Deadline: Accused Moonee Ponds steroid dealer Robin James Taylor no stranger to tough times
Supporters of Robin James Taylor — whose Moonee Ponds clinic was raided in a steroid-trafficking investigation — can take comfort in the fact he’s escaped unscathed from tight scrapes before.
Police & Courts
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Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.
Muscle merchant loves muscle cars
Tough times hit Robin James Taylor last Friday when police raided his Moonee Ponds clinic.
Taylor was arrested as his Melbourne Sports Medicine and Anti-Aging Science operation on Mt Alexander Rd was turned over as part of a big steroid-trafficking investigation.
It turns out the 54-year-old businessman already has some experience with attracting heat — and surviving it.
Back in 2022, Rockin’ Robin was piloting his Pro Slammer drag car in the Winter Nationals in Queensland when the machine burst into flames at high speed.
As footage from the time showed, it was a near miss for Taylor, who couldn’t stop the drag car before it was totally covered in flames from an exploded fuel tank.
In a minor miracle, he walked away squirting his scorched face with a water bottle. As it turned out, it was his second big slice of good fortune in the space of two years.
In 2020, he overturned a conviction and seven-year jail sentence on appeal after initially being jailed for trafficking a drug of dependence, namely anabolic and androgenic steroidal agents, and eight counts of importing the same substances.
The most recent events suggest that cars are a passion for a compulsive risk taker.
In a connected warrant last Friday, police searched a Somerton factory where up to 50 cars worth millions are, or were, being stored.
Interestingly, they also uncovered almost $1m in cash and a gold Louis Vuitton table and chair estimated to be worth $250,000. High octane, indeed.
The Gregorys, the Goose and the Lewis guns
The official version of a strange and sinister chapter in the gangland war is that ex-boxer Ange Goussis was convicted of shooting two Lewises — young Caine and old Moran — 39 days apart in 2004.
Both deaths were in Brunswick.
If consecutive hits on targets called Lewis could be called Lewis Squared, then the answer to the question “What is Lewis Squared?” is 35 years, the jail term that “Goose” Goussis is doing.
It seems clear to many lawyers and police that Goussis didn’t do the Caine murder but let himself be conned into falsely confessing to it on the basis he could beat it on “self defence”.
Now he says he didn’t do the Lewis Moran murder, either.
A well-connected source familiar with underworld players of that era tells Deadline that “Goose” is telling the truth. This suggests that the lying, manipulative old crook (since given the legal alias “Mr Gregory”) who talked Goussis into copping the blame for Caine was, in truth, the second gunman at the Moran hit alongside a lifelong associate and boyhood playmate, Noel Faure.
But who drove the getaway car, the Falcon station wagon identified by police?
Our man says Mr Gregory’s everloving female associate took the wheel that night in Sydney Rd in March 2004.
If so, she is the only one that the old reptile hasn’t turned over to the police. Her “reward” was, they say, to be waiting for him when he was secretly released into an anonymous life somewhere.
The guessing game is whether he will die of natural causes before he offends again, or will someone finally catch up with him?
Les was more
Deadline is largely about crime so we’ll excuse mention of Les Twentyman on the basis that he probably kept so many people out of jail over the years.
One half of this column had a three-decade association with Twentyman which, at one stage, involved reading over the then scallywag youth worker’s columns in the Footscray-based Western Times newspaper.
It was frequently challenging work as Twentyman liked to insert bad taste and even worse grammatical landmines in his copy.
One such occasion was when he previewed a Bulldogs game against the Cats to be held at Kardinia Park the next weekend, he wrote: “I’m confident the Dogs will eat pussy,” he predicted.
He no doubt meant “the Pussies” but just happened to forget the capital and the plural.
A much younger and less mature Deadline waved the gag through with a laugh, until the next day when there were reader complaints followed by stern words from the editor.
We would not have raked over such crassness if Les had not guffawed many times over the years at someone being kicked in the backside for something he got away with.
Not that Les minded being the butt of a joke.
In the early 1990s, he promoted a circus to be held in the western suburbs by posing for a photo next to an elephant.
“Spot the difference,” was the Times’ rather weight-ist headline, a bit of casual fat shaming that might not pass muster now.
Les would have admitted he could get pretty big but, at one point, did something about it when Times editor Ron Coleman and Bulldog Brownlow Medallist Brad Hardie bet $500 he could not drop three stone (19kg).
Footscray runner Ron Simmons flogged Twentyman on the track until the pud was gone.
It’s often said that it’s a pity someone isn’t around to see the reaction to their passing. Never more true than with Les, who loved the spotlight but did a hell of a lot of good away from it right up to the day he died last Saturday.
Vale Les Twentyman.
Somebody call the bomb squad
He’s the Melbourne reporter who turned up for a big country news story recently in his shiny VL Commodore.
The vehicle attracted plenty of admiring oohs and aahs from some police and others gathered for the high-profile operation. Unfortunately, they would later find out that all that glitters is not gold.
There wasn’t quite so much admiration at the end of the day when the vintage banger wouldn’t start, blocking in all and sundry as they tried to head home.
Police taser knife-wielding man in dramatic arrest in Coolaroo
Footage shows the moment a knife-wielding man is brought down in a car park in Melbourne’s north as officers used tasers while one bystander tried to stop the offender with a shopping trolley.
Baby killer cleared to work with children
A Victorian woman who killed her eight-week-old daughter was granted a Working with Children Check through a loophole that has angered child safety advocates and victim families.