Deadline: Angel City hits trouble as president Luke Moloney arrested again

Its president has been arrested again while other members are under the microscope — the Hells Angels’ exclusive Melbourne chapter is off to a turbulent start.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest scallywag scuttlebutt.

HELL-RAISER BACK ON ICE

The Hells Angels’ new Angel City chapter is off to a turbulent start.

Its president, Luke Moloney, was arrested by Echo taskforce detectives last week for the second time in six months, this time over an alleged assault in Reservoir.

Angel City was set up last year as a small, exclusive chapter with only a handful of members.

“It’s going to be hard to find a quorum at the meetings,” one seasoned investigator remarked.

Moloney, an accomplished boxer, and two other Angels allegedly went hands-on with a fellow at a home in Maclagan Crescent, leaving him with serious upper-body injuries.

During a bail hearing last August. his lawyer, Damian Sheales, uttered some prophetic words.

“He understands if he gets arrested again … it will be a very different ball game,” Sheales told a court.

The latest arrests come in a period of keen police scrutiny for the Angels.

Luke Moloney is the Hells Angels most senior member in Melbourne.

Members remain under the microscope over the disappearance and suspected murder of Adelaide gang associate Kerry Giakoumis in 2020.

The young concreter was last seen alive at the infamous stronghold of the Angels’ Nomads division in Lipton Drive, Thomastown.

A special taskforce is investigating and they appear confident.

The Nomads’ Thomastown lair, of course, is known as a place where the Angels turn on their own.

Among the most notorious examples is that of Terence Tognolini, an evil arsonist and extortionist suspected of multiple murder conspiracies, notably the killing of young mother Vicki Jacobs at Bendigo in June 1999.

Tognolini thought he was a big deal until other Angels heard of his habit of drugging under-age girls to sexually assault them.

In 2007, he was summoned to Lipton Drive and bashed within an inch of his life.

A tattooist blotted out his Hells Angels “stamps” before he was rolled into the street in a wheelbarrow and tipped out.

His brother was reportedly contacted and told to “come and pick up your trash.”

BAD HAIR DAYS IN THE CLINK

Matthew Wales may have a challenger as the prison system’s number one hairdresser.

The “Society Killer”, convicted of murdering his mother Margaret Wales-King and stepfather Paul King, is the go-to man for those wanting to look like the stars while stuck behind bars.

But a veteran Melbourne underworld figure has made his move, more than once shaving the locks of other inmates.

Unfortunately for them, the haircuts were involuntary and preceded by a belting and were, it seems, an exercise in humiliating the victim.

It is suspected the brutal barber gets some kind of kick from it. But, it should be noted, he also has a shaved melon himself and might just like fellows in his own likeness.

Jailhouse barber Wales also fancied himself as a chef but lost out in the prison system’s in-house cooking competition to former harness racing identity Rod Weightman.

Given that the spoiled little rich boy put sleeping tablets in the risotto he fed to his mother and stepfather, it’s no wonder he lost.

It’s fair to say Tognolini’s life hasn’t been the same since.

“Society Killer” Matthew Wales is an enthusiastic jailhouse barber. Picture AAP

BIG FAREWELL FOR ‘FATHER ARMANI’

Joe Walsh, not the Eagles guitarist but the high-flying cleric known to West Coast Eagles, has just been laid to rest in Perth.

The free-spending, scallywag Irish priest who was dubbed “Father Armani” went out in the style to which he had become accustomed.

Among the reported 1000 mourners at his funeral last Thursday were high-ranking mobsters, including weepy biker boss Troy Mercanti and enigmatic gangland figure John Kizon.

If you’re judged by the company you keep, then Father Walsh, originally of County Galway, will be doing some smooth talking at the Pearly Gates.

The polished priest, who died at 70 after a three-year battle with cancer, had expensive tastes somewhere between those of the Dalai Lama and Liberace. Some might think this was linked to the fact he was charged a few years ago with embezzling $500,000 from St Joseph’s parish in Subiaco.

The 36 charges were later dropped, but not before a police investigation revealed that the freewheeling cleric had splashed around $200,000 on travel between 2014 and 2017.

His luxury trips included boat cruises around Monte Carlo, and visits to Mauritius, Kenya and Bali. In Ireland, he stayed at the luxurious Mount Falcon Estate in Mayo.

Prosecutors eventually let the charges slide on grounds that canon law allows priests to spend parish money as they see fit. But the parish dug in and launched a civil lawsuit, eventually settled last year.

Father Joe Walsh outside Perth Magistrates Court in 2018.

According to one eulogist, Father Walsh’s nephew Eoin, he was always a go-getter. As a kid, he once received a personalised letter from then US president John F. Kennedy and he met Mother Teresa in the 1970s. It seems he admired JFK’s jetset lifestyle more than Mother Teresa’s.

But, like his Melbourne counterpart Father Vincent Kiss, Father Walsh was a complex character with many admirers.

One eulogy was from the father of Irish woman Ciara Glennon, one of three young women murdered by Claremont serial killer Bradley Edwards in 1997. Denis Glennon thanked Father Walsh for his “compassion and friendship over the past 25 years.”

At least, unlike Vincent Kiss, “Father Armani” didn’t have any exposed form for sex offences.

It took the church a long time to move against Kiss, who cut a swathe through charity funds — and young boys — after joining the church in Wagga Wagga in the 1960s.

As the Broken Rites organisation puts it, “It is unclear how much the Wagga Wagga diocese authorities knew about Kiss’s criminal activity at the time but in the 1970s he was allowed to move to the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu (where he) worked as a priest with the approval of the Vanuatu and Wagga Wagga dioceses.”

Catholic priest Father Vincent Kiss.

In the 1980s, the Wagga Wagga diocese “seconded” Kiss to work as the manager of a charitable fund associated with the ANZ Executors and Trustees Company in Melbourne. Not a wise move.

As manager, Kiss had discretion to distribute up to $100,000 to various charities. But he also diverted $2.5 million from four of those charities into a non-existent charity, the Vanuatu Development Project — a Westpac bank account of which he was the sole signatory and beneficiary. Nice work if you can get it.

Kiss was often seen at exclusive functions with Melbourne socialites and was a prominent Carlton football supporter.

Socialite Sheila Scotter described him as “an utterly charming man” and arts patron Jeanne Pratt said he was “like Jesus Christ … he is not priestly, he is saintly.”

He was on the board of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, the Victorian State Opera and the Emergency Services Foundation, a member of the Guardianship and Administration Board, the Intellectual Disability Review Panel, and was an adviser to the Victorian Minister of Housing.

It was all too good to be true.

In 1993, Kiss pleaded guilty to stealing $1.8 million from the charitable fund to finance “an orgy of spending”.

He ate at the best restaurants, bought fine wines, travelled frequently and owned several homes, including a luxury villa in the Philippines, mecca for kiddy fiddlers and sex tourists. He was planning to retire to the villa, Casa Bianca, when arrested on theft charges.

Broken Rites investigators say that visitors to Casa Bianca included one who became a prominent Australian Catholic Church leader.

When a string of sex abuse complaints were filed against Kiss, not everyone was shocked.

OLD SALT MP STILL IN THE RACE

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus is the Des Renford of federal parliament, being a slow swimmer of advanced years.

Unlike the late channel-crosser Renford, Dreyfus does not smear grease over his 65-year-old body before heading to sea, but he does keep chugging away long after most of us would have hollered for a Marshall.

On Saturday, he took on the Club2Club 1.8km open water swim off Aspendale, logging a time of 36 minutes, 40 seconds.

That made the amphibious attorney 215th of 240 competitors. It was a fair way back in the field but put him four seconds ahead of someone called Fugly Mchideous, who may be using an alias.

WHEN LAWYERS ATTACK

Word in court circles is that some long-standing friction between a group of lawyers has turned nasty.

The scuttlebutt is that one of the legal figures involved suffered a home invasion. Nostradamus says there’s every chance that won’t be the end of the matter. Watch this space.