How Bert Wrout was shot, Lewis Moran executed during gangland war
THE shooter raised his gun and declared, “Got you old man”. By the time a blood-soaked Bert Wrout fell, the gun was empty and Lewis Moran lay dead. But as Wrout tells, he wasn’t going down without a fight.
Melbourne
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THE look on Lewis Moran’s face said it all.
Standing at his usual corner of the main bar at the Brunswick Club, his back against the wall, Moran had ended a mobile phone call.
He turned to his drinking partner Bert Wrout, a look of terror in his usual hangdog eyes.
Whatever that last message was, according to Wrout, Moran knew it meant a storm was coming.
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His death knell had just tolled.
“I didn’t need any words. I knew we were in trouble,” Wrout said while recollecting the Brunswick Club shooting 10 years after the event.
“I knew (because of) Lewis’s expression. I turned to pick up my change off the bar. Lewis’s evil hands tried to pick up everybody else’s change, so that slowed him up a bit.
“As I’m picking up my change I heard ‘bang, bang, bang, bang’ — the thump of boots on the floor.”
Those boots belonged to two gunmen working for cross-town drug rival Carl Williams; a one-time Moran family errand boy turned vengeful paranoid enemy.
By that stage of Melbourne’s gangland war, Lewis Moran’s stepson Mark, his son Jason, and several of his allies, such as Graham “The Munster” Kinniburgh, had all been gunned down.
According to Wrout, Williams had made it quite clear that Lewis, and anyone with him, was next.
Wrout remembers his and Moran’s pervading attitude at the time.
“Lewis and I both lived by routine,” he said.
“We were not going to be bluffed or frightened by s---men.”
Williams had often phoned the Laurel Hotel and threatened to turn up there and shoot Moran and his pals, Wrout said.
But that last call to Moran on his mobile phone at the Brunswick Club — the call that reportedly instilled fear — did not come from Carl Williams.
According to Wrout, it came from a Moran insider verifying Moran’s location for the hit team.
That is Wrout’s theory.
Wrout has never told police who he reckons made the call.
Aged 63 back then, Wrout was drinking alongside Moran at their usual spot at the Brunswick Club, on Sydney Rd.
Moran, 58, was a permanent fixture there between set times.
“Yes, he used to attend regularly,” club gaming manager Sandra Sugars would tell the Supreme Court.
“He didn’t always come with Bert. He sometimes came on his own or met other friends.”
Moran would usually arrive about 5.30pm and drink until around 8.30.
On the night of March 31, 2004, Moran and Wrout arrived together.
They had only recently reconciled, according to Wrout, after Moran dobbed him in as the boss of their drug syndicate in an effort to get bail.
“Lewis left me in the boob,” Wrout said.
“I went there (to the club with Lewis) through a sense of duty and ethics and honour and all that sort of thing.”
Both men were on bail in March 2004, meaning they were reluctant to carry firearms.
Being pinched with guns would have meant a breach of bail conditions.
“That was a worry (not being armed) because we knew we were walking targets,” Wrout said.
One week earlier, Carlton businessman Mick Gatto, a friend of the Morans, had shot Williams’ close friend Andrew Veniamin dead in self-defence during a wrestle over a revolver in a restaurant corridor.
Veniamin, a hot-headed gunman, had pulled a .38 Smith & Wesson.
On March 30 (the day before the Brunswick Club hit), Veniamin was buried after an open-coffin funeral — morticians having restored his face and neck.
Williams had kickstarted the Lewis Moran kill plan several days before Veniamin’s death.
Williams’ first move was to contact a devious gangland figure, whom we shall call “The Rogue” for legal reasons.
The Rogue was offered $150,000 to do the job.
“Carl asked me how I stood with the Carlton Crew,” he said in a tendered police statement.
“It was common knowledge that I fell out with them. Carl mentioned that we had common enemies: Lewis Moran was one of them.
“The reason Carl approached me was because he considered we had mutual enemies and his gang were too hot at that stage to get close to Lewis Moran — that’s why he needed an outsider.
“There were so many people that were going down (getting shot) and I really didn’t know how Carl could think he could trust me. At that stage I did say to him, ‘Look, I’m not interested.’
“I told Carl I would contact him if I found somebody that was interested. Carl said in a joking manner, ‘Don’t wait too long’.”
Williams told The Rogue about Lewis Moran’s movements.
“He told me (Moran) was virtually a creature of habit and drank at the Brunswick Club hotel every night through the week,” The Rogue said in the Supreme Court.
“He more or less filled me in on Lewis Moran’s routine.”
In court, The Rogue said he planned to make inquiries about any contract Moran may have put on him.
“I think I did say that if I found out it’s true I’d rather get paid for doing it (killing Lewis Moran) than doing it for nothing,” he told the court.
The Rogue phoned Moran at the club and inquired if there was “bad blood” between them.
“The conversation wasn’t a friendly one,” The Rogue told the court.
In his police statement he said: “I told him who I was and I asked him whether we had a problem that we needed to discuss. He told me to get f---ed.”
With those words, Lewis Moran signed his own death warrant.
The Rogue: “I said to myself, ‘That’s it, I’ve made up my mind.’ I was going to go ahead with the contract.”
A day or two later The Rogue met with Williams again, and told him the Moran job was “a goer”.
He pulled on two gunmen for the job.
We shall call them “Shooter 1” and “Shooter 2”, again for legal reasons.
The trio did some surveillance work on Moran.
“I was satisfied that it wasn’t going to be very difficult to carry out the killing,” The Rogue said in his tendered statement.
In court he added: “My thoughts at that time were to go through the front door of the club. One man would execute Moran while the other man stood at the door and watched that shooter’s back.”
The Rogue was to act as driver.
A date was yet to be decided.
On March 23, Gatto shot Venimain dead in self-defence.
“(Because of this) I was concerned about surveillance on all notorious underworld figures and I did contact Carl Williams,” The Rogue said in his statement.
“He said something along the lines that ‘that thing is still sweet’. By this I understood him to tell me to go ahead with the job on Lewis Moran.
“He seemed very incensed. I think this was because of Benji (Veniamin) being killed.”
In court he added: “I believe Carl Williams wanted it (the Lewis Moran murder) to be a message in relation to a payback for Veniamin.”
According to The Rogue, he decided to carry out the Moran hit around the time of Veniamin’s funeral.
“Because of Benji’s death,” he stated, “the police would have had a lot more interest in the underworld. I believe most of the interest would have been on Carl Williams and his crew.”
The Rogue drove his two-man team to the Brunswick Club about 6.30pm on March 31.
“(Shooter 2) took the (9mm handgun) and put it down the front of his pants,” The Rogue told investigators.
“(Shooter 1) took the .357 and put it down the front of his pants. He put the jacket on. It was dark coloured. He put the shotgun underneath the jacket … I stayed with the car.”
Pulling down balaclavas, the gunmen stormed the pub.
Wrout heard them enter; their boots were loud against the tiles.
Shooter 1 went straight for Moran, standing in his normal spot.
“We’re off here,” he quipped.
“Moran was clearly concerned something of this nature may have occurred,” Supreme Court judge Betty King would later say.
“He had in fact been warned by the police on a number of occasions that his life was at risk in this gangland war, but chose to live his life in the manner that he did.”
Moran proved a hapless target.
“I turned around and the first bloke barges his way through us, knocks me (out of the way) ... and sticks a shotty in Lewis’s groin,” Wrout told the Sunday Herald Sun.
“Lewis went to water then. Started to f---ing cry … He gave up like a pricked balloon.”
Moran ran for his life down a corridor.
Shooter 1 chased him.
Standing by the doorway, Shooter 2 raised his handgun and told Wrout: “Got you old man.”
One thought ran through Wrout’s mind: “Oh s---, I’m off here.”
But he wasn’t going to go down without some sort of a fight; something more than Moran had shown.
“(I wasn’t) taking any notice of where Lewis had gone.”
Wrout tried to kick at the second gunman.
In response, Shooter 2 let one round go.
It hit Wrout in the arm; the bullet shearing into his chest where it shattered and did terrible damage to major organs.
Wrout said it hit him “like a freight train”.
“The actual impact — mate you couldn’t believe it. It didn’t hurt. It was just a thump.”
Sandra Sugars heard the shot.
“I thought maybe Bert and Lewis had had an argument or something,” she said in court.
A frantic Moran charged into her.
“Sandra, out of the way!” he shouted.
Shooter 1 caught up.
Moran cowered, his hands up in a futile attempt at self-defence.
Shooter 1’s shotgun jammed so he pulled his powerful handgun.
In the words of Justice King, he “put two bullets into (Moran’s) head at very close range”.
Ms Sugars was close enough to feel the heat of the handgun.
“I shut my eyes to try and get rid of the sound of the bullets,” she said in court.
“The last image that I had of Lewis was his hands above his face.”
Back at the bar, Wrout had his own problems.
His lifeless right arm was hanging by threads.
He was stunned, and bleeding profusely.
“The next thing I know this blokes barking at me,” Wrout said of Shooter 2.
“I thought to myself what the f---’s going on here?”
The gunman wasn’t verbally barking.
He was, instead, firing off more shots.
“I must have been duckin’ and weaving … I don’t know what I was doin’,” Wrout recalled.
“I sort of staggered and hung on to the bar. I didn’t want to go down on the ground.”
By the time a blood-soaked Wrout did fall, Shooter 2’s handgun was empty and, elsewhere, Lewis Moran lay dead.
The gunmen fled.
When paramedics wheeled Wrout past Moran’s body, Wrout asked about his “mate’s” welfare.
“He was dead before he hit the floor,” one of the paramedics replied.
Wrout died on the operating table, but would — obviously — pull through.
After the shootings, the hit team met at a house for a celebratory beer.
“A cold beer,” The Rogue said in court.
The handguns were thrown into the ocean and the shotgun chopped up, he said.
The Rogue told detectives that Williams later rang him and said: “Good one mate. You have 150,000 reasons to smile.”
It was alleged in court that Tony Mokbel later handed The Rogue an envelope containing $140,000, ten thousand short of the agreed payment.
A jury did not believe Mokbel was involved, and acquitted him.
Williams, The Rogue and Shooter 2 pleaded guilty to their involvement and were jailed.
Shooter 1 pleaded not guilty.
A jury found him guilty of murder and intentionally causing serious injury.
“Your role was that of a paid assassin … you were just a gun for hire,” Justice King said.
“How someone else (in the club) was not hit by (Shooter 2’s) shots is nothing short of miraculous.”
Shooter 1 received a lengthy jail term.
Wrout died in 2015 at age 73, 11 years after surviving the brutal hit on his drinking buddy with the shallow pockets and a hangdog face at the height of Melbourne’s gangland war.
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