An ankle bracelet proved an unusual accessory for a beach polo date with the stars
As Melbourne’s elite partied innocently at the polo, one guest raised eyebrows with his unusual accessories. Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.
Police & Courts
Don't miss out on the headlines from Police & Courts. Followed categories will be added to My News.
If racing is the sport of kings then polo, say the game’s boosters, is the king of sports. Polo’s royal links might explain why the fit, muscular young man wearing shorts that showed off his leg tattoos was one of 2000 spectators at the Twilight Beach Polo at St Kilda on the weekend.
While celebrities including Alex Pike, Totti Goldsmith, Shane Warne and Sam Newman wandered innocently through the crowd, eyewitness evidence suggests one particular fan had been a guest of Her Majesty recently. That’s because he was wearing what would appear to be the electronic security ankle bracelets fitted by vigilant authorities to some prisoners on provisional release.
If the accessories are not electronic bracelets, then our apologies to the guy with the interesting ankle wear. They team nicely with the tatts, which was why our eagle-eyed snapper squeezed off a shot.
It’s all proof that polo is appealing to a wider audience than back when Gillon McLachlan and his polo-playing mates were recruited to play with Prince Charles on a long-ago royal visit.
SERGEANT-AT-HARMS
Polo isn’t the only equal opportunity sport to attract colourful fans from vibrant minorities. What a pleasure to see Comanchero enforcer Tarek Zahed back in Melbourne and relaxing at the recent Australian Open tennis final.
These have been turbulent times for Zahed, who last year left Sydney for Lebanon, returning a few months later and hanging his shingle in Melbourne.
Novak Djokovic wasn’t allowed into the Open but Zahed obviously got the green light to be at our greatest tennis event. He and others delayed proceedings at one stage as they scrambled back to their seats, though none of the cucumber sandwich set seemed particularly keen to bag him for delaying Rafael Nadal.
For some time, Zahed has been shouldering the gang’s important national sergeant-at-arms position, which tends to involve the enforcement of club rules and other muscle work.
It is a position which carries some prestige, but also the twin occupational hazards of attracting police scrutiny and attention from other outlaws.
Toby Mitchell was sergeant-at-arms for the Bandidos the day he was shot and almost killed outside their Brunswick clubhouse in 2011. The bloke in the chair before him, Lee Undy, was earlier shot in a separate ambush and moved up north as his sense of wellbeing headed south.
Comanchero Victorian sergeant-at-arms Christian Taumoefolau is in Port Phillip Prison after being locked up in last year’s Operation Ironside organised crime sweep.
Former soldier Josh “the White Devil” Faulkhead, who was Comanchero national sergeant-at-arms, was last year released from prison after doing a long stretch for high-level drug offences in the Mildura area.
Some Mongols haven’t fared much better. The gang’s former sergeant-at-arms, Shane Middleton, was arrested in 2015 and later convicted of drug trafficking, armed robbery and firearms offences. No one was ever charged with shooting Middleton in the same year.
Cobram-based sergeant-at-arms Josh Eddy is also in custody after police moved on a drug syndicate operating out of the Murray River town last year.
His Rebels Melbourne chapter counterpart Jerome Ah Soon faced court last year over Echo taskforce allegations he was involved in a terrifying blackmail and extortion ring.
Brothers for Life sergeant-at-arms Michael Arbawi was last year jailed for shooting a man who consequently needed a colostomy bag.
WHAT THE SCOUTMASTER DID
When Robert John Richardson lived in Kilmore in the 1980s, a couple of knockabout locals who suspected he was a lying deviate used to drive past his house after a night at the pub and yell abuse at him.
It’s a pity the larrikins didn’t have the evidence to take it further because they were bang on: the over-friendly ambulance driver who’d ingratiated himself with local families turned out to be one of the worst paedophiles convicted in Victoria, as he finally was in 1994.
Richardson’s despicable ruse was to tell kind and gullible parents around the district that his own wife and family had been killed in a car crash, which was a lie. He would then suggest that a particular son of the target family reminded him of his dead son.
By contriving misplaced sympathy, he infiltrated families as a “friend”, which was reinforced by his tireless volunteer work as a scoutmaster and YMCA member. One big-hearted family overflowing with children, touched by Richardson’s alleged plight, regularly invited him to meals and to Christmas dinner despite the fact they had so many mouths to feed.
Those parents and others trusted Richardson to take boys aged from 11 to 16 on weekend trips as far afield as the Bathurst car races. They marvelled at how generous he was to pay for motel accommodation as well as meals. For people with big families and small budgets, the obliging bachelor’s deep pockets seemed a Godsend. They were wrong.
It seems there’s no such thing as a free lunch, let alone free motels. The result, a judge noted when sentencing Richardson to 10 years for 41 offences, was that he offended 100 times against at least a dozen boys over 20 years.
The damage done to them is incalculable and permanent.
One of the victims, now in his 40s, “fell” from an upper storey balcony while drinking. He survived. Another got in touch with Deadline from the UK this week, saying he fled Australia to get away from the memories of what happened to him and other Kilmore scout members.
He referred to two other men (from Melbourne suburbs, not from Kilmore) known by their first names, who were in cahoots with Richardson but never arrested. It seems to him that the police were content with one scalp.
He got $17,500 “compensation” as a teenager and was free to blow the lot on a bender which left him worse off than ever.
GRAPES OF WRATH
Falling out with friends and allies is never nice.
But when your former buddies are a hot-headed triggerman and a violent drug-dealer, things can get positively dangerous.
Deadline hears that a chap once close to the dangerous duo received an awful beating, including a wine bottle where the sun don’t shine, after relations soured a while back.
He was then dumped at a hospital to be patched up. The good news is that his assailants have since felt the wrath of karma.
One is sweating bullets over some heavy police and underworld attention and the other is looking at a long stint in the big house.
DEAD TO RIGHTS
What sort of person desecrates a grave and interferes with bodies?
That will be a troubling question for police and courts to ponder if and when they handle those allegedly responsible for breaking into mausolea at a Footscray cemetery recently and taking skulls from coffins.
It is not so much the offence itself, serious as it is, as the depths of depravity that it reveals.
Anyone weird enough to cut the head off a dead body might be working up to harming the living. It is as disturbing as the thought of the potential evil in weirdos who deliberately torture animals, as some compulsive killers do before they commit murders.
Speaking of cemeteries and homicides, it is 24 years this month since a gravedigger reopening a family grave near Shepparton found the plastic-wrapped body of young Rocky Iaria, missing for more than six years.
Rocky, 20, had vanished in 1991 just before his two alleged co-offenders in a massive Bendigo burglary were due to begin a new trial.
As a helpful lawyer for the accused had innocently pointed out, Rocky’s presence at the new trial would be a problem for his clients, because Rocky had foolishly sold a video recorder stolen in the burglary. And that one item linked the two accused, Vincent Paul Latorre and Danny Murtagh, to the $500,000 Bendigo heist.
Rocky vanished, the video recorder evidence became inadmissable, and the trial collapsed. His car was found at Benalla railway station, setting up the idea that he’d bolted.
And that’s how it would have stayed if a gravedigger hadn’t dug up the Pearson family grave ready to bury the everloving husband of the late Dulcie Pearson.
Incidentally, a coroner found that Vincent Latorre either killed Iaria or ordered his death, probably because it would ensure his acquittal on the robbery charges. Can’t fool a good coroner.
The other footnote is that Latorre and Murtagh were grabbed and taken for a ride into the bush and given a belting, possibly by rogue lawmen looking to unearth the treasure trove of cash, gold and jewellery taken from a safe hidden in the chimney of Bendigo tomato grower Stephen Monti. What happened to most of the loot remains a mystery.
MEMBER FOR FAR KEW
Vandals with an eye for history and drawing a long bow have struck at the scene of MP Tim Smith’s drink-drive smash a few months back.
You won’t need to be any political junkie to recall that Smith ploughed his new Jaguar into an innocent fence before blowing a .131 blood alcohol reading.
A section of temporary timber fencing erected where Smith left his mark has been defaced, although the graffiti artist misspelt the word Chappaquiddick.
The last four letters were underlined, for reasons which are unclear.
Chappaquiddick was the Massachusetts island where Senator Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge late at night in 1969, resulting in the death of young passenger Mary Jo Kopechne.
Our eastern suburbs spy, The Irishman, doesn’t miss much and snapped a shot of the offending graffiti last weekend.
“Granted, Tim Smith never quite reached his Camelot and didn’t leave a woman at the bottom of a pond but wags along Power St seem to have drawn the parallel,” the Irishman said.
LEGEND’S SCREEN(ING) TIME
Nothing to do with crime, at least in recent decades, but one of Deadline’s sharpest spies tells of an interesting recent exchange in a swank Melbourne restaurant.
A sporting legend trying to enjoy a feed with mates copped a mobile call from a business leviathan who has the ear of our most powerful people.
It clearly wasn’t the first call and the sportsman let it ring out, telling his friends who it was as he did.
The consensus at the table seemed to be that the tycoon — a man unaccustomed to being ignored — had become something of a pest. We bet the lads wouldn’t have treated this particular millionaire like that back in the bad old days when jacking him up could get you a broken leg, at best.
‘We adored her’: tributes for Melb model killed in crash at rave
The 24-year-old woman killed when she was struck by a car at a gathering in Kooyong on Sunday has been identified as “bubbly, bright” Clifton Hill model Elise Hodder, with tributes flowing.
Bali brothel accused seeks hospital treatment
Melbourne man, Michael Le Grand, who is charged with running a Bali brothel is seeking medical treatment amid fears he has a dire illness — with his wife set to accompany him to hospital.