How Melbourne’s criminal world has shifted after Mark Moran’s death

Drug runs, secret payments and a bent cop – these were the dodgy dealings unearthed after Mark Moran was killed 25 years ago, sparking all-out war among Melbourne’s meanest crooks.

Only in death did Mark Moran become a notorious gangland figure.

And with his murder, Melbourne’s criminal dynamic shifted.

Moran was almost certainly the first hit ordered by Carl Williams, who may have even pulled the trigger.

Williams despised Moran, an unemployed pastry chef born into criminal royalty.

Moran, 36, was facing drugs and firearms charges when he was shot at close range as he got out of his car, returning home from a drug delivery.

It’s believed that prior to the hit, Moran had been under police surveillance.

But on the night he died, June 15, 2000, the undercovers were missing.

Mark Moran was facing drugs and firearms charges when he was shot dead.

He was shot at close range as he got out of his car, returning home from a drug delivery.

It would emerge police were supplying pure pseudoephedrine to Moran in a scheme called a “controlled delivery”.

There was another twist.

The scheme was meant to bust crooks like Moran.

But Moran was corrupting a bent cop in charge of the scheme, lining his pockets.

The payments from Moran ended when his life expired.

A source has told the Herald Sun there was a “significant” secret payment Moran made not long before his murder, which was allegedly delivered to the cop in charge of the “controlled delivery” scheme – Sen Sgt Wayne Strawhorn – after the killing.

That alleged cash payment was never recovered, but Strawhorn was convicted over trafficking a commercial quantity of pseudoephedrine to Moran and jailed for seven years.

Whether Carl Williams pulled the trigger outside Moran’s Aberfeldie home will never be known with certainty.

Whether Williams pulled the trigger outside Moran’s Aberfeldie home will never be known with certainty.

But, if he was not the shooter, he was behind it and the subsequent murders of Mark’s brother Jason and his stepfather Lewis.

Williams had been obsessed with obliterating the Morans since being shot during a meeting with the Moran brothers over a pill press at a reserve in Gladstone Park.

One strong theory is that Williams regarded Mark as more dangerous than his younger, hot-headed sibling, and decided he would murder him while Jason was in prison.

The Moran brothers were very different men.

“He (Mark) was a gentleman. I had also met Jason a few times and knew that he was a loose cannon,” one informer later told gangland police.

Jason Moran was known as the more reckless of the two Moran brothers.

Mark Moran was described as being a gentleman.

That sentiment was echoed by one former top detective.

“Mark was low-key. Jason would bring undue attention,” the ex-investigator said.

Days after the murder of Mark in Combermere St, it was reported that a squad of Moran supporters met to discuss exacting revenge.

They told police they were not interested in co-operating with their inquiries and would sort things out themselves.

It was a plan that never went anywhere, in part because they had been superseded by the expanding power of the Williams family and its ruthless band of violent henchmen.

In 2003, Jason and his mate Pasquale Barbaro would die in a horrific ambush at an Essendon footy clinic.

Lewis was gunned down as he drank with mate Bert Wrout at The Brunswick Club in 2004.

A year later, Lewis was gunned down as he drank with mate Bert Wrout at The Brunswick Club.

In 2009, Lewis’s brother, Desmond Moran, was shot dead in an Ascot Vale cafe.

Lewis was five years gone, but his former wife, Judy Moran, was every bit as greedy as him.

Judy had been incensed by her brother-in-law, Desmond, changing his will and organised for a hitman to kill him.

She was convicted and jailed over the murder and remains behind bars, leaving the entire criminal arm of the family, by one means or another, taken out of the game in the space of nine years.

Mark Moran’s mother Judy arrives at the scene of her son's murder with father Joe Giaccobe.

Mark Moran’s murder, however, remains unsolved.

Detectives never laid charges over the killing although many names have been thrown forward over the years.

One who nominated himself was Rodney Charles Collins, the Melbourne gangland triggerman responsible for a number of homicides which some say would stretch towards double figures.

Williams would later tell a witness that Collins wanted it out there that he had murdered Moran.

“Carl told me a lot about Collins and said he was a gun for hire and that Collins needed to know that people were saying that he was responsible for the Mark Moran hit,” the witness would later tell detectives.