Carl Williams, Benji Veniamin named by sportsman as killers of missing underworld figure
A FORMER top sportsman has named drug dealer Carl Williams and gunmen Andrew “Benji” Veniamin and Dino Dibra as the killers of a missing underworld figure.
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A FORMER top sportsman has named drug dealer Carl Williams and gunmen Andrew “Benji” Veniamin and Dino Dibra as the killers of a missing underworld figure.
The witness was one of several professional sportsmen cultivated by the late Williams and his criminal connections, notably Tony Mokbel.
He often accompanied Mokbel and Williams on cocaine and vodka-fuelled sex romps with strippers and “escorts” at Melbourne nightclubs, but was shocked to be drawn into a murder plot.
READ MORE: CARL WILLIAMS AND THE ESKY IN THE BOOT MURDER
It happened in late September or early October 1999, days after the still unsolved gangland murder of crooked “businessman” Dimitrios Belias, who was shot dead in a St Kilda Rd carpark. Five days after Belias was shot in the head by a cool killer whom police now suspect of involvement in a string of unsolved crimes, a Belias associate made a statement to homicide detectives.
The seasoned criminal was wary of naming suspects for the Belias killing, but that did not buy his safety. Within hours or days of leaving the St Kilda Rd police complex, the criminal vanished. His name was Milorad Dapcevic, then 47.
For 15 years, the official line was that Dapcevic had probably left the country. But police decided last year to investigate, conceding he might have been murdered.
The Sunday Herald Sun can today reveal that Williams, Veniamin and Dibra — all since murdered in the gangland war — disposed of a man’s body the same month that Dapcevic disappeared.
The former sportsman unwittingly accompanied Williams, Veniamin and Dibra on a ghoulish car trip to bury a body near a lonely beach. He believes the body was that of Dapcevic.
If the witness is correct, it was Williams’s first known involvement in a gangland murder.
Williams told the witness the victim’s name, which he recalls as “Croatian” and starting with D. The witness knew of the victim as an associate of Belias in “the St Kilda crew”, involved in drug trafficking.
The witness was shaken to discover that the real purpose of “a night out” with Williams was to bury a dismembered body hidden in the car boot.
He described in detail the events of that Sunday evening when Williams and the two young gunmen picked him up from St Kilda and headed to the Mornington Peninsula. Police do not have any evidence to either support or dismiss the witness’s account.
Information received from overseas law agencies suggests a man who might match Dapcevic’s description left Australia using false documents in 2002, headed for Europe.
Dapcevic, who would be 62 now, belonged to a family from Montenegro near Croatia.
Det Sen-Sgt Mark Burnett of the armed crime unit said this week that investigators were not aware of links between the Williams camp and organised crime figures that police suspect killed Belias.
Dapcevic “could have met foul play” he said, but equally could have fled because he feared Belias’s killers or because he faced outstanding drug charges in NSW.