Cold case search for the $6m man
POLICE suspect the same people are behind a string of serious crimes spanning at least 26 years. ANDREW RULE and MARK BUTTLER report
Law & Order
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LOCKSMITHS, clockmakers and successful armed robbers have something in common. It’s called precision.
Combine the three and you might have the perfect heist. It happened 20 years ago today, under the famous Nylex clock where Punt Rd bridges the Yarra.
The bad guys were so good that scriptwriters are still recycling versions of the Richmond caper in television dramas nowhere as good as the real thing, even in the snappy dialogue department.
It happened like this: an Armaguard armoured van left Carrum Downs early morning on June 22, 1994. It was just another routine Wednesday. As anyone who worked at the Armaguard office might have known, the van was scheduled to pick up two crates of cash from the Reserve Bank in Collins St at 10am.
The crew did the pick-up on time and the van was heading back to the south-eastern suburbs when everything went wrong. Or right, depending on how you look at it.
No one knew it then but (police now believe) a white utility slipped in behind the van as it trundled from the city, turned into Brunton Ave at Jolimont and skirted the MCG.
The van and its anonymous follower paused at the lights where Richmond station straddles Punt Rd, then turned right and headed south to the freeway entrance next to the Yarra.
In the lull between peak hour and lunch time, the traffic was relatively light, so the Armaguard driver must have been disgusted to find cars banked up in the narrow access lane that leads on to the freeway. For motorists, it was another frustrating set of roadworks that had popped up overnight. For the “men at work” it was the perfect cover. A man with a stop sign was halting traffic while his mates sliced into the bitumen with a concrete saw, making plenty of noise and dust.
That’s when a fellow “worker” calmly stepped up to the van’s back door and opened it with what reporters later described as a “skeleton key” (or maybe two) but which might have been copies of the real thing.
WHEN the door swung open, the guard in the back got a shock and a pistol aimed at his head. At exactly that moment, another robber disarmed and handcuffed the two guards in the front and took over the wheel. Too easy.
So far, everything was running to script — even the dialogue. When the driver’s watch had to be taken off so he could be handcuffed, the crook joked: “Don’t worry, I’m not a thief.” And when another guard complained that the handcuffs were too tight, a robber deadpanned: “Don’t worry, we’ve had these on before — you’ll get used to them.”
So far it had taken barely a minute. The bandits drove the truck a little way and turned left into the backstreets of riverside Richmond — the rats’ nest of laneways, warehouses and dodgy old houses that had been the haunt of the late Dennis Bruce “Mr Death” Allen. Every “good crook” in Melbourne knew those streets as well as Brer Rabbit knew the briar patch. The van wove through the warren and stopped in nearby Walnut St.
The bandits handcuffed the guards to each other and put bags over their heads. Then they unloaded the crates of cash and drove away in a car.
No voices raised, no shots fired. The whole operation was executed with discipline and precision in less than eight minutes, much the way a commando unit or special operations police do an exercise.
What the robbers didn’t know, perhaps, was that the car park near where they left their getaway car was next to a warehouse secretly used by the police’s elite and secretive surveillance unit. In other words, the
heist-masters had grabbed what was then described as “about $2.3 million” in used notes from under the force’s keenest noses.
Twenty years later, the bloodhounds are no closer to their quarry than they were that Wednesday morning.
Or are they?
ALMOST exactly 10 years before the Armaguard job, a hit man silently entered a brown brick house in Kiely Ave, Werribee, probably between midnight and dawn.
It’s clear the intruder was quiet because two people asleep in the house didn’t wake. Which means Maryanna Lanciana was at least spared the terror of knowing she would be killed. The killer shot the 25-year-old wife and mother behind the ear as she slept. It was a ghastly, cold-blooded crime carried out with the nerveless precision of a military operation. Maryanna’s 22-month-old son, Daniel, was asleep in his nursery, which was where his father, “Percy” Lanciana, found him in his cot the next day — July 3, 1984.
Lanciana, first name Pasquale, was a 27-year-old kickboxer, one of six brothers whose migrant parents lived in Seddon, near Footscray. He had not been home the night his wife was murdered because he’d stayed at his parents’ house after working all night.
Normally, he would drive home to Werribee after closing his pizza house, Mr Natural, in Chapel St, Prahran. But this night he filled in for a friend on the door of the Hardware Club night spot until 5am, then went to Seddon.
Lanciana was Australian welterweight kickboxing champion and would channel his grief into training hard for world title shots the following year. At that time, the fighter vowed to more than match the State Government’s $50,000 reward with $55,000 of his own. There have been no takers so far.
It was a chilling end to their suburban marriage. The young martial artist had met Maryanna Pomogacs when she was a Deer Park schoolgirl wanting to learn karate. Lanciana, then 18, was teaching the sport. They had soon become an item, and stayed together ’til death did them part, courtesy of a gunman who came calling for reasons known only to the evil people who arranged it.
For nearly 30 years, the professional murder of that young Werribee housewife has been a mystery, apparently forgotten by all but family and friends and a few conscientious detectives who have long since retired.
This year, something changed.
CRIME investigators aren’t saying much and Maryanna’s still-grieving relatives have been unable to bring themselves to publicly comment.
Police are letting their actions speak for themselves. Early this year they launched Operation Tideland. It means a taskforce has been probing anything that could link Maryanna Lanciana’s murder with at least two other apparent executions and a series of slick robberies — not just the Richmond heist but also a $2 million theft from an Armaguard van at Sunshine Plaza in 2006 and a $100,000 cash consignment stolen at Perth Airport in 2005.
Both thefts happened in intriguing circumstances. The airport cash vanished after baggage handlers dropped it from a trolley between the cargo shed and an aircraft, and the Sunshine sting happened when guards were inexplicably careless or distracted and left their van unguarded just long enough for thieves to strike. It was either a gang of clairvoyants or someone with inside information.
Police don’t believe in clairvoyants or coincidence. But they do believe there’s a link between the thefts and the robbery — and at least another two unsolved underworld murders. They suspect the same people are behind a string of serious crimes spanning at least 26 years, which suggests that at least one suspect is a mature-age career criminal with deadly connections.
Intriguingly, Armaguard now states it lost “$4 million” in the 1994 Richmond robbery.
Either the $2.3 million figure released at first was deliberate misinformation — or the recent $4 million claim is. But if the revised $4 million claim is accurate and added to the other $2 million “jobs”, then investigators are looking for a “Six-million dollar man”, which certainly makes a better headline.
It’s no coincidence police have announced $1 million rewards for each of the three “cold case” murders Operation Tideland is reviewing. But the question remains: what connects the murder of an innocent young mother in her own home with the violent deaths of a crooked property developer named Dimitrios Belias and a brooding bouncer named George Germanos?
It’s unlikely any of the three knew the other — but someone knew (or knew of) all three victims. Someone with the power to have each killed, possibly even by the same “trigger man”.
On the day he died, Belias spent most of the day with one Gregory Smith, described by some as more bodyguard than friend. As a minder, Smith made a good driver. He drove Belias to a series of meetings around Melbourne on September 9, 1999, before leaving about 5.15pm after they had a drink at a Collingwood pub.
Belias then drove himself to Rockman’s Regency Hotel in the city. There, half an hour later, he was parked near the hotel when a colourful identity climbed into his car for a chat.
A calm and polite man whose wide range of acquaintance includes police, he later declined to make a statement on the matter but detectives were able to obtain his version of events.
“In a covertly tape-recorded conversation,” deputy state coroner Iain West later observed of the man, “he told police that while he was in the car, the deceased handed him a diamond simulant, being synthetic moissanite, that he had given the deceased a week earlier.”
Police heard that Belias had been offering the moissanite to potential buyers in the days leading up to his murder, claiming it to be genuine diamond.
Investigators believed that Belias hoped to get big money for the moissanite — which vanished after he was killed, as did other bogus gems in his possession.
After the meeting outside the Regency, Belias was seen sitting in his car talking on his mobile phone outside 594 St Kilda Rd about 6.50pm.
Ten minutes later, in a nearby underground car park, he was shot dead.
Homicide squad detectives interviewed more than 100 people. No one knew anything.
One of those asked his thoughts was Milorad Dapcevic, a close friend of Belias and also a man with a colourful background. Dapcevic made a statement to investigators five days after his mate’s ambush and was not seen again. It was rumoured he, too, had been murdered but investigators this year discovered he was alive and overseas. It seems unlikely he will return for some time.
As part of the investigation, police divers scoured a stretch of the Yarra. It is unclear what was found but they later told the media “an object” had been taken for ballistic examination. More significant, police say, is spent ammunition (bullet shells) and other items found at a Strath Creek property after a search linked to the Belias case.
The inquest finding did not nominate who killed Belias, only how it was done.
It outlined how the 38-year-old suffered a single gunshot wound to the back of his head, the bullet exiting through his forehead.
The finding went on to portray the kind of career path which can earn enemies.
“The deceased … worked as a debt collector, although he was also involved in a number of illegitimate businesses that focused on gambling and loan scams,” the coroner wrote.
“He was a very heavy gambler with a past history of failed business ventures, association with underworld criminal figures and having criminal convictions for deception offences.”
Belias seemed not to know he was in danger, whereas belligerent bouncer George Germanos feared for his life for weeks.
His sister was later to give the Herald Sun an account of a man who spent his final days waiting for the bullet with his name on it.
“He was on edge. He said we wouldn’t be seeing each other again. I asked, ‘Can I help you?’” the sister said.
“He said, ‘It’s too late. You can’t do anything’. He was living on borrowed time. He said to me he’d been betrayed. He said, ‘My time’s up and I’ll see you on the other side. Pray for my soul’.”
The end came on the night of March 22, 2001, in Inverness Park in Armadale.
The one-time champion powerlifter was lured to the park for what he sensed was a high-risk rendezvous. He parked 50m from the park between 10.30 and 11pm.
He left his cigarettes, lighter and watch in the car then walked towards a park bench next to a playground.
The killer was waiting, probably hiding under a bush near the entrance.
Germanos walked into the dimly lit park then turned when something attracted his attention. One shot hit him in the head, the other in the chest.
Such a killing has all the signs of being “drug related” but not everyone thinks so.
The whisper in the underworld was that Germanos the bouncer had savagely bashed the wrong punter behind a St Kilda nightclub five months earlier.
The injured party was reputedly the son of a crook who had connections on both sides of the law.
With $1 million bait dangling over each murder, police hope someone will break ranks. Meanwhile, they are going over clues gathered over 30 years.
They have security footage of a man and a woman who tried to exchange $40,000 of the Richmond robbery proceeds not long after the Armaguard robbery. They also wonder about other angles.
One former detective says he still wonders about a well-known criminal’s “cleanskin” relative who worked for an armoured car company, arranging delivery schedules.
But the real key to the case might be exactly that … the key that opened the armoured car so quickly 20 years ago.
Which specialist locksmith had the knowledge and the nerve to pull off the perfect heist? The answer to that could unlock not just one mystery, but three murders.