Subscribe

Powered By

Free XML Skins for Blogger

Powered by Blogger

Headline

Contract Killings

Translate

Tuesday 22 January 2008

Tony Mokbel, Lewis Moran

Lewis Moran, father of slain underworld brothers Mark and Jason Moran, was shot dead in a Brunswick pokies club .
The other victim in the shooting at the Brunswick Club, at the corner of Sydney Road and Michael Street, was believed to be Moran's bodyguard.
Moran was pronounced dead at the scene.Lewis Moran was killed and his friend Bertie Wrout wounded when two masked men walked into the bar of the Brunswick Club in Sydney Road, Brunswick, and opened fire.
Moran was a career criminal and drug dealer and a close friend of crime identity Graham Kinniburgh, who was shot dead outside his Kew home on December 13, 2003. Lewis Moran's son Jason and stepson Mark were also victims of the underworld war.
Tony Mokbel went missing in March 2006 when he failed to appear towards the end of his Victorian Supreme Court trial over the importation of 2kg of cocaine.
He was subsequently found guilty of trafficking cocaine and sentenced in absentia to a minimum of nine years' jail.



He was also charged over the murder of underworld figure Lewis Moran in the front bar of Melbourne's Brunswick Club in March 2004.Lewis Moran, father of slain underworld brothers Mark and Jason Moran, was shot dead in a Brunswick pokies club .
The other victim in the shooting at the Brunswick Club, at the corner of Sydney Road and Michael Street, was believed to be Moran's bodyguard.
Moran was pronounced dead at the scene.
His death follows that of Andrew "Benji" Veniamin, the alleged right hand man of accused drug baron Carl Williams, who was shot dead in a restaurant in Carlton.
Mokbel tried to trick police in Australia into thinking he was dead in the hope they would stop looking for him.
His ruse was plausible enough to convince police to do a preliminary search of the Tatura cemetery in northern Victoria.
Plans were well advanced for Australian Federal Police to hire expensive sonar equipment to scan every grave in Tatura for Mokbel's body.
If that hunt was unsuccessful, the graves in other cemeteries would probably have been searched.
The planned sonar search was scrapped when police discovered Mokbel was alive and well and living in Greece.
AFP agents were told the Calabrian mafia murdered Mokbel the night he disappeared and buried his body in an existing grave.
Information provided to the AFP suggested Mokbel's body was in either the Tatura, Swan Hill or Stawell cemetery.
Evidence suggests Mokbel himself was behind the elaborate disinformation campaign.
The AFP suspected from the beginning that the "Mokbel is dead" theory was a disruption tactic by Mokbel or his associates because it would be to Mokbel's advantage for people to think he had been murdered.
But AFP could not ignore the information just in case it was correct.
Valuable AFP time was wasted in the initial search of the Tatura general cemetery and nearby Tatura War Cemetery, which contains the graves of 250 German servicemen and civilian internees who died in Australia during World Wars I and II.
The AFP was told the Italian secret society murdered Mokbel in revenge for the death of mafia money launderer Mario Condello.
It had been alleged that Mokbel ordered the murder of Condello, 53, who was shot dead on February 6, 2006, as he was parking in the garage of his Brighton East home.
The AFP was told a senior Calabrian mafia identity had been bragging to associates that Mokbel's body would never be found.
He claimed that Mokbel was murdered to send a message to Melbourne's underworld that crossing the mafia would have deadly consequences.
He claimed Mokbel was disposed of in the same way as Rocco Iaria was in 1991.
The AFP was told the Calabrian mafia was involved in hiding Iaria's body in somebody else's grave at Pine Lodge cemetery near Shepparton.
Iaria, 20, disappeared in 1991 while on bail awaiting trial over a $700,000 safe robbery that was allegedly organised by the Calabrian mafia.
Police believe Iaria was murdered to stop him implicating others in the Bendigo robbery.
A gravedigger found Iaria's body in 1998 when he opened the grave of an elderly woman to bury her husband in the family plot.
An autopsy revealed Iaria was shot three times in the upper body.
His hands were taped behind his back and his body covered in lime and wrapped in plastic.
The Australian Government had had a comprehensive dossier on Mokbel prepared for months to present to the Government of whichever country Mokbel was caught in.
It points out Mokbel is a convicted drug dealer and includes compelling evidence he is also a major organised crime figure and multiple murder suspect.
Details of the offences for which Mokbel is wanted in Australia – including murder and serious drug charges – are included in the dossier.
Despite an Interpol red alert, Australia's most wanted man did not lie low in the 15 months since he disappeared.
With only an ill-fitting wig and facial hair, Mokbel ate out and regularly wandered about the exclusive seaside Athens suburb he was calling home.
In an interview, Mokbel would not elaborate on the countries he had been hiding in but he did say he had flitted from place to place -- including the Philippines and Dubai -- and that Greece was the first country in which he had spent a substantial amount of time.
He was renting a luxury apartment which cost him over 2000 Euros a month.
The apartment is located in Hellenikon, a leafy Athens suburb next to Glyfada.
His girlfriend, Danielle McGuire had been living with him in the hideaway.
It is understood their home backed on to a Greek Supreme Court judge's estate.
Inquiries at a local real estate agent revealed the couple were looking to move house.
While police did not know how long he and McGuire had been living in Greece, they believe it was for months.
The couple had a child, a daughter born in Greece, in early 2007 and named Renate, after Tony's sister-in-law.
Despite the Interpol web-site suggesting McGuire would seek work as a hairdresser, Mokbel later told police she hadn't held a job there.
"She came here pregnant," a policeman close to the case said.
Australian police saw this as evidence that the family, including Ms Maguire's daughter Brittany, 11, who Mokbel had organised a private school education for, planned to settle quietly in Athens.
The day Ms McGuire left Australia, she was watched by the eyes of only a few detectives as, under the pretence of a holiday, she and Brittany flew to France in mid-2006 for a visit to EuroDisney.
Their next stop was Rome, where thanks to some slick work by former store detective McGuire, they shook off the police on their tails.
Where they spent the intervening months before her reunion with Mokbel and a new life in Greece remain unknown.
The home the family chose has strong echoes of Melbourne.
He wore a moustache and his now famous wig.
Police believe Mokbel bought it from an Italian wig website.
He spoke English — staff thought he was American — he always paid cash and often tipped 10 to 20 euros on a 60 euro bill. He smoked cigars.
Greek authorities said Mokbel offered a $1.6 million bribe to escape.
police source later confirmed he had twice tried indirectly to bribe local police before he realised they knew his identity.
"He left it to be understood how much money we wanted to let him go," the source said
Theodoros Angelakis, 64, the Greek man Mokbel was with, owns a company for buying and selling yachts — existing only on paper and registered three months before — which Mokbel was funding.
With silver hair and pockmarked skin, Angelakis, said he had lived in Australia but "wasn't fond of the place", he gave Tony Mokbel the Volkswagen four-wheel-drive, took him to smart restaurants and planned to go into business with him.

No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...