John Macris: Slain gangster’s glam wife to come to Australia: report
The reality TV star model wife of former Sydney underworld figure John Macris has reportedly been considering leaving Greece after he was gunned down outside their luxury villa.
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Few Greeks had heard the name John Macris before the Sydney underworld figure met his grisly death this week at the hands of a hitman in Athens.
But his stunning blonde wife Viktoria Karida was a star in Greece, appearing regularly in a reality TV fashion program on the country’s most popular channel and strutting the capital’s catwalks.
Karida is now reportedly considering a move to Australia with her two young children, after her husband was gunned down outside their Greek villa.
Local newspaper Ta Nea has reported that Karida ia distraught after her husband’s murder and is living in fear in Athens.
The Athens news outlet claims to have heard a leaked deposition of Karida, who reportedly told police: “He wasn’t scared of anything. He hadn’t told us of death threats he had received. We led a quiet life,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.
The former hairdresser was modelling at a fashion show on Wednesday as her 46-year-old husband had been gunned down outside the plush minimalist villa they shared in the upscale seaside suburb of Voula.
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Both had a taste for the high life, and both were of Greek stock but had grown up abroad — Macris in Australia and Karida in Ukraine, to a Greek father and a Ukrainian mother.
He was into ritzy nightclubs and flashy cars — his Lamborghini was parked in his villa’s garage the night he died in an execution-style hit over which police had still made no arrests nor announced any progress in their inquiries three days after the murder.
And he went for glamorous blondes and had dated Sydney socialite Roxy Jacenko.
She was passionate about fashion and modelling.
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Karida, whose surname is the Greek word for coconut, got to flaunt her dress sense at the couple’s 2016 wedding on the holiday island of Mykonos when she wore a tiny lace outfit with an extravagant tail.
“It was the most beautiful moment of my life,” she told the Greek celebrity magazines that gave lavish coverage to her marriage to the man more than a decade her senior whom she had been seeing for several years.
“I am very happy to have met the man of my dreams. Our children wanted us to get married and it was a very cheerful day,” she said after the ceremony, at which the couple’s young kids Alexandra and Achilles were present.
Karida was born in Ukraine in 1985 and according to her profiles in Greek magazines moved in her late teens with her family to Greece, where she trained as a hairdresser in the drab northern town of Alexandroupolis near the Turkish border.
But it was not clear if she ever worked cutting hair as her modelling career was launched when she claimed runner-up in an obscure beauty contest, the 2003 Miss Tourism Queen of the Year International pageant.
The same year Karida, who speaks English, Ukrainian, Russian and Greek, won the “Playmate” award on a TV show of the same name.
The current show she appears on, My Style Rocks, is on five times a week on Skai TV and pits 13 models against each other over 13 weeks during which they are given a budget and have to go and buy a new outfit, with those whose purchases fail to impress being eliminated each week.
In the finale the winner is nominated the most stylish woman in the country
But Karida was not on TV the fateful night her husband, who had just launched a new security business in Athens, was shot dead in a hit which police believe may have been ordered by Australian or Greek enemies in the drug trade or other criminal sectors.
She was happily modelling clothes on a catwalk just a few kilometres from her home.
Video on YouTube shows her modelling a white dress and, later, smiling and laughing in a short video she had originally posted to her Instagram account, which has since been shut down.
Macris was shot at 8.10pm and it was not until nearly two hours later, while the fashion show was still going on, that police told Karida she needed to get home quickly.
“We saw her leaving. Noone knew that the killing we had heard on the news was her husband,” said a photographer working at the fashion show, who asked not to be named for fear of possibly being targeted by Macris’ entourage.
“We just thought she had finished her work. She did look a bit worried but she wasn’t crying so I don’t think she knew yet what exactly had happened,” said the photographer.
A funeral service for her husband was held in the same Voula district where the power couple lived. His remains were later to be flown back to Australia for burial there.
Originally published as John Macris: Slain gangster’s glam wife to come to Australia: report
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