Underbelly: The Aussie Sopranos

Words: George Wales, Images: Newspix/Rex Features, The Age

Melbourne, 13 October 1999. In a quiet suburban park, a business meeting between two drug dealers was about to take a turn for the worse. Jason and Mark Moran, step-brothers and prominent members of established Italian-Australian crime family ‘The Carlton Crew’, had arranged a meet with drug dealer Carl Williams. After a brief dispute, passers by heard a man cry, ‘No Jason’ followed by a gunshot. Andrew Rule, a Melbourne-based crime journalist who has chronicled the war in the book Underbelly, compares the ensuing feud to the Kray era in London’s East end. ‘It was that big, the names have gone into history’. 

John Silvester, Rule’s Underbelly co-author and senior crime writer for The Melbourne Age newspaper, says the shooting had been on the cards. ‘Jason and Carl were associates and competitors in the same business. There were several reasons behind the shooting, primarily that Carl was undercutting the Morans on the product, selling his amphetamines at almost half their price. On top of that, he’d done a pill run for them but hadn’t used enough binding material. It’s pretty hard to sell these pills if they turn to powder in your hands.’ The Morans wanted an explanation. ‘They chose an open location so there was no chance of an ambush or police bugs, and the rule was no guns. But for Jason that was more of a guideline than rule. He produced a .22 Derringer and popped Carl in the tummy.’

Whilst Mark apparently urged him to finish the job, Jason reasoned that with Carl dead, they’d never see their money again. Silvester says it was a decision that would prove to be the undoing of the Moran family, and the Carlton Crew as a whole. ‘If the Morans had killed Carl, he would’ve just been another dead try-hard, but their mistake was leaving him alive. They thought he was like a puppy dog. If they whacked him over the nose with a rolled-up newspaper he’d park his tail between his legs and that’d be the end of it.’ They were wrong.

DEATH NOTICE 

Carl Williams doesn’t look like your average gangster. A doughy-faced man with an easy smile, he was always more at home in a T-shirt and board-shorts then the pinstripe suits favoured by his peers. Appearances however, can be deceptive. ‘Carl, overweight, pleasant looking – you would’ve thought maybe he would talk to the police after he was shot’ says Silvester. ‘But in fact he refused to say anything. All he would say was that, “I was walking along and I felt a pain in my tummy. I thought it was indigestion and then I found blood”.’ Sure enough, Williams soon had his eye on getting the kind of payback the police couldn’t offer him.

Less volatile than his step-brother, Mark Moran attempted to keep a low profile as much as possible. But whilst Jason’s violent nature could get him into trouble, his reputation had its uses. With Jason around, only a masochist would cross the Morans, but when he was jailed on affray charges in January 2000, Mark no longer had his muscle to fall back on. Five months later as he stepped from his Commodore outside his home, he was shot dead, taking both barrels of a shotgun in the chest. The man behind the hit was Carl Williams. Mark had been right: they should have killed him when they had the chance.

The funeral was a textbook underworld send-off, all black suits, sunglasses and hangers-on. Rule describes the event as something straight off the big screen. ‘You’ve got these egotistical, narcissistic characters who are constantly showing off with their clothes or their cars. They want to live out this gangster dream that they’ve soaked up from films for years, so they turn up to the church and enact this big theatrical scene’. Star of the show was Jason Moran, granted day-release from prison, who spoke passionately about his fallen brother. The death-notice he placed in the newspaper however, was less touching: ‘This is only the beginning, it will never be the end. REMEMBER, I WILL NEVER FORGET’.

ESCALATION 

Carl knew he would have to act first. Whilst spending time in Port Phillip Prison on remand for drug charges, he spotted the potential for recruitment. Williams befriended an armed-robber known as ‘The Runner’ (who for legal reasons, cannot be named), a bank robber renowned for sprinting up to 500 metres from the crime scene to his getaway car. The Runner was offered a 0,000 contract to take out Moran upon his release in early 2003, and the hit was on.

If Jason Moran wasn’t worried about Carl, the police certainly were. In a stunningly lenient move, the parole board granted him permission to relocate himself and his family to London, due to fears for his life. However, it wasn’t long before Jason returned. According to Silvester, he couldn’t let go of the underworld. ‘Remembering that his family were doing quite well, there was still a lot of drug money, Jason had the chance to live a long and unremarkable life in London. He could’ve got a job, and his income would’ve been very well supplemented. But he came back. These people just loved the life. They seemed to think that The Sopranos was a lifestyle programme and The Godfather was a documentary’. Jason would soon be in the headlines again, but not in the way he would’ve liked.

Having followed Moran for several months, the Runner had yet to spot an opportunity to carry out the hit. Carl’s plans were becoming increasingly absurd, including one scheme that would see the Runner, dressed as a woman and pushing a pram, ambush Jason in a public park. They even bought a shoulder-length wig before abandoning the plot.

Eventually however, they found a more obvious chink in the target’s armour. Every Saturday morning, Jason would take his kids to an Aussie Rules Football clinic in the suburb of Essendon. The Runner was doubtful at first. Killing someone outside their house was one thing, but carrying out a hit in front of hundreds of witnesses in broad daylight? Carl however refused to wait any longer, and gave the Runner the green light. On June 21 2003, Jason Moran was murdered in his van as his six year old twins and Mark Moran’s own fatherless children sat in the back seat. The Runner had strolled up to the driver’s side and fired a shotgun round through the window before firing three further shots from a long-barrelled revolver. Jason’s friend Pasquale Barbaro, sitting in the passenger seat, was also killed.

The murder was national news. There had been plenty of gangland slayings in Melbourne over the past decade, but nothing quite as shocking as this. Silvester argues that, ‘Jason’s shooting was the point at which the war became massive news because A, he was known, B, the murders were coming closer together, and C, the sheer audacity of it. It was done during a kids’ Saturday sport! There had been a sense of, “It’s not a threat to me because I’m not a gangster,” but now we had Pasquale Barbaro sitting in a car shot dead, we had kids sitting in cars who saw their fathers murdered. Even though they lived their lives like two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs from a TV show, these men had mothers and fathers and kids. The trauma was enormous.’

NOW IT'S PERSONAL 

Carl wasn’t finished though. He wouldn’t rest until the rest of the Carlton Crew were wiped out along with the Morans. Next up was career criminal and renowned safecracker Graham Kinniburgh, shot dead outside his home in December 2003. A retired elder statesman, Kinniburgh was killed to send a message to de facto Carlton Crew boss Mick Gatto. According to Silvester however, Gatto was not a man to be trifled with. ‘That was the one that caused the real angst with Mick Gatto. Kinniburgh was like a father to him, so once Williams killed him, the feud became personal.’

Three months after Kinniburgh’s shooting, Carl’s right hand man Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin met Gatto for a business meeting in La Porcella, the restaurant from which Gatto operated in Carlton. He didn’t make it out alive. Silvester describes the incident as shady at best. ‘Gatto’s version of events, which was accepted by a jury, was that Veniamin arrived and said “I want to see you”. They went into an enclosed corridor out the back, which is a dead end, and had a dispute. Veniamin’s produced a gun and fired, Gatto’s taken it from Veniamin and killed him. He said it was self-defence. The police argued that Veniamin had often been pulled over and had never been carrying a gun, yet supposedly on this day he was. In any case, Gatto was acquitted and walked away from court a free man. But as the old saying goes, the survivor owns the crime scene.’

Carl was furious. As well as being Williams’ alleged gunman, Veniamin was a close friend. Retribution was swift, and Lewis Moran, father to Jason, was next to fall. Broken by the murders of his family, Lewis spent his days drinking at the Brunswick club, seemingly unconcerned about the target on his back. As Silvester explains, he seemed to have thrown in the towel. ‘The police got his bail varied to let him move about, but he always went to the same pub at the same time, so he’d really given up.’ CCTV footage showed Moran cowering in the pub corner as his assailants shot him dead, an inglorious end for the patriarch of one of the city’s most powerful crime families.

KILLING TIME 

With the majority of his rivals wiped out, Williams’ ego continued to swell, to the point where he referred to himself as ‘The Premier’ because, ‘I run this state’. Predictably, it was to be his undoing. A taskforce named ‘Purana’ had been set up by the police with a view to stamping out the spiralling violence that had spread over the past few years. Approximately 53,000 hours of telephone surveillance would pay off when Carl sanctioned the murder of Michael Marshall, a hotdog seller who turned a profit by selling drugs from his van.

‘The Purana taskforce sourced a car that was to be used for the hit and put a tracking device in it, only for The Runner to find it. Now any 15 year old street hood would see that and know they were in trouble. But Carl, full of his own product and his own importance, proceeded to go on with it. They used one of the crooks’ own cars, and were caught.’ Andrew Rule concurs with Silvester that the hit was a shambles. ‘They were caught because they were stupid. Large, violent children’.

Even with the Runner behind bars, Carl was complacent, foolishly taking his employee’s loyalty for granted. ‘When they got the Runner, Carl was too stupid to look after him, put him on legal aid or try to get him a separate trial’ says Silvester. ‘The Runner had already been dudded on a murder where they hadn’t paid him in full, and Carl proceeded to dud him again. The Runner asked him to pay his mother for the Marshall hit, but all she got was ten thousand dollars. So this old style crook who nobody thought would talk to the police, went to the authorities and became the star witness.’

The Runner told police that he had been paid by Carl Williams to kill both Jason Moran and Michael Marshall, in exchange for his own sentence being reduced. Implicated in a further four murders, Williams was finished. With charges stacking up and knowing the Runner had given compelling evidence against him, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Lewis and Jason Moran as well as another man, Mark Mallia, whose charred remains were found in a drain in August 2003. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum of 35 years.

Nonetheless, in Carl’s eyes he had come out on top. When quizzed on whether there had been any winners in the war, the response from the Williams camp was remorseless: ‘Carl says his mother might have to visit him in Barwon Prison, but Judy Moran has to visit her sons and husband in the cemetery’. With 33 underworld murders carried out in Melbourne between 1995 and 2004, she won’t be the only one.