Cornered drug lord Tony Mokbel’s bizarre praise for police after manhunt tracks him to Greece
“FAT Tony” left Australian police red faced when he pulled off an audacious international vanishing act to enjoy a life of luxury in a Mediterranean hideaway. When they finally caught up with the drug kingpin his reaction was priceless.
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NOTORIOUS drug lord and Melbourne gangland figure Tony Mokbel became Australia’s most wanted when he skipped bail during a cocaine smuggling trial in March 2006.
What followed was a remarkable escape act as he first holed up at a rural property in Bonnie Doon, later crossed the Nullabor, then sailed secretly to Greece to reunite with his pregnant girlfriend Danielle McGuire, who had fled Australia separately.
With Mokbel posing as a businessman named Stephen Papas, they enjoyed the good life in their Mediterranean hideaway, bankrolled by Mokbel’s extensive drug empire — dubbed The Company — which continued to operate back home.
But in his absence, “Fat Tony” had been sentenced to a minimum of nine years over the cocaine trafficking and charged with the murder of Lewis Moran (a crime for which he was later acquitted). Officers with Victoria Police’s Purana gangland taskforce were determined to get their man.
These edited extracts from Bigwig: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of Tony Mokbel, reveal the indignities of Mokbel’s escape, how his girlfriend outsmarted “Interplod” and the moment the infamous fugitive’s international vanishing act finally unravelled — ultimately resulting in extradition and a minimum 22 years behind bars on ecstasy and methylamphetamine charges.
ESCAPE
With the court in possession of his passport, Mokbel was travelling with no papers, officially stateless. If they sailed into someone’s national waters or passed a coastguard his only option was to stick to his hidey hole and officially not exist. If spotted and questioned he would have had to resort to his other more persuasive papers — the bags of cash he carried with him.
There were creature comforts on the multi-cabin 17-metre yacht, including hot water, a deck shower, and cooking facilities. But Mokbel’s bed was set up in the front of the vessel which had the greatest vertical movement as it bumped over the swells of the Indian Ocean. Mokbel spent most of the trip seriously seasick and vomiting. With the ceaseless rocking and nausea, the possibility of a jail cell on terra firma must have been growing on Tony. But life on the high seas soon got even more dramatic as Mokbel’s escape plan hit its first hitch.
The vessel’s ‘automatic pilot’ broke down and started gushing hydraulic oil. The Edwena’s crew had to take turns working shifts manually steering the vessel on course across the heaving ocean. The crew kept the yacht running on cooking oil — further dampening Tony’s culinary expectations — before making it safely to the Maldives, 6000 kilometres from Fremantle, for repairs.
As Mokbel grew his sea legs Danielle McGuire continued to lead police through a variety of countries on a merry chase around the northern hemisphere. Her beauty salon, run with (Tony’s sister-in-law) Renate (Mokbel), closed five months after she left Australia. Growing more visibly pregnant and with her primary-school-age daughter in tow, Mokbel’s girlfriend spent time in Rome, Paris, EuroDisney and at beach resorts in the south of France. A source said McGuire also spent time in Dubai. An expert at counter-surveillance, she would disarm the various Euro-spooks on her trail by smiling at them, waving, or confronting them in a less friendly manner.
‘She was too good,’ said one overseas source. ‘She was quite brazen. She would approach them and tell them to f--- off and stop following her.’ She outran the French gendarmes and made for Italy where she eventually slipped her polizia pursuers in Rome. Headlines back in Australia screamed ‘INTERPLOD’ as, against the odds, she outsmarted overseas police and jumped countries once more. Police had begun to suspect McGuire was leading them not to Mokbel but on a wild-goose chase. Now that she too had fallen off the radar authorities had a nasty feeling they had been double duped, that she was now living it up with the country’s most notorious criminal in a love nest somewhere on the other side of the planet.
Danielle somehow magically materialised in Greece with no entry stamp in her passport. After shaking the polizia in the Italian capital she is believed to have travelled halfway down the boot-shaped country’s heel to Brindisi. From that ancient coastal city a traveller can catch a ferry direct to Greece. They can even take their car. All they have to do is buy a one-way ticket.
Once the Edwena was repaired it sailed northwest from the Maldives. It crept through pirate-infested waters around the Horn of Africa, into the Gulf of Aden, then up the Red Sea between Africa and Saudi Arabia. The sloop then sailed through Egypt along the man-made Suez Canal, with bribes slung to appropriate officials, and out the other side to the Mediterranean Sea. From there it was a picturesque sail past white stone islets emerging out of turquoise seas before the Edwena came to rest at the Greek Island of Syros. There, after more than forty days and nights on the choppy seas, the Australian fugitive stepped off his yacht and onto Greek land.
For Tony the 10,000-kilometre journey had seen high drama, some laughs and a lot of vomiting. But on the island of Syros police believe Mokbel farewelled his crew and left the three Greek sailors, now home, checking in the yacht and displaying any necessary paperwork. From Syros Tony only had to jump on a ferry full of tourists for a short ride to Pireas, the main port of Athens, and on to the Greek mainland. No passport required.
On 24 December 2006 — just as on every Christmas Eve — wide-eyed Greek children lay sleepless in bed waiting for a bearded portly stranger to visit their country from a faraway land. And on that date something fitting that description but decidedly dodgier and minus any gifts — a swarthy wig-wearing Tony — floated silently into their harbour.
MANHUNT
Purana continued monitoring Mokbel’s bugged phone, and then one day as Tony was talking on the wired line the breakthrough came. Mokbel, who was partial to a crushed-ice latte, said: ‘I’m having coffee at Starbucks in Glyfada.’
Detective (Jim) Coghlan’s ears pricked up. Having been to Greece, he was the only one in the room who recognised the name of the Athenian suburb. It gelled with the money trail to the Greek capital they had established earlier. ‘It wasn’t until that day we thought, s---, he’s there,’ a detective said. ‘It meant all right, we have a suburb. It still didn’t mean he was living there. The fact he’s having coffee could mean doing business with banks and not living there.’
Coghlan asked a Greek friend of his to take photos of the Glyfada coffee precinct so he could show the team the layout of the area. On a Monday morning in late May the photos arrived in Coghlan’s inbox. His friend had taken snaps of the Starbucks and then an ice-cream parlour directly opposite.
As Coghlan perused the pictures he heard on a live broadcast of a phone intercept that Danielle was going to meet someone at Haagen Daaz. He zoomed in on the ice-cream shop in the picture. The quality broke down but it was still readable: Haagen Daaz. ‘We were all sitting there and I said, “She’s going to this place where I’m looking at the picture of it right now,”’ he said. The pictures were printed up and the team quietly stared at them, soaking in the details.
Coghlan recalled: ‘I said, “There’s no way known that she would risk driving in Greece on the wrong side of the road and the potential of getting involved in an accident. I know Danielle and she wouldn’t risk doing it.”’ That meant for Danielle to go to the Haagen Daaz ice-cream parlour she would have to go on foot. Which meant the likelihood of Danielle and Tony both living in or near Glyfada was pretty high. ‘That was Monday morning. I was gone by Wednesday,’ Jim Coghlan said.
Based on the new information, authorities were confident enough to send a local team to Greece to liaise with the Hellenic authorities. In May 2007 a Purana detective and a federal agent got the two most prized plane tickets in Australian policing — return to Athens to catch Tony Mokbel. Jim Coghlan went for Victoria Police and Agent Jarrod Ragg for the feds. Ragg could not tell loved ones where he was going. He had to ditch his usual mobile phone because callers would be able to tell he was overseas. The pair flew out of Melbourne hoping that within days they could end the global hunt for Tony Mokbel and return with the biggest fish of all.
‘I’d been running the Mokbel job since October 2000. It had been a very difficult prosecution. I’d managed to turn two very difficult crooks into witnesses,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘There’d been an incredible number of issues that we’d overcome. I was just really hoping to get hold of him.’ Coghlan and Ragg met with the AFP’s man in Greece, David Dalton, who worked the bureaucracy to speed things up. The Australians received an elite team of Greek investigators who, among other things, were incorruptible. Upon landing they still did not have an address and had to energise the occasionally overly relaxed Greek police to get out and look for Mokbel. Only the Greek police would have the immediate authority to arrest and hold him on a domestic charge.
As well as observing the local legal niceties to make any arrest valid, the Australians had to keep out of the frontline lest Tony spot them around town and once again vanish with the wind. ‘On a day-to-day basis we were highly aware he would recognise me in a heartbeat because I’ve spent years sitting in court with him,’ Agent Ragg said. ‘McGuire would have spotted me in a heartbeat as well.’ The Australians kept a low profile, moving between their hotel, the Australian embassy and Greek police headquarters.
‘At the time, he was Australia’s number one fugitive. When I went to Greece they didn’t know who Tony Mokbel was,’ Coghlan said. ‘But when they brought up his Interpol file he made the top 100 in the world. Which meant the other people on that list were Osama bin Laden and all these other characters. So we’ve got a bloke from Coburg who’s on the top 100 wanted people in the world and that’s when they took real notice that he does mean something.’
The Australians gave Greek police twenty photos of Mokbel in various guises and a list of his likely haunts, and shared their belief that he was living in or near Glyfada. ‘If he is here, we will find him,’ the Greeks proclaimed, and deployed plainclothes officers to walk past harbourside cafes.
Every day the Australians would check in and give the local police any new tips they had on Mokbel. ‘We were turning things that came across the wires from VicPol into intelligence for Greek police,’ Ragg said.
Days became a week as the duo tried to identify Glyfada locales that would fit Tony’s lifestyle, schools where they may have sent (Danielle’s daughter) Brittany, and hospitals where (their baby) Renate may have been born. ‘From the wires we were trying to get together a pattern of movement on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis that might enable us to trip over him if we could put him into a routine,’ Ragg said.
In early June police crashed a baby swim meeting at a local pool but just missed Tony and Renate by minutes. Frustratingly, even with a baby in tow the super-crim would follow his instincts or be rescued by his luck and become a phantom just moments before the cavalry would arrive.
‘By the time we received information, reported through Greek police and they responded, we were just missing him,’ Ragg said. ‘When we were missing him by half an hour, an hour, you could almost taste it,’ he said. ‘You just knew you were so close. You could feel there was just something in the air. You’re just so close to getting hold of it all.’
Without immediate success, the Greek unit assisting the Australians full-time had to drop the case to get on with their other tasks. ‘We started all this with the Greeks on 29 May. They worked solidly with us for the next five or six days but we weren’t getting anywhere. We were just too far behind,’ Ragg said. ‘This was a very busy tactical unit. So they gave us some advice on some official requests we should make.’
Momentum was being lost. Things were again sliding from hopeful to grim. Tony’s luck was again on the rise. And then, less than a fortnight after the Australians’ arrival, a phone call and a manila folder intervened to change the fortunes of everyone.
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It was just like any other Tuesday in Athens for Tony. On 5 June 2007 he woke up in his luxury apartment next to Danielle as the sun broke in and woke the girls.
Mokbel was a fervent enough believer in his own mythology to imagine a lifetime of liberty and Greek sunsets. He and Danielle had been buying furniture and, according to local real estate agents, had planned to buy a house. Mokbel was even making moves to establish himself as a Greek drug kingpin. But Tony was also canny enough to realise each day of freedom could be the last. On that Tuesday he would spend time with the girls, don his wig and cap before visiting friends, warm the blood in the Athenian sun and have a business meeting at an exclusive harbourside eatery. Even if his days in the sun were numbered it would be la dolce vita to the last.
That morning Mokbel was on a call to Australia when he broke away from the chat to tell someone in the background: ‘I’ll see you at the Delfinia at eleven.’ It was an uncharacteristic slip-up for Tony, who usually tried to maintain a professional criminal phone manner. Purana’s surveillance picked up the comment.
Coghlan and Ragg leapt to the Greek phonebooks. The Delfinia’s number was 005. That meant it was in Glyfada. At 9.45am the Greeks were forwarded the Delfinia intelligence and dispatched officers almost immediately. The first crew were deployed on mopeds to try to cut their way through the horrendous Athens traffic and get to Tony.
‘We were asked to make a decision on what we wanted the Greek police to do. Whether we wanted him followed or wanted him arrested on site. Given the circumstances we all agreed he should be arrested on site,’ Agent Ragg said. Under Greek law the Interpol red notice would allow them to arrest Mokbel. Authorities had also taken out a diplomatic document, a provisional arrest order, requesting Hellenic police to make an arrest.
Mokbel went to meet his shipping-industry friend Theo Angelakis at the Delfinia — an expensive cafe overlooking a marina full of expensive yachts. Fat Tony nonchalantly sipped a short black and talked shop with Thin Theo in what would be their last rendezvous.
Tony and Theo were taking in the ambience of trams and sea and the sound of sail toggles clinking against masts when Greek police arrived. The officers cast their eyes about, but the paunchy pale Tony from the photos with signature exposed pate was nowhere to be seen. Members of the Greek team went through the cafe but they could not find their target. They saw Angelakis and his colleague with the moptop hairstyle but did not recognise the latter as Mokbel.
The officers had, however, been told Mokbel was to be at the Delfinia for a business meeting. One of the younger Greek officers again looked at the short, tanned man with the biker moustache, sunglasses, cap and Beatlesque wig. He then noticed the older pockmarked Greek he was chatting with was holding a manila folder. ‘He thought, stuff it, they’re the only two looking like they’re at a business meeting. So he’s gone over and fronted them,’ Agent Ragg said.
The officers worked their way through the exclusive cafe crowd as if on a routine identity check.
Mokbel was asked for his ID. He showed them his Stephen Papas passport and said: ‘Why are you asking?’
The police perused Mokbel’s documents and asked the two men to accompany them to the station. The Greeks, who had been told by the Australians that Mokbel had been using the name Stephen Papas, were confident they had their man. At 11.15 they called the Australians and told them so.
Greece is the fifth most corrupt country in the world, according to Transparency International, and has been labelled ‘the EU champ of corruption’ for kickbacks to public officials. Mokbel — the Australian champ of corruption — allegedly offered his accompanying officers a $1.6 million bribe to let him go. Tony was good for the amount. But the arresting officers refused. Unrebuffed by the rejection Mokbel was optimistic he could talk his way out of the squeeze. He thought the local fuzz were just interested in his bodgy passport. He was still insisting he was Stephen Papas of Bondi and he was still confident that diplomacy and cash could conquer the small misunderstanding of his arrest.
Coghlan and Ragg made their way to the Athens police station. By the time they got there silver-tongued Mokbel had been making some progress with his captors. ‘Tony had been talking to them for quite a while by now and he had been denying who he was,’ Ragg said. Mokbel had been maintaining he was Stephen Papas and offering explanations which to the Greeks were plausible. The Australians outside Mokbel’s interview room were shown Mokbel’s hybrid Victoria — New South Wales fake licence and pointed out the flaws to the Greeks, stating it justified arrest. ‘They said, “Well, look, we’re happy with that but we want you guys to go in and do a physical identification,”’ Ragg said.
Tony was sitting in handcuffs with two Greek police when Ragg and Coghlan entered the room. His face fell when he saw the federal agent and the Purana detective. ‘I walk in. His eyes went wide and he went, “Jarrod!”’ Ragg said. ‘I said, “How are you, Tony?” and he shook my hand. He looked genuinely pleased to see me for about five seconds. He then got pretty angry. He got very angry. And he had quite a bit to say about a number of issues.’
Mokbel unleashed a wide-ranging spray threatening Ragg. He told the agent he was prepared to do the jail time over the cocaine charges, but he said when he was provided with the witness statements against him (for an impending murder charge) on the Saturday before he left, he had to go. Mokbel told Ragg: ‘I won’t contest the extradition if (then Assistant Commissioner) Simon Overland agrees to drop the murder charges but otherwise I’ll tie things up in Greece for ten years.’
Mokbel was never going to stop trying his luck. He would never stop playing courts and legal systems like lotto machines. He would never stop offering bribes and trying to cut impossible deals. It was just not in his nature. But from the moment Tony saw the Australians he knew it was curtains. He knew the great escape was over.
Mokbel told Coghlan: ‘I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve done a brilliant job.’
• Liam Houlihan’s Bigwig: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of Tony Mokbel, (HarperCollins Publishers 2012) is available as an ebook, RRP $12.99. These edited extracts are reproduced with permission of HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Ltd.
Originally published as Cornered drug lord Tony Mokbel’s bizarre praise for police after manhunt tracks him to Greece