Melbourne crime dynasties: Inside the fall of the Morans
The Morans of Ascot Vale went from crime royalty to six feet under in a few short years. This is the inside story of their fall.
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Before the Morans became extinct they were an endangered species — so much so that one old-school crime reporter vowed he “wouldn’t even sit on a Moran couch”.
That was in the late 1990s, when festering underworld enmities were set to explode into the gangland war. The younger Morans, Jason and Mark, were in it up to their gold neck chains.
As happens with family dynasties, the gains made in the first generation and held by the second are usually lost by the third.
The Morans of Ascot Vale were once crime royalty in a business that attracts people with short use-by dates. Both generations were educated at Essendon Grammar on the proceeds of crime but ignored the chance to “go legit”. That was a mistake.
Now they are deader than the Russian royal family, with the last adult male Moran murdered on the order of his former sister-in-law, Judith, who will die in jail knowing her de facto husband Lewis was probably right about her.
“She’s an imbecile,” Lewis once told his lawyer, Andrew Fraser, about the former Channel 9 dancer turned shoplifter, real name Judith Brooks.
Lewis never married Judith; she changed her name by deed poll because she liked the notoriety. She was careless with “husbands” — Mark’s biological father, the gunman Leslie John Cole, was shot dead in Sydney in 1982.
The Morans’ business interests were profitable but mysterious. They were familiar with the waterfront, where cargo would be pilfered and contraband received. They were also well-connected to local abattoirs, the meat racket being a big deal in the inner-western suburbs around the former Newmarket saleyards from Ascot Vale across to Footscray.
Lewis Moran and his brother Des Junior, universally known as “Tuppence”, grew up in a big brick house in Langs Rd, just west of the showgrounds near the Flemington rear entrance.
Their father, Desmond, dabbled in anything that made money, from pickpocketing to punting on fixed races. Their mother, Belle, was a backyard abortionist at a time when that was a lucrative racket run in cahoots with bent police — a sneak connection that Lewis Moran quietly cultivated for decades.
Lewis had enough “pull” to nobble the murder investigation of Carlton crew racketeer, Jeff Reading, who killed an innocent man outside the Brandon Hotel in Carlton in May 2004.
Later that football season, Lewis Moran counted out $50,000 cash he told friends was to sling a senior policeman to fix the charges against Reading.
Some say the policeman would later leave the force to pursue his hobby of haunting under-age girlie bars in third world countries.
Lewis was a cash operator. He once forgot there was a large roll of it stashed in the kitchen oven. Too late, he realised heat had shrivelled the polymer notes to the size of playing cards. Luckily, he had an ace up his sleeve: an understanding bank manager who replaced $14,000 worth of notes as “damaged”, no questions asked.
Although they didn’t resist the drift towards the drug trade along with the underworld at large, the older Morans kept up their traditional family enterprises a long time: SP bookmaking, receiving and reselling stolen goods and running place cards — a profitable sideline in which punters have to pick a placegetter in each of four feature races.
As one old-school detective put it, Tuppence and Lewis were “real old-school crooks” who “didn’t mind a bit of hard work but they didn’t mind an easy quid either.”
In his heyday Lewis spent most of his time in his favourite pubs, the Newmarket in Racecourse Rd and the Laurel in Mt Alexander Rd, where publicans and staff catered to his taste in six-ounce beer glasses. One publican wanting tactfully to discourage the Morans’ patronage made sure the small beer glasses got broken then claimed, straight-faced, he couldn’t source new ones.
Lewis turned up the next day with a box of the “rare” six-ounce glasses. No arguments.
Although he had learned how to pick pockets at his father’s knee and was known to lift wallets on the way home on the tram after an expensive lunch at the Flower Drum restaurant, he resented being called “Lewis The Dip”.
He also had to live down the disgrace of being chased out of a circus once after being sprung picking pockets in the crowd.
Brother Tuppence, a confirmed bachelor, was well-liked by many racing people. After their parents’ death, he took over the old family house in Langs Rd, where he rented a room to a former jockey later (wrongly) rumoured to have inherited the property after Tuppence’s sudden death.
But he didn’t love all has-been jockeys. He wasn’t easily riled but could use his fists if pushed, such as when Group One pest Gavin Eades made the mistake of annoying the older man at his favourite pub.
“He started abusing Tuppence while he was eating his parmigiana,” says a witness.
“Tuppence said ‘f--k this bloke’ and went bang.”
Tuppence picked up Melbourne Grammar’s only professional jockey and slammed him against the wall so hard it shattered his ego.
The older Morans were dedicated punters as well as SP bookmakers.
Lewis’s stepson Mark kept a low profile but “had dash” and ran with armed robbers — such as the one that shot security guard Dominik Hefti dead at the Barkly Square shopping centre in Brunswick in 1988.
The mistaken belief that another Flemington crook, Graeme Jensen, was behind the shooting led to Jensen being shot by gung ho detectives at Narre Warren soon after — sparking the revenge killing of the two young police at Walsh St., South Yarra.
Jason Moran, younger half-brother of Mark, was more erratic and seen as more dangerous. He carried a gun before he was old enough to drive and loved standing over people.
Jason worked at the abattoirs after quitting school in the 1980s. One contemporary recalls that whereas most kids had a picture of KISS on their walls, Jason had “a picture of Al Capone”.
Self-control was not his strong point. He once received a fearful beating when he jacked up the wrong policeman in an intercept, and had a scar on his shaven head to prove it.
One Melbourne newsman recalls Jason providing wholehearted feedback outside the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court shortly after Alphonse Gangitano’s murder in 1998.
Macho Moran was upset at a story suggesting he might have concerns for his own safety and shouted abuse from the passenger seat of a passing BMW.
“He was hanging out the window calling me a f---ing c--t and a dog,” the reporter recalls.
Moran was right about having nothing to fear from anti-Alphonse forces. He knew what the reporter didn’t — that it was he who had shot Gangitano, using a pistol he later threw off the Westgate Bridge.
But he did not always shoot to kill. It was Mark who was urging Jason to shoot Carl Williams “in the head” in the infamous “meeting” at an Oak Park reserve where Williams ended up with a bullet in his large belly on his 29th birthday in 1999.
If Jason had shot Williams dead that day, the underworld war might have stopped before it started. Wounding him set off a wave of revenge attacks that became a war of attrition.
In the end, all four Moran men and Williams and more than 20 others met violent ends. Lewis was easy for the hit men to find because he insisted on going to the same Brunswick club daily because it sold cheap beer. And Tuppence was killed by the stupid gunman that Judith sent after him because she thought she had been dudded out of an inheritance.
Jason’s children were subjected to seeing their father and his mate Paddy Barbaro shot dead at an Auskick game in Essendon in 2003. They grew up fatherless (and without either grandfather).
That’s how it ends for the Romanovs of Racecourse Rd.
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