Melbourne mobster Mario Condello’s brother, Enzo, spills the beans on infamous sibling
LONG before he was gunned down at his luxury Brighton home during Melbourne’s gangland war, Mario Condello was embroiled in another feud. His brother, Enzo, tells the story.
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My brother Mario was a Tony Soprano character with a law degree long before there was a Tony Soprano — and with all the fictional New Jersey don’s complexities and contradictions ...
MARIO wasn’t your cliched mobster. While, as a solicitor he practised law, he contemptuously broke it again and again.
You can’t get a bigger contradiction than that.
While he was mixing with shady types, he was also fraternising with politicians the likes of former Whitlam immigration minister Al Grassby. I’m still trying to figure him out.
Late in 1979 while Mario and I were in Calabria, Italy, he was a busy man. He was sent, on a false passport, to have talks with an associate of Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar, at one point meeting Escobar himself. He also set up an international $2 million insurance fraud of Australian art prints with connections in Calabria and Naples (a detective who later questioned me over this told me: “Enzo, you’re not as innocent as you look.”)
Back in Victoria, Mario set up a marijuana plantation. He was also involved in arson, protection rackets, money-laundering, illegal gambling and loansharking. And now drugs.
For months after we returned from Italy, I wondered what was in store. I didn’t know much about his “Calabrian horticulture” venture in Buangor, near Ararat, until one day it hit home with the force of a freight train.
I was in the back yard when the phone rang. My father answered and uttered a couple of words of alarm, the blood draining from his face. “Mario’s in terrible trouble,” he told me. “People have abducted him and are holding him at gunpoint.’’ My stomach fell as I imagined the worst. People who think they are fearless have obviously never stepped into a gangland war.
My dad and I went to the Moreland Hotel in Coburg where we were to meet a man called “Joe” who had also been detained at the house but was later released. I wondered why he had been allowed to leave but not Mario. Joe explained that Mario had been lured to a house in Thomastown by a drug dealer called “Rob”, the same man who sold the drugs harvested from the Ararat plantation. Several months earlier it had been raided by police but Rob had managed to escape. Together, Mario and Rob dealt in hashish, cannabis and a little cocaine. They even used to deal late at night outside the Melbourne University law library, thinking there would be no police detection there.
My father and I were in a terrible panic. Joe told us Rob wanted to punish Mario over counterfeit $50 notes that he thought (wrongly) Mario was giving him to buy drugs. If the drug suppliers cottoned on they were being paid in dud notes, Rob figured his life was in danger. He blamed Mario. Where he got this idea from, no one knows. Although Mario later told me that Joe, who knew Rob well, had made a joke about counterfeit money and Rob (a prolific dope smoker) had taken it seriously. In the underworld, even a joke can lead to tragedy.
Rob had two armed associates watching over Mario at the Thomastown house — the very same house Mario was paying the rent on to help look after Rob and his family. Rob, high on marijuana, had Mario tied to a chair while he pistol-whipped and bashed him, demanding Mario reveal the location of the counterfeit money-making plates. Obviously, Rob thought he could make his own $50 notes. There were no plates and no counterfeit notes. Rob was also holding $80,000 cash belonging to Mario, $80,000 he had no intention of handing over.
Soon after, Mario pulled up outside the hotel in a taxi. We rushed outside to see him. He was a scary sight. He was wearing sunglasses. The whole side of his head and face was swollen and bleeding. His clothes were bloodstained.
An underworld war was now imminent. It was surreal and nightmarish.
Mario had been released after 24 hours in order to deliver the counterfeit plates to Rob — or there would be consequences. Adding to Mario’s anger was the fact that Rob’s brother had visited the Thomastown house during his ordeal, swaggering in claiming status as a full-blown drug-dealing accomplice — which he was not.
Mario went to a doctor he knew to get treatment for his facial injuries. I wondered what he would do next. It was obvious Rob wasn’t aware who Mario really was or he wouldn’t have pulled such a stunt. He did not know Mario was not your ordinary, law-abiding (or law-breaking) suburban solicitor.
We could no longer live at our family home in Fitzroy for obvious reasons. Mario, dad, a couple of my friends and I moved to a house further down the street that I was minding. My mother and sister were staying with a relative. I had no choice but to stick it out and help Mario for now.
In any case, Mario had his own crew that he would soon call on. A crew that included the Kane brothers, Brian and Les, heavy gangsters and standover men with links to the notorious Painters and Dockers union.
On the second day in our safe house, an Italian guy turned up. I don’t know who he was. Mario was explaining what had happened with Rob and his brother in Thomastown when suddenly he shouted: “Those two brothers are dead and need to go!” “Those c---s,” I blurted out. “Now Mars, wait a minute! His brother didn’t do much,” the Italian guy said. I saw that Mario was in a fury and would eventually calm down so I didn’t take his killing threats seriously.
It was a shocking dilemma to be in as Rob and his associates were dangerous and Mario wanted revenge — as well as his $80,000. It was surreal to think I might be caught in the crossfire. Here I was. Only three years earlier I was at university studying and wanting to become a writer. Now I was in the thick of an underworld war.
Mario had asked me to go interstate for a while but I refused as I thought it would be deserting him. We had three registered shotguns in the house, more because of paranoia than a plausible chance of being attacked. I thought we’d be pretty safe in the house and didn’t think Rob or his people would want to harm me. Not yet anyway. The police had no idea what was going on. Why would they? We were well under their radar.
One night, a couple of Mario’s friends came to the door. I only caught a fleeting glimpse of them and to this day don’t know who they were. Two other men were waiting in a car outside. Mario turned to me and said: “If something happens to me, just look after our families and say nothing to the cops. Understood?” “Yes,” I replied. I suggested he shouldn’t go himself, but he simply said: “This is my business.” They all got in the car and drove off.
It was the following day or so when something about Rob and his brother appeared in the newspapers and on TV. Men, wearing disguises or balaclavas, had gone to Rob’s brother’s house. Mario later took up the story.
His crew had broken into the house. Rob’s brother told the crew he didn’t know anything, especially not about the $80,000. But they eventually “persuaded” him to give up Rob’s location. They dumped him in front of the emergency department of the local hospital.
They drove on to a motel in Footscray where Rob was thought to be staying. They were going to kill him. When Mario and his crew burst into the room, they found him terrified, cowering in the shower recess. Mario made a last-minute decision not to kill Rob — it wasn’t “justice”. After all, Rob hadn’t killed anyone, only injured and robbed him. Plus there was the matter of the $80,000 — Mario wanted it back.
But Rob didn’t have the $80,000. Mario demanded to know where it was and the crew dragged him to the car at gunpoint. While trying to force him in, a scuffle broke out. Rob managed to break loose and ran for his life. The crew gave chase and fired shots but lost him. He had already escaped police during the raid on the marijuana farm. It seems he was a rat with nine lives.
This feud was small fry, a footnote to what would transpire with Mario’s central involvement in the Melbourne gangland wars of later years.
After the feud with Rob, my father made a prediction. “Mario will either end up in jail, go too far and lose everything or be murdered.’’ He was accurate on all three.
Two years later Rob was arrested by police in NSW and subsequently testified against Mario with indemnity over the plantation, drug trafficking and arson. Mario eventually did six years in jail.
The whole episode had been a nightmare. For months afterwards, I was always looking over my shoulder. And much worse was to come in the years ahead.
Not long ago, a young bloke who hated authority and was at a fork in the road, fished for some advice. I said to him:
“Real men don’t carry guns. They don’t sell drugs. It takes a tough guy to resist selling drugs that end up ruining families and kids. Perhaps your own one day. Can you look at yourself in the mirror if you did? Be a moral tough guy. Don’t get suckered or drawn in as I nearly was. Criminal life is not life. It’s a slow or sudden death. Why bother with something self-destructive when there’s life to be lived? If you don’t want to do it for yourself or for the victims and drug addicts you’re doing an injustice to, then do it for the safety of your parents, brothers, sisters and others you care for. Gangster life is a con, a mirage with fake glamour. This isn’t Hollywood, it’s real life. Real jail. Real death. Guns do not a tough guy make. Violence and crime do not a true man make. You have a conscience, use it.”
Mario told me he understood this late in his life. Too late.
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