The Gangland War

by John Silvester

  Parked just ten metres away is her husband’s 1993 maroon Commodore sedan — the car he was sitting in when he was shot dead in Bay Street, Port Melbourne, on 1 May 2002.

  When all the forensic checks were done and the police finally returned the car, Wendy Peirce immediately slid her fingers under the front ashtray with practised ease.

  The grieving widow found what she was looking for — almost $400 in cash. She was pleased but not surprised at this small legacy. ‘It was his favourite spot to stook (hide) money,’ she shrugs.

  Once police finished with the maroon sedan, Wendy had it detailed — which included patching a nasty bullet hole, replacing the shattered driver’s side window and fitting seat covers.

  Now it looks good as new.

  She decided to keep it ‘for sentimental reasons.’ Victor, she explains, always had a soft spot for Commodores and they were his vehicle of choice to steal for getaway cars. It was also the type he left abandoned in Walsh Street to lure two young police to their deaths.

  Wendy Peirce has spent nearly 30 years watching, committing and concealing serious crime. She talks of her history with no obvious signs of guilt or embarrassment. What is done is done.

  But she has finally agreed to talk, she says, to set the record straight. ‘I have been an idiot. If I could have me life back I wouldn’t have done this. It has been a total waste.’

  She is considering changing her name and trying to bury her past. She says her son, Victor junior, is burdened with carrying the name of the brutal gunman, drug dealer, police killer and gangland murder victim.

  Her daughter is still filled with anguish at losing her father. Her youngest son goes to school near where his father was shot dead.

  So why did she agree to give evidence for the police and then change her mind before the trial?

  Peirce says she was never going to give evidence: that her decision to go into witness protection was part of a long-range family plan to sabotage the prosecution from the inside.

  She now says that although Victor organised the murders, he felt there would never be enough evidence to justify his arrest. ‘He covered his tracks and he didn’t think he’d get pinched,’ she says.

  But when Victor Peirce’s sister, Vicki Brooks, and her son, Jason Ryan, went into witness protection, the police case became stronger.

  At first Wendy Peirce stayed staunch, following the underworld code of refusing to make admissions. ‘My first statement was to Jim Conomy (on 9 November) stating that we had nothing to do with it. Noonan wanted to charge me with murder.’

  Wendy Peirce claims she knew her alibi was worthless and no-one would believe her. She claims that Peter Allen — Victor’s half-brother and the jailhouse lawyer of the family — was the one who decided Wendy would be more valuable if she appeared to change sides.

  ‘He said, “If you give evidence for Victor he’ll go down (be convicted). With your priors (convictions) the jury won’t believe you”.’

  ‘He said that if I somersaulted them (changed sides) … Peter said I would get no more than 18 months for perjury and he was spot on.’

  She said she never intended to give evidence against Victor and that she stayed in contact with him, even when in witness protection.

  ‘I would talk to mum and Kath (Pettingill, Victor’s mother) was there to pass on messages to Victor. I was posting him letters and photos. I always loved Victor and I was never going to give evidence against him.’

  Police claim the suggestion that Wendy was planted as a witness is a fantasy.

  One member of the taskforce says she saw the chance to start a new life and grabbed it but had second thoughts when she realised that she would have to work rather than living off the proceeds of drugs and armed robberies.

  Another said she was happy when she was duchessed by the taskforce but felt miffed when moved to Canberra and put in public housing by witness protection.

  ‘She saw that even before the trial she was no longer special. She realised that after she had given evidence she would be left to fend for herself,’ one policeman said.

  One detective said she was besotted by one of her guards and decided to flip sides and return to the Peirce camp when the policeman was moved to other duties.

  Inspector John Noonan, who was joint head of the taskforce, blames the legal system. It was simply too long from arrest to the trial to hold the unreliable Peirce.

  He says he has no doubt if a jury had heard her evidence all four accused men would have been convicted.

  ‘They (Victor Peirce and his family) kept at her. Getting messages to her that everything would be all right and if she changed her story back she would move back with Victor. She was getting messages from Peirce in prison through third parties that he understood the pressure she was under, but they belonged together.’

  ‘They told her they could look after her better than the police.’

  The treatment of Wendy Peirce split the taskforce when some members were banned from dealing with her for fear their confrontational style would push her out of the prosecution camp.

  Joint-taskforce head, Commander David Sprague, said police lacked the professionalism in witness protection at the time to deal with someone like Wendy Peirce.

  ‘She could not cope with witness protection. I think we had a real chance in the early days but as the case dragged on she changed sides again.’

  He said she was difficult to control, continuing to shoplift and drive without a licence while under witness protection.

  In the early months, she was protected by the taskforce and treated as a star. She stayed in hotels — some of them luxurious — and was constantly moved.

  She was flattered, taken out for meals and her children entertained with outings that included sailing trips around Port Phillip Bay.

  But as the months dragged on towards the trial, she was put into the much less glamorous witness protection program.

  Many of her young guards had trouble concealing their contempt for the wife of a police killer. She had lost her friends and her extended dysfunctional family and the detectives who had persuaded her to become a prosecution witness were no longer there to fortify her weakening resolve.

  Senior police say she had a glimpse of her future as a struggling single mother. And she didn’t like it.

  WENDY Peirce says her husband was a criminal with two great passions — his love of armed robberies and his hatred of police. ‘Victor was the planner. He loved doing stick-ups. He was the one who would do all the planning and tell the others what to do.’

  Police say the core members in the team, known as the Flemington Crew, were Jedd Houghton, Graeme Jensen, Peter David McEvoy, Paul Prideaux and Lindsay Rountree. The specialist car thief for the gang was Gary Abdallah.

  Jedd Houghton would be shot dead by police in a Bendigo caravan park on 17 November 1988. Abdallah was shot dead by police in a Carlton flat in April 1989.

  ‘He (Abdallah) was always good with Holdens. Victor would tell him to steal two and have one left at a certain spot.’ The armed robbery team would do the job in one stolen Holden before swapping to the second a few kilometres away.

  To Peirce it was a job. Nearly every work-day he would head off to observe possible targets and plan armed robberies. ‘He was an absolute expert,’ she says proudly.

  But if it was a job, he certainly loved his work.

  ‘He told me he often got an erection when he charged into a bank. He was just so excited. He planned the jobs and then they did the robberies. He loved doing banks — he just loved it. He got off on it.

  ‘I always got him to ring me straight after a job to make sure he was okay. Then I’d tell him to get home with the money. I loved it.’

  The most money she saw was $200,000 after Peirce robbed the ANZ bank in Ringwood in January 1988. ‘He did heaps, he did over twenty armed robberies.’

  The money, she now admits, was laundered through lawyer Tom Scriva, but none remains.

  ‘We wasted
it all. We wanted to buy a new house near Too-long (near Port Fairy). We had five acres picked out but we just spent all the money.’

  Gaetano ‘Tom’ Scriva, 55, died of natural causes in July 2000 but by then much of the black money he was holding for his gangster clients had disappeared.

  Scriva’s father, Michele, was a Melbourne mafia figure connected with the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. In 1945, Scriva senior was acquitted of the murder of Giuseppe ‘Fat Joe’ Versace in what was probably Victoria’s first mafia hit. Versace was stabbed 91 times.

  Michele Scriva was later sentenced to hang for stabbing Frederick Duffy to death in North Melbourne, but the sentence was later commuted and he served 10 years.

  Scriva was a trusted lieutenant to Godfather Liborio Benvenuto, who died of natural causes in 1988. Much later, Benvenuto’s son, Frank, would become good friends with Peirce.

  According to Wendy, her husband robbed banks in East Bentleigh, Ringwood and Knox City in 1988. He also hit security guards carrying cash boxes into banks and attacked couriers who were picking up large amounts of cash.

  ‘He would knock them out and take the money,’ she recalls.

  She says that when armed robbery squad detectives came to interview him, he told her ‘if he didn’t come back they had loaded him (fabricated evidence to justify an arrest). He came home and said they told him to pull up on the banks or they would load him’.

  She confirms the stick-up crew saw the armed robbery squad as its enemy and believed the detectives were methodically murdering criminals they could not convict.

  The pact to kill two police for every armed robber? ‘It was more Jedd and Macca (McEvoy) than the others.’

  ‘Jedd was the trigger man; he had the shotgun. Macca took the (Damian Eyre’s) handgun. Victor was pissed off with him for that. Abdallah knocked (stole) the car. I don’t think (Anthony) Farrell and Trevor (Pettingill) were even there.’

  Wendy Peirce says Victor was convinced police were going to kill him. ‘We went on the run, living in motels with the kids.

  ‘It (Walsh Street) was spur of the moment. We were on the run. Victor was the organiser.’

  But she says he showed no regrets over what he did. ‘He just said, “They deserved their whack. It could have been me”.’

  According to Wendy, Jensen’s violent death hit Peirce hard. ‘Graeme was his best mate. He idolised him.’

  But what Peirce didn’t know at the time was that his best mate and his wife were having an affair. ‘It just happened. Graeme would come over to see Victor to talk about jobs and he would wink at me. Then he came over and Victor wasn’t there and it just happened.’

  It was the relationship rather than the double murder that led Peirce to his only moment of remorse.

  He told her, ‘If I had known about the affair I wouldn’t have done it (Walsh Street).’

  IT has taken Wendy Peirce almost two years — since agents acting for the Underbelly conglomerate first approached her — to finally agree to tell her story.

  She has been interviewed on the record and then later asked for her story to remain unpublished. Now she says she is ready to tell the truth.

  Her private life is a disaster, her family is collapsing and she is heavily in debt.

  She says she hopes her life can show others that there is no glamour in the underworld. She claims that the death of her husband has finally given her the victim’s perspective of crime.

  She was just a teenager from a law-abiding family when she met Victor Peirce and his mother, Kath Pettingill. She fell in love both with the criminal and his gangster lifestyle.

  But in 1983, she says, Victor wanted to leave his criminal past and get a job.

  He had just been released from Ararat prison after serving two years and they moved into a rented unit in Albert Park, suburbs away from the rest of his criminal family.

  But Peirce’s half-brother, the notorious Dennis Allen, offered to give them a house next to his, in Chestnut Street, Richmond.

  ‘Once we moved in, that was the end. Victor was always helping out Dennis. If we hadn’t moved there, then none of this would have happened — none of the murders, the armed robberies and the drugs. If we hadn’t moved there, then Victor would be alive today and so would those two police (Tynan and Eyre).’

  Allen was a prolific drug dealer in the early 1980s. ‘I saw Victor with cash, sometimes $50,000, sometimes $100,000. I saw Dennis with $500,000.’

  Allen had many bank accounts but also liked to bury cash so it could never be traced. Much of it was never recovered when he died of natural causes in 1987. ‘When he got sick, he couldn’t remember anything. It must all still be buried around Richmond.’

  Police say Allen was responsible for up to 11 murders and Wendy says she learned from experience to read the signs when her brother-in-law ‘was about to go off’.

  One day in August 1984 she saw him turn and look coldly at small-time crook Wayne Stanhope, then turn up the volume of the stereo — not because he loved music but to drown the shots he was about to fire.

  ‘I told him, “Not in my house”.’ Allen grudgingly agreed and took Stanhope next door to shoot him, but left the body in the boot of a car in the street for two days.

  Wendy Peirce later took police to a bush area near Ballan where Stanhope was buried. Detectives found the burnt-out car but could not find the body although they remain convinced they were close.

  Allen was blamed for the deaths of Victor Gouroff and Greg Pasche in 1983, Helga Wagnegg in 1984 and Anton Kenny in 1985.

  ‘Dennis gave Helga Wagnegg pure heroin. They poured buckets of water from the Yarra River down her throat to try to make it look like she drowned.

  ‘Anton did nothing wrong. There was no reason. Dennis didn’t need a reason.

  ‘Victor Gouroff killed Greg Pasche. Dennis killed Gouroff because he didn’t get rid of the body properly.

  ‘Pasche said something out of school and Gouroff stabbed him. He was in the kitchen saying, “Dennis, help me, help me”. Dennis picked up a bayonet and stabbed him in the head. They dragged him into the backyard and wrapped him up. There was no need for any of this. It was madness.’

  After the Walsh Street trial, many police expected Wendy Peirce to eventually be murdered by her husband or one of his criminal associates — but they remained together, when he was out of jail.

  VICTOR Peirce got away with murder — and from the moment he was acquitted of killing two police he was a marked man. When he was released from prison after serving his armed robbery sentence, the crime world had moved on. New security measures meant armed robberies were no longer lucrative. Old stick-up men like Peirce had to either go straight or find a new line of crime.

  An honest living was never an option for Victor. He moved into the stand over business — trading on notoriety — and also into the drug game.

  Peirce, a traditional Australian crook, began to hang out with Italian organized crime figures. The introduction probably came through his links to bent lawyer, Tom Scriva.

  There was trouble at the wholesale fruit and vegetable market, a flashpoint for violence in Melbourne since the 1960s, and Frank Benvenuto employed Peirce as his minder.

  The middle-aged gunnie was quick to make a point when he fired a machine gun in the market to show that he meant business.

  But, unfortunately for him, someone else did as well.

  On 8 May 2000 Peirce’s best friend Frank Benvenuto was murdered by Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin — another gunman who had been employed down at the markets.

  Some suggested Peirce had been offered a contract to betray Benvenuto but, if so, why didn’t he warn his best mate?

  Wendy believes Benvenuto was murdered because he had ordered the killing of another market identity in the 1990s.

  When Benvenuto lay dying, he managed to ring Victor on his mobile phone. ‘He just groaned.’

  A few minutes later, the phone rang again. It was a major crime figure informing Peirce that B
envenuto was dead. How the man knew so quickly has never been explained. ‘There was $64,000 in the boot of Frank’s car and they didn’t even take it,’ she said.

  ‘Benji wanted a meeting with Victor and they met in a Port Melbourne park. He wanted to know if Victor was going to back up for Frank. He was his best mate. Victor took a gun and Benji would have been armed.’

  They agreed there would be no payback. Well, that’s what Victor thought. History shows that Veniaimin went after anyone he suspected could come looking for him.

  ‘Frank kept my family going for six years (While Victor was in jail). Frank was a lovely man.’

  Peirce was not the man he once was. He began to take the pills he was selling and was losing his rat cunning. He took to dressing like a young gangster and believed his reputation made him bullet proof.

  Police were told Peirce accepted a $200,000 contract to kill Jason Moran. The story goes that Peirce was paid $100,000 in advance but then refused to carry out the contract and warned Moran his life was in danger.

  Perhaps tellingly, Jason Moran was a prominent mourner at Peirce’s funeral although the two gunmen were never considered close. Moran could not know that his funeral would be held across town just over a year later.

  Police suspect convicted murderer Mark Anthony Smith also accepted a contract he did not fulfill. But an attempt to kill Smith failed when he was shot in the neck in the driveway of his Keilor home on 28 December 2002. He recovered and fled to Queens-land for several months.

  With all underworld murders, police look to those close to the victim to find a link.

  On the evening of Wednesday 1 May 2002, Peirce was relaxed and chirpy. Forensic tests later indicated his good mood was chemically induced. His autopsy revealed residues of ecstasy, Valium and amphetamines.

  He had played football with his son, Vinnie, and then kissed Wendy and daughter Katie before saying ‘he had to meet a bloke’.

  ‘He told me to go home and put his coffee machine on for his short black,’ Wendy says. ‘The last thing he said to me was, “I love you, Darl”.’