Jason Moran murder shocked Melbourne 20 years ago
Twenty years ago, homicide detective Rowland Legg arrived at a blood-spattered van in an Essendon park and one of the most horrific murder scenes in his 30 years on the job.
Andrew Rule
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Not everything a crook tells police is reliable but when the insider codenamed “Mr Thomas” told detectives secret details of the vendetta that eradicated the Morans, it had the ring of truth.
“Mr Thomas” was the legal alias for the man who supplied the shotgun used to kill Jason Moran and his friend Pasquale Barbaro 20 years ago this weekend.
It was the worst of the series of underworld murders that from that moment had to be seen as full-scale war.
If Moran was still alive after two blasts of buckshot at point blank range, he wasn’t after the shooter dropped the sawn-off 12-gauge gun, pulled a revolver and shot him three times in the head.
The shotgun’s deadly spread — nine lead slugs in each cartridge, all the size of a .22 bullet — had killed Moran’s friend Pasquale “Little Pat” Barbaro as Moran’s body slumped over the wheel of a borrowed van parked between the Cross Keys hotel and the local football oval.
When “Mr Thomas” was arrested the following year, after the shooter and the getaway driver, he made a statement that confirmed what investigators suspected even before the Cross Keys outrage: a rival was out to exterminate the Morans.
This was Carl Williams, a once pudgy teenage burglar who’d risen from pinching video players to become a player in the party-drug racket after the overdue arrest of drug supremo John William Higgs in the late 1990s.
“Mr Thomas” was a prosperous crook who navigated the treacherous waters between established criminal clans such as the Carlton Crew and Morans on one side and irrational young gunmen in the Sunshine Crew on the other, a group whose aggression was fuelled by greed, hatred, violence and drugs.
All this was swirling in the background when “Mr Thomas” made a key statement to Purana taskforce detectives the year after the Cross Keys hit.
“Carl was totally obsessed with getting back at the Morans,” he stated.
“He wanted both Mark and Jason dead, along with their father Lewis.”
Williams was doing “everything he could to gather information about the Morans and their movements,” he told detectives assigned too late to stop the war but by this time nailing the main players.
“Mr Thomas” had a rare insight into the shifting loyalties of shifty people on both sides of the war that Williams had plotted since the day the Morans started something they couldn’t finish in a suburban park on October 13, 1999, Williams’s 29th birthday.
That was, of course, the legendary confrontation between the brash upstart and the Moran boys, half brothers Mark and Jason, seen in certain circles as criminal royalty. The meeting with Williams was to settle a dispute over a pill press and $400,000 worth of amphetamines.
The rules were that neither side was to come armed but Jason Moran had a hidden .22 “derringer” pistol. When the argument got heated he pulled the pistol and, despite being urged by brother Mark to shoot Williams “in the head,” he shot him in the stomach.
The meeting was over, the war just beginning.
Williams walked home bleeding, saved from the tiny bullet by a layer of belly fat. He later told police he didn’t know how he’d come to be shot. But from that moment he plotted revenge.
“Mr Thomas” knew that some of those who’d supplied information to Williams’ side were in the Moran camp.
Reasons for this casual treachery varied but Williams had not risen without standing on toes: he’d “stolen” his wife Roberta from a rival and had a bad (and ultimately fatal) habit of not paying big money he promised for “work” done. Those he dudded could hardly take him to the small claims tribunal.
Despite the criminal bravado both sides put on, each was paranoid. Williams had Mark Moran killed first (in 2000) because, underneath his calm exterior, Mark was more likely to carry out a revenge attack than Jason, who wasn’t a stone cold killer despite his menace and volatility.
In fact, those who knew Jason as a family man recalled him as impulsively generous and sometimes kind. He once bought and fitted a battery to a poor migrant housekeeper’s rattletrap car so she could get home to her young daughter in time.
Williams had good reason to believe the Morans were out to kill him. Once Mark was shot dead outside his luxurious period house in Aberfeldie on June 15, 2000, the lines were drawn: either Williams or Jason would die violently. In the end, of course, both would.
Dino Dibra, one of the Sunshine Crew that included the doomed Andrew “Benji” Veniamin and Paul Kallipolitis, supplied guns to “Mr Thomas” for Williams to arm his mercenaries — the shooter and the driver.
According to “Mr Thomas”, Dibra brought two shotguns. One was an old-fashioned “side by side” model, the other a modern “under and over.”
“I decided to keep the newer gun (the under and over) and cut the older one for Carl,” the insider told police. He sawed off the barrels in an engineering shop in Tullamarine and kept the under-and-over at home.
But, later, he would also cut that one down, too. And pass it on.
That was the sawn-off that veteran homicide detective Det. Sgt. Rowland Legg found next to the blood-spattered blue van in which Jason Moran and his friend Pasquale Barbaro died on that overcast morning on June 21, 2003, the third Saturday of winter.
Rowland Legg was at home when the call came around 11.30am about a double shooting at Essendon.
Legg had investigated scores of homicides in his seven years with the squad in what would become a 15-year stint. His cases included the disappearance and death of toddler Jayden Leskie at Moe in 1997.
The Cross Keys scene had been sealed so he methodically called his crew and ballistics, photographic and forensic officers then picked up a fellow detective and headed for Essendon.
On the way he got a call saying one of the victims was Jason Moran. It was news but hardly a surprise.
“We were aware,” Legg recalls drily, “that Jason’s brother had been killed previously and that Carl Williams had been shot … by Jason and Mark Moran.”
The Cross Keys park between Strathmore rail station and Moonee Ponds Creek is a peaceful suburban setting scarred by a crime as brutal as something in Miami or Mexico.
The park has changed in 20 years since that bloodstained day, but Legg, now retired, recalls details of one of the most horrific scenes he saw in more than 30 years in “the job”.
The van’s driver side window was blown apart, the windscreen splattered from inside with blood and body matter. The victims’ upper bodies and heads were mutilated by the close range shots.
When experts opened the shotgun they saw what did the damage: two empty SG shells, “buckshot” designed to stop heavyweight targets.
SG cartridges are murderous at close range, which is why police hunting dangerous fugitives like serial cop shooter Pavel “Mad Max” Marinof loaded police shotguns with them. They could blow a hole through glass, body panels or car seats.
What horrified Legg and his crew was that the shooting happened with the victims sitting in the front seat of a people mover with 10 small children in the back, including Moran’s six-year-old twins, Christian and Memphis.
No one publicly speculated whether Moran thought that being with young children shielded him temporarily from an attempted hit, but it’s true that in his own circles no “good crook” would breach the code of behaviour that protects children.
If that’s what Moran believed, it got him killed. Williams routinely used hitmen who ignored the “old school” code that painters and dockers observed. Williams’ shooter and his driver played by different rules.
After the execution, the hitman had run off across the footbridge over Moonee Ponds Creek. An off-duty policeman gamely followed but was lucky to be outdistanced, as he was unarmed and the shooter still had the revolver. The shooter jogged around two corners and vanished, probably picked up by the van.
Afterwards, police searchers found a balaclava in a nearby street — but it was later proven to be unconnected, proof it doesn’t pay to leap to conclusions. But other investigations bore fruit.
The nearby hotel’s security footage was poor quality, but detectives who pored over it that night identified a white van dropping off the shooter. That van had been in a side street earlier while its occupants spied on Moran watching the kids’ football.
The patient Legg and his crew set other lines. They were especially interested in any unusual use of pay phones anywhere near the crime scene.
Records from telephone boxes revealed one of interest at 291 Moreland Rd, 2km away. It was barely used from one week to the next but the day before the Moran hit, someone had made a bunch of calls there within a few minutes. Several were to Carl Williams, one to a city business, one to a northern suburbs house.
The war went on, ramping up pressure on police command to catch up and end the mayhem. A month after the Cross Keys outrage, kickboxer Willie Thompson was shot dead outside a Chadstone gym.
Tracing and cross checking telephone box calls led investigators to a southern suburbs house where there were two vehicles. One was a white Toyota van matching the Cross Keys getaway car.
This was the breakthrough moment that would eventually end Carl Williams’ war. But it would take many more steps before the man who called himself “The Premier” would finally face the consequences.
The key was to monitor the white van and those who handled it. One of Legg’s detectives started walking his toddler’s pram past the address every day. The air wing monitored the vehicle and the SOG was on standby in case of any movement.
Technical experts monitored telephones. Surveillance experts followed the shooter. Legg noted that by October the shooter was regularly driving around the Prahran and South Yarra area as if reconnoitring another hit — but no one knew who.
One day that month the driver and shooter met in a northern suburb, too wary to talk “business” on telephones. Legg’s team sensed the looming hit was close. But then police politics got in the way of their so-far impeccable investigation.
On October 17, Legg was ordered to take his crew to northeastern Victoria to investigate the presumed murder of a small boy in a country town.
When he protested he was in the middle of solving the Moran-Barbaro case, and maybe Willie Thompson’s murder as well, he was told the new Purana taskforce would take over those shootings, and that his homicide detective, Stuart Bateson, was being seconded to Purana.
Legg was pleased for Bateson but disappointed otherwise. Because, he says, “We’d been kicking goals and … we were sure another shooting was proposed.”
He was right. On October 25, he was at Myrtleford in northeast Victoria when Bateson called him: suspiciously wealthy “hot dog vendor” Michael Marshall had been shot dead in front of his little son outside their South Yarra house.
The target’s identity was a mild surprise but the shooting was totally expected.
Purana would get the credit for the homicide crew’s months of painstaking work. But the big picture was that the law had caught up with the outlaws.
The shooter and the driver were grabbed for the Marshall shooting and began to talk. Carl Williams, unwisely, had cheated them.
Williams’ delusion that he was untouchable evaporated in late 2003 when he was arrested.
In 2007 he was sentenced to 35 years which turned into a death sentence. His cellmate Matthew Johnson bashed him to death in April 2010.
In the decade since Williams had been wounded in the belly, more than a dozen people had died violently, most on his orders.
Hear Andrew Rule examine the case on Life and Crimes. It’s first and ad-free on Apple Podcasts with a Crime X subscription.
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