Andrew Rule: Evil killer only man standing from Lewis Moran murder
Just days after hit man “Benji” Veniamin was shot in Carlton, Lewis Moran took a disturbing phone call as he sat at the bar of the Brunswick Club — moments later he was dead.
Police & Courts
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Eight days after sawn-off hit man “Benji” Veniamin was shot dead in Carlton, Milad and Tony Mokbel were in the Belfiore Restaurant in Sydney Rd opposite Brunswick Police Station.
With them was a skilled “speed cook” who worked for the amphetamines production branch of the Mokbel family business.
The cook would later tell police that early in the evening Milad Mokbel had told him “I should go straight home that night because Lewis Moran was going to be killed.”
Soon afterwards, still at the restaurant, he saw “a large number of police cars exit the Brunswick Police Station heading south in Sydney Rd at high speed.”
The police were rushing to the Brunswick Club where, as predicted, Moran had just been shot dead.
Unless the Mokbel brothers were psychic, they had inside knowledge of the hit — undoubtedly from the man who ordered it, Carl Williams.
Veniamin had been buried just the day before, following his funeral at the Greek Orthodox Church in Sunshine where he’d once been an altar boy.
Now the little gunman’s mates had struck back, killing one of the oldest and most respected crooks in the Carlton Crew and badly injuring his drinking mate, Bert Wrout.
The underworld vendetta that had begun when Mark and Jason Moran wounded Carl Williams’ pride with a bullet to his belly four years earlier had led to their deaths and now their father’s.
It had seemed to some that at age 62, Lewis Moran had lost interest in living.
He made it easy for his enemies by drinking at the same bar at the same time, most evenings of the week.
He had switched from his local, the Laurel Hotel in Ascot Vale, to the Brunswick Club but refused to vary his routine by going anywhere else because the beer was cheaper at the Brunswick.
It was a bad mistake by a stubborn man of such legendary meanness that he would pick pockets on the tram on the way home from eating at the expensive Flower Drum restaurant in the city.
Moran was an old-school hard man but, when it came to the moment of truth, he didn’t want to die.
According to Wrout, Moran was frightened several seconds before two masked men ran into the club waving guns.
Like the Mokbel brothers, the cunning old crook was unlikely to be psychic. Wrout often said later that Moran took a call which shook him badly just before the shooting.
Either he’d been told directly he was about to die or he guessed that the caller was pinpointing his location to relay it to a nearby hit man. The Judas kiss, executed with a mobile telephone.
As Wrout went to grab his change from the bar, they heard the thump of running feet echo through the bar when the hit men burst in at 6.40pm.
Moran gasped, “I’m off here.”
He was right. He ran through the poker machines, alarming gaming room supervisor Sandra Sugars by yelling “Sandra, out of the way!”
Moran was trapped, cowering with his hands up to his face, and the shooter caught up. His shotgun jammed but he pulled out a pistol and shot Moran twice in the head at point blank range.
Sandra Sugars could feel the heat of the handgun and smell the cordite.
“I shut my eyes to try and get rid of the sound of the bullets,” she said in court much later.
“The last image that I had of Lewis was his hands above his face.”
Wrout, meanwhile, had one arm hanging uselessly after being hit by bullets from the other shooter. He tried to kick the gunman but could not dodge the shots. He could have died, but would survive the injuries and live another 11 years, until 2015.
The shooting was over within seconds. The gunmen escaped in an EF Ford Falcon station wagon driven by a third man, yet only two men would eventually be charged.
It would take the police and prosecutors four years to get two murder convictions over the line. But there are still lingering legal doubts over the case, which is entwined with two other murders: the killing of “vampire” male prostitute Shane Chartres-Abbott the previous year and of violent young criminal Lewis Caine six weeks after Moran’s death.
One of the Brunswick Club gunmen, Noel Faure, was sentenced to a minimum of 23 years. True to the code, he did no deals with police or prosecutors.
The other man convicted of the Moran murder, former boxer Ange Goussis, is still in prison after finishing a long sentence for another murder.
Goussis insists he was wrong convicted for the Moran hit on the fabricated evidence of a now-protected witness he once knew and liked — a mistake he has had many years to regret.
That key witness, named “Mr Gregory” in more recent legal proceedings, has been in the underworld all his long and violent life, as were his father and grandfather. He has had at least two legal code names and cannot be publicly named.
One judge has described the now ageing criminal as the most important witness in the entire gangland war but that is not his only claim to fame and infamy. He is also known by the underworld, police and lawyers as an habitual and manipulative liar.
On May 8, 2004, Goussis and “Mr Gregory” arranged to meet a handsome young criminal called Lewis Caine at a Carlton pub frequented by rogue police, crooks and football and racing people.
Caine had served a long sentence for kicking a man to death outside a nightclub and was the live-in boyfriend of enigmatic defence lawyer Zarah Garde-Wilson, who would later make waves by attempting to obtain sperm from his corpse so she could bear his child.
Until his death, Lewis Caine was under the radar. But it seems he was hoping to set up as a gun-for-hire in the ongoing gangland war, which was probably the real reason for him to meet Gregory the veteran gunman and Gregory’s “driver” Goussis.
But Caine was not aware of the deadly undercurrents in play. Even something as simple as jealousy could bring out the worst in Gregory, let alone some sinister underworld double cross.
At one point that evening when Caine stepped away, Gregory snarled to Goussis “I’m going to whack that (expletive).”
The older crook seemingly calmed down. But, according to Goussis, after the three left together in a black SUV, his “mentor” suddenly ordered Goussis to pull up in a quiet spot.
As the car stopped, Gregory produced a modified, snub-nosed pistol and shot the drunken Caine in the face as he sat in the back seat. They then drove to a quiet Brunswick street and Gregory dragged Caine’s body onto the footpath.
The pair were stopped at a police breathalyser unit near Melbourne Zoo but then they were waved past — in a car that had the dead man’s blood in the back seat and the murder weapon in Gregory’s belt. But that’s where their luck ran out.
Days later, the special Operations Group grabbed the pair and a third man at Geelong.
The naive and trusting Goussis was still living up to his nickname, “Goose”.
Despite the subsequent advice of lawyers and detectives who sensed the truth, Goussis doggedly insisted on sticking to a false statement that he had killed Caine “in self-defence”, in effect exonerating the real killer.
Sadly for the trusting ex-boxer, the defence of self-defence did not fly as well as Mick Gatto’s would over the shooting of Veniamin seven weeks earlier.
While Gregory the protected witness-turned-informer was eventually lodged in what prisoners derisively dubbed the “Deals or No Deals” protection unit, Goussis served a hefty sentence for the Caine killing he didn’t do.
Now, he still faces the balance of the monster 35-year sentence he got for the Lewis Moran shooting, which he also claims he didn’t do.
Goussis’s self-inflicted plight has attracted interest and sympathy from defence lawyers and others who consider him the victim of a system that let the tainted testimony of a proven liar and career criminal nail a scalp in a high profile case.
Gregory’s real name cannot be revealed at least until his death, which is well overdue. How such an evil man lived to see his 70th birthday is amazing, given the number of enemies he has made in half a century on both sides of the law.
But there it is. The strange fact is that everyone else involved in the murder of Lewis Moran and shooting of Bert Wrout is now either dead or in prison.
Noel Faure got life with a 23-year minimum and died in prison in 2017. Wrout, a physical wreck, died two years earlier.
Tony Mokbel, who was charged but cleared over the Brunswick Club murder, is in prison for drug crimes.
Carl Williams, who most likely arranged Moran’s death, was killed in Barwon Prison in 2010.
And Ange Goussis, the polite kid from a respectable family who should have boxed for Australia at the 1988 Olympics, is (in his own words) “mowing the lawns at Acacia,” meaning he is in Barwon Prison’s most secure unit. He has a new lawyer who hopes to prove that he was unfairly convicted, but it’s a long shot.
Meanwhile, the worst man of all, the one who poisoned Goussis’s mind then coldly betrayed him, has most likely been secretly released to live out his worthless life under yet another alias.
That evil career criminal has been closely involved in at least five murders and has ruined many more lives. Yet, of all those involved in Lewis Moran’s murder, he’s the last one standing.
Standing? Funny that, given that most people refer to him as “a snake.”
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