Andrew Rule: The weird and wonderful relationship of crims and cash
Most criminals aren’t too smart, so when you mix them with large amounts of cold hard cash, you’ll likely get some hilarious results, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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Everyone has seen cash trickle away. It can also literally shrink. A few years before he was shot dead in the Brunswick Club, that cunning old gangster Lewis Moran found that out the hard way after he hid a bundle of banknotes in a microwave oven which someone later foolishly used for cooking.
The hot money came out shrivelled to half size. This would have been a severe financial setback if Moran hadn’t cultivated a friendly Sydney bank manager who replaced the “damaged” notes with nice, new ones.
It was a far better result than for the fearsome armed robber sometimes known as “The General”. Regular readers will recall the story that he reputedly planted a massive cash haul on his property near Broadford just in time for the Black Saturday fires.
The cash was sealed in a plastic plumbing pipe and well-buried but the fire burned so hot it melted the lot. A witness swears that when the hard man dug it up, he was in tears.
But there are other sorts of cash shrinkage. Such as what happened the day a horse trainer was driving in country Victoria, minding his own business, when a police car stopped him. Business must have been extremely good, because when the police checked the boot, they found several Mumm champagne boxes.
When they opened the boxes they found not French bubbly but a huge amount of cash. Even in the freewheeling 1980s, it seemed extravagant to be carrying around more than $300,000, the equivalent of more than $5 million in today’s real estate market.
The exact sum in the car is a mystery. But the horse trainer, who insisted he could account for it through a big month on the punt, later instructed lawyers there was $355,000 in the champagne boxes. That seems a precise amount but it’s possible he got it wrong. Right or wrong, by the time the boxes made it to court, according to well-placed sources, the cash stash had shrunk to exactly $305,000. Allegedly.
The trainer and his “punter”, a colourful Greek identity with plenty of form, were charged with the offence that roughly translates as having a carload of cash they couldn’t legally account for. But it turns out they could, because the case was tossed out in a matter of minutes.
Their problems weren’t over; a tax man lurking outside court seized the cash. The wheels of due process are slow but someone eventually must have produced betting records that explained away the dough’s murky origin. Because many months later the Greek received a cheque from the Tax Office for the $305,000, which delighted him far more than a bag of banknotes.
The Greek cashed the cheque then had it framed. He was even more delighted later, to receive another cheque for $27,000 “interest”, which he handed to his lawyers for their good work. Little more was said about the 50 grand that either had or hadn’t fallen between the cracks, depending on who tells the story.
It goes to show that where there is cash there are crooks and cops and lawyers. And sometimes racing identities. Not to mention Greeks.
The late Carl Williams, for instance, was always on the lookout for a way to clean black money, a subject his mate Tony Mokbel spent a lot of time studying.
Mokbel enjoyed washing dirty money at the track, where he rigged races with varying success. But he had more reliable ways, such as setting up patsies in trendy clothing stores, then pumping black cash through the till, cooking the books to fatten up the business ready for resale.
Williams the former supermarket shelf stacker, was less sophisticated than Mokbel the former pizza parlour operator. The chubby drug dealer was at a jockey’s barbecue in a bayside suburb one day and heard the host’s brother talking up a sure-fire share deal. Carl wanted in. The jockey’s brother knew as much about shares as he did about brain surgery, which is why he so confidently tipped Carl’s 50 grand into the scheme, promoted by a dodgy accountant. What could go wrong?
The shares tanked and the $50,000 vanished like a snowflake on the Nullabor. Williams was so deeply unhappy that his jockey mate was worried about protecting his brother from retribution. It seems that 50 large buys a lot of retribution.
The jock did a deal to restore the family honour by “minding” a Tupperware container of something that Williams did not want in his house, or even in the same postcode. And not only because of the smell, which reminded the jockey of wet cement but stronger. Jock didn’t ask what it was but he had a fair idea it was a good idea to stash it high up and not to lose it. He put it on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard.
It is said that opposites attract. The jock’s long-suffering girlfriend was a religious, charitable person who had taken him on to try to reform him. She was so innocent she had pictures of the Virgin Mary on the wall and drove a Honda Accord that Tony Mokbel had given the jockey as a “sling” after Mrs Mokbel decided to upgrade her wheels. The possibility the police had bugged the car might have influenced the decision.
The good-hearted girlfriend wanted to help some recent migrants set up house. She also wanted to declutter. One day when she was home alone, she raided the cupboards and took spare towels and sheets and this useless Tupperware container full of smelly stuff …
When the jock got home he checked the cupboard and felt sick. He hoped it was his girlfriend who had taken Carl’s container, not someone more sinister. But his problem was to find her before she binned it.
She wasn’t answering her phone. He raced out to look for her. He tracked her to a relative’s house in Deer Park, grabbed the keys and opened the Honda’s boot. There was the Tupperware, unopened. He had survived some terrible race falls and savage punters but had never felt more relieved than at that moment.
It would be nice to say everyone lived happily ever after but it wouldn’t be true.
The jockey’s brother is no longer with us. The jockey’s girlfriend eventually decided she had better prospects of converting some less hardened sinner and left him to his life of debauchery. The cash-carrying trainer lives a quiet life but not as quiet as his “punter”, the Greek, who is serving a long terandrewm over a misunderstanding with the authorities about a batch of imported toilet cisterns which happened to contain drug-making chemicals.
And we all know what happened to Carl Williams.