Lives of Crime

298 Pages·2008·1.25 MB·English

by  I Munro, G Tippet

CONTENTS
Cover
THE DEAD DUCK LIVES
’TIL DEATH US DO PART
CRIME IS HIS MISTRESS
LOST IN THE FACE OF EVIL
THE POLICE KILLERS
CHASIN’ – STORIES FROM THE HEROIN PLAGUE
THE HOUSE OF HORRORS
POLICE STORY
PRIME SUSPECT
ORDINARY MONSTER
‘I AM A SERIAL KILLER. I HAVE GOT A PROBLEM’
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
CHASIN’ – STORIES FROM THE HEROIN PLAGUE
SO MANY BECAUSES
THE BABYSITTER
THE WAR WITHIN
WHEN THE JOB IS MURDER
FALL FROM GRACE
THE BIG STEAL
THE LONGEST REACH
LAW OF THE LAND
CHASIN’ – STORIES FROM THE HEROIN PLAGUE
JUST ANOTHER NIGHT IN THE ’BURBS
DARK PLACES
THE BATSMAN AND THE BOUNCER
WHAT’S A NICE GIRL: LIKE YOU …?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE DEAD DUCK LIVES
ut of nowhere, he produced the gun. There was the conversation.
OThen, there was the gun.
From somewhere inside that tight T-shirt, or those three-quarter track
pants, came the gun. A six-shot revolver, like the ones kids use to play
cowboys.
A. 38 calibre. Not an ugly little snub nose. Not a cannonlike Magnum.
But full of lethal menace all the same.
The big man made a lunge for the gun at the end of the tattooed arm
and the world exploded.
It was the loudest noise he had ever heard, and something burned the
air alongside his left ear.
Dominic Gatto was still grabbing for the gun, wrapping both his paws
around the little man’s gun hand.
‘I had hold of his hand with both my hands and just pushed it towards
him,’ Gatto said later. ‘I have got to be honest; I thought I was a dead
duck.’
As he forced the revolver back against the little man, Gatto felt himself
toppling forward. He was trying to hold the little man’s trigger finger in
place, trying to force it to squeeze out another shot.
He did not fall, but pressed the gun towards the little man and the
world exploded once more. And again, and again and again, showering
the pair of them with burned cordite.
Andrew Veniamin, alleged hitman and all-round Melbourne western
suburbs bad boy, lay on his back, a lake of blood forming behind his
head and soaking his shirt.
A scorch mark on his chest told of the closeness of one shot that either
sheared his carotid artery, or severed his spinal cord, its ultimate path
unclear.
Despite the severed carotid, there was not much blood spray on the
walls, just the growing spill behind his prone body. A third bullet had
entered his head above the right ear, bounced off the interior of his skull
and drilled through his brain. But all that became known later.
Gatto eased the gun from Veniamin’s grip and walked out of the
passageway, through the kitchen towards the restaurant area of La
Porcella, an unremarkable faux Italian restaurant in inner-city Carlton,
which he treated as his office.
He had the revolver, a Smith & Wesson, in his right hand. With his
free hand, he tested his left ear.
He told his mates that Veniamin had said he had killed his close friend
and gangster Graham Kinniburgh three months earlier, and now he had
tried to kill Gatto too.
‘Can you believe it? He killed Graham and he told me he was going to
kill me,’ someone remembered Gatto saying, before asking if his ear was
bleeding.
Gatto slipped a little Sterling. 25 calibre pistol, his own gun bought
from the now-deceased drug king pin Lewis Moran, out of his right
trouser pocket and palmed it to a friend, telling him to look after it. (Pity
that Lewis sold it. There was a night in March 2004 when two gunmen
came charging through the front doors of the Brunswick Club on busy
Sydney Road – Lewis’ preferred drinking hole – that he could have used
some hardware of any calibre at all.)
Anyway, there would be no mention of this little gun for nine months,
until it became clear that Gatto’s story of self-defence was not believed,
and that he would be tried for murder.
There were two Dominic Gattos who appeared during the Supreme
Court trial for the killing of Andrew Veniamin in May 2005, 14 months
after Veniamin died.
To begin there was the tall and trim Gatto, capped with a helmet of
greying hair, and eased into a well-cut business suit. When the jury was
absent, this Gatto conducted audiences with the retinue of family and
associates that arranged themselves behind him each day.
His wife, his brother John and his wife, sometimes his children –
young adults – were there, while above, in the public gallery were the
usual court watchers and non-family Gatto supporters. These included
building industry workers in their union windcheaters and non-industry
types in dark shirts and gold jewellery.
Once the talking was done Gatto would turn back to the court, draw
himself to his full height, fill his chest and run his thumbs around his
belt line to prepare for the next court session.
And sometimes, when the jury was present, this Gatto could not
suppress himself. So when the prosecutor held aloft the six-shot revolver
that killed Veniamin, and assured the jurors not to be afraid, the gun had
been rendered harmless, this Gatto smirked and lowered his head too
late to hide his amusement. And as the prosecutor related the story of
how Veniamin was shot, this Gatto turned to smile encouragingly at his
family. Despite 14 months in custody, he had the air of a man at ease,
and enjoying himself.
This Gatto speaks in aphorisms, such as ‘you don’t know what’s in a
man’s heart’. Interviewed at the restaurant two months before the
shooting, he said this to police while referring to Veniamin.
The cops were investigating three underworld shootings, including the
murder of Gatto’s best friend, Graham Kinniburgh, known as ‘The
Munster’ for his resemblance to the 1960s American TV character
Herman Munster.
Kinniburgh was gunned down outside his home in the comfortable,
leafy suburb of Kew soon after midnight on 13 December 2003. It looked
like a professional hit, although The Munster managed to fire a shot
before his attacker finished him off.
Another expression this Gatto relied on was ‘you never get into trouble
minding your own business’. This was to explain why he lied to police,
telling them he knew and had heard nothing about who was responsible
for the murders of Kinniburgh and two others.
Another was ‘keep your friends close, and your enemies closer’.
If this last saying sounds familiar it may be because it was previously
delivered by Al Pacino in his Godfather Part II role as Michael Corleone,
a character ruthless with enemies. Yet when Gatto said those same
words, it sounded as if he had made the expression his own. He was
trying to justify having stayed in contact with Veniamin long after he
had ceased to trust him.
In the witness box Gatto was charismatic and persuasive, but also
aggressive when crossed and revealing of a lifestyle where carrying a
gun is as routine as donning a business suit.
The other Dominic Gatto was in the court only briefly, captured on a
security videotape at Crown Casino. This Gatto appeared drinking and
talking at a bar, a bear of a man, dressed in a vast short-sleeved shirt
that shrouded him like a curtain.
This Gatto, 30 kilograms heavier than the man who faced the jury,
was the one that confronted the diminutive 168-centimetre Veniamin at
the moment of his death.
This Gatto was captured on camera during their casino ‘peace
conference’, called days after Kinniburgh’s murder. Veniamin had to
stretch to put his heavily tattooed arm around Gatto, and to offer him
the obligatory kiss of greeting and farewell.
This Gatto made another appearance, on another videotape. During
this second recording, at the homicide squad’s office, he is seen
distractedly inspecting his fingernails during police questioning while a
few kilometres away, in a passageway at the rear of Carlton’s La Porcella
restaurant, investigators picked their way around Veniamin’s still-
cooling body.
They had been friends, Gatto and Veniamin. And Gatto’s mates were
friendly with him, too. Steve Kaya had known the dead man most of his
life. Faruk Orman said he had retreated from his friendship with
Veniamin in the 18 months before his death because he was crazier and
even more out of control than when Orman was close to him:
‘Like, he was always unpredictable, you know, but he just got a lot
worse.’
Orman and Kaya, who knew Veniamin from his days growing up
around Sunshine in Melbourne’s western suburbs, and the late Ron
Bongetti – like Kinniburgh, a father figure to Gatto – were there the day
Gatto shot Veniamin dead.
While there were two Gattos, there really was only one Andrew
Veniamin.
According to prosecutor Geoff Horgan, SC, the 28-year-old from
Sunshine was ‘not a particularly nice man’.
While the defence agreed, they offered a more graphic description of a
murderous, psychopathic thug. This was despite Kaya describing
Veniamin as a friend and a nice type of lad. He had known Veniamin
through Veniamin’s parents who, as with Kaya himself, originated from
Cyprus.
Kaya, like Veniamin, is a mere 168 centimetres tall, but lightly framed
where Veniamin had the sort of muscularity that can only be found in a
gym. And unlike Veniamin, Kaya, who identifies as a company director,
dresses formally in dark blue pinstripes.
Kaya related how he had to talk Veniamin out of a shooting rampage
at the St Kilda Road police complex after a police raid on his mother’s
house turned up one of his revolvers which police seized.
And it was Kaya who negotiated a payment to Veniamin so that he
would abandon his bid to kill a man who beat up his brother in a
Melbourne nightclub. The man bought his life with $20,000.
Kaya knew plenty about Veniamin. Everyone in Sunshine knew
something. Sure, murder was one of his first resorts, and Veniamin liked.
38 calibre revolvers because they don’t jam.
Police believe that even before Faruk Orman decided he was too crazy
to be around, Veniamin had murdered a prominent Mafia figure Frank
Benvenuto at his Beaumaris home in May 2000, and drug dealer Dino
Dibra outside his West Sunshine home five months later. Two other
killings, of his former friend Paul Kallipolitis, whose body was found in
his West Sunshine home in October 2002, and Nik Radev – a drug dealer
and standover thug, killed in Coburg on 15 April 2003 – came in what
Orman assessed as Veniamin’s crazy time: the last 18 months of his life.
Senior Constable Boris Buick, an investigator for the Purana Taskforce
– an operation set up to investigate Melbourne’s gangland killings –
identified three stages in Veniamin’s criminal life: ‘Phase one he was
part of the Sunshine crew, where he and others, Paul Kallipolitis, Dino
Dibra, were running amok, out of control. In these Sunshine days
Veniamin, with Dibra, were raiding “crop houses”, used for growing
hydroponic crops of marijuana and committing frequent acts of
violence.’
Veniamin graduated to hanging around Gatto’s group briefly, but soon
found more action further north of Melbourne with amphetamines
dealer Carl Williams.
‘Then there was the phase where he moved into the Gatto group …
and away from the Sunshine group,’ said Senior Constable Buick. ‘And it
was during this phase that he came to the interest of the Purana
Taskforce. And as the Purana Taskforce began to look at him it became
obvious to us that he was moving, or had moved into the Williams camp,
and out of the Gatto camp. And it was at this time that we began to
target him fervently.’
Veniamin looked fit and toned, but was not as healthy as his
appearance suggested. He was often in pain, and had recently been
hospitalised after repeated bouts of pancreatitis. He had a brother,
Stephen, who had done time in prison, but it was Andrew police
identified as ‘a shooter’. Police intelligence reports suggested Andrew
Veniamin had an undefined psychiatric illness and was inclined to snap
into violence, particularly in the company of peers and associates.
The defence compounded this impression when it produced as a
witness Pasquale Zaffina, whose misfortune had been to lose a girlfriend
to Veniamin.
They had arranged a meeting in a park to settle the matter with their
fists, or so Zaffina thought. But Veniamin, dressed in a T-shirt and track
pants similar to those in which he died, produced a revolver from behind
his back and, in a struggle, Zaffina was shot three times.
From Gatto’s perspective, this showed Veniamin’s ability to hide a
weapon in the sort of clothes he wore at La Porcella, but there was
nothing in Zaffina’s account that suggested Veniamin turned his back,
potentially displaying the hidden weapon to his victim before reaching
for the gun. Whereas at La Porcella he reputedly led Gatto out to the
passageway.
The fervent targeting of Andrew Veniamin included listening devices
bugging his telephone calls and a tracking device installed in his car.
The phone bugs showed that even as he moved closer to Carl Williams,
Veniamin maintained his relationship with Gatto.
In conversations beginning in July 2003, and continuing to the day of
the shooting, they were ‘buddy’ and ‘mate’ and ‘champ’ to one another
in calls overheard on Veniamin’s phone. They had little to say, but they
made it as amiable as possible. What is also clear, through the self-
conscious bonhomie, is Gatto’s seniority to the fawning, eager-to-please
Veniamin.
In the days before the shooting, the mood between them had openly
changed, with Gatto asking of Veniamin: ‘Hey, what’s happened to you?
… You given me the arse? … I haven’t heard from you for a month.’ The
reason for the change was the murder of Gatto’s good friend and old
style crook, Graham The Munster’ Kinniburgh.
Gatto called the Crown Casino peace conference to ‘clear the air’ with
Veniamin and Williams. The phone contact diminished after that. Gatto
was worried that he might be the next victim of the underworld
shootings and said he rang Veniamin ‘just so I could keep tabs on him’.
There was a brief call on 23 March 2004 when Gatto summoned
Veniamin to La Porcella.
He arrived in his trademark track pants and T-shirt. According to
Gatto’s defence, somewhere in there was a. 38 calibre revolver.
According to the prosecution, police surveillance on Veniamin was so
rigorous he could not afford to be carrying a firearm in his car or his
clothing. If so, then he had minimal time to arm himself – the phone call
that beckoned him to La Porcella came just on two o’clock, and he
arrived there six minutes later.
According to the prosecution everything that happens is at Gatto’s
instigation: Veniamin’s visit, the private chat, the walk out to the
private, narrow passageway.
On Gatto’s account, however, after 20 minutes or so Veniamin kicked
him underneath the table and gestured that he wanted to speak
privately. Once in the passageway, Veniamin complained that he was
hearing rumours Gatto still blamed him for Kinniburgh’s death.
Gatto reminded him of two of his mates he had killed – Dibra and
Kallipolitis – and told him not to come around any more. ‘I was looking
at him in the eyes and his face went all funny and he sort of stepped