Riddled with bullets, bikie Toby Mitchell ran and lived. To this day, he’s not talking
This is the inside story of how shot-up bikie Toby Mitchell incredibly survived a very public hit a decade ago. If he knows who tried to murder him, he’s still not saying.
Victoria
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Toby Mitchell was having a coffee with gym owner and friend Tony Doherty when the bullet struck him straight in the chest.
It snapped him straight out of a hangover he had been nursing all day.
Mitchell had just emerged from Doherty’s Gym, next to the Bandidos’ bikie gang clubhouse in Weston St, Brunswick, where he was trying to sweat out the alcohol still in his blood from a boozy weekend.
In true Mitchell style, he had celebrated his birthday by treating himself and a girlfriend to a Japanese spa retreat at the foot of the Dandenong Ranges.
The outlaw had turned 37.
He nearly died two days later, on November 28.
It took about 20 seconds for Mitchell to be shot six times after two gunmen ambushed him.
Their identities have been widely speculated but remain officially unknown.
Even Mitchell could not know for sure who tried to murder him in an underworld hit still unsolved a decade later.
The ambush made him arguably Australia’s most identifiable outlaw bikie and, in Melbourne at least, he joined the ranks of the city’s most infamous.
Like Tony (Mokbel), Alphonse (Gangitano) or Squizzy (Taylor), his first name alone brings with it his reputation.
His would-be assassins wore masks, some say similar to clown masks, as they drove by the Bandido stronghold in search of Mitchell.
Their target wasn’t far away.
A little further along the street, as Mitchell chatted to Doherty, he presented as a sitting duck.
The-then Bandidos national enforcer glimpsed a gunman coming towards him and refused to go down after being rocked by the initial shot to the right side of his chest.
Mitchell’s strength probably saved his life.
He took evasive action and attempted to take cover by rolling behind a car.
Five rapid shots were now hitting him in the back, hip and wrist as he headed towards and cleared a low-fence into the Barkly Square shopping centre carpark.
A second gunman, presumably the getaway driver, got out of the Ford Territory and fired shots without hitting Mitchell and drove off with his accomplice before any nearby Bandido gang members could react.
In the midst of pandemonium, Mitchell was calm.
He walked up to a shocked shopper and told him he had been shot in the wrist and asked if he could take him to hospital.
It was obvious to the stunned bystander, who had heard the shots, Mitchell was riddled with bullets.
On hearing the gunfire, his mate and fellow Bandido, Walker, ran to his aid and lay him on the bitumen.
For between 20 and 30 minutes he held onto him as paramedics were prohibited from entering the open-air carpark until police deemed it safe.
Mitchell was fighting for life.
He had survived the most audacious public hit on an underworld figure since the shooting murder of Lewis Moran at the Brunswick Club Hotel seven years earlier, just a few hundred metres away on Sydney Rd.
At the scene, Acting Supt Stephen Mutton told reporters it was sheer luck that bystanders were not killed.
One of the bullets had hit a passing car with children inside.
“We’ve got a shopping centre here, there are a lot of families doing their normal day-to-day business so it is a great concern to us,” he said.
“Fortunately there’s only been one person injured.”
A mother shopping with her children was stunned.
“At first, we thought it was a car backfiring. People were screaming and running,” she said.
“It was like being in a movie.”
Barkly Square food court attendant Dianne said: “We had women and children on the ground, there were shopping bags everywhere.”
A woman with a blood-smeared singlet was led from the scene.
In the aftermath of the shooting, then Detective Supt Brett Guerin said he believed the shooters intended to kill Mitchell but failed.
“It would appear that that’s the case,’’ he said.
“Driving a stolen car, stolen plates, (they) drove very slowly in front of the gym, got out, shots were fired directly at him, we’re reasonably sure they intended to kill him.’’
But the shooting fell short of a “professional hit’’.
‘’If the mission was to murder Toby Mitchell, it was spectacularly unsuccessful,’’ Supt Guerin said.
The triggermen fled via the neighbouring suburb of Parkville where they set fire to the stolen getaway vehicle.
It was also suspected they dumped their guns in nearby wetlands, but they were never found.
The newly formed Echo taskforce and Armed Crime taskforce quickly identified suspects.
Mitchell spent three months in Royal Melbourne Hospital, some of it in an induced coma.
Among his visitors were his ex-girlfriend and Tony Mokbel’s former de facto, Danielle McGuire, along with a who’s who of Melbourne’s underworld.
Police investigators tried to speak with Mitchell, but to this day he has refused to answer questions.
His liver, which would not stop bleeding, gave doctors problems.
After 30 operations, he emerged from hospital a shadow of his former self.
Mitchell had been taken to hospital a muscular 113kg, but emerged at a comparatively frail 84kg.
Apart from losing a quarter of his body weight, he lost a kidney, his gall bladder and a section of his liver.
And he gained a temporary walking stick.
It would take him years to rebuild his physique with rigorous gym work and the aid of peptides.
His refusal to stop drinking alcohol has got him into drunken fights and he has tread a fine line to avoid being placed on dialysis.
But what has never been established is whether the ambush was a contract hit, or was it personal?
It may have been both.
Before the hit, Mitchell and another then high-ranking senior Bandido, Lee Undy, were aware their lives were under threat.
In the days leading up to the shooting, Mitchell was escorted by Federal Police at Melbourne Airport after authorities became aware he may be confronted by enemies.
Mitchell refused to leave by a side exit and would not change his routine.
The now Mongol bike club Victorian president held a view that he was under police surveillance at the time of his shooting.
Police would investigate one theory linking the shooting to a drug deal gone bad almost a year earlier in a Brunswick Park in December, 2010.
A secret witness told police during a separate investigation a feud began between mafia boss Rocco Arico and Mitchell after the latter allegedly ripped him off in a cocaine deal.
The bitterness erupted when Mitchell was said to have fooled a middleman who wanted to sell him a kilo of the drug for $375,000.
But instead of leaving a bag full of cash, Mitchell, it is alleged, left him with bag filled with lads’ mags.
A hit was ultimately ordered on Mitchell.
A pair of hapless goons even lay in wait outside Mitchell’s Point Cook home in a failed bid to get him.
Then, out of the blue, Mitchell was gunned down on November 28, 2011.
But Arico soon found out it wasn’t his henchmen who fired the bullets.
Gangland figure Sean Sonnet was among the early candidates eliminated as a suspect.
Eventually, two heavy-hitters were at the top of the list – underworld enforcer Gavin ‘’Capable’’ Preston and associate Nabil Maghnie.
Neither man would be charged.
Preston, who has denied involvement in the shooting, had his say in a 2017 posting relayed from his prison cell to Facebook.
“Over the past six years I have continuously been accused by the media of shooting some bloke named Toby Mitchell outside the Bandido Club House in Brunswick,” Preston wrote.
“I just want to set the record straight, I DID NOT SHOOT TOBY. This is just police propaganda regurgitated on mass (sic) by unethical journalists.
“They know if you say something often enough people tend to believe it, so I just wanted to clear that up.’’
Then came a sly dig which clearly indicates some kind of ill-will.
“From what I’ve heard if you weren’t running so fast you might’ve seen who shot ya, then you’d know it wasn’t me. #JustSayin.”
It’s possible some of that rancour is related to Mitchell’s friendship with veteran armed robber Christopher Dean Binse.
Both Binse and Preston had been friendly Bandidos’ members and even had a drink, although not together, at the Brunswick clubhouse.
And both sledged the other to anyone who’d listen resulting in a ban from the clubhouse.
Following the attack on Mitchell, Binse put a vehicle tracker under Preston’s car as part of a plan to find and shoot him.
Preston and Maghnie were arrested months after the Mitchell shooting outside Melbourne Town Hall.
It has been reported that police intervened as they travelled to a restaurant to murder Carlton Crew figure Mick Gatto.
It is an allegation Preston has also denied on social media.
“If I was pulled over by the jacks on my way to kill someone I would’ve been charged with conspiracy to murder. Never been charged with that coz it’s a load of shit. How would the jacks even know what I was about to do? I’m not Chris “Sadass” Binse. I wouldn’t say “OK fellas you got me, I was about to go kill someone”.
If Maghnie was involved, he won’t ever pay.
The feared gunman was shot dead at Epping in January last year as he carried out the kind of standover work that was his stock in trade for years.
Also wounded in the Dalton Rd shootings was one of Maghnie’s mates and his son AJ.
It was the kind of spectacularly public bloodshed in which Mitchell was attacked.
As with the Brunswick ambush, it appears increasingly unlikely that it will ever be solved.
Maghnie became increasingly erratic in the years after the Mitchell shooting and was a person of interest in a number of murder inquiries.
He was regarded as being a close associate of the Comancheros and as someone who would do just about anything for the right money.
“He’d just walk up to people in their driveway and start shooting. Nabil was out of control,” one investigator said.
Preston remains an intriguing ‘old school’ underworld figure.
He has almost served out his time in jail for the 2011 killing of Adam Khoury and is eligible for parole.
Like Mitchell, Preston has survived being ambushed when inmates attacked him with shivs in a Barwon Prison yard.
That attack was linked to another gang he co-founded, the Prisoners of War.
Preston, however, is rumoured to have ditched his old ways for Buddhism, abandoning war for peace.
In 2013, Mitchell was shot again.
He retired as a Bandido the same year but never truly left the bikie scene.
In 2019, Mitchell tried on some new colours – black and white.
The Mongols bikie gang promoted him to state president. In return, he promoted the gang.
HOW TOBY BELIEVED POLICE ALSO WANTED HIM DEAD
A bikie in shock and unfounded rumours can be a dangerous mix.
In the chaos of being shot by a masked hit man on November 28, 2011, bikie Toby Mitchell wrongly became convinced a senior anti-gang police officer wanted him to bleed to death.
As Mitchell, the then Bandido Sgt-at-Arms, lay wounded in a Brunswick car park trying to survive an attempt on his life, an ambulance sat waiting around the corner.
Why? Paramedics will not enter a crime scene until police deem the area safe.
It took about 20-30 minutes for the ambos to get to the wounded Mitchell who had been shot six times in a public underworld hit.
It felt like an eternity to him.
The Bandidos’ blame for the ambulance delay was falsely levelled at a prominent anti-bikie Echo taskforce detective, Sen Sgt Wayne Cheesman, who knew Mitchell.
This blame would morph into a mistaken belief.
In 2011, Sen Sgt Cheesman was the new face of the anti-bikie taskforce and, with his big, imposing frame, was not afraid to eyeball gang members.
It would soon get back to Detective Cheesman that not only was he wrongly being held responsible for stopping the ambulance entering the Barkly Square car park to attend to Mitchell, but that he had walked over to him and whispered in his ear ‘’I hope you die....’’
It’s understood that to this day Mitchell remains wrongly convinced officer Cheesman and his Echo taskforce counterparts had him under surveillance throughout the day of the shooting, November 28, 2011, and watched as he was ambushed by two gunmen in broad daylight.
The fact, however, was and remains that Sen Sgt Cheesman was nowhere near the scene when the shots rang out in Brunswick.
He was at his office in St Kilda Rd, South Melbourne, when alerted to the hit on the high-profile Bandido.
Sen Sgt Cheesman was not responsible for delaying the ambulance nor did he speak to the wounded Mitchell in the carpark.
Rumours, however, can be deadly in the outlaw bikie world, as police would learn.
The Bandidos banter continued on the topic during a trip to Pattaya, Thailand, while they were on their ‘’Australasian run’’.
It sparked concern for someone who was there who called Australian authorities and asked: ‘’Do you have a policeman named Cheese – man?’’
‘’They are going to kill him.’’
It is not suggested Mitchell took part in the meeting and was likely still in hospital when the disturbing chatter took place.
But police were not going to take any chances.
Sen Sgt Cheesman was informed and would settle the matter himself.
The Bandidos then national president, Jason Addison, was given the facts and the threat was cooled.
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