by Graham Guy
Bourke got up to grab his gun and vest.
“Forget it son. He’s already invisible. I’ve just been around to his joint.”
Chapter 3
Franco, Luigi and Enrico were the three sons of Giuseppe and Rosetta Mogliotti. With their parents they toiled day and night, along with their three sisters to scrape a living growing vegetables from a minuscule landholding on the western outskirts of Sydney.
From an early age the three boys decided that they hated market gardening; there had to be a better way. For their parents, this was ‘the better way’. For their sisters, the better way was to grow up, get married and move away. Which they did. Not more than an hour’s drive, but nonetheless away from chipped and broken fingernails and washing the dirt from freshly pulled carrots at midnight.
Only two years separated each of Franco, Luigi and Enrico.
As brothers went, they were particularly close. They loved their mother, were loving and protective of their sisters and condoned their father. None of them could wait to grow up.
School was a waste of time. They spent their teenage years absconding as often as they could and concocting ‘get-rich-quick schemes’ which would see them into big houses, flash cars and trips to the Riviera. Not one of the three was a scholar. Their interests lay in motor cars. The bigger the engines, the lower the suspensions and the wider the wheels, the more they liked them. And if they could watch their mates get a zero to 100 kilometres per hour on the backstreets of Blacktown in six or seven seconds, then all the better.
As each one left school, he gained employment as an apprentice panel beater in a Blacktown crash-repair business.
During this period their education increased ten-fold. At first they watched in dismay as the owner of the business brought in the wreckage of two vehicles. Two cars of the same make. One would be written off from the front, the other from the rear. And they knew the vehicles had been purchased for only a few hundred dollars from insurance companies.
Immediately, the vehicles were set upon by workers with oxyacetylene torches. Within two weeks, one good car had been created from the wrecks and, after it had passed through the paint shop, only a keen eye could spot the compilation.
The next thing they’d see the vehicle take pride of place on the used-car lot next door. And it sold for thousands of dollars to some poor unsuspecting sod who believed the bit about it only being driven to church on Sundays by a little old lady. It took them a while to learn that the car yard next door was also owned by the man who owned the crash repair business.
Another of their boss’s good money-spinners, they discovered, was vehicle sabotage. But he chose his victims carefully.
Invariably they would be young or elderly women who drove the latest models. The vehicle would be dropped off for a spot of panel beating, but when that person came to pick it up, unbeknown to her, parts like the exhaust system, battery, alternator, radiator, hoses, belts (and, in some cases, even the tyres) had been replaced with cheaper or used, generic alternatives.
Franco, Luigi and Enrico used to gawk at the boss’s bright-red Ferrari. Often they’d discuss amongst themselves how the owner of a relatively small business could afford such a fine piece of machinery. As obvious as the answer was, the answer to the question of why he kept it hidden from public view was now just as obvious.
After a while, Franco, Luigi and Enrico began to get restless. Apprentice wages weren’t high, so they decided what was good enough for the boss was good for enough for them. Pooling their resources, they leased an old shed at the back of a neighbour’s market-garden and bought their first two wrecks. After working all day at the crash-repair shop, they continued to toil into the early hours of the morning making one good car from the remains of two. Within a short space of time they saw their first completed vehicle driven away. They’d managed to turn $700 into $7000 in just six weeks.
Over the next five years, one shed grew to two much bigger sheds. The turn-around time was down to four weeks and the $7000 had grown into amounts of up to $16,000. They stayed clear of the stolen-parts racket, seemingly happy to go with the fast money from wrecked vehicles.
By the time Franco, Luigi and Enrico had turned twenty-four, twenty-two and twenty respectively, the fast buck had encompassed their lives. All three had matching Monaros, and when one went out on a date the other two would tag along. Sometimes it would be six for dinner and a show, other times four or five.
But it was the seedy side of town which attracted them most. The petty crime. The loose, foul-mouthed women. The booze, the deals. As greed became an increasing factor in their lives, they began to search for bigger fish to fry. All three gave up their jobs and concentrated entirely on creating one good car from two wrecks. Turnaround time came back to two weeks and dollar amounts moved up into the $20,000 category.
In line with their parents’ wishes, all three boys, like their sisters, went on to marry within their ethnic nationality. But it was the weddings of the three sons which had their mother gravely concerned. At various times she would ask each of them, “What are you doing with your life?” The only reply she ever received was, “Mamma, you worry too much. I make a good living.”
At each wedding, Rosetta Mogliotti noticed a group of young men and women who were not part of the family circle.
“Franco, who are these people?” she’d ask.
“Friends, Mamma, just friends.”
But Rosetta knew differently. She knew that the area in which she lived had a grimy underbelly. Her instincts told her these people were part of it.
“Oh Mother of God, what are my boys doing?” she’d pray.
She would try to raise the subject with Giuseppe, but he chose only to turn a blind eye.
“Let them be, Mamma. They have been taught right from wrong.”
All three marriages went smoothly enough, although for three nights a week, none of the women knew their husbands were drinking and womanising at the Lay Lady Lay nightclub in King’s Cross. They just accepted the fact that brothers were brothers and liked to spend time together. Apart from birthdays and family celebrations, the brothers’ wives had little or no contact with their husbands’ sisters.
But in the murky little world in which Franco, Luigi and Enrico now moved, things were beginning to get tougher. The government and insurance companies were clamping down on backyard car dealers, spare parts rorts, and turning out a clean vehicle from two wrecks. Legislation was introduced to prevent insurance companies selling off wrecked vehicles willy-nilly, and buyers had to have rock-solid reasons for buying them. At times, the three would sit idle in their sheds due to the lack of product.
“Diversify,” Franco told his brothers. “We need to diversify.”
“Like what?”
“It’s obvious the government has screwed our business. Maybe we should look at doing a couple of hits. We all need money and what we’ve got isn’t gonna last forever.”
Luigi became alarmed at such a suggestion. Enrico jumped at the chance.
“You mean we knock some bastard off?” he said.
“Do that and we’ll all end up in jail,” Luigi said.
“No, no, listen to me,” Franco went on. “Just think about who lives and does business around here. Lots of people with lots of money. But we stay away from the Italians, OK. We just go for the locals. Blokes we know who are as shaky as a shithouse rat.”
Franco insisted that under no circumstance were guns to be used, and that they rely entirely upon the three-P policy: Preparation, Patience and Professionalism. Nothing would be rushed. When a target was settled on, be it a private home or a business, certain criteria needed to be adhered to.
“OK, we do safe jobs and only safe jobs. When we decide on where to hit, first we cut the power off a week beforehand then sit near the place and watch what happens. That will tell us if there’s a back-up or silent alarms. If there’s no back-up, we go ahead. But not before a week has passed. That should allay any suspicions about the el
ectricity dropping out. Luigi, it will be your job to know at all times where the victim is. If he leaves and starts heading for home and we’re still in there, get on the bloody phone. We wear very large, very heavily padded oversized jackets and balaclavas. If we do get seen, the descriptions will be for blokes a hell of a lot bigger than us.
“We go for lone targets. Rich blokes with not a lot of ties. That means there won’t be a lot of congestion in their lives and we won’t have to worry about a whole lot of people.”
* * *
One day at work, a couple of months earlier, Enrico had noticed Fritz, the German, improvise in a way he’d never seen before. It was late on a Friday afternoon when Fritz, half-way through a job, ran out of acetylene. It was too late in the day to order more in, and the job had to be completed. Enrico watched, totally enthralled, as Fritz grabbed a small length of half-inch pipe, quickly threaded one end and attached a connection to a oxygen bottle. He then filled the small length of pipe with welding rods, turned on the oxygen and lit the other end. After adjusting the oxygen bottle’s valve to bring the flame to a manageable level, Fritz applied his newly-constructed blowtorch to the steel he’d been working on. Enrico’s eyes nearly popped as he saw the ease with which the pure flame of oxygen mixed with welding rods cut through such a hardened metal.
“Where the hell did you learn how to do that?” he asked.
Fritz grinned. “Bloody good trick, eh? My father told me a long time ago, yes. Apparently in the war, some fellas were stuck on the Russian front in a tank that needed repairs to a track. They couldn’t get a pin out of somewhere, so this bloke suddenly appears on the scene with his magic stick. Jesus Christ! Magic bloody stick all right! My father. He piss himself laughing when he tell me. After a couple of minutes, this bloody pin… it just melt away. My father, he say he never forget. And he tell me.”
“You reckon it might work with a longer rod, more gas and more welding rods?” Enrico urged, his mind racing.
“Maybe! Maybe bloody not, too! You should be ask my father, but he bloody dead now. You probably blow your bloody self up. Whoooosh! Nothing left, eh! This pure bloody oxygen, mate.”
Enrico went back to what he had been working on, shaking his head in disbelief. But the idea stuck.
And the more he thought about it the more he wanted to try it out for himself. For several days he found excuses to remain behind after his brothers had left to go home.
Enrico equipped himself with several lengths of pipe of varying diameters and began to experiment. After working out the perfect com-bination to extract maximum heat, he smiled contentedly to himself and put the matter to rest in the back of his mind.
Now, when Franco said, “Let’s diversify,” Enrico grabbed his opportunity.
Franco noticed an excited urgency overtake Enrico. “The three P’s little brother… settle down.”
Enrico couldn’t contain himself any longer. “Let me show you something,” he offered.
The two elder brothers watched Enrico walk to the rear of the shed and draw the covers from a strange piece of apparatus.
They looked at each other and shrugged. Moments later, after Enrico wheeled a large, very thick, and very heavy piece of steel into an open area, they watched him assemble a strange-looking object. His brothers were about to interrupt with a whole barrage of questions when Enrico raised his hand. “Just watch,” he told them.
Within moments a hole appeared through the centre of the massive piece of heavy-gauge steel.
“Seeing is believing isn’t it?” he smiled.
“What the fuck is that?” Franco gushed.
“Should make pretty quick work of any bloody safe, eh?”
Franco and Luigi stood in stunned amazement.
“Where the hell did you pick up on that?”
“Fritz used a smaller version on a job at work one day. He called it a magic stick, so I got him to tell me about it. Beats the shit out of having to carry oxyacetylene doesn’t it? The pipe is about four metres long and I reckon it works best with a diameter of one-and-a-half centimetres. Very portable and very bloody effective. I reckon this little bastard will cut through any-thing. When do we start?”
Over the next two years, the brothers pulled off five safe breakings. Their targets were always people they knew who were dishonest, and in the case of three of the robberies, no reports were made to police.
Gradually the heat began to lift on the sale of insurance write-offs, and the three brothers were able to return to some degree of normality. The money wasn’t like it was previously but, nonetheless, each was provided for handsomely. Even so, the taste of easy money, and the high provided when a hit was on, made them yearn for more. They would speak about it amongst themselves and be consoled by the fact that they’d done five safe breakings and got away totally undetected. But the itch was now going three ways and getting harder and harder to scratch. Their hearts were no longer in turning two wrecked cars into one good one. And each knew the other had only one thing on his mind. Finally it was Franco, the unelected leader of the trio, who conceded.
“OK, we go again.”
It was a decision met with broad grins and a loud “Yeeeesss!” by his brothers.
The next two years the brothers only pulled two jobs. But they were big jobs. With big rewards. Police were at their wits’ end in tracking down who was responsible. Shakedowns on known offenders were increasing. Hardened detectives were coming down hard on their snitches, but nowhere was there a leak. The brothers adhered rigidly to the three Ps, but most of all, there were no big spend-ups. They would still turn out enough cars from wrecks to allay any questions about supplementary incomes. For the three brothers Mogliotti, life was good.
“Be nice though to get one really big bastard wouldn’t it?” Franco would surmise to his brothers. “Just one really big one. You know, maybe a couple of mill and we could piss off all this shit and go away and sit under a bloody tree.”
* * *
During these years, the brothers adhered to a thrice weekly ritual of visiting their favourite Sydney night club, deep in the heart of the King’s Cross no-go zone, where they enjoyed the company of the locals—transvestites, lesbians, homosexuals, drug dealers, drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves, paedophiles, small-time crooks, conmen, and a general mishmash of society’s misfits and drop-outs.
Each had their women at Lay Lady Lay. Women who knew better than to ask questions, knew when to smile and when to disappear. Their reward was money and lots of it. Their duties were purely sexual. And whenever their lovers demanded it. Failure to ‘come across’ would ensure a beating. In the case of Enrico, a particularly brutal beating.
One such woman who dared to refuse Enrico and talk to another man suffered miserably. Enrico followed her home and beat her so severely she became a brain-damaged vegetable. No witnesses. No evidence. Even his brothers never knew. When they asked whatever happened to her, he would shrug his reply and change the subject. But word spread amongst the women that Enrico was the likely assailant, and whilst they were ‘nice’ to him, many kept their distance.
Franco’s woman, a fiery, thirty-year-old Sicilian redhead called Gina was as protective of her man as he was of her. Any woman new to the club who flashed an eye towards Franco was given the ‘treatment’. Years earlier, Gina had seen it carried out in her home country on a young woman who dared to be unfaithful to her lover. Her lover’s friends grabbed her and sewed the lips of her vagina together with fishing line then smothered their handiwork with super glue. Apart from the humiliation and agony suffered at the time, the victim invariably required several days in hospital and several weeks at home for recuperation. Gina had seen two women off from Lay Lady Lay in this way.
Such brutality turned Franco on, and very rough sex between the two would follow. After the first few times with Gina, Franco came to the full realisation of why men took lovers.
Imagine doing this sort of shit with your wife?
Yet unbeknown to Franco, G
ina also liked to play on the other side of the tracks. He didn’t know that by day she held a highly respectable job as a consultant in a travel agency in Sydney’s central business district. It was only when the sun went down did her dark side emerge… and only on the three days a week she met with him. The other sides to her social life were trade fairs, functions, cocktail parties and travel nights.
It was at a travel agency’s cocktail party she was to catch the eye of the guest speaker for the evening, Federal Government Minister Sebastian McAlister.
McAlister, a Presbyterian lay preacher and married man with three young daughters, was highly-credentialed in government circles. The ear of the Prime Minister, a top-gun whenever a peacemaker was needed between warring parties, he was also a hard-nosed negotiator between the factions. He was also a wonderfully gifted public speaker, a snappy dresser, and a man who people felt they could warm to.
As he spoke from the rostrum to the cocktail party guests, his gaze fixed momentarily on Gina’s. It was a powerplant of electricity and each of them knew it. Gina turned away quickly, but just as quickly glanced back. Sebastian McAlister faltered in his delivery, but ever so slightly. No-one picked it up. Except Gina. She felt her stomach knot, her throat go dry. She reached for another glass of champagne from a passing waiter.
At the end of his speech, the applause was polite, but enthusiastic, and many gathered by his side to speak with him as he stepped down. She was standing with her profile to him on the other side of the room, sensing him slowly working his way towards her, paying lip-service to those who followed. But as he approached she moved away.
He turned discreetly to his minder and whispered in his ear. The minder then inconspicuously made his way to the back of the room toward her. On hearing the message from the minder, again Gina’s and Sebastian’s eyes met. She gave the faintest of smiles. She reached into her handbag and scribbled a phone number on a business card.
“Tell him to call me in two hours,” she said, and was gone.
