How Melbourne gangland war took off 20 years ago
As the world watched Sydney’s spectacular Olympic display, Melbourne was busy making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Now, we mark two decades since the beginning of unprecedented bloodshed on our city’s streets.
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Two decades ago, Sydney had the Olympics and Melbourne was hosting a long-running and unwanted shooting event.
Violence through 1998 and 1999 had claimed some significant names but 2000 was to be an even more dangerous period to be a Melbourne gangster.
There was deepening underworld carnage as new players started to murder business rivals and enemies at an alarming rate.
Things had escalated after Carl Williams was shot in the guts at a meeting in a park with brothers Mark and Jason Moran in October of the previous year.
Not all of the four gangland killings of 2000 could be traced back to the rendezvous at Gladstone Park but Williams – or his close associates – could be connected to each.
Mark was to die in an ambush outside his Aberfeldie home in that year, a murder undoubtedly ordered by Williams.
His uncle Tuppence — a veteran of bloody gangland conflict in the 1970s — was at the house that night and knew this was only the beginning.
A veteran detective recalled a clearly shaken Tuppence saying to him: “It’s all going to start again. He had a shocked look on his face.”
All of the 2000 murders remain unsolved.
THE 2000 KILLINGS
Those responsible are either dead or police lack the evidence to put the suspects before a court.
First to go, on May 8, was 52-year-old fruiterer Frank Benvenuto, found slumped over the steering wheel in Dalgetty Rd, Beaumaris.
Benvenuto — who locals thought had nodded off — was actually in the big sleep, having been shot with a .38 calibre handgun.
Before he died, he had managed to make one quick call.
It went to Walsh St killer Victor Peirce, a well-connected underworld figure who would himself be murdered a few years later in Port Melbourne.
Hitman Andrew Veniamin, who was known to Williams and would later become part of his stable of killers and thugs, was regarded as a major suspect in the Benvenuto murder.
He would also emerge as the likely killer of Peirce in 2003.
Eight days after Benvenuto died, Richard Mladenich was shot dead in an unrelated but highly significant slaying which still reverberates today.
Career criminal Mladenich was a former mate of Williams but the working police theory is that they fell out badly.
Investigators suspect Williams sent another soldier, Rocco Arico, to shoot him dead at the Esquire Hotel in St Kilda.
They believe the second player was another member of Team Williams.
As recently as this month a Purana Taskforce detective fronted court and named Ivanovic as a suspect in the Mladenich murder.
A $1 million reward remains in place for anyone who can solve the Mladenich case.
Less than a month later, on June 15, Williams’ second contract killing was carried out.
It was never quite clear whether Jason or Mark shot him at Gladstone Park but Carl didn’t care and would ultimately get square by killing both brothers.
Mark was just climbing out of his ute on an icy Melbourne night when a shooter, who had hidden in the garden, opened fire with a shotgun and handgun.
Jason would suffer the same fate two years later, murdered with mate Pasquale Barbaro in an infamous killing at a kids footy clinic.
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The fourth death of 2000 was that of Dino Dibra, an underworld wild man who had been a good mate of Williams and Veniamin.
Dibra had been mixed up in drug trafficking, shootings, standover work and, most likely, murder.
But on the night of October 14, he found himself on the wrong end of the gun at his west suburban home.
Again, police suspect his death was the handiwork of his old Sunshine running mate Veniamin.
As Tuppence Moran said to the detective at Aberfeldie, this was just the start.
In the next few years, Williams and Veniamin would be directly or indirectly linked to as many as 15 homicides in Melbourne.