Chopper Unchopped (232 page)

Vic got caught up with Dennis and the rest is history. After he and his pack of nutbag armed robbers killed those coppers in Walsh Street, Vic should have packed it in, but he just loved being a crook.

When he did an armed robbery he would get so excited he would bar up. I’m all for loving your work but that’s a little over the top if you ask me. When they said he was a stick-up man, they really meant it. But when he jumped into the drugs, any sense of reality in him packed up and moved to Rio.

After his best mate Frankie Benvenuto was murdered, Vic found out the killer was little Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin.

Vic and Benji had a meeting to convince each other there would be no square up.

Imagine that, such gentlemen, such men of their words. I would rather trust a cobra with a cocaine problem than one of them, but that’s the way they do it these days, I suppose. Meetings in parks, I’m so over them. I’d rather a weak tea in an art gallery, but then again, I’m quite the sophisticate.

Vic apparently thought there could be some easy money to be made in the underworld war and accepted a contract to knock Jason Moran. He wanted $200,000 and took half as a down payment. But Victor wouldn’t deliver the body and wasn’t too keen on making a refund. The people who took the contract out were unhappy and they are the ones who decided to terminate the deal and terminate Vic at the same time.

Benji was the shooter. He must have told a little fib when he told Vic they should have a truce after the Benvenuto shooting. Vic was shot in Bay Street, Port Melbourne, not far from his home. He was waiting to meet a friend. Was he set up? Maybe someone with the same surname as his great mate Frank Benvenuto could answer that. But he won’t.

Another crook, Mark Smith, got shot in the neck because he took the contract to kill Jason and then reneged. Not a good career move, I would have thought.

Funny thing is that Jason turned up at Vic’s funeral. I wonder if he knew Peirce had accepted a contract to kill him. Or maybe Vic had flipped the people who set up the contract and warned Moran what was coming. Doesn’t matter much. Vic’s dead, Jason’s dead and Benji’s dead.

You would think police wouldn’t try too hard to find the killers of Victor Peirce after what he did at Walsh Street, but they have had a dip. They can’t get the shooter unless they have an extradition treaty with the Devil, but they can get the getaway driver who took Benji from the scene. That bloke’s still breathing, for the moment.

Silly Kath kept saying she was going to back-up for Vic. She should stick to her bingo at Venus Bay while she can. Wonder if her favourite number is still 69 like it was when she would take her teeth out for the lemon chicken when she worked in the parlours. These days the only thing she could back up is a toilet.

Shot dead in his West Sunshine home. Body found October 25, 2002

PAUL Kallipolitis killed a bloke when he shot him twice in the head back in 1994. He beat the murder blue on appeal and did a little bit of time for manslaughter but didn’t learn his lesson. He was another of the western suburbs crew who wanted to make the big time. Was big into speed and was a bit of a kick boxer, but being fast with your feet won’t stop a bullet.

He was a panel beater who preferred to beat people around the head than bother about knocking out dents from cars. As a young bloke he was making a fortune out of drugs. If he kept a low profile he might have kept going but he had to have the usual toys. He had the hotted up Holden and had the personalised plates CORRUPT attached. What? Why didn’t he just get DUMB DRUG DEALER or wouldn’t that fit?

One of his best friends was Andrew Veniamin, but Benji was never a sentimental bloke, just a semi-mental one. He was the one who shot Paul. Whether it was orders from above or Benji was having a bad hair day, who knows? Maybe Benji just got in first – after all, business is business.

Kallipolitis was paranoid from the drugs and spent most of his time inside his house that he fortified to protect himself from his growing list of enemies.

But as usual in the underworld you have to worry more about your friends than your enemies. Only his best mates and favourite customers were allowed into his house. So it would have been a surprise when police were called that they found the security door and the heavily bolted front door unlocked.

Not that Paul needed to worry any more about the security breach, as he was dead in his bedroom with two bullets in the brain. He usually carried his guns, but this time his pistol was hidden under the mattress a couple of metres away. Not too smart unless he was expecting to be attacked by killer bed bugs.

When you are made redundant in the underworld, you well and truly get the bullet.

Shot in Queen Street, Coburg, on April 15, 2003

NIK Radev was born an idiot and went backwards from there. He arrived in Australia in the early 1980s and got a job in a fish and chip shop for about six months. Then he’d had enough of hard work and decided to get out of the fast food industry to move into the drug business. The only chips he wanted were the $1000 variety he used at the casino.

When he got married, he came out in his going away gear dressed like Al Pacino in
Scarface
– the white suit with the red open-necked shirt. He should have been shot on the grounds of crimes against fashion and no Australian jury would convict.

Maybe it was because Nik was an immigrant, but he always struggled with the tax system. He solved that problem by not paying a cent for 20 years. Not that it worried him. His attitude to personal accounting has always been cavalier, to say the least.

Radev could have made a fortune through his drug connections, but he wanted to be the tough guy as well. He fire-bombed Willie Thompson’s car over a debt of $40,000.

He stood over people and gave the impression he ran the Russian Mafia, but he was just a middleweight who bummed around in and out of jail until he started selling pills around 2000.

All of a sudden Nik was rolling in it. He bought the black Mercedes, the imported suits and French cognac. He employed his own bodyguard, using a pro kick boxer. The knucklehead didn’t know that a gunman usually wins on points against a kick boxer. He wore Versace (I’m more a King Gee man myself) and had a $20,000 imported watch, which didn’t tell him his time was running out.

Radev wanted to run everything. He would go into partnerships and then take over, dudding his partners.

He was allegedly connected with a group who flogged Tony Mokbel (cocaine and rug dealer who fled Australia and was recaptured in Greece in June 2007) in Lygon Street. Now Tony was about as rich as Kerry Packer, nearly as ugly and had about as long a memory as well. Tony was not a man to take a beating lying down. Well he was, actually. He was lying down while they kicked the shit out of him.

But Radev had his eye on the amphet cook who worked for Williams and Mokbel. His plan was to get an introduction and then abduct the cook, torture him until he resigned from the Williams/Mokbel crew and decided to work for him full-time. That was workplace relations, Bulgarian style.

Now Carl and Tony didn’t like the idea of losing their best man to mad Nik, so a set-up was planned.

Nik met with members of the crew at the Brighton Baths café for a latte, then they headed off to Coburg for the big introduction.

But Benji Veniamin was there, driven by one of Australia’s best armed robbers. Nik arrived, hopped out of his Merc and was shot several times in the head.

The getaway car was a little Holden Vectra. Funny that Carl’s dad, George, had one exactly the same. Must be a total coincidence.

The police were stuffed, even though they put out the word they would look after any insiders who were prepared to give evidence.

Or put more simply: Nik’s Knocked, Paddy’s Whacked, Gave the Dogs Some Bones, Carl’s Old Man Went Rolling Home.

Thank you. For $19.95 you want Shakespeare?

Please pay at the door.

Nik’s mates were quick to organise a wake. They headed back to his place and found $200,000 in cash – none felt the need to hand any of it over to his family. How dare they, did they think they worked for the drug squad?

He was buried in a $30,000 gold casket. Big deal – he was just another cardboard crim who thought the world was a movie and he was the star.

Nik arrived in Australia with a bad attitude and bad teeth. He couldn’t fix the first, but he could do something about the second. He went to a top-of-the-range dentist and said he wanted Hollywood teeth – perfect white ones that made him look like he was out of
Baywatch.
Well, sort of.

The dentist must have known Nik was in the drug business and declared it would cost $50,000. Nik didn’t say a word, got up, went outside, went to the boot of the Benz and came back with the cash.

What a waste of good money. After many appointments, the dentist finally finished and the teeth were perfectly capped.

No sooner was the job finished than Nik got himself shot seven times. Sadly there’s no money-back guarantee on a mouthful of lead fillings.

Look at old Chopper, still got the old false teeth, but at least I’m around to use them.

Nik the Bulgarian? Bit off more than he could chew, even with flash new teeth.

A 28-year-old male prostitute gunned down on June 6, 2003, in Reservoir as he left home to defend charges in the Victorian County Court that he had raped and attacked a female client

VIOLENT little bisexual prostitute who copped it at both ends. So it was bye-bye bi-boy. Who cares?

Shot in car park of the Cross Keys Hotel, Essendon North, on June 21, 2003

BACK in 2001 I wrote this. Nostradamus could not have done it better.
‘Friends of mine from Melbourne have told me to expect a new wave of murders. At least three, including at least one with a Moran influence to it
.

I will watch and wait. I see the names of some crooks in the papers. I wonder if they know they are dead men walking.

Some of them don’t know that their best friends are plotting their deaths. Have another short black, fellas. It is much later than you think.’

THE Moran name was big in Melbourne crime circles for 30 years. Jason was related through marriage to the Kane standover family. On bloodlines he should have been a master criminal, but he was just another big-noter with a gun and a wardrobe of imported suits.

For years, he ran around bashing and shooting anyone who looked the other way. But he always waited until he could launch a sneak attack or he had the numbers on his side. I have no problem with that. Good gangsters are like good politicians. They wait until they have the numbers before they move and they also do their best work in the dark.

When Jason was an up and comer he could have been squashed, but his surname meant many experienced crooks cut him some slack because of respect for his family. But he developed a bad habit of pulling his gun and then not using it. You can only bluff so many times.

Now Jason was a wannabe nutbag who used to play gangster against harmless cleanskins. He bashed one with a brick and another with a wheel brace. His dad, Lewis, never pulled him up, so he ran wild. He and Fat Al started bashing people in a bar. They were both filled with drugs and bad movies, so they thought they would get away with it. The coppers turned up and they were charged. It was the beginning of the end of a beautiful friendship.

They fell out on how they should handle their defence and we all know Jason ended up shooting his best mate.

The others started to realise that Jason couldn’t be trusted. Then he shot Carl Williams in the guts and didn’t have the brains to either square up with him or finish the job. He was so arrogant and so far into gangster-land he thought Williams would just roll over and take it.

But Williams backed up. Even after he had killed Jason’s half-brother Mark, Jason was still too stupid to get in first.

When Jason got out of jail the Parole Board let him piss off overseas because everyone knew he was on a death list. If he didn’t know he just had to look at the back cover of my seminal work, Chopper 10.5,
The Popcorn Gangster.
He would have seen three grave sites on the cover. One had the name ‘Big Al’ and the date he left us, the second had ‘Mad Charlie’ and the date he died and the third had ‘Jason’ and a question mark.

I published that in 2001 and two years later, the date was filled in. June 21, 2003.

Everyone knew Carl was on the warpath. He was hunting Moran down, but I think Jason must have thought he was bulletproof.

But Carl couldn’t find him. His team of nutbags that masqueraded as hitmen could have been out of a Jerry Lewis movie, except they had real guns.

One of his crew was given the job of finding Jason. Now I know that bloke well and while he was a top stick-up man, he was hopeless at trying to follow anyone.

What made him a good stick-up man was that he had dash, had a gun and could run pretty fast. What made him no good at finding Jason was that Carl didn’t even give him a picture of the target, so he wouldn’t have known him if they had bumped into each other at the Myer sales.

When you go to rob a bank you don’t need to find it and follow it and then wait for it to be alone. You drive around until you see the word ‘bank’. Then put your balaclava on run in, pull your gun, swear like you’re on
Big Brother
and run out with the cash.

But if you are doing a hit, it would be handy if you knew what the bloke you are going to kill looks like.

At one stage, Carl wanted one of his men to frock up and walk past Jason hiding his gun in a pram, then pull it out and do the business. If you knew the man who was to pull the trigger, you wouldn’t want to see him in a dress. He had legs like a baboon and you would be better off waxing a sheep than trying to give him the ladies’ smooth look.