On a wild ride with Tony Mokbel

TONY Mokbel was a man who liked to get close to jockeys - and with good reason. His plan was to fix races to launder the drug money he was making.

Tony Mokbel after his luck ran out, arrives in an Athens court after being arrested in Greece in 2008. Picture: AP

CARL Williams introduced the young jockey to Tony Mokbel about 1990, when Carl was a chubby nobody selling hot video recorders around Broadmeadows.

The jockey was a little older than Williams but just as foolhardy: within a couple of years he was up to his neck in a race-fixing racket with "Tony", the big punter with the bottomless buckets of cash.

The jock was Mokbel's middleman with jumps riders, but he says "Tony" didn't limit his rorts to jumping races. Some top flat riders were doing business, too.

They would meet on Saturday nights at the Men's Gallery strip club in Lonsdale St, a place known to the intelligence-gatherers who parked their plain police cars nearby with police signs on the dashboard to deter grey ghosts.

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At that stage, not many detectives knew the chunky Lebanese punter glad-handing a swarm of jockeys.

With Mokbel, "big noting" meant exactly that. He came with rolls of cash - eight grand here, 10 grand there, depending on who was owed what. Sometimes (the jockey said later) Mokbel must have been carrying $100,000 in "slings" for those who helped him back winners.

"The strippers and hookers were around him like seagulls.

For young jockeys it was an intoxicating lifestyle and we thought it would go forever. He would take us to the Top of the Town (brothel) and pay for everyone."

One of the greediest jocks was a Melbourne Cup winner with double-decker addictions. Another was a gun who lost a fortune at Crown's gaming tables and ended up broke. But some jockeys could smell the danger. Patrick Payne was young, but he was a good judge of people as well as horses.

When the middleman tried to steer Payne towards Mokbel, the shrewd boy from Ballarat said: "He's stamped with a danger sign - can't you see it?" The jockey replied, "All I can see is the money!".

Much later he would admit, "I wish I'd listened to Patrick". Instead, he ran errands for Mokbel, whose business plan was to fix races to launder the vast amounts of money generated making and selling drugs.

Mokbel was flying … but still under the radar, apparently. Every trainer and jockey knew of him and by the late 1990s regular racegoers muttered about the "tracksuit gang" hitting the betting ring with bundles of cash big enough to choke a horse, especially a favourite.

In 1998, Mokbel ran his car into the back of a tradesman's ute in the city. When the tradie looked behind him he saw the passenger door open and a small man run off at even time.

He recognised him as a jockey who'd already had a few brushes with the authorities and didn't want another one.

The race rorts worked often enough. Two out of three wins is plenty when you're playing with funny money. One out of three covers expenses.

There was a steeplechase where the leader conveniently drifted out in the closing stage of the race, allowing Mokbel's favourite rider to dart along the inside to land another plunge.

The winning rider admits getting $20,000 for his efforts - and pocketed an extra $5000 he told Mokbel he'd had to pay the selfless rider of the beaten horse.

The fact was, he'd given the other jockey nothing but a slab of beer for his trouble. Jumping jockeys are among the gamest people on the planet but not all are heavy thinkers.

The fix was in as often as not but the rorters didn't always win. To be fair to Mokbel, he enjoyed telling a story against himself.

He once told a Queensland jockey-turned-trainer and a Sydney form analyst (on a car trip to a horse stud) that he'd set up a "one goer" in a hurdle race at a Victorian provincial track.

He said he'd paid every jockey in the race except a novice riding a rank outsider.

The plan unfolded beautifully right up until the shadows of the post, when the outsider bolted past the field to beat Mokbel's heavily backed "certainty".

Mokbel laughed a lot about that. He could afford to. His pet jockey had a purple patch in the first part of the new decade, riding dozens of winners - "not all organised, either" - and reckons Mokbel backed them all. But by the mid-2000s he was finished and Mokbel wasn't far behind.

HE was confident he could handle a cocaine importation charge. But when told he was under investigation for paying contract killers, the man who by then owned strings of shops, a pub and a horse stud started to lose his nerve.

Police wondered about the existence of a relationship with gangland lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, whose exotic habits included keeping a pet snake in her chambers, an eccentricity that caused rude reporters to dub her "the hyphen with the python".

Mokbel, meanwhile, wondered about his future - or lack of it - if he hung around until there was a watertight murder brief against him.

So he jumped bail and vanished in March 2006. We now know he holed up in the serenity of Bonnie Doon (where he managed to impregnate his girlfriend, Danielle McGuire) before being driven across Australia disguised as a deaf mute, then hid on a secretly customised yacht that spirited him to Greece.

The tale of Mokbel's time on the run and eventual recapture will be told in a TV series in the new year, not to mention a couple of books out before then - one written by this newspaper's own Liam Houlihan.

But the jockey's story has not been told yet. Nor have the cash-laundering rorts Mokbel pioneered been completely unravelled.

One supposed large-scale "systems" punter rumoured to have lost his edge recently had a long spell overseas. It has the smell of when Ponzi schemer and high-priced yearling buyer Mike Bastion had a sudden fall from grace (and a six-storey building) when Mokbel was flying high in 2000.

Bastion was a good-time playboy whose last party trick was to make $35 million of other people's money vanish. Now some worried "investors" wonder if history could repeat itself.

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