The Gangland War (6 page)

The furnishings were another matter. A policeman who raided the property described the décor as ‘Franco Cozzo on angel dust'. Long before Tony Mokbel had become the public face of
drug dealing in Victoria, children in the street began to refer to the million-dollar property as ‘the drug house'.

The $1.1 million Brunswick property would be used as bail surety for Tony Mokbel when he was charged with cocaine trafficking in 2002.

The property was listed as being owned by Mokbel's sister-in-law, Renate Lisa Mokbel, but police believe the house was financed through Mokbel's prodigious drug activities.

But Howden, the burnt patsy, would never tell detectives who funded the initial venture — and ‘Tony' would not forget his loyalty. During Howden's sentence, Mokbel would regularly drive to the jail to visit, even persuading prison officers to let him take his friend for an unauthorised trip to a local McDonald's for a break from prison food.

It would not be the only time Mokbel tried to lift the spirits of inmates with fast food.

In June 2004, he visited a friend at the Melbourne Custody Centre who complained about his bland dinner. Mokbel — who had once owned an Italian restaurant — immediately spoke to a guard and peeled off $350 to pay for pizzas and soft drink from La Porchetta in North Melbourne.

The obliging officer popped out to collect 40 large pizzas for all inmates and staff.

It was typical of Mokbel, whose seemingly impetuous generosity was calculated to build long-term loyalty. Police say he would hand over $10,000 on a whim for a friend to have a bet, with a casual, ‘Pay me back if you win'.

One associate said he was known as the ‘softest touch in town'. Any sob-story resulted in Mokbel handing over $5000, but in return he expected total support and the money repaid on demand.

Tony's reliance on fast food rewards for his team backfired when Howden, 36, died of heart disease in December 2001. Mokbel placed a death notice in the
Herald Sun
that read, in part, ‘You will always be in my prayers and I will never ever forget you. I promise to you my friend to be there for your family till the day I die.' It was another Mokbel trademark — never forget a friend or an enemy.

While police had known for years that Mokbel was involved in drug manufacturing, it was the Brunswick lab fire that showed the businessman on the make had become a big underworld player. And it would be another decade before they were able to trace his shadowy financial network and prove he was one of Australia's richest — and nastiest — men.

Of course, by the time Mokbel was finally sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison for cocaine trafficking in early 2006, he had jumped bail and become Australia's most wanted man.

ANTONIOS Sajih Mokbel was one of the sharper students at Coburg's racially diverse Moreland High School in the late 1970s, but he was never going to push on to tertiary study. He had no desire to spend years as a poor undergraduate, although he would later employ university chemistry students in his drug enterprises.

The school was divided into three sub-schools and the teenage Mokbel stayed in the Zeta stream of nearly 100 students until he was old enough to leave.

He might not have immediately embraced the school motto of
Sapere Aude
(‘Dare to be Wise') but outside the classroom the apprentice wise guy was keen to excel.

The Kuwaiti-born boy with rich Lebanese heritage and traditional Australian tastes was always in a hurry to make money. His
first full-time job was as a dishwasher at a suburban nightclub before he became a waiter. Later, he worked in security — a surprising choice for a man not much bigger than a football rover. But Mokbel was smooth. He found he could often persuade people to his point of view without overt violence.

Later, if he decided there was a need for bloodshed, he would employ others. Young and ambitious, he soon realised that to get the sort of money he wanted, he would have to be his own boss. It was in those early years, too, that Mokbel noticed that people who were partying often lost their inhibitions, and were prepared to pay for a good time.

In 1984, aged just nineteen, he bought his first business — a struggling Rosanna milk bar. For two years he and his young partner, Carmel — whom he would marry in 1989 and with her have two children — worked long hours seven days a week battling to make a living before finally selling out for their original investment price.

It would be the one and only time Mokbel didn't seem to make massive profits in his business ventures, despite an early police report saying he ‘lacked financial acumen'.

In 1987, he bought an Italian restaurant in Boronia. In those days he was content to roll the dough — years later he was rolling in it. He steadily built the business, expanding when he bought the shop next door. He sold the restaurant as a going concern in 1994, but kept ownership of the building.

It would remain his long-term strategy — to invest in bricks and mortar, among many other things. It was a sound investment strategy, but it was also a simple way to transform fresh drug money into seemingly solid assets.

In 1996, he bought a bar and restaurant in Swanston Street, Carlton, but sold it a year later to a property developer for a substantial profit.

In 1997, he bought several adjoining properties in Sydney Road, Brunswick, and opened T Jays Restaurant. It was around this time he started being noticed as an ambitious developer with an appetite for consuming businesses. Police should also have been aware of the man on the make. T Jays was opposite Brunswick Police Station.

By 2000, the former struggling milk bar proprietor bragged to friends he owned or controlled 38 different companies. In the same year, he began his most ambitious development — an $18 million, ten-storey ‘winged keel' apartment tower over Sydney Road. The plan was to build 120 apartments and townhouses, offices, restaurants, gym with pool and a four-storey car park on the old Whelan the Wrecker site. No-one seemed to wonder how he could generate that sort of money. Much later, police financial experts would find that he needed at least $2 million from drug money every year to fund the so-called ‘legitimate' arm of his business.

Moreland development services manager Michael Smit was quoted as saying of the Mokbel monolith: ‘It has the potential to be a strong landmark in the sense of buildings like the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe — which the architects have used as inspiration — and change people's perceptions of Sydney Road.'

Perhaps Mr Smit should get out more.

At the same time as Mokbel was planning to turn Sydney Road into a tourist attraction for visiting architects, he was also developing ten units in Templestowe that he intended to sell for $300,000 each. In 2000, he owned the Brunswick market site and claimed to make $500,000 a year in rent money.

His business portfolio was as wide as it was impressive, with interests in shops, cafes, fashions, fragrances, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs and land in regional Victoria. He and his companies owned two white vans, two Commodores, a red Audi, a 2000
silver Mercedes, a Nissan Skyline and a red Ferrari Roadster that he bought in September 1999. He even managed to give his wife a pub in the town of Kilmore as part of the family businesses. Intriguingly, the pub was granted a gaming licence to run lucrative poker machines after the owners passed the highest probity checks — even though Tony Mokbel was a convicted criminal and prolific drug dealer.

One of his fashion houses was appropriately named LSD — ostensibly an abbreviation for Love of Style and Design. It was apparently the drug dealer's idea of a private joke. He also opened a café near his old school — Moreland High. He owned fourteen properties in Brunswick, three in Boronia, two at Kilmore and one each in Coburg, Pascoe Vale and Templestowe.

Just about everyone seemed to know that Tony was a big-time crook — that is, except some of the bankers from the top end of town.

The National Australia Bank loaned Mokbel nearly $6 million, apparently unaware their cashed-up client was a drug dealer. He had nineteen accounts and an A-Grade credit rating with the NAB between 1985 and 2001. Clearly, credit officers were not prepared to ask too many questions of the ‘property developer' with the flash clothes and the big dreams.

Mokbel was the drug dealer from central casting. He bought a top-of-the-range jet ski and was a regular at marquees at the Grand Prix. He once managed to get not one but two personally signed Ferrari caps from champion driver Michael Schumacher. The speed producer loved fast cars, fast horses and life in the fast lane.

He left his wife and in late 2000 began an affair with Danielle McGuire, who ran a Mokbel-owned South Yarra beauty shop. But she was not the only woman in his life — he apparently believed monogamy was a board game for bored people.

He'd been living with McGuire when he was found to have disappeared on 20 March 2006 — days before his cocaine trial was due to finish. Oddly, McGuire was unable to assist police in their enquiries about the whereabouts of her once-constant companion. But in the last days before he flew the coop, the lovebirds were not living in sin. Mokbel's divorce from Carmel had finally come through. His long-suffering ex-wife was either extraordinarily naïve or born with no sense of curiosity. In court documents she swore she had no idea of her husband's prodigious criminal activity during their married life. In other words, Carmel claimed she was a Patsy.

McGuire was no stranger to police investigations — she was the ex-girlfriend of Mark Moran, the drug-dealing standover man murdered on 15 June 2000. She was truly unlucky in love. But with Mokbel she had the million-dollar lifestyle, living in a massive city apartment and dining at the best restaurants.

When Mokbel was arrested, he was living in a Port Melbourne bayside penthouse he rented for $1250 a week. He told friends he planned to buy the property. He would never have the chance. Not that his lifestyle suffered. He moved into the four-bedroom apartment in Southbank with panoramic views of Port Phillip Bay, which was a world away from his previous address — a onebed cell in Port Phillip Prison.

But Tony, the former suburban pizza shop proprietor, never lost his common touch and loved nothing better than to snack on a Capricciosa.

He was a well-known customer and generous tipper at the city's up-market pizzeria — Sopranos, naturally.

Sopranos manager Frank Sarkis was quoted as saying: ‘He came for breakfast, lunch and dinner and his favourite meal was medium-rare eye fillet steak topped with prawns and smoked salmon — about $50.'

When Tony wanted to snack in the privacy of his own home the restaurant would send over platters of pasta and pizza to the penthouse.

‘My staff described it (Mokbel's penthouse) as something so beautiful they had only seen anything like it in movies,' the restaurant man said. ‘And money was no object. He'd regularly spend $200 a night on pizza and pasta. The staff cried (when Mokbel absconded) — he was a big tipper, $100 bills.'

IT was not through drug dealing or shady business dealings that Mokbel first started to develop a questionable public profile, but through one of his other great passions — gambling. In later years, with nearly $20 million of his assets frozen, he took to describing himself as a professional punter, even though he was banned from racetracks and casinos as an undesirable person.

For years, Mokbel was the type of heavyweight punter who used inside information to tip the odds his way. He was the leader of the notorious ‘tracksuit gang' — a group responsible for a series of suspicious late plunges on racetracks in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

His team once won $500,000 and demanded to be paid in green $100 bills, after lodging the bets with the older grey notes, in what was clearly a money-laundering exercise.

Some bookies refused to take credit bets for Mokbel because he was often forgetful on collection day. One claimed he lost more than $1 million from the non-payer.

Bookies soon learned it was best to write off the debts from the dealer with the long pockets and even longer memory.

In 1998, racing officials launched an investigation into the ownership of nine horses linked to Tony and Carmel Mokbel. The following year, the Victoria Racing Club banned them from racing horses.

But racing experts say Mokbel continued to own horses although they were officially under the names of friends and associates. He used the same strategy in ‘legitimate' business, hiding his interests under the names of friends and family.

During the 2001 police investigation into Mokbel, police found the prolific drug dealer had strong links to seven jockeys and trainers. Phone taps picked up his regular conversations with three leading jockeys, but racing authorities were powerless to act, as the phone taps could not be released for a non-criminal investigation.

While under surveillance in the Flemington young members' enclosure on Derby Day 2000, Mokbel was seen to be unusually popular. Some of his ‘friends' that day were household names — television identities and members of the ‘A List' crowd endlessly photographed for the covers of glamour magazines and newspaper social columns. Police said he brazenly handed out small ‘gifts' of cocaine to the partying punters.

Years later, he was still a regular at the races even though he was on $1 million bail for serious drug charges.

In 2004, despite having his assets frozen, Mokbel told friends he had won nearly $400,000 on the Melbourne Cup. He was also seen punting heavily at the Oaks two days later, backing three winners in a row, including the appropriately named Hollow Bullet.

The public display so angered senior police they moved with racing clubs to ban him from the Melbourne casino and Victorian racetracks.

He was also banned from entering licensed premises in the South Yarra and Prahran areas, meaning he could not walk into some nightspots he owned.

SO HOW did Tony Mokbel graduate from dishwasher to unknown amphetamine dealer and then to the Hollywood crime cliché of the millionaire, Ferrari-driving drug baron with the blonde girlfriend and the celebrity lifestyle?