasn't turned on his absolute shit of a boss.

He's in jail, but Williams selling himself out, sorry, but Williams selling him out eventually takes his toll and Brinkhat sends a letter to the police. And when they ask him what he wants in return, he says, quote, I'd kill for a vanilla slice. Of course. Yeah. Why not? He's got to keep that energy up for the running. Jesus Christ.

I mean, it's kind of crazy, right? So yeah, we'll jump toward to 2007 at this point. So Williams is actually sent down for three of the murders and he gets off a fourth, although the true number of people he killed is probably quite a few more and he gets 35 years.

At this point, the day, uh, Dale, the accused officer, he's in deep trouble. Obviously if William spills the beans about the Hodson couples killing, he'll probably be screwed. Although I probably should add at this point that he denies everything. Um, Oh, and by the way, he's being represented by Nicola Gobbo. Um, and she's having an affair with the assistant police commissioner who's called Jeff Pope. Uh, and these names, they, yeah, these really don't need any nicknames at all at this point. Um,

And Williams has realised that Gobbo is the gob shooting her mouth to the police at this point because she's been visiting all sorts of people in prison who aren't even their clients and he can see.

So this is just mad. And at one point, she breaks into the office of another lawyer. I think that is Zara. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, and she finds a bunch of phone records that would have outed her at this point. So she slams the cops for their, quote, sloppy work. What do you think she wanted as payback? LAUGHTER

It wasn't a vanilla slice, but it was tickets to see Lionel Richie. Well, look, to be fair, I think that's a good buy. Like, if you're going to get tickets for anything, I would say Lionel Richie is a concert that you definitely want to risk your life for. At least it wasn't something crap.

Fair, fair. Yeah, maybe I'm being too harsh on the rich. But so the tights net, like, so the net is tightening, obviously, on Gobbo and Dale at this point. And Williams realises and he decides to turn super grass behind bars at Barwon Prison, which is near Geelong in Victoria. That's like,

What, a short hour drive away from Melbourne? Yeah, not far at all. So he tells cops that under Dale's orders, he'd paid a small-time gangster called Rodney Collings to kill Terry and Christine Hodgson. And that year, actually, off to the side a little bit, but still involved in Mafia, documents provided by Gobbo helped make the world's biggest ever ecstasy busts.

when 15 million pills hidden in 3,000 tins of tomato are stopped in New South Wales where they're being brought in by the Honor Society Calabrian guys. And there's rumors that the Indrangheta mobsters back in Italy still want people dead over that bus today.

So she's got the goods, but she's a lawyer. So this is not going to end well. Well, that's the problem is she did a good job. It just wasn't her job to do at all. Yeah, I mean, and she definitely knows what she's doing, right? So she says, quote, I've chucked ethics out the window. I've chucked legal professional privilege out the window. I've chucked my career out the window. And if any of this came out, she tells a handler, she'd be so fucked it's not funny.

So, yeah, she knows exactly what she's doing now. So now we've got Williams in a high security prison singing about everyone in the underbelly. We've got Paul Dale sweating out a double murder charge. And we've got Nicola Gobbo getting increasingly wound up in all this dangerous informing and she's getting death threats. And it's now 2010 and everyone in Melbourne's mafia is shitting bricks, basically, about what Williams is telling the police.

One of its biggest players by this time is a guy called Rocco Arrico. And of course, Paul Dale's entire case rests on Williams' testimony.

Well, bad news for Williams. The two guys he's sharing a cell with, and this is this kind of big common room with cell rooms off to one side and a gym seating area. It looks quite nice, actually. I'm just trying to stoke the prisons of bloody cakewalk guys, you know. So these two guys, one's an associate of Rocco Rico, and the other is this big scary guy called Matthew Johnson. Long history of violence, pretty nasty bloke. How he ended up in a cell with those two guys is just incredible.

So one day in April 2010, Johnson walks up behind Williams while he's reading the paper and he smashes his head in with the stem of the exercise bike. Ten minutes afterwards, the third cellmate calls up a Rico and tells him about it. Like they just had open phone lines. Yeah, for some reason there's no, yeah, there's no, you know,

How in the start of serial season one you have that, you know, you've got to collect coal from so-and-so prison. There's none of that here. It's just everyone's got a cell phone. They've got a good data plan. It's incredible. And this guy calls up Rocco Rico, tells him the deed is done or whatever. And it's in another 17 minutes before the guards even realize, any guards realize what's going on. The anti-corruption cop at this point, Murray Grego, he's just like,

I think he's just like bewildered that this happened. Like literally every single thing they could have done to protect Williams and Hodson has just been scuppered by their colleagues. And that's really the end of the Melbourne gang killings, really, because Dale, obviously with the biggest evidence against him, he's now six feet under. And by the way, he gets taken out in a gold coffin. So he keeps the look to the end. Of course, of course.

Yeah, so Dale... Yeah, perfect. So he gets off the charge, Dale, and Gobbo, she gets increasingly death threats and the police aren't protecting her at all. She flees to another country with her kids. And until recently, she was there, I believe, and the Australian police said that if she returned, they'd take the kids off of her because of the dangers she was under. So they really did a number on her. Mm-hmm.

And like you were saying, there's tons of inquiries about police corruption in the last few years, and it seems that the cops are trying to scupper that too. And then what's more, because the evidence supplied by Gobbo is clearly tainted, a bunch of guys have already got off their charge.

So, yeah, a complete shitshow, basically. And there you have it. That's the Melbourne gangland case. One of the guys you mentioned, Tony Mockbell, he's in prison, but he's been contesting his conviction because he says that the way that the police got the information on which to arrest him, that is in and of itself illegal because it came through Garbo. So she basically compromised the whole case. And the reason why the police are so desperate to use her because they had no other ways to

bringing these guys in and so they went with you know the extreme option except when you look at the court coverage and the and the police investigation there were a million other ways to bring these guys in the wiretaps for example or the eyewitness accounts or any of those things they just were either so compromised by corruption themselves or were just so utterly terrible at their jobs that they never bothered bringing anyone in properly it doesn't sound like a lot has changed since either right well i

I mean, basically, the one thing that's changed is either the mafia and everyone have really gone underground and done a better job of hiding themselves, or the cops have... I think, honestly, what ended up happening is

This whole Melbourne gangland killings was such a high profile event. It worked badly for not just the police, but also for the mafia. You know, they don't want to be, you know, this isn't, this isn't the Sicilian mafia, which has a more prominent public profile, you know, even in Italy, even in, and if you go out to places like New York and all these places, you know, the Sicilian mafia are media figures. We always know their names. We always know their personalities and all that stuff. The,

The Calabrian mafia is very low-key. They don't like being talked about. They don't like being in the press. And so that's how they exert their power, is by being the invisible hand. And so the fact that this was such a high-profile thing, I think for them was a lesson in decorum and a lesson in restraint. And you've seen a bit of that now. Okay, well, I mean...

Yeah, that kind of brings us full circle. Does that sound like the city you know and love, Sammy? Honestly, it does not sound like the city I know and love now. It's very much the past of Melbourne and it is something that's a big part of the past of Melbourne. You can go to the areas now, but there's, for example, the Moran area.

the elder of the Moran family was shot in the Brunswick pub, which, you know, you can go into and just see if you want. So the Oz Cakes Clinic where those guys were shotgun to the face while there were seven kids in the back seat.

That's near where I'm living right now. So that is very much still there. The history of it's there. You're aware of that history. But it's so different in terms of... You know, a lot of it's like...

If you go to Times Square now, or in the last, you know, 20 years, and you see this kind of Disney-fied version of Times Square, which used to be a really seedy place in the 80s and 90s. You know, 80s and 90s New York, Times Square was just peep shows and drug deals and things like that. And now it's just, it's this wonderful place where you can take awesome photographs. And that's what's happened. It's been like the gentrification of Melbourne has kind of pushed all of that underground and out of sight. Yeah.

And Melbourne is such a great, such a modern, such a livable city with such a good reputation for peace and low crime that I think it works in everyone's favor to maintain that.

Okay, so the Tourism Board of Victoria State are going to be very happy with that. That's the final parting advert for them. They took a beating because of COVID lockdown. So yeah, I'm sure they'd be thrilled to hear that they're doing a lot better now. Cool. Well, Sammy, thanks ever so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. It's been a ride talking about this. Cheers. And yeah, don't forget, you can find us on Twitter, Facebook, our website, Patreon, obviously, and all of that good stuff. So yeah, thanks again, and we'll see you soon.