How police went on trail of assassins who shot Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro
CARL Williams and the hitman he hired to kill Jason Moran were prime suspects almost as soon as the shots were fired.
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CARL Williams and the hitman he hired to kill Jason Moran were prime suspects almost as soon as the shots were fired.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the murder of Moran and his mate, Pasquale Barbaro -- a turning point in the gangland warfare that gripped Melbourne.
They were shot dead, in front of a van full of children, at an Auskick junior football clinic at Cross Keys Reserve, North Essendon.
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Rowland Legg, a homicide squad senior sergeant, was at home when he received a phone call at 11.30am.
Mr Legg told the Herald Sun the scene inside Moran's Mitsubishi van was "messy''.
"There was relief and astonishment that the children in the back of the van were totally physically unharmed,''
Mr Legg said.
He said that within hours, intelligence was received that a man known as The Runner was responsible.
His long criminal history was marked by prison escapes and armed robberies in which he fled on foot, rather than in a getaway car. At the Cross Keys, the killer had shown a good turn of speed to outrun a pursuing off-duty police officer.
"There was information coming in that he (The Runner) might be the one,'' Mr Legg said.
The Runner was known to be extremely close to Williams, who years earlier had been shot in the stomach during a confrontation with the Moran brothers.
"Obviously, we were thinking pretty strongly of the Williams camp,'' Mr Legg said. ``(But) you've got to eliminate other possibilities.
"You could not exclude the possibility someone would take advantage of that to carry out their own vendetta. It (the conflict) was common knowledge.''
Williams and The Runner were interviewed within days but declined to talk. Two breakthroughs later brought them undone.
One came from grainy black-and-white CCTV footage from the back of the Cross Keys Hotel, which was analysed over many hours.
It showed a white van seemingly being used to case the area, and later dropping off someone police were to conclude was the gunman.
"A few very committed homicide squad detectives nearly went dizzy staring at the screen,'' Mr Legg said.
"They went over it and over it and over it.''
The second breakthrough came when call records from a pay phone outside 291 Moreland Rd were analysed.
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On the day before the shooting, that infrequently used phone, 2km from the crime scene, had an unusual level of calls in a short space of time. There were multiple calls to Williams, one to an associate of The Runner, and others to a business in the city and a home in the northern suburbs.
"All this was in a block which suggested that the same person or people were making the calls. We surmised they were planning, making final calls,'' Mr Legg said.
A visit to the northern suburbs property revealed the caller was a violent career criminal from the southeastern suburbs, who it was established owned the same kind of white van captured on CCTV.
This man was to become known as The Driver -- and investigators were on their way.
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