THE sprawling new £850,000 suburban home of Melbourne crime figure Mick Gatto bears more than a passing resemblance to the home of American television’s favourite neurotic gangster, Tony Soprano.
The similarities became even more vivid on Tuesday morning when the former heavyweight boxer and “construction consultant” emerged in dressing gown and slippers to hurl eggs at television crews camped on the footpath.
Gatto had reason to be agitated. The previous night his alleged lieutenant, Mario Condello, had been gunned down in the driveway of his home on the other side of Melbourne, joining a long list of Gatto associates who have departed this earth prematurely during the city’s eight-year gangland war.
The killings — nearly 30 so far — have ripped apart the city’s criminal underclass, fuelled rumours of police corruption and unleashed a media circus of lurid proportions.
Over the past three years, so many Melbourne crooks have published their memoirs, spilled their stories on national television or ushered journalists into their homes and private clubs that the gangland wars have come to resemble a surreal, long-running reality television series — albeit one in which the cast is being slowly whittled away by unnatural causes.
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It is a show populated by indelible characters, from the one-eyed, seventysomething crime matriarch Kath Pettingill to the 26-year-old sex-bomb defence lawyer, Zarah Garde-Wilson, who has announced her intention to bear a child using the frozen sperm of her dead gangster boyfriend.
It takes an effort to remember that this is a genuinely bloody conflict with real victims. At Condello’s house on Monday night his hysterical wife cradled his body as his 17-year-old son ran for his life after jumping from a first-floor window.
Despite its conservative reputation and puritanical history, Melbourne has always harboured a hardcore criminal fraternity centred in the tough working-class areas that hug the city centre — the stomping ground of violent heavies such as Squizzy Taylor in the 1920s and the wharf-workers of the Painters and Dockers Union in the 1960s, whose bloody internal power struggles resulted in more than 40 murders.
More recently the baton was passed to hard men like Mark “Chopper” Read, the famously unhinged thug who once backed up his demand to be transferred from prison to hospital by getting a fellow-inmate to slash his ears off.
The heavily-tattooed Chopper is now a bestselling author whose gangster tales run to 11 volumes, proof positive that a nation founded by convicts never quite loses its romanticised fascination with criminals. Chopper, a sought-after commentator on the current gangster wars, even tours Australia’s pubs as part of a cabaret act with a former corrupt detective, Roger Rogerson. Other Melbourne crooks who have followed his lead as memoirists include Kath “Granny Evil” Pettingill and former docker Billy “The Texan” Longley.
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The publicity afforded these celebrity criminals seems to have spurred the current generation of gangsters to discard their traditional reticence. Since the gangster wars erupted in 1998 with the shooting of reputed drug-dealer Alphonse Gangitano in his home, most of Melbourne’s leading criminals have shared their reflections on the mayhem. Even Mick Gatto succumbed in late 2003 when he allowed a reporter to spend five hours with him in a café while he greeted a series of swarthy confrères sporting sunglasses and pinky-rings.
What has emerged is a tale of toxic underworld rivalries and betrayals fuelled in large part by the lucrative trade in Ecstasy and speed.
Gatto, who ostensibly runs a building industry mediation company, is reputedly the most senior figure in a network of Italian-Australian criminals centred around the inner-city district of Carlton, their principal allies being old-fashioned Australian crooks from the nearby working-class suburbs of Essendon and Richmond.
Since June 2000 this group has been the victim of a series of hits that claimed the lives of Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh, Lewis Moran, his sons, Jason and Mark, and several others. Jason Moran was in a car with several children watching football when he was shot to death.
Chief suspects in the killings are a new guard of western-suburbs criminals led by Carl Williams, a podgy 35-year-old.
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William and his wife, Roberta, are possibly the most media-friendly criminals in Australian history, having allowed select journalists unfettered access to prove that they are — in Roberta’s words — just an “everyday suburban family” despite the framed stills from The Godfather and Scarface that decorate their lounge walls. Williams has claimed that he is being set up by police for murders he has nothing to do with, and more than a few underworld figures mutter darkly that the gangland murders have conveniently rid Melbourne of many senior criminals whose knowledge of police corruption was buried with them.
Police flatly refute such rumours, and point out that they have made many arrests since 2004.
Certainly the murders halted nearly 18 months ago, after Gatto was charged with killing one of Williams’s associates, Benji Veniamen, and Williams himself was charged with importing drugs.
Perhaps sensing that things had spun out of control, Gatto’s friend Condello used an interview to call for peace. “For the first time,” said the Shakespeare-loving former lawyer, “I’ve heard the birds singing in the trees.”
Unfortunately the birdsong was cut short. Gatto was ultimately acquitted of murder after claiming self-defence, but Williams went to jail and is facing several murder charges. Condello, meanwhile, was about to stand trial on his own conspiracy to murder charge when he was shot in his driveway on Monday night, reigniting a war that the police had predicted was over.
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The main debate now centres on Gatto’s odds of making it through to the end of the year.
SUCH NICE NEIGHBOURS . . .