The Gangland War Read Online Free Page A

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 Bush 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.
    Next day, Williams told one of the authors he was not involved.
    NINE days after Kinniburgh’s murder three edgy men met at Crown Casino. They were Carl Williams, Andrew Veniamin and Mick Gatto. It was an open secret that Gatto was on Williams’ death list and this was a last chance to stop the killings.
    â€˜It’s not my war,’ Gatto warned the two upstarts from the western suburbs. His words, later deciphered by a lip reader from security footage, were carefully chosen but the meaning was clear: if anything happened to Gatto or his crew, retribution would be swift. ‘I believe you, you believe me, now we’re even. That’s a warning,’ the big man said.
    For perhaps the first time Williams wavered. Later, he went to see The Lieutenant for a second opinion. Should he trust Gatto and declare a truce?
    The Lieutenant advised him to ask Veniamin because he knew Gatto better. Veniamin had no doubts. ‘Kill him,’ he said, thereby effectively passing his own death sentence.
    Gatto would shoot Veniamin dead in a Carlton restaurant just three months later, on 23 March 2004, and subsequently be acquitted on grounds of self-defence.
    And eight days after Veniamin died, Williams hit back.
    LEWIS Moran was