Here, drug baron Jason Moran did not kill wannabe drug baron Carl Williams on 13 October 1999. Instead, he wanted to remind Williams, in his Mambo shirt and thongs, of his place.

There was history between them. Jason Moran and Williams had recently scuffled after a friend of Williams had failed to return a piano belonging to Moran.

Williams had also taken up with Roberta, the wife of Moran associate Dean Stephens. To
this day, Roberta Williams says Carl saved her from Stephens.

But that’s not why they were in the park. They were there because Jason and his half-brother, Mark, were upset about a delivery of pills from Williams that had crumbled, a disputed pill press, and Williams’s undercutting of the Moran price of ecstasy tablets.

They wanted $400,000 whereas Williams believed Mark Moran owed him $1 million.

Dead men cannot pay. So Jason whipped out a .22 Derringer and shot Williams in the stomach instead of the head.

“We want that bullet back, you f***ing dog,” one of the Moran brothers reportedly said.

The aftermath of the Williams-Moran encounter heightened its oddness. The three men drove — in the same car — back to where they had met earlier at a nearby shopping centre.

A wounded Williams had turned 29 that day, and came home to find his mother, Barbara,
had baked a chocolate birthday cake.

He reluctantly went to hospital five hours later, where he invoked the criminals’ code of silence, and told police he’d been knocked out while on a walk and had woken up with a pain in his stomach. He couldn’t remember a thing, he said.

Yet Jason Moran had made a fatal mistake by not listening to brother Mark, who had urged him to kill Williams. After this encounter in a park with no name, a grudge would morph into a vendetta and launch an unprecedented bloodbath.

Gangland was sparked in 1999, but a brutal drug trade had flourished for generations, hidden in plain sight from
Victoria Police.

Blood had long splattered the Melbourne wharves and produce markets in explosions of anger and brutal power plays, yet no one ever saw a thing.

Police’s inability to crack the underworld’s code of silence dated back to 1958, when Freddie “the Frog” Harrison was killed on the docks, and thirty-odd witnesses, including a bystander splashed in Harrison’s blood, could not identify the killer. Many of the men said they were in the toilet at the time of the murder.

Gangland was just an amplification of a previously unseen battlefield. Vaulting egos collided with expedience: killing your opponent grew to be the easy option. History favoured the killers. Hampered by the criminals’ refusal to assist, police almost never solved underworld murders.

The Gangland War escalated quickly after Williams’s stomach wound. This family feud lacked the pathos of Capulet v Montague, but Williams v Moran was just as murderous.

Jason Moran’s choice had granted Williams another decade of life: ample time for Williams to kill him, his brother Mark, his father Lewis, and up to seven others whose continuing existence was bad for Williams’s business.

At the time of his shooting, Carl was an ambitious bogan of 29 going on 15. He still lived with his mum Barbara and dad George.

Older brother Shane, known as Pear, had died of a heroin overdose two years earlier. In tribute, Carl Williams vowed never to traffic heroin.

Father and son bonded after Pear’s death, and together they graduated into a Gangland crime outfit. George was later said to “pull the strings” of the operation. He had grown up as a pool shark, and had been blinded in one eye in a pub fight.

He had moved his family to Broadmeadows, a kind of Struggle Street of unemployment where many of Carl’s schoolmates later joined him in jail.

The Williamses were close-knit, even though George and Barbara had drifted as a couple. After she moved out of the family home in Broadmeadows, her sister moved in as George’s new romantic partner.

When Barbara died in 2008 of a drug overdose, her son described her as his “pillar of strength”, whom he’d called on the phone each morning.

Carl was considered soft as a kid, but he followed his brother into drug trafficking after leaving Broadmeadows West Technical College in Year 11.

He had hoped to be a policeman, until he was clocked over the head with a telephone book in a police station.

When he fell in with the Morans, Carl delivered drugs and did dogsbody duties. Carl was friends with his bosses; he went to the races with them on days out.

He was busted in a speed lab in his twenties and served a brief stretch in jail. His drive to drug trafficking was largely driven by his aversion to hard work. He lived on fast food and hair product.

Police knew little about Williams when Jason Moran shot him in the stomach in 1999. They belatedly realised that his shitkicker status was misplaced. Williams was wily and manipulative.

In just a few years, he had nurtured his own enterprises and loomed as a serious player in the Melbourne drug trade.

He showed little respect for police, a common trait throughout Gangland. The law was a nuisance, not a handbrake. So Williams started killing people.

Psychos for hire aren’t usually known for their insights. Yet an armed robber and hit man who befriended Carl Williams in prison had a simple explanation for the Gangland death count. Williams was a “very kind person before he was shot”, he said.

After that, Williams’s “whole demeanour changed”.

Until mid-2003, ordinary Melburnians sized up Gangland’s likely prospects — and targets — as they might horses in a form guide. It inspired little more than a ghoulish voyeurism. Was the killing of the bad really all bad? But the murder of Jason Moran on 21 June 2003 changed all that.

Moran was known just as “Jason”. In the Gangland ooze of nicknames, a one-name title denoted high status. Moran fired so many bullets into other people’s legs that a medical condition was coined — the “Moran limp”.

Yet despite this position, and a widespread fear of “the Moran limp”, Mark Moran’s death in June 2000 had exposed his half-brother. Carl Williams later boasted that he told Jason while they were in prison together: “I got that bullet out and had it put in your brother.”

By 2003, Jason Moran’s warning to Williams in October 1999 flashed as a death warrant. For a time Moran got lucky: he and Williams kept getting jailed, as if clocking on for alternating shifts. As Jason entered, Carl left, and vice versa. Soon, though, Williams was offering $200,000 for Moran’s death.

He and the shooter conjured odd plans, like surprising Moran by jumping out of a car boot. In another scheme, the killer was to don a wig and pretend to be a mother pushing a pram. Williams also fantasised about killing Jason at his half-brother’s gravesite on the anniversary of Mark’s death.

They schemed for months, then botched their choice of venue.

On a Saturday morning in Essendon North, surrounded by other junior footy mums and dads, Moran sat in a light-blue Mitsubishi van with a friend, criminal Pasquale “Little Pat” Barbaro (not to be confused with a Calabrian crime boss with the same name).

Five kids, including Moran’s 6-year-old twins, sat in the back. Moran had just been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He had a gun down his pants.

Let’s call the killer “the Assassin”. When he appeared at the driver’s window, Moran might have glimpsed a blur of gloves and a balaclava. Then he was blasted with a shotgun and slumped forward.

The Assassin wasn’t finished. He used a long-handled revolver to shoot Barbaro while the kids in the back looked on.

Such unchecked retribution put innocents in danger. The public was glimpsing a twilight world where hit men roamed freely and their masters plotted.

Suddenly, the public mood shifted from morbid fascination to fear and anger. The citizens of “the world’s most liveable city”, as Melbourne is commonly known, demanded an end to the bloodshed.

It was December 2003. Carl and Roberta Williams had welcomed their first, and only, child Dhakota into the world two years earlier, and they wanted to celebrate with everybody — now that Carl was not in jail. So they hosted a $150,000 christening bash at Crown Casino.

Vanessa Amorosi belted out tracks, and the master of ceremonies was Carl Williams’s dependable lawyer: Nicola Gobbo.

Author Anthony Dowsley later found a photo, now infamous, of Gobbo at this event, her arms around Carl Williams and hit man Andrew “Benji” Veniamin, her breasts spilling out of her skimpy dress.

Next to Veniamin, she looked like a female basketballer alongside a jockey. He’d evidently made up with Gobbo since she had represented Lewis Moran in July 2003 and Veniamin had called her a “fucking dog”. A swag of lawyers attended the event, though Gobbo later said she was the only one “stupid enough” to make a speech. The police heard every word.

“I’ve been asked to make a special thank you that Carl could be with us tonight,” she said. Gobbo offered a mock toast to “the boys at (police taskforce) Purana and, especially, Stuart Bateson”.

Gobbo didn’t feel so silly at the time. She was the focus of jubilation. Her client Carl Williams was rapidly building a reputation for criminal grandeur. He was on stage beside her, deferring to her banter.

Roberta Williams was miffed by the ease with which Gobbo stole the attention. She felt Gobbo overwhelmed her daughter’s event.

Gobbo was by then a pseudo member of Williams’s crew, a fixture at lunch and dinner meetings, some at the fast-food restaurants Williams preferred.

Gobbo had met Williams and his father George after Tony Mokbel pointed out Carl in Port Phillip Prison in 2002. She would go on to represent both father and son on various charges between 2003 and 2005. She met them for coffees, she later said, though she did not frequent nightclubs with Carl as other lawyers did.

Williams trusted Gobbo, even if his wife didn’t. As Roberta Williams now describes it, Gobbo just materialised one day and ensconced herself.

Gobbo acted like one of the boys, and the boys didn’t betray Carl. Gobbo’s role was to help him stay out of jail. Why would he suspect that she was actually trying to put him in jail?

Gobbo represented Carl Williams. And Tony Mokbel. And Mokbel’s crew members. She advised Mick Gatto. And Faruk Orman, the alleged getaway driver in the shooting of Victor Peirce. She was also close to police officers such as Stephen Campbell and Paul Dale.

She was playing all sides: the cops and the crims, and the lawyers who represented the glue between them.

She knew all of the Gangland players, good and bad. She chortled at their jokes, babysat their kids, and woke up next to them.

And they didn’t know her at all. No one did.

Least of all herself.

TOMORROW: INSIDE THE MIND OF NICOLA GOBBO. Exclusive Lawyer X extract only in the SUNDAY HERALD SUN

LAWYER X: INSIDE AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST GANGLAND SCANDAL

Explosive new revelations and exclusive extracts from gripping new book Lawyer X, by Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon, only in your HERALD SUN this weekend.

Lawyer X, the story of how one woman played off police and criminals, is published by HarperCollins Australia on September 7. SPECIAL OFFER: For a limited time, enter the code LAWYER at checkout at booktopia.com.au to receive a 30% discount off the RRP. Offer ends midnight AEST Sunday 6 September.

Live online Q&A with authors Dowsley and Carlyon, hosted by Sky News’ Peter Stefanovic, on their battle to expose the truth. Send questions to ask.lawyerx@news.com.au and watch at facebook.com/TrueCrimeAustralia/ 6:30pm AEST, Sept 9.

Watch Peter Stefanovic’s compelling two-part documentary Lawyer X: The Untold Story on Sky News at 8pm AEST, Sept 12 & 19.