How a Lamborghini led cops to mistake this average Joe for ace crook Michael Sullivan
Joe Taranto was a respectable, hardworking young man with a good job and an exotic Italian car. Little did he know selling the lambo for some extra cash would see him mixed up with Michael Sullivan.
Andrew Rule
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JOE Taranto was a respectable, hardworking young man with a good job but he hankered for an exotic Italian car. An itch he had to scratch.
In 1977 Joe broke out and bought a used Lamborghini Urraco for $17,000, at that time roughly half the price of a modest suburban house.
The “Lambo” was a vivid green, wickedly racy and on weekends Joe would polish it and drive around with the young woman who would become his wife soon after.
The newlyweds bought a house in Mt Eliza and started making other plans. The Lamborghini was beautiful but hardly practical. The money could be used better in other ways, paving the driveway or putting in a pool. Besides, Joe reckoned he could make a profit on the car.
He advertised it on November 8, 1980. He got one bite. The next day a well-dressed man driving a big American car arrived at the Tarantos’ house. He was friendly and confident and introduced himself as Michael Sullivan — which was, surprisingly, his real name.
Joe noticed Sullivan’s stylish clothes and easy manner. He said he was an antiques dealer and that he would bring his wife to see the car and if it passed a mechanical check, he’d buy it.
A lot of “tyre kickers” say things like that and vanish. But three days later Sullivan returned, this time in an Alfa Romeo, with two beautiful women. One was his wife; the other he introduced as his sister-in-law.
After a test drive, Sullivan handed Joe $1000 cash and promised a bank cheque for $21,000 once it passed an inspection. He didn’t haggle. He also mentioned that he’d owned 34 cars in his life, which seemed a lot for one so young.
Deal done and cheque banked, Michael Sullivan drove the Lamborghini away on November 19. He took with him the regulation paperwork, the notices of acquisition and disposal, supposedly to lodge with the authorities.
Joe Taranto had no reason to doubt the buyer wouldn’t do what he’d promised with the papers but one thing seemed odd: Sullivan had not attempted to haggle.
Like every car seller, Joe had set his asking price above what he was prepared to take. He knew the car’s collectable value had risen in the time he’d owned it, as his mechanic had warned him not to take less than $20,000. Sullivan could have knocked $2000 off the asking price in a matter of minutes — but didn’t bother.
The last time Joe saw the Lamborghini was by chance when he drove beside it on the Nepean Highway on Christmas Day five weeks later. He waved to Sullivan, who was at the wheel, and kept driving.
And that was that. Until it wasn’t.
Taranto never thought much more about it until the day 18 months later when he took a strange telephone call at the Dulux headquarters in Mulgrave where he and his wife worked.
The caller identified himself as a policeman, and asked to come and see him. Embarrassed but co-operative, Taranto agreed.
It was May 11, 1982. When ushered into a private meeting room, the detective told him an unsettling story. He said a police taskforce working on a drug-smuggling ring had been watching Joe and his wife Jennifer for a year after they had sold the Lamborghini to Sullivan but had finally concluded they were not involved in any wrongdoing.
The reason he was there, he said, was to take a statement from Taranto that would explain how his name — and certain false addresses — had been used to buy cars subsequently driven by Sullivan and his associates. Sullivan had never transferred the Lamborghini into his own name but had traded it in on a new Rover bought in Taranto’s name, among other devious transactions.
The policeman took down a handwritten statement from Taranto, who signed each page and took a copy home. When he told his wife she immediately said “I told you I was being followed home some nights!”
Jennifer Taranto often worked late shifts at Dulux, and had several times noticed a car in the street outside and headlights behind her on the drive home to Mt Eliza.
One reason for the police’s misplaced interest in her was that Jennifer drove a car she had “inherited” in a divorce and still registered in someone else’s name.
Joe Taranto wasn’t happy that Sullivan had used his name to lay a false trail and he realised that Sullivan was headed to jail. But he was too busy with work and home life to follow the case, and missed the fact that Sullivan was half of a criminal partnership with dashing crook David McMillan. The pair had been arrested with a Thai national, Supahaus Chowdury, in early 1982 and jailed after a marathon trial.
The Tarantos were just innocent bit players in a huge “joint task force” investigation named Operation Aries. In the end, their evidence about Sullivan’s car dealings was not needed.
Operation Aries had been triggered by an alert retired policeman who noticed that his young neighbours in a bayside suburb showed signs of sudden and conspicuous wealth, especially cars, were often absent and yet showed no signs of employment.
Suspicions hardened after undercover police started to watch and listen. It became clear that McMillan, rogue former Caulfield Grammar student, was fabricating dozens of false passports and bank accounts to run multiple international drug couriers the way a conductor works an orchestra.
Michael Sullivan was McMillan’s main ally, although many other players were involved, in Australia and Thailand and elsewhere.
McMillan always seemed headed for jail and disgrace. According to his sister and those who knew him best, underneath the winning charm, calculating brain and granite confidence was a boy who’d habitually taken short cuts by stealing and cheating.
Sullivan was different. The impressive man who’d bought the Lamborghini had, in fact, gone to school at Mordialloc High with one of Taranto’s friends.
He had been an elite schoolboy athlete, a pole vaulter whose coach once said if he hadn’t been injured he would have represented Australia. But when he wrecked a knee so badly that it ended his vaulting career, he used prescription drugs to ease the pain, forming an addiction that grew into a heroin habit.
It didn’t just end badly but in tragedy. Sullivan’s Colombian wife Mary Escolar Castillo, and McMillan’s lover Clelia Vigano, daughter of a famed Melbourne restaurateur, died in a deliberately-lit fire at Fairlea women’s prison weeks after their arrest in 1982.
By then Marie Castillo had a baby, Sean, later raised by various relatives on both sides of the family. That motherless boy lost his father as well when Michael Sullivan died of leukaemia a few years after finishing his sentence.
McMillan has skated from one crisis to another, driven by ego, greed and a destructive taste for his own “product.” His rogue’s progress around the world saw him pull an audacious escape from Thailand’s notorious Klong Prem (“Bangkok Hilton”) in 1996 and then end up in and out of prison in several countries.
Along the way, he has used his near-photographic memory, elegant turn of phrase, ruthless opportunism and careless regard for the truth to create books that have led to dramatised versions of his story being portrayed by actors in television dramas.
It was one of these that Joe Taranto happened to watch just before Christmas three weeks ago. Based partly on McMillan’s book Escape, it is called The Man Who Got Away.
The film, of course, portrays McMillan’s partner-in-crime Michael Sullivan. It was only when he saw it that Joe Taranto realised exactly who had bought his precious Lamborghini a lifetime ago.
These days Joe is still respectable but also retired and drives a sensible BMW sedan. He has, of course, one of the best dinner-party stories going around. But if he’d kept the Lambo it would now be worth close to $100,000.
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