A bloody death for villain Carl

IF he had not been so personally involved, Carl Williams would have been impressed with his death yesterday. It said everything about the way he liked to operate.

Fat boy is dead ... Carl Williams / Pic: Fiona Hamilton

IF he had not been so personally involved, Carl Williams would have been impressed with his death yesterday.

It said everything about the way he liked to operate.

It was confronting and completely outrageous, and sent the kind of powerful message Williams preferred. Nothing like a little blunt force and head trauma to make a statement.

But that was Fat Boy Carl. He had a flair for such things.

Read Underbelly insider Roger Rogerson's blog here.

VIDEO: KIller Carl feared it was coming

Williams was notorious for putting to work Australia's busiest hit man, as they liked to call Andrew "Benji" Veniamin. That was the catalyst for a killing spree that first became known as the Melbourne gangland wars and then later as, simply, Underbelly.

It was a spree that won't end, even with his own death yesterday.

Williams' appetite for his work started the wars and oversaw the death toll as it rose to where it now stands, numbering at least 30.

Timeline of Carl Williams' life

Gallery: Killer Carl

And Williams was a solid contributor to the list, even before his own inclusion.

He was serving time for four murders and was involved in several more.

He will be missed only by those who knew him closely, who were few, and a couple of recently cashed-up screenwriters.

Which is where Williams' appeal lies, really.

He was a murderer. A drug dealer.

And until Underbelly rumbled across our screens and brought the foul whiff of glamour to drug-dealing killers, he remained just that.

But after Underbelly's success Williams became a Melbourne celebrity.

Until Underbelly Williams was simply a survivor of what many in Sydney knew as the Melbourne gangland war, which more or less began and ended there.

Nobody knew who the Carlton Crew was, or the Moran family. Nobody knew about Williams or Alphonse Gangitano, the Black Prince of Lygon St, or Veniamin or Mick Gatto. Now they are household names.

And Williams appeared to be the great survivor, the last man standing.

Jason Moran was dead.

He was murdered on Williams' orders while he was about to leave a football clinic in June 2003. Williams had him shotgunned along with his mate, Pasquale Barbaro, while his children sat in the back seat.

Lewis Moran was dead.

He was also murdered on Williams' orders, shot to death at the pub where he drank.

Also dead was Mark Mallia, a minor gangland figure murdered on Williams' orders, his charred remains found in a wheelie bin.

As was Michael Marshall, shot outside his home in front of his five-year-old son.

Elsewhere among the dead was Mark Moran. He was murdered outside his home, shot getting out of his car, and police agreed not to charge Williams for his murder after he pleaded to the murders of his brother and father, Jason and Lewis, as well as Mallia.

The biggest casualty on Williams' side was Veniamin.

They are all dead because Williams went to war with the Morans after he was shot in the stomach by Jason in 1999 when they had discovered he was using their pill press to manufacture his own drugs on the side.

They believed he owed them money, with some justification.

This simple discovery revealed Williams' great talent, which was to lean into a pill press until it popped a little pill out at the other end.

That was his only talent, really.

It allowed Williams to rise from a fat, stupid "go-for" for the Moran family - allegedly dumber than his onscreen portrayal - and eventually become one of the biggest drug dealers in Melbourne's violent underworld.

The pill press gave him drugs and the drugs brought money and, in the gangster world, money is power.

But once he was there, rich and powerful, he soon revealed how ill-equipped he was to handle the job.

He was not a good criminal.

Williams had no idea how to act once he became the boss.

His answer to any problem was to eliminate it at the end of a gun. He was brash and irrational, and the evidence is the bodies left in the street in brazen, callous murders that terrified Melbourne and forced the police to step up investigations.

The murders were so public the police could do nothing but throw all their resources at them.

"Today only proves that the Sydney criminals are up a notch," former detective Roger Rogerson said.

Rogerson confirmed the long-held belief that Melbourne's criminals are a cowboy bunch without the nous to survive as top-flight crims.

"Down in Melbourne they're all amateurs," he said.

Blog with Roger Rogerson on the latest Underbelly

Maybe it's because of something as simple as Melbourne not having a harbour where the bodies could disappear.

Regardless, the murders were so amateurish Williams was soon linked to many of them, and was in the unfortunate predicament of also being responsible for them. It meant he was doing life in jail, a sentence that would most likely end only one way, as it did yesterday.