In March 1990, The Runner had escaped from Northfield Jail in South Australia, where he had been serving a long sentence for armed robberies. The following month he was arrested in Melbourne and questioned over four stick-ups. As he was being driven to the city watch house he jumped from the unmarked police car and bolted, much to the chagrin of the sleepy detective escorting him. He wasn’t caught until January 1991 — in Queensland.
Police claim The Runner carried out 40 armed robberies in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia over seven years. In 1999 he was again arrested after he tried to rob a Carlton bank.
Why ‘The Runner’? His trademark was to run into a bank, pull a gun, demand large denomination notes and then run up to 500 metres to his getaway car. His gun-and-run method earned him a reputation as a long-distance runner among police and criminals.
Williams believed this running talent could prove useful in ambushes that might have to be carried out on foot. When he popped the question, The Runner did not hesitate.
On 17 July 2002, Williams was bailed, despite having twice been arrested on serious drug charges. But the courts had no choice, Williams’ case (and those involving six others) was indefinitely delayed while prosecutions against corrupt drug squad detectives were finalised.
Five months later, The Runner was released and within weeks he was going out with Roberta Williams’ sister, Michelle. He may not have been blood family, but he seemed the next best thing.
The Runner and Carl Williams met daily, and Williams asked his new right-hand man to find Moran. He said Moran was aware he was being hunted and had gone to ground.
‘Carl told me that he still wanted Jason dead and that he wanted me to locate Jason so he could kill him. We did not discuss money at this point but I was to start surveillance on Jason Moran.’
Williams’ ambitions and his desire for revenge were growing. No longer did he want only to kill Jason. ‘Carl developed a deepseated hatred of the Moran family … there is no doubt it was an obsession with him. Carl told me on numerous occasions that he wanted everyone connected with the Moran family dead.’
The Runner began to track Moran. With every report Williams would peel off between $500 and $1000 for the information. His former prison buddy was also paid to deliver drugs and collect money, and set up in a Southgate apartment that Williams sometimes used as a secret bachelor pad.
The Fatboy may have been prepared to wage war in the underworld but he was still frightened of Roberta, whom he had married the previous year when she was heavily pregnant with his baby.
The Runner would tell police he was not the only one spying on Moran. Williams also received information from convicted millionaire drug trafficker, Tony Mokbel, and soon-to-be-deceased crime middleweight, Willie Thompson.
Williams and The Runner regularly swapped cars — a black Ford, a silver Vectra, a grey Magna and Roberta Williams’ Pajero.
But finding Moran was one thing, killing him quite another. They began to discuss how — and the schemes ranged from the imaginative to the innovative to the idiotic.
One was to hide in the boot of Moran’s silver BMW and spring out, another involved lying beneath shrubs outside the house where Moran was believed to be staying. Williams even considered hiding in a rubbish bin. It would have had to have been a big bin.
Another plan was to lure Moran to a park so The Runner, dressed as a woman and pushing a pram, could walk past and shoot him. They even bought a shoulder-length brown wig before ditching the idea. Just as well. The Runner had a distinct five o’clock shadow and hairy legs.
Killer? Yes. Drag Queen? No.
Finding Moran proved difficult. He was an expert in counter-surveillance and teamed with a man who appeared to be a bodyguard. He quit his flamboyant lifestyle, rented a modest house in Moonee Ponds and kept on the move.
Also, The Runner had never met Moran and Williams did not provide him with a picture.
They finally spotted him in late February at a Red Rooster outlet in Gladstone Park. Williams was not armed. They followed him and an unidentified female driving a small black sedan.
As a surveillance operative, Carl made a good drug dealer. He grabbed a tyre lever and a screwdriver from inside his car and followed at a distance of only twenty metres. According to The Runner, ‘The rear of the hatch of the car opened up and Jason shot several shots at us from the back of the car.’ Which is when Williams lost interest, saying: ‘We will get him another time’.
Williams and the Runner went to pubs and clubs where they might find Moran. They may have ended up full, but they came back empty. They thought about a hit at the docks where Moran was said to work occasionally, but fears of terrorism had prompted tight security that made it impossible to hang around without attracting suspicion.
Williams started to get desperate. If he couldn’t get to Jason he would kill those close to him, he thought. He told The Runner to start surveillance on Moran’s oldest family friend, Graham Kinniburgh, and another associate, Steve (Fat Albert) Collins.
Kinniburgh was a semi-retired gangster, well-known in police and underworld circles and close to Jason’s father, Lewis Moran.
Williams finally figured that even an erratic man like Moran must have some family routine. He and Moran were linked by more than greed, drugs and hatred — their children all went to the same private school in the Essendon area.
Williams finally put a bounty on Moran’s head in April 2003. Veniamin and The Runner would get $100,000 each. The pair, armed and masked, hid in the back seat of a rented car outside the school expecting Jason to drop his children off. But he did not show. Next time, Roberta Williams picked a fight with Jason’s wife, Trish, outside the school in the hope she would call her husband to come and support her. Still no Jason.
Williams wanted Veniamin (who was still associating with Gatto and the Carlton Crew) to set up Moran for an ambush, but Benji was frightened Big Mick would realise he was working for Williams.
‘Carl was becoming wary of Andrew and told me that he was concerned that Andrew was more in the Moran camp than in ours,’ The Runner later told police.
In fact, Williams believed Moran was trying to persuade Veniamin to become a double agent and kill Carl.
When Benji failed to deliver Moran to a planned ambush at the Spencer Street taxi rank near The Age building, Williams started to doubt his number one killer.
‘From then on Carl would only meet Andrew on his own terms. That way Carl could be sure of his own safety. He did not trust Andrew any more,’ The Runner said.
Certainly Williams was jumpy. An interstate AFL spy wanted to check out the Essendon team at Windy Hill, but because it was a locked training session he had to drive to one end of the ground where he hoped to use binoculars to study the opposition.
He lost interest in sport when Williams, whose mother lived nearby, fronted him, believing the spy was trying to follow him.
The spy waved a Football Record at him, stuttering that his interest in sharp shooters was limited to Essendon’s star full forward, Matthew Lloyd. It is thought to be the only time the Football Record has been used to save a life.
The Williams team learned that Moran took his children to Auskick training every Saturday morning in Essendon North, near the Cross Keys Hotel. Williams had eased Veniamin out of the hit team and replaced him with the getaway driver from the Mark Moran murder.
The Runner and his new partner, ‘The Driver’, inspected the football oval and planned an ambush. On 14 June 2003, armed and ready, they watched the football clinic but did not see Jason. They agreed to try again the next week.
Williams had another plan. He wanted not only to kill Moran, but to make a statement no-one could mistake. He told The Runner he wanted Jason ambushed on 15 June, the anniversary of Mark’s murder, at Mark’s grave at Fawkner Cemetery.
It was too late to do the necessary homework and on the assigned day it took the hit team more than an hour to find the grave. By then the window of opportuni
ty had shut. When they arrived, they found a card signed by Jason. They had missed their mark, but only just. As they left, they saw a car fly through a red light. It was probably Moran.
During the following week, the team repeatedly went to the Cross Keys ground to fine tune their planned hit. The Runner would be dropped at the hotel car park where Moran would be parked; he would run up, shoot Moran in the head then run over a footbridge to the getaway van.
At the precise moment of the hit, Williams was committed to spilling blood but in an environment far more sterile than the grubby murder scene. He had organised a blood-test for that morning, giving him an alibi.
On the Saturday morning they collected guns stashed at a safe house, and fitted stolen number plates on the white van to be used in the getaway.
Williams’ lieutenant, a man who could source chemicals for amphetamines and who cannot be named, then advised The Runner to, ‘Get Jason good and get him in the head’.
The Lieutenant later disputed this when he became a police witness. He claimed he told The Driver to do the killing away from the kids at Auskick — ‘Hey, I’m no monster.’
As they sat near the park, The Runner spotted a man he thought was Moran. Williams and The Lieutenant drove past and nodded to confirm the target’s identity, then headed off to set up their alibi at the medical clinic.
As the football clinic ended, the hit team watched Moran walk to a blue van. Williams’ men drove to the rear of the car park for The Runner to get out before the driver headed around the block to wait for him.
The Runner put on a balaclava. He had a shotgun and two revolvers. He ran to the driver’s side of the blue van, aimed the shotgun at Moran and fired through the glass.
He dropped the shotgun and fired at least three shots with a revolver, then ran off.
The man sitting with Jason was Pasquale Barbaro, a smalltime crook who often worked for Moran. The Runner later said he didn’t see Barbaro, let alone intend to kill him.
Williams received news of the hit with the message that ‘the horse…had been scratched’.
Later, Williams and The Lieutenant congratulated The Runner on a ‘job well done’ and gave him $2500 cash. At first he was promised $100,000, and then a unit in Frankston as payment, but neither happened. The killer was short-changed and it would prove a short-sighted decision. But if it worried the hired gunman it didn’t show — hours after killing two men and scrubbing off gunshot residue, he attended a birthday party at a North Melbourne restaurant.
Murder, it would seem, can sharpen the appetite.
Another person was clearly pleased with the news of Moran’s death. Roberta Williams was picked up on a bug shortly after the murders saying, ‘I’ll be partying tonight.’
EVEN though Williams was the obvious suspect, his blood-test alibi was standing up. The shotgun found at the scene had not been traced and those around the Williams camp said nothing.
There had been eleven underworld murders since 2000 and all remained unsolved. Police initially treated each crime individually, despite it being obvious that some (but not all) of the murders were connected.
Senior homicide investigator, Phil Swindells, was frustrated by the lack of results and began lobbying for a taskforce. He reported that Andrew Veniamin was suspected of three murders and a taskforce was necessary to target his group. Senior police finally acted and the Rimer task group (later renamed Purana) was established in May 2003, with Detective Senior Sergeant Swindells in charge.
Many believed it was doomed to fail. ‘We had no intelligence and we didn’t know anything about many of the major players,’ Swindells would recall. Assistant Commissioner Simon Overland would later admit that police ‘dropped the ball’.
Swindells knew there would be no early arrests and there might be more murders. He also knew police had to go back to the start and build up dossiers on all the players. Only then would they be able to try to isolate the weak links.
Politicians, self-proclaimed media experts and cynical old detectives thought Purana would self-destruct. A lack of success would result in bitter infighting and no results. The underworld code of silence would never be broken, they said.
To keep up morale during the years of investigation, the taskforce called on Essendon coach and long-time AFL survivor Kevin Sheedy to motivate Purana investigators. Believe in yourselves and your team mates and don’t worry about the scoreboard, he said. Do the planning and the results will come.
In October 2003 the taskforce was enlarged to 53 staff, including nine investigative groups, with Detective Inspector Andrew Allen in charge.
From the start no-one really doubted that Williams was behind the killing, but there was no hard evidence. Several names were nominated as the shooter, including The Runner, but names without facts were little use.
The initial homicide squad team was convinced The Runner was the gunman and had identified others who would later be shown to be part of Williams’ hit squad.
The initial work of the homicide squad cannot be underestimated. But the better-resourced Purana team was able to make vital breakthroughs — eventually.
It was months before the first strong lead emerged from the double murder. Near the Cross Keys Hotel in Moreland Road is a public telephone and detectives eventually checked the calls made from there around the time of the murder.
On a long list, a series of numbers stood out. On Friday 20 June, the day before the double murder, someone rang Williams’ mobile phone from the telephone box. Roberta Williams’ mobile had also been called, and then The Runner’s. It was clear to police that one of the hit team was checking out the layout for the ambush planned for the following day.
But the next call on the list was not a known suspect. When police tracked down the man who received the call he told them he had been rung that day by a mate. That friend was The Driver. It did not take long to find out that The Driver was a thief, drug dealer and close friend of Williams. He sold speed and had a lucrative sideline in stolen Viagra. He was still selling the remains of 10,175 sample packs lifted from a Cheltenham warehouse in April 2000.
Detectives went to The Driver’s house. Sitting in the driveway was a white van, the same type as one captured on closed-circuit video depositing a masked gunman in the car park just before Moran and Barbaro were killed.
It was a breakthrough — but not the breakthrough. It would take police fourteen months before they could lay charges. Meanwhile, the murders kept happening.
PURANA detectives knew the Williams team would eventually make a mistake, but wondered how many would die before they found the weak link.
In October 2003 police learned that The Driver, Williams’ trusted associate, had sourced an abandoned sedan rebuilt by a backyard mechanic — a perfect getaway vehicle.
Police placed a listening device in the car and waited. But The Driver, having collected the car and driven it a short distance, noticed the brake light was on. He checked it and found the bug, which he ripped out.
He immediately told The Runner, ‘we’re hot’ and wanted to cancel the job. But The Runner had lost his sense of risk and insisted they push on, a decision he later admitted was ‘sheer stupidity’ caused by the pressure on him to get the job done.
That night they met Williams separately in Flemington for new instructions but Williams’ growing sense of invincibility lulled him into making a massive misjudgement. The one-time suburban drug dealer with gangster boss dreams ordered his hit team to carry on regardless.
Inexplicably, The Driver decided to use his own car (a silver Holden Vectra sedan once owned by Williams) to drive to the scene. But it, too, was bugged with recording and tracking devices.
Police knew that The Runner and The Driver planned a major crime in a square kilometre block of South Yarra but did not know what it would be.
For a week, the pair repeatedly drove around the same streets. Police suspected they were planning an armed robbery and guessed potential targets could be the TAB at the B
ush Inn Hotel or two luxury car dealerships.
A week later, on Saturday 25 October, the Purana chief, Detective Inspector Andrew Allen, was catching up on paperwork when he got the call from police monitoring the car.
The suspects had been talking about guns, getaways and something ‘going down’. But the tracker failed (they drop out in the same manner as mobile phones) so police could not identify the car’s location. Detectives could only sit back and listen, as they still did not know the men’s intended target. They could hear muffled gunshots and the suspects driving off. It wasn’t until police received calls that a man was lying in Joy Street, South Yarra, that they knew what had happened. Michael Ronald Marshall, 38, drug dealer and nightclub hotdog salesman, was dead.
Marshall had just got out of his four-wheel drive, his five-year-old son still in the vehicle. The Runner later told police that he shot the drug dealer four times in the street before escaping.
Later The Runner rang Williams to give him the usual crudely coded message: the job was done.
Williams understood — but so did the listening police. Within hours, The Runner and The Driver were arrested. The walls were starting to close in on ‘The Premier’.
Police knew who had killed Marshall and who ordered the hit, but it would be more than two years before they learned why.
THREE days before Christmas 2003, Carl Williams and Andrew Veniamin met Mick Gatto at the Crown Casino to have what were supposed to be peace talks. It was only days after Gatto’s close friend, Graham Kinniburgh, had been gunned down outside his Kew home.
Kinniburgh was an old-time gangster who had made his name as Australia’s best safebreaker. For three decades he had been connected with some of Australia’s biggest crimes. He was known to be the mastermind behind the magnetic drill gang, which had pulled some huge jobs. Kinniburgh had put his children through private school and was semi-retired, but he was a friend of Jason Moran’s father, Lewis, and therefore Williams saw him as an enemy. In what would prove to be Kinniburgh’s final few months he had become downright morose. A shrewd punter and expert numbers man, he knew the odds were that his would come up. He told a friend, ‘My card has been marked’ and began to carry a gun. He was shot dead on 13 December 2003, carrying groceries from his car to his house.
The Gangland War Page 2
